The thing about boxing movies is that they’re never really about the boxing. They’re about everything else the fighter has to contend with: family, friends, anger, addictions, the often-corrupt machinery of professional sports, the body’s failure in the face of age and abuse. David O. Russell’s “The Fighter’’ is no different. Otherwise it would place Micky Ward’s legendary 2002-2003 trio of fights with Arturo Gatti at the center of the movie instead of relegating them to a mention just before the end credits roll.
A Ward biopic without Gatti? That’s like a Muhammad Ali movie without Joe Frazier. Yet “The Fighter’’ is this close to a triumph: a movie that steeps us in the grit of its time and place — Lowell, Mass., in the 1990s — and electrifyingly dramatizes Ward’s battles with the family that almost loved him to death.
The first person we see is Micky’s half-brother Dickie Eklund, and it’s a horrifying sight. Christian Bale has gone back to his skeletal “Machinist’’ weight for the role. His eyes bright and hollow, he sits on a couch for an HBO interview and proclaims his readiness for a ring comeback. Everyone but Dickie seems to realize he’s in a documentary about crack addiction.
Dickie had his shot in 1978, when he knocked Sugar Ray Leonard to the canvas (and he’d be the first to throw a punch if you suggest Leonard might have slipped). Now he’s training his kid brother (Mark Wahlberg), with constant input from the boys’ pit bull of a manager-mother, Alice (Melissa Leo), and her seven fearsome daughters. No wonder Micky’s record in the ring is inconsistent — he has never drawn a breath for himself. Every hook, every jab, is second-guessed by people who know better.
“The Fighter’’ spans the years 1993 to 2000, when Ward pulled away from his family to make a name for himself. After a disastrous bout against an over-matched last-minute replacement (Mike Mungin; the fight actually took place in 1988), Micky understands he’s fighting Dickie’s battles, not his. With the backing of his girlfriend, Charlene (Amy Adams), he finds a new manager and new trainers, slowly pulling himself up the rungs toward title contention. It helps that Dickie’s in prison for much of this time, after a ridiculous shakedown scheme to raise money for his brother has gone bad.
Indeed, at its punchy, profane best, “The Fighter’’ struts along the line between melodrama and comedy. The first time Dickie jumps out a crackhouse window into a dumpster to avoid his mother, it’s alarming; the second time, it’s farce. If the older brother is known as “The Pride of Lowell,’’ you sense that Lowell’s more than a little embarrassed about the honor.
Actually, I’m curious what Lowell will think of the movie as a whole, since it paints the town a deep, bilious gray. A decade-plus of Boston-area movies has rubbed our noses in the yawp of working-class neighborhoods but never as relentlessly as this. The triple-deckers sag with decay and the faces are bloodshot with vanished hopes. You watch half-wondering if there’s a statute for civic libel but also rapt, because Russell makes the place jump with life, his camera swiveling to catch every desperate street-corner showdown.
He shoots the fights on video, a tactic that’s the opposite of “Raging Bull’’-style operatics. It works: The high-key lighting and the jagged VHS lines give the punches immediacy, and even if you know the outcome you’re caught up in the suspense, expecting the worst because that’s what Micky’s used to.
Yet as well-made as “The Fighter’’ is, the performances put it over. As Dickie’s the loudmouthed star of his extended clan, Bale is the secret star of this movie, his ruinous charisma stealing the spotlight from the little brother with talent. The actor is mesmerizing, unpredictable, much too much — you realize why people are drawn to Dickie and also why they give him a wide berth. I’m not sure whether Bale should be nominated for best actor, best supporting actor, or best animated feature.
With her frosted hair and tips that hide claws, Leo also goes the distance as Alice, overacting in the service of motherly venom. Mama Ward brooks no rebellion; when Micky’s dad (Jack McGee) suggests the boy might be better off with other management, he gets a frying pan to his head for his pains. A shout-out, too, to the chorus of sisters, Irish-American furies who include in their number Conan O’Brien’s sister Kate and the redoubtable Jill Quigg (“Gone Baby Gone’’), a bouillon cube of pure Bay State meanness.
Yet it’s Mark Wahlberg’s movie, and not just because he spent years trying to get it made. The star has the tricky role of a soft-spoken man in a family of loudmouths, and his power in and out of the ring builds in satisfying increments. The scenes with Adams’s Charlene are tender and unexpectedly moving; Micky has finally met someone willing to listen. You could say that Wahlberg’s playing Wahlberg. You could also say the star’s stubborn gentleness fits the part so well it doesn’t matter.
“The Fighter’’ is so good, so engrossing, for so long, that its failure to find an ending to match is perplexing. In part, the shape of its subject’s life works against tidy storytelling: The family issues dramatized here were resolved years before the fights with Gatti that made Ward’s name. Yet the climactic March 2000 bout with Shea Neary isn’t the best replacement, since it closely replicates a fight earlier in the film. As the credits roll, you hear the wind whistling out of the movie’s sails — or maybe it’s our own disappointment that life doesn’t snap together as neatly as “Rocky.’’ “The Fighter’’ doesn’t go out with a bang but with the less showy sound of a man winning a bigger battle by decision.
Directed by: David O. Russell Written by: Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, Keith Dorrington Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Melissa Leo At: Boston Common, Fenway, suburbs Running time: 114 minutes Rated: R (language throughout, drug content, some violence and sexuality)
By Hal G.P. Colebatch on 12.20.10 @ 6:07AM The American Spectator http://spectator.org
The Glastonbury Thorn Tree before it was hacked apart. Legend says it sprang from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea, the man who helped Jesus of the cross. To the right of the tree, in the distance, is Glastonbury Tor
The other week in Britain the Glastonbury Thorn Tree was destroyed by persons unknown.[1] It was a scrubby, undistinguished-looking tree. Few trees have had such links with high religious mystery.
It is said to be in its origins 2,000 years old and to have direct links with Christ. According to legend it is either sprung from the Crown of Thorns or from seeds planted by Joseph of Arimathea, who, according to the Gospel, gave his tomb to hold Christ's body.
In fact it is historically possibly, if not particularly likely, that Joseph of Arimathea visited England. Archeological evidence shows that England had considerable trade with Europe before being absorbed into the Roman Empire after 43 A.D. and travel in the Roman World was relatively easy.
Although the story of Joseph of Arimathea is encrusted with legends, he is described by St. Mark as an "honorable counselor" in Judea and may have been a wealthy merchant.
Whether or not there is any truth in any of the many legends that have grown about the tree is in a sense unimportant. It has been at the very least a place of contemplation.
The important fact is that the Glastonbury Thorn, like Glastonbury itself (Glastonbury Abbey is one reputed burial-place of King Arthur), has been a focus for Christian beliefs in England since ancient times. It had, over the centuries, become a site of pilgrimage, and a cutting from the tree was sent to the Queen to decorate her Christmas dinner table every year.
Glastonbury is also a seat of the legend of the Holy Grail. Many have remarked on a feeling of uncanniness about it.
The thorn tree is said to have flowered on Christmas Day every year for the last two millennia.
G. K. Chesterton, in "The Ballad of the White Horse," telling of Alfred the Great's defense against the marauding and destroying Viking barbarians, referred to:
The Earls of the Great Army That no men born could tire, Whose flames anear him or aloof Took hold of towers and walls of proof, Fire over Glastonbury roof And out on Ely, fire …
The fires of the Great Army That was made of iron men, Whose lights of sacrilege and scorn Ran around England red as morn, Fire over Glastonbury Thorn-- Fire out on Ely Fen.
The destruction of the tree may have been mindless vandalism or a deliberate attack on a symbol of, and aid to, Christian faith -- and there are plenty of anti-Christian fanatics in Britain today (when both convicts and police, as well as members of the remaining armed forces, are, in the name of political correctness, given time off to observe pagan rituals). Or possibly the target was British history and identity, which has been under attack from many quarters, including official ones, in recent times.
Whoever did it went to a good deal of trouble because the tree was protected by a wire fence. Further, the fact that the destruction took place on December 8 suggests those responsible were well aware of the significance of the tree. This has traditionally been the date on which a sprig was cut from it to present to the Queen.
Whatever the motive behind the destruction was, if the tree is lost then something at the core of Western civilization has been diminished. In "The Ballad of the White Horse," Alfred, looking at the senseless destruction and waste caused by the barbarians, tells them:
Therefore your end is on you, Is on you and your kings, Not for a fire in Ely fen, Not that your gods are nine or ten, But because it is only Christian men Guard even heathen things.
The branches were sawn off the tree and piled nearby but a six-foot stump remains. There is apparently some hope the tree may be saved. Tree-surgeons have dressed the tree's wounds in pine resin and beeswax and it has been wrapped up to protect it from the frost.
Arborist Peter Wood Frearson was quoted as saying: "I am 75 per cent sure the tree will survive."[2]
Religious fanatics have attacked the tree previously, but it has proved very hard to kill. During the English Civil War Oliver Cromwell's Puritan Roundheads felled the tree. However locals salvaged the roots of the original tree, hiding them in secret locations around Glastonbury.
Various shoots of it were raised and tended over several centuries and it was replanted on the hill in 1951.
Many people have been distressed by the destruction of the tree. However in "The Ballad of the White Horse" Chesterton had Alfred give an answer to the barbarians' destruction:
For our God hath blessed creation, Calling it good. I know The spirit with whom you blindly band Hath blessed destruction with his hand; Yet by God's death the stars still stand And the small apples grow.
And, after all, he did win the final battle.
Hal G.P. Colebatch's "Immram," Counterstrike, is being published by Australian publisher Imaginites.
GLASVEGAS are planning to come back bigger, better and stronger than ever, according to frontman James Allan.
But the Scots singer, who caused a scare when he failed to show up at the Mercury Music Awards earlier this year, admits he struggled to deal with the way his band were catapulted to stardom.
After hits such as Daddy's Gone and Geraldine from their self-titled 2008 debut album, the 31-year-old endured a period of soul searching.
He admitted: "I don't know where hell ends and heaven begins. We've been pulled inside out.
"I am quite a resilient person then I fall down.
"I had some kind of ... it was like I was chasing parked cars. Sometimes it is so easy for me to say I am partying. So it's a little more complex.
"It's not just putting my feet up and having a good time.
"Sometime I am trying to make sense of my life and sometimes I feel I'm a stranger to myself.
"Along the way, there are certain things that aren't good for you, that catch up with you.
"I'm not just talking drugs and alcohol or any other cartoon cliches of a rock 'n' roll person. There are other less subtle things that aren't advertised in the rock 'n' roll comic book."
According to James, the madness of being in Glasvegas took its toll on the other members. None more so than drummer Caroline McKay, who quit in March.
James, 31, said: "There are probably lots of reasons why Caroline left. It is quite a tall order being in a band.
"When we started, we practiced and practiced. We didn't just spark up a cigar.
"But Caroline had never played drums before and it grew from my sister saying, 'I'll get you a gig', to something much bigger in such a short period of time.
"Caroline never asked to play gigs at Wembley with U2. In some ways, I feel responsible for that."
James insists his own emotional breakdown took place during the last days of a tour with Kings Of Leon, six months before Caroline quit.
Having been gifted two goldfish on his 30th birthday by his sister and band manager, Denise Allan, he became strangley attached to the newly acquired pets.
"The last two years have been crazy," James recalled. "The tour with Kings Of Leon came to a shuddering halt. We had to cancel the last few days.
"The last thing I remember was being given two black goldfish by Denise. It was my birthday.
"I took the fish to the zoo and I was singing The Carpenters' (They Long To Be) Close To You to the fish 33 floors up in a Chicago hotel.
"I even took the fish into the bar. I remember sitting on the edge of the bed in my bathrobe with the fish in the tank on my lap, flicking through all the TV channels. God knows what happened after that."
Explaining his decision to turn down the Mercury Music Prize last February, he added: "I got invited to the Mercury awards and one of my friends asked me to go and meet them in Central Park, New York. I chose Central Park."
The last time we spoke, James had been set on emigrating to Los Angeles. But he changed his mind when he got there.
"My initial instinct had been that I felt at home in Los Angeles. But I wasn't sure if my instincts had been right," James recalled.
"So we went to different places, including Venice beach, Silverlake and Hollywood. At the end of 12 days, I thought my instincts had been wrong.
"Then Denise suggested Santa Monica. We got there and I had never felt any more at home. I said, 'This is it.' "We took a walk along the beach, saw a house with a To Let sign, called the estate agent and did the deal.
"We took some microphones over, set up some nice amps and came back with about 20 songs."
The next step was to find a producer. The Glasgow rockers chose Flood, best known for his work with U2 and Depeche Mode, and the recordings were completed at his Assault & Battery studios in London.
In the process of recording the as-yet-untitled album, the band also found a replacement drummer for Caroline.
Swede Jonna Löfgren will join the band on their January tour of Scotland which takes in Orkney, Wick, Oban, Dunoon, Troon, Hawick and Dunfermline.
Lead guitarist Rab Allan said: "Jonna is beautiful. She has been working with us for the past couple of weeks. She is a good drummer and stands up when she drums.
James added: "I was speaking to Jonna and saying how funny it was that she was from Sweden.
"I found out that Rab had told the record label that he didn't want a drummer unless it was a girl and she was from Sweden.
"Rab is quite cocky and so clumsy. When she turned up, I just thought what a genius Rab was.
"I am so proud of my cousin for that. It is early days and it's like a new girlfriend. I just want to take things slowly and make sure that she is having fun and she's OK.
"She is pretty and there is electricity dripping off her when she is playing."
Unlike Caroline, Jonna has been drumming from an early age.
"I started playing drums when I was three," she said. "I took the pots and pans from the kitchen and started banging on them.
"I've been taking lessons since I was seven. I am trained and my style is different."
The album, due for release in March, is currently being mixed by Claudius Mittendorfer, who has worked with Muse, Franz Ferdinand and Arctic Monkeys.
"This has been one of the hardest points of my life - sometimes I am trying to work out if I am losing my mind," James confessed.
"I am trying to prove to people I don't have OCD. I really need to believe in myself and believe that I'm not a maniac and the sound will work out in the end.
"Somebody asked what I wanted the album to sound like. I said, a dream. So I'm sure over the next week, it'll be wrapped up. I have to cross my fingers and hope it works out. I'm hoping for the best and that the stars align."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life was more riveting than most of the novels written this year. And Eric Metaxas (pictured at right), in his new monumental biography of the Lutheran pastor who was executed at the Flossenburg concentration camp after his participation in a failed attempt to kill Hitler, tells Bonhoeffer’s story with the fluidity of a novel. Metaxas talks about Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez.
KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: When did you decide to tell Bonhoeffer’s story?
ERIC METAXAS: I first heard the story of Bonhoeffer in 1988, when I was returning to the Christian faith. I was so staggered by it — I’m half German — that I thought I must do something with it someday, but what? At the time I was planning to be a fiction writer, not a biographer. But after my first biography came out in 2007 (Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery), many people asked me who I would write about next. Some people asked me about whom I would next write. The latter were, of course, correct. I realized then that there was only one person besides Wilberforce who captured my imagination sufficiently to draw me into the rococo agony of writing another biography. That man was Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
LOPEZ: Isn’t he an atheist hero?
METAXAS: He’s not an atheist, but yes, he’s been a hero to atheists! It’s absolutely crazy, as if the Tea Party were to hail Stalin and Bernie Sanders as their ideological icons. On one level it’s really hilarious, almost on par with the late Foster Brooks’s brilliant performances on the Dean Martin roasts. Of course nothing could be that hilarious, but Charlie Callas came clos
But seriously, Bonhoeffer, the ultra-devout Christian, has been celebrated by Christopher Hitchens and the heretical Episcopal “Bishop” John Spong. They thought of him as some kind of “post-Christian humanist.” It’s sheer lunacy. In fact, the secular Left has since the 1950s hailed Bonhoeffer as an apostle of the so-called “God is Dead” movement. It’s all based on a number of myths about Bonhoeffer that I hope are once and for all exploded in my book.
LOPEZ: What are the most prevalent myths about him?
METAXAS: One of the big ones is that he was a pacifist, which he wasn’t. But the Sixties anti-war movement appropriated Bonhoeffer for their purposes nonetheless. They seemed to be under the impression that, had he lived, he would have been the third person in bed with John and Yoko. Another myth about him is that he was an advocate of income-redistributionist “social justice.” There’s just no actual evidence for that.
But the main myth about him is that while imprisoned by the Gestapo he drifted away from orthodox Christianity toward some kind of “post-Christian humanism,” that he became some kind of atheist. This one is based off of a single infamous phrase — “religionless Christianity” — that he wrote in a letter to his best friend Eberhard Bethge. It turns out that Bonhoeffer meant precisely the opposite of what the atheists and agnostics said he meant. This is a classic case of the lie traveling around the world four times before the truth gets a chance to put its shoes on. There was no rebuttal to this misinterpretation for so long that it just got out there as a fact and stayed out there — basically until now, over 50 years later.
LOPEZ: How are you so sure you’re so right and they’re so wrong?
METAXAS: Because we now simply have all the information. In the Fifties and Sixties, when these three myths were born, there was little real information about Bonhoeffer. Eberhard Bethge’s great biography didn’t come out in English until 1970, and by then the damage had been done. So people based their ideas about Bonhoeffer on a very limited amount of information. Bonhoeffer was a Rorschach blot onto which the people could project their own fantasies, which they did in abundance.
And since the Bethge book, more and more information has come out to give us some context. When you see the big picture, which I try to give in my book, it’s all rather clear and simple. Now we have almost everything he ever wrote, including journals and letters and sermons, amounting to 16 volumes, and most of that has been translated into English. We also have the correspondence between him and his fiancée, which wasn’t published until 1992. When most of these myths were formed, all people had was Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. So the secular Left was free to create a Bonhoeffer in its own image. He became a combination of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Che Guevara.
Of course for the full story on all this, you’ll have to read my book. But let me just say that the one thing I’m proudest to have corrected is the awful misconception about the phrase “religionless Christianity.” Amazingly, we have the testimony of Eberhard Bethge himself, to whom the letter that contained the infelicitous phrase was addressed. I give Bethge’s full quote in my book. It’s clear that he was deeply disturbed by how that phrase had been misused.
For Bonhoeffer, the term “religion” meant a false substitute for true faith, so “religionless Christianity” meant true Christianity. Bonhoeffer saw that the people in Germany who called themselves Christians were mostly not real Christians. They were just churchgoers, going through the motions. But they weren’t deeply committed disciples of Jesus Christ. So when the evil of the Nazis came, they were utterly unprepared and just floated along with the red-and-black tide. Again, to get the full picture, you’ll have to read the book. But it’s all pretty clear once you have the facts, which we finally do, thank God. Still, it’s awful to think how Bonhoeffer’s legacy has been besmirched for half a century.
LOPEZ: How does a Lutheran pastor wind up as a spy?
METAXAS: As I say, Bonhoeffer was no pacifist. He had been part of the conspiracy against Hitler and the Nazis from the beginning, but not in any official capacity. He mostly provided moral support to the resistance. But when the war started, everything changed. Bonhoeffer knew that he couldn’t pick up a gun to fight in Hitler’s unjust war of aggression. At first he escaped to the U.S., but no sooner did he arrive here than he knew God was calling him back to stand with his people in Germany. That’s when he got involved in the conspiracy in an official capacity, as a spy.
His brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, was a leader in German Military Intelligence, which was actually a center of the conspiracy against Hitler. So Dohnayni hired Bonhoeffer. Of course both of them and many others in the Abwehr were actually working against Hitler and the Nazis. Bonhoeffer was specifically charged with getting word to the Allies — mostly to Churchill’s government — that there were Germans inside Germany trying to bring down Hitler.
Bonhoeffer had no theological problem with deceiving the Nazis. On the contrary, he felt God called him to do it. He knew that when God commands us not to lie, it doesn’t mean that if the Gestapo asks us if we are hiding Jews and we really are hiding Jews, we are obligated to say so. I write about this in my book. Bonhoeffer has a much more nuanced and deeper understanding of these things and he challenges Christians to go beyond mere religious pieties and to really serve God with our whole hearts. In his case, that meant deceiving the Nazis.
LOPEZ: How does a Lutheran pastor wind up in a plot to kill Hitler?
METAXAS: Well, this is an extension of that same idea. God does not say we shouldn’t kill, but that we shouldn’t murder. So we are forced to think about what murder really is. If I am trying to prevent the death and torture of millions of innocent Jews, am I allowed by God to take the life of the tyrant who is overseeing those horrors? Bonhoeffer didn’t have a flippant attitude about any of this, and he even thought that he might be wrong, but he cast himself on God’s mercy. He didn’t know for sure that he was right, but he didn’t lazily and comfortably ignore his responsibility to do what he thought was right just because he had doubts. He knew what was at stake and he knew he had to act.
LOPEZ: Does Bonhoeffer shed light on morality and capital punishment for you? Assassination? Just war? Torture?
METAXAS: Bonhoeffer sheds light on almost everything, so much so that I hope my book will lead people to read Bonhoeffer’s own writings on these subjects. He’s amazing. There’s just no one like him. His book, Ethics, is a masterpiece and is particularly instructive on all these issues. But I do think that his life itself sheds light on everything. That’s really been the missing piece in the great puzzle of Bonhoeffer.
LOPEZ: How was he a prophet?
METAXAS: In several respects. For one thing, he seemed to somehow see the future. But in another, he seems to have been called by God to speak out, specifically to God’s own people, the Church. Bonhoeffer was maybe the single most courageous voice in the German Church in the Thirties. Like all the prophets in the Bible, he took a lonely stand and was not much appreciated during his time. But in retrospect, we can see who was right.
LOPEZ: Why do you say Rome “brought everything together” for him?
METAXAS: Bonhoeffer went to Rome when he was 17 and it marked the first time he had seriously been exposed to Christianity beyond the rather parochial world of German Lutheranism. He attended Mass every day during Holy Week, at St. John’s Lateran and at St. Peter’s. On Palm Sunday, he saw Mass celebrated by men of every race and color and it struck him profoundly. He saw that the Church was something that transcended nationality and race, and this would change everything for him and would lead him to oppose the Nazis, who saw everything through the lens of race. It was a seminal moment in his life.
LOPEZ: What did you learn about politics?
METAXAS: For one thing, Bonhoeffer shows us that Christians have to be careful about allying themselves with a political party. Christian conservatives in Germany during this time were very badly deceived by Hitler. He played them for fools and won. It’s a real cautionary tale. But Bonhoeffer also shows us that Christians cannot avoid politics. Sometimes being a Christian means taking a political stand, period. When there is injustice, it is our job to speak out, to act. We can’t pretend that the Gospel does not extend into politics. We might not like that, but the fact is that it does. It must.
LOPEZ: What did you learn about courage from him?
METAXAS: Courage isn’t something we work up, like an emotion. Courage is simply acting on what we believe. Bonhoeffer simply believed Jesus Christ was Lord and everything followed from that. And he challenges Christians to ask themselves: Do we really believe what we claim to believe? If we do, we will live it; we will act on it fearlessly, knowing that God is with us. If we don’t act on it, we obviously don’t really believe it.
LOPEZ: What did you learn about love?
METAXAS: It’s related to the idea of courage. Love is an action, it’s not a feeling. Bonhoeffer’s love of God was neither a mere intellectual assent to some theological ideas, nor was it merely a warm, fuzzy feeling. His love of God was borne out in his obedience to God, even unto death. If you love God and others, you will act accordingly. You will obey his commandments.
LOPEZ: What did you learn about faith?
METAXAS: Again, this is related to the previous two ideas. Faith without action is simply hypocrisy. Bonhoeffer wrote about that in his book The Cost of Discipleship and he lived it. To say that one believes something must mean that one actually lives it. If one does not actually live out what one claims to believe, one obviously does not believe it. And one is, alas, behaving hypocritically. Bonhoeffer challenges us to really examine what is truth and then to act on that knowledge. That’s what faith is.
LOPEZ: What were you most surprised to learn about him?
METAXAS: That he played drums for Supertramp. Just kidding. I think I was most surprised to realize that, contrary to what I’d heard about him, he was a devout Christian all the way to the end. I had no idea what I would find when I did the research, but to really dig into his life and see who he was, was in some ways very, very surprising. He held a service for his fellow prisoners and preached a sermon 18 hours before going to the gallows. So he was faithful to the very end. Bonhoeffer is the real deal, authentic to the bottom. Anyone who has ever dismissed Christianity probably has not encountered Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
LOPEZ: Why isn’t he a household name? Why should he be?
METAXAS: I think in part it’s because he became a darling of the secular Left and was co-opted by them for many decades, as I’ve said, which alienated him from mainstream America, who probably thought of him as effete and aloof. But now that we can know the real story of who he was, of his extreme courage, and of his profound Christian faith, he seems very different, so I do think that he will become much more well-known. We desperately need to know his story. He is a real hero and we need stories like his to encourage us. So stay tuned.
LOPEZ: Do you enjoy writing? You read like you do.
METAXAS: I mostly enjoy having written. But yes, sometimes I enjoy writing very much! I’m glad that’s evident from this book. I particularly enjoyed writing about Hitler and the Nazis, because I hadn’t known this period of history very well. I had many questions about how this all could have happened, and as I began to see answers I had a real passion to share them. This is such a fascinating period! The Nazis provide such a disturbing and clear picture of what happens to human beings when they push God out of the picture completely. The depravity of who we are apart from God is writ large in them, in a way that is powerfully instructive. At least I think so. It’s a warning we need to heed. And Bonhoeffer’s story gives us the full picture, of what can happen and how we need to behave if and when it does happen. I’m happy to think that my passion on this subject comes across in the writing. How many copies may I put you down for?
— Kathryn Jean Lopez is an editor-at-large of National Review Online.
Monday, December 20, 2010
By Eric Olson, The Associated Press
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette http://www.post-gazette.com
Russ Rose has guided Penn State to four consecutive NCAA volleyball titles - no other school has won more than two in a row. (AP)
KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Penn State's Russ Rose makes it sound so simple, winning those four consecutive national championships in women's volleyball.
"I don't think we're training any different than people," the longtime Nittany Lions' coach said, "but there are some levels of expectations, and the older kids understand it and the younger kids understand it, and that's what we're doing at Penn State."
The Nittany Lions' run to another title, completed Saturday night with a three-set sweep of California, has been overshadowed by Connecticut's domination of women's basketball.
Penn State (32-5) is the only Division I volleyball program to have strung together more than two titles and boasted an NCAA-record 109-match win streak before losing to Stanford in September.
Rose's volleyball program has reached the point where anything less than winning, and winning championships, is a surprise. The Lions are that good, even in a year when they took their lumps early after having to break in a new setter and replace Megan Hodge, one of the greatest players in the history of the college game.
A total of 34 athletes have been part of Penn State's championship teams from 2007-10. Only three of them -- Blair Brown, Arielle Wilson and Alyssa D'Errico -- have been members of all four.
The players come and go. The constant is the 57-year-old Rose, a Chicago native who has been coaching since the mid-1970s, wrote his master's thesis at Nebraska on volleyball statistics and took over at Penn State in 1979.
"Penn State's done it," Rose said. "I've been the coach, but Penn State's really why it's happened. I've had terrific support."
Rose and Hawaii's Dave Shoji are the only (active) Division I volleyball coaches with more than 1,000 career wins, and Rose is the only one with five national championships. His first came in 1999, after his teams had been national runner-up three of the six previous years.
Deja McClendon, Katie Slay and Kristen Carpenter celebrate Slay's championship clinching kill on Saturday night. (AP)
California coach Rich Feller, who has known Rose for three decades and has lost to him four years a row in the postseason, said Rose has an eye for talent and an ability to make a good player great.
"He knows what he wants out of a recruit," Feller said. "He goes out and gets the ones that fit his system. He's probably a little bit like Bobby Knight. If you are willing to do it his way -- probably not quite like that -- but if you're willing to do it his way, you're going to play well."
Wilson can vouch for Rose's ability to bring out a player's best. She finished her career with a Division I-record .468 hitting percentage.
"You usually come in not knowing what you can do, and by the time you leave here, it's like, 'Wow, I didn't know I had that in me,' " Wilson said.
Deja McClendon, the most outstanding player of the final four and the national freshman of the year, is Penn State's next star.
"I was pretty much a blank slate when I came to Penn State, and they just helped me," she said. "All the coaches worked me a lot. Probably the biggest lesson I learned from this team is how to push through, especially when you're having a hard time. We started off really rough this season and the girls never stopped working."
Rose has a reputation for being a straight shooter. He's not one to sugarcoat or tell players what they want to hear about their games. He's big into tough love.
"That's what makes us the best players we can be," D'Errico said. "He's never going to let us settle. It just drives us and motivates us, and it draws in very, very similar players."
Brown, the Big Ten player of the year, fellow All-American Wilson and D'Errico will leave. But Rose will return McClendon, freshman defensive star Katie Slay and sophomore setter Kristin Carpenter.
"Nobody's winning in any sport who doesn't have a great collection of student-athletes," Rose said.
And then there's that great intangible -- the expectation that Penn State will win every time it steps on the court.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — For a season that had been less than perfect, the ending certainly was.
Penn State players celebrate after winning the second set of their final match against California of the in the NCAA Division I Women's Volleyball Championship, Saturday, Dec. 18, 2010, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
With one final swing, freshman Katie Slay hammered the ball into the floor to secure a fourth straight national championship.
The Nittany Lions took down California in straight sets 25-20, 27-25, 25-20 Saturday night in the Sprint Center to bring another trophy back to State College.
“The legacy we leave, we don’t want it to be about numbers,” senior Blair Brown said. “We’re thrilled to have four national championships, but the legacy we want to leave is the program’s history.”
Before the Nittany Lions came along, no school had ever won two straight titles. Instead, Brown, Arielle Wilson and Alyssa D’Errico will graduate with championship rings for each of their seasons after extending their record to 24 consecutive tournament wins.
“No one’s every done it, so I think that sums it up,” said Russ Rose, who became the first coach to earn five NCAA titles. “Especially tonight, we got a big night out of Ari and Blair. ... It was a collective effort and I feel thrilled for these guys. They worked hard, they had a lot of expectations on them early and they developed and got themselves in a great spot and pulled it off.”
Brown was big in the final set, with eight kills on her way to a match-high 18 for the night, while Deja McClendon was the other big star with 16 kills to earn tournament Most Outstanding Player honors.
“The biggest lesson I learned from the seniors is how to push through, especially when we’re having a hard time,” McClendon said. “We started out really rough this season and the girls never stopped working with us.”
Wilson also brought the hammer with 12 kills while hitting .316. In the process she also set the NCAA Division I record for career hitting percentage at .468.
D’Errico collected 13 digs while Brown had 10 and Kristin Carpenter gave out 46 aces. Slay led the blockers with seven.
Once again, Penn State’s freshmen looked like anything but newcomers to the big stage. After playing huge roles in a three-set sweep of Texas in the semifinals on Thursday, McClendon, Slay, Ariel Scott and Ali Longo all had a major impact in Saturday’s win, combining for 24 kills, 17 digs, seven blocks and three aces.
Cal outside hitter Tarah Murrey carried a heavy load, finishing with 16 kills on her 56 swings — nearly half of the team’s 121 total attacks.
“Cal wasn’t going to quit,” Rose said. “They wouldn’t have won the Pac- 10 if they had any quit in them.”
The Bears, who have lost to Penn State in each of the last four postseasons and were playing in their first final, also got 33 assists and 11 digs from AVCA national Player of the Year Carli Lloyd, 16 digs for Robin Rostratter and six blocks for Shannon Hawari.
“I thought the staff did a great job helping devise a game plan,” Rose said. “The kids listened well and played hard and we were in a great position.”
Cal got off to a good start in the third set after the 10-minute intermission, building a 10-6 lead with some high-pressure serving and erratic play for the Nittany Lions. After Rose called a timeout, the teams traded a few points before McClendon, who had an error on the point before, snuck in a kill just inside the back line.
It ignited an 8-0 run that left Penn State firmly in command. Brown had three kills during the stretch, Scott had a kill and Longo collected three service aces.
“I thought we had great contributions off the bench,” Rose said. “I thought Ali Longo, in that third game, really gave us the separation that we needed with those three aces when we started stepping points with her serving.”
Once Penn State got to its first match point at 24-17, the jitters arrived as Cal grabbed the next three points. Rose called a timeout to settle the women, setting up the final series. Brown blasted a hard spike that Rostratter sprawled to dig up, but the pass sailed straight to Slay, who drilled the ball into the floor for her only kill of the night.
“They’re big moments, but I think it’s just, go out there and play,” Slay said of dealing with the pressure. “The seniors on our team did a really great job of keeping us relaxed for the match, so when I knew I was going to be on the floor for those key moments I didn’t really feel nervous.”
Penn State led nearly the entire first set, which was capped by the big swings of McClendon and Brown. They had three and two kills, respectively, on the Nittany Lions’ final five points.
The second set was tougher, with Cal putting on a small 3-0 run for a 14- 10 lead before Penn State rallied. The Nittany Lions then had to fight off two set points, first with a block by Carpenter and Wilson on Cal freshman Adrienne Gehan. After a Lloyd kill, Slay put a roof over Murrey to deny another set point. Brown then put two kills down the line, the second with a tip to a deep corner, to secure the 2-0 lead.
Despite some ups and downs in the season, with so much new blood and a rocky 3-3 start to the Big Ten season, not to mention seeing their record 109-match win streak halted, the Nittany Lions managed to close strong — the same way they have for four straight years.
“It’s a testament to what Coach Rose does with us every day,” said Brown, who missed her graduation ceremony on campus to play in the match. “We’re very well prepared for matches and tonight I felt like we knew what was going on out there.”
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Penn State volleyball team might not have been as dominant from start to finish as the previous three editions, but that didn't matter in the end.
Penn State won its fourth straight title Saturday night, sweeping upstart California in three sets behind the power of Blair Brown and Deja McClendon and a gutsy performance in the key second set.
Blair Brown and Erica Denny (AP)
Brown had 18 kills and 10 digs and McClendon added 16 kills for the Nittany Lions (32-5), who won 19 of their last 20 matches and extended their record number of consecutive national titles.
Penn State won 25-20, 27-25, 25-20. After Katie Slay put down an easy kill to finish the match, she turned her back to the net and welcomed her teammates with open arms as they mobbed her.
"We had some ups and downs throughout the year, so it was a big challenge for us," Penn State coach Russ Rose said. "We never lost hope. We always felt that if we could get ourselves into certain matches that we could win those matches."
The Golden Bears (30-4), who won each of their previous five tournament matches by sweeps, lost 3-0 for the first time since Penn State beat them in last year's regional final. Penn State has beaten Cal four straight years in the postseason, all by sweep.
McClendon, the national freshman of the year, was named the Most Outstanding Player of the final four.
"I'm so pleased about how Deja played this weekend, and Blair had big numbers for the second match and led the match in points," Rose said. "Katie Slay did what we asked of her, blocked some balls. We came out strong in the first game. The second game was going back and forth and we were fortunate enough to win that game, and that's where most of the momentum really came from."
The Nittany Lions, who won their fifth title in program history, had new faces in the lineup and, unlike their unbeaten teams of the past two years, showed signs of vulnerability during the season. Their NCAA-record winning streak ended at 109 in September, and they battled through ups and downs in Big Ten play.
Rose, their 32nd-year coach, said before the tournament that he wouldn't have considered his team to be the favorite. But the Lions, the No. 4 national seed, again were best at the end.
They dominated Texas in Thursday's semifinals, posting a three-set sweep, and Saturday's victory ran their record NCAA tournament win streak to 24 matches in a row. They won 18 of 19 sets in the tournament.
Penn State's six seniors finished their careers 142-7 and having never finished a season without winning the national championship.
"The legacy we leave, it's not about numbers," Brown said. "We're thrilled to have four national championships. But the legacy we want to leave is the program history, working hard in practice, going hard. We didn't want to lose that along the way. The most important thing for us was the tradition of the program."
Penn State put itself on the cusp of the title in a hard-fought second set that was tied 16 times.
Seventh-seeded Cal twice was a point away from winning the set, and tying the match, but couldn't finish.
Ariel Wilson and Kristin Carpenter blocked Adrienne Gehan to tie it 24-all, but Cal setter Carli Lloyd, the national player of the year, answered with a kill to put Cal up 25-24.
Slay and Carpenter blocked Tarah Murrey to tie it 25-25, and consecutive kills by Brown won the set for the Lions.
Kristin Carpenter (5) sets Arielle Wilson (7) during the second set of their final match in the NCAA Division I Women's Volleyball Championship, Saturday, Dec. 18, 2010, in Kansas City, Mo. Penn State won the championship 3-0. (AP)
Penn State took control of the third set after Ariel Scott's kill broke a 12-all tie during an 8-0 run for the Lions.
Cal fought off match point three times before Penn State won it. McClendon looked to have the deciding kill when she hammered a monster drive, but the Bears somehow were able to get the ball back over the net. Slay was there to dunk it and set off the celebration.
Carpenter finished with 46 assists, and Wilson added 12 kills for the Lions.
Murrey had 16 kills, and Lloyd had 33 assists and 11 digs.
"Cal is not hanging its heads," Murrey said. "Every single day we've worked so hard, and we're going to miss all the things we've been through. I know it's going to make us stronger. I know our team is going to be so strong next year and I'm going to do a great job of leading this team next year."
With nine freshman on the roster - national rookie of the year McClendon and blocking star Slay among them - and a sophomore in setter Carpenter, the Nittany Lions are well-positioned to challenge for titles for years to come.
Rose said it's too early to make predictions about whether Penn State can make it five in a row.
"We'll celebrate this great event with these girls," Rose said. "I have a cigar in the future, and I'll worry about what's next when I have to worry about what's next."
C.S. Lewis was talking to his lawyer one day when the attorney told him he had to decide where his earnings would go after his death.
Lewis, who had already written “The Chronicles of Narnia” book series, told the lawyer he didn’t need to worry.
“After I’ve been dead five years, no one will read anything I’ve written,” Lewis said.
Lewis was a gifted writer, but he would have been a lousy estate planner. More than 40 years after his death, the former medieval literature professor has become the Elvis Presley of Christian publishing: His legacy is lucrative and still growing, scholars and book editors say.
The third film adaptation of Lewis’ "Narnia" series, “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” was released in theaters worldwide this month. HarperOne publishers also just released “The C.S. Lewis Bible,” a book pairing 600 selections of Lewis’ writings with matching scriptural passages.
Lewis’ books remain strong sellers. His “Mere Christianity” has been on the BookScan Religion Bestseller’s list a record 513 weeks since the list started in 2001. At least 430,000 copies of Lewis’ books have been sold this year alone, HarperOne officials said.
Lewis’ contemporary appeal may strike some as odd at first because he seemed so firmly planted in the past. A scholar at the University of Oxford in England, he wore shabby tweed jackets, smoked a pipe in the pub and was wounded in the trenches of World War I.
But Lewis’ popularity endures because of several reasons: his distinctive writing style, a tragic love affair and a shrewd choice he made early in his career, Lewis scholars say.
Lyle Dorsett, author of “Seeking the Secret Place: The Spiritual Formation of C. S. Lewis,” says Lewis was fearless.
“He didn’t dodge the tough questions,” says Dorsett, who told the story of Lewis’ conversation with his lawyer in “Seeking the Secret Place.” “People find that refreshing.”
Lewis’ shrewd early career move
Lewis is labeled a Christian writer, but he also wrote essays, children’s fiction, literary criticism and science fiction. He even hosted a popular BBC radio show during World War II.
Some scholars say Lewis’ BBC experience, where he had to make points quickly, honed his writing style. Lewis learned how to systematically explain Christianity in clear and catchy language, devoid of religious jargon.
Philip Yancey, an evangelical author, says Lewis developed this gift because he came to Christianity as an outsider. He was an atheist.
“Coming to faith as an atheist, he had an understanding of and sympathy for people who look at faith wistfully but can’t swallow it,” says Yancey, who writes about Lewis in his latest book, “What Good is God.”
Lewis remains popular because his books don’t seem dated, says Mickey Maudlin, HarperOne's project editor for "The C.S. Lewis Bible."
Lewis didn’t write about the doctrinal squabbles dividing Christian groups of his time, Maudlin says.
“He made a strategic decision early in his career to talk about ‘Mere Christianity,’ ’’ Maudlin says. “He never writes about different modes of baptism, different views of communion or anything that separates one church from another.”
The result: Lewis has a big following today among Evangelicals, Roman Catholics, Mormons - even skeptics, Maudlin says.
“C.S. Lewis wasn’t trapped by tribal thinking,” Maudlin says. “He was able to speak to everybody. He felt called by God to be an explainer of the big issues.”
Sculpted by Ross Wilson, the statue is a life-sized figure of CS Lewis opening a Victorian wardrobe, a gateway to Narnia. The statue was unveiled in November 1998, the centenary of CS Lewis.
How 'good infection’ converted Lewis
Though Lewis looked like the prototype of the mid-20th century English professor, he was actually an Irishman. He was born as Clive Staples Lewis in 1898 in Belfast. Friends and family called him “Jack.”
Scholars cite two events as the source for Lewis’ early atheism. His mother, Florence, died of cancer when Lewis was 9. And his best friend, Paddy, was killed during World War I. Most of the men in Lewis’ platoon didn’t survive the trenches.
“When he saw the carnage of World War I, he concluded that if God exists, He is a cosmic sadist,” says Dorsett, Lewis’ biographer.
Lewis' conversion to Christianity was gradual. It was prompted by what he later called “good infection” - being drawn to faith unawares through the friends he made and books he read.
One of those friends was J.R.R. Tolkien, a fellow English professor at Oxford best known today as the author of “The Lord of the Rings.”
According to some accounts, Tolkien, a Christian intellectual, helped convert Lewis. He showed Lewis that many of the mythological books he loved to read were Christian allegories.
Lewis, though, would later add that there was something more subtle that led to his conversion.
He called it “joy.”
“Joy” was Lewis' term for a stab of longing that unexpectedly welled up in him during moments of contemplation, such as listening to opera or reading an ancient Norse tale.
In his book, “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis wrote that the yearning he experienced during those moments convinced him there was another existence beyond this world.
“For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a love we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.”
Lewis’ painful love affair
Lewis could be poetic, but he could also be brutally honest. He demonstrated this in his most searing book, “A Grief Observed.”
In the book, Lewis writes about falling in love - and losing that love. Lewis was a bachelor who lived with his older brother Warnie for much of his life. Then he met Joy Davidman Gresham, a Jewish American writer who was 15 years his junior.
Dorsett says Lewis was both physically and intellectually smitten with Gresham. He says they used to play Scrabble together, using Hebrew, Greek, Latin and German words to fill in the blanks.
“She had a sharp wit and he loved it,” Dorsett says. “She loved to debate and challenge him. They were always having an intellectual tennis match.”
Lewis’ relationship with Gresham would also challenge his faith.
Lewis married Gresham when he was 58. Soon, however, she developed bone cancer. She experienced what seemed to be a miraculous recovery only to fall ill again. Four years after marrying Lewis, she was dead.
Lewis was devastated. He began to question his belief in God:
“Go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face and a sound of bolting,” he wrote in “A Grief Observed.”
“A Grief Observed” inspired the film, “Shadowlands,” starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger. One of the most moving scenes in the film took place when Lewis’ character embraced Gresham’s grieving son, Douglas, and they both wept unabashedly together.
Douglas Gresham at the premier of the latest 'Narnia' film in London.
Douglas Gresham is now 65 with a bristly white beard and a booming baritone. He still holds tightly to his memories of Lewis.
Gresham says there’s one part of Lewis’ personality that movies and scholars often get wrong. Many people think Lewis was a dour Englishman.
“He was full of fun,” Gresham says. “He was always surrounded by people who liked to laugh and drink pints of beer. You could always tell if Jack was in the house. You would hear roars of laughter.”
He was also humble, Gresham says. Lewis spent hours each day answering letters from his admirers.
“Jack was someone who believed that if someone would write him, then the least he could do was give a reply,” Gresham says. “Sometimes people would just show up at the door, and he would never turn them away.”
What would Lewis think of his fame?
Gresham says commentators also often miss the mark on Lewis' friendship with Tolkien.
Lewis and Tolkien were both members of the Inklings, an informal literary group at Oxford that met to swap stories and ale.
In “Shadowlands,” Joy Gresham is portrayed as a party crasher who alienated a stuffy Tolkien. Some scholars have suggested that Lewis and Tolkien’s friendship suffered because of Lewis’ marriage to Gresham.
“Tolkien was a devout Catholic,” says Dorsett, Lewis’ biographer. "He found her quite abrasive.”
Gresham, though, snorts at the suggestion that his mother damaged Lewis’ friendship with Tolkien.
“It never happened,” he says.
Gresham says that when he went to visit Lewis in the hospital during his last days, he saw Tolkien. Tolkien told him he could live with him if anything happened to Lewis, Gresham says.
“Now you don’t do that for someone you’re not fond of,” Gresham says. “He was Jack’s best friend when he died.”
Lewis died at 64 of kidney failure on November 22, 1963, the same day President Kennedy was assassinated. His death was overshadowed by coverage of Kennedy’s death as well as the death of Aldous Huxley, another famous author who died that day.
Lewis, however, grabs his share of headlines today.
Gresham, a retired physiotherapist, spends much of his time talking about Lewis. He’s a producer for the latest "Narnia" film, answers letters from Lewis' fans and has written a biography called “Lenten Lands: My Childhood with Joy Davidman and C.S. Lewis.”
He says he doesn’t get tired of talking about the man some still call “Jack.”
“It gives me great pleasure to introduce him to people who haven’t met him yet,” he says. “I’m an unashamed C.S. Lewis fan.”
And what about Lewis? What would he think of the movie franchise he’s spawned and the Christian icon he’s become?
“I think he’d be embarrassed,” Gresham says quickly. “The thought that he would be idolized by so many people would embarrass him deeply.”
Double meanings were a focus for Guillermo Del Toro when coming up with the titles for his trilogy. Photo / Supplied
Stephen Jewell talks to director-turned-writer Guillermo Del Toro about his life post Middle-earth and the newly released second part of his spine-chilling vampire trilogy.
Considering the chaos that has recently surrounded The Hobbit, it is easy to conclude that Guillermo Del Toro got out while the going was good. Film studio MGM's continuing financial problems forced the Guadalajara-born 46-year-old to resign as director of the much-anticipated prequel to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings in May. Still, he sounds almost wistful when he speaks about the three years he spent living in Wellington after relocating down under in 2007 to work on the movie's extensive pre-production and to pen the screenplay with Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens.
"New Zealand is an absolute paradise," declares Del Toro, who has returned to his hometown of Los Angeles. "The New Zealand people must be the most delightful people on the planet. Part of the tragedy is that if I were to lose another couple of years, I would have loved to have lost another couple of years in New Zealand. It's easy to do that there because time slips by without you noticing it when you're in New Zealand."
He pays tribute to Auckland in The Fall, the second volume of the contemporary vampire trilogy that he is co-writing with Chuck Hogan. He notes that the City of Sails is one of many cities around the globe to be devastated by undead hordes after a spookily possessed plane arrives at the airport.
"And then there's the certain destruction of New Zealand in the third book," he promises with a laugh. "I try to put everything that is dear to me into the books. Most of the characters are named after very close friends of mine. I killed my wife in the first book after about 40 pages."
In homage to Bram Stoker's seminal 1897 novel Dracula, last year's first instalment, The Strain, opens with an airliner touching down at New York's JFK airport with most of its passengers and crew dead and a mysterious coffin in the hold.
"We've made a huge point to try and root this thing in classic folklore and literature but what we then do with it is very different," says Del Toro. "I wanted the plane to be like the ship in Dracula, coming into port in England. And I named our vampire hunter Abraham Setrakian after Abraham Van Helsing. Dracula was an eminently modern novel when it was first published. It used all the latest cutting-edge technology of the day, like telegraphs, cipher machines and recording machines. It was like a Tom Clancy novel of its time and we want to honour that."
With New York in ruins after the sinister Master and his minions have laid waste to it, The Fall is a much bleaker book than its predecessor.
"From the get-go, I wanted the titles of the books to have a second meaning," says Del Toro. "The Strain was as much about a viral strain as it was about social strain and the strain that is placed on the main character, Ephraim Goodweather, after the dissolution of his marriage, his divorce and the custody battle for his son."
The book takes place during the autumn. "It refers to the fall of mankind and it also hints at where the vampires come from," says Del Toro. "The second book in every trilogy is usually the darkest, because in the traditional three-act structure, the middle act is always about conflict and the moment where the night is the darkest. The third book is probably the hardest to write because it's the book where the characters need to reach some kind of resolution, whether it be good or bad. It's the same with movies and you notice it with any trilogy. The first Godfather was the beginning and Godfather II, which is most people's favourite, is the darkest of them all, while the third one is the most difficult to do because you will always find people that like it and others that dislike it."
With much of the action occurring in downtown Manhattan and the streets around Ground Zero, Del Toro and Hogan draw some striking parallels with September 11. The story also harks back to the atrocities of World War II.
"Setrakian first encounters the Master at the concentration camp at Treblinka," says Del Toro. "We reveal in the third book, which is called The Night Eternal, that the vampires are born out of a great cataclysmic tragedy in a place of great pain and loss. This is because thematically and socially the monsters in The Strain are social monsters. They're creatures that are born out of everything we do wrong and the reason we cannot fight them is because we are incredibly fallible as a social entity. The Fall begins by saying that it took the world 60 days to end and we're basically accountable for that because of our arrogance and pride. That's exactly how I feel: you can apply that to eco-tragedies, viral outbreaks or any kind of disaster. It's a miracle that society functions at all because it is such an imperfect model."
In the prologue, Goodweather, director of the Centres for Disease Control's New York office, refers to the standardised response to a pandemic. "You can apply the Kubler/Ross model of the Five Stages of Grief to any individual or group when they go through anything shocking in their lives," says Del Toro. "It begins with denial, then you get anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It's really quite interesting to realise that as a species or individuals we go through those five stages."
Renowned for his exploration of myths and fairytales in films like Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Del Toro delves into the power of folklore in The Fall. Much of the novel involves the hunt for a mystical text, the Occido Lumen, which details the true nature of the vampires. "I take full responsibility but one of the things that I wanted to do in this book was to create a completely fictional volume that sounded like it could have existed," says Del Toro. "The creation of this forbidden document was essential for the second book because it validates everything. If there is a book about something, we immediately believe that it is real in the same way that people assume that something must be true if it is written in print. I wanted to marry old mythologies with new mythologies and in the third book the crazy origin of the vampires in ancient times relates to this piece of Mesopotamian culture that we introduce in the second book."
A stickler for accuracy, Del Toro does all of his own research. "I don't hire anyone to do it for me," he says. "I know my alchemy and I know my Mesopotamian lore. I just go for it and try and get my facts right. Then at the end just before publication, we run it past an expert. We usually get a lot of slaps on the hand and a few congratulations. Then I argue with the expert and most of the time they win but some of the time I have the satisfaction of proving that our hero is right."
While Del Toro's name looms largest on the cover, he insists that his co-author should receive equal credit. "Chuck is not only a really nice guy but he's also a phenomenal writer," he says of Hogan, whose 2004 fourth novel, Prince of Thieves, was recently turned into the Ben Affleck film The Town. "It's a really great book and people should seek it out."
When The Strain was published, Del Toro was accused of merely providing some spine-chilling ideas while leaving the bulk of the writing to Hogan. However, he has always maintained that the novels are joint efforts. "The way we write and the way we collaborate has just got better and better," he says. "Each of us writes different chapters of the novel and then sends them to the other to look over."
According to Del Toro, The Night Eternal "will definitely be the end of the series." However, he is currently working on a couple of short stories set in the world of The Strain, which will appear in Phantom Limbs, a short story collection that he is writing on his own.
Since The Strain debuted in mid-2009, the vampire genre appears to have become even more popular, with the publication earlier this year of Justin Cronin's much-hyped apocalyptic epic The Passage and the release this month of Let Me In, the American adaptation of cult Swedish film Let the Right One In. With the emphasis placed firmly on bloodshed, Del Toro and Hogan's series is the polar opposite of the anaemic Twilight and other saccharine spin-offs like The Vampire Diaries.
"When we first started writing the books, this fad hadn't happened yet," says Del Toro. "Everything was in its infancy. Twilight wasn't the phenomenon it is now. But the current over-abundance of vampire fiction is mostly based around the romantic, melodramatic take on vampires. What we do goes completely against the grain of that as we use brutality and treat vampires as parasites."
Killer instinct
Film director del Toro unleashes gruesome vampire trilogy
Forget "Hellboy." Forget "Pan's Labyrinth." Forget directing "The Hobbit," which is why Oscar-nominated director Guillermo del Toro finds himself in New Zealand these days.
For the moment, del Toro's all about a plague of blood-feeders taking over New York -- and the novel he's written about them, a man vs. vampire page-turner called "The Strain."
"There was a little book I read as a kid," del Toro says, on the phone from Wellington, New Zealand, by way of explaining his fascination with vampires. "I was very, very young, I must have been 9 or 10. It was a book that compiled 'true fact' vampiric lore ... Not a literary book, but an anthology that harvested 17th Century, 18th Century,19th Century pamphlets and stories about vampirism. Oral traditions, legends from Eastern Europe.
"It was really quite fascinating. I still have it ... I cherish it."
Bits of that little book, eagerly gobbled up by the young del Toro in Guadalajara, Mexico, in the early '70s, have found their way into "The Strain," the first installment in a trilogy by the filmmaker in collaboration with author Chuck Hogan. Published Tuesday -- with the second book ("The Fall") and third ("The Night Eternal") due in 2010 and 2011, respectively -- "The Strain" is a fast-paced mix of gruesome horror and straightforward investigative crime fiction.
The novel begins on the tarmac of JFK International, where an arriving trans-Atlantic flight goes dead before it can taxi to its gate -- and it's soon discovered that just about every passenger on board is dead too.
Enter Ephraim Goodweather, head of New York City's disease-control operations -- he's thinking virus, pandemic. And then enter into a world of verminlike bloodsuckers, living in the sewers, sleeping in the dirt.
Del Toro, who dealt with vampires in "Blade II," with a freakish devil-child-turned-superhero in his two "Hellboys," and with a traumatized girl's immersion into an alternate reality in the Oscar-winning "Pan's Labyrinth," isn't going for that vampires-are-sexy "Twilight" thing.
Rats, not Robert Pattinson.
"Romantic vampires are a perfectly legitimate part of vampire myth, and romanticizing, literally, the nightlife and the thirst and all that is a perfectly legitimate thing," he says. "But it seems like everything is a variation of that theme these days.
"And I really wanted to show it as a disease, and for it to have the inevitability of a disease. To see the vampirism more like a gradual loss of our humanity. ...
"I posit that vampires nest in tragedy, and it's linked to their origin. They grow in tragic times and they essentially nest in places of great pain."
There's a passage in the "true fact" vampire book of del Toro's youth that has stayed with him all these years, and that resurfaces in "The Strain."
"It's about how vampires turn with zealous attention first to their own families -- first they kill the dearest ones, and then they go out into the world," he remembers.
"And rarely have I seen that in vampiric depiction. It's always a stranger attacking strangers. But the idea of a man turning against his own family, or a woman turning against her own family -- I thought that was powerful. That was the moment when I became engaged with vampires."
Del Toro and Hogan started swapping chapters via e-mail, writing and rewriting each other's work -- a "true collaboration" del Toro says.
Hogan, for his part, says that del Toro was equally merciless, editing, cutting, retooling.
"At the same time, he's open to anything I throw out there," the writer reports, on the phone from his home near Boston. "There's an alchemy there."
Hogan adds: "The impressive thing about Guillermo is how specific and exact he is about that world. I'll ask him a question and there's no hesitance. He knows exactly what the vampires look like and what they do."
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Greatest Indian of Them All, Bob Feller, grew up in Van Meter on the Iowa prairie, among legends both real and make-believe.
Winterset, Iowa, was the hometown of John Wayne, although his name was Marion Morrison then. Nile Kinnick, who won the Heisman Trophy at the University of Iowa, was Feller's catcher in American Legion ball and grew up in Adel, Iowa. A sportscaster called "Dutch" Reagan was working in DesMoines.
Feller's life was a tale as tall as any of theirs.
Bob Feller was born, bred and whole grain-fed to be an American icon, and certainly the most beloved athlete to play in Cleveland.
Ted Williams, the consensus choice as baseball's all-time greatest hitter, closely studied pitchers, but he never obsessed about them -- except for one.
Feller captivated Williams. While Williams would focus on someone like Allie Reynolds of the Yankees, a terrific pitcher, for two hours before a game, he started psyching up three days before facing Feller. The difference between Feller's stuff and "good" stuff was always exponential.
Feller had a "field of dreams," in Iowa, just like in the movie. After clearing the land with his own hands, his father planted more wheat than corn on the rest of the farm. Wheat was easier to harvest, which left more time for baseball.
That's a synthesis of fathers, sons, baseball, and amber waves of grain. Feller, who passed away Wednesday at age 92 of complications from leukemia, was born, bred and whole grain-fed to be an American icon.
To protect his amateur eligibility, he signed with the Indians for $1 and a baseball autographed by the members of the team. Feller struck out 17 Philadelphia A's, breaking the American League record, when he was only 17 years old. Then, he went home to finish high school. He would have been a global sensation in today's world of 24/7 news cycles on cable TV and the Internet. It is not overstating it to say that Feller might have been the greatest prodigy in any field since Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
He was self-assured enough to throw a strike, at nearly 79 years of age -- and from the pitching rubber yet -- while making the ceremonial first pitch during the 1997 World Series.
Blunt and outspoken, he was also one of the most admirable men of an admirable generation. In the prime of his career, he gave up 31/2 years to serve in the Navy. He enlisted two days after Pearl Harbor, although he could have gotten a deferment since he was the sole support of his family, and his father was dying. In contrast to how teams schemed to arrange reserve-unit berths for players during the Vietnam war, Feller told told Cy Slapnicka, the scout who had signed him: "I'm going to enlist."
Slapnicka replied: "I think you should." As chief of an anti-aircraft battery on the battleship USS Alabama, Feller steamed 175,000 miles, crossed the Arctic Circle six times and the Equator 24 times, won eight battle stars, and, for his pains, saw a bunch of know-littles exclude him from the list of the 20th century's greatest players because he didn't win 300 games. Why, without World War II, he'd have won close to 400!
Although he played catch on the Alabama every day, Feller could not have known that he would come back to the big leagues as good as ever, not after missing most of four seasons when he was his early to mid-20s. In a way, it figured. .Legends are for all time, literally.
Before the color barrier fell after World War II in big-league baseball, Feller barnstormed in the off-season against the best of his era, including the great Negro League stars. He was an equal-opportunity strikeout artist.
He said only Walter "Big Train" Johnson was faster than he was. That riled Nolan Ryan's fans, but Feller had a strong sense of what it meant to be "Rapid Robert." Still, his self-gratification was slight, compared to his self-sacrifice. "Freedom's not free," he said.
On 9/11, one of the darkest days since Pearl Harbor, a reporter seeking reaction from a player who was a veteran of military service called Feller. It was an easy choice. He was the greatest American I ever knew.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The barn was red, right on top of a dirt road.
Inside the barn was this sign: FELLER 1886.
"This is where I used to play catch with my father," said Bob Feller.
The Hall of Fame pitcher meant the red barn. He meant the farm that had been in his family since 1886. He meant his life in Van Meter, Iowa, which he shared with a few media members in the summer of 2007.
The work ethic learned at a Depression-era farm in Van Meter, Iowa never left Bob Feller, who arrived in the big leagues at age 17 and had 107 victories before enlisting in the Navy in 1941. (Des Moines Register photo)
Feller is gone now, died Wednesday night at the age of 92 from leukemia. But that trip to Van Meter will forever live in my memory.
There was Feller leading us down that gravel road, a straight shot lined by corn and soybeans and long, prairie grasses. This is the Great Plains, where on summer days the endless sky is swimming pool blue. There is a sense that everyone can see you, but no one is looking -- as novelist Dan O'Brien once characterized the area.
"People don't know much about these roads," said Feller. "When it rained, your tires got stuck. You had to get out the horse and wagon from down by the Racoon River..."
Feller road horses, drove tractors and stood behind a plow. It all came back to him on the summer day, a time when he and the country were so much younger -- and the work was back-aching harder.
Many are now saying that Bob Feller is a true American. He was born in the 1918 at the end of World War I. He grew up during the Roaring '20s and the Great Depression. He pitched in the majors at the age of 17. That was in 1936. He served in World War II, then returned to pitch for the Tribe until 1956. He never wore any other professional uniform than that of the Cleveland Indians. He never played a day in the minors, he never wanted to play anywhere but Cleveland.
He was a man who said, "They talk about Cal Ripken's streak. My father went 40 years and never took a vacation."
Those who romanticize life on a farm probably never lived on one. They didn't deal with the wind, rain, droughts, blizzards and insects -- all capable of destroying a corn crop and sending a family into a sinkhole of debt. They didn't see months or work wilt away in a hot summer sun or washed away in a sudden spring flood.
Feller's father was William Andrew, and he knew that life was hard -- and didn't expect it to be otherwise.
"His father died when my father was nine," said Feller.
The elder Feller never played organized baseball. His education ended in the eighth grade. He played crops, milked cows, cleaned chicken coops and horse stalls and mended fences.
"He ran ahead of the crowd," said Feller. "If everyone planted corn, he planted wheat. ... He knew what to plant and when to plant it. We didn't get hurt as bad as some during the depression."
Childhood memories
William Feller caught the fast balls fired by his son at his own risk. When Bob was just eight, he broke three of his father's ribs with a pitch.(Plain Dealer Historical Collection)
Like many men of his generation, Feller had trouble expressing his feelings about his family.
Andrew Feller took his son to nearby Booneville, where his father sold grain that was hauled away to big cities by trains. A young Feller looked at trains from the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific railroads, trains that Feller said went from Gary, Indiana to San Francisco. He knew there was a big country out there, waiting for him.
Feller's father knew there was something special about his son. Baseball. The father could really feel it when he played catch with his son on winters in the barn -- the father's palm hurt from catching his son's fastball. There also was the day that a Feller pitch broke three of his father's ribs.
At that point, young Robert was only 8.
One summer, they went to a part of the farm where they decided to build their own Field of Dreams, long before the movie.
"We cut down about 20 trees and made them into fence posts," Feller recalled, staring at a field in 2007 that had returned to pasture land. But he saw a wire backstop. He saw his father hauling in dirt, making a pitcher's mound and an infield. He could hear the other farmers saying his father was "crazy" to waste the land on a baseball field.
While the Field of Dreams movie made this line famous: "If you build it, they will come," the Fellers built their field and players came. Soon, the Feller family constructed bleachers and charged each person 25 cents to watch the games played by some of the best athletes in the area. A 13-year-old Feller was pitching to 30-year-old men.
His father knew his son's arm would be something beyond the brick factory that Feller showed us. It's now just an overgrown field with old bricks scattered about; a few horses were grazing on that summer day in 2007.
"When we were kids, we used to come here after school to watch them make bricks," Feller recalled. "More than a hundred people worked here. It was a big deal in a jerk town like this."
Start of the glory days
West Des Moines, Iowa resident Ed Brown takes in a display at Van Meter's Bob Feller Museum on Thursday morning. (Charlie Neibergall / Associated Press)
Van Meter is 17 miles from Des Moines, now a bedroom community of 1,200 (still no stoplight) to that major Iowa city. Its population was about 300 when Feller grew up.
Feller's high school remained, sort of, where he pitched for the Bulldogs. He couldn't remember how many no-hitters he pitched. "Six ... a dozen?" he shrugged. "No one kept track."
Feller mentioned there were about 45 boys in the entire school. "Only six could play," he said. "The other three just stood out there like statues."
He paused.
"I pitched five games in eight days when we went to the Iowa State high school finals. My arm was tired and we lost to North High of Des Moines."
As he toured the school, so much had changed. There were more buildings. The diamond where he played was gone, and there were three fields in the area.
This memory came back: "My mother made me wear a white shirt and tie to school each day, instead of these rags and dungarees they do now. ... We'd be better off if kids did that today."
Then he added this, "We started out as Catholic, but the priest told my father not to play baseball with me on Sundays. So we became Methodists."
The house where Feller grew up is gone, replaced by a wonderful brick home built in 1940 -- for the then-outrageous sum of $75,000. It was Feller's gift to his parents. He was 22 and already in his fifth major-league season, coming off a 27-11 record with a 2.61 ERA. He completed 31 of 37 starts.
Feller believed you could never throw too much. He thought it was "idiotic" to put ice on an arm, use heat after pitching. Pitch counts "made no sense." In Feller's Iowa, a man should finish whatever he started -- and that carried over to baseball.
Feller walked around his farm. In 2007, it was owned by the Angel family, where the kids called him "Mr. Feller" and hug him as he arrived. He is like a favorite uncle, welcome any time. The farm was once 300 acres, it's now down to 40 as the rest of the land was sold off to other farmers.
Van Meter is the home of the Bob Feller Museum, a must-see for baseball fans.
Without baseball, Feller said he probably would have ended up working on the farm, then paused.
"My mother was a teacher and a nurse. She wanted me to go to college. I was a C-student, but a good speller. I guess I would have ended up being another damn lawyer."
One of my earliest memories was seeing Bob Feller in a jacket and tie. My father took me to some sort of morning meeting in Cleveland — a small room, in my memory, filled with metal folding chairs placed in uneven rows — and Bob Feller stood behind a lectern (and perhaps in front of a chalkboard; for some reason I see a chalkboard). I do not remember a single thing he said. I only remember him standing in the front of the room, and the awe he inspired, and my father telling me this: “That’s Bob Feller. He threw the ball faster than anyone who ever lived.”
Bob Feller threw three no-hitters and 12 one-hitters during his 18-year career -- all with the Indians. (Walter Iooss Jr./SI)
The fastest pitcher ever. I was maybe five years old then, and the image shattered my imagination. This man in the suit? This man threw the fastest pitch ever? Of course, I believed it. Bob Feller was one of the enduring sports themes of my childhood in Cleveland, a sports childhood that was as fragile and brown as the autumn leaves dusting Cedar Road. My favorite teams were terrible. My favorite athletes were flawed. Cleveland’s past always seemed greener and richer and better than the future. I grew up on the story of Jim Brown pounding into the line, gaining five or six or seven yards, then lying on the mud and snow for what seemed forever (Is he hurt? Can Jim Brown BE hurt?). Then, finally, he would get up and jog back to the huddle, line up and pound back into the line, gaining five or six or seven yards again. I grew up on the story of Jesse Owens, who won gold medals under the outstretched arm of Hitler and then returned to Cleveland where people talked often about seeing him and meeting him and shaking his hand and how it felt like shaking the hand of history. I grew up on the stories of Paul Brown and Otto Graham and Rocky Colavito and Dante Lavelli (who, I was told, never once dropped a pass) and Lou Boudreau (who invented the Ted Williams shift).
Mostly, though, there was the legend of Bobby Feller, Rapid Robert, the Iowa farm boy who at age 17 took the mound at League Park in Cleveland, threw his hardest fastballs, and scared the living hell out of grizzled baseball men who thought they had seen it all.
* * *
The Bob Feller Museum is a fairly small building that looks like a home in Van Meter, Iowa, which is 17 miles west of Des Moines. Bob Feller told me this so often — Van Meter is 17 miles west of Des Moines — that it is burned in my memory. I cannot tell you precisely how far London is from Paris or how far Los Angeles is from San Francisco. But I sure as heck know that Van Meter is 17 miles west of Des Moines.
He told me this often because Bob Feller believed that if you are not willing to promote yourself, well, who will? This was one of the first things I learned about him. The first time I had ever talked to him was close to 30 years ago at a baseball card show. He was signing autographs. The way I remember it, he was signing them for free, though it’s possible that he was charging some absurdly nominal fee for each one, like a dollar or something. He was sitting behind this card table, and when I walked up to get my Bob Feller autograph he decided to give me a little test.
“Who is the greatest pitcher of all time?” he asked me.
I panicked. In retrospect, the answer seems pretty obvious. But I was never good at pop quizzes. And, anyway, I had been raised on the legend of Bob Feller, had been taught all about his childhood on the Iowa farm, his arrival in Cleveland as a phenom, his blazing fastball and shaky control, his titanic battles with Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams, his time at war, his refusal to say what people wanted to hear. I guess I wanted to impress him with my answer.
“Sandy Koufax,” I said in a voice that was still maneuvering unsteadily through puberty.
To his credit, Feller did not seem put off by my answer. He, in fact, treated it with a measure of respect — the answer was wrong, sure, but it was more misguided than anything else. He set me straight. “How many games did Koufax win?“ he asked. “What did he win? Hundred fifty games?” There was a small stack of papers on the table, and Feller reached over and took one, handed it to me. These were stat sheets. They were put together to estimate what Bob Feller’s career numbers would have looked like had he not gone off to war from 1942-45. The estimate was that he would have won 373 games, struck out 3,651 men and thrown five no-hitters. The strikeouts and no-hitters would have been records.
I have thought about that scene a lot over the last three decades. There were times, when I was younger, when I found the scene kind of sad. Here was Bob Feller, one of the greatest pitchers of all time, handing out what his stats might have looked like to a kid and a few other baseball fans who had made the trek to a card show in Charlotte, N.C. But as I have grown older my point of view has changed a bit. That’s because I don’t remember Bob Feller being sad at all. I don’t remember him being sad when I saw him pitching baseballs at minor league games or when he was talking baseball at whatever Optimists or Kiwanis Club meeting where he was speaking or when he was showing people what his baseball statistics might have looked like had he not enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor. He was a great pitcher. He wanted people to remember. And if you don’t promote yourself, well, who will?
Jim Schraner walks past the statue of Cleveland Indians Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller outside Progressive Field in Cleveland Friday, Dec. 17, 2010. Feller, 92, died Wednesday night of leukemia. (AP Photo/Mark Duncan)
* * *
In the Bob Feller Museum, there are numerous surprising artifacts — including the bat that Babe Ruth was leaning on in that famous picture of him on Babe Ruth Day in 1948. The Yankees were playing the Indians that day, and Ruth had taken Feller’s bat.
But what is easily my favorite piece of Bob Feller memorabilia is a baseball that is signed by Ruth and Lou Gehrig. That comes from 1928, when Feller was nine years old. Gehrig and Ruth had come to play an exhibition in Des Moines, which you now know is 17 miles east of where Feller grew up in Van Meter. Feller desperately wanted to go to the exhibition and, more, he desperately wanted one of the autographed baseballs they were selling. The baseballs cost five dollars, which (as Feller would tell you in the grumpy tone he had perfected) was a lot of money in those days.
Here’s what Feller did: In Van Meter, in an effort to rid the town of a gopher problem, authorities were giving 10 cents for every dead gopher turned in. Feller drove his father’s truck to a gopher hole, he and a friend configured some sort of hose to smoke out the gophers, and they trapped exactly 50 of them, just the number Feller needed to buy the baseball.
The story sounds mythical. But Feller’s whole career sounds mythical. And the baseball is there for everyone to see in the Bob Feller Museum.
That same year, 1928, Feller fully understood and embraced his destiny. His own imagination had been exploded when a mail order package arrived with a Rogers Hornsby model glove, a few clean white baseballs and a full baseball uniform down to the socks. These were gifts from his father Bill, who saw his son’s dream clearly and years before his son saw it. Every day, they would play catch on the farm. The father from the movie “The Natural” seems closer to Bill Feller than just about anyone else, though Bob would often compare his childhood to a different movie.
“I had the first ‘Field of Dreams,’” Bob Feller used to say, and he did. Bill Feller one year asked his son if he wanted a baseball field. Well, what son would say no to that? Bill Feller then leveled the ground on his farm, carved out a ballpark, put up a scoreboard and bleachers, and created a team where Bob Feller could play. Supposedly there were people in town who thought Bill Feller had lost his mind (just the way the townsfolk felt about Kevin Costner in the movie). But Bill Feller didn’t seem to care. He knew his son was going to play in the major leagues.
Bob at that point still had dreams of being a hitter, but Bill knew better. He had seen the power in his son’s right arm. He had carved and whittled and sculpted for Bob a clean motion, one that would produce fastballs that nobody on earth could catch up with. Once Bill impressed upon his son that pitching was his ticket, Bob embraced the future. And when Bob Feller was 17, he signed with the Cleveland Indians for a dollar. His first exhibition game against big league players, he struck out eight St. Louis Cardinals in three innings.
When Dizzy Dean was asked to take a picture with Feller — one of those “Present and Future” kind of photographs — Dean was willing but unusually modest. “After what he did today,” he said pointing at Feller, “he’s the guy to say.”
* * *
Bob Feller was always good for a quote. He had three qualities that made him so utterly quotable:
1. He saw the world in distinct and pronounced ways — Bob Feller was not much for shades of gray.
2. He did not mind telling you what he thought.
3. He did not seem to care much if people liked it.
Because of this, Feller was always good for a line about how pitchers were not as tough as they used to be or how much money is in the game or both. When all the hype about Stephen Strasburg built up in 2010, Feller was happy to pierce the absurdity of things (“Call me when he wins his 100th game”) or remind everyone that hype was not invented yesterday (“They broadcast my graduation from high school coast to coast, live on NBC”).
He said some things that followed him around all his life. Well that’s the cost of being quotable. And there was nothing easy about Bob Feller. He was, without question, the most famous ballplayer of his time who regularly barnstormed with black players. He and Satchel Paige were close, they were business partners, they were often great friends. And yet Feller said that Jackie Robinson would not make it as a big league player, and said that there wasn’t a Negro Leagues player who was good enough to play in the big leagues. (His famous and straightforward quote on the subject comes from 1969: “I don’t think baseball owes colored people anything. I don’t think colored people owe baseball anything either”). He railed against steroid users, the mushrooming of relief pitchers, the greed of owners, the greed of players and people who too quickly forgot their history. He offered up enough cranky quotes to leave an impression. He also said that the heroes of war are the ones who do not come back. And that America is the greatest country on earth. And that his father was the best man he had ever known.
Feller’s first start in the big leagues, he struck out 15. That was against the St. Louis Browns, who were managed by Rogers Hornsby — the man whose glove had helped set Feller’s baseball dream soaring. That game was in 1936, the day Jesse Owens returned home after winning those four Gold Medals at the Berlin Olympics. When the game ended, the home plate umpire Red Ormsby, who had been umpiring games since 1923, said simply: “That Feller showed more speed than I’ve ever seen uncorked by any American League pitcher, and that does not except Walter Johnson.”
That would be a common topic of discussion over the next 20 or so years as Bob Feller went through his Hall of Fame career. He did too many remarkable things as a pitcher to stuff into a single story. He led the American League in wins, innings and strikeouts every full year he pitched from 1939 through 1947. He threw an Opening Day no-hitter in Chicago in 1940, sparking what was always Feller’s favorite trivia question: “Name the only game in baseball history where every player on a team went into a regulation nine-inning game and came out of it with the same batting average.” That was Feller’s no-hitter. Each White Sox player came into the game hitting .000 and left hitting the same three digits.
He threw three no-hitters in all, one against the Yankees; he would sometimes call that his greatest day, though Feller had too many great days to stick with just one. That Yankees no-hitter was at Yankee Stadium in 1946 in what was probably Feller’s greatest year. He struck out 348 that season in what he thought was a modern major league record. It turned out that it was not the record — statisticians had miscounted Rube Waddell’s total from 1904 and upon recount it turned out he had 349. In any case, Feller won 26 games, and he threw 371 innings, and he proved that he was as good as ever after returning home from the war.
All the while, people tried to figure out how fast Feller threw. People often seemed more interested in that than his pitching greatness. He had his fastball tested many times. Once he was clocked at 104 mph. Another time, he remembered his fastball measured at 107.9 mph. He had his fastball measured by sensitive army equipment, and he had his fastball race against a motorcycle, and he had his fastball measured by various hard-throwing pitchers …
“If anybody threw that ball harder than Rapid Robert,” Satchel Paige said, “then the human eye couldn’t follow it.”
“Feller isn’t quite as fast as I was,” Walter Johnson said.
The second of those quotes is a bit surprising — Walter Johnson was a modest man who would often say that others (such as Smoky Joe Wood) threw harder than he did. But Johnson was nearing the end of his life when he gave that quote.Feller would later say that Koufax and Nolan Ryan didn’t throw as hard as he did. Maybe that’s age speaking. Maybe when you get older, you sometimes want to protect what you believe is yours.
Bob Feller, I suspect, always believed that he threw the fastest pitch in baseball history. He was generally pretty modest about it — his stock answer was that he belonged “in the discussion” but nobody could ever really know who threw the fastest. Still, I think he always believed that when he was just 17, when he came off the Iowa farm armed with his father’s pitching motion and the certainty of youth, he threw the fastest pitches that anyone has ever thrown.
Why do I think this? Well …
“Yes, I do think I threw a baseball harder than any man ever,” he told me once as we walked on a dirt field in Georgia. “A man should always believe in himself.”
An American flag flies at half mast at Progressive Field behind a statue of Bob Feller Thursday, Dec. 16, 2010, in Cleveland. Feller, one of baseball's greatest pitchers during a Hall of Fame career with the Cleveland Indians, died Wednesday night Dec. 15, 2010. He was 92. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)
* * *
There is a Bob Feller story I am thinking of now, one I’ve never told before. I probably talked with Bob Feller 15 or 20 times in my life. I would call him for a story. I would see him at spring training. I would show up for a Bob Feller event. I don’t know that he ever knew my name. He did a lot of interviews.
I had finished interviewing him this one time — a typically rollicking interview that included stories and gripes and directions to the Bob Feller Museum, just 17 miles west of Des Moines. And for the first and only time, I told him that I was from Cleveland, and that one of my first memories was having seen him speak. He was interested in that. He asked me what I remembered … I told him what I wrote above. I remembered only what my father had said about him.
And then Bob Feller asked me about my father. Direct questions. Did he play catch with me when I was young? I said yes. Did he take me to baseball games? I said yes. Did he believe in me deeply? I said yes.
The tape recorder was off and my notebook was put away and so I cannot write here what he said word for word. But I remember the important part. He told me that I was lucky, that what you need to succeed in this world is a father who believes in you. And he told me that his father believed in him. Funny thing, though, he said Bill Feller never once said, “Bob, someday you’re going to pitch in the big leagues.” No, there were no words. There are some things that cannot be said with words. There was only those sweaty Iowa afternoons and those chilly Iowa evenings, and the sun setting, and a baseball going back and forth. Everything he needed to know about life was in that back-and-forth.
Bill Feller died in 1943, while his son Bob was at war. He had seen his son become the best pitcher in baseball.
Bob Feller died Thursday in Cleveland of acute leukemia. He was 92 years old. He grew up on a farm in Iowa. He played catch with his Dad. He played baseball for the Cleveland Indians when he was young. And when he was no longer young, he traveled the country promoting baseball and himself and America and all the things he believed in deeply. He signed more autographs, probably, than any man in baseball history — so many that an autograph dealer once joked that a baseball without Feller’s autograph was rarer and more valuable than one with. Bob Feller leaves behind family, friends, a detailed baseball record, countless stories and little confusion about how he felt about things. And he threw a baseball harder than any man who ever lived. At least that’s what my father told me.
In this Feb. 28, 1941, file photo, Cleveland Indians star pitcher Bob Feller works out during spring training in Fort Myers, Fla. (AP)
I’ve often imagined that if I could be one 20th-century American athlete it would be Smoky Joe Wood in 1912. But it wouldn’t have been a bad thing to have been Bob Feller in 1940. Or 1946.
Because to be Bob Feller in those years was to be the baseball equivalent of the heavyweight champ. There were many fine pitchers in those days, just as there were many fine boxers not named Joe Louis. But Joe Louis was boxing to the average person. He was the one and only Heavyweight Champeen of Da Woild and he didn’t just defeat opponents; he knocked people out! Likewise, in Bob Feller’s heyday he was pitching to the average baseball fan. He owned the preeminent fastball in the world, and he didn’t just retire batters; he blew them away!
They say Bob Feller died last night at age 92, but I’m going to need some convincing. Bob Feller was ornery, cantankerous, and extraordinarily opinionated, and he was Iowa farm tough. It’s hard for me to believe a little thing like leukemia could get Bob Feller out. I would have sworn it would at least have to be a nuclear weapon landing at his feet. I see him buzzing one under St. Peter’s chin right now.
I feel safe in saying that Bob Feller had a unique career. There were younger players in the annals of baseball, but none more productive. He was no wartime accident of history, such as lefthanded pitcher Joe Nuxhall or shortstop Tommy Brown, who were 15 and 16 years of age, respectively, when the Reds and Dodgers employed them in 1944. No, Bob Feller was elevated to the Cleveland Indians at age 17 in 1936 because he belonged there.
Baseball was in its complete dominance as the unquestioned national pastime in 1936, and the Indians were not a sad-sack team, either. Into this world stepped Bob Feller, a farm boy from Van Meter, Iowa, whose father, Bill, had long ago decided was destined to be a major league pitcher, and who helped make it happen by building a full-sized baseball field, complete with seating, on his property. This baseball Mozart introduced himself to the American public at large by striking out 15 St. Louis Browns in his first major league start two months in advance of his 18th birthday.
Arm trouble hampered him during his first two years, but he made a huge statement in September 1936 when he tied Dizzy Dean’s major league record of 17 strikeouts in a game. He went 17-11 in 1938, and on the last day of the season he separated himself from the pack by fanning 18 Tigers to set a mark that would last until Sandy Koufax came along a couple of generations later.
Those first three years were the appetizer seasons. The main course in Bob Feller’s career began in 1939, when he was 20. He went 24-9 with a 2.85 ERA, the beginning of a dazzling three-year run in which he went 76-33, leading the league in strikeouts each season and walks twice. He led the league in both 1939 and 1940 with 6.9 hits per nine innings. He averaged 320 innings per season.
Note the strikeout/walk juxtaposition. Bob Feller led the league in strikeouts seven times and in walks four times. The base on balls totals didn’t bother his managers because the fear of his high 90s fastball and crackling curveball were all they cared about. He was, as they liked to say in those days, “pleasingly wild.’’
Bob Feller turned 23 on Nov. 3, 1941. He was the best pitcher in baseball. No pitcher since Lefty Grove in 1929-31 had put together a comparable three-year period of dominance (Lefty had a positively sick six-year roll of 152-41 from 1928-33). There was every reason to think he was on his way to becoming the greatest righthanded pitcher in history.
And then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
Bob Feller was no different than millions of his countrymen. Those two hours changed his life forever. He enlisted in the Navy on Dec. 9, 1941, and the next time he appeared in a major league game was Aug. 24, 1945.
On Dec. 8, 1941, a day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Feller volunteered for the Navy. He missed four seasons due to his service in World War II, but earned five campaign ribbons and eight battle stars for his performance in the military. (AP)
Like many other jocks, he played his share of baseball while in uniform, but he also served the better part of three years aboard the U.S.S. Alabama — his request to be assigned to the U.S.S. Iowa was rejected — a vessel he described in the 1950 ghostwritten autobiography “Bob Feller’s Strikeout Story’’ as “a mighty battlewagon of 35 tons.’’ (Incidentally, I must have read that book, coauthored by Cleveland baseball scribe Gordon Cobbledick, 10 times when I was a lad.) He was given charge of a 24-member anti-aircraft gun crew, and he spent the bulk of his time in the Pacific Theatre.
What happened to Bob Feller was hardly unique. Hundreds of big league ballplayers had careers interrupted, altered, or downright ruined by serving in World War II. The least important fallout imaginable was the inability of a Ted Williams to hit more homers or a Bob Feller to strike out more people, and you never heard any one of them complain about serving in WWII.
Would it have been nice for Bob Feller to have won the 95 or so games he would have, absent the war, and thus have won 361 games instead of the 266 he retired with? Would it have been nice to add 900 or even 1,000 more strikeouts to his career total of 2,581?
Well, sure, but in the end, what does it matter? What matters is a legacy, and he nailed it down for good with his 1946 season. The numbers read like baseball science fiction. He was 26-15 with a 2.18 ERA, completing 36 of 42 starts. He had 10 shutouts. He struck out a major league-record 348. He threw a ridiculous 371 1/3 innings. He no-hit the Yankees in Yankee Stadium, the second of his three career no-nos (to go with 12 one-hitters), the first, in 1940, still baseball’s only Opening Day no-hitter.
He pitched until 1956, winning 20 twice more for the only team he would ever play for, getting his only ring in 1948 and having his last good season in 1954, when he went 13-3 on that wonderful 111-43 pennant-winning squad. Losing those wins and those strikeouts to WWII didn’t keep him from being elected to the Hall of Fame with a 93.8 percent vote in 1962.
He was always good and tight with a buck, barnstorming endlessly as a player and then spending much of his later years going around the country giving clinics and taking on gigs in which he would sign autographs and books and pitch to the locals. Count me among the many who can say he batted against the great Bob Feller. He fed me a curve one night in Lynn and I popped it up. He last took the mound at age 90, no kidding.
He was a fixture in the Cleveland press box, answering questions from anyone. He was Old School to the max. The modern players were no good, overpaid and ungrateful, etc., etc., etc. He didn’t suffer the fools all that gladly, but, hey, he was no phony. He was Bob Feller and he was supremely comfortable in his skin.
I’ll tell you what he was. He was real. He was one of the greatest pitchers of all time, he was a red, white, and blue Patriot who had put it on the line in the Big One and he did things his way.
Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from "The Stark Truth: The Most Overrated and Underrated Players in Baseball History" by Jayson Stark. Copyright (c) 2007 by the author. This excerpt has been printed with the permission of Triumph Books.
Bob Feller warming up during the 1940 season, when he went 27-11 as a 21-year-old. (The Cleveland Plain Dealer)
I'm still convinced that Bob Feller is the most underrated righthander who ever lived. But only because he is.
Imagine this kid, at 17 years old, pitching an exhibition game in 1936 against a Cardinals team still rolling out most of the lineup that had won the World Series in 1934 -- and striking out EIGHT of the nine hitters he faced. Imagine this kid, a few weeks later, making the first start of his big-league career, and whiffing 15 St. Louis Browns. Imagine him, three weeks after that, ripping off 17 K's against the Athletics -- the biggest strikeout game in American League history at the time. Now imagine him, just a couple of weeks later, heading back home to Iowa -- so he could ride the SCHOOL BUS with his sister and finish high school. All true. It all happened. In real life. He was the LeBron James of his era -- except with a 12-to-6 curve instead of a learning curve.
How many American teenagers have had the impact on their country that Bob Feller once did? His high school graduation was broadcast live -- to the whole U.S.A. (on NBC radio). His face was on the COVER of Time Magazine before he'd even started 10 big-league games. So it's pretty clear Bob Feller wasn't overrated back then.
But that was then. This is now, all these decades later. And Feller no longer gets his due. When ESPN asked its in-house stable of baseball "experts" (full disclosure: myself included) to rank baseball's greatest living pitchers in May of 2006, Feller finished sixth. But in an accompanying ESPN Sports Nation poll of ESPN.com surfers, Feller didn't even make the top 10. (The only other Sports Nation omission from the experts' top 10: Juan Marichal.) Seven years earlier, in the fan voting for the All-Century team, Feller wasn't even close, finishing 13th (with nearly 740,000 fewer votes than Ryan).
So what's up with that?
We'd better remind you -- assuming you ever knew -- just how enormous a figure Feller was in his time. Over the first 95 seasons in the existence of Major League Baseball, only one pitcher cranked out four straight seasons of 240 strikeouts or more -- Bob Feller. In that same period, he and Walter Johnson were the only pitchers who ever led their league in strikeouts 10 or more seasons apart. Through the first nine seasons of Feller's career, he was the most unhittable pitcher in history (allowing just 7.01 hits per 9 innings). And the real proof was all those games in which nobody -- or just about nobody -- got a hit. This man threw three no-hitters and TWELVE one-hitters. Until Nolan Ryan came along, the only pitcher in the 20th century with even half as many combined no-hitters and one-hitters was Walter Johnson (one no-hitter, seven one-hitters). And Feller was the only 20th-century pitcher with three no-hitters until Sandy Koufax showed up.
Feller also just might be (ahem) The Hardest Thrower Who Ever Lived. We'll never know for sure, of course. In his day, there were no radar guns attached to every scoreboard in America -- possibly because radar had only been invented about 20 minutes earlier. But there's one expert who KNOWS (totally for sure) that Feller was The Hardest Thrower Who Ever Lived. And that would be the ever-modest Feller himself.
I'll never forget, back in the 1997 Indians-Marlins World Series, the radar board in Florida threw a "102 mph" up there after one fateful fastball by Marlins closer Robb Nen. Yep, 102. Never saw one of THOSE before. Before the game the next day, the New York Post's Tom Keegan and I spotted Feller on the field. So we decided to ask for ourselves whether he thought he'd ever thrown a pitch that traveled 102 miles an hour. "Hell," he said, "that was my CHANGE-UP."
Feller then proceeded to tell a story about some gizmo, or military invention, called the Electric Cell Device. This was some kind of chamber -- no longer available at a Wal Mart near you -- that was used back in 1946 to clock his fastball. Feller claimed he whooshed a pitch through the old ECD that was measured at 107.9 miles per hour. Must have been that point-9 that made him so hard to hit.
Virtually from the minute he threw his first pitch, there was so much national fascination with Feller and his heater that folks were constantly looking for ways to figure out whether his 100-mph flameball was reality or myth. So in 1940, Feller was lined up for his most legendary pitcher's duel -- with a speeding motorcycle. Just as the motorcycle varoomed by him at 86 mph, Feller launched his fastball at a target 60 feet, 6 inches away. The baseball won that race so easily, it was calculated that his Harley-ball was traveling at 104 mph. Oh by the way, a small hole had been cut out of the target so a camera could record this fabled pitch -- and Feller launched his fastball right through the target, wiping out the camera. So don't try to buy that historic photo on eBay any time soon.
Now no doubt you Nolan Ryan fans out there are saying: "What's the big whoop?" There are all kinds of stories about Ryan -- who was elected (by me) as the most overrated righthanded starter of all time in this book -- that sound just like these, right? Well, there is one significant difference between Ryan and Feller: Feller consistently found ways to convert his smokeball and all his whiffs into wins.
Feller had seven seasons of at least 15 wins and a .600 winning percentage. Ryan had ONE (and it took him 23 seasons to have it). Put another way, Feller had five seasons in which he won at least 10 more games than he lost. Ryan had NONE. True, Feller's teams were generally better than Ryan's teams. But Feller had a much better winning percentage (.621) than his teammates (.541) -- a margin that's almost three times higher than Ryan's. Feller also had a higher winning percentage than the rest of his staff in nine straight seasons. Ryan's longest streak was six.
Ryan, of course, vastly out-accumulated Feller -- 324 wins to 266, 5,714 strikeouts to 2,581. But who's to say where Feller would have wound up had World War 2 not lopped nearly four full seasons off his career? When he headed off to war at age 23, Bob Feller already had 1,233 strikeouts and 107 wins. No pitcher, before or since, has equaled those figures at that age. So had the four years he missed gone anything like the four seasons that preceded them, we might be talking about a man with more than 360 wins and more than 3,500 strikeouts. And the only pitcher -- ever -- who could say he moved into that neighborhood was Walter Johnson.
Oh, it's true that Feller might have blown out his arm. Or he might have been injured in a collision with a motorcycle than spun out of control in a rematch with his fastball. But let's just assume that hadn't happened. Let's just assume there had never been a World War 2. Where do you think Bob Feller would sit THEN on those greatest-living-pitcher lists, or in the All-Century Team voting results? Wherever it was, you can bet he'd have been high enough that nobody would have to nominate him as The Most Underrated Righthander in History.
Jayson Stark is a senior writer for ESPN.com. His latest book, "Worth The Wait: Tales of the 2008 Phillies," was published by Triumph Books and is available in bookstores and online.
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