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Thursday, August 10, 2006
Gus Zernial lives
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
How long it may have been stretched across the door of my office, I can’t say. Just another one of those stickers meant for the bumper of an automobile. I do know that Dick Williams gave it to me, and having nothing else to do with it, I stuck it on the door and it has been there ever since.
“GUS ZERNIAL LIVES,” it reads.
Rarely some person curious enough will look in and ask, “Who is Gus Zernial? And why?” There just aren’t that many passing by who have lived long enough to know who Gus Zernial was, or is. For he does indeed still live. It was confirmed the other day when a copy of John Kuenster’s Baseball Digest reached my desk.
Gus Zernial, the story said, lives in Fresno, and that he has lived in California most of the years since his playing career ended. He is 83 years old now, but I see him only as the perfectly sculptured athlete playing the outfield in the American League. He was good, probably the best of all the big league players whose name start with Z. Maybe the next best was Todd Zeile, who in 16 seasons hit 244 home runs, seven more than Zernial did in 11 seasons.
Zernial was an outfielder, and when the all-time all-star team of Athletics was selected a few years ago, he was one of the chosen outfielders, with Al Simmons and Sam Chapman. In 1951, he led the American League in home runs and runs batted in. By that time he was famously known as “Ozark Ike,” so called because he reminded a broadcaster in Hollywood, where he was having the season that launched him to the White Sox, of a bucolic comic strip athlete named “Ozark Ike.”
Curiously, in the midst of his third season with the White Sox, that 1951 season, he was traded to the Athletics, still in Philadelphia at the time, he hit his power stride. He hit 42 home runs in 1953 and finished of a string of over 100 RBI seasons in a row (1951-53), when those seasons played out to only 154 games. And for a power hitter, he struck out remarkably few times.
Now, there is a connection between Zernial and Atlanta. He was signed by the old Atlanta Crackers of the Southern Association, out of Beaumont, Texas, by a scout named Claude Dietrich. He spent his first season, 1942, on their farm club at Waycross, the next three in the military, and his first season back in uniform in the Carolina League, at Burlington, and there hit 41 home runs and drove in 111. The Crackers recalled him, but before they could ever get their hands on him, Cleveland drafted him, and after five seasons of owning him, the Crackers never had him in their uniform.
Oh, another thing relating to Atlanta. Luke Appling was with the White Sox when Gus checked in, 42 years old and playing out his Hall of Fame career, and it was Luke, Gus has said, who “took me under his wing,” and smoothed his swing, converted his power into finesse.
Nevertheless, Gus was on his way and it didn’t hurt his popularity that he bore the muscular nickname of that comic strip character. He finished off his 11-year career with the Tigers in Detroit, followed by a curtain call in the Pacific Coast League, where he settled down.
For years he was an official of the Fresno Class AAA farm club of the Giants, instrumental in getting a new stadium built, also broadcasting Fresno games and Fresno State sports. He may relate to another age, but he is not one of the fogies who bellow against the designated hitter rule. “I like it,” he tells the magazine writer, I think it’s good for baseball. I also believe in having a designated runner.”
Well, ol’ Gus may have flown a little off my radar screen, but that diminishes him none in the eyes of this old dude. “Gus Zernial Lives” and he has his place on my door, and ever shall until life dictates otherwise. Oh, and what’s he doing now? Writing a book. Doesn’t everybody?
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Abraham planning to make a difference
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Flowery Branch — John Abraham plays right end. On defense, that’s the glamour position. A quarterback has the best chance to make a big offensive play because he touches the ball every down. A right end has the best chance to make a big defensive play because he can touch the quarterback — assuming he’s right-handed, which most are — from his blind side.
Most defenders will pay lip service to the importance of stopping the run. Abraham skips over that part, saying, “If you can’t stop the run, there’s no reason for anyone ever to pass on you.” But let’s assume this season’s Falcons will stop the run better than last season’s. That done, what commodity propels a defense to the summit?
Big plays.
John Abraham makes big plays.
In six pro seasons, he has 53-1/2 sacks and has induced 19 fumbles. (See what happens when you hit a quarterback when he’s not looking?) Abraham’s arrival in Flowery Branch has passed largely without notice, but when the Falcons start playing — that comes tonight against New England — he’ll become rather more apparent.
About those fumbles: “I learned as I got older. When you’re young, you care more about getting sacks. But I have more opportunity [to force fumbles] than anyone because I’m the right end. Getting the sack is fine, but forcing a fumble is bigger.”
In a difference-making position, Abraham plans to make a difference. Three times a Pro Bowler, Abraham arrives at something approaching a career apex. He’s 28. He wanted to play here partly because it’s close to home — he’s from Timmonsville, S.C. — but mostly because the Pro Bowler wants to sniff a championship.
In Abraham’s six seasons in New York, the Jets won one AFC East title and a total of two playoff games. (They were 4-12 last year, a time in which Abraham said he “learned to focus on my football, not wins and losses.”) In his last season at South Carolina, the Gamecocks were 0-11. When you’re as good a player as he is, you don’t want to be known as the All-Pro who never found the right team.
His new employer, Abraham said, “has everything it needs already. This defense can be the top defense in the NFL — top five, easy.”
Certainly this defense has the makings of a front four. Rod Coleman just played in the Pro Bowl. Patrick Kerney, the left end, has 48-1/2 sacks over the last five seasons, and already Abraham senses a wager a-brewing. “[Kerney is] such a competitor. He’s going to be mad if I have more sacks than he does, and I’m going to be mad if he has seven and I have five and I have to get my grind on. I had something like that [a side bet] with Shaun [Ellis, the Jets’ other defensive end] last year.”
For the record, Abraham won by eight sacks. That was about the only positive memory he takes from his final year in New York, although playing for the Jets scarcely qualifies. Abraham lived on Long Island to be close to the Jets’ practice facility, and when it came time to play a “home” date in New Jersey, logistics made it seem “like a road game. You had to get on the bus and get through the traffic. It’d take three hours to get back. It’ll be a lot easier here — there’s less traffic.”
That’s correct. Abraham stands as the first transplanted Atlantan not to feel nonplussed by the local road conditions. Indeed, nothing about his relocation has given him cause to reconsider. When he talks to his friends around the league, “Nobody’s said I made a bad choice [coming here]. I’m going to be close to home. Every game’s going to be a home game.”
And the team? The difference-maker has this immediate goal: “Nothing less than the Super Bowl. It may be a little too early to say that, but that’s how my heart feels, and I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t believe it. We’ve got the potential — which is the worst word in the book, by the way — and if we go 12-4, 13-3, against our schedule, there’s no way we can’t win the championship.”
A Falcons player for not quite five months, John Abraham believes he has found the right team. The Falcons seem certain they’ve found a right end.
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Practice is overrated
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
I went to Georgia’s football practice Wednesday; maybe 10 minutes of it. At Georgia, writers are only allowed to watch the first 20 minutes, most of which consists of stretching. And you know what I say to coaches who close practice to writers?
Thank you.
That’s not what I’m supposed to say, I know. We’re supposed to clamor for access, access, access. (Speaking of which, sort of, the writer Larry Sloman — who was covering the Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1975 — complained to Bob Dylan, whose idea the Rolling Thunder Revue was, that he needed access. Deadpan, Bobby D. said, “You need Ex-Lax? What have you been eating?”)
But here’s a confession from this particular writer: I HATE watching practice. I hate batting practice. I hate basketball practice. I hate football practice most of all.
I hate it because you stand there and watch and you learn almost nothing — at least I learn almost nothing — from watching. You see guys run around and think, “Boy, they look pretty good.” But until you see them running against somebody who plays for a different team, you don’t actually know if they’re any good or not.
My first season as the beat writer for The Lexington Leader — it was 1980 — I went to the first couple weeks of Kentucky’s football practice and became convinced that the Wildcats, who’d been picked to finish ninth or so in the SEC, were so talented that they were going to win a slew of games and show those know-nothing prognosticators the error of their ways. Kentucky finished, you should know, 3-8 and beat only Vanderbilt in SEC play.
Practice is a bigger deal if you’re a beat writer and need to know who’s hurt or who’s been demoted, but that’s not my job anymore. My job is to give pithy little opinions, and it’s my pithy little opinion that watching practice is the most overrated thing in sportswriting. I do it as little as possible, and then only grudgingly.
I know what you’re thinking: That the average fan would love to trade places and stand on the sidelines in the hot sun at Flowery Branch or in Athens or wherever it is that football is being practiced. And the average fan probably would — for three, four, maybe five sessions. But after that the novelty would wear off and you know what the average fan would be?
Exactly the same as jaded ol’ me — hot and bored.
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