Month: June 2022

Yogi Wisdom Explained

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Yogi Berra-isms don’t lack for insight — they’re just sloppily worded. What follows are the originals with HE improvements & explanations.

1. “When you come to a fork in the road, take it“. HE version: Life will sometimes say “that chapter’s over and now it’s time for a new one…up your game by trying something a little different. Something smarter, nervier. Be bold and go for it.”

2. “You can observe a lot by just watching.” HE version: “You’ll never learn anything by listening to yourself talk. Try sitting silently…watch and listen, take it all in…you might learn something.”

3. “It ain’t over till it’s over.” HE version: Ditto.

4. “It’s like deja vu all over again.” HE version: Exactly.

5. “No one goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded.” HE version: The cool people don’t go there any more — too much riff-raff, too many tourists and families.

6. “Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical.” HE version: Baseball is a mind game…a feel-the-spirit, go-with-the-flow thing that’s half Zen submission and half exertion and perspiration. Or 90% Zen and 10% exertion. Or vice versa. What do I know?

7. “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.” HE version: Precisely.

8. “Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.” HE version: If you don’t attend the funerals of friends and co-workers when they pass on, their living-dead zombie corpses won’t dig their way out of the soil and attend your funeral so think twice and be considerate.

9. “We made too many wrong mistakes.” HE version: Sometimes mistakes can be good, by which I mean lucky or even glorious. Or at the very least instructive.

10. “You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.” HE version: Ditto.

11. “You wouldn’t have won if we’d beaten you.” HE version: Yup.

12. “Slump? I ain’t in no slump…I just ain’t hitting.” HE version: I don’t believe in slumps. Slumps are spooky. Don’t even say the word.

13. “The future ain’t what it used to be.” HE version: When we were younger and more optimistic we all felt better about what seemed to be coming around the corner. Now we’re feeling only dread and foreboding. Being older does that to you.

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Yogi, Yogi, Yogi

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Two baseball moments happened over the weekend — one that made me feel like an over-the-hill weakling, and another that made my heart swell a bit and even brought me to the edge of tears.

Moment #1 was having a catch with Jett in a Montclair park. To my surprise and horror I discovered that my throwing arm is stiff and more out-of-shape than usual. The first few throws were actually painful — I cried out John McEnroe-style with each toss. I gradually limbered up but for a while there I was crestfallen.

Moment #2 happened when I saw Sean Mullin‘s It Ain’t Over, an affectionate, unexpectedly emotional Yogi Berra doc that’s playing at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Speaking as one who grew up in the tristate area (New Jersey, Connecticut, Manhattan) and managed to attend a grand total of two Yankee games and no Mets games that whole time, I’m not what you’d call a diehard baseball fan. But I certainly knew and admired Berra (1925-2015), a legendary Yankee catcher (18 seasons), power hitter, “bad ball” hitter and shoot-from-the-hip philosopher whose peak years were in the ’50s and early ’60s.

Yogi Berra is one of the greatest sounding baseball names of all time, right up there with Moose Skowron, Goose Gossage, Miller Huggins, Ty Cobb, Bobo Rivera, Ryne Duren, Hoyt Wilhelm, Duke Snider and Mookie Wilson. (Berra’s birth name was Lorenzo Pietro Berra.)

There was always something simian about Berra’s size (he stood 5’7″) and facial features, but what a magnificent athlete. Named the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award three times, an All-Star player 18 times, played in 10 World Series championships (more than any other player in MLB history), a career batting average of 285 (struck or thrown out 7 out of 10 times — Mickey Mantle ended up with .298), caught Don Larsen‘s perfect game in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series, etc.

And what a TV pitchman! Yoohoo chocolate drink, Camel cigarettes, Florida Orange Juice, Kinney Shoes, Miller Lite, etc.

What does Mullin’s doc do with all this? Nothing miraculous but it always satisfies. Mullin just lays it out, decade by decade, straight and plain, St. Louis childhood to World War II to years of Yankee (and later N.Y. Mets) glory and into the coaching years, and always with an emotional gloss or spin of some kind.

Is it par for the course and familiar as fuck to share various affectionate, awe-struck observations from players, commentators and family members who were Berra fans over the years (Billy Crystal, Derek Jeter, Bob Costas, Vin Scully, Joe Torre, Don Mattingly, Joe Garagiola, Roger Angell, Bobby Richardson, Whitey Herzog, Tony Kubek, Willie Randolph, Ron Guidry and the Berra family — Dale, Tim, Larry, late wife Carmen and granddaughter Lindsay Berra)? Yes, but it works here. Of course it does…you want it.

Does the doc feature a villain? You betcha — Hannah-Barbera’s Yogi Bear, a revoltingly cheerful cartoon character who came along in 1958, and was hated by Berra and everyone else over the age of ten. Thank God the doc doesn’t feature “Yogi,” a 1960 pop tune by the Ivy Three.

The personal Yogi stuff puts the hook in. The 65-year marriage to Carmen (1949 to her death in 2014). Home life in Montclair. The TV pitchman career. The D-Day heroism. Yogi’s long feud with Yankee owner George Steinbrenner after the latter fired him as manager (and by proxy yet). Dale Berra sharing the intervention moment when Yogi and his brothers confronted him about cocaine addiction.

I’ve decided to devote a separate piece to the better-known Yogi-isms — poorly worded sayings that don’t sound right at first, but start to sound right the more you repeat them or think about them.

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“Paradine” Perplexed

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There’s no other way to put it — Facebook film maven W.T. Solley is fooling around — i.e., impishly trying to provoke reactions — by listing, of all films, Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Paradine Case (’47) in fifth place on his All-Time Great Movies list. To which I have no choice but to say, “Will you cut it out, please?”

“The Paradine Case is a straightforward portrait of obsession and downfall,” I wrote on 12.16.15. “It’s a carefully measured, decorous, stiff-necked drama about a married, middle-aged attorney (a too-young Gregory Peck) who all but destroys himself when he falls in love with a femme fatale client (Alida Valli) accused of murdering her husband.

“A foolish love affair is one thing, but Peck’s exists entirely in his head as Valli isn’t the least bit interested and in fact is in love with Louis Jordan, whom she was seeing before her husband’s death. Not much of an entry point for a typical moviegoer, and not a lot to savor.

“It’s essentially a romantic triangle piece (Peck, Valli, Jordan) but you can’t identify or even sympathize with Peck as Valli is playing an ice-cold monster. But I’ve always respected the tragic scheme of it. By the second-to-last scene Peck’s humiliation is complete and absolute.”

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Wokester Death Throes

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From Peggy Noonan‘s “The Boiling Over of America,” Wall Street Journal, 6.9.22:

“Progressive politicians have been around long enough running cities that some distinguishing characteristics can be noted. One is they don’t listen to anybody. To stop them you have to fire them. They’re not like normal politicians who have some give, who tack this way and that. Progressive politicians have no doubt, no self-correcting mechanism.

“Another characteristic: They are more loyal to theory than to people. If the people don’t like the theories the progressives impose, that’s too bad; the theory is pre-eminent.

“Progressives say: We are changing all rules on arrest and incarceration because they are bad for minority groups.

“The minority groups say that sounds good in the abstract but let’s make sure it’s good in the particular.

“It proves not to be. The minority groups say: Stop.

“The progressive says: You have to like what we’re doing, it’s good for you! What are you, racist?

“The minority groups say: We’re going to fire you.

“No you’re not, don’t be ridiculous.”

“Watch.

“And they fire him. And he’s shocked.

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Excellent “Barry” Action

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This is how I like my action scenes to be shot and cut…atypically, I mean. And let’s hear it for that used-car guy who keeps an AR-15 handy! Producer-writer-star Bill Hader directed this…hats off! My only beef is with the psycho idiot shooting automatic rifle fire at Barry as he zooms by…what about all that lead being loosely sprayed at average drivers on the freeway?

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