"Chasing Jose" -- by the great Pat Jordan.

If you're a sports fan and are still unfamiliar with the work of Pat Jordan, you're missing out.

Jordan is a gifted writer who only happens to write about games, and by doing so, he invests the normally mundane topic with a depth and universal applicability seldom seen in the genre, as in a recent piece (linked below) on baseball star, steroid abuser and supposed screenplay writer Jose Canseco's inability to return a telephone call.

It is wickedly funny, but at the same time, Canseco's nihilistic self-absorption is revealed as far more sad than anything else. Jordan's question is left unstated: Why do we idolize such flawed men?

Chasing Jose

I tried to picture Jose writing his book and his movie. Hunched over, his broad shoulders casting a shadow across his desk like a raptor's wings, his brow furrowed in concentration, his massively muscled body tensed in anticipation of that torrent of words about to flow out of him like urine for one of the many steroid tests he'd been forced to take during his baseball career. I wondered, just how does Jose write? Like Shakespeare, with a quill pen on parchment? Like Dickens, wearing a green eye shade while seated at a clerk's desk? Like Hemingway, standing at a lectern in Finca Vigia, with a stubby pencil and unlined paper? Like Thomas Wolfe, in his Victorian house in Ashville, pounding away on a tall, black, manual Underwood? Or maybe the words flow out of Jose in such a torrent, 10,000 an hour, that he can relieve himself adequately of his thoughts only by tap-tap-tapping on a lightning fast computer, like Stephen King?