Word: abbotts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Abbott was born with just a rudimentary finger on his right hand 21 years ago to teenage parents. His father packed meat and sold cars. His mother educated herself, first to teach, then to go to law school. They raised a remarkable boy by never treating him too remarkably. "I had a hook," he says. "I hated it. They let me discard it." They let him dream of anything. "Growing up, I always pictured myself as a baseball player, but I can't remember how many hands I had in my dreams. I never thought to myself, 'Wow, I only...
...University of Michigan, earning the 1987 Sullivan Award as America's best amateur athlete, winning the gold-medal baseball game in the Seoul Olympics and being drafted No. 1 by the Angels. Though he is expected to open the season in the AA or AAA minors, for now Abbott's shirt says ANGELS. "Just looking around at everything here," he says, "it hits you. A big- league camp...
...faced in batting practice was Lance Parrish, a former Detroit catcher he had been partial to in Flint. ("I definitely didn't want to bean him.") The ball came flying back with a wonderful new timbre. "He was the first guy I ever faced with a wooden bat," says Abbott, too young to see the sadness in how far a player has to come these days to escape aluminum. After hitting against the rookie, Parrish moved behind the plate: "He probably has as strong an arm as any lefthander I've ever caught. His motion is so fluid, the ball...
...made his dance debut in 1937 and hit Broadway a year later. It was a time of innovation and entente. Director George Abbott was whipping up Broadway souffles like On Your Toes, and ballet master George Balanchine was staging On Your Toes' novel Slaughter on Tenth Avenue. Mr. A. and Mr. B., as they were known, would be Robbins' mentors. In 1940 he danced in the Balanchine show Keep Off the Grass, and at the end of the decade, he joined Balanchine's New York City Ballet (today he is one of two ballet masters in chief...
...Robbins, the 62-member cast of this show might be the Straw Hatters of a half-century ago, and he might be Abbott or Balanchine. "We have a wonderful company," he says. "They are devoted to the show and to each other and to the material, and I am touched and astounded by their capacity." He is already a bit sad that this long voyage into his shining past and Broadway's iffy future is completed. "I'm like a cruise director," he says. "I organize the trip and the entertainment and the luggage. Then everybody gets on the ship...