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Saturday, June 3, 2006
Chipper not appreciated enough
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Something keeps occurring to me while watching the Braves: We’re taking Chipper Jones for granted. Then again, Billy Williams was Jones. Season after season, the slugger for the Chicago Cubs not named Ernie Banks would become quietly spectacular before he would retreat to the shadows of the Wrigley ivy.
The next thing you knew, Williams was glowing in the sunshine of Cooperstown with a bronzed plaque.
Larry and Lynne Jones nearly wept on Saturday at Turner Field after hearing my Williams analogy. They are the parents of baseball’s most unappreciated player of consistent goodness along the way to ultimate greatness. When I visited their suite and asked them whether they thought their son would reach the Hall of Fame someday, the mother closed her eyes tightly before crossing her fingers.
The father tried to speak, but a lump in his throat kept getting in the way. “It’s hard to believe that my son, from Pierson, Fla., with one caution light and a convenience store, would even be considered for the Hall of Fame,” said Larry Jones, Chipper’s high school coach, talking and blinking. “Just to make it here [pointing toward the field, where Chipper stood at third base for the Braves] for that matter, but to be considered for the Hall of Fame, it’s unbelievable. Unbelievable.”
Actually, it’s believable. You just haven’t been paying attention. Few have, and given his swagger of a gunslinger preparing for high noon in the Old West, Jones couldn’t care less what you think — especially if you don’t have a tomahawk across your chest. We’re talking about a guy who prefers to stay so deep in the shadows that he told his agent six years ago to drop his endorsements to zero. His selflessness caused him to agree to the second-worst move in the history of Georgia sports (topped only by D.J. Shockley’s decision to spend four years as a backup quarterback at UGA) when he spent those 2 1/2 years in left field.
Now, with Jones in the midst of his second full season back at third, and with the assumption he’ll stay healthy for more than a little while, he’ll score 100 times again, and he’ll collect that many RBIs again. He’ll also slam more than 30 home runs while hitting over .300 again.
He’ll also get overlooked again when compared to those others that you always hear about each season.
“My name doesn’t have to be right beside A-Rod, Jeter, Pujols or some of the other elite players in the game, and that’s OK,” said Jones, softly, forming one of his famously crooked smiles at his cubicle. “I know that when I’m done playing, my numbers and my consistency will speak for themselves.
“You know, I’m the No. 3 hitter for one of the best teams in baseball over the last 14 or 15 years. So I know that when I walk out on the field that, in a clutch situation, that pitcher and those players on the other side don’t want to have to get me out. That’s the kind of respect I’ve tried to gain throughout my career, and that’s a compliment enough for me.”
Well, that, and this: David Justice was the Braves’ undisputed leader for the longest stretch, but just before he was traded after the 1996 season, he told me, “This is Chipper’s team now.” Justice even spent his last year with the Braves grooming Jones to become his successor. Even so, it wasn’t until two springs ago that Jones confessed that one of his primary goals now that he was leaving his early 30s was to become the leader that Justice wanted him to be.
Mission accomplished. Rarely does a conversation reach a few minutes with Jeff Francoeur, Adam LaRoche and Ryan Langerhans before you hear a reference to Jones as a constant and effective mentor to the young Braves.
That other stuff doesn’t hurt Jones’ messages around the Braves clubhouse, either. Stuff such as Jones ranking as the only switch-hitter ever to collect more than 300 home runs and hit over. 300. Not even his idol, Mickey Mantle, did that. Jones also entered this season with more game-winning RBIs than anybody in the majors since 1995. Plus, his brilliance wasn’t so hidden not to be named the National League’s MVP in 1999, while finishing in the top 10 four other times.
Said Lynne Jones, an accomplished equestrian who trains and boards horses on their ranch in southwest Texas, “He has such a respect for the game, and I hope that the game has respect for him when he gets finished playing.”
It did for Billy Williams, and Chipper Jones is Billy Williams.
Permalink | Comments (75) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Terence Moore
We play world football, but we love only ours
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Flash back to September 1991. Remember how it was to be consumed by a team and a sport? Remember the nightly dollop of drama as the upstart Braves chased the mighty Dodgers?
If you can recall how that giddy and frazzled month felt to Atlantans, you know how the World Cup feels to the rest of the world.
No, not to us Americans. Nothing in domestic sports has the unifying and catalyzing effect that the World Cup has on every other soccer-playing nation. The closest thing is the Super Bowl, which has become more of a social thing. (Did folks in Peoria care deeply whether a team from Pittsburgh or one from Seattle won in February?) We’re a big nation with a range of diversions, and if we’re going to coalesce around anything, it won’t be a soccer ball.
The rest of the world views soccer rather differently. Asked if the sport was indeed a life-and-death matter, former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly — roughly the Lombardi of English football — famously said: “Listen, it’s more important than that.”
When the World Cup begins Friday in Germany, the world beyond these borders will pay rapt attention. Indeed, the fretting and planning is well under way. Every Englishman (and woman) knows the date of Wayne Rooney’s next CT scan — the gifted Rooney is rehabbing a broken foot and is touch-and-go to be fit — has been moved from June 14 to Wednesday. Inmates in a Brazilian prison have demanded 60 TV sets so they can follow their national team, which is favored to win its sixth Cup. (Talk about a captive audience.)
And here? Americans of Italian descent will gather in selected establishments to track the Italian team, and those of Mexican (or German, or Spanish, or Togoan descent) will do the same for their sides. But will the American masses rally around the U.S. team?
Sadly, no. As Simon Kuper writes in the U.S. preface to “Soccer Against The Enemy,” which was published everywhere else in 1994: “When I wrote this book, I still had to convince my British readers that Americans played soccer; now probably more Americans do so regularly than western Europeans. … The U.S. would still seem to be immune to the social resonances of soccer, given that the game struggles even to make the papers here. … ‘Small’ soccer [the participatory kind] thrives in the U.S. without ‘big’ soccer [the spectator sort]. … The U.S. is the only country where the women’s national soccer team is better-known than the men’s.”
We Americans speak of “football widows” on autumn weekends. There are a million soccer moms in this land, but there’ll be few World Cup widows. ABC and ESPN’s broadcasts won’t come close to matching those of the Winter Olympics. We Americans continue to see soccer at its highest level as aimless and boring and foreign.
The rest of the world stops. We go on, impervious and imperious. Not everything that happens because of a World Cup is celebratory — the Colombian defender Andres Escobar was murdered 10 days after he scored an own goal in 1994; the 1966 Italian team, which had just lost to North Korea, was met at the Genoa airport by a cascade of rotten tomatoes — but the happier notes tend to drown out the discordant.
When France won in 1998, the streets of haughty Paris were filled with celebrants. When South Korea advanced to the semis four years ago, the fervor of the singing “Red Devils,” as its official fan club is known, became the tournament’s lasting memory. Every World Cup is vibrant and passionate, and we jaded Americans could stand a little of that about now. But we’ll ignore the doings in Germany because that’s what Americans do — we hate watching the global brand of football. Once again, the most powerful nation in the world will be the one that cares the least about the World Cup. Once again, it will be our loss, not the world’s.
Permalink | Comments (41) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Other
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