Makes you wonder if it really was Straw, Doc, Mookie, Nails, and The Kid.
Years and years ago, when I was first writing for Sports Illustrated, I was assigned to cover a senior golf event somewhere in Arizona. Now, I knew nothing about golf. Absolutely nothing. So, because the intricacies both confused and bored me, I aimed for color. Outfits, looks, sayings, glares, etc. While watching someone hit a ball, I noticed a loud, large, ugly heckler. He was, as I recall, quite the obnoxious guy—and he was wearing a blue Milwaukee Brewers cap. In my piece, I referred to him as “Robin Yount.” Not as the real, literal Robin Yount, obviously, but as a schlub in a Brewers cap. “Robin Yount”—ha! Get it.
Anyhow, I should have used Yount’s name in quotes. Or italics. Or … something. Because, a couple of days after the story ran, I was home in Mahopac, visiting my folks, when the phone rang. My mom answered.
“Jeff,” she said, “someone named Robin Yount is on the phone.”
Hahahaha.
“No, really.”
Glub.
I picked up. It was Robin Yount. The Robin Yount. “Mr. Pearlman,” he said, “why do you have me looking like an ass at a golf tournament in Arizona that I didn’t even attend?”
Uh … I tried explaining. It was “Robin Yount,” not Robin Yount. You know, you’re the most famous Brewer, and this tool was in a Brewer cap and … and … ha! Get it! Like, a joke, Robin. Funny, funny, funny …
He wasn’t laughing. But, to his credit, he was understanding-ish. “I don’t totally get it,” he said, “but clearly you weren’t trying to hurt anyone.”
The magazine ran a correction in the ensuing issue; something along the lines of, “The Robin Yount identified in the recent Golf Plus piece was not, actually, Robin Yount.”
I felt 3-inches tall.
Repoz
Posted: December 22, 2012 at 04:41 PM |
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1. Jose Can Still Seabiscuit Posted: December 22, 2012 at 05:57 PM (#4331014)"So instead of learning about the game and writing a meaningful story I just took the easy way out." Attaboy Jeff.
Because you grew up liking sports...and golf isn't a ####### sport.
(It's a sport in the same way the Jeff Loria is a human being, yes technically both comments are true, but to many, golf is not a sport, it's a pastime.)
years later, seems some things never change.
No kidding.
I teach in a Music Department at a small University for a living. There are times I am asked to teach a class outside of my direct expertise, so I - you know - do some hard work before I write the syllabus and get in front of the class.
I create PAGES of notes, analyses, discussion topics, ideas, etc. so that when I am teaching the course, while I am not THE expert on the topic - I am able to work my way through a course and teach the undergrads what they need to know about what it is they are trying to learn.
It would never occur to me to find some other way to do the job. The ONLY answer is to buck up and learn the thing that needs to be taught. I don't understand folks who find ways to avoid work while picking up a paycheck.
Of course it isn't.
I know nothing about Jeff Pearlman, but from the above I can tell he didn't grow up rich & traipsing to a country club to hang out with Muffy & Buffy & Tuffy. And while he may be rich now (at least compared to me ... then again, so, I swear, are most people here, or so it sometimes seems), at least he apparently doesn't go drink at country clubs with a bunch of useless wastes of space.
The NY Times trots out Dowd and Collins 4 times a week to do the same thing. It's not an accident.
Wait, what?
that is my reading of the article
Yes, that's the proper takeaway (I can't say for sure that Pearlman's account of his own story is entirely accurate, primarily because Jeff Pearlman hasn't given me any reason to believe anything he writes). But yes, he decided it would be cool to ID this gent as Robin Yount, thinking that no one could possibly think that he meant he was Robin Yount. Ever the embarrassment, that guy.
Link to article. It is, to say the least, confusing. Can't believe the editor kept it in.
HEY SI -- it's the internet -- you can put the correction right next to Article if you want.
But yes, a fine gentleman so far as I know.
This is the grumpy betraying a lack of knowledge. I grew up in rural/industrial nowhere, played golf pretty much every day of my life from about 14 to 18 on public courses, quite a bit since, know just about everything there is to know about golf, and haven't spent a day rich in my life and maybe five rounds in 25 years at a country club.
Pearlman grew in a Hudson Valley suburb of Manhattan, Mahopac NY. He may not have cared about golf, but I have little doubt there were Muffys, Buffys, and country clubs galore in his upbringing.
http://mlb.sbnation.com/2012/12/4/3730094/dale-sveum-shot-robin-yount
I'm not sure which astonishes me more - the utter stupidity of the assignment and the execution, or the willingness of the author to write about it years later with a less than complete sense of shame.
Well, ashamed about the Yount confusion, but not about his apparent unwillingness to do much/any homework in spite of the standards at the time of the place that employed him. Even granting it to be a "fish out of water" piece, that doesn't mean you should skip even understanding a little what dry land you just landed upon.
My uncle lives across the water from this.
I know nothing of Pearlman's upbringing, but nobody's confusing Mahopac with Scarsdale or Armonk despite its flowery Wikipedia entry. It would very easy to grow up there without any kind of country club background (I say this as someone who grew up not terribly far from Jeffy without any country club experiences of any kind, and I never met a Muffy or a Buffy until I moved to the Midwest. I do like to play golf though).
You don't have to be rich to afford a membership to a golf course but you kind of have to have a lifestyle that can afford to devote over a quarter of your day to playing golf every single day.
Not the PGA tour and all the crap and millions that go along with it, but playing. You and the shot. Knowing that however you hit it would say something about you. A bad slice banging off a tree says something almost definitive about your character. A long iron that holds the green, though, hints that life might actually be something you could get good at. I got the bug when I was thirteen and fourteen years old and during summers I slung my bag across my back and biked the five or seven miles to one of two public courses in the county I grew up in. The green fee was three bucks, and when I didn't have three bucks I'd steal onto a private course closer to my house, a few miles away, but it was patrolled by a gargantuan fat man in an electric cart who chased me off the course with real anger, even on a weekday early in the afternoon when the course was almost empty.
.
That is all.
And of course it's a sport. It takes an extraordinary amount of skill to master, plus self-control up the wazoo. AFAICT 99% of the people who slam it have either never played it or tried it once or twice and realized it's an impossible sport to pick up right away. And if being associated with rich people disqualifies a sport, then what in the hell can you say about baseball and football, with their multi-millionaire benchwarmers and their best seats occupied exclusively by fat cats looking for tax deductions?
I thought he was a #########. I think ######## is putting it mildly.
Robin Yount or Dick Cheney, I love these cartoon stories. Nothing better than seeing a hunter on the wrong side of the bullet.
That describes about half of the country now. (And with four more years of Obama, that number's only gonna go up.)
This would be more an example of being a 1st-round pick based on perceived talent as a SS, then being told you're next Tuesday's starting pitcher - and showing up on the mound that night without having bothered to learn how to toe the rubber, and walking the first four guys while also balking them around the bases.
Whatever results may have come later (I realize there are a lot of Pearlman bashers here, but I am not one of them), no one voted him to any All-Star teams for this one...
I will gladly defer and retract my "galore". Still, it ain't Wappingers.
That describes about half of the country now. (And with four more years of Obama, that number's only gonna go up.)
I hate when liberals and Albert Belle hijack baseball threads with their liberal agenda.
I've been to Mahopac a few times, covering high school football playoff games. It's nice enough in a bland sort of a way, similar to the quiet little town across the Hudson I call home.
I hate when liberals and Albert Belle hijack baseball threads with their liberal agenda.
And Mike Crudale.
Also hilarious is that, a couple paragraphs later in the original article, he describes one of the golfers as looking like Sparky Lyle.
Agreed that the original article is nearly incomprehensible. It's not a fish out of water piece, and of course Pearlman's wrong that it's about color, outfits, looks, sayings, glares, etc.
Not knowing much about golf myself, it sure seems like he's at least credibly faking it here:
True. His willingness to allow corporate subsidies and corporate welfare to increase is dismaying indeed.
Of course it isn't. What it is though, is an awesome excuse to ride around in a little car, drink beer and smoke cigars, all whilst being outdoors in a pleasant environment. The golf is superfluous to the whole experience. I "golf" about 5 times a year and it's a hoot.
Whereas Robert Griffin III, that's not a country club preppy name at all.
As opposed to Curtis Montague Schilling or Francis Asbury Tarkenton or Julius Winfield Erving II?
There's nothing like a career and family to curtail your golfing ambitions. The summer when I was 21, I played probably five days a week. Didn't have a job and neither did my buddies. We went out and played golf many weekday afternoons - Robert, the guy in the pro shop, would let us go out and play 18 for $3 each and, I assume, pocketed the money for himself. I'm from rural Kentucky. Believe me, all golf isn't Bushwood Country Club.
I don't recall any of those guys using those names when they played. As for Robert Griffin III, I of course don't regard the NFL as a sport, either -- it's professional wrestling crossed with gambling.
I have 2 friends here (well, one ... the other one unfortunately died about 4 years ago) who are IIIs, as it happens. It would never occur to them to be such asshats as to actually use that in their daily lives. I can only assume that Robert Griffin III suffered severe brain damage at some point (a very safe bet, since he's a football player).
If so, he must have kicked Stephen Hawking's ass at chess before the brain damage, if you know anything about Griffin (which you don't).
per wiki, granting that Baylor is a football factory (fyi, it isn't)
"Griffin graduated in three years with a degree in political science and a 3.67 GPA, while appearing on the Dean's List twice. During his final year of college sports eligibility, he was studying for a Master's degree in communication."
This after this son of two U.S. Army sergeants graduated from high school a semester early.
what a dullard
-------------------------------------------------
If he willingly goes by "Robert Griffin III," something the #### is wrong with him. I suppose some form of autism is possible; those guys are often pretty bright, seems like.
Or maybe he's just close to his father and wears the name proudly. What a crime.
I agree, Starcraft is definitely a sport.
One of the great things about Twitter is getting your introduction to the latest pop culture topics via the Iron Sheik.
wait, did you guys miss Maureen Dowd's psychotic 'RG III re Obama' column?
it's a tired right-wing meme, but it's the one case where, 'can you imagine if a righty compared a black athlete to a black President' angle might actually fit:
bonus material is Pierce's vivisection:
http://dc.sbnation.com/2012/11/27/3697474/washington-redskins-robert-griffin-iii-maureen-dowd-charles-p-pierce
Tantric golf?
For crying out loud Howie, I already mentioned her once; if anybody says her name a third time, she's gonna show up in the thread.
I just did. What's the big deal about it? It was just Dowd being her usual free-associating self. It was a silly column, but hardly worth a reaction like Pierce's.
I'm going to pretend that his dad was sports anchor Bob Griffin on one of the Shreveport stations when I was growing up. He also hosted a cartoon show called "Bob & His Buddies," & his schtick was a talking alligator named Orville who lived in his straw hat.
Granted, they don't look a thing alike -- Bob, for starters, is white -- but still.
By the way, RGIII is the nickname that he seems to be OK with; but he does respond positively to Robert as well.
I wish each of you BTF posters the very best of both health and happiness in the coming years.
Enjoy this season in whichever way it most pleases you.
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