Today in 1963, the Beatles appeared in a concert at the East Ham Granada in London … as third billing after Tommy Roe and Chris Montez.
Today in 1964, Capitol Records released the Four Preps’ “Letter to the Beatles.”
The song started at number 85. And then Capitol withdrew the song to avoid a lawsuit because the song included a bit of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
Dan O’Donnell lays out what Congressional Republican leadership has devised to replace ObamaCare, beginning with the parliamentary hurdle:
Before the ink had even dried on the House Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare, the American Health Care Act (AHCA), Democrats and Republicans alike were blasting it.
Naturally, very few had a chance to actually read the bill, but that didn’t stop every one of them from giving their opinions on it. Most have been remarkably disingenuous, especially those that fail to mention the budgetary process needed to get around a Democratic filibuster in the Senate.
A filibuster is all but a certainty, as Democrats have made it their sole mission to thwart the Republican agenda at quite literally every turn. Heck, they are even delaying President Trump’s Cabinet confirmations longer than any other President’s in American history.
Given that, does anyone really think that they would allow Republicans to just dismantle former President Obama’s singular (and some would say single) domestic policy achievement? Of course they wouldn’t. They would filibuster the American Health Care Act and Republicans would be powerless to stop them.
A cloture vote to stop a filibuster requires 60 Senate votes, and since Republicans only control 52 Senate seats, Democrats will be able to stop any Republican legislation by simply announcing plans to filibuster.
Thanks to a change in Senate rules in the 1970s to a “two-track system” of legislation, they don’t actually have to hold the Senate floor for weeks on end; they merely have to threaten it. Under this two-track system, once they do, if Republicans don’t have the votes for cloture, the filibustered bill (in this case, the AHCA) would quite literally be sidetracked–placed on one track while all other Senate business moves to a second track. The change to a two-track system led to a dramatic rise in filibusters and the AHCA debate would be no exception: The bill would simply stall in the Senate with no hope of rescue unless Republicans were to win an additional eight Senate seats in the 2018 midterms.
To get any sort of Obamacare repeal and replace measure passed through Congress, then, Republicans need to get around the filibuster. In a rather ingenious but admittedly limiting move, the House has settled on a method of passing legislation known as “budget reconciliation.” This allows for a bill to pass through the Senate with just 20 hours of debate and no possibility of a filibuster.
However, there are specific requirements for a bill to qualify for the reconciliation process–most notably that the bill be budgetary in nature. This means that the AHCA can only repeal Obamacare’s taxes and spending and not its onerous regulations.
Understandably, conservatives are furious that the bill is not tackling what they believe to be the fundamental problems with Obamacare, but the AHCA does repeal the individual and business mandates–generally seen to be the linchpins of Obamacare itself–as well as taxes or tax increases on prescription medication, over-the-counter medication, medical devices, health savings accounts (HSAs), and Medicare.
The bill also repeals the elimination of deductions for expenses that can be allocated to Medicare Part D subsidies, repeals the increase in the income threshold for medical expense deductions, repeals limitations on contributions to flexible savings accounts (FSAs), establishes a refundable tax credit for health insurance, and increases the maximum contribution limit to HSAs.
All of these, particularly the repeal of the individual mandate and the medical device tax, have been things conservatives have clamored for for years. Moreover, the AHCA completely overhauls Medicaid in the wake of Obamacare’s massive expansion of it. The Republican bill gives states far more flexibility in administering Medicaid than the remarkably unworkable one-size-fits-all approach of Obamacare.
Yet conservatives understandably want more. They don’t want the AHCA to merely repeal Obamacare’s taxes and spending, they want to eliminate all of its regulations. Unfortunately, that would necessitate a normal bill that would be subject to normal Senate rules and therefore subject to the inevitability of a Democrat filibuster.
Because of the two-track system, Democrats could keep any such bill sidelined for years and Republicans would be left with neither the repeal of nor the replacement for Obamacare that they so desperately want (and that America so desperately needs).
So House Republicans chose to repeal and replace as much of Obamacare as they legally could using the only realistic means they have of sidestepping Democrat obstruction–reconciliation.
In order to qualify for reconciliation (which can only occur once a year), a measure must be passed by April 15th and, critically, it must be budgetary in nature. Otherwise, it is subject to 2 U.S.C. § 644, more commonly known as the “Byrd Rule” as an homage to former Senator Robert Byrd.
If a bill or a portion of a bill does not generate a net change in either budgetary outlays or revenues–in other words, if it does not explicitly deal with taxing or spending–it is not eligible for reconciliation and would be declared a regular bill and thus subject to regular rules (and a filibuster).
Even an effort to erase the most onerous Obamacare regulations, which one can absolutely argue have an impact on the federal budget, would be subject to the Byrd Rule, which makes a bill that “produces changes in outlays or revenues which are merely incidental to the non-budgetary components of the provision” ineligible for reconciliation.
This is why the bulk of Obamacare’s regulations are not able to be included in the AHCA: They are simply not budgetary in nature. Were they to be included, Democrats would invoke the Byrd Rule and simply filibuster the measure to what would effectively be its death.
Given this harsh reality, Republicans are wise to use the budget reconciliation process to bypass Democrat obstruction and achieve the bulk of their single biggest campaign promise, the repeal and replacement of Obamacare.
It is only natural that conservatives want the AHCA to do more, but ignoring the fact that Democrats would simply filibuster any effort to completely undo all of Obamacare’s provisions is disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst.
A Democrat filibuster isn’t just a threat, it’s a certainty, and the reality is that passing the AHCA through the budget reconciliation process is quite simply the best option that Republicans have.
So Republicans’ best opportunity here appears to be to repeal as much of ObamaCare as they can without invoking the filibuster, get a larger majority in the 2018 elections, and then do the rest. And that’s an uncertain strategy not merely for the obvious reasons, but because poll results are mixed about how Americans feel about ObamaCare. Great.
Today in 1965, Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” was released. Other than the run-on nature of the lyrics, the song was one of the first to have an accompanying “promo film,” now known as a “music video”:
Today in 1971, Radio Hanoi played the Star Spangled Banner, presumably not as a compliment:
Today in 1973, Paul McCartney was fined £100 for growing marijuana at his farm in Campbelltown, Scotland.
McCartney’s excuse was that he didn’t know the seeds he claimed to have been given would actually grow.
University of Tennessee Prof. Glenn Harlan Reynolds:
So President Trump set off a firestorm over the weekend with a series of tweets alleging that Obama had tapped Trump Tower. But getting hung up on imprecise language in the president’s tweets isn’t the right way to look at things. What seems to be at true is that the Obama administration spied on some of Trump’s associates and we don’t know exactly how much information was collected under what authority and who was targeted.
As former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy summarizes in National Review, the Obama Justice Department considered a criminal investigation aimed at a number of Trump’s associates. When they didn’t find anything criminal, they converted the investigation into an intelligence probe under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Elements of that story have been confirmed by The New York Times, the BBC and McClatchy newspapers.
FISA surveillance has to be approved by a special court, which almost always allows the government to spy on people when asked. But when the Justice Department asked to spy on several of Trump’s associates, the court refused permission, according to the BBC. As McCarthy writes, this is notable because “the FISA court is notoriously solicitous of government requests to conduct national security surveillance.”
Not taking no for an answer, the Obama administration came back during the final weeks of the election with a narrower request that didn’t specifically mention Trump. That narrower request was granted by the court, but reports from the Guardian and the BBC don’t mention the tapping of phones..
Former Obama officials issued denials that the former president had anything to do with it, which McCarthy calls “disingenuous on several levels.” Others have characterized them as a “non-denial denial.”
First, as Obama officials well know, under the FISA process, it is technically the FISA court that ‘orders’ surveillance. And by statute, it is the Justice department, not the White House, that represents the government in proceedings before the FISA court. So, the issue is not whether Obama or some member of his White House staff “ordered” surveillance of Trump and his associates. The issues are (a) whether the Obama Justice Department sought such surveillance authorization from the FISA court, and (b) whether, if the Justice Department did that, the White House was aware of or complicit in the decision to do so. Personally, given the explosive and controversial nature of the surveillance request we are talking about — an application to wiretap the presidential candidate of the opposition party, and some of his associates, during the heat of the presidential campaign, based on the allegation that the candidate and his associates were acting as Russian agents — it seems to me that there is less than zero chance that could have happened without consultation between the Justice Department and the White House.
And as journalist Mickey Kaus commented on Twitter, there’s a reason why presidents name trusted allies as attorney general. As close as former attorney general Loretta Lynch was to Obama, and as supportive as she was of his political goals, it seems very unlikely that this was some sort of rogue operation.
It’s certainly not impossible to believe that the Obama administration spied on Trump. Obama wouldn’t be the first president to engage in illegal surveillance of opposition candidates, and his administration has been noted for its great enthusiasm for domestic spying. In an effort to plug embarrassing leaks, the Obama administration spied on Associated Press reporters and seized the phone records not only of a Fox News reporter but also of his parents. Obama’s political allies even alleged that his CIA spied on Congress.
Nor is it unbelievable that under the Obama administration, supposedly non-partisan civil servants would go after political opponents. After all, the notorious IRS scandal was about exactly that.
Trump has called for a congressional investigation, but what this really needs is a special prosecutor, someone from outside the politically tainted Justice Department, to look into the political abuse of surveillance laws by the Obama administration. Maybe, upon investigation, it will turn out that nothing improper happened — that this is a lot of smoke, but that there’s no fire. But we can’t know without an investigation, and if there really were political abuses of the Justice Department and the intelligence surveillance process, those guilty should not simply be exposed but go to jail. Such abuse strikes at democracy itself.
Note that FISA surveillance is severely limited and requires information from surveillance to be kept very secret or, if not relevant, deleted. If those limits were exceeded, if Obama officials lied to the court, or if the information was — as it appears to have been — excessively shared within the government, or leaked to outsiders, those are all serious crimes, as First Amendment attorney Robert Barnes notes.
Watergate brought down a presidency, but if the worst suspicions here are borne out, we’re dealing with something worse. Hopefully not, but there’s no way to tell at this point. As The Washington Post has been saying lately, “Democracy dies in darkness.” Let’s shine some light on what the Obama administration was doing during this election.
Today in 1962, the Beatles recorded their first radio appearance, on the BBC’s “Teenagers’ Turn — Here We Go”:
Those who read Wisconsin newspapers have been reading all about the $1 billion transportation spending deficit.
But is there a deficit? The MacIver Institute does some math work, starting with …
A billion-dollar shortfall in the next transportation budget started the debate about raising Wisconsin’s gas tax, which was so explosive, no one seemingly had the time to confirm there is a billion-dollar shortfall. If they had, the current debate might not be centered on the gas tax, but instead on how we fund roads in the first place, because there’s only a shortfall if you change the way Wisconsin funds transportation.
The current 2015-2017 state budget spends $2.8 billion on highways, and $855 million of that comes from bonding. That means about 30 percent of everything Wisconsin spends on roads is borrowed, and there are those who believe the state should not be borrowing at all to pay for roads. That was the cover story for a peculiar request the Legislative Fiscal Bureau received last summer.
Even though the DOT was about to submit a new budget request in less than two months, Fiscal Bureau was asked to project what the DOT’s budget would look like under an unlikely set of circumstances. The request wanted the Fiscal Bureau to omit all bonding under a cost-to-continue scenario. The result was a $939 million difference between the current budget and the next.
The billion-dollar transportation deficit was born.
That number started the narrative that Wisconsin has a transportation funding crisis. It didn’t matter that two months later the DOT presented its actual budget request that included spending projections, revenue estimates, current federal funding commitments, and existing bonding. That request also indicated there would be a shortfall, but at $449 million, it was less than half of the previous projection. When Governor Walker presented his budget proposal, he included $500 million in new transportation bonding to fill that gap, which would be the lowest amount since the 2001-2003 budget. It would also mean no delays on major projects currently underway.
Still, the fabricated billion-dollar deficit dominates coverage of the transportation budget, and it continues to frame the debate over the gas tax. Framing the transportation debate this benefits those who want to raise the gas tax. However, they will still readily point to bonding as an underlying concern.
“It is more conservative to pay for projects today than it is to borrow the money and make our children pay the price. But for far too long under Democratic and Republican leadership, the state has relied too heavily on bonding. According to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, Wisconsin will spend roughly 20 cents on every transportation dollar on debt service for this fiscal year,” Vos said in a September 15, 2016 press release.
The Walker Administration, on the other hand, argues that transportation bonding is no different than taking out a mortgage for your house. The idea is you spread out the expense over the amount time you plan to use it.
Bonding is the one of the most common ways states fund transportation projects. There are only five states that don’t use transportation bonds at all. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) released a report in November that found bonding to be one of the most successful approaches to transportation funding and finance.
Meanwhile, heavy reliance on fuel taxes is considered one of the least successful approaches to transportation funding according to AASHTO. In fact, many experts say fuel taxes are becoming obsolete as people drive less and cars become more fuel efficient. Even the supporters of raising the gas tax in Wisconsin admit it’s not a perfect solution.
“Even though a lot of conversations have been about the gas tax being a declining revenue source or a dying revenue source long term, there are limitations to every different option that’s out there,” Representative John Nygren, Co-chair of the Joint Committee on Finance, told the Milwaukee Press Club at a luncheon on January 11th.
When it comes to options, Wisconsin has 19 different sources of revenue for its Transportation Fund. That’s more than any other state in the country, according to AASHTO. These include aircraft registration fees, airline property tax, drivers and vehicle records fees, driver’s license and state ID card fees, fines for truck size and weight violations, fuel tax, general funds, interest income, outdoor advertising revenues, oversize/overweight truck permit fees, passenger rail station sponsorship, passenger vehicle fees, petroleum inspection fund revenues, property sales, railroad property taxes, state rental vehicles fees, taxes on alternative fuels, taxes on aviation fuels, and truck registration fees. This is expected to bring in a total of $3.5 billion over the next biennium. When it comes to user fees specifically, Wisconsin’s collections of user fees per lane mile are comparable to its neighbors.
However, when we compare total highway spending (including administrative and debt service costs) per mile to road quality, we see that Wisconsin spends more for poorer quality roads. The state is clearly not getting a good deal on its roadwork, and it begs the question why? Fortunately, lawmakers sensed something was not right at DOT and ordered an audit last year.
That audit came back in January 2017, and it was, in a word, devastating. The auditors found the DOT regularly breaks state law in budgeting, negotiating, communicating, and managing contracts. Among these statutory violations: the department does not always solicit bids from more than one vendor, it does not spread out solicitations throughout the year, it does not post required information on its website, its cost estimates to the governor are incomplete, and it skips steps in the evaluation process for selecting projects. These practices manifest themselves through an inescapable reality: the cost of major projects tends to double after the DOT gets approval from the governor and legislature to proceed. The auditors looked at 16 current highway projects and found they are over-budget by $3.1 billion. …
The side arguing for more highway spending hasn’t provided a solid figure. We often hear about that fabricated billion-dollar deficit, but now there are some, like Rep. Nygren, who say even that might not be enough. On the other hand, Rep. Vos has suggested $300 million might be a realistic amount given the governor’s budget criteria.
The governor has been firm and public in his opposition to raising taxes or fees for transportation. However, in December he made a comment that the only reason he might reconsider is if there were tax cuts in other parts of the budget to offset it. Vos took that comment and ran with it. He announced the $300 million target a month later, and Walker quickly clarified there was no deal to begin with.
Hypothetically, if Wisconsin were to boost highway funding by $300 million and it all came from a gas tax increase, the state’s gas tax would have to go from 32.9 cents to 37.7 cents a gallon. That would give Wisconsin the eighth highest gas tax in the country. Of course, Vos’ plan could spread that $300 million out across various taxes and fees in order to soften the blow. No one’s really talked about that $300 million for over a month now, but then again, Vos and his allies are playing this very close to the vest. …
Yet, the only option we continue to hear is raise the gas tax, and the best evidence to support that option is the fabricated billion-dollar shortfall. And nobody has definitively promised if we raise the gas tax, there will be no transportation bonding – which supposedly initiated this debate in the first place.
The number one British album today in 1965 was “The Rolling Stones No. 2”:
The number one single today in 1965:
Today in 1970, an album was released to pay for the defense in a California murder trial.
You didn’t know Charles Manson was a recording “artist,” did you?
Today in 1955, Elvis Presley made his TV debut, on “Louisiana Hayride” on KWKH-TV in Shreveport, La.
The number one album today in 1966 was Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’ “Going Places”:
The number one single today in 1966:
The Grammy Awards premiered today in 1959. The Record of the Year came from a TV series:
Today in 1966, John Lennon demonstrated the ability to get publicity, if not positive publicity, when the London Evening Standard printed a story in which Lennon said:
Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first — rock and roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.
Lennon’s comment prompted Bible Belt protests, including burning Beatles records. Of course, as the band pointed out, to burn Beatles records requires purchasing them first.
The number one single today in 1967:
Today in 1973, Pink Floyd began its 19-date North American tour at the Dane County Coliseum in Madison.
The headline refers, of course, to ABC-TV’s Howard Cosell, who claimed to “tell it like it is” when that was not always the case.
Two things in the last week brought this subject to mind. First, a death, reported by the Dallas Morning News:
Gary Cartwright, a colorful Texas journalist who began his career on the talent-laden sports staff of the Fort Worth Press in the 1950s, died Wednesday morning after suffering a recent fall at his Austin home. He was 82.
Cartwright went on to become an award-winning sportswriter for the Dallas Times Herald and The Dallas Morning News. He left TheNews in 1967 to advance a career that included writing the 1968 novel The Hundred Yard War, inspired by his coverage of the Dallas Cowboys.
But his most prominent years as a journalist came during his time with Texas Monthly. He worked for the Austin-based magazine from 1973, when he profiled controversial Cowboys running back Duane Thomas for its debut issue, to 2010, when he retired. …
“He was certainly one of a kind,” acclaimed Texas author Dan Jenkins, 88, said of Cartwright, with whom he worked at the Press and the Times Herald. “He was a wild card, but he was awfully talented. We had a million laughs.”
Cartwright, Jenkins and mutual friend Edwin “Bud” Shrake collaborated on what may have been the most audacious, literary-minded sports staff ever assembled. All three worked at the Press and Times Herald, where their boss was an equally vivid character, the late Blackie Sherrod, who later became a columnist for TheNews.
Cartwright was well-read, Jenkins said, “and he was a fan of the trade, as we all were. It just came natural to him. We were all kind of natural, for some strange reason. It was just one of those things. We all fell together. Blackie had an awful lot to do with making us work hard.
“We laughed a lot, we joked a lot, and we kind of wrote for each other and tried to outwrite each other. It was fun, and we were all friends.”
Jenkins, who now lives in his native Fort Worth, said: “I figured it up one day. Blackie and Bud and Gary and I, the four of us, combined to have 57 books published. For a little sports staff, that may be a world record.”
Cartwright came of age as a journalist in the 1960s, which coincided with a memorable era in Dallas sports. The decade began with not one but two professional football teams playing in the Cotton Bowl.
It was a time of raw turbulence in the country but especially in Dallas, where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, when Cartwright was the Cowboys beat writer for TheNews and Shrake was its lead sports columnist. The two covered the Cowboys game in Cleveland two days after the assassination, a Sunday in which a man they knew — strip-club owner Jack Ruby — gunned down Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas police station. …
But one of the most talked-about moments in Cartwright’s career came after a bitter Cowboys defeat. The lead to his game story published in TheNews remains a staple of sportswriting folklore.
On Nov. 21, 1965, the Cowboys were playing the defending champs of the National Football League, the Cleveland Browns, led by Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown. In their sixth year of existence, the woeful Cowboys had yet to experience a winning season. But on Thanksgiving Day 1965, they teetered on the threshold of a turning point.
Don Meredith, the team’s often-embattled quarterback, had marched the Cowboys to the Browns’ 1-yard-line, with 4 minutes 34 seconds remaining and the Browns ahead, 24-17. The cacophonous crowd of 76,251 was, at the time, the largest in Cotton Bowl history.
But, sadly, the comeback unraveled.
Rather than have the Cowboys run the ball, Meredith hurled a wobbly first-down pass, which caromed into the arms of a Cleveland defender.
Hunched in the press box on deadline, Cartwright crafted a lead that serves as a lasting parody of turn-of-the-20th century sportswriting legend Grantland Rice:
“Outlined against a gray November sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. You know them: Pestilence, Death, Famine and Meredith.”
That, Dan Jenkins said, “was one of the greatest leads ever.”
Sam Blair, a retired sports columnist for TheNews, once wrote a piece in which he quoted Cartwright, his longtime friend, expressing regret about something else he wrote of Meredith: “In a column I said Meredith was a loser. That was stupid. Meredith wasn’t a loser. I was.”
The second was a girls basketball playoff game I announced (one day late due to weather) at Wisconsin Heights High School near Black Earth. Wisconsin Heights is what I call a “hyphen” school district (whether or not there’s an actual hyphen in its name), a combination of two or more communities whose school districts merged. Wisconsin Heights, which opened in 1965, is made up of the former Black Earth and Mazomanie schools.
From Black Earth (nickname: “Earthmen”) came Gene Brabender, who was one of the first Milwaukee Brewers pitchers, and before that a member of the one-year Seattle Pilots. The Pilots were the subject of one of the first sports tell-all books, Ball Four, written by one of the Pilots’ pitchers, Jim Bouton. If you ever announce a Wisconsin Heights game, you are obligated to bring up the story about how Pilots players speculated on Brabender’s alma mater fight song, and they came up with “Black Earth, we love you, hurrah for the rocks and the dirt.”
The Hundred Yard War and Ball Four were two of the first sports tell-all books, even though the former was fiction and the latter was not. (Bouton wrote the book via tape recorder, unbeknownst to his teammates, most of whom reacted quite negatively when the book came out. That prompted a sequel, I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally.)
Bouton, a Yankees starting pitcher who pitched in two World Series before an arm injury, reported on his teammates’ philandering and use of amphetamines (called “greenies”). He also opined freely on his teammates, manager and coaches, management, wife (eventually ex-wife) and children, and so on. In the style of the ’60s he was an outsider and nonconformist when conformity was king in baseball and, with a few outliers (Joe Namath, Bill Russell), every other pro sport.
Even if you don’t buy Bouton’s description of the poor Pilots management, the Pilots obviously had poor management, as proven by the fact that (not reported in the book) they were bankrupt before the end of their first season. Milwaukee car dealer Bud Selig bought the team in a bankruptcy sale during the 1970 exhibition season, and thus the 1969 Pilots (without Bouton, traded to Houston and into a pennant race) became the 1970 Brewers, though with the Pilots’ jerseys (with lettering and insignia ripped off and replaced by “BREWERS”). That obviously would never happen now; the big leagues are much more careful about who gets awarded their expansion franchises. (Of course, the Pilots-turned-Brewers needed nine seasons to win more games than they lost, and three more to make the playoffs. On the other hand, the replacement for the Pilots, the Mariners, have been in one more fewer World Series than the Brewers.)
Ball Four became a brief TV series …
… although not as Bouton intended. He had in mind, believe it or don’t, “M*A*S*H” set in a baseball stadium, which no viewer of the time would have accepted. (“Ball Four” had just seven episodes filmed, only five of which were aired.) There was a TV series that perhaps patterned what Bouton wanted …
… though “Bay Cities Blues,” though created by Steven Bochco of “Hill Street Blues” fame, lasted four (of the eight filmed) episodes. Then as now, most people seek sports as an escape, not to be reminded of the crappiness of life.
The News story about Cartwright notes former Cowboy receiver Peter Gent, who then wrote his own novel, North Dallas Forty. The aforementioned Jenkins wrote a more comedic novel, Semi-Tough, which became a Burt Reynolds movie.
Kirkus Reviews called War …
… a very cynical view of the world of pro football and a rather too naive psychological look at the players working out — the patterns off the field generally run to sleazy adventures while practice time is surprisingly inhuman. Generally this follows the career of Rylie Silver, star quarterback on an ailing team, a man who makes a ritual of getting drunk before every game. He’s an erratic genius and also accident prone. And obviously there isn’t the rapport between the coach and his #1 man that one has been led to assume. The book starts out well, with the tension and schemata of the draft choices as coach Andy Craig tries to get next year’s winning combination. He succeeds but is later sacked and his “”dream”” never gets off the drawing board since Iris replacement, a rather strident sadist, turns the men into instruments of their own destruction and Rylie is finally traded out. Mr. Cartwright, a sports Writer, combines an intimate knowledge of the game with a grimly intellectualized look at the creatures who play it. Oddly, none of them seem real and misapplied metaphors (“”She had breasts like pine smoke””) don’t help.
North Dallas Forty was similar, with various sex and drug use, though funnier until the grim ending where the hero gets cut and his new girlfriend is murdered. The latter detail was not included in the movie:
Both the novel and the movie are thinly veiled tales of the ’60s Cowboys. “Phil Elliott” (Nick Nolte) was the author, “Seth Maxwell” (Mac Davis) was Meredith (who said upon seeing the movie, “If I’d known Gent was as good as he says he was, I would have thrown to him more”), his backup must have been Craig Morton, the coach (G.D. Spradlin) was Tom Landry, “Delma Huddle” (played by former NFL running back Tommy Reamon, known later for coaching NFL quarterbacks Aaron Brooks and Michael and Marcus Vick in high school) must have been Bob Hayes, and so on.
One assumes the authors wrote The Hundred Yard War, Ball Four and North Dallas Forty as exposés of the dehumanizing nature of professional sports. I was in middle school and high school when I first read them, so I didn’t have an adult perspective. To me, however, they were all like the movie “Apocalypse Now,” intended as an antiwar film, which was recast by its viewers as a pro-war film. (“I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It’s the smell of … victory.”) I was not and am not a fan of drug abuse, but to a teenage reader another thought came to mind about each book’s depiction of pro athletes — GIRLS!
Around this time I also read the autobiography of Oakland Raiders defensive back Jack Tatum, They Call Me Assassin. The Raiders were the renegades of the NFL in the 1970s, and Tatum’s self-described exploits (for instance, a training camp air hockey tournament where cheating was mandatory, and a food fight at a team banquet) reinforced the concept that pro sports was a nonstop party even beyond games. (Years later Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler wrote his own autobiography, Snake, which reinforced more of this, though again some of his teammates denied Stabler’s reports of Raider hijinks, perhaps because they weren’t involved with them.)
The aforementioned three books paved the way for later series and movies about sports, including ESPN’s “Playmakers” (killed after one season by the National Football League, which was not amused by one of its broadcast partners carrying an unflattering portrait of pro football), Oliver Stone’s “Any Given Sunday,” and the soccer series “Footballers’ Wives.”
Gent, meanwhile, wrote a sequel to his own book, North Dallas After 40, in which characters, well, age. (Forty was written in the first person, while After 40 was written in the third person.) Publishers Weekly reviewed it:
This sequel to Gent’s very funny look behind the scenes of professional football, North Dallas Forty , is not what you’d expect. Most of the major characters are back, and their lives after football are right on target (coach B. A. Quinlan is now governor of Texas; ace quarterback Seth Maxwell is a TV star), but the emphasis here is not on the game but on corruption, murder, savings-and-loan frauds and drugs. Phil Elliot, the alienated wide receiver, is still odd man out, in conflict with the new owners of the North Dallas NFL team, who badly want the small piece of land which is his only legacy to his young son. His ex-wife is pressuring him for everything he’s got ( except custody of their son), his body is a painful relic of his playing days and even some of his ex-teammates, back together for the 20th anniversary of North Dallas’s first championship season, seem to be in league with the forces of evil. Gent uses a series of flashbacks expertly, filling in the gaps for readers not familiar with the earlier book, but his farfetched story is too improbable to work and is helped not at all by an ending as jarring and disconcerting as an official’s flag canceling out a spectacular touchdown play.
Monday Night Football viewers since its inception know that Meredith left ABC for a couple years to announce for NBC and act:
There is a great irony in these books that the authors may not have realized. Gent and Bouton bit the hands that fed them; even though pro athletes weren’t paid like they are now, they were still paid rather well for a part-time job playing sports. Cartwright was paid to cover sports. Had the public rebelled against what Gent, Bouton and Cartwright wrote about, Gent’s and Bouton’s playing successors would have had to find some other line of work.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 