Mom got new rain boots
Red, rubber, and tall.
Dad asked, “How’d you choose’em?”
Mom said “They’re cool. That’s all.”
Now my Mom’s no liar
But I thought, nonetheless,
Let’s take those cool boots
And put’em to the test.
So when she was too busy
To stop my experiment
I took some cold milk
And in those boots it went.
Like a good scientist
I let my test tube be
And went off to play
For an hour or three.
Perhaps it was even longer
I lost track when Mom screamed,
The unexpected milk
In her boot had her steamed.
I said, “Wait one sec, Mom,
Take a breath, cool down.
Allow me to measure that
Milk puddle on the ground.”
Once I had I said, “Mom,
I’d be angry too!
This spilled milk is warm.
So those boots? Not so cool.”
The thing that they sold you
Is not what you bought.
It seems in some faux-thermo-
boot-scam you’re caught!”
Overcome with shock
Or maybe with grief
Like anyone who’s been
Taken by a thief
She said not a word
but just looked at me,
And I wondered perhaps
if deep down she felt glee
At her little scientist’s
new discovery.
Yes, I thought to myself,
pride must be what I see.
On the shortest day of the year
The sun takes an extra long lunch,
So long it doesn’t end until
Almost the next day’s brunch.
Head lights and night lights get lots of action
The day of the year that’s shortest.
While that day more than any other is for
golf clubs and lawn mowers the boredest.
It seems like it should be relaxing and yet
There’s always so much around you,
On the year’s shortest day, falling as it does,
Right about when the holidays do.
Still songs like “Oh, What a Night” or “Thank
the Lord for the Nighttime” spread cheer,
Of how happy folks get after early sunset
On the shortest day of the year.
Among everything else it is, the shortest day of the year is half a calendar away from its cousin the longest day of the year.
Want in on my Master Plan?
Come closer and listen to me.
Because the blueprint of it’s now taking shape
Oh so satisfactorally.
When’s it start, my Master Plan?
Well don’t worry it won’t be long now.
Just know by the end life will be so sweet
We’ll sweat candy bars from our brows.
Before that part, the Master Plan middle
Involves espionage and boats,
Action car chases, exotic horse races,
Fine jewelry, machine guns, fur coats.
What’s the Master Plan Step 1, you ask?
Simple: win the lottery. Huh?
Well….
…..guess what…
If you’re gonna’ roll on the floor laughing at it,
Then out of the Plan you can be.
Click on the image below to view a Steller Story featuring re-colorized renditions of 9 Pro Football Hall of Famers and 1 Heisman Trophy Winner. Can you name them?
At one time about baseball
There was little I didn’t know
From Tinker to Evers to Chance
To Cano.
But that knowledge has slipped
As I’ve watched the game less
Which I was ok with
‘Till my ignorance caused a mess:
One night I awoke
Suddenly from a crash
That sounded like a baseball
Coming through my window sash.
I squinted to gather
What it really was I saw
Sitting there resembling
A fluffy bear paw.
Sensing my fear it
Spoke first calling, “Child,
You need worry not
For my manner is mild.
At least to you it will be
For you’ve wronged me not.”
“Who are you?” I quaked.
“If we’ve met … I’ve forgot.”
“Some call me ‘Donnie Lipsmack’”
it laughed, “when I’m brash.
But most use my full name:
The Ghost of Don Mattingly’s Mustache.”
Hearing that I sat up and
Gave my eyes a wipe.
Sure enough the ‘stache had on
Number 23 in pinstripes.
Next I learned this apparition
Visiting that night
Had come on a mission
To make an old wrong right.
“I’ve come back,” said the Ghost,
“To settle a score
With the Ghost of Keith Hernandez’s Mustache,
That so-called hirsute legend of yore.
“Long ago we competed
For all the damsels fairest,
Who loved us most because
Our mustaches were the rarest.
And though many eyes then
Stuck to my upper lip
Hernandez’s was always
Considered more hip.”
“But I’m confused, Ghost,
Why come to see me?”
He motioned to the Keith poster up on my wall.
“‘Cause I thought you’d know where that ghost might be.”
“All I know, Ghost
Is Keith’s real mustache lives on.”
And the color drained from him.
“You’re telling me that thing isn’t gone?”
“Not last that I checked,
Though it’s been a while.”
“I was afraid of this,” he said,
through an upside down smile.
“I couldn’t beat it on Earth
and it won’t join me in the Sky.
The odds, for eternity,
That lip hair will defy.”
The good mood he’d arrived with
Had vanished in a flash.
Then Don’s whiskers’ specter
Began to sound rash.
“I’ll be second forever.
Know what that is? Lame!
Can I go on? How?!?
There’s no way!” he exclaimed.
“We should look it up, Ghost,
There’s a chance I’m not right.”
“M’boy,” he said, “I’m certain
that you’re too polite.
But there is no need
To go on pretending
the reign of Keith Hernandez’s mustache
Will have an ending.”
Like a wind-starved kite
With body language bad,
The Ghost of Don Mattingly’s Mustache
Was sad.
Slinking back to the window
At the spot he’d broken in,
The Ghost whimpered,
“Send my people a bill for the glass here, eh, cousin?”
Then like that: he jumped,
And I was by myself again.
When I heard a new voice say,
“Ol’ Lipsmack, aw hell, he was a great friend.”
Now with my blankets
Thrown over my head
I peeked at the Keith poster
Across from my bed
And saw there popping off
The image on the paper
Hernandez’s mustache,
But translucent, like a vapor.
“But how could you too
Be a ghost,” I inquired.
“When the real Keith’s real mustache
Has not yet expired?”
“Au contraire, my good friend,”
he said, “That’s not true.
Nowadays Keith’s as clean shaven
As the Mets wear orange and blue.
Google Image it if
You need confirmation,
Only now in this Ghostly form
Is the Hernanstache a sensation.”
“Well that means,” I said,
“Mattingly’s mustache’s ghost
Based on my bad info
Just made himself toast.”
“Oh don’t sweat it, pal,”
Keith’s ‘stache Ghost assured me
Things will work out fine for him.
Always do for a Yankee.”
“How can you be sure?
They’re not all in baseball heaven.”
Keith’s Mustache Ghost laughed:
“Because at title counting time,
they have 27.”
It was a good point,
And it was his last.
After that without more visitors
that haunted night passed.
Sometimes still I feel bad
Lipsmack’s Ghost met his Gillette,
Though I bet he’d choose death
Over life as a Met.
SANS ‘STACHE – Keith Hernandez today, with a clean upper lip. If only the Lapsed Mets Fan had known, perhaps the Ghost of Don Mattingly’s Mustache could have been saved. (Photo – Gary Gershoff)
During a job interview with NFL Films near the end of my senior year of college, I sat across from the man who named the Dallas Cowboys “America’s Team.”Older, quieter, and more serious than the rest of the 4-person panel conducting the session, he spoke up only occasionally, and throughout, appeared generally unmoved by any thoughts I had to offer.
During one answer about something else entirely I happened to mention Sports Illustrated, a side-door he immediately threw open.
“Who’s your favorite Sports Illustrated writer?” he asked.
It was a completely subjective question from the senior guy in the room, someone whose thinking I could not possibly have prepared for, and yet who could on the merits of any one answer determine the fate of my application.
Frank Deford, I replied.
“Mmmm,” he nodded. “Deford is the greatest writer that magazine has ever had.”
Never mind that a court of law would have dismissed it as an opinion. In these chambers, the fact that mattered was my taste and the head magistrate’s were the same. It was enough to calm my racing heart in the moment; it was what came back to me first when Films called with a job offer a week later; and it was what I thought of immediately upon hearing recently that Deford had died.
“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write something worth reading or do things worth the writing.”
Ben Franklin wrote it. Frank Deford merely embodied it — penning himself a permanent place in the history of American letters by both writing volumes worth reading and indisputably doing something worth the writing:inspiring others. They are many, I am one. Officially, since the day in 1999 when I read “The Ring Leader”and loved it with the pure, inexplicable certainty that only the best creators spark.
Despite the example of his writing and the cosmic assist he provided in that job interview, I never did make the appropriate effort to thank Frank. Not even given the opportunity a few years into my career, when he was one of my interview subjects the first day I ever directed a documentary film crew. Be a pro, I thought. Circuitous anecdotes in which a thesis of gratitude only might be clear to the listener, well, those are a tricky species. Better to try being a competent inquisitor than come off as a stammering ink-sniff. So I stuck to the task at hand.
It was an air-ball with no do-over. So let this be my penance.
Thank you, Mr. Deford.
I’m happy to say I’m still at NFL Films, the company your inspiration helped lead me to join. The week I marked my 15th work anniversary was the same week your pen went silent forever. Since then, countless lovely words have been spilled in your honor. But unless you, Frank, got out in front of the Reaper, filing the copy for a publication to be named later, I’m certain there’ll be no written tribute to you that’s quite worthy.
For its small part, my best assessment of your influence is to offer this: that whatever accolades every G.O.A.T. of Sports’ Future may ultimately compile, all their resumes will still possess the same hole: Born too late to be profiled by as great a writer as any magazine ever had.
FOR AN HOUR in New York in 2005, I conducted this interview of Frank Deford for the first long form documentary I ever worked on, “Rozelle: Building America’s Game.” On this day part of my job as director was to bring props in the event we got stuck shooting in an undesirably blank room. And so, my own typewriter, books, and portrait of my high school adorn the set behind one of my writing heroes.
The remarkable GROUNDS FOR SCULPTUREis like no place I’ve ever been. Part museum, part botanical gardens, this indoor/outdoor art gallery contains the realistic and abstract, the sublime and ridiculous. As remarkable as the space looked during my visit, I left thinking that I could probably enjoy entirely different experiences of it in the spring, summer, or fall ; in the early morning or by the light of the scattered lampposts and landscape lights. So large and diverse is the installation, that every trip there seems as though it would offer something unique.
On the afternoon I spent at this world class exhibition — tucked into a quiet, central New Jersey town between Trenton and Princeton — the plants on the snow covered landscape were still shivering, but doing so with their leaves turned optimistically toward the sun. The scenes produced by the intersection of the natural and man-made artwork on that Eve of Spring inspired my latest STELLER STORY, readable by clicking on the photo below.
Click the photo above to view scenes from the Grounds for Sculpture.
For the past six months I’ve had the great good fortune of working on a documentary film about a remarkable year in the life of the city of New Orleans. Here is a Steller Story photo journal behind the scenes of the production.
The film, titled “The Timeline: Rebirth in New Orleans”, tells the story of how after Hurricane Katrina, a great city, its football team the Saints, and their iconic stadium the Superdome were forced to respond to an unprecedented natural disaster. It premieres on Wednesday, September 21 at 8pm/ET on NFL Network, and features new interviews with Saints quarterback Drew Brees, and former NFL safety and ALS advocate Steve Gleason.
Late last Friday night it came to my attention that I’d lost Muhammad Ali. Not that he’d died. I’d learned that along with the rest of the world hours earlier, a newsflash that sent me in search of an Ali drawing I’d done years before. It was a pencil sketch comprised of two elements: a close-up of the fighter as modeled after the photo on the cover of David Remnick’s outstanding Ali biography King of the World,combined with a speech bubble that in graphic title fashion melded the two-word poem “Me. We.”, which Ali once delivered at a Harvard graduation.
As keepsakes go, this picture lived in the same space that much stuff does: so precious there’s no way I’d have ever thrown it out, so irrelevant to my daily life I wasn’t sure where it was, so singular that there was only a few places it could possibly be. Yet it wasn’t there, there, or there: not still attached to any one of the old sketch pads on my shelf ; not in a pile of old clips and copies and print-outs-of-note dating back decades ; not even unceremoniously folded and stuffed into the binding of the Remnick book.
GOOD, BUT NOT THE GREATEST — Among the items I laid hands on during the search for my “Me, We, Ali” drawing: the David Remnick book whose cover photo helped inspire the missing design ; a pencil-mimic of a Walter Iooss, Jr. portrait of Paul “Bear” Bryant ; and two Vince Lombardi holiday season sketches that never made it onto one of my annual Christmas Cards. Maybe this will be the year St. Vince meets St. Nick?
I had expected to locate the image without much thought or effort, but when more of the latter was needed more of the former came along. My mind went back to an evening in the spring of 2002, the only time I stood in the same room as the Greatest of All-Time. It was in the Joyce Athletic & Convocation Center at the University of Notre Dame during the school’s annual amateur boxing tournament, known as Bengal Bouts. Notre Dame is in South Bend, Indiana, just 25 miles from Berrien Springs, Michigan where Ali had a home. He’d made previous appearances at Bengal Bouts, but that didn’t take any luster from the moment: when he entered, the building buzzed like the bee whose sting Ali had so famously claimed he could replicate.
What happened next lives in my mind’s eye like a stop-action sequence of still photos. Not because the years have made the motion fade from the memory, but because that’s how it actually felt as the moment unfolded.
First, I could see his entourage far on the other side of the floor level on which I was standing. Next, the small group in which the Greatest was at the center was halfway around the arena. Then suddenly, it was in front of me. The next two instants I recall with perfect clarity: I made blink-long eye contact with Muhammad Ali ; he noticed the female spectator beside me wearing a Notre Dame Women’s Boxing sweatshirt, and he began charmingly, playfully shadow-boxing with her.
I have no idea how well he could speak back then, or even if he had the desire to in such a crowded, fluid setting where the main objective was simply to get to his seat. But clearly, the old Champ could still kid, still joke, still float like the butterfly he’d so often promised he would resemble — and became again right then: fluttering out of the space in front of us as instantly and magically as he’d appeared.
Being delusional, selfish perhaps, I’d always felt that my Ali experience was a unique one — the way I’d seen him appear to defy physics as he moved through physical space ; by simply walking, somehow performing the unforgettable in a way that even the witnesses of it would later describe as unbelievable. But I was way off thinking there was anything unique about the stirring presence Ali had had that night in northern Indiana, and it took only the first few bits of reaction and reflection that followed his death to illustrate it. So many authors used the same language as I hadto describe completely different interactions with Ali, and so striking was the shared quality of the collective memory of “meeting” him, that even if you believe just a fraction of what seeped into the world simply on the day of his death, the only comparison that feels apt for the Greatest is not to another person but to a heavenly body. Because like the Sun, Ali seems to have touched everyone on Earth.
Long after midnight the day Ali died, my Artwork Search Party of One continued. Perhaps I was clumsy enough to leave it buried inside the frame of my boxing-centric collagethat it wasn’t part of ; or alongside the Bear Bryant drawing I’d certainly done around the same time, and ultimately that night found in the basement. No. It must be somewhere in the inches thick, Usual Suspects-style sedimentary formation I called a bulletin board in my office at work. Certainly, after passing the weekend, I would poke around that paper-relief sculpture on Monday morning and find my sketch faster than I could say Keyser Soze.
On Monday, no dice.
Just as he was in the ring, Ali is proving elusive rendered in pencil. I refuse to believe the picture got tossed ; searching for it has turned up far too many other pieces of less important creative driftwood for it to be plausible that THAT of all pieces is gone. I imagine someday it will appear suddenly and remarkably, just like Ali did both to the world at large and to the individuals who for even an instant were in his physical presence. I am one of those lucky ones. So even if my hand-drawing of him never surfaces, the greatest image I have of Ali will never fade.
Tweed Typewriter 