March 5, 2011
“Holy Cow, look at that!” That’s Phil Rizzuto, beloved, befuddled Yankees announcer and as usual he’s talking about anything except baseball. For decades he perfected his senile old man act on Yankees telecasts where he’d talk about his golf game, his grandkids, anything but the game. I actually heard him once say “I’ll get back to my story after this pitch.” Bill White deserves to be in the Hall of Fame simply for managing to get in a halfway decent broadcast while sitting next to Rizzuto. My favorite Phil Rizzuto story is one he once told himself. He somehow found an old gift certificate for a free suit he was given for being a guest on a sports show. It was at least twenty years old. Phil Rizzuto, former baseball player, Yankee icon, Hall of Famer, decided that he would go to the store and see if they would still honor the certificate and get a free suit. The decades old certificate. There is no way Phil Rizzuto was so hard up for a suit that he would stoop to that. He had plenty of money, but he went to the store anyway, and simply because he was Hall of Famer Phil Rizzuto, with a national platform to plug the store, they gave him a free suit. Joe Schmoe from Parsippany would get thrown out on his ass but they gave that second rate Yogi Berra a suit. And here’s the kicker- he never even offered to pay for it!
But the purpose of this blog is not to mock Phil Rizzuto, I can do that any time. Read this:
Rule Number One: If Ben Affleck is attached to a movie, it is a bad idea.
Rule Number Two: Don’t need it, Rule One is enough for me.
Man, those swinging days of the 1970’s- key parties, sleeping around, no AIDS (plenty of gonorrhea and syphilis, not to mention crabs, but no AIDS). And where was I? Way too young for any of that. And when I got old enough no one was interested.
This may have been a huge scandal in the Seventies, but today? Two words: Reality show.
This is the era of Charlie Sheen. A couple of guys swapping wives forty years ago? Yawn.
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