Dan Riley's Blog, page 24

November 9, 2016

A prayer unanswered

If this feeling of emptiness, of something without form, and void, can be deliberately accepted, not denied, then the sequel can be an intense richness and fullness of perception, a sense of the world reborn...and to be reborn, we have to pass through the grave. Crucified, dead, buried...--Norman O. Brown, Love's Body

1956

Having turned a significant birthday ending in zero this year, I decided to engage in a conceit over on my Facebook Timeline by celebrating momentous events in my life with various anniversaries ending in zero. As the exercise unfolded, I found myself giving more attention to some years than others. With only two months left, I decided to balance the scales where needed and found that no year needed more attention than 1956. No one big event of that year stood out in my memory, but as I looked deeper into it I realized that it was among the most important years in my life. It really marked the birth my American Enculturation, as opposed to the 10 years before, which were more about family enculturation. 
Politics In 1956 Ike was running for President and I liked Ike, which was significant because almost all the adults in my world were for Stevenson. This was either a case of incipient contrarianism or sympathy for the underdog…either would be American characteristics that I would embody and appreciate as I grew up.  (Of course the notion of Eisenhower as underdog in that election is one only a 10-year old could hold, but next week a mass of voters will handle the results of the current election with all the sophistication and understanding of a 10-year old, so there’s that.)
Rock ‘n Roll, Sex and Drugs
The top 10 songs of the year were dominated by Elvis hits, most notably Don’t Be Cruel. To this day whenever I play it I feel 10 again, hearing it for the time. His voice is so pure and playful. Before the insipid movies, sequined jump suits, drugs, and the soul-sucking sycophants who can ruin the best of us, his was a voice for mamas, and girls unmet and boys without voices of their own. "Don’t Be Cruel" brought rock ‘n roll into my life, one of the least cruel, most liberating things anyone ever did for me. One more indisputable thing about Elvis…beyond the music (along with whispers about a book called Peyton Place) he put sex in the air that I breathed.
As for drugs, I hated needles and wasn’t much into science as a boy, but the arrival of the Salk vaccine was met with joy because it eliminated a constant threat to childhood…and met with reverence because it taught me that science played a sacred role in modern society. 
Movies The movies of 1956 were, for me, a uniquely memorable bunch. Having been lucky enough to be born into the black and white era, every time I went into the local Strand Theater I had no expectation of seeing big, flamboyant splashes of color across the screen. I was always satisfied with the small black and white films as long as they were good. The films I recall from 1956 were very, very good.Anastasia…was one of those big, splashy, color spectaculars that stuck with me, mostly due to the exotic Yul Brynner. With the recent reboots of Magnificent Seven and Westworld, I’m reminded that Brynner, with his pre-fashionable bald head and villains-only Russian accent, was a phenom to have landed so many great leading roles. His leading lady, Ingrid Bergman, not only had an accent, but a scandalous past. So sin, too, was in the air. The Killing was my first Stanley Kubrick film. I had no idea who Kubrick was…what 10-year old back then even knew what a film director was? (Nowadays, what 10-year old doesn’t know George Lucas and Steven Spielberg? Tyler Perry for crying out loud!)  His out-of-chronology approach in The Killing anticipated Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs by decades, and his artful use of facemasks bookended his career with his last film Eyes Wide Shut. I loved every one of his movies in between.Invasion of the Body Snatchers was the most jarring anti-Disney movie-watching experience of my boyhood (and little did I know it would anticipate the current political landscape as we look around at the supporters of the opposition candidate and wonder where were they hiding all those pods).    Moby Dick and 1984 --though I didn’t know it when they came out in 1956, those films would be my first exposure to the works of two writers who would later have a profound and lasting influence on my life, Herman Melville and George Orwell.Friendly Persuasion introduced me to pacifism, and though I never actually became a pacifist, it was the first time my mind was challenged to confront a philosophy that differed from the prevailing one. Fashion
James Dean had died in September of 1955, but it was in the spring of 1956 that my Aunt Jean bought me a red jacket like the one Dean wore in Rebel Without a Cause. In Dean’s honor, of course, I wore it with the collar up, and the first day wearing it to school I brought my brother’s milk money in to his teacher. Mrs. Lyons had been my first grade teacher as well, so she didn’t think twice about turning the collar down and saying to me, “There. You’re not that kind of a boy.” I left the classroom and turned the collar back up, thinking I got the last laugh. But here I am 60 years later still wondering about what kind of boy I am. 
Crime Every Sunday the house was full of newspapers…all the New York tabloids and the two Springfield papers. After church I would spend much of the morning reading through them with my father. No newsman was more famous in 1956 than Victor Reisel, who was blinded that year when a thug threw acid in his face for exposing the connection between the unions and racketeers. My father was an active union man, but still the disgust he openly expressed about the attack on Reisel was a valuable lesson for me: a violent attack on a free press is an outrage no matter how much you disagree with the media. 
Religion
I would in later years adopt Irony as my God, but I didn’t realize until writing this post that the roots of this belief go back to 1956 where I experienced not only the cultural liberation detailed here, but was confirmed as a member of the Catholic Church. Confirmation is the initiation rite for young Catholics in which you are sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit and are strengthened in the Christian life. I would indeed be a pretty devout Catholic for the next 10 years of my life, but eventually the enculturation into American life that began when I was 10 would soon overtake and subsume the orthodoxy I had been fed since I was an infant. That’s the way it goes with religion…the way it should go anyway…as you grow up, it should grow up with you…pushing and pulling against the secular society, helping to form you into a fuller, wiser human being. If you die with the same set of beliefs you were born into, you’ve pretty much wasted the reason for being.  

Sterling Sisters Celebration

Point of privilege as I have to post this personal video here though it has no overriding political, social or metaphysical import, except insofar as it raises the question of why the copyright cops at You Tube would allow this one, but not this one: 



Oh, You Tube just answered my question...Eagles put lock on their music being used in home videos ...so screw the Eagles. 

Dear Mr. Kraft...

No mas!

Robert KraftCEO, New England PatriotsOne Patriot PlaceFoxborough, MA 02035
CC: Tom Brady
October 23, 2016
Dear Mr. Kraft:
Greetings from the trenches…
I am one of those loyal Patriot fans who’s been vigorously defending the reputation of the Pats in blogs and online comment threads for the years from “Spygate” to “Deflategate”. As you can imagine, it’s been a fairly fulltime mission, but I undertake it gladly because your organization has been a constant source of pride and joy for me. I’m writing this letter to you today, however, because I believe the most serious challenge to your ownership legacy lies just ahead. I think you know what it is.
Very shortly Donald Trumpis going to end up the totally discredited loser in this election, and he is going to be desperate to rehabilitate his reputation in part by basking in the aura of you, your team in general and Tom Brady in particular. He will be coming to you as someone fully exposed as a con man, bigot, fraud, bully and sexual predator. He is also teasing out the vile canard that an international cabal of quite possibly Jewish financiers is conspiring to control the world and further that it’s time for the 250-year old American tradition of peaceful transition of power to go. Needless to say, if a college prospect had one tenth of Trump’s baggage he wouldn’t even make your draft board; if a vet on your roster engaged in any of this he’d be gone quicker than you can say Brandon Spikes. There’s probably no one in America who less embodies "The Patriot Way" than Donald Trump. He cannot keep his mouth shut; he cannot avoid distractions; he cannot prepare or practice properly; he cannot stop making excuses for losing; he cannot do his job. (And, alas, do the Patriots really need any more association with cheating?)
I have no doubt that neither you nor Tom Brady had any idea of the trainwreck the Trump candidacy would become on that fateful day when you gave Tom that “Make America Great” cap from Trump that innocently ended up in Tom’s locker. Now, however, you should be as aware as is most of the country that however benign the relationship you had with Trump--on the golf course or your private box at Gillette—such indulgence is no longer possible. Trump is toxic and everything he touches from this point on…his properties, his charities, his beauty pageants, his personal relationships…will be tainted by his poisonous emissions. Fair or not, those who associate with him will be called upon to answer for him. I suspect you’ve already had private thoughts, if not internal discussions, as to how to handle this imminent threat to the team’s reputation and your legacy. Your dilemma is most likely exacerbated by a sense of loyalty to someone who you and Tom believe had your backs at a difficult time, and neither of you is inclined to turn your backs on someone in time of need.
As a dedicated fan, please allow me to offer my two cents on the matter. First, both you and Tom have had to turn your backs on other members of “the Patriot family” in the past when circumstances demanded, and you’ve done so admirably and without hesitation, most notably in the case of Aaron Hernandez. Second, surely you know by now that with all his other self-evident faults, Trump only cares about Trump. Whatever relationship he fostered with you and Tom Brady over the years never would’ve come to pass if there hadn’t been something substantial in it for Donald Trump. Since Tom was very young when he met Trump, he can be forgiven for being too naïve not to recognize that, but neither of you can afford to be so naïve or blinkered on that score now. Finally, and please forgive me, but you must ask yourself, WWMD…What Would Myra Do? Your late, beloved wife rightly once steered you away from a relationship with Christian Peter, a promising young player, due to his assaultive sexual behavior. Even those of us at a distance do not have to think too hard about how she would feel about you opening the Kraft family box at Gillette to host the vulgar, transgressive lecher revealed on the "Hollywood Access" tape. In that numerous women have come forward to tell us that Trump acted on his disgusting words, it beggars common sense and common decency that Tom Brady would allow Trump anywhere near his wife and daughter.
You once famously said, “Today, we are all patriots.” Well, today Donald Trump is forcing people all over the country to choose between extremist partisan loyalty and true patriotism. I trust based on all I know about you that you will make the right choice. But I must leave you with this: As dedicated a Pats fan as I am, if in the months and years ahead I have to witness the insulting and grotesque sight of you and/or Tom Brady schmoozing with Trump in perverted bonhomie, I will rededicate myself to opposing the Patriots as fiercely as the most zealous Jets fan. If it ever comes to that, it will be one of the saddest, most disappointing points of my life.  
Respectfully
Dan Riley
#WWMD
No damn mas!

My Father-in-Law

At sail...Bill guiding first grandchild Meagan 
Bill Woodsum died this past Sunday, October 16 at age 91. I’d known Bill for 50 years this very month and for 48 of those years he was my father-in-law…with greater emphasis on the father part than the law part…although that did not seem likely to be the case at the beginning. Before I met him, Lorna had told me about the ice blue eyes that he used to chill the blood of all the boys who came to call on her and her twin sister Lorraine. And she told me a story that had only taken place the year before I met her in 1966, but which in due time would take on legendary status in the family. It was how the early rock group The Beau Brummels had come to play a concert at the local high school and a handful of choice coeds had been chosen for a night on the town in New York City as the band’s after-concert dates. Needless to say, the excitement and preparation this engendered was of Bye Bye, Birdie proportions, and since Lorna was among the chosen it almost blew the roof off the Woodsum house. But when the manager of the band appeared at the door to pick up Lorna, he was met by Bill who turned those icy blue eyes on him and then cast a glare at the long black limo parked in front of the house and announced that Lorna would not be going.
I really should’ve been more intimidated than I was by all this, but I was deep into the question authority stage of my life and a budding revolutionary...and, well, if you can’t face down a dad, what good would you be when it comes to The Man? I really do hate to bring politics into this at a time when everyone…and I mean everyone…is so damn sick of politics, but the inescapable truth is that the relationship between Bill and me was amalgamated in a crucible of politics. Broadly speaking, most father-in-law/son-in-law relationships are naturally political given that it is about two males jockeying for primary position in one woman’s life. Amazingly, our relationship almost completely averted that particular power struggle. We both seemed to have an innate sense of what each other’s roles were in Lorna’s life and never got in one another’s way in fulfilling our respective roles.
Politics of the more typical kind was another matter. As I say, I fashioned myself as a bit of a revolutionary at the time having taken over as editor of the campus paper and turned it in a pro-pot, pro-birth control, anti-war direction. These were views Bill would prefer to have seen contained by his TV screen and not spilling over onto his dinner table, but so it did. Our differences were pronounced. He was a conservative from a long line of Yankee Republicans and I was a raging liberal from a short line of immigrant FDR Democrats. He golfed and skied and sailed his own boat, and I played softball, football and Risk. He was the single most prepared man I ever met. Battery dead? There was always a spare. Liquor run dry? The liquor cabinet was bottomless. Need emergency money? There was no such thing. There was just money. I grew up in a house where a rope held the oven door shut for years, where Mom would usher in every Christmas season with the pained words “At least we’ve got our health” (more warning than blessing), and Dad’s economic fortunes were always at the whim of big, faceless forces beyond us.    
It was the height of the Vietnam War, and my perilous draft status hung heavy over Lorna’s and my marriage plans. So there really was no dodging politics at dinner, especially since it usually preceded or just followed the evening news that served up the war as hors d’oeuvre or dessert every night. So for the better part of three decades, whenever we got together, the news of the day, especially its politics, would dominate long, late night dinner table conversations that were fueled by vast quantities of wine, but never the rancor that has come to ruin so many current such discussions. Part of that was due to the fact that neither Bill nor I had much rancor in us. Another part of it was because there was always a place for humor at the table, and the most intense conversations could suddenly be lightened by a burst of mutual laughter. And part--a more important part than it seemed at the time--was that we shared common reference points. This was before history books started getting customized to affirm regional prejudices, before news sources got Balkanized into a thousand tiny pieces to reinforce tribal biases, before opinion was elevated above fact. So disagreements could actually be resolved by “going to the tape.” 
Right after 9/11, Bill asked me how I thought George W. Bush was doing. I said I thought his admonition to the nation not to blame Muslims as a whole for the attack and reaching out  to Islam was an important show of leadership. Four years later the possibility of such accommodation completely eluded us. He asked me what I thought about the “swiftboating” of John Kerry, which involved the smearing of Kerry’s war record. I said The Boston Globe had just done an investigative piece totally debunking the smear. Bill laughed and said, “What do you expect from The Boston Globe.”  That exchange marked a turning point in our political discussions. They became increasingly oblique, but the gingerliness that followed did not harm our overall relationship. In fact I’d say the opposite. It became warmer and more openly affectionate. On the first morning of a Christmas holiday visit, I came down to find Bill struggling with our TV remote. He said, “Dan, I’ve been at this all morning and I can’t find Fox News anywhere.” I said, “Oh, I’ve blocked it.” We both got a big laugh out of that…and then I fixed it so we had Sean Hannity as the most unwelcome houseguest ever for the next 10 days (good thing it’s a big house). That aside, we found lots other to talk about, such as family matters and family histories. On one visit we watched The Blue Planet series every night and lost ourselves in the wonders of existence. Other visits turned into black and white film festivals or football marathons. Politics was unnecessary. 
It would be very misleading of me to portray Bill exclusively through a political prism. He would’ve preferred to live a life entirely without politics…and indeed he filled it with so very much else. He was a lifelong athlete…tennis in addition to sailing, skiing, and golfing, and in his last year even overcoming a distaste for water (odd for a Navy man) to take up swimming. In his professional life at IBM, he had played a prominent role in providing corporate support to attorney David Boies in the company’s defense against government anti-trust charges. He was an enthusiastic musician, playing trumpet in a band right up until hit with pneumonia that did him in at the end. He once attended a Christmas party of a friend of ours. Kathryn had hired a trumpet player named Spider for the evening. During Spider's break, he and Bill disappeared into a guest room only to emerge a half hour later with Bill carrying a spare horn of Spider's, and they proceeded to do a duet of Silent Night that actually wowed the night. In his last year he produced a small book for his family of poems he had written while serving on a ship in the Pacific during the Korean War. They were reflective, deeply felt little gems, exposing a loneliness and longing that those who always knew him as a man in charge could never have imagined.
Ultimately the richness of his life was manifest in Bill the family man. He and Betty, the childhood sweetheart who would proudly spend 70 years by his side as his wife, would regularly host grand family reunions in big Victorian houses on Narragansett or on cruise ships. They would outwardly resemble those family reunions popular in foreign movies and sagas…but without any of the angst or intrigue of those entertainments because ours were always fully infused with Bill’s generosity of spirit.  
Back to politics…two years ago Daughter Gillian said to me, You know, Dad, grandpa reads your blog every week and you say some pretty harsh things about Republicans and people who watch Fox News. You should be more careful how you express things. I told Gillian that I’ve always written to appeal to readers, not to protect readers. Only lawyers should write defensively. I said my mother warned me when I first started writing publicly as a boy that if I kept it up the way I was, I would end up in Russia. I told Gillian I could never write freely or effectively with a parent’s voice in my head. 

But here’s the thing…ever since that conversation, I never wrote another political blog post without thinking of Bill…not to protect him…indeed, I felt I owed him my voice in his head to counter Sean Hannity’s. But I thought of him to remind myself that there was at least one person out there who I truly loved, admired and respected who held different political views from mine. That became critical in preventing me from ever allowing myself to dismiss or demean all those I disagree with as enemy. As the demonization of our political opponents continues apace, gathering withering, wicked force, I am convinced that the only thing that can save us from national self-destruction is that we each find our own Bill Woodsum and cling to that precious relationship for all its worth. 

Dan on Bob

Visiting my cousin Donna Harrison and her husband Don in Reno this weekend, and Donna just happened to ask me how and when Bob Dylan became so important in my life. Little did I know that as I was answering her, Bob was winning an election in Stockholm that nobody was paying any attention to, and this morning I awoke to the glorious news that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. I am overwhelmed in a rush of emotions about this for many reasons, not the least of which is that as a writer I came to Bob for his literary genius first and his musical genius (astonishingly still underrated) second. The Nob has featured numerous of my takes on Bob over nearly 600 posts (here, here, here and elsewhere) and at the risk of repeating some of them, I just want to tee off Cousin Donna’s question and play some of my greatest Bob hits rather than try to fashion something new out of the swirl of thoughts and emotions I have about this today.
I recall as vividly as if it happened yesterday seeing a very small ad in one of our Springfield papers that Dylan would soon be playing there. He was billed as “the man who wrote Blowin’ in the Wind,” which was a big Peter, Paul and Mary hit at the time. When I asked my high school buddies if anyone wanted to go see “the man who wrote Blowin’ in the Wind”, one of them, another cousin, Junior Nosal, replied, “Did you ever hear him sing? He’s awful.” So we didn’t go, and for many years thereafter Junior would struggle to regain status as one of my favorite cousins.
Then college and the world opened up, pal Alan Osborn and I would escape the dullness of I soon planted the seeds of my own Dylan collection and fell asleep most every night with my big clunker of a record player beside my bed playing Bob low so as not to wake the house.(Ramona, come closer/shut softly your watery eyes/the pangs of your sadness will pass/as your senses will rise… my lullaby).
And then John Robinson entered my life. John and his girlfriend Nancy had defied the "Dylan can't sing" canard and gone to that concert I missed in Springfield and not only that but they got there early enough to catch Dylan in rehearsal where, as John tells it, Bob sang a song directly to Nancy. Don’t know if it was She Belongs to Me, but it could’ve been: She’s got everything she needs/She’s an artist, she don’t look back/She’s got everything she needs/She’s an artist, she don’t look back. I won’t pull punches here…with the saintlike indulgence of Nancy and Lorna we became total Dylan obsessives. Entire evenings would be spent sitting around a turntable in the dark listening to that voice, which had now become as fundamental to my being as my dear old dad’s (in fact Dad said to me one day, in a flash of self-pity, “I wish you’d listen to me like you listen to him").  John and I got to the point where we could talk mostly in Bob speak…quoting lines to each other like a couple of master linguists speaking in an exotic foreign tongue. Our most manic expression of Bob-love was when John heard that someone was selling the long-rumored, highly mysterious Dylan bootleg up near the green pastures of Harvard University. We immediately gassed up my VW bug and made a mad dash two hours up from Hartford to Boston. We found a wild haired guy in a trench coat standing beside a stack of blank, white covered albums smack in the middle of Cambridge Square. We gave him $5 each, got back in the car and drove all the way home for a turntable which would reveal whether we had been scammed. That was the earliest version of the legendary Basement Tapes and remains among my most precious possessions.  
Just a few years later, I was teaching an advanced course of my own design in Dylan as Literature at Lebanon High School in Lebanon, New Hampshire. Imagine Dead Poet’s Society without the dead part. On the jukebox in the student lounge Lay Lady Lay, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door and the Hendrix version of All Along the Watchtower were among the most popular plays…at least when I had monitor duty. I’m guessing there weren't many other high schools in America where that would be so. To this day, I hear from many former students…not dead yet on Facebook…who tell me with great gratitude how that course introduced them to Dylan. That has probably brought me my greatest satisfaction as a…as a what? The word fan really doesn’t come close to covering it.
Dylan has been a guide…a comfort…an inspiration…an intellectual sparring partner…my wicked messenger…a joker and a thief…even, as he sometimes insists, an entertaining song and dance man. I cannot imagine having lived this life of mine without him in it and consider it one of the true blessings of my life that I didn’t have to.  


Bob autograph, secured for me by Sister-in-Law Hayden Riley,
 who boldly approached the man himself at an airport one day.

President Belichick

Whenever I find myself in an Internet throwdown with a Bill Belichick hater it is my custom to tweak my adversary by declaring that if Belichick had been President of the country rather than coach of the New England Patriots during the first decade of the 21st century, the US would've been far better off than it is. As Belichick was astonishing detractors and admirers alike during the opening month of the 2016 season--basically coaching his team to a 3-1 record with one hand tied behind his back (or as Roger Goodell would have it, one Hall of Fame quarterback suspended)--and as the Presidential candidate for one of our two major parties was melting down before our very eyes, I decided to elevate the idea of a Belichick Presidency from mere Internet taunt to critical analysis. To do so, I applied what we might call the known knowns of Belichick's leadership style to a sampling of significant events of the past 16 years to show how The Genius of Foxboro may very well have made America, rather than the Patriots, great...again, if you insist.

Kevin Faulk: "We prepared for everything. Not saying we perfected it, but we prepared for everything. There's no second-guessing or hesitation when you play for Bill. When you have to think on the field, it slows you down. When you know exactly what you're doing and how to do it and why you're doing it, that allows you to play faster, and your talent flows freely. It's like being in class. They hand you a test, you open it up, look at the questions and go, 'Wow, I know all the answers already.'"

My analysis must begin with the un-likability factor, which has played such a prominent role in the current Presidential race. Belichick's lack of likability probably places him right between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in that sorry regard, but as I've written before I believe this particular election should be a welcome correction to our society's overemphasis on personality, especially when it overshadows competency. To get better, American society really has got to begin putting at least as high a value on people who get the job done right as it does on those who merely please us. We're being charmed to death by hucksters, con artists, and phonies, and the election of 2016 is about as near a death experience as we should ever want as a nation. So it's given in this analysis that Belichick could not have relied on any reserve of public affection to either accomplish great things or weather crises. Though it should be noted that Belichick is not oblivious to the benefits of emotional appeals. He once took his team out to bury "the ball" from a particularly brutal loss to help put it behind them. He made his team watch a film about Schackleton's incredible Antarctica survival to inspire its endurance, and other times he’s shown movies of boxers and horses who have come from behind to win to lift his team's faith in itself. One could easily imagine a President Belichick drawing upon Valley Forge, the Alamo, the Birmingham bus boycott or other inspirational stories from American history to effectively, albeit dryly, motivate the citizenry.

Aqib Talib: "Once, in practice, Brady threw a seam ball that was intercepted, and Bill, man, he chewed Tom out, saying, 'You got 130 career interceptions,' or whatever it was, 'and half of them are on this route. You keep doing the same shit over and over and this is what happens.' Right then you know two things about the Patriots and Bill Belichick: Everybody is treated the same, and you better get your shit together."

It's unlikely, however, that he would have had to climb on a pile of New York City rubble with a bullhorn after the attack of 9/11. Given his famous attention to detail and every aspect of his responsibilities, it's impossible to imagine Belichick ever being handed a confidential memo headlined Osama bin Laden Determined to Attack US and then moseying off to cut wood. It's for dead certain that a coach who demands that his players master all the tendencies of their opposition would have, as President, immediately convened a meeting and tasked everyone to respond to that memo. Of course, if you do your job--as he no doubt would have, as that is his motto--and you prevent 9/11, that would have also prevented the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And that same attention to detail and taking preemptive action probably would have saved the nation from the embarrassment of the government response to Hurricane Katrina. Ask any player who ever played for him if they could ever imagine Belichick uttering the words "Heckuva a job, Brownie" after such a monumental screw up.

Jim Schwartz: "Probably the biggest thing I learned from Bill is that there isn't anything that is not important. Anything that touches the team is important. That philosophy of 'Don't sweat the small stuff'? Yeah, that was never his philosophy."

This analysis gets a little trickier when it comes to assessing how Belichick’s proclivities would’ve met the financial collapse of 2008. Belichick's disdain for ticky-tacky or unenforceable rules and his willingness to push beyond the spirit of the rules is now as permanent a part of NFL history as is the invention of the wing-T formation (though it should be noted, he’s not an anarchist, having often suggested rule changes to improve the game over the years). It’s possible that Belichick would be more in sympathy with the private corporations who bridle against regulation than with the bureaucrats charged with enforcing them, who he might view as no more than referees without whistles and zebra shirts. The countervailing argument here would be Belichick’s mantra of always doing what’s best for the team. If he perceived the team as being the American economy, he could go for less regulation; if he perceived the team as the entire country, not just business, he might opt for more. Here’s the thing, in either case the decision would not be based on ideology. Among the things we know about Belichick is that he doesn’t allow himself to be wedded to any one approach. If a ground and pound strategy works well in one game, he has no trouble switching to an air attack in the next if he thinks that will work better. So we would neither have a dogmatic free-marketeer or socialist in the White House with Bill. We would have a guy who goes with whatever works. The country would get a heavy dose of old-fashioned American pragmatism and be spared further left-right squabbling and petty point scoring.

Rick Venturi "Everybody in football wants to take away what you do best. The difference is Bill would go to an extreme to make you play left-handed. That's Belichick's absolute genius: pragmatism. When other coaches say it's important that we take away an opponent's best receiver, only Bill would commit four defenders on a receiver and play the rest of his defense with the other seven."

If his administration had replaced the Obama years, would a President Belichick have pursued healthcare and immigration reform? He surely would’ve been persuaded by the overwhelming evidence that both were necessary for the long-term stability of the economy. He famously went for it on 4th in 2 in his own territory against the Colts. He once took a safety, giving the Broncos 2 extra points late in the game, in order to get the ball back with enough time for his team to win. Another time he won the toss but gave up the ball first in overtime in order to take advantage of a favorable wind. His decision-making has always shown him to be a calculated, as opposed to reckless, risk taker. There’s little doubt that as President he would’ve dared make big, game-changing decisions if his instincts and experience told him there was a chance to succeed. Being cautious and conservative is not part of his M.O. except when it gives him a tactical advantage.

Rosevelt Colvin: "He knows all the gray areas and knows most of, if not all, the rules, and he wants to gain an advantage the best way possible. If the rule says you can inflate a ball to 15 psi ... Bill is going to inflate that thing right to exactly 15 psi. I've never heard him say we're going to deliberately break the rules or cheat. He just tried to be on the edge, the cutting edge, of what can and cannot be. It's like this with Bill: Is this the limit? OK, then let's go to the limit."

As for ISIS? Well, no 9/11…no Iraq War…no ISIS. That was easy. But what of the global terrorist threat generally, granting that it was enflamed by the Iraq War but knowing that it was still a growing threat before it, how would Belichick’s administration have handled it? Here’s where it gets real interesting. Belichick’s NFL coaching legacy is somewhat tarnished by the incident called Spygate, his taping of opponents’ signals from the sidelines during games. That was more of Belichick testing a rule he found ticky-tacky because it really regulated the placement of the cameras, rather than the act of taping.  It also speaks to  Belichick’s long time affection for and reliance on having film on the opposition. He was raised by his coaching dad to break down game and practice film. Studying the opposition on film and tape has been as much a part of Belichick’s football life as sweat socks and jocks. Malcolm Butler’s last seconds, game-winning interception against the Seahawks in the 2014 Super Bowl as a direct result of Belichick’s obsession with film study has been well documented. So what do we think would happen when a natural born spook like Belichick gets control of the largest spy apparatus in the history of the world? The guy condemned for spying in a football game would suddenly be able to spy on the world stage, fully funded by the American taxpayer and sanctioned by the United States Congress. And you can bet he’d make more of it than any CIA chief ever because Belichick knows how to break down film, he knows its true value lies not in the exposure of private lives but the exposure of enemy tendencies, and his aim has always been to find vulnerabilities in the opposition not confirm his own biases. As fundamentally a civil liberties guy, I’ve got to be cautious not to go overboard celebrating the exercise of government surveillance, but the fact is the battle against global terrorism is now fought as much with drone cameras as drone rockets. Having a President who understands and accepts that is critical to the job. Belichick probably wouldn't have been any softer on whistleblowers than Obama has been, and poor Edward Snowden would still have ended up with an address in Moscow.

Mike Whalen: "You want to know what kind of influence and control he has over this franchise? Listen to his players. It's totally, exactly the same things Bill says. That resonates with every single coach out there. Same page. Same message. Same culture. When you get to a point when you hear your players talking and answering questions very similarly to the way you would answer, you know the philosophy is in place, they're all in..."

As much as do your job sounds simple and straightforward as a work motto, it is, like most things in life, not without its complications. 
Thanks to Dave Fleming of ESPN the Magazine for a mass collection of great quotations on Belichick to choose from for this post.

My Adventure in Self-Publishing

The Red Sox Reader, first edition
Thirty years ago, my team, The Boston Red Sox, lost a World Series in the most heart crushing way imaginable, and most of what is now commonly known as Red Sox Nation fell into a state of great, unyielding depression. I, however, taking a cue from the greeting card industry, took this box of lemons fate and the New York Mets had dealt me and whipped it up into as fine and frothy a pitcher of lemonade as you’d ever hope to swallow.  As happened, shortly after the debacle in Shea Stadium, I opened the feature section of the LA Times and read an article about one Dan Poynter of Santa Barbara who had become somewhat of a pioneer in the just newly re-borning self-publishing industry. Poynter, the Times reported, had produced a remarkable publishing success with his homemade book on hang gliding, which he had not been able to sell to a mainstream publisher.  He went on to sell 125,000 copies of that book and followed it up with 21 other books. The focus of the Times article was on Poynter’s latest book, The Self-Publishing Manual, which was a distillation of all he had learned as a self-publisher. It was not just a nuts and bolts book that guided me every step of my adventure, but was inspirational as well. Poynter was near evangelical about the personal empowerment that came with publishing your own book.
Long ago, self-publishing was a reputable undertaking…no less august a literary figure than Mark Twain self published Huckleberry Finn.Over time, so-called vanity presses emerged to besmirch the reputation of self-published books by blatantly exploiting the fantasies of would-be authors for their own profit. With the help of enormous advances in technology, self-publishing has slowly been building up a reputation for offering writers the same opportunity to bet on themselves as inventors, entrepreneurs, and adventurers of all kinds have always had. If you believe in yourself, you can do it yourself.
When I read about Dan Poynter, I was as much caught up in that spirit as I was in the idea of publishing a book on the Red Sox. In truth, the Red Sox book only came about because it met so many of the requirements Poynter had laid out for a successful self-publishing venture. It would have a clearly identifiable niche audience; it would provide a clear marketing path; and it would be a subject that spoke to both my passion and expertise. I had been collecting newspaper and magazine articles on the Red Sox since I was 12-years old.  First in collection that would lead to
The Red Sox ReaderThe Sox collapse in the 1986 World Series suddenly provided me with a windfall for my collection when The Boston Globe invited some notable writers to offer their reflections on their Red Sox loyalty, among them John Updike, Stephen King, Geoffrey Wolff, David Halberstam, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Charlie Pierce. (The conceit of the book, expressed in the most quoted line from the introduction, was that while the Yankees may have had the better players, the Red Sox always had the better writers.) That bounty from the Globe along with the works I had stored away in my filing cabinet instantly created a book all by itself. The niche audience was easily identifiable of course--Red Sox fans, and some fellow entrepreneurs who had launched The Fan, a periodical devoted to the Sox, gave me a marketing path by selling me their mailing list.
The two other ingredients necessary to the enterprise were money and the tools of production.  The first was graciously and enthusiastically answered by my in-laws, Bill and Betty Woodsum, who invested $10,000 in Ventura Arts, the name I gave my new publishing company. The second would be answered by PageMaker, the revolutionary new software designed especially for desktop publishing. PageMaker was both my deliverance and the bane of my existence. I was new to computing as it was, and found myself well over my head in trying to use PageMaker. It definitely helped me get the book done, but between my technical difficulties using it and the sketchily scanned copies of the articles, the first edition of the book that I would title The Red Sox Reader: 30 Years of Musings on Baseball’s Most Amusing Team, (excerpt) was not exactly an example of elegant book craft.  
Nonetheless, it sold right out of the chute. Dan Poynter had promised unimagined joy upon going to the P.O. box each day and collecting bundles of book orders accompanied by checks, and he was right. It was a giddy experience that would not even be matched when the book got picked up by big time publisher Houghton Mifflin and those small, individual orders would be replaced by quarterly royalty checks. The Houghton Mifflin partnership was not even part of my plan at the outset, although it is now pretty common among independent authors to hope to parlay a self-published book into a regular book deal. Mine came about purely by virtue of Lorna’s preternatural selling ability. We took the Ventura Arts edition to the American Booksellers Association convention in San Francisco and...this at a time when you could do such a thing...Lorna approached established publishers at their booths and pitched the book to them. The result was a 4-book deal to include follow-up books on the Dodgers, Yankees and Cubs.
It was more than that, of course…the kind of glamour things a self-publishing author can only dream and scheme about…book tours and signings, newspaper and radio interviews, and a New England boy’s ultimate dream come true…a night as Houghton Mifflin’s guest of honor in their Fenway Park luxury suite.  
And before all that there were the personal negotiations with the anthologized writers for the rights to use their works. I cherish my written correspondence with the astonishingly eager Updike, who saw publication of his classic "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" in The Red Sox Reader as a chance to get his precious footnotes for the piece finally published somewhere (still only available in The Red Sox Reader!). I’m pleased to recall that I was able to maintain my cool through an extended phone back and forth with the great Halberstam. And though my editorial sense told me Stephen King’s piece was really the weakest of the collection, my publisher’s instincts told me to include it anyway…and was handsomely rewarded for that when Stephen King fan clubs, who couldn’t care less about the Red Sox, promoted the hell out of it…pushing sales, if not exactly to the horror master’s level, to pretty fantastic self-publishing numbers. 
After the 2004 season, which ended the Sox nearly century-long championship drought, Houghton Mifflin asked if I wanted to go back to the well to duplicate that success. I chose not to for a variety of reasons, both commercial and artistic. Perhaps, too, I wanted to save myself from being haunted by my closing words in the introduction of the revised edition in 1990 where I wrote: "Red Sox teams from here on out, of course, are now saddled with a dual burden. They either have to win it all, or they have to find a way to lose more dramatically, more tragically, more unbelievably than their predecessors. Frankly, as these pages reveal, winning it all would be a whole lot easier." Of course it wasn't.   
The downside in all this? In the end I came away with a touch of survivor’s guilt. Although the mass of my fellow citizens in Red Sox Nation came out of 1986 badly bloodied and beaten and would stay that way until the miracle cure of 2004, I pretty much walked away from the disaster with my champagne flute still filled to the brim. So today, 30 years later, I lift it in a toast to Dan Poynter, Bill & Betty, Lorna (always and ever), The Red Sox Reader, and self-publishers everywhere.  

5 Reasons Why Hillary Will Win

This post is dedicated to Wife Lorna who asks me now almost every morning to assure her that Hillary Clinton will win this election. Lorna’s got a business to run so she can’t be as immersed in the minutia of daily polling results, political strategizing and tea leaf reading as I can. In that regard, she’s like most people, who, as I’ve written before (and will stand by as an immutable fact of life) fucking hate politics. I’ve tried to get her into the lotus position and repeat the mantra: Fivethirtyeight…Fivethirtyeight…Fivethirtyeight, but for all the reliability of Nate Silver’s invaluable election polling coverage, paranoia, as the Buffalo Springfield once warned us, “into your life it will creep.” So for Lorna and all those millions of others who are positively spooked by the prospect of a Donald Trump Presidency, I hereby submit 5 cold hard reasons why it won’t happen.
Reason #1: The nation is now properly frightened that Hillary might not win. Her recent dip in the polls has not only scared her supporters straight, but also--like a hangman’s noose around the neck--most likely focused the attention of those heretofore indifferent to the election’s outcome or so effete in their politics that only those who totally reflect their own interests are worthy of their vote. Thanks to the disastrous Brexit vote, we all have a glaring example of what can happen when people take their voting responsibility lightly. I know from decades of watching sports that no good coach wants the team going into the big game overconfident. And I can tell from HRC herself that she rather welcomes her recent slide in the polls. The emails I get from her campaign daily have been riding the polling slump for all it’s worth…and I‘m going to guess that when her next fund raising numbers are announced we’re going to learn it was worth plenty. I can also tell from her first appearance after her pneumonia. In her reply to a question about the tightening polls she said that the election is going to come down to voter registration and get out the vote efforts. That shows that decades of electoral experience have not been wasted on her…she knows that being up or down in the polls at any time before election day means far less than who actually shows up to vote for you…and that brings us to…

Reason #2: The ground game. One of the most instructive political pieces I ever read appeared after the 2004 Democratic primary between John Kerry and Howard Dean. Going into the Iowa caucus Kerry was the establishment figure suffering under a severe “enthusiasm gap” to Dean who was the Bernie Sanders of the day, galvanizing the young, the independent, and progressive vote. The article detailed how Kerry flew in an experienced, nuts and bolts political strategist who put together a get out the vote effort that was far more damaging to Howard Dean’s chances than his so-called Dean Scream. That media event captured all the attention, and the diligent groundwork of the Kerry campaign was largely ignored. The media is fixated on sensational events and their impact on polling numbers, but making phone calls, registering voters and getting those voters to the polls really is determinative. Hillary’s campaign was good enough at that in 2008 to give Barack Obama a far tougher fight than Bernie Sanders gave her this year (despite Bernie's Trump-like, large enthusiastic crowds). And now she has the cream of the Obama strategists working for her. A cursory look at the respective ground games between the two tells you all you need to know about where things are headed for Election Day. In swing states Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, Clinton’s field offices number, respectively, 51, 38, and 30; Trump’s corresponding numbers: 2, 4 and 0! Experts say that a good ground game can make a 1-3 point difference in an election’s outcome, which is huge in a close race. (Anyone whose concern about a Trump presidency is limited to checking the daily polls and complaining about what Hillary is or isn't doing might want to check in with one of her field offices and offer to do more.)  
Reason #3: Barack Obama won handily in 2012 even though the pundits were predicting a razor thin margin either way. Obama went before the American voters in 2012 with a still ailing economy holding down his approval numbers and making him vulnerable, the experts thought, to a successful capitalist who promised to fix things with business savvy. At this point in that election Obama and Romney were tied in the polls. It remains a question whether Hillary can use the recent good economic news to her advantage…economics doesn’t explain well in an election (voters either feel good about the economy or they don’t). But she doesn’t have to defend sorry economic numbers as Obama did, plus she's facing a less reputable businessman. Obama's challenge  in beating Romney in 2012 was greater…not to mention war hero McCain in the 2008…but was still able to pull out comfortable victories because the fundamentals of the electoral map so favor Democrats that it would take a total breakdown in support for Hillary not to duplicate if not improve upon Obama’s vote totals.
Reason #4—The voters not only find Hillary qualified to be president, they find her opponent unqualified. Here’s just the latest evidenceof it from just a few days ago:

Although Clinton seems to be facing a tight race with her rival Donald Trump, a new Quinnipiac University poll out Thursday seems to show that the American people agree with Obama’s testament to her qualifications. Sixty-two percent of likely voters say Clinton is qualified for the presidency while nearly the opposite amount — 61 percent — say Trump is not, the poll shows.

All the attention of course has been on the fact that Hillary has a trust problem with voters. In one of the most astonishing through-the-looking-glass episodes in American political history, voters believe that Trump, a congenital and conspicuous liar, is more honest than she is. But here’s the thing, voters already expect politicians to lie…it’s one of the main reasons they hate politics so much…so fair or not, HRC can survive the trust issue this election. Trump, on the other hand, cannot survive his unqualified problem, which will be exacerbated the closer we get to Election Day as the Clinton campaign no doubt bombards him with ads featuring all those well-known Republicans who have already endorsed her because they believe he’s unqualified. I’ve already addressed the likeability vs. competency argumentin an earlier post so no need to rehash here, except to say it defies all logic to believe the nation is going to put anyone in charge that the majority of citizens finds unqualified to be in charge.  
Reason #5: The debates. There is general consensus that Hillary should “win” the debates through her breadth of experience and knowledge. But winning debates is the quicksilver of American politics. John Kerry reputedly won all his debates over George W. Bush in 2004; Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama in their first debate in 2012. Hillary will win just by showing up looking hale and hearty and holding her ground for 90 minutes. That will be enough to supplant the public image of her crumbling into her van after the 9/11 ceremony a few weeks ago. Though the public can hardly be blamed given how much the media replayed that clip (including, regrettably, Stephen Colbert who ran it just for laughs days later, raising the question: is there any difference between Trump mocking a reporter's medical condition and a celebrity mocking a politician's medical condition?) That incident coincided with her slip in the polls. By all accounts this will be one of the most watched events in television history, and subsequently one of the most analyzed. Because the media finally seem to have caught on to how well Trump has played it over the past year, chances are it’ll be working to regain its integrity during and after the debate. Mature and responsible media coverage heading into Election Day will greatly benefit the mature and responsible candidate over the con artist.

Bonus Reason: I believe that the majority of my fellow citizens are too smart to turn the reins of power over to the very worst among us. If I am wrong on this, I will retire The Nobby Works-- my bliss & my passion--on November 9 because, truly, a new dark ages will be upon us.

My Exclusive Donald Trump Interview

Donald J. Trump

LIVE VIA SATELLITE, the exclusive Nobby Works Interview with Donald J. Trump


With apologies to Academy Award winning director Clint Eastwood for ripping off both his idea and quality of execution.


Are you media or are you mice?