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Ten years ago, I wrote one of my favorite ever stories … about the late, great Larry Phillips. Larry was, as I wrote in the piece, “the roughest, toughest, meanest, craziest and grouchiest son of a gun who ever climbed into a race car.” Only, Larry told me later, he wasn’t really all that.
No sir, he said. That was Dick Trickle.
Nobody cares -- or should care -- what a sportswriter has to say about The Office. But the show has dominated my life for nine years and it goes off the air today. So, here are a few thoughts on why I think The Office is one of the best shows ever on television, and how the second-last show perfectly summed it all up for me.
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In sports, people talk all the time about team chemistry. I’ve written about this hundreds of times and, yet, I still can’t quite put my finger on what team chemistry means. Sure, there is some obvious stuff. Some teams have players who like each other a lot. Some teams have a sweet blend of vocal leaders and loyal followers. Some teams have diverse talents that mesh into a greater whole. Some teams just have a lot of fun together, and because of that maybe they play with energy and enthusiasm even in the low ebbs.
Some people believe team chemistry is overrated and perhaps even nonexistent as a factor in winning. Others think it’s the most important thing in sports. And team chemistry -- to those who believe in it -- has a bit of a mystical quality, an ineffable value that players and managers and general managers and coaches and owners and fans stutter around. “When it came down to it,” the Hall of Famer George Brett said of the 1985 Kansas City Royals, “we knew we weren’t going to lose. We’d had better teams. But there was something about that team that just … we knew someone was going to come through. We didn’t know who it would be. But we knew it would be someone.”
The Office has great chemistry. That is my best explanation. I have watched every single episode for the last nine years -- most of them two or three times. I am obsessive about the show. This is strange because, as I’ve written here before, I watch almost no other television. I don’t feel good about that. I wish I did watch more television. I find myself constantly in awkward conversations explaining that I have never seen a single episode of “Mad Men” or “Breaking Bad” or “Game of Thrones,” or, well, just about any other show. I can’t tell you how many times I was in lost in conversations about “Lost.” But for now, anyway, my life just doesn’t make room for those shows.
I never missed The Office, though, not once, not when traveling, not when on deadline, not ever. I have built my schedule entirely around it. Why? It had to be the chemistry.
Some people, well, you think they will live forever. That’s how I always felt about Fred White. He was just always there to bridge the years, to stand for the small towns, to tell a story, to talk about the weather. He was always there to point out something joyful. There’s a story I think of now … it was during a basketball tournament, the Big 12 Tournament it must have been, and Fred was calling some of the games and he sought me out.
“When you get a minute I really want to show you something,” he said, and he was so excited. I got caught up doing something else, but a little while later, he grabbed me again and said, “you really have to see this.”
Then, he took me back to press row where he was announcing the game. “This,” he said gleefully, “is what we use to pass notes.” And there was one of those old fashioned toy magic drawing boards, you know, the kind with the plastic pencil and the waxy paper that you would pull up to make the words disappear. It is a toy right out of childhood. And it is impossible for me to communicate just how much of a kick Fred got out of that. But, you know, Fred got a kick out of a lot of things.
Last night on the Kansas City Royals game, announcers Rex Hudler and Ryan Lefebvre briefly discussed Sabermetrics and the stolen base. I want to make a point about what they were saying without (I hope) insulting either one of them. Ryan is a friend, and while I don’t know Rex I hear that he’s a very nice guy.
Ryan made the point that there are studies that seem to show that the stolen base is not as effective or important as people used to assume. Ryan will tell you he’s not especially a fan of some of these advanced statistics, but he’s also an open-minded guy and we have had some fun discussions and disagreements through the years. Anyway, I think he was simply making the fair point that while statistics may show that attempting steals is not necessarily a prudent play -- and he concedes that this absolutely might be true -- he wonders if maybe the statistics do not pick up on some of the psychological force of the stolen base and its threat, such as how it can distract a pitcher and stress out a defense.
This could make for a very interesting discussion. Unfortunately, Rex Hudler took it in kind of a different direction.
Every now and again -- well, let’s face it, pretty much every day now -- I get another email telling me that Vernon Wells -- Vernon Bleepin’ Wells -- just got another two hits with another homer with another three RBIs and so on.
The emails are from Michael Schur, Parks and Recreation executive producer, and the emails have a purpose: Michael is convinced that it is time that I just admit that I am wrong, and he is right about the New York Yankees being a magical species, not unlike house elves. He is fairly enraged that I will not just admit defeat. I picked the Yankees to collapse under their own weight this year. He thinks I’m a flat-earther who will not face the obvious truth -- that the Yankees will always, continuously, endlessly, constantly, incessantly and unceasingly win forever and ever, amen. He thinks it is way past time for me to admit it doesn’t really matter who is actually ON the Yankees -- doesn’t matter if every single baseball player on earth gets hurt and they are forced to have Shecky Greene hit second and play centerfield. In this case, Mike is convinced that Shecky Greene would hit .289 with 24 homers and win a Gold Glove.
His latest evidence for this Yankees sorcery is, of course, Vernon Wells, who at this moment for the Yankees is hitting .299/.349/.526 with nine homers -- he’s ninth in the American League in home runs per at-bat after a career of never once being in the Top 10 in that category. He is roughly on pace for 100 runs and 100 RBIs, something he did only once, a long time ago, when he was 24 and full of promise.
My mother is a huge Tiger Woods fan. Even now, one second after typing that sentence, I cannot believe that I just wrote those words. But it’s true. Somehow, it’s really true.
My mother, as I have written many times before, does not care at all about sports. I usually make this point by telling the unearned runs story -- when my first baseball story appeared in a newspaper, Mom said she liked it but asked, “Who are you to decide that a run is unearned?” -- but the truth is there are a lifetime of stories like that. There is no single story that could capture the day-after-day-after-day scorn she has expressed for these silly little games that took up way too much of my attention. I would never be able to count the times my mother shook her head at her oldest son and said the word “Sports!” with disdain. Nothing on earth seemed sillier to her.
Writing a bunch of live stuff, but I’m going to get to those blog posts. In the meantime:
-- Last year we were lucky enough to have Mike Trout and Bryce Harper emerge at the same time. This year, it’s Shelby Miller and Matt Harvey. Not a bad time to be a baseball fan.
-- You couldn’t really blame Tiger Woods if he stopped caring so much. The guy has done everything. But he can’t stop caring. There’s a part of him that comes alive when his name’s on the leaderboard.
