Right on, Dwyane Wade: "We will not just SHUT up and dribble."

If the degree of free speech allowed hereabouts pertains to pay grade, there are quite a few old, rich white guys I'd like to see shut up.

Etan Thomas: Now a Different Kind of Player, by Sopan Deb (NYT)

With the advent of social media, politically active athletes seem more common now than ever before.

Indeed, N.F.L. players kneeling during the national anthem, a movement started by Colin Kaepernick and echoed by others, became a cultural flash point last season after President Trump aimed his ire on the movement, accusing them of disrespecting the troops.

But before Kaepernick, there was Etan Thomas, an N.B.A. forward who played for nine seasons, seven with the Washington Wizards. Thomas built a reputation for himself as a socially conscious activist and poet, including frequently speaking out against the Iraq War and the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. (Of course decades before Thomas, there were activist athletes like Bill Russell, Jim Brown and Muhammad Ali.)

In his latest book, “We Matter: Athletes and Activism,” due out on March 6, Thomas interviewed a number of basketball staples, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Dwyane Wade of the Miami Heat, about the consequences of publicly voicing opinions off the court or playing field. He also talked to figures like Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and Ted Leonsis, who owns three sports franchises, including the Washington Wizards, about their perspectives.

Perhaps most notably, Thomas spoke to family members of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Terence Crutcher and Philando Castile — all victims of shootings that received widespread attention from prominent athletes.

I spoke to Thomas by phone about the recent comments from conservative commentator Laura Ingraham about LeBron James and Kevin Durant, his experience sharing a locker room with Michael Jordan and why he wrote the book. This is an excerpt from that conversation.

In fact, the intersection of athletics and politics is a constant, here and abroad. If you don't see it, perhaps your eyes are shut.

Pep Guardiola’s yellow ribbon ties football up in knots over true enemies, by Barney Ronay (The Guardian)

Thirty years on, the basic premise of Football Against the Enemy illustrates a different world where the game was a point of resistance against control and oppression

This summer it will be 30 years since an event that helped inspire what is still one of the most deliciously moreish football books in English.

Football Against the Enemy is a collection of excellent, energetically compiled essays by Simon Kuper. It can seem a little dated in parts now, postcards from a world still shrouded in pre-internet mist but in a week of apparently irresolvable moral confusion over Pep Guardiola, yellow ribbons and all that, it also feels like a point of illuminating contrast.

At which point the pages rustle, the screen dissolves and we are back at the 1988 European Championship. It is hard to get a sense of the unsettling emotional power of the Netherlands’ defeat of West Germany, the feelings of delighted surprise as a fine team saw off one of the more sharp-elbowed West Germanys.

Ruud Gullit ran the semi-final in Hamburg, striding about with such regal ease you half expected to look down and notice he had spent the last 90 minutes playing in tails, top hat and wing collar. Marco van Basten scored the winner at the end. People in Amsterdam threw bicycles in the air shouting “we’ve got our bikes back”, a reference to the transport-thieving crimes of the Nazi occupation during the second world war.

Kuper, then in his early twenties, notes all this with an amused but also quietly brutal note of fascination. Asked about the morality of holding this generation of West German footballers to account for the sins of the past, one Dutch celebrant notes: “Well, they had the wrong ancestors” ...

ON THE AVENUES: Scoreboard daze of old.

ON THE AVENUES: Scoreboard daze of old.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

On the occasion of Indiana's impending (and long overdue) Sunday Sales Apocalypse, I'm finding myself waxing nostalgic about Scoreboard Liquors.

These reflections were published most recently in 2015 at The Potable Curmudgeon blog; the article actually originated here at NA Confidential back in 2004, and eventually morphed into one of my pre-merger New Albany Tribune columns.

Joe K. mans the counter during the Reagan Years.
He introduced "retail-itis" to the lexicon.

The essay has been updated several times, and lately my memories seem prompted by mental archaeology ... or, the constant excavations of my cluttered cranium as I struggle to recall the details of my 1980s-era travels in Europe, which occurred during the same period of liquor store employment described here.

Another reason is belatedly remembering Ralph, and others who are no longer with us.

---

There used to be a package liquor store called Scoreboard Liquors on West Spring Street in downtown New Albany. I worked there part-time from 1982 through 1988, when the store moved to a different location, a couple of miles uptown. In fact, I continued to work at Scoreboard after the move, but to tell the truth, it was never the same as it had been at the downtown location.

Scoreboard’s downtown building directly faced the federal courthouse, and it was within spitting distance of numerous bankers, lawyers, title abstractors and others performing their hoary time-honored roles amid the daily antics of a county seat in seemingly terminal decline. For a lad from Georgetown, working the package liquor trade in the core of the historic business district was both a kick and an education.

Surely the 1940’s-era structure housing the business was the ugliest in all of downtown. Tacked onto its frumpy backside was the infamous (trust me) Cadillac Lanes bowling alley, run by a fractious family of immigrants from Pittsburgh eligible for reality television long before the genre was invented. In olden times, the cobbled-together retail space out front had hosted an upscale automobile dealership.

Needless to say, those days were long gone, even in 1982.

The barren north side of Cadillac Lanes faced a gravel parking lot separating it from Elm Street, and it became known among liquor store employees, in purely figurative terms, that to be taken “out behind the bowling alley” meant to be stood against the otherwise useless concrete block wall and shot for crimes against humanity.

In retrospect, this reference seems tactless, but it was used quite often, especially in conjunction with obnoxious, drunken customers – particularly those employed by the Coyle auto dealership down the street.

I worked two or three nights a week, Saturday afternoons and the occasional day shift. The job was good, my pay was hard cash, and included as part of the deal were discounts on merchandise (where most of my paycheck naturally landed). My early travels were plotted from behind the store’s worn Formica counter, using paper, pens and actual books.

Nowadays, whenever I spot a package store clerk with eyes glued to an iPhone or laptop, I think back to my entertainment options on slow business nights: A minuscule black and white television set with rabbit ears, from which many a McNeil-Lehrer News Hour was observed. I probably should have been sweeping or stocking, anyway.

Package stores of Scoreboard’s socioeconomic ilk still are a trip, and an ongoing psychological experiment. During my long-ago tenure, insights into the human condition were plentiful, and sometimes fairly hard to stomach.

At least the owners indulged my interest in imported beers (craft beer had not yet come into existence), and they allowed me to purchase and stock options beyond the norm. I was given one walk-in door and a shelf outside it for warm bottles. We did a fairly good trade in imports, given their obscurity and the fact that whenever I wasn’t on site to explain what they were, consumer requests generally were greeted with a sneer by Duck, the manager.

“Huh? I don’t drink that shit.”

My favorite Duck story (his real name was Lloyd) was the time when he was standing behind the counter, peacefully smoking a cigarette, when a complete stranger walked in. The man gestured toward the door to the rear office, and asked, “Do you mind if I go back there and change my pants?”

YouTube obviously didn’t exist back then, but Candid Camera did, and Duck's immediate, unprintable reply to the unknown man’s request would have played well in syndication, with Allen Funt joyfully suffering the brunt of bleeped-out epithets as the would-be wardrobe shifter was physically chased from the premises.

After a few years, business downtown began declining, and the owners had few good options when the lease expired in 1988. Scoreboard’s relocation took place the same summer. I took a week off from my “real” job in Louisville to help move the store to affordable digs at the traffic-challenged corner of East Spring & Beharrell.

Few tears were shed by New Albany’s historic preservationists when the downtown building was hastily demolished to make way for a vacant lot, and a few years later, the construction of Chase Bank, which still stands there today. The store itself changed ownership, and eventually was shuttered.

Three decades later, I think back to the downtown liquor store stalwarts, and sadly, quite a few of them have died, including Jim, the principal owner. More recently, Mamie and the School Marm both passed away. There was Norman and James Not Jim, the Canadian Club lady with all the books, the Upholsterer, and certainly numerous others. Their faces pass through my dreams on occasion, as though it had come time for a final round before closing.

Among the departed was Gin Lady, originally known to us as Mother Gargle, who usually walked to the liquor store from the East Bloc-designed senior citizen housing tower one hundred yards away. As the day progressed and she stopped for the second or often third time, her red-dyed hair would become more and more unmanageable and frizzy. By late afternoon, her mop would be standing straight up, antenna-like, as though she’d jammed a finger into the power grid.

You see, the Seagram’s was never for her. It was for her gentleman friend, who perpetually called on her, but was never seen then or any other time. Neither was Gin Lady after the store moved across town.

Chemical Man was so dubbed for the spectacular lack of nutrients in his bloodstream, and my rigid certainty that the only thing keeping him alive was infusions of formaldehyde, Kessler whiskey and Sterling beer.

Early on, when I hadn’t come to understand the nuances of alcoholism, I asked Chemical Man why he bought three half-pints of Kessler at points throughout the day rather than a liter of whiskey first thing in the morning, which would be cheaper.

He sputtered indignantly that my college education had taught me absolutely nothing, because any fool knows that if you start the day with a big bottle, you’ll just go and drink it before lunch – and then what?

Later, Chemical Man grew too weak to carry the daily case of Sterling to his house, which fronted the side street fifty yards from the store’s front door. I’d carry it over and put it on the porch for him. A year or so later, his obituary was in the newspaper. I’d have bet money that he was in his 70s, but he was only 59 at the time of his death.

Of all the people I met at Scoreboard, Snake was tops. For decades he kept a series of decrepit pick-up trucks alive just long enough to run a regular route through New Albany, collecting cardboard and taking it to Riverside Recycling for a few bucks, which went into the jar and paid for season tickets to Louisville Redbirds games.

Snake’s life wasn’t easy, but it could have been worse, and he generally kept a cheerful demeanor in the face of the curve balls thrown at him by fate. For example, the nickname came from a tattoo on his right arm, the one that ended just below the elbow, the rest having been removed after an accident decades earlier.

He had a recurring, acrimonious relationship with the New Albany Tribune, our local newspaper of record, and often vowed that if his wife died before him, he’d call to cancel the newspaper first -- and only then ring the funeral home.

Snake worked hard as a bartender, and drank just as hard as a customer until swearing off the bottle in the early 1960’s. He never drank a drop again, ever. When the bartending jobs at New Albany’s neighborhood taverns dried up, Snake turned to cardboard full time, and occasionally filled a shift at the liquor store.

In 2001, Snake’s truck died for the final time, and since cardboard wasn’t paying squat, anyway, it was time for him to get out of it. He’d already decided that ballgames were too expensive and the club’s management too arrogant. A couple years later he stopped by my pub to chat, and it was the last time I ever saw him, for he died shortly thereafter on the day before my birthday.

There were others dear to me, like Gene, Tom and Lewie, and I miss them all – the people, the store, and the time – but I miss Snake the most. Rest in peace, my friend. If you could see what’s become of the local newspaper these days, you just might reconsider that vow of sobriety.

We often had too much time on our hands.

---

Recent columns:

February 22: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Money is the ultimate bully (2015).

February 15: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: No more fear, Jeff (2015).

February 8: ON THE AVENUES: Golden oldie classic comfort beers at an old school pub? Sounds like Pints & Union to me.

February 1: ON THE AVENUES: Did you hear the one about Duggins' deep TASER regrets? I laughed until I cried -- and so did the folks in Keokuk.

Two documentaries about Dean Reed (who?) provide long-lost Cold War time capsules.

Particularly in the early days after the East Bloc imploded, visiting westerners would scratch their heads at any local mention of Dean Reed, the American pop star. In turn, East Germans, Czechs and Russians would express befuddlement.

How could Americans not know about Dean Reed?

Three days ago, I found myself unable to remember the name of "that American singer in East Germany back then." Google promptly schooled me, and then YouTube sweetened the offer.

I hadn't planned on spending several hours watching videos and reading remembrances of a fellow whose unlikely (red) star already was fading prior to his untimely death 31 years ago, but as regular readers of NA Confidential know, the history of late-period communism has an enduring grip on me, primarily because I had the good fortune to see a wee bit of it first-hand just before the end.

The boy can't help it. Yes, Roger's on a Commie Jag again.

Truth be told, it's likely that my very first exposure to Dean Reed came in 1986, courtesy of the infamous segment on 60 Minutes. I finally made it to the GDR three years later, but by then Reed was dead, and I'm fairly certain I didn't know about his passing until my fellow East German student summer workers told me. By this time Guns 'N' Roses was a thing, even in Karl Marx Stadt -- not exactly Reed's bailiwick.

Dean Reed was born in Denver. He went to Hollywood in search of careers singing and acting, and improbably, he found them. Armed with a few minor American hit songs, Reed traveled to South America in the early 1960s and discovered he was an idol on a par with Elvis.

Amid the Cold War dualism of the time, Reed also abruptly became "woke" as a socialist. One thing led to another, and after stints in Argentina, Chile and Italy, he surfaced in East Germany. There he embraced the party line, made his home (a very nice one, too), became a superstar in the Warsaw Pact, and later fell victim to internal cognitive dissonance and external geopolitical shifts.

American Rebel, the older of these two documentaries (1986) doesn't purport to be a critical examination of Reed's various careers on the other side of the wall. However, it's entertaining, and about as much a period piece as can be imagined from a time that still feels all too immediate to me.

We really talked about those things all the time, didn't we? It might as well have been 300 years ago, not 30. 

The Red Elvis gets slightly closer to the central questions of Reed's life (and death), as summarized in this passage from a separate essay.

Over time Reed recognized the contradictions between his idealistic world views and the reality of life in East Germany, but he didn’t know what to do about them. As the years passed, he also saw his fame and star power fade. A new generation barely knew who he was. People who knew him well have said he longed to return to the US, but his socialistic, Marxist views and actions would have made it impossible for him to make a living in the land of his birth – especially after his 1986 appearance on 60 Minutes. Only six weeks after that TV interview his body was pulled out of Lake Zeuthen (Zeuthener See) near his home at the southern tip of East Berlin.

There has been much speculation about Dean Reed’s death. Was it a suicide (as most of his East German friends and family think), a strange accident, or was it something more sinister? We may never know, but he was known to be very depressed and suicidal in the weeks before his death. Dean Reed was caught between two worlds, between two countries, in a trap of his own making.

More from a fan site which looks to have been functional since the Internet's dawning: Dean-Reed-Archiv-Berlin.

Finally, from the guy who literally wrote the book on Dean Reed: The life and mysterious death of a rock ‘n’ roll radical, by Chuck Laszewski (Twin Cities Daily Planet).

As usual, I'm deeply moved by material that will seem almost comical to many, but who else except Dean Reed could connect Phil Everly and Egon Krenz?

What a long, strange trip it's been.

A new book: Gorbachev: His Life and Times, by William Taubman.

Just before the deluge.

I'll never cease to be fascinated by this era.

My European travels during the decade of the 1980s began in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev had been in power only a few months, and ended in 1989, with the Berlin Wall reduced to rubble and the Soviet satellite nations falling like dominoes. Two years later, so ended the USSR.

From an older book ...

Ronald Reagan was widely eulogized for having won the cold war, liberated Eastern Europe and pulled the plug on the Soviet Union. Margaret Thatcher, Joe Lieberman, John McCain, Charles Krauthammer and other notables offered variations of The Economist‘s cover headline: “The Man Who Beat Communism.”

Actually, Jack F. Matlock Jr. writes in Reagan and Gorbachev, it was “not so simple.” He should know. A veteran foreign service officer and respected expert on the Soviet Union, he reached the pinnacle of his career under Reagan, serving first as the White House’s senior coordinator of policy toward the Soviet Union, then as ambassador to Moscow. In both the title of his memoir and the story it tells, he gives co-star billing to Mikhail Gorbachev.

Reagan himself went even farther. Asked at a press conference in Moscow in 1988, his last year in office, about the role he played in the great drama of the late 20th century, he described himself essentially as a supporting actor. “Mr. Gorbachev,” he said, “deserves most of the credit, as the leader of this country.”

... to this new one, which I'll be purchasing. Is the bookseller reading?

How Mikhail Gorbachev ended the cold war

The peasant boy turned Communist Party boss who liberated his people from 70 years of lies and buried the Soviet Union

... Ever since the end of the Soviet Union, the question of “why” has lingered in Western, Russian and Chinese minds. Why did a man at the head of a superpower undermine his own authority? Did he simply fail to understand the consequences of his actions, or did he act out of courage and vision? How did Mr Gorbachev, the peasant boy turned Communist Party boss in a fedora, become the statesman who liberated his people from 70 years of lies and fear, end the cold war and bury the Soviet Union? Was he a product of the Soviet system, as he claimed, or its “genetic error”, as Andrei Grachev, an earlier biographer described him? What made Gorbachev Gorbachev?