I Live for This!

Bill Plaschke, Tommy Lasorda

Description

An award-winning sportswriter teams up with LA Dodgers manager and Hall of Famer Tommy Lasorda to reveal the secrets of his unlikely success.

Tommy Lasorda is baseball's true immortal and one of its larger than life figures. A former pitcher who was overshadowed by Sandy Koufax, Lasorda went on to a Hall of Fame career as a manager with one of baseball's most storied franchises. His teams won two World Series, four National League pennants, and eight division titles. He was twice named National League manager of the year and he also led the United States baseball team to the gold medal at the 2000 Summer Olympics.

In I Live for This! award-winning sportswriter Bill Plaschke shows us one of baseball's last living legends as we've never seen him before, revealing the man behind the myth, the secrets to his amazing, unlikely success, and his unvarnished opinions on the state of the game. Bravely and brilliantly, I Live for This! dissects the personality to give us the person. By the end we’re left with an indelible portrait of a legend that, if Tommy Lasorda has anything to say about it, we won’t ever forget.

Sujets

• Temple de la renommée du baseball
• Cooperstown
• Los Angeles Dodgers
• Major League Baseball
• Teamwork
• Major professional sports teams of the United States and Canada

Informations

• Publié par: Open Road Media
• Date de parution: 03 avril 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9780547347271
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
I Fought for This
I Gambled for This
I Trained for This
I Bounced Around for This
I Hungered for This
Photos
I Was Born for This
I Preached for This
I Nearly Died for This
I Cried for This
I Was Reborn for This
Tommy Lasorda’s Managerial Record
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Authors
Copyright © 2007 by Bill Plaschke and Tommy Lasorda
All rights reserved
 
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
 
www.hmhco.com
 
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Plaschke, Bill. I live for this!: baseball’s last true believer / Bill Plaschke with Tommy Lasorda. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN -13: 978-0-618-65387-4 ISBN -10: 0-618-65387-2 1. Lasorda, Tommy. 2. Baseball managers—United States—Biography. 3. Los Angeles Dodgers (Baseball team) I. Lasorda, Tommy. II. Title. GV 865. L 33 P 53 2007 796.357092—dc22 [ B ] 2007018306
 
e ISBN 978-0-547-34727-1 v2.0614
 
All photographs courtesy of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
 
Major League Baseball trademarks and copyrights are used with permission of Major League Baseball Properties, Inc.
 
 
 
 
To T-Berry, Boy-Boy, and G-Dog You are my strength, my spirit, my soul
— B. P.
 
 
To my family
— T. L.
Foreword
It is a glorious summer Sunday morning at Los Angeles’s Dodger Stadium. I am walking through a dark tunnel. It leads from a glistening green field that smells delightfully of summer into a dank clubhouse that reeks like an old sock.
Outside, fans are buzzing and Nancy Bea Hefley’s organ music is playing and athletes in brightly colored uniforms are jogging on the perspiring grass. The four bases are impossibly white, the two chalk lines are amazingly straight, and even the dirt seems to have been shaped and tinted like a socialite’s hair. This is baseball. This is America.
Once inside that tunnel, the world turns. Everything in the Dodger clubhouse feels close and cramped and confusing. A heavy-eyed kid in a stained blue golf shirt is pushing a laundry cart. A lumpy older man in his underwear is filling a plastic tub with bubble gum. Two players in long johns and T-shirts are arguing over queens and hearts. Another player, in jeans and a jersey, is studying a truck-trader magazine. Three guys in the corner are cursing one another in Spanish. This is also baseball. This is also America.
I think, If only fans on the outside could see the inside. I wonder, What if all those who sat in this charming ballpark were exposed to the quirkiness of its depths? Would it ruin this splendid piece of American culture if folks knew that Dodger Stadium has more than one level, more than one angle, many crooked shadows? Or would it simply make it more real?
I walk underneath low ceilings, past ancient cubbyholes, up a chipped concrete walkway, through a wobbly blue door, and into the office of a similarly splendid piece of Americana named Tommy Lasorda.
It is 1990, and he is the legendary manager of the renowned Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team. In the past thirteen seasons he has won two world championships and four National League pennants and has captured the imagination of the jaded American baseball fan with everything from his crooked smile to his jiggling belly to his innate ability to create magic.
He howls, he hugs, he screams, he cries, he hikes his giant belt above his skinny legs, and sometimes he literally chases his players to greatness, running over anyone who dares to step in their path. He bumps bellies with umpires, exchanges curses with opponents, argues with sportswriters, taunts fans, and somehow makes them all laugh while doing it.
Tommy Lasorda is baseball’s Santa Claus, and Americans are clamoring for his lap. Aging Dodger Stadium is usually filled to capacity because of the energy around him. A little-known diet product called Slim-Fast is making millions because of the salesman within him. Thousands in the military and in business and countless students have been motivated listening to speeches by him. Folks from Asia to South America have swooned during visits from him. He once went to the White House as a tourist, and within ninety minutes he met with President Reagan, his chief of staff, and the vice president without having an appointment to see any of them. This country’s leaders heard he was there and went looking for him. He is not only one of baseball’s best managers, but, in a crude yet lovably blustery way, he is also baseball’s best ambassador.
Yet on this summer day in Chavez Ravine, he is just Tommy. He is the same man I see almost every day for six months every year. He is my assignment. He is my job. I am the Dodger beat reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and he is an integral part of my daily coverage. I talk to him at least twice a day. I report his opinions and insights. He is the public face of the team, he sets the tone for each day’s news, and he is the best source for the best material. If he’s mad, my words scream. If he’s funny, my words laugh. He is an important figure for journalists because he always generates news. But he can also be an impossible figure for journalists because he insists that such news make him look good. He will gladly share the story of a pregame spaghetti dinner with his players. But he will berate you for writing about the spaghetti stains on his collar. He will gladly supply inside information, as long as that information makes him or the Dodgers look good. He may be the most unassuming yet image-conscious figure in sports.
On this day, it’s that inside information that I’m seeking. Lasorda has already held his pregame press meeting with the Dodger beat writers from five different newspapers, but I want something more. So I leave the serene field and dip into its sweaty bowels. I travel from the public Tommy Lasorda into the tiny office that houses the private one.
“Plaschke,” he shouts brightly, seeing me at the door. “Get in here!”
When Tommy Lasorda summons you so cheerfully into his office, with that bony finger and that huge grin, it usually means just one thing.
He is alone. He wants the company. He needs the company.
Despite being constantly surrounded by backslapping sycophants, Lasorda often acts like a lonely orphan. He hates to be alone. He moans about being alone. He lives for an audience. When one audience grows weary of his stories, he searches for a new one.
“Plaschke,” Lasorda shouts again. “Get in here and have a piece of pizza. Now!”
This has long been one of Lasorda’s methods to ensure that he will never be alone. He fills his office with food. He is, in fact, the only manager in major league history to set up the postgame buffet in his office. Other teams feed their players in separate rooms, far away from the boss, giving them a private place to unwind. But not Lasorda, who uses food to draw the players to his quarters, where they can eat veal piccata next to piles of his soiled underwear. He’s told the media he does this to foster teamwork. But he also does it so he will never have to do so much as dress by himself.
This morning I need only one bit of information—no time to eat, no time to hang out. Plus, I had just eaten a huge Sunday buffet at a nearby restaurant; no room for anything more. But Lasorda doesn’t care.
“Here,” he says, handing me a huge piece of pepperoni pie, dripping from a paper plate. “Eat this.”
He’s wearing white underwear with a wrinkled blue T-shirt covered with a sauce-splotched towel. He’s sitting behind a cluttered desk that is nearly toppled by the six pizzas piled atop it. He’s not giving me a choice.
“Pizza! Now!”
“Tommy, I’m stuffed,” I say. “I can’t eat it. I’ll vomit, I swear. I just need to ask you one question. Can I ask you just one question?”
When dealing with Lasorda, you often have to fight outlandishness with outlandishness. And, yes, if he’s going to try to force you to eat greasy pizza on a Sunday morning, you have to counter with the threat of vomit. Which doesn’t work. It never works. Not even vomit.
“C’mon, sit down, take your time, eat this pizza . . . and I’ll give you a scoop,” he says.
“A scoop?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says, shaking his head as if disgusted by his own vulnerability. “You sit here with me and eat pizza until the start of the game, and I’ll give you some inside information.”
“Pass the pepperoni.”
So I sit and eat my pizza while he slowly gets dressed. And then he starts talking. But, funny thing, he’s not talking about baseball, he’s talking about his feelings. For the next half hour, while lineup cards are being filled out and coaches are reminding him to hurry up and players are clanking toward the field in their cleats, Lasorda momentarily lets down his bluster and reveals himself.
Earlier that morning, he had breakfast with an old friend from his hometown of Norristown, Pennsylvania, so he talks about growing up. He says something about a stolen glove, and prison baseball, and over