Slate eBook Club - Best of 2003

by Slate. com

  Matsui acquired his nickname "Godzilla" in high school, according to Ken Maranta, a writer at Japan's Daily Yomiuri newspaper: "At the Koshien tournament, Matsui would grit his teeth as he was swinging. One reporter said he looked like Godzilla because his teeth were all in line." In characteristic self-erasure, Matsui claims to "like the nickname a lot. Godzilla is a very strong creature but also has a good heart, and my face looks kind of like Godzilla. My face is scary."

  When Matsui held a press conference to announce that he was leaving Japanese baseball, he wrote his talking points in pen on his hand, and he had tears in his eyes. Matsui says, "For the past year, I played with the Giants, and that meant I couldn't share my dream with my teammates or the fans. I had to avoid thinking about it by making every effort to place a lid on my selfishness." Matsui "agonized over it to the end. I tried to tell myself I needed to stay here for the prosperity of Japanese baseball, but my personal desire to go over there and play didn't go away. In the end I decided to go with what my gut said. This is the first time I've ever been faithful to myself. My greatest regret is what the fans will think. Some might call me a traitor. Once over there, I will do my best, as if my life were on the line, so the fans will be glad I went. The only thing I can say is 'I am sorry.' "

  Asked, at the beginning of his first MLB season, if he had any regrets leaving Japan to play in the United States, Ichiro said, "I have no regrets following my dream to play in the major leagues. In fact, my only regret would have been if I didn't follow my dream." Upon arriving in the United States, Ichiro said, "Hey, Seattle, wassup?"

  Ichiro says, "I don't play baseball for other people; I play baseball for myself." When asked if he had any special feelings after playing his first spring-training game with the Mariners, Ichiro said, "Today was just another game to me. I know it has some importance to the media, but not to me. Even being the first game, I was excited, not anxious." Matsui, on the other hand, tends to tighten up under pressure, because baseball is everything to him. In the U.S. All-Stars' tour of Japan in November—which Japanese fans hoped would showcase Matsui's home-run prowess; every time he came to bat, the public-address system played "We Are the Champions"—he hit no home runs and went 5-for-31 in the seven-game series. With each failure, his shoulders slumped lower, and he gripped the bat handle more tightly. In the bottom of the ninth inning of the tie-breaking seventh game, with Japan behind 4-2 and the bases loaded, Matsui, with a chance to redeem himself, weakly grounded out to end the game and the series. During his home-run duel with Barry Bonds before one of the games, he was so anxious that Bonds came over and massaged his shoulders, trying to get him to relax a little.

  Matsui said, "During this series, I found out there are a lot of things I need to work on. I just have to accept the result and try hard when I get to America so I can show what I can do. I want to put the lessons I learned in this season to good use next year. I have to show the fans a bigger Matsui. Otherwise, there's no point in my going over there." More so than most players, certainly in the United States and even those in Japan, Matsui is aware of fans' fantasies of him, and he badly wants to live up to these fantasies—which makes him seem quite likable but also enormously vulnerable and somewhat naive. It's difficult to imagine him not struggling mightily his first year in New York.

  At the press conference introducing him as a Yankee, Matsui, sounding as if he were reading from a TelePrompTer, said, over and over, "I'll try my best. I'll work hard. I'll do my best." He also said: "I'm really honored to be able to come to this beautiful city. … Today has been one of the happiest days of my life. … I'd like to try as hard as possible to become one of the team members of the New York Yankees and to be accepted in the city. … I can't wait to stand in the batter's box at Yankee Stadium, where honorable and very famous players have stepped. The ideal ballplayer is Babe Ruth. I want to be that kind of ballplayer, to give back to the baseball fans. I want to stand in the same batter's box where Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig stood. I'll try really hard to bring a World Series championship to this city."

  George Steinbrenner—who recently said, "I used to be an isolationist, but now I see the benefits of reaching out worldwide"—said about Matsui at the end of the media session, "What a nice young man." Yankee triumphalism had another willing convert.

  The Nightmares of NASCAR

  Why I'm too scared to go the Daytona 500.

  By Mike Shropshire

  Posted Friday, Feb. 14, 2003, at 10:36 AM PT

  If the Daytona 500 isn't the largest all-Anglo assembly this side of Liverpool, it is certainly the drunkest. It's an around-the-clock intox-a-thon. Retribution weekend. For racing fans, the opening of the NASCAR Winston Cup season represents emancipation from pissant micromanagers, HMO rip-off professionals, PalmPilots, child-support collection pests, and mothers-in-laws who lurk in the shadows like Hannibal Lecter. And while you're at it, pass me another one of them room-temperature cans of Old Milwaukee.

  Oh, I'll be watching the televised race on Fox, clinging to color announcer Darrell Waltrip's every syllable. I am hip to NASCAR, and with the new season unfolding I'm wondering how the Joe Gibbs racing team will fare now that it's switched from Pontiac to Chevrolet. Can Jeff Gordon regain his focus in the aftermath of his acrimony-spattered divorce? Can NASCAR maintain its ass-kicker panache after it allows somebody with one of those Formula-One-sounding names like Christian Fittipaldi into the mix?

  See, I know all about this stuff. But I cannot muster the words to adequately describe how delighted I am that I will not be there in person to experience Daytona. Why? I've been around these guys, and frankly, they scare the crap out of me.

  My first on-site exposure to the astounding phenomenon of Winston Cup racing happened in 1997, when they opened the Texas Motor Speedway here in my own bailiwick. NASCAR was big, a culture unto itself, and I felt compelled to go out there and experience the enchantment, the allure.

  I was little like Casy, the preacher, when he hitched a ride out to California with the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath. The preacher said, "Somethin's happening. I got to go where the folks is goin'. Gonna cuss 'n swear 'n hear the poetry of folks talking." Yeah, and once the preacher made it to California, he got his head opened up with an ax handle. But I went ahead and got a coveted press credential that offers access to the garage, pit areas, and media center, where Winston reps hand out free cartons of cigarettes.

  You practically have to provide dental charts and DNA samples to land NASCAR media credentials. A press guy told me that a couple of journalists had the temerity to give (or perhaps sell) their credentials to some unauthorized rubes. He claimed that the reporters have been blacklisted, eternally banished from future events, and that NASCAR had fined their publications because of this unspeakable ethical lapse. "NASCAR can actually fine a newspaper?" I said. The NASCAR guy offered me a thin and rather chilly smile. With that, I entered the kingdom of modern big-league stock-car racing. This is no place for sissies.

  The race teams—the drivers and crew chiefs and gas guys and tire changers and the whole entourage—still sport a number of psycho-rural types who have experienced the sensation of being whopped in the back of the head with a 2-by-4. Now, these folks should be fun to interview, but in order to get to them one must circumvent a gantlet of corporate shills with their characteristic high-viscosity personalities. "Oh, there are still some of the down-home types of fellas racing," Cale Yarbrough, who won his first Daytona in 1968, told me. "But they're getting harder and harder to find. The successful drivers are the ones with the financing. When I was doing it, the winner of the race was the driver who was the bravest one out there at the end of the day."

  In the media center, a reporter tried to approach Bruton Smith Jr., a car-racing big-hoss who had built the new track in Texas. Smith has the darting eyes of an Enron exec and mean little teeth. Squirrel's teeth. "Bruton, I just talked to Dale Earnhardt, and he said he doesn't like the track," the reporter told Smith. "He said that Turn 3 is a disa
ster waiting to happen and that …"

  Smith's entire head took on the helium-inflated look of a float in the Mardi Gras parade. "Bullshit! Dale didn't say that! That's a big, fat lie!" Smith responded. "Where you from, anyway?"

  "Philadelphia," said the reporter.

  "Well, then, that explains it," said Smith, who huffed away to the buffet, joining the line of baby elephants that constitute the NASCAR press corps.

  About those NASCAR writers: A few of them go a quarter-ton, at least. The food-line fare, courtesy of the Lowe's home-improvement people, was gut-measurement appropriate. The writers carried off massive servings of synthetic cholesterol, coated with Ragu pasta sauce, and were soon back for seconds and thirds. During the course of the afternoon, I asked one of them to describe the benefits of covering the sport full-time, as opposed to say, ACC hoops. "No night games, no nigras, and no goddam coaches," he cheerfully explained.

  Trent Lott could not have put it more eloquently. When they start the engines on Sunday, I'll be watching. Fifteen hundred miles seems a safe enough distance.

  Chuck Those Woods

  High-end golf clubs might boost Tiger's game, but they won't help yours.

  By Nick Schulz

  Posted Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2003, at 1:37 PM PT

  After last year's British Open disaster, Tiger Woods set golf junkies buzzing when he changed his irons to those made by his sponsor Nike. Hackers like me wondered: If the greatest in the game thought his performance might improve with new clubs, maybe mine would, too. No more shanked long-iron approach shots from 185 yards, no more punch and roll on the par threes. New irons. New technology. New game.

  Not quite. While pricey clubs might add a few yards to Tiger's drives, they offer little solace to muni-course hacks like you and me. The idea that high-end clubs will significantly improve a hack's game is lucrative fiction. If anything, buying top-of-the-line woods and irons will probably add more strokes to your game than they'll take away.

  The problem with high-end golf equipment is that new "innovations" are designed specifically to combat minor flaws in a PGA tour professional's game. If you're Phil Mickelson—spinning balls intentionally, slicing them precisely, or hooking 'em smartly—top-end clubs might help you get over the hump and win your first major. But if you're a weekend player, with serious flaws in your swing and far less ball control, you're better off with less-advanced woods and irons. The highest of high-end clubs are just a waste of money.

  Take the Callaway Golf Forged Wedges, a beautiful new set of clubs designed by golf maestro Roger Cleveland and hawked by pros Annika Sorenstam and Charles Howell III. (A sand and pitching wedge will run you about $200.) Cleveland shrank the club heads of the Callaways, while retaining the density and weight distribution pro golfers need for smooth, consistent shots and a true "feel." The smaller head will undoubtedly help pros like Sorenstam hit balls cleanly out of crummy lies while still allowing them to feel exactly what they did with a shot in terms of loft, spin, and power. But for the hack golfer, smaller club heads aren't helpful. The average golfer is more concerned with "forgiveness"—essentially, that poorly struck and errant shots will not stray too wildly and get a golfer into much trouble. Smaller clubs are much less forgiving of tiny mistakes than larger, blunter heads, which means they'll probably just send your balls whizzing from one sand trap to another.

  Or consider the design leap at the other end of the spectrum, the oversized club head. The new Redline Driver from Adams Golf features tungsten perimeter weighting and the highest possible "coefficient of restitution" (that's golf geek speak meaning it will generate the greatest possible velocity). The company says the clubs will give you "maximum distance, maximum accuracy, and maximum ease." Sounds promising, no?

  But there's a tradeoff, and it's one a lot of golfers don't realize they are making. As Dick Rugge, senior technical director for the USGA, and others have pointed out, oversized clubs encourage people to swing a lot harder. With a bigger club head, you are psychologically less worried about hitting a bad shot. So, you overswing. Who wants to pull that huge No. 1 out of his bag in the tee box in front of his friends, only to lay off the backswing and follow through? It's true that a bigger club head is more forgiving. But it's also encouraging people to think they can swing like Tiger and get away with it. Bigger cuts actually mean less control and bigger misses. And that results in some truly awful golf shots.

  Even high-end golf balls are suspect. The new HX balls (pronounced "Hex") go for $45 for a box of 12, about two to three times the cost of standard balls. The innovation? They replace the circular dimples found on normal balls with hexagonal dimples, designed to give your drives an aerodynamic boost. And whereas traditional balls have about three-fourths of the ball surface covered by dimples, the new HX balls have dimples on almost 100 percent of the surface, which should reduce wind drag. The manufacturer claims HX balls will likely add yards to your tee shot.

  The problem for casual players is that HX balls can magnify your mistakes as much as they minimize your distance to the green. And that can be a big problem. For the weekend player, catastrophic mistakes are what make a golf game disgraceful. (There's a reason golfers say "the woods are full of long drivers"—referring to people, not clubs.) And HX balls mean that while it's now likely that a perfect tee shot might sail an extra 10 or 20 yards, it's just as likely that an errant shot into the high rough will become an errant shot into another fairway.

  Why do golfers keep buying this stuff? Well, for one thing, they tend to have a lot of disposable income. For another, they tend to confuse equipment changes in golf with those in other sports, like tennis. (Indeed, since they are both club sports, racket and golf equipment are often sold in the same specialty stores.) Whereas a graphite tennis racket allows the average player to hit the ball much harder than the wooden paddle Bjorn Borg used, new golf technology hasn't really changed the fundamental nature of the game—even for the pros.

  Bob Haines, a mechanical engineer who outfits well-to-do golf clients in the Washington, D.C., area, says there's a reason "scoring averages are the same as they were 50 years ago." Tiger and Annika Sorenstam might be hitting a little longer today than they would using clubs made 30 years ago—but that has as much to do with athletic conditioning and course upkeep as it does their clubs. As Haines told me, "An old Wilson-made Sam Snead set is basically the same design as the top-of-the-line Nike clubs Tiger uses today. … They may use new names—beta titanium vs. regular titanium—but, look, I can tell you all these fancy names don't make much difference. If your swing isn't good, your game won't be either."

  I, too, can testify because I'm one of the dupes. After upgrading to a $1,500 custom-made set of clubs several years ago, I was hopeful a new era of sub-90 rounds was imminent. Nope—my scores still exceeded my IQ. Despite longer steel shafts and elliptical back-weighted heads (whatever the hell those are), my rounds collapsed in a John Daly-esque fit of blown shots at the 13th and bourbon shots at the 19th. New gear won't do anything to reduce a hack golfer's high scores. For that, there's a cheaper albeit less sexy alternative: practice.

  Romancing the Microbe

  Cheese fervor in a time of germ anxiety.

  By Sara Dickerman

  Posted Friday, Sept. 5, 2003, at 9:58 AM PT

  "It's a little like Best in Show" joked California cheese-maker Sue Conley, whose washed-rind triple-crème beauty, Cowgirl Creamery Red Hawk, had just won the American Cheese Society's top prize.* The annual competition, held last month in San Francisco, was indeed a celebration of the same kind of arcane, all-consuming passion on display in Christopher Guest's dog show mock-u-mentary.

  The contest was part of the American Cheese Society's 20th annual conference; the organization, dedicated to the promotion of traditionally made cheeses, is riding high right now. American cheese has come into its own, if not fully casting off the shadow of European classics like Roquefort, brie, and Parmigiano Reggiano, then at least finding a place alongside the imports at in
fluential restaurants and cheese shops. Even Daily Candy, the effervescent online fashion and shopping newsletter, provided a link to the Manhattan restaurant/cheese shop Artisanal. There's something kind of funny about the thought of women in Sigerson Morrison flip flops dishing over the latest stinky soft-rind cheese. But just as peasant blouses made it big a couple of years back, so are peasant cheeses.

  Certainly, the quality and availability of American artisan cheeses have steadily improved over the past two decades. Small-scale cheese-makers have tried hard to define themselves against the blandness of plastic-wrapped "commodity" cheese, and specialty-food retailers such as Whole Foods have spread across the country. But the improved inventory doesn't entirely explain the current popularity of cheese. The Atkins diet, with its validation of high-fat foods, surely has something to do with it. The program has thoroughly undermined the low-fat imperative in American nutrition, even for those who don't adhere to it. And reports in trades like the Cheese Reporter have suggested that specialty foods like cheese seem to be recession-proof. People may be staying home from restaurants, but when they entertain at home, they still seek status in rustic-chic comestibles like cheese, bread, and wine.