Friday, April 15, 2022

STILL AT IT

 

               I saw the movie “King Richard” the other night, and liked it. I say this in full understanding that movies about real sporting figures and events are held to a standard of accuracy quite a bit lower than those of other mediums. Some measure of suspense must be conjured up even when audiences are aware of outcomes, and this requires that some facts be fudged. Heroes ofttimes must be burnished to appear to be more, uh, heroic than they are or were in real life, villains sometimes must be manufactured. That’s entertainment.

                In “King Richard,” the main character is Richard Williams, father of the tennis players Venus and Serena Williams, and the story centers on how he made his daughters what they turned out to be. The film ends with V and S still girls (Venus 14 years old, Serena 13) on the brink of the stardom we know will be theirs. That made them bit players in their dad’s drama.

               Will Smith plays Richard, and does so wonderfully. Smith is 53 years old, around the same age as Richard Williams was in the movie, but Smith can do young, middle-aged and, probably, elderly as well or better than any contemporary actor, so whatever he does on screen usually turns out well. As you no doubt know, he made news at the Oscars the other night with an impromptu performance that brought him much-earned obloquy. What you might have missed is that same night he won the best-actor award for “King Richard.”

               As for the truthfulness of the movie’s script, I give it a C. The movie’s biggest failure was its core portrayal of Richard as a steadfast father who, in his own, oft-spoken film words, would “always be there” for his family. The easily verifiable fact was that his family with Venus and Serena’s mom Oracene and her three girls from a previous marriage was his second. He’d had five children from his first marriage but abandoned it while all the children were age eight or younger, apparently with few backward thoughts (“he was a sperm donor, not a father,” one daughter from that marriage recently told a British newspaper). Post-movie timeline, he would divorce Oracene, remarry and father a son, then divorce that wife.  

               I was sportswriting during the late 1990s when the Williams sisters came upon the professional tennis scene (“burst” would be more like it), and had some personal knowledge of Richard Williams. He liked to talk generally and to me in particular, probably because he admired the newspaper I worked for. I liked him because he had a light manner that inspired grins, but he had a story to tell and told it at every opportunity.

               His main pitch had a two-pronged thrust: the “ghetto to glory” story of his girls’ roots and his own role in their ascent. The first part was true and amply covered in the movie. Venus and Serena grew up in mostly black Compton, California, and Richard, without much background in the sport, had them smacking around tennis balls daily on the city’s public courts from the ages of five (Venus) and four (Serena), even during rainstorms.  The movie makes a bow toward recognizing that some might consider his regimen excessive in the form of a busybody neighbor who sics the social-welfare people on him, but it portrays the girls as happy participants in his program. Nothing they’ve said since contradicts that.

               To its credit, the movie’s portrayal of the girls’ early coaching history probably is more accurate than Richard liked. Even after they were successful pros Williams’ family mythology had it that he was their sole guiding hand, but the movie shows them coming under the tutelage of California coach Paul Cohen before they were 10 and then moving to Florida to spend four highly formative teen years in the Rick Macci Tennis Academy, a well-known assembly line that also produced Jennifer Capriati, Andy Roddick and Maria Sharapova. That move also cast doubt on Richard’s repeated claim that education came first in his girls’ upbringing; in such places the emphasis is much stronger on the “tennis” than on the “academy.” 

               The part of Richard’s spiel I found most curious wasn’t covered in the movie. It was his insistence that tennis would be a fleeting part of his girls’ careers, that they had numerous aptitudes and soon would tire of ball-bashing in favor of other, weightier pursuits. Cut to the present, with Venus age 41 and Serena 40, with both saying they haven’t quit the game even though neither has played a tournament match since last summer. Both women have had various side interests, but their involvement has been more as celebrity decorations than as fully active participants.  

               F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line that there are no second acts in American lives seems to apply particularly to sports, especially lately when sports’ rewards are enormous. But with 30 Grand Slam singles titles between them, and nine-figure net worths for each, money or acclaim can’t be compelling reasons for their continuing. Thanks in part to their dad’s inventiveness the Williams sisters occupy a singular niche in our culture, and I’ve hoped he’d be right about them focusing their abilities elsewhere.

               That thought has been with me of late, not only because of “King Richard” but also because of the recent retirement at age 25 of the Australian tenniser Ashleigh Barty, the sport’s No. 1-ranked woman.  In going out on top she joined a short list of athletes who’d done the same, including Pete Sampras, Jim Brown, Barry Sanders and Sandy Koufax, although Koufax might still be pitching if his elbow allowed. It might be a bit late to put Venus and Serena on that roster, but better late than later.

                

Friday, April 1, 2022

STARTING OVER

 

               Baseball is back, which is a good thing, but much of the news surrounding its return isn’t good. Here in Arizona, our economy deprived of the first three weeks of scheduled spring training, crowds at the first week of the resumed practice games were off about 25%. By my own unscientific measurements, fan mood is sour.

 Maybe I’m just projecting my feelings about the game’s nose-thumbing lockout, but maybe not. Last week I dropped by Sloan Field, the Mesa spring base of my Chicago Cubs, always the Cactus League’s darlings, and found tickets for sale at the box office instead of through recent-year scalpers’ monopolies. There were lots of empty seats in the park at game time and the faux-team jerseys some fans sported bore the names “BRYANT” “BAEZ,” “RIZZO,” “BANKS” and “LESTER” rather than those of any present team members. No surprise there since the current Cubs are pretty much incognito.

Roster changes had been expected as last spring’s exercises began; the rosy bloom of the 2016 championship team had faded and the core of that hallowed group—Kris Bryant, Javier Baez and Anthony Rizzo— were entering their final season before free agency. Most speculation had it that the team couldn’t afford paying today’s rates to retain the entire trio but probably would keep one or, maybe, two. Turned out they let all three go for prospects in mid-season trades, on top of the two other standouts (Yu Darvish and Kyle Schwarber) they’d shed before the season began.

 Suddenly it was déjà vu all over again, back to 2011, when newly hired baseball boss Theo Epstein dumped every saleable Cub in a frank project to tank a few seasons while manning up for better days.  We Cubs’ fans put up with it—even cheered—because of the numbers 56 and 103. Those were the years gaps between the team’s last National League pennant and World Series victory.

But that was then and this is now, and I’m thinking that the highs generated by a half-dozen years of playoffs contention has spoiled us for radical sacrifice, especially when another drought could have been avoided.  In billionaire Tom Ricketts the team finally seemed to have the sort of big-egoed, deep-pocketed owner who would spend with the big boys and, thus, avoid the downturns that come in transition periods.

Pre-pandemic full-house crowds at Wrigley Field, paying top dollar for their seats (only the Boston Red Sox have a higher ticket-price scale), meant the fans were doing their part. Major ’16 heroes Bryant and Baez, aged 30 and 29 respectively, had enough foreseeable good years ahead to sustain Cubs’ relevance. The teams that rewarded those two with long-term, megabucks contracts-- the Colorado Rockies (Bryant) and Detroit Tigers (Baez)—certainly thought highly of them.

But noooooo, it was back to the bad old days, and with an exclamation point. Sans stars, the 2021 Cubs’ limped home with a 71-91 won-lost record, going 29-58 after a decent start. That was the Major Leagues’ worst mark over that 87-game span.

The Cubs finally spent some money in the off-season, but on second-tier free agents. Their big splash was signing 27-year-old Japanese outfielder Seiya Suzuki, late of the Hiroshima Carp, to a five-year, $85 million deal. He’s supposed to be the best thing since sukiyaki, but Cubs’ fans can’t help thinking about a previous Japanese signee, Kosuke Fukudome (2008-11). He’s best remembered for screwing himself into the ground every time he struck out, which was frequently.    

Failure to develop pitching was the black mark on the Epstein regime, and new boss Jed Hoyer, Theo’s longtime second in command now in his second season in charge, has yet to prove he can do better. The Cubs’ other big offseason move was the signing of pitcher Marcus Stroman, ex of the New York Mets, to a three-year, $71 m pact. The most notable thing about him is that, at 5-foot-7, he’s the shortest pitcher in the Majors.

Stroman’s addition increased the team’s for-certain starting rotation to two—he and the veteran Kyle Hendricks. It’s just a week before the regular season is to begin and the identity of the other three starters remains mysterious. Venezuelan Adbert Alzolay last season became a rare starter who came up through the team’s system, but he was a disappointment (5-13 in wins and losses, 4.58 ERA) and will open this season on the injured list. The other candidates are retreads with no great promise.

Aside from Suzuki and outfielder Jason Heyward, who stays with the Cubs because no other team wants his $22 m-a-year contract that seems to have no end, the eight-man lineup remains similarly iffy. Catcher Willson Contreras is a good one but the team seems determined to trade him, if only for that reason. Middle-infielders Nico Hoerner and Nick Madrigal spent most of last season being injured.

  Frank Schwindel and Patrick Wisdom, a couple of career minor-leaguers the Cubs used to fill self-made holes at first and third bases last year, did well, but with caveats. Wisdom, 30, set a Cubs’ rookie home-run record with 28, but also struck out about 40% of the time and would have threatened a Major League strikeout record if he’d had enough at-bats. Schwindel played with 14 different minor-league teams before the Cubs brought him up at age 29. That is not the stuff from which dynasties are made.

Thanks to their kids-for-vets trades the team has a raft of young prospects, but none seem ready to step up to the Bigs just yet. None has nearly the pedigree of Bryant, the team’s top draft choice in 2013, who’d been the MVP in college ball, the minor leagues and the Arizona Fall League before being promoted in 2015.  Las Vegas puts the Cubs’ 2022 over-under win total at 75.5, but that’s stretching it, I think.  Starting over is hard to do.