Wednesday, December 31, 2014

the last book I ever read (All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, excerpt five)

from All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews:

On the way to the Starbucks in the lobby I got a call from Finbar. He asked me what the hell I’d been talking about. You want to kill you sister? he said. I’m a lawyer, for god’s sake. Don’t tell me these things. No, I don’t, I said. But I’m wondering if I should. Yolandi, he said, you’re exhausted and stressed out. You can’t kill your sister. You can’t do anything for her other than what you’re doing right now. I told him I wasn’t doing anything for her right now and he said that I was there, that’s what mattered. Was there something he could do for me? I asked him to drive past my apartment in Toronto and see if there were signs of life from Nora and Will and maybe he could knock on the door and ask them if they were okay and why Nora wasn’t answering her phone. Although I already knew why. I was because she had poisoned Will and dragged his body into a closet and was having unprotected sex all over the house with her fifteen-year-old Swedish dancer boyfriend and she didn’t have the time or the inclination to talk to her sad old disapproving mother in the midst of it all. Consider it done, he said. He promised to call later that day.



Tuesday, December 30, 2014

the last book I ever read (All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, excerpt four)

from All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews:

I leave Emergency to find my mother and my aunt who are drinking black coffee in the cafeteria. My aunt Tina is older by a few years but otherwise they are almost the same person. They both have snow-white bobs, flashing cat eyes, a million wrinkles each, and really strong grips. They’re barely five feet tall. When they see me they both call out my name and make room between them and pull me onto a chair and put their arms around me and my aunt tells me she loves me and my mother tells me she loves me and I tell them I love them too. I can barely breathe. I’m jealous of my own mother for having her sister near her at a time like this. When my father died Tina came then also to be with my mother and my sister and me, and bought each of us a dozen pairs of white cotton panties so we wouldn’t have to worry about mundane things like laundry while we were planning a funeral. When my mother had her bypass surgery Tina came then too and took me to Costco and we pushed a giant cart around an enormous warehouse buying my mother a year’s supply of ketchup and toilet paper and Vaseline Intensive Care lotion, which has recently been renamed Vaseline Intensive Rescue lotion by the company to reflect the emergency atmosphere of current life on earth. During her recovery Tina bathed her sister gently, laughing, immodest, the way I helped my sister shower when she was too weak from starving herself to do it alone. My mother a Rubenesque bundle of flesh and scars, a disciple of life, and my sister a wraith. How does one give birth to the other?



Monday, December 29, 2014

the last book I ever read (All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, excerpt three)

from All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews:

I said goodbye to Julie and drove around the city for a while wanting and not wanting to drive past the old house on Warsaw Avenue, trying and not trying to remember those years of marital happiness.

Dan, my second ex, the father of Nora, raised Will as his own while Will’s biological father, my first ex, was in the States embracing volatility, and we both really felt like we’d gotten things right this time around after crappy first marriages, that at long last we’d resolved the agonies of unfulfilled romantic yearnings and were finished with bad decisions. Now we’re engaged in a war of attrition but mostly, like modern lovers, through texts and e-mails. We have very brief truce-like moments at times when we’re either too tired to fight or somehow simultaneously feeling nostalgic and full of goodwill. Sometimes he sends me links to songs he thinks I’ll like or essays about waves or whatever, the universe, or apologies for a million things and sometimes he gets drunk and writes long scathing diatribes, litanies of my failures—which are legion.



Sunday, December 28, 2014

the last book I ever read (All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, excerpt two)

from All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews:

I hung up and threw the phone into the river. I didn’t throw the phone into the river. I stopped myself at the last second and muffled something like an already muffled scream. I decided I’d rather set the hospital on fire. I’d prefer not to have my soul crushed. Bartleby the Scrivener preferred not to until he preferred not to work, not to eat, not to do anything, and died under a tree. Robert Walser also died under a tree. James Joyce and Carl Jung died in Zurich. Our father died beside trees on iron rails. The police gave my mother a bag of his belongings afterward, the things he’d had on him when he died. Somehow his glasses didn’t break, maybe they flew off his face into soft clover, or maybe he had carefully removed them and put them down on the ground, but when she took them out of the plastic bag they crumbled in her hands. His watch too. Time. Smash it. His wedding rings were bashed and nearly all of his two hundred and six bones broken.

He had seventy-seven dollars on him at the time and we used the money for Thai takeout because, as my friend Julie says about times like this: You still have to eat.



Saturday, December 27, 2014

the last book I ever read (All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, excerpt one)

from All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews:

Elfrieda’s a concert pianist. When we were kids she would occasionally let me be her page turner for the fast pieces that she hadn’t memorized. Page turning is a particular art. I had to be just ahead of her in the music and move like a snake when I turned the page so there was no crinkling and no sticking and no thwapping. Her words. She made me practice over and over, her ear two inches from the page, listening. Heard it! she’d say. And I’d have to do it again until she was satisfied that I hadn’t made the slightest sound. I like the idea of being ahead of her in something. I took real pride in creating a seamless passage for her from one page to the next. There’s a perfect moment for turning the page and if I was too early or too late Elfrieda would stop playing and howl. The last measure! she’d say. Only at the last measure! Then her arms and head would crash onto the keys and she’d hold her foot on the sustaining pedal so that her suffering would resonate eerily throughout the house.



Wednesday, December 24, 2014

the last book I ever read (Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion, excerpt twelve)

from Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion by William Fotheringham:

The racing was not the only pressure. Success did not make The Cannibal’s life easy. Once he had become public property, the demands of media, fans, the whole cycling world, were immense. The writer Marc Jeuniau noted that it could take up to two hours to get through to the single open phone line in the Merckx house. (There was a private line for talking to his sponsors in Italy.) His number was available through directory inquiries; most of the calls were fielded by Claudine, who would filter media demands as well. The line usually received about fifty calls a day; Jeuniau counted seventy-five calls in five hours one day when he was with Merckx not long after his accident in Blois. The demands were multifarious, one example being a call from a woman a few days after the accident, with this to say: ‘I hope that now that Eddy is unwell he will have time to answer me at last. I want my son to be a professional cyclist and a message from Eddy would help.’ Further inquiries revealed the son was three and a half. There were continual requests for money, appearances, logistical demands.



Tuesday, December 23, 2014

the last book I ever read (Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion, excerpt eleven)

from Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion by William Fotheringham:

Three days after the Giro, Merckx was in the Swiss town of Gippingen to start the second leg in a now-legendary triple: Giro, Tour of Switzerland and Tour de France, forty-three days of racing between 16 May and 21 July; three days recovery after the Giro, five between the finish of the Swiss Tour in the northwestern town of Olten and the Tour de France start in Brest. The ten-day Swiss event—the hardest stage race on the calendar behind the three Grand Tours—was won in essentially defensive style, in which Merckx landed the prologue time trial, then rode tactically until the final time trial to seal victory by fifty-eight seconds from the Swede Gosta Pettersson. But he came out of the race with a sore backside, a small sebaceous cyst precisely where his crutch sat on the point of the saddle. Watch the old television footage and it’s no surprise, given the way that The Cannibal throws himself around the bike as he chases Fuente through the mountains in the Giro. He was to have problems in this area for the next couple of years, like Louison Bobet, whose career was ended by a crutch wound.

The operation to clear up the cyst took place the day after the Tour of Switzerland finished, 22 June; recovery was expected to take five days, precisely the interval before the start of the Tour de France on Thursday 27 June. Merckx travelled to Brest for the Tour start a day late because he was having his stitches out. When the race started, the wound was small, but it was still open, which did not bode well for a three-week event. All he could do was pray for dry weather. As it was, he could never get comfortable, and the whole thing reawoke the referred pain in his left leg dating back to the crash in Blois. He won the prologue with his shorts bloodied as the wound opened further; for the next three weeks it needed constant care, constant bathing, the application of cream and sterile plasters, and cushioning with bits of foam and bandages.



Monday, December 22, 2014

the last book I ever read (Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion, excerpt ten)

from Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion by William Fotheringham:

‘Fuente would always attack when you were least expecting it, he didn’t have the calculating spirit that says “I’m going to go for it here”,’ recalled his teammate Txomin Perurena. ‘He just went for it without thinking whether Merckx was in good shape or looking bad. He would just feel like attacking. There was no doubt he was affected by the moon. I can’t remember whether it was when the moon was waxing or waning but he would suddenly flip and it wouldn’t matter whether he had Merckx in front of him or not, he would go haywire.’



Sunday, December 21, 2014

the last book I ever read (Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion, excerpt nine)

from Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion by William Fotheringham:

‘Merckx and I were the same age, twenty-four,’ wrote Ocaña, ‘but he had had a happy childhood and adolescence, not market at all by the same privations that I had suffered, and life continued to smile on him’ Ocaña was from the village of Viejo in Castile, where his father worked in a textile mill carding wool, but the family had trouble scratching a living in the years after the Spanish civil war. ‘Meat was a luxury, so too our sweets at Christmas,’ wrote Ocaña. They moved several times as his father sought work, ending up in the Landes of southwest France, close to the town of Mont-de-Marsan. There he began racing only at the age of sixteen, because his family could not afford a bike for him (he ‘borrowed’ his first one, without asking the owner). By 1968, after his father’s premature death, he was supporting his wife and child and his mother and four siblings. He was a near neighbor of the legendary rugby player Guy Boniface, to whom he was related by marriage. Ocaña was as much French as Spanish, and might well have had a French professional licence had he not been offered a contract with the Fagor team in 1967. These were all connections that endeared him to the French public and press.

Ocaña could climb almost as well as his fellow Spaniard José Manuel Fuente, the supreme mountain specialist of the early 1970s, but he had more all-round talent. He was a stylish cyclist when in perfect health—which was not as often as it should have been—a supreme time triallist on his day, twice a winner of the Grand Prix des Nations, the longest and toughest time trial on the calendar. He was more talented than the best cyclist Spain had produced until then, Federico Bahamontes. ‘The Eagle of Toledo’ had set the mercurial standard for Spanish cyclists with a series of spectacular mountain victories and dramatic—occasionally petulant—abandons during the 1950s and early 1960s. Both Fuente and Ocaña burned brightly but briefly. Their careers lasted seven and ten years respectively, their retirements were premature and their deaths tragically early, Fuente at fifty from kidney disease, Ocaña taking his own life at forty-nine.



Saturday, December 20, 2014

the last book I ever read (Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion, excerpt eight)

from Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion by William Fotheringham:

There was a talented cyclist who happened to be born at the same time as Eddy Merckx. Like so many others, the cyclist spent the best years of his career trying to beat Merckx but was constantly frustrated. Time and again he knew he was in perfect form, time and again The Cannibal defeated him. When he died, the pro went to Heaven and was greeted by St Peter. The saint put him on the start line of a race on the smoothest velodrome he had ever seen, on the finest handbuilt Italian frame.

All the greats who had predeceased him were on the start line: Fausto Coppi, Maurice Garin, Ottavio Bottecchia and so on, but, even so, our cyclist knew he could win. He rode the perfect race, timed his effort just right, and had victory in the bag on the final lap. As the line approached, however, he sensed a wheel coming past, glanced to the side and saw the face of The Cannibal.

Afterwards, in a state of some distress, the cyclist went up to St Peter and said, ‘Eddy isn’t dead yet, what’s he doing here?’ St Peter replied gravely: ‘That wasn’t Merckx. It was God. He likes to pretend he’s Merckx.’



Friday, December 19, 2014

the last book I ever read (Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion, excerpt seven)

from Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion by William Fotheringham:

The king of cycling was certainly not mechanical or robotic in his diet and lifestyle. He did not follow the lines drawn up by Fausto Coppi and Louison Bobet, who were legendarily strict in their diets and lifestyles. He was not an ascetic semimonk like Gimondi. He was fond of a beer. Smoking was actually recommended by some team doctors to wind down after a race; the Faema doctor advised Merckx to have the odd one so he would occasionally nip into Roger Swerts’s room to get a cigarette, Swerts being the team’s smoker. If anything, he veered more towards the bon vivant lifestyle of Jacques Anquetil, although without excess of Master Jacques, said Van Buggenhout. Vittorio Adorni came across Merckx and his teammates knocking back beers in his hotel room one evening during the 1968 Giro.



Thursday, December 18, 2014

the last book I ever read (Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion, excerpt six)

from Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion by William Fotheringham:

It was the essential paradox of any sporting great: Merckx was winning so often and so brilliantly that it was expected of him; it had become banal. As a result the press and fans looked intently for cracks in the carapace. As Blondin wrote: ‘May the best man lose, but not too often.’ Merckx’s defeats became a better story than his victories. Like other dominant figures since, Merckx did not understand and was hurt by that. Some of it was wishful thinking: journalists hoping for a Merckx defeat in the same way that writers like me would optimistically watch for Miguel Indurain or Lance Armstrong cracking in the 1990s and 2000s. For example, during the 1970 Tour one journalist recalled listening to commercial radio as the commentator excitedly proclaimed that Merckx was struggling. The dramatic news was eagerly picked up by the radio commentator’s colleague, the only problem being that, as he did so, the writer who related the story was watching Merckx stamping out his rhythm at the front of the bunch.

The year 1970 saw the first hints of hostility towards Merckx, which would become more marked throughout his reign and would culminate in the incident at the Puy-de-Dôme in 1975 when he was punched by a spectator. Spectators spat in his face as he ascended the Col de Porte and there were whistles at some of that year’s stage finishes. France-Soir explains: ‘There is more applause than there are whistles, but it’s true that Merckx’s apparent coldness and his haughty attitude do not make for a sympathetic reception. And the French feel uneasy about his dominance.’ Part of the lack of sympathy stemmed from the fact that Merckx himself was unable to play to the crowd. His mother had noted when he was a boy that he didn’t really manage to ‘sell himself’ to customers in their shop. Spontaneous public gestures of joy did not come naturally to him: he was too worried for that.

Publicly, Merckx was restrained in what he said and did. As Geoffrey Nicholson wrote: ‘Merckx is a good-looking man but he has the high-cheeked, graven features of a totem pole and they break into laughter about as often. So much so that it has become a kind of game with the press to record instances of him smiling.’ He was nicknamed il mostro—the monster—in Italy. According to Ocaña, many riders referred to him as ‘the crocodile’. Presumably this was for the same reason that he was given his most famous nickname, The Cannibal, because he devoured the opposition. But describing Merckx as sphinx, despot or vampire was simplistic. There was a resounding dissonance between the Belgian’s public and private personae. ‘Are you an introvert?’ asks one television interviewer. ‘I suppose so’ is the muttered answer, with a shrug.



Wednesday, December 17, 2014

the last book I ever read (Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion, excerpt five)

from Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion by William Fotheringham:

Van Buggenhout describes Merckx’s preoccupation with the details of his bike (compared with Jacques Anquetil who would simply get on the machine and race) but his punctiliousness went further than worrying about his position. ‘Eddy thinks about the future a great deal and already, even though he isn’t yet twenty-five years old, he is concerned with what he will do after he has finished racing. He is continually asking himself the question: what will I do with my life after my sporting career?’ One Belgian paper asked Merckx if he was a worrier and if it was a weakness. He answered yes to both, adding that he had trouble sleeping before a race, as ‘I wouldn’t want to disappoint myself or the team or the supporters’. In his eyes, worrying was a virtue, because ‘in cycling, being sure of yourself is an almost inevitable guarantee of not winning’. Insecurity meant minding every detail and never understanding the opposition.

Merckx had, he said in other interviews, always been nervous, ‘almost irritable’. ‘I used to feel taken over by doubt, by fear. There were times when I wouldn’t be able to sleep. Sometimes my stomach wouldn’t keep my food down.’ It was a patronising parallel, but there was something in the assertion of a rival team manager who said Merckx was ‘like a little third category amateur who isn’t sure what the result will be’. The opposition might have been sure; he wasn’t.



Tuesday, December 16, 2014

the last book I ever read (Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion, excerpt four)

from Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion by William Fotheringham:

The Eddy Merckx metro station lies on the outer reaches of the Brussels underground, the Bruxellois equivalent of Cockfosters or Alperton. Line five crosses the Belgian capital from east to west, a modern, airy mass-transit system. The Merckx station, penultimate stop on the south-western branch, is bizarrely understated given that it is named after the country’s leading sportsman. You can leave by the north exit without even noticing the tiny display that commemorates the great cyclist, although when you come back through the south exit you can’t miss it: the small glass case on the platform, with a track bike, a section of the wooden boards from a cycling track and a handful of photographs. And that’s it. Other than the Merckx display, there is a very fine Magritte-style surrealist mural—which holds the attention for far longer than the Merckx artefacts—and, outside, a large stand for supermarket trolleys.



Monday, December 15, 2014

the last book I ever read (Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion, excerpt three)

from Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion by William Fotheringham:

Stage five of Merckx’s rapid progress to world domination was completed at the end of 1968, when he overcame Gimondi yet again, this time to win the Tour of Catalonia. Gimondi had been the precocious new star of Italian cycling: handsome and urbane, son of a postwoman and a lorry driver who initially could not even afford to buy him a bicycle. He was three years older than Merckx and, at twenty-six, approaching full physical maturity. On the bike, he was a stylist: spinning the pedals far more smoothly and with less impression of effort than the brutally physical Merckx. Watching him ride, the purists purred.

Their careers had run parallel since he won the Brussels-Alsemberg amateur classic ahead of Merckx in 1963. In 1964 Merckx won the world amateur road race championship with Gimondi fifth. At the Olympic Games, Gimondi had been responsible for Merckx being caught after a late attack. Unlike Merckx, the Italian had broken through immediately he turned professional in 1956. That year, he became one of the youngest ever Tour de France winners, and he added the Tour of Spain and Tour of Italy in the following two seasons, plus Paris-Roubaix and the Giro di Lombardia. It was all enough for the Italian media to crown him as the obvious successor to their late lamented darling Fausto Coppi.



Sunday, December 14, 2014

the last book I ever read (Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion, excerpt two)

from Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion by William Fotheringham:

Merckx achieved his dream of racing at the Tokyo Olympics later that year, but while the ambition to ride the event had driven him since his early teens, the race itself was anything but a defining occasion. As the amateur world champion, he was no longer just another rider. He was heavily marked by the entire field as he attempted to split the race apart—not the last time he was to find this happening. He suffered from cramp. He rode a less restrained race than in Sallanches, and was chased down by Gimondi when he made his move three kilometres from the finish. Fate had stepped in. The night before, his wallet had been stolen from his room in the Olympic village; in it were the 12,000 Belgian Francs he had brought to pay his teammates. That was the best way to be absolutely certain that they would help him to win. Instead the Belgian team rode for themselves: the gold medal went to an Italian, Mario Zanin, with Godefroot winning the bronze medal and Merckx twelfth. His meteoric amateur career was all but over.



Saturday, December 13, 2014

the last book I ever read (Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion, excerpt one)

from Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion by William Fotheringham:

Guilt or innocence was only one part of the lasting issue, however. Before the Allies appeared Gaston Merckx’s three brothers, Maurice, Marcel and Albert, had escaped, most probably to Germany, and no one knew where they were: they were never seen again. There was no immediate closure. There were two waves of reprisals in Meensel-Kiezegem, one following liberation in September 1944, and a second when the few survivors of the round-ups returned to the villages from May 1945.

As in other communities across Europe, there was harassment and violence and destruction of property. Armed men searched houses at dead of night for collaborators who had escaped. In August 1945, one of the handful of men who had survived the concentration camps returned to the village and heard rumours that one of the Merckx brothers might be hiding on a farm owned by a member of the Pittomvils family, Louis. A group of former resistance men gathered by night and burned the place. Louis Pittomvils was shot dead, although he was innocent of any misdeed. The perpetrators were never brought to justice.



Friday, December 12, 2014

Tell Me When It's Over, a/k/a How A Career Ends: Bobby Holik, part two

Tell Me When It's Over is an interview series with retired athletes talking about the moment they knew their playing days were over. The vast majority were published over at Deadspin. Every once in a while I stumble across the inevitable, unpublished stray, like this interview with former hockey center Bobby Holik from just about two years ago.

Holik, a Czech-American, coach’s son, and professional athlete since age 16, was the number 10 overall pick by the Hartford Whalers in 1989, six months before the Velvet Revolution. After two seasons in Connecticut Holik was traded to New Jersey, where he played the next ten years, winning the Stanley Cup in 1995 and 2000. Holik signed a big money contract with the Rangers in 2002, but had moved on to Atlanta for the three seasons following the 2005 lockout, including the last as captain. He returned to New Jersey in 2008 for what would be his final season in the National Hockey League.

Holik played his last game on April 23, 2009, Game 5 (a Devils win) of the Conference Quarterfinals. He was a healthy scratch for both Games 6 and 7, which New Jersey lost to the Carolina Hurricanes.

I published the first part one of my interview with Bobby Holik yesterday. This is part two.




The first year after I retired from playing was just wonderful. I mean, it’s still wonderful, but in a sense you actually, for the first time in 20 years, you don’t have a schedule day to day. Even in the off-season you have your own schedule in your own mind. Like, Okay, tomorrow is aerobic work and sprints, and the next day it’s anaerobic and weightlifting. It’s every day. And when you have a day off, it’s like, Okay, today’s my day off. Every day, since I was like five years old, I had a goal for the day, for the week, for the month, for the year. And suddenly it wasn’t there. And I felt mentally spent, because you always think about what you need to do. Listen: physically it’s easy. Mentally, you always have to think about what you need to do next to be at your best. So suddenly I retired and I started living day to day.

I started watching a lot more hockey towards the end of my career. As soon as I retired it was a kind of a relief to be able to enjoy the game without really having to get ready for one. So basically, from the first year on, I watched sometimes three games a night. There have been times where, like on a Saturday when I’m out west and afternoon games on the East Coast start at 11, I can watch games from 11 in the morning until midnight. In the middle of winter, every so often I had to climb on the roof and clear the snow off my satellite so I could watch the game. It was caking up, you know, and when it falls that fast you lose the signal, so I have the ladder by the garage and I climb up there. I always liked, especially after I retired, watching the games because suddenly the pressure, the physical pressure was off of me, not having to really get ready for the game. Last year, sometimes I watched eight, ten games a week.

Ultimately I would like to see myself getting involved in the game, whether it’s mentoring younger players in some way or working for a team. Because it’s just, it’s in me. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s just part of me. You know, I have so much to share.

***

Any earlier would be too early, but any later I would be asking for trouble, whether a serious injury or not being able to play on my . . . Not asking for trouble, but you know what I mean. Yeah, I could probably have played longer, but it would not be the same. It was time. I think the timing was right. Any earlier would’ve definitely been too early, and any later I felt like I was asking for trouble. Towards the end of my career, the last year or two, I found that the pucks were hitting me more often. You know, deflected pucks. I was actually getting hit a little bit more than I used to, and I'm like, Hm, maybe those are signs that . . . I was fortunate during my career, as many games as I played. I was not injury free, but minor injuries. And suddenly I started realizing that there’s nothing I can do about certain aspects of my game. The reflexes, or intuition. You’re just losing a tiny, tiny bit of edge, and it starts showing because the game is so fast and so physical and so, so intense. And so I kind of started reflecting every so often. I’m like, This usually doesn’t happen to me. And maybe that’s why I started thinking . . . Again, it was a combination of many things that I said, Okay, it’s time.

It wasn’t like suddenly it started happening. It happened every so often. Every few weeks or months I would get hit with the puck in the face when I rarely did before, because I couldn’t get out of the way. I didn’t just . . . You know, the reflexes . . . Then in my last year, when I went back to New Jersey, I really felt good about going back for one more year, and I was coming into my own, and then a game in Washington, DC I almost lost a finger because I got hit with the puck. It was a true accident. So suddenly I’m out for two months because I had surgery. I almost lost the nerve where it’s . . . I mean, the finger was hanging on the tendons only, so they basically reattached it. Big surgery. I came back. And, you know, at age 38 it takes longer to come back from injury than in the past, when you’re younger, and when I finally came into my own and started playing as well as I could at 38 years of age, suddenly I kind of realized, Wow. I think this is it. Because I was not getting the same high out of it. You know, I worked my way back from the injury, come back to the form and suddenly I just wasn’t . . . My heart and stuff suddenly was like, I think this is it. And so, you know, there was so many weeks left in the season. I’ll give it everything I have as I always did, and when the season was over it was like, Yeah, this is it. So it kind of just happened.

***

I wasn’t thinking about it until I came back to full health and to full form after the injury. Suddenly I came back. I worked my butt off because, as I said, for an older player it’s very hard to come back from injury. It just takes that much longer. So I finally got back to where I wanted to be, where I wanted to be in October, but it was now in December, if not January, and suddenly I realized I came back all this way to realize that this is it. It’s really the end. You know, I’m glad I came to my full strength and full form, but suddenly my heart was like, Okay. You know, it’s just not the same anymore.

So after the New Year, I suddenly realized that, you know, I’m going to finish this season as strong as I can, but that was it. It was something that I felt inside that’s almost impossible to explain. When it’s your choice to be able to say, This is it, then that’s . . . I reached that point.

There were no thoughts of retirement before the last couple of years. You knew it was going to happen. I didn’t have any specific plan. I was coming back to New Jersey because the system that they played, and if it’s going to be my last year – actually I thought I was going to play two more years – you know, and if it’s going to be my last couple of years, it’s always good to be in a familiar place, to just be able to play your game. And what happened during the injury was the opposite. You know, I get hurt. A lot of people said, Hey, don’t worry about it. You get two months off. You rest up. You’ll be better afterwards. And I’m like, That’s not a bad point. Like, instead of playing the whole season you’re going to be playing, you know, 80% of the season, or 70% of the season. But it didn’t happen. Physically it happened. Mentally it happened the opposite. So I didn’t think about retirement. I didn’t realize that it came after I came back to full health and full form after the injury. Up to that point I was just kind of like, It’s inevitable. I don’t know when it’s going to happen.

You’re playing, and because you’re having such a good time it’s like, I don’t think I can think about it. I’m just going to play and do my best. And the opportunity of going back to New Jersey, it was like, Okay, I’ve played almost 20 years. I have the opportunity to go back where I was very successful, in a different role – more like a mentor, more of an experienced player – in a different role than I did in my mid to late 20s. But I wasn’t going there like, I’m going back to New Jersey and I’m going to retire. No. I wanted to go there because I thought I could be an effective player for that organization still.

I wanted kind of the dust to settle, and then I wanted to think about it clearly. I almost waited a month, maybe longer. I never felt like the game I'm playing is the last game I'm playing. Because you don’t want to say, I’m done, when you don’t know. First of all, I always wanted to make it clear, free of emotions. Kind of like, Clear your mind. I didn’t want to make it after a great game or a bad game or a great ending or a bad ending. I just wanted to walk away, separate myself for a few weeks and think about it and then make a decision. And pretty much it was a sure thing, but you still want to make sure. You want to get home. You want to clear your mind and then, you know . . .

I was never the player who had to have kind of the last hurrah and skate around the rink and shake hands. I was kind of an aggressive player. There was always, always something happening when I was playing. So I decided to make the retirement as quiet as possible [laughs]. Because who cares? You know, it’s just another player retiring, okay? I didn’t want to make a deal out of it. People watched me and they cheered for me because I played, not because I’m retiring, you know what I mean? That’s how I felt. I was playing loud as a player, but let’s just keep it on the down low when I retire.

I wanted to get home first, to think about it. We had exit interviews – we always did – with the general manager. You know, we sat down with the coaches and we hung out with the players, but I wasn’t going to make a big deal out of it because I really wanted to make it low-key. Really just announce it over the phone, like, Hey, this is it. And I’m glad I did it that way, because as I said, when I played there was always something happening, and I was in the middle of it. But when I was retiring I wanted to make sure it was a nice, quiet way.

I have a couple of jerseys from the time we won the championship. You know, I always looked at it, when you win championships, that’s the pinnacle. Why save things from ordinary days? I kept both jerseys. I’ve got the Cup replica that we got. I’ve got the rings, and I think I have one or two sticks from my career. And that’s it. I only kept, you know, the good stuff [laughs].

I don’t have a room where it’s all displayed. I have a couple of nice pictures in the house, but other than that, life goes on. Great experience, a great life and great career for me, but life goes on.

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Tell Me When It's Over, a/k/a How A Career Ends: Bobby Holik, part one



Tell Me When It's Over is an interview series with retired athletes talking about the moment they knew their playing days were over. The vast majority were published over at Deadspin. Every once in a while I stumble across the inevitable, unpublished stray, like this interview with former hockey center Bobby Holik from just about two years ago, which I'll post here in two parts.

Holik, a Czech-American, coach’s son, and professional athlete since age 16, was the number 10 overall pick by the Hartford Whalers in 1989, six months before the Velvet Revolution. After two seasons in Connecticut Holik was traded to New Jersey, where he played the next ten years, winning the Stanley Cup in 1995 and 2000. Holik signed a big money contract with the Rangers in 2002, but had moved on to Atlanta for the three seasons following the 2005 lockout, including the last as captain. He returned to New Jersey in 2008 for what would be his final season in the National Hockey League.

Holik played his last game on April 23, 2009, Game 5 (a Devils win) of the Conference Quarterfinals. He was a healthy scratch for both Games 6 and 7, which New Jersey lost to the Carolina Hurricanes.




I had other interests. My dad said, Hockey is great. Give it everything you have. But it is not everything. So there was time where, you know, it was time to give it all, and there was time to get away from it, too. And my interests were always, as a kid growing up, history, geography and the out of doors. So I read tons, and when I had the opportunity to spend time outdoors, whether it was at the cottage or with my grandfather, that’s what I did, too. I dedicated my life to hockey, but you can’t do it every day, 24 hours a day, all year round. That’s not going to make you better. So I always had an outlet to get me away from the game, and when I came back, whether it was a day later or a week or two weeks later, after vacation or in the off-season, I felt that much better and stronger and more hungry for the game. And I think it’s important to have that balance.

I believe it made me a better player, and more successful in the long run because, yeah, we have to learn to focus and give it everything we have, but again you don’t play hockey 24 hours a day. You don’t train 24 hours a day. This all or nothing focus on the game is, I think, overrated in my opinion. It worked for me to have diversified interests.

Also, you can only play hockey for so long. Or you can only be a professional athlete for so long. I was very fortunate. You know, I started playing professionally at 16 in Czechoslovakia, playing for the national team, and then I played 18 years in the National Hockey League, so I played a very, very long time. But still, if all is good, it’s probably only a quarter of my life. There’s a lot of life to live afterwards, and so diversified interests are important because now as we get into post-career, it makes you a lot happier afterwards.

***

When you’re good enough, nothing will stop you. And I firmly believe that our generation of players, or, you know, the players around my era, they were motivated by proving that nobody will stop them from doing what they really want to do.

The Velvet Revolution came. It couldn’t be better timing. I was drafted, still from behind the Iron Curtain, but six months later the government changed and all that stuff had improved. So I couldn’t be more fortunate in that sense. But whether the Velvet Revolution happened or not, I was leaving. I was going to defect, sooner or later, if I had to. Because my parents raised me, not knowing that the democratic changes will come. They were like, This is no place for you. You go where the best play, the best compete. And so was the regime going to limit me? Ultimately no, because I decided, my parents decided that for me to have a better life and the opportunity to compete against the best in the world was to defect. Fortunately the timing of the Velvet Revolution couldn’t happen any better.

It was definitely not certain that I’m going to be able to play there anytime soon, so there was this certain level of risk involved, for sure.

They never contacted me before, but the kind of in I had was Ivan Lendl, the Hall of Fame tennis player. He was a multiple U.S. Open winner. He was on the board of directors there, and he grew up watching my dad play in the Czech Republic. And from what I understand he told them that, If his son is half as good as his dad, you’ll get yourself a great hockey player. Again, that’s what I heard. That’s how it came down to being drafted by Hartford. I was young. I was 18 years old. I didn’t know whether I was coming or going. I was just playing hockey and trying to be the best I could be. I wasn’t concerned about anything else.

It’s much easier to leave when you’re young. I didn’t think about it before the Velvet Revolution. I didn’t think about it afterwards. I came as a 19-year-old, and from Day One this country feels so blessed for me. You know, I still can’t put a finger on it, but I feel so at home. And a lot of it has to do with I’m a small fish in a very, very big pond. And it would be completely opposite in the Czech Republic.

I didn’t know it at the time. I just kind of realized it over the last few years. This country allows me a certain anonymity. It allows me to live my life the way I want to live it. Some people would like more attention. I like it the way it is. You know, compared with the Canadian players from Canada, small town Canada, it’s quite different. It’s a quite different atmosphere or environment than it is if you were in the States.

***

I don’t want to be too clichéd because I’m never big on clichés, but now, being retired, people ask me, What’s your highlight? What was the best part of playing hockey? And I say, If you’ve ever laced up skates . . . You lace them up in the locker room. You pick up your skates, you get your gloves, your helmet on. You walk 20, 30, maybe 40 feet. And then those first few steps you take on the ice. That, to me, was the best. Every day. Whether it was practice, whether it was a game, whether it was a pre-season game, whether it was playoffs, whether it was just a skate around, those few steps that you take.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been inside of the hockey arena or the locker room, but you take a few steps from the locker room and there’s a gate open, and you take those steps through the gates, from the hard ground, the regular surface, onto the ice, and suddenly you’re transformed into a fantasy world. And then you do what you do for two, three hours - with practice it’s 45 minutes or an hour - and it’s like nothing else matters but the game. And I was fortunate to appreciate that every day, every time that happened. And people are surprised to hear that, because they always think about the championships. And I say, No, it’s every day.

I call it an escape from reality. It’s not that I wanted to escape reality, but you’re leaving the real world behind and you’re going to play a game. And I did it for a long, long time. And I not only liked playing games or playoffs or championships, I liked practicing. I just loved being a hockey player. And I would say, The best life there is is a professional hockey player. You’re playing a great game for a living. You’re surrounded by great people who have sacrificed so much to be where they are. And they pay you a lot of money [laughs].

You know, we all are great at something. Most of us, and I believe all. We’re all great at something. Some people find it. Some people never do. Some people find it late. Some people find it early. I was fortunate. I think that I was put on this earth to be playing hockey, and given the opportunity to be the best I could be. It was up to me to accomplish that.

I always take the financial rewards out of the equation, because I would probably be doing it if they paid me half, or just a quarter of what they did. I didn’t know, ever, that I was going to make that kind of money. But I was shooting to be the best I could possibly be at hockey. I was put on this earth to be great at that. Unfortunately there’s a time window that closes for all of us [laughs]. And now we close that window and I will try to move onto the next thing.

If I had a recommendation for retired athletes: don’t try to replace what you did all your life, because you will never accomplish that. Find different direction. You know, there’s so many players who want to replace basketball with golf or football with whatever. No. You’re not going to replace what you did all your life. You just need to find something different, take a different direction.

***

The transition period doesn’t start when you finally hang up the skates. I think the transition period starts when you face the reality and say, Ok, I’ve got a year or two left. I might have more but I’m not going to be able to perform at the level that I would like to. So it was about two years left in my career and I’m like, You know what? It’s coming. I don’t know if it’s coming next year or the year after, but I will not be able to perform at the level I used to. I want, you know, to be realistic. So I started kind of going through the transition.

Not that I gave the game any less. It’s just kind of facing the reality at the right time. And so the last two years of my career, say maybe the last eighteen months and the first year or two after you retire, that’s the transition period, and that’s kind of the time where you have to give yourself time to reflect. You know, don’t dwell on your accomplishments as a player, because it’s over. Look ahead. What do you like? What’s important to you? You know, all that stuff.

I don’t want to be too philosophical. I never was. But it takes, say, a total of three years where you kind of find your new place and you start basically a new life. And that’s why I went out. Nobody wants you or you’re crippled or you suffer traumatic injury. Not that you can’t perform. Again, it’s all intertwined.

At that point of your career, the personal life and the professional life starts mixing. That’s one of the reasons I retired. You know, it was always hockey, hockey, hockey. Not that I didn’t love it, but you have that window of opportunity. And you’re going to give it everything you have. Well, the window was closing, and suddenly you’re like, Well, the window is closing. I still want to play. I still can play. Teams still want me. I’m still healthy enough, but I’m just not getting the same high out of it as I did in the past, because I want to go home and I want to see my daughter grow up. You know, she was becoming a teenager. And I’m like, This is a time of life that I will never have back. It’s just like, You know what? It’s enough. You know, it’s all good. Why not end it now?

So it’s not one thing or the other. It’s a combination. For me it was a combination of the things, because I never want to ask for way too much. Life is not fair, and I’ve had such a wonderful career and such a wonderful life, and my family, you know, I love being around them and I love being home. I’m like, Why push it, you know?

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

the last book I ever read (John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, excerpt seven)

from A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole:

“We are going to have the most fantastic time in New York. Honestly.”

“I can’t wait,” Ignatius said, packing his scarf and cutlass. “The Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the thrill of opening night on Broadway with my favorite musicomedy stars. Gab sessions in the Village over espresso with challenging, contemporary minds.”



Tuesday, December 9, 2014

the last book I ever read (John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, excerpt six)

from A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole:

Mrs. Reilly looked out the front shutters. It was very dark now, which was good. The neighbors would not see too much if they took Ignatius away during the night. She ran into the bathroom and powdered her face and the front of her dress, drew a surrealistic version of a mouth beneath her nose, and dashed into her bedroom to find a coat. When she got to the front door, she stopped. She couldn’t say goodbye to Ignatius like this. He was her child.



Monday, December 8, 2014

the last book I ever read (John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, excerpt five)

from A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole:

Mr. Levy settled in the yellow nylon couch and unfolded his paper, which was delivered to the coast every morning at a higher subscription rate. Having the couch all to himself was wonderful, but the disappearance of Miss Trixie was not enough to brighten his spirits. He had spent a sleepless night. Mrs. Levy was on her exercising board treating her plumpness to some early morning bouncing. She was silent, occupied with some plans for the Foundation which she was writing on a sheet of paper held against the undulating front section of the board. Putting her pencil down for a moment, she reached down to select a cookie from the box on the floor. And the cookies were why Mr. Levy had spent a wakeful night. He and Mrs. Levy had driven out through the pines to see Mr. Reilly at Mandeville and had not only found he was not there but had also been treated very rudely by an authority of the place who had taken them for pranksters. Mrs. Levy had looked something like a prankster with her golden-white hair, her sunglasses with the blue lenses, the aquamarine mascara that made a ring around the blue lenses like a halo. Sitting there in the sports car before the main building at Mandeville with the huge box of Dutch cookies on her lap, she must have made the authority a little suspicious, Mr. Levy thought. But she had taken it all very calmly. Finding Mr. Reilly did not seem to bother Mrs. Levy particularly, it seemed. Her husband was beginning to sense that she did not especially want him to find Reilly, that somewhere in some corner of her mind she was hoping that Abelman would win the libel suit so that she could flaunt their resulting poverty in the face of Susan and Sandra as their father’s ultimate failure. That woman had a devious mind that was only predictable when she scented an opportunity to vanquish her husband. Now he was beginning to wonder which side she was on, his or Abelman’s.



Sunday, December 7, 2014

the last book I ever read (John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, excerpt four)

from A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole:

“Angelo’s got him a hard road to travel,” Mrs. Reilly said absently. She was thinking of the PEACE TO MEN OF GOODWILL sign that Ignatius had tacked to the front of their house after he had come home from work. Miss Annie had immediately started an inquisition about that as soon as it had appeared, screaming questions through her shutters. “What you think about somebody wants peace, Claude?”

“That sounds like a communiss to me.”

Mrs. Reilly’s worst fears was realized.

“Who wants peace?” Santa asked.

“Ignatius got a sign up in front the house about peace.”

“I mighta known,” Santa said angrily. “First that boy wants a king, now he wants peace. I’m telling you, Irene. For your own good. That boy’s gotta be put away.”



Saturday, December 6, 2014

the last book I ever read (John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, excerpt three)

from A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole:

Gus Levy was a nice guy. He was also a regular fellow. He had friends among promoters and trainers and coaches and managers across the country. At any arena or stadium or track Gus Levy could count on knowing at least one person connected with the place. He knew owners and ticket sellers and players. He even got a Christmas card every year from a peanut vendor who worked the parking lot across from Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. He was very well liked.

Levy’s Lodge was where he went between seasons. He had no friends there. At Christmas the only sign of the season at Levy’s Lodge, the only barometer of Yuletide spirit was the appearance of his daughters, who descended upon him from college with demands for additional money coupled with threats to disavow his paternity forever if he continued to mistreat their mother. For Christmas, Mrs. Levy always compiled not a gift list but rather a list of the injustices and brutalities she had suffered since August. The girls got this list in their stockings. The only gift Mrs. Levy asked of the girls was that they attack their father. Mrs. Levy loved Christmas.



Friday, December 5, 2014

the last book I ever read (John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, excerpt two)

from A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole:

“I refuse to ‘look up.’ Optimism nauseates me. It is perverse. Since man’s fall, his proper position in the universe has been one of misery.”

“I ain’t miserable.”

“You are.”

“No, I ain’t.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Ignatius, I ain’t miserable. If I was, I’d tell you.”



Thursday, December 4, 2014

the last book I ever read (John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, excerpt one)

from A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole:

“Ignatius, what’s all this trash on the floor?”

“That is my worldview that you see. It still must be incorporated into a whole, so be careful where you step.”

“And all the shutters closed. Ignatius! It’s still light outside.”

“My being is not without its Proustian elements,” Ignatius said from the bed, to which he had quickly returned. “Oh, my stomach.”

“It smells terrible in here.”

“Well, what do you expect? The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I, too, have my needs. You may remember that Mark Twain preferred to lie supinely in bed while composing those rather dated and boring efforts which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful. Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.”



Wednesday, December 3, 2014

the last book I ever read (Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You? excerpt fourteen)

from Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You? by George Clinton with Ben Greenman:

Hey Man...Smell My Finger was a hot record. People loved its texture and its message. But support was lacking from the label. Over the years I’ve seen a variety of ways in which companies help records succeed or fail to do so. In this case, they deliberately stepped away from it. I can only speculate on their reasons. Maybe it was related to their lack of patience with Prince. Maybe they were breaking in new radio people. Maybe they honestly just didn’t see how they could succeed with it. But when we sensed that they weren’t working with us, we went over their heads and started dealing straight with the programmers and jocks. Berry Gordy, Kerry’s father, caught wind of it and told us not to do that anymore. His theory, being Berry, was that you can’t anger the company. He thought it would only make things worse. In retrospect, he was right. It’s a shame, because we had a video for “Martial Law” all ready to go. It had been directed by Reginald and Warrington Hudlin, who I had worked with on their movie House Party (I played the DJ at a fraternity reunion). The very next year, the Hudlins did a pilot for HBO, a black take on The Twilight Zone called Cosmic Slop. One of the segments was an adaptation of a short story by Derrick Bell, who was the first tenured African-American law professor at Harvard, called “The Space Traders.” The idea of it was that aliens came to Earth and agreed to solve all the plant’s problems—they would give us infinitely renewable energy, pay off the debt, leave a Utopia when they went—if they could take all the black people in America back to their planet. The spaceships that Bell imagined were “huge vessels, the size of aircraft carriers,” sort of anti-Motherships.



Tuesday, December 2, 2014

the last book I ever read (Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You? excerpt thirteen)

from Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You? by George Clinton with Ben Greenman:

There were only a few stars who carried the torch for raw funk in the mid-eighties, and the baddest of them all was Prince. He knew P-Funk in and out, and he was trying some of the same tricks we had. He believed in the two-band balance, though he did his own take on it, setting the Revolution up against the Time. He wrote and produced for outside acts like the Family, Sheila E., Jill Jones, and more. And his Camille character, a sped-up voice that was one of his alter egos, had more than a little Star Child in it. Prince had been hip to us since the early days. He was the perfect age. In the late seventies, when he was getting ready to debut as an artist, he had brought his first record to his label, which happened to be Warner Bros. During their meetings, they played him Ahh...The Name Is Bootsy, Baby, and it stopped him cold. He didn’t even want to go forward. He took his own record back home and worked on it for eight more months. Mo Ostin from Warner Bros. told me that he had been talking to Prince once and that Prince had given me a compliment: he said I was up there with Elvis and James Brown.

In the early eighties, the feeling was mutual, especially after records like Dirty Mind and 1999. I heard his songs everywhere but more than that, I listened into the middle of them and heard a rock or new wave update of some of the same things we were doing in Funkadelic: 1999 especially, with the sped-up and slowed-down voices, the mix of commercial singles and out-there experiments, even the cover art. Then he exploded with Purple Rain. He was such a talented songwriter, especially when it came to absorbing other people’s styles and making them into something distinctive. Like Stevie Wonder, he wrote songs that were instant standards. “Purple Rain” would have played straight as a country song, or a folk song. But unlike Stevie Wonder, he didn’t like people to cover his material. I didn’t get that. I thought he didn’t understand what publishing was for. It’s to stick a flag in a song and claim it so that when someone else works with it, you get paid.



Monday, December 1, 2014

the last book I ever read (Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You? excerpt twelve)

from Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You? by George Clinton with Ben Greenman:

We were reworking our own product, too. At the end of 1977, we hired a new management team: Steve Leber and David Krebs, who had been with Aerosmith and also managed Ted Nugent and Mahogany Rush. We knew that we were in that rock space, and we thought they could help us navigate. Around that same time, most of the original Parliaments left the band: Calvin, Grady, Fuzzy. They hadn’t been fully happy in years, and I could understand why. In the early years they were out in front, getting all the attention, all the girls, and then the spotlight shifted over to musicians like Billy and Eddie. Those guys were like their little brothers. They had sponsored them out of Plainfield. Those younger guys were brats and it was hard for the older guys to stomach them. Plus, when new members came in, like Bootsy, their stars shot right up past those original guys. They always had the nagging feeling that things could have gone in another direction, that they could have been on top of the elevator instead of inside it. They were wrong, of course, but you can’t always control for right and wrong. In the music business, like in everything else, so much dissatisfaction has to do with outsize dreams. When people start out in groups, everybody imagines making it, but no one thinks hard about what that means. Does it mean being a star, staying in the top hotels, headlining arenas? Or is it enough to be able to do what almost no one in the world does, and sustain a career as a professional musician? The mere fact of surviving in this industry is a huge victory. But survivors forget that the alternative in annihilation. They think that the choice is between a good career and a great one. They reach for stardom. And those unrealistic expectations are compounded by creative ability, or the lack of ability. People don’t have a clear idea of what they can and can’t do as artists. I knew my limits. I knew what I couldn’t do. I couldn’t play an instrument. I couldn’t sing as well as some and I couldn’t arrange as well as some others. But I could see the whole picture from altitude, and that let me land the planes.



Sunday, November 30, 2014

the last book I ever read (Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You? excerpt eleven)

from Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You? by George Clinton with Ben Greenman:

An airport hangar is a strange place to rehearse, even if you do have a spaceship. It was absolutely cavernous, to the point where Bootsy could be down at one end with his band and we could be at the other with the spaceship, and we could both be playing and we wouldn’t interfere with each other. Down on our end, we had basically built the stage out to look as it would on tour. The P-Funk stage equipment had come from Aerosmith, who had retired it in 1976. We had a kind of indirect history with them: Bernie had played with Joey Kramer in Chubby and the Turnpikes, and we ended up having the same manager for a minute. I saw them as a funk band, strangely enough—they played loose and with rhythm, which you can hear in a later song like “Rag Doll.” The only other rock band capable of that was Led Zeppelin, and only onstage: when they went into the studio they started tinkering with effects and complexity. And the ship—well, it was all I had hoped for and more. It looked like some kind of unholy cross between and American car from the late fifties and early sixties, a piece of equipment from a children’s playground, and a giant insect. It was awesome. I went into a black box, sort of like a magician’s cabinet, at the base of the ship, came up via an elevator, and then, as smoke and lights went crazy, appeared at the top of the steps. It made for quite an entrance. Soul music had never seen anything like it—for matter, neither had rock and roll. It was like a Broadway show in the most elaborate sense, or what Las Vegas would become decades later.



Saturday, November 29, 2014

the last book I ever read (Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You? excerpt ten)

from Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You? by George Clinton with Ben Greenman:

California was a rarity. For the most part, we were back East and in the Midwest, touring hard as always. One night, Calvin was driving and I dozed off. When I woke up, the grass was parting in front of us and trees were whizzing by on the left. Calvin was still in the driver’s seat, but with his head down on one shoulder, snoring lightly. I couldn’t reach the wheel, so I started to whisper to him so he wouldn’t wake up alarmed. He resurfaced with a look in his eyes that was so calm that it must have been desperate, took the car up the embankment, fishtailing like a motherf*cker the whole way. Fuzzy and Grady woke up, too, and they cheered him on: “You got it, Calvin.” Heads were hitting the ceiling of the car, but we ended up right back on the highway, like we had never left.



Friday, November 28, 2014

the last book I ever read (Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You? excerpt nine)

from Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You? by George Clinton with Ben Greenman:

What did it mean to taste the maggots in the mind of the universe? Well, it meant all of it: the lack of self-knowledge outlined in “Free Your Mind,” the consumerism and short-sightedness in “Eulogy and Light.” It was writing that moved away from prose and even poetry into a kind of sloganeering. That made it compact, mysterious, and memorable. But the song’s immortality came from Eddie Hazel’s guitar solo, which occupied most of the rest of the ten-minute track. I remember recording the solo, of course. It’s possible I’ll never forget. Eddie and I were in the studio, tripping like crazy but also trying to focus our emotions. There was a band jam going, a slow groove I knew he could get into, and we were trying to launch his solo. Before he started, I told him to play like his mother had died, to picture that day, what he would feel, how he would make sense of his life, how he would take a measure of everything that was inside him and let it out through his guitar. Eddie was the kind of player who rose to a challenge. If you gave him instructions or a prompt, he’d come around to it. And when he started playing, I knew immediately that he understood what I meant. I could see the guitar notes stretching out like a silver web. When we played the solo back, I knew that it was good beyond good, not only a virtuoso display of musicianship but also an almost unprecedented moment of emotion in pop music. That was the missing ingredient that arrived in time for that song; it was maybe the first time that our emotional ability as artists matched our technical ability as players.



Wednesday, November 26, 2014

the last book I ever read (Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You? excerpt eight)

from Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You? by George Clinton with Ben Greenman:

Right around the time that Free Your Mind came out, Jimi Hendrix died. That was the end of an era as certainly as anything else was. He had come up to Toronto in May of 1969 and gotten busted. They had opened his luggage and found drugs right there. I just assumed that it had been planted. Why would he be so stupid as to leave it right on top like that? And so when I heard that he had died, I took it for granted that he had been killed. To me, the music he was making was far too great a threat to the establishment. It was generating questions that no one wanted to answer, and the only other way you can quiet a question is by quieting the questioner.



Tuesday, November 25, 2014

the last book I ever read (Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You? excerpt seven)

from Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You? by George Clinton with Ben Greenman:

The two artists who did this better than anyone else, obviously, were the Beatles and Bob Dylan, which is why they not only survived the era but set the tone for everything that came afterward. When the pressure started to mount for them to be spokespeople, when fans and reporters started fishing around for deep thoughts, they had sharp-enough instincts to deflect and say something off the wall. They made an art out of nonsense. Even when John Lennon got in trouble for saying that the band was bigger than Jesus, he was doing it sarcastically and snottily, to make a point. He wriggled so you couldn’t catch him. It got into his art, too, and you can see it clearly in a song like “I Am the Walrus.” Was it deep because it showed how shallow everyone else was? Was it making fun of the idea of being deep? Was it just a matter of opening people’s heads up a little wider than they had been before? It was the same with Bob Dylan, though it took me longer to understand how he was operating. At first, he seemed especially sincere: just a guy out there with his guitar, singing in a nasal voice about love and politics. But when I started seeing his interviews, and then especially when he broke out of that troubadour mold, I saw more clearly what he was. He was a poet, and he was using language to open things up.

Those two influences fed me during that first phase of Funkadelic, along with many others. I was also doing lots of reading: Black Power books, novels, pulpy shit, underground comics, and then all those best-sellers that people now think of as the classics of the hippie era. One of the most influential books of that time was Erich Von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods. Everyone had a copy of it. He had a theory that the greatest achievements of human history, from the pyramids to crop circles, were the work of aliens. They had come down from outer space and given the gift of advanced civilization to humans. Why else would the Egyptians embalm somebody to last so long and put all their belongings in the tomb with them unless they thought that they’d be collected later on? Maybe the aliens were coming back for the pharaohs. It was an intriguing idea that didn’t seem entirely crazy on its face. It seemed like something to explore. These ideas of serious wisdom, these intriguing theories that bordered on historical conspiracy, they all got mixed together in my head. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that they were dissolved in acid. Free Your Mind . . . and Your Ass Will Follow was written almost entirely on LSD. You can hear it in the guitar sound we got, and the way we produced it, and you can read it in the lyrics and the song titles.



Monday, November 24, 2014

the last book I ever read (Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You? excerpt six)

from Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You? by George Clinton with Ben Greenman:

My love affair with British rock followed me back to the States; soon after we returned, I found myself in Boston, tripping my ass off, watching a double bill. Jethro Tull opened the show, and Ian Anderson’s flute was a transformative experience. All the good bands from England were starting to experiment with classical elements: Procol Harum, the Moody Blues, and especially the Beatles, through George Martin’s production. And the headliner, Led Zeppelin, was as loud as anything I had ever heard but with subtle details, too, a sledgehammer with a filigreed handle. They were taking black American music and feeding it through a white heavy-metal filter. They had great songs and a legitimately dangerous energy. And even though they weren’t exactly using classical sounds yet, they had ancient elements that gave their music historical scope. Jimmy Page was playing a thousand-year-old folk song, the same way that Cream was playing off of Greek mythology. My vision of the future sharpened.