I’m Rarely inclined to express spirituality in this space, but it strikes me that anyone with a radio in this town should feel blessed.
To have steady, first-run access to Mike Francesa — to just be alive at the same time as he, to be able to inhale the same air after he’s done breathing it — can only be the act of a higher power. Not quite as high as Francesa, but, you know, up there.
I admit it: It’s lonely around here without Mikey when he takes a week off to have his formaldehyde changed, his diet cola cans cleaned and waxed, or to sit among kings within a compound far beyond our reach. Hey, even on a bus trip he would demand to sit front row, center.
I miss the guy when he’s gone. I still sleep on the same side of the bed as if nothing has changed. But deep down, I know better. I’m not bad, just weak.
If not for his vacations, we would run the risk of taking his extraordinary gifts, which he so generously shares with us, for granted.
Why, just this past Thursday afternoon, he — or is it “He”? — allowed us to follow his sage genius in arriving at exactly the kind of greeting Derek Jeter would receive upon coming to bat for the first time this season, just a few minutes away.
Francesa pondered his own question, then declared Jeter would receive “a five-minute standing ovation.”
Thank you, Mikey! Toto, leave that curtain alone!
Five minutes? Not that we ever would question the great and powerful Oz, but try standing and applauding for five minutes. Go ahead. Your hands would burn, blister, catch fire. “I should’ve stopped at four!”
Funny, the day before, flipping through actor/activist/essayist Charles Grodin’s new book, “Just When I Thought I Heard Everything,” I bumped into a passage in which Grodin cited a report claiming that after the French debut of Michael Moore’s political documentary, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” the audience gave it a “20-minute standing ovation.”
Grodin wrote that he wasn’t there, didn’t see it, didn’t hear it, but knows this about it: It’s bull. “Have you ever stood up, or sat, for that matter, and applauded for 20 minutes? Try one minute.”
Francesa’s wisdom-generated tout was particularly strong given Yankee Stadium was, at most, half-filled — the lower, pricier seats nearly abandoned. To think small pockets of people could or would produce a sustained, five-minute standing ovation was the kind of inspired know-it-all Francesa genius for which we’re grateful.
Alas, though, Francesa was due to get one wrong.
The mostly standing ovation for Jeter lasted 35 seconds, which isn’t a short ovation, but one that naturally ended when Jeter was ready in the batter’s box. Clearly, Francesa’s factoring held that Jeter would wait five minutes for all to be seated and silent before facing the first pitch.
Modern history shows and tells us that only one person was capable of inspiring such sustained standing ovations — Josef Stalin.
As Stalin appeared to address large audiences of party operatives in Soviet Russia, he would stand and observe the standing ovations below him. Those O’s seemed endless because not until Stalin sat or gestured for quiet was one expected (allowed) to cease standing and applauding.
Meanwhile, Stalin would scan the crowd, to see if anyone had stopped applauding. But no one dared stop. Not on their life.
You know, Mike knew Stalin. Yup, called him Joe.
Art — and new video game — imitates life
Just because football is in disrepute due to 1) gang-grown or gang-inspired criminals, and 2) concussions, doesn’t mean the NCAA or NFL are going to stop selling its ugliest acts or excessive brutality, not as they see money in it.
Commercials for the new EA video game “NCAA Football 14” include a narrator inviting participants to enjoy “smash-mouth football” while computerized players are seen celebrating themselves by flashing hand signals.
Of course, TV’s greatest enemy of all sports — ESPN — as always, is in the EA sales mix. It’s conducting an “Ultimate Team” vote in a cross-promotion with this game. Unfortunately, the game’s rated E — for everyone.
So come and get it, kids. Play football the way the big boys play.
* So help me, we’re in a cultural free-fall — the good people can get lost, the bad guys — and worse — shall be served.
It now seems as if Red Bulls fans want to be real international soccer fans — i.e. drunk, vulgar, eager for trouble. Hardly even matters the team’s roster radically changes every season.
Even team-sanctioned bribes — payments to fan clubs — to encourage these louts behave have been rejected, of course, on First Amendment grounds. Freedom of speech allows them to make games insufferable for kids, families, the right-headed. Yeah, they’re patriots!
A fellow who lives up the road from me gave up his family’s four Red Bulls season seats because of the relentlessly obscene, often homophobic chanting in his kids’ ears.
Good! Get out, stay out! Blank you! They can’t be real soccer fans, anyway.
Marshall plan needs reworking by CBS, TNT
For as long as Ole Miss lasted in this past NCAA Tournament, CBS and TNT chose to ignore the previous arrests and assorted, recidivist misconduct of me-first gunner Marshall Henderson, choosing instead to hype him only as a feisty, must-see novelty act.
Now that Henderson has failed two more drug tests, CBS and TNT, come this March, may get a second shot to play stupid.
* Thursday afternoon, during Royals-Yankees, Suzyn Waldman noted it was a nicer day than was forecasted, adding that you just can’t trust the weatherman to get it right. Reader Todd Brech from Staten Island: “Does she know who she’s sitting next to?”
ESPN again last week credited itself with “confirming” some other news entity’s scoop, never identifying whose scoop it “confirmed.” Such blatantly dishonest self-promotion comes easily to ESPN.
* Sherry, Baby: Reader David Greenfield wants to know if Matt Harvey treats his pitching blisters with Harvey’s Blister Cream. (Hey, he dared me!)
How is it that it’s a given that Metropolitan area hotels will whack up rates during Super Bowl week, yet when hotels did the same during Hurricane Sandy they were charged with a crime? Special-event, supply-and-demand price-gouging is price-gouging, no?