Word: lardner
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...movie, based on a book by Eliot Asinof, tries to answer one central question: what would drive these eight men to sacrifice the game of baseball for $10,000 dollars apiece? Sayles, who also plays Ring Lardner, a Chicago sportswriter who suspects wrongdoing in the Series, offers an explanantion--the stinginess of White Sox owner Charles Comiskey (Clifton James) While Comiskey courts the Chicago media with champagne-catered press conferences, he gives his players flat champagne and no extra bonuses for winning the pennant...
...much onto the screen in too little time. Perhaps if he had focused tightly on the team's inner dynamics, seen the unfolding tragedy entirely through the players' eyes and kept everyone else at a distance, he might have done better. But outsiders, ranging from ) sportswriters like Ring Lardner (played by Sayles himself) to Supergambler Arnold Rothstein, are present and superficially accounted for. They take screen time away from the team, where the only ones who lay full claim to our attention are the great but aging pitcher Eddie Cicotte (David Strathairn); Third Baseman Weaver (John Cusack), an appealing victim...
...sepia photographs out of which he has stepped, going back to Mike Donovan, Jack Blackburn and Joe Jeannette, who in 1909 fought a 49-rounder that featured 38 knockdowns. Louis, Rocky Marciano and Ali are there, but Jack Johnson, Jim Jeffries and Stanley Ketchel are more prominent. (John Lardner told Ketchel's 1910 fate in a pretty good sentence: "Stanley Ketchel was 24 years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.") The repeaters in Tyson's gallery are Joe Gans and Battling Nelson...
...week he thought of adding a chapter. But on an unlikely afternoon in 1966, Drabowsky turned into the sort of World Series hero Dan Gladden and Tom Lawless have just become, not to mention Al Weis, Al Gionfriddo and a lot of ordinary Als from the past that Ring Lardner could not have invented...
...before television, Ring Lardner's World Serious was never as somber as baseball's capitalists made it seem for the longest time last week. Late- night games on weekends are crimes against nature. When venality becomes a ground rule, a dreariness seeps into the cool night air, and the Red Sox and Mets seemed only alternately able to shake it. "Here's the windup and the pitch," in the modern form, means The Cosby Show is ending, the Merrill Lynch commercials know no boundaries, and it is getting on to 9 p.m. EDT -- cue the pitchers...