posnanski – Tommy Tomlinson

So I was on the phone with my friend Joe Posnanski today, and we were talking about how the Home Run Derby the night before the All-Star Game is now way more popular than the All-Star Game itself.

Joe and the great Michael Schur take it upon themselves to fix the All-Star Game in an upcoming episode of The Poscast, a podcast you should most definitely listen to if you want to listen to two of America’s smartest and funniest people talk about baseball and peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, sometimes in that order.

Anyway, in the 10 seconds that it took Joe to explain how he and Mike fixed the All-Star Game — you’ll have to listen to the podcast to find out — I figured out how to fix the Pro Bowl.

Look, nobody cares about the Pro Bowl. NFL players care about MAKING the Pro Bowl — it’s a huge honor, and most players have Pro Bowl bonuses written into their contracts. But nobody cares about the game itself. Players come up with random injuries to get out of playing (“Tom Brady announced today that he will miss the Pro Bowl with a Grade 3 paper cut”). Coaches treat it like a charity flag-football game (except for Bill Belichick, of course — read down to the Tony Gonzalez story). TV ratings have declined for six years in a row. The game still gets decent ratings, but anybody who watches the Pro Bowl all the way to the end is by definition way too interested in football. Or has money on the game, which is its own problem.

They have started a skills competition before the Pro Bowl, maybe in hopes of getting some of the shine of the Home Run Derby or the NBA’s dunk contest. But the Skills Showdown features stuff like a dodgeball game and a relay race. Nobody cares about those, either. And the NFL has the perfect skills competition sitting right in front of them.

Here’s how to fix the Pro Bowl:

Turn it into Punt, Pass and Kick.

You’ve seen Punt, Pass and Kick. They’ve been doing it since 1961 as a showcase for young people to show off their football skills. It couldn’t be simpler: You punt, you pass, you kick, they add up the distances, the highest score wins. Sometimes they’ll do it at halftime of an NFL game, and often it’s better than the game. It’s so cool to see some 60-pound third-grader fire a spiral halfway down the field. It’s also a great illustration of how kids get their growth spurts at different times, as you know if you’ve seen Andy Reid doing Punt, Pass and Kick at 13.

So bring all the Pro Bowlers together and let them have at it. Group them by position, and have the positional winners meet in the finals. Tell me you wouldn’t watch J.J. Watt try to throw a spiral down that little tape they string down the middle of the field. Tell me you wouldn’t watch Drew Brees get ticked off after shanking a punt. No injuries. Immense trash-talking potential. TV gold.

The Pro Bowl itself? Cancel it. Have a nice dinner, hand out the bonus checks and send everybody home. Except for the Punt, Pass and Kick winner. He goes to Disney World.

–TT

Rock Hill, South Carolina, somewhere around 1990. I’m a reporter in the York County bureau of the Charlotte Observer, working alongside a sportswriter named Joe Posnanski. I’m 25 or 26, he’s 22 or 23. I’m covering fatal wrecks and school board meetings, he’s writing up high-school football games and a weekly volleyball notebook. We get to be friends, and we find out we have the same impossible dream. We want to be newspaper columnists.

Some nights, after deadline, we throw a baseball in the parking lot of his apartment complex and talk about making it to that sacred place, down the left rail of the front page of the section — him in Sports, me in Local. Our mug shots at the top. We’re full of ideas about how we would do the job if we ever got there. I’ve been sneaking little scenes into my straight news stories, seeing how they look on the page. He’s been practicing nearly every day, picking something out of the sports world and writing columns that nobody sees.

We scan the wires and out-of-town papers, and when one of us finds something great, we clip it out or print it — this was before the Internet, children — and share it with the other. Before long we both have thick file folders, our homemade textbooks, full of lessons from Dave Barry and Leonard Pitts and Jim Murray and the other columnists we loved.

We spend long nights just sitting around and talking — our romantic lives were not exactly thriving at that point — and one of the things we talk about is this: What was the greatest newspaper column of all time?

After much debate, we decide on two. We call them The Bat and The Bear.

The Bat was written by a young sports columnist out of Detroit named Mitch Albom. You might know Mitch Albom as the author of “Tuesdays With Morrie,” followed by several best-selling Hallmark-ready novels that have sold untold million copies. Mitch has made himself mockable — I’ve mocked him some myself — but in his prime, as a columnist and feature writer, you couldn’t beat him.

The Bat was a piece about a school superintendent, a former member of a Little League World Series champion, who had been shot to death by a disgruntled teacher. Throughout the story, Mitch talked to surviving members of that Little League team, one after another. He asked to see their trophies. He noticed something. The figure at the top of the trophy is a batter waiting for a pitch. But every time one of the players got out his trophy, the bat was missing.

It had been a long time, the trophies were fragile, things fall apart. Mitch saw something bigger:

The snow falls, summer is a distant memory, and even golden boys of Little League have the bats taken out of their hands.

The Bear was a column by Jimmy Breslin.

Breslin had many more famous columns. The one he wrote on the gravedigger at John F. Kennedy’s funeral is still taught in journalism schools. The one he wrote about the cops at the scene when John Lennon was shot still pops up on the anniversary of Lennon’s death. But the one Joe and I loved was about an 11-year-old boy named Juan Perez.

Juan and two friends broke into the Prospect Park Zoo one night and slipped into the polar bear cage. When the bears saw them, the friends ran, but Juan Perez did not. And so he became a child in the middle of Brooklyn who was eaten alive by polar bears.

You can imagine the TV crews and the front-page headlines. But Breslin saw something bigger:

I guess it was a momentous story because of the manner in which the boy died. But at the same time, perhaps somebody should stop just for a paragraph and mention the fact that there are many children being eaten alive by this bear of a city, New York in the 1980s. To say many is to make an understatement most bland, for there are hundreds of thousands of young in New York who each day have the hope, and thus the life, chewed out of them in a city that feels the bestowing of fame and fortunes on landlords is a glorious act, and that all energies and as much money and attention as possible be given to some corporation that threatens to move 40 people to Maryland.

The column is 30 years old and isn’t on the Internet — at least I couldn’t find it — and so I dug a version out of a database. It’s from a Toronto newspaper, reprinting the original from the New York Daily News, and somehow Toronto cut the best line. Breslin hammers the developers and the politicians who chew up and discard kids every day in New York — he even gets in a shot at Donald Trump — and then, after a couple paragraphs of this, he drops in one perfect sentence:

They shot the bear.

I write all this because Jimmy Breslin died on Sunday at 88, and he was the best columnist there ever was, and I stole from him freely — his language and his spirit — until I found my own voice. He got out there and talked to people and found the story and wrote it up. It sounds easy, like falling into a pool. But there’s falling and there’s diving.

Joe and I kept working and got lucky and found editors who believed in us. We both got the jobs we dreamed about, and then others beyond our dreams. Our romantic lives got better — we’re both married now — but we still spend long lunches and phone calls and text threads continuing that conversation we started more than 25 years ago.

I’ve read many a story in all those years. I’ve got a lot of favorites. But none will ever matter as much to me as The Bat and The Bear. They gave two young guys something to reach for.

— TT