The Magic of Maddux
Here’s something I didn’t know about growing old… you spend a lot of time with your longtime friends talking about growing old. Maybe it’s different for you, but in my life, it seems like every other conversation with friends is about some new thing we can no longer do or some child we watched grow up get married* or some fascinating and inventive way we have found to hurt ourselves.***
*I might have mentioned this, but a couple of weeks ago we went to Kansas for the wedding of a cousin, McKenna, who was the 3-year-old flower girl at our wedding. The time-thing that was mind-blowing to us was not that our flower girl was getting married, but that the couple had been dating for TEN YEARS before they got married, long enough that the word “Finally” was on their invitation. It was a lovely wedding, and they had a cute little guy as their ring warmer**, and someday he, too, might get married, and the world keeps on spinning.
**I’ve never been to a wedding with a ring-warming ceremony in it—I’d actually never heard of ring-warming before—but I really love the idea. The idea, as I understand it, is that you hand the wedding band out to family members before the exchange so that each can hold it for a few seconds and make a wish/blessing. Pretty cool, right?
***Last week, I helped build the bed frame for our older daughter’s new apartment. And by “helped,” I do have to say—I didn’t do much at all. I got an important call in the middle (more on that in the coming weeks!) and Elizabeth’s boyfriend handled all the heavy work. I barely did anything at all. I was sore for three days afterward.
One of the few great things about getting old, though, is that people seem to think you know something. Every few weeks, like clockwork, I get a call to appear in a sports documentary. I’ve been in so many of them now, I honestly have lost track. It’s crazy that I not only have an IMDb page, there are like 15 credits on there. And those don’t include the Fergie Jenkins documentary I was in, the Buck O’Neil documentary I was in, the second Buck O’Neil documentary I was in, the third Buck O’Neil documentary I was in, the George Brett documentary I was in, the Marty Schottenheimer documentary I was in, the Bobby Richardson documentary coming out, the Dick Perez documentary I wrote that will be out this summer, the Baseball Hall of Fame movie, “Generations of the Game,” that I wrote, and probably a half dozen more. Like I say, people keep asking, time after time, which leads me to one of two conclusions:
I’m really good on camera.
I’m old.
Obviously, the answer is No. 2.
On Tuesday, I did a long interview for a Greg Maddux documentary that’s coming out on MLB Network this August. I have to say I’m so excited to see this one, as many of you know that Maddux is my all-time favorite pitcher. I got to talk a lot about that in the interview; I’m not sure how much of what I said will be left on the cutting room floor—probably 99.8% of it—but I did write down a few things about Maddux before I went to the interview. This won’t be ordered all that well; I’m basically just offering you some of my raw notes, but hopefully, you’ll find it interesting.