Word: patly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Pat Jordan...
...consider sport a metaphor for life is sad. To think of sport as life itself is tragic. None succumb to this delusion more readily than ghetto youth, for whom athletics is both a means of escape and an opportunity for approval. And none have described the process better than Pat Jordan. His own decline as a professional pitcher was recollected in the poignant autobiography A False Spring. Four years ater, he turns from the diamond to the court to watch basketball players yield to the pressures of ambition, and to the damning testimony of their skills...
Clad in his normal working garb of jeans, sneakers and a T shirt stenciled with the name of a local gym, Pat Jordan looks like the jocks he writes about. The similarity is purely deliberate. Jordan, son of Pasquale Giordano, went through a disastrous season as a professional baseball player and never quite got over it. At 38, he stays in shape by compulsively pumping iron twice a day. He keeps his psyche in trim by reminiscing with cronies in bars. "I make my social contacts there," says Jordan. "Writing is lonely. You have to get out and talk...
...with the Milwaukee Braves fizzled, Jordan supported himself and his wife Carol by teaching at a local girls' school. But he also wrote, and, in 1969, sold his first piece, a short story, to Ingenue. Says he: "It was great. I got a check made out to Miss Pat Jordan...
...story's truly exciting figures (Charles Colson, John Ehrlichman, H.R. Haldeman, Bud Krogh) get such short shrift that it is often hard to tell them apart; they are interchangeable ciphers in a series of look-alike scenes. Pat Nixon (Cathleen Cordell) is a walk-on role, and Martha Mitchell is not even mentioned. The show has a surprisingly in consistent attitude toward the casting of famous faces. Ehrlichman (Graham Jarvis) and John Mitchell (John Randolph) vaguely resemble their real-life counter parts, but many of their White House cronies do not. This indecision extends right up to the stars...