From the Writing Archives--Nice Guys Finish Last

 

 This week I begin my last week in my 50s. In celebration of that, I'm dipping into the archives every day this week to feature something I've written in the past. This was a review of the Leo Durocher book "Nice Guys Finish Last" which was reissued on this day in 2009. It appeared in the Beachwood Reporter. Some of the great anecdotes from Leo's book, of course, also made their way (with attribution of course) into my book EveryCubEver...

I knew a few things about Leo Durocher before I cracked open the pages of “Nice Guys Finish Last” (just re-released on paperback by University of Chicago press).

I knew that he was such an irritant as a player and manager in the 1930s and 1940s that he once provoked Cubs pitcher Hi Bithorn to throw a pitch into the Brooklyn Dodgers dugout.

 I knew that his language was so foul it would have made Bobby Knight blush.

I knew that he was essentially an unlikable guy. When Vin Scully, a man that never has a harsh word for anyone, heard Leo took a job in Japan he said: “It took the U.S. 35 years to get revenge for Pearl Harbor.”

But most importantly, I knew Leo Durocher was the manager and wore #2 for the team of my childhood; the late 60s and early 70s Chicago Cubs.

 What I didn’t know about Leo Durocher was his almost sociopathic motto: “Do whatever you feel like doing whenever you feel like doing it, and everything will turn out just fine.”

 I learned that in “Nice Guys Finish Last.”

I also learned that despite his unlikable personality and foul mouth, Leo Durocher personally witnessed and experienced nearly every important event in baseball between the late 1920s and the early 1970s. Imagine getting behind the scenes reports from someone who absolutely doesn’t care about stepping on toes.

That’s “Nice Guys Finish Last.” 

Durocher was a bench warmer on those great Babe Ruth-Lou Gehrig Yankee teams in the late 1920s, a spark plug for the legendary “Gas House Gang” in St. Louis in the 1930s, the manager of the Dodgers when the color line was broken in the 1940s, and the manager of the Giants in the 1950s when Willie Mays came to the majors and Bobby Thomson hit the shot heard round the world.

 His stories about his run-ins with the baseball executives of the day, including Yankees owner Ed Barrow (Leo said “Go Fuck Yourself” to him), Cardinals owner Branch Rickey (the tightwad bible-thumping baseball genius), Dodgers owner Lee McPhail (the manic-depressive lunatic), and Giants owner Horace Stoneham (the distant drunk), are almost inspiring in their iconoclastic furor.

But I’m a Cubs fan first and foremost, and for me the most interesting parts of the books were the little tidbits about some of the all-time Cub greats like Pat Malone, Charlie Grimm, Billy Herman, Bill “Swish” Nicholson, Rabbit Maranville, and of course, the Cubs that Leo managed in the late 60s and early 70s.

 Those Cubs years were still fresh news when “Nice Guys Finish Last” first came out, and while I love the behind the scenes look at my childhood heroes, this entire section does make Leo sound like he’s attempting to settle some scores. He calls out Ernie Banks as a phony, and implies Ron Santo was an overrated dimwitted baby. He calls Milt Pappas an agitator, and implies Joe Pepitone was God’s punishment for Leo’s own behavior as a player.

Perhaps the most shocking part of the book for me, though, was Leo’s portrayal of Cubs owner P.K. Wrigley. Durocher, who has almost nothing nice to say about anyone (except Willie Mays and Eddie Stanky), calls Wrigley “The finest man to work for in the world” and “The most decent man I’ve met.”

 I did not see that one coming.

 In fact, the entire Cubs section of the book made me question everything I once believed. Wrigley was a sweetheart, but Jack Brickhouse was a jerk? (Leo actually writes: “Up yours, Brickhouse”). Ernie Banks and Ron Santo were the reason the Cubs didn’t win it? (“We were too slow in the middle of the lineup.”) For cryin’ out loud, Leo tried to trade Santo for Cesar Tovar and Billy Williams for Mike Epstein. The only reason neither trade happened was because the other team said no. You’ve got to be kidding me!

 The book was co-written with incredible flair and style by Ed Linn, who also co-wrote one of my other favorite baseball books, Bill Veeck’s incredible autobiography (“Veeck...as in Wreck.”). But while it doesn’t pull many punches, and it’s never ever boring, there are a few parts of the book that just don’t ring true.

For instance, Durocher’s run-ins with baseball commissioners Kennesaw Mountain Landis, Happy Chandler, and Bowie Kuhn make those men sound like absolute idiots who fined and suspended him for no reason whatsoever. It’s hard to dispute that some of their rulings were a bit random, but it hardly seems likely that Durocher was the unluckiest man in baseball history. There’s certainly more to those stories.

The other part of the book that seems a bit whitewashed is the first season Jackie Robinson played with the Dodgers. Durocher was suspended that entire season so he didn’t actually manage him until Jackie’s second season, but Leo really downplays the unrest in the Dodgers clubhouse before Jackie’s arrival. Durocher claims to have held a late night meeting with the players to warn them that Jackie was coming and if they didn’t like it, they could take a hike. He doesn’t mention that the Commissioner had to step in to issue a more direct threat.

 While I absolutely love the baseball tales in “Nice Guys Finish Last,” I’m not wild about the Hollywood stories. For all the down and dirty criticism of baseball players and executives, Leo is downright sycophantic when it comes to Hollywood. Perhaps the most ridiculous part of the book is the five page ass-kissing of his pal Frank Sinatra. Leo’s head is so far up Frank’s butt you can actually see Durocher’s bald head when Frank says hello. He does the same thing to Danny Kaye earlier in the book.

 It’s unbecoming.

 I like my irascible curmudgeons to be pure.

On the other hand, that kind of ass-kissing led to quite a few cameos and guest spots. Durocher was on Mr. Ed, The Munsters, The Beverly Hillbillies, and The Judy Garland Show, among others.

Maybe I shouldn’t question Leo. It hasn’t turned out well for anyone else that has.

Don’t believe me? Just read “Nice Guys Finish Last” and see what I mean.

 

From the Writing Archives

 

On this day in 2007, I reviewed a great media book about the dangers of media consolidation, a subject that is near and dear to my heart, in the Beachwood Reporter. Even though the media landscape has changed dramatically over the past  15 years, if you can find the book out there, it's still highly recommended.

“Fighting for Air”

Reviewed by Rick Kaempfer

 

As a long-time radio veteran, and someone who has followed the story of media consolidation as closely as anyone in the country, even I was appalled by the details of the Minot, North Dakota train derailment story from the introduction of Eric Klinenberg’s “Fighting for Air.”

According to Klinenberg’s excellent narrative, local officials tried to contact the radio stations in Minot to declare an emergency because a toxic cloud five miles long, two and a half miles wide, and 350 feet high was heading right for town.

There was only one problem with this plan.

Clear Channel owned every radio station in town, and all of the programming was coming from elsewhere. There wasn’t a single person in any of the radio studios to answer the calls, and therefore, there was no-one to alert the public about the impending danger.

By the time the cloud had dissipated, one man was dead, and more than a thousand people needed medical care. If Minot’s radio stations hadn’t been consolidated and downsized, the town could have been easily evacuated before the slow-moving cloud reached the town limits.

And that’s just the introduction of “Fighting for Air.”

Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist from New York University with a reporter’s gift for uncovering the stories behind the stories, methodically chronicles the effect of consolidation on every medium since the disastrous Telecommunications Act of 1996; including network and local television, network and local radio, mainstream and alternative newspapers, and the Internet.

Why does radio suck now? Klinenberg explains it.

Why does 24-hour cable television news cover so little news? Klinenberg explains it.

Why does it seem like we have more media options than ever, yet less information and entertainment? Klinenberg explains it.

He effectively and meticulously presents evidence of the cost cutting that follows all big media mergers, and shows how that has led to decreased news staffs in every medium. That, in turn, has led to a country that only appears to have more information available, while it actually has far less.  (What’s more terrifying than an uninformed electorate? An uninformed electorate that actually thinks it’s informed.)

He shows how the increased power of these few media corporations has led to several big stories being buried in the broadcast media; including, and especially the effect media mergers have had so far, and the fact they are trying to get even bigger and even more powerful as this book went to press.

He chronicles the complete disregard the current FCC (and the one headed by former FCC Chairman Michael Powell) has for public, professional, and scholarly opinion about consolidation.

The arguments against media consolidation are clinically enumerated by Klinenberg, most convincingly in the sections about the loss of local news and information. The arguments that were presented by big media before the Telecommunications Act of 1996 are also thoroughly and convincingly proven to have been far off the mark. For instance, instead of the 1.5 million new jobs promised, 500,000 have been eliminated.

So what is the argument for further deregulation? I thought this was the funniest quote in the book. In a report often quoted by former FCC Commissioner Michael Powell: “The real danger to Americans is that outdated and unnecessary FCC restrictions will limit improvements in media markets and technologies, limiting the benefits that they can provide.”

Got it? They aren’t making enough money to improve technologies. If you just let them own it all…they’ll work harder at making it better.

Is there honestly someone in the world who believes that? Certainly no-one who has ever worked in the media. So why aren’t members of the broadcast media (who would personally be most harmed by further consolidation) coming out to aggressively point out how ridiculous this argument is? Simple.

To tell the truth about your corporate media bosses is to commit career suicide.

To tell the truth about the FCC is to bring down the wrath of the FCC on your bosses, which is an even more effective way of committing career suicide.

“Fighting For Air” isn’t the first book to tell this story, but it’s probably the most impressively researched and well written.

My only quibble with Klinenberg’s book is his assignation of political motives to some of the big media CEOs. In my experience, these guys don’t have a political agenda as much as they have insatiable greed. Scratch the surface of an apparent political agenda (even Rupert Murdoch’s), and you’re bound to find just another money grab.

At its heart, however, “Fighting for Air” tells an important truth: The big media corporations have completely abdicated the public interest obligations required as a precondition of operating the public airwaves, and the FCC, which was founded to keep an eye on this above all other things, is helping them do it.

I guess it takes a sociologist to tell the real truth about the media.

But at least he tells it well.

 

Rick Kaempfer was a Chicago radio producer (Steve Dahl & Garry Meier, John Records Landecker) and host for twenty years. He is the co-author of the Radio Producer’s Handbook (Allworth Press, 2004), and the author of the upcoming satirical novel about the broadcast media “$everance,” available in April on ENC Press (www.encpress.com/SEV.html.) He calls the writing of that novel “a cathartic experience.” Rick covers the media regularly and is a frequent Beachwood contributor.