It is your movie, you and a partner wrote it, interviewed former Jets general manager Mike Tannenbaum along the way, watched the artistry of its making, and Kevin Costner’s and Jennifer Garner’s as well.
Now it is Friday night and your movie has just opened nationally and you are watching it for the first time with the general public at Lincoln Square by Lincoln Center.
“It was amazing,” Scott Rothman told The Rumble. “It’s just where I’m from, so it was really important to me that the people here enjoyed it.”
His movie is “Draft Day,” starring Costner, the fictitious GM of the Browns, and Garner.
“The last half hour of the movie I think is arguably its strongest part,” Rothman said, “and certainly by the climax, I think people were really invested in it.”
Imagine how rewarding it was for Rothman and his screenwriter partner Rajiv Joseph to see.
“Immensely, immensely, yeah,” Rothman said. “Because you have no idea when you make these things how they’ll sorta play in the theater. I’m used to writing comedies, so you kinda know if it’s working or not because people laugh. With dramas, it’s a little bit more difficult, you’re sorta left guessing as to what people are going through, but people were applauding by the end, which was a great sign.”
The NFL’s next draft day is May 8 at Radio City Music Hall, and the Browns will be picking fourth.
“I grew up in Long Island, but I grew up a Dolphins Dan during the [Dan] Marino years, and I’ll always be a Dolphin fan, but I’ll now also always be a Browns fan,” Rothman said. “After you spend so much time [filming] in Cleveland, it really does become kinda contagious when you see the way the fans there love their team and rally behind their team, oftentimes in the bleakest of times, they still never lose faith.”
Book details NBA hurdles for Asian-American
Charley Rosen, Phil Jackson’s longtime buddy dating back to the 1970s, is out with a new book that can be labeled as the anti-Jeremy Lin tome.
Rosen and Jackson think a lot in terms of what makes a good team player, and the 6-foot-7 lefty forward Sammy Wong, whose parents hail from Taiwan, is the consummate selfless, pass-first player. The novel “Sammy Wong: All-American’’, published by Seven Stories Press, follows Wong’s attempt to make it into the NBA.
Rosen — who has written books with Jackson before, including “Maverick’’ — was approached by his editors wanting him to weave a Lin fantasy tale about an Asian-American hoopster. But Rosen, who lives in Woodstock and was on Jackson’s staff with the Albany Patroons, turned it into a more dire portrait of an Asian-American’s struggles against prejudices in the hoops world, growing up in New York’s Chinatown, working at his ironclad father’s low-rent Chinese restaurant, Po Ping’s Palace, where he wanted his son to forever remain.
“I couldn’t write the fairy-tale ending like what happened with Jeremy Lin,’’ Rosen told The Rumble. “He did it already. He lived it already. To write a novel about it would’ve been redundant. This is real but it’s not real. Anybody trying to get to the NBA is accustomed to failure more common than success. Most guys don’t make it.’’
Against his father’s wishes, Wong played at Bronx High School of Science but was ignored by Division I scouts, wary of his heritage and physicality. However, Wong received an academic scholarship to attend tiny Division III Rheingold College in Vermont whose coach, Billy Kramer, ran the Triangle offense in which Wong mastered.
Wong played in the NBA’s summer league, had brief stints in Switzerland and Israel, and the minor leagues in Albany. But his basketball career hit its climax and low point when joining the Harlem Globetrotters traveling circus as member of the Washington Generals, where he was the recipient of ethnic slurs was part of the gag.
Rosen, now working on a book about the historically-bad 1972 Sixers, did a ton of research on Chinese culture and historical droppings are spread across the book.
Curtis gives back to his H.S. alma mater
Curtis Granderson naturally is excited about Thursday’s dedication of the stadium that bears his name at his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Chicago.
It will be the new home field for his college team, the Flames, but more importantly, it will be the home field for more than 38 youth organizations in Chicago.
“Having the stadium bear my name is great,” said Granderson, who will fly to his hometown for the ceremony after the Mets game on Wednesday. “But what I’m most excited about is the fact it’ll give a number of inner-city kids a chance to play baseball on a great complex. It’ll also give them a taste of what college life is all about.”
Granderson gave $5 million dollars to the $10 million project. Granderson will be there to cut the ribbon and throw out the ceremonial first pitch.
“Inner-city kids across the country aren’t playing baseball anymore,” Granderson said. “One of my passions is to make it easier for them to get on the field. Hopefully this stadium will go a long way towards doing that.”
MLS fans gets
Topps treatment
Getting your own trading card probably is one of the most unique experiences a professional athlete can have. From David Wright to Eli Manning, many athletes readily say that opening a pack and seeing your image is one of those memories that is really part of Americana. But for all its cache, the card business has stagnated over the years, but Topps never stopped trying to find ways to engage fans.
Their latest product offering, out last week, is with a new partner, Major League Soccer, and is full of items like jersey relics and autographed cards of well-known former players like Alexi Lalas and Claudio Reyna (who has his own New York City Football Club card, even though the team has yet to play a game) to current stars like Landon Donovan, Clint Dempsey and Red Bulls stars Thierry Henry and Tim Cahill. The cards even have unique analytics provided by Bloomberg Sports to give fans a different and more granular look at the numbers behind the game.
However the real difference is not in the players or the special foil cards, its with the fans. For the first time, Topps has included in the sets cards of fans — the die-hard supporter groups that adorn each MLS stadium and cheer, chant and sometimes taunt the opposition just like their counterparts do in soccer stadia around the world. The fandom of some clubs is even so passionate that two groups were selected for cards, with the Red Bulls Viking Army FC and Empire Supporters Club each getting their own collectable in the set.
“The culture of what MLS has built is very unique to sport in the North America, and a big part of that culture are the supporters groups,” said Zvee Geffen, Topps Brand manager for MLS.