All of that turned out to be a false alarm, a case of heat rash that I confused with genuine emotional growth. Three days later, I lay in my bed in a Paris hotel room—the seventh game between the Red Sox and the Indians started at 2:30 a.m. there—and stayed up all night following the action pitch by pitch, click by click on by Blackberry. Click: strike one. Click: ball one. Click, ball in play–out on ground ball to second. Not exactly the most mature expenditure of prime sleeping time.
I returned home to the series and a Sox triumph—with a Riverdance through my city punctuating it on Tuesday. And I returned to confirmation from my editors that I am not remotely as mature as I, for a very brief moment, thought I might be. They greeted me from on high with a request that, after seven years of writing my Starr Gazing column, I add a blog to my Newsweek.com repertoire.
Frankly, I find it hard to use “blog” and “mature” in the same sentence. I have always considered the blogosphere a world populated by twentysomethings who can’t possibly understand my frame of reference, like this very next sentence. Then again back in 2001, when an online column was first proposed to me, I felt like Marlow going upriver into the “Heart of Darkness.” Turned out I was totally wrong. Today I regard that column as a pleasant pedal-boat ride on a warm, spring day. So this time around when they made the proposition, I didn’t even hesitate: I, blogger!
Fortunately, my last name lends itself to infinite plays on words so we had no trouble coming up with “All-Starr Sports.” This column remains a place to deal with the biggest and most serious issues in sports, like my turning 60. The blog gives me a timely way to chime in—short, long or medium—on all my favorite sports subjects whenever the urge hits. Which at my age is often at 4 a.m. when I can’t sleep. It will also give me the chance to display some personal generosity, occasionally offering up the space to other smart—but hopefully not at smart as me—voices.
I chose to give the All-Starr blog a soft launch, eschewing the multi-million-dollar promotional campaign NEWSWEEK had promised and, instead, simply begging my friends to read it. I’ve been at it for almost a week now (look ma, I can hyperlink) and if you visit you will find it replete with wit and wisdom. Or at least a decent line or two:
On A-Rod: “Perhaps L.A. is the only place that can afford A-Rod while allowing him to remain less conspicuous. If he decides to take his shirt off and sun in the park, he will stand in line and not even be the biggest hunk out there. As my friend Michael, a proud Hollywood hack and savvy baseball guy, writes me: ‘In L.A. he’s be just another garden-variety minor celebrity, a little higher up the food chain than David Beckham, but below Lindsay Lohan’.”
On the Red Sox World Series win: “In 2004, when the Red Sox won the World Series, I wept. And wept. I wept for 49 years of keeping faith with my hometown team, for my dad who never got to see them win, for my family and friends with whom I shared a passion centered around a ballclub and for a whole lot more. Even then I knew it could never, ever be that good again and three years later I can’t pretend any differently.”
On Rudy Giuliani rooting for the Red Sox: “Our dismay went way beyond the fact that it was such a naked pander to New Hampshire, part of the heartland of Red Sox Nation and, just incidentally, the host of the first-in-the-nation presidential primary. After all, we’re not unfamiliar with pandering; Mitt Romney was our governor.”
Good stuff, huh? So I invite all my readers, all those who have enjoyed my long, strange trip through the sports world—and, of course, all those who haven’t—to, in the parlance of the blog, hit me. After almost seven years of “Starr Gazing,” there are many things of which I am proud. But high among them is that I personally answered every e-mail from you folks, sometimes hundreds of them in a week (including those that were less than kind, even downright nasty). I always felt that if you took the time to read and then write, I could spare the time to respond.
The blog takes that intimacy a step further. You can comment directly on the site, your shot at publicly eviscerating me. So as the eternally hippest crooner, Ol’ Blue Eyes, once sang, “Come blog with me.”
