Word: benching
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...TIME'S cover story "Baseball's Best Catcher" [July 10]: Fantastic! Great! It's about time Johnny Bench got the recognition he deserves...
...second girl is Bobbi Michele, a paranoid pothead whom Barney picks up while munching peanuts on a bench in Central Park. He lends her the cash to hire an accompanist for an audition on Broadway. When she shows up at Mom's apartment the next day to repay the money, all of Barney's fantasies of extramarital fulfillment vanish in a haze of marijuana smoke...
...Bench is thinking every minute, however-about every batter in the box, every runner on base, every pitch in his battery mate's repertoire. It is his brains and his calm, confident manner that elevate him to a special plateau above the merely superior receivers. He knows better than any of them how to keep his hurlers mixing their pitches, and will not hesitate to cajole or even bully a reluctant hurler into following his commands. Once Maloney shook Bench off repeatedly on Johnny's call for a curve; he wanted to throw his patented fastball. Bench persisted...
...Because Bench is a brash, smooth-talking top-drawer athlete with a lavish bachelor pad in a Cincinnati singles complex, he naturally invites comparison with Joe Namath. The comparison is invidious. He is warm, friendly and never overweening. Bench's confidence is the deeply ingrained type peculiar to young men who have always known exactly what they wanted to do in life. As he recalls: "In the second grade they asked us what we wanted to be. Some said they wanted to be a farmer. Some said rancher or cowboy. I said I wanted to be a ballplayer...
...Pearl Harbor Day, but raised in the town of Binger (pop. 730), which he describes as lying "two miles beyond Resume Speed." Binger is also near the heart of Last Picture Show country (Johnny guffawed appreciatively at the movie's realism). The third son of Ted and Katie Bench (there is also a daughter Marilyn), Johnny prospered in the kind of aggressively athletic household that can send a young man to the big leagues or the psychiatrist's couch. His father, a onetime truckdriver and furniture salesman, had been a semipro catcher. It was his idea for Johnny...