Category: Professional Entertainment – People Pay to See or Hear It

No Way But to Fight

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The Book of the Week is “No Way But to Fight, George Foreman and the Business of Boxing” by Andrew R.M. Smith, published in 2020.

Born in 1949 in the Houston, Texas area, Foreman grew up in poverty in a large family. His future looked dim, as his schooling had been scant and his leisure activity had consisted of mugging people on the streets in the middle of the night.

Beginning in the mid-1960’s, president LBJ’s federal job-training program, called the Job Corps, arguably saved Foreman’s life. Various mentors who had acquired diverse life experiences- military veterans, counselors, coaches and teachers– supervised about two thousand troubled teens. Foreman learned about boxing, and won the first tournament he fought, in January 1967.

Foreman’s coach got him excused from the military draft for an undisclosed reason. As is well known, rival boxer Muhammad Ali became religious and resisted the draft. Through the decades, compulsory military service hindered plenty of careers of professional athletes, but they (Ty Cobb, Joe DiMaggio, Joe Louis and Roger Staubach, to name four) didn’t make a public issue of it. The government wanted to punish Ali on behalf of those athletes– regardless of his ethnicity– because it was unfair to them, that Ali could continue to develop his career while their lives were disrupted or put at risk.

Ali obviously turned this into a civil rights issue, but other people considered him to be “cheating” as he was getting an unfair advantage over his competition. It is interesting to see how, through the decades, the conversation has shifted on how some Americans define “cheating” in professional sports.

Performance-enhancing drugs (regulated in international competitions but not terribly strictly in American professional sports) have quietly disappeared from the discussion in the United States, as a million conspirators have pushed gender-issues to the forefront– as the next form of cheating. That just shows how easily human beings can be brainwashed by propaganda!

Anyway, yet another turning point in Foreman’s career, occurred at the dawn of the 1970’s, when he met Dick Sadler. The boxing promoter was a rare bird– did business on a handshake and wasn’t as greedy as his competition.

Boxing through the 1970’s was a complicated business, considering all the stakeholders involved: the fighters themselves, their entourages, event-venues, event-broadcasting outlets, the various professional groups that organized the matches, and the political entities that regulated and taxed the aforementioned.

In the early years of his career as an amateur, Foreman was criticized for choosing to fight easy opponents. In March 1974, he was also labeled unpatriotic for scheduling a match outside the United States (in Venezuela), even after his tax-avoidance and financial-related divorce troubles had ended. The international media stories arising from that fight, smacked of the poor diplomatic relationship between America and Venezuela (for oil-related reasons).

Read the book to learn much more about the boxers of Foreman’s generation who began their careers in the 1960’s, the history of the industry through the 1990’s, and Foreman’s careers.

Cobb

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The Book of the Week is “Cobb, The Life and Times of the Meanest Man Who Ever Played Baseball, A Biography” by Al Stump, published in 1994. Born in December 1886, Cobb grew up in Royston, Georgia.

In 1904, with big-league dreams, Cobb began “paying his dues” in semi-professional baseball. It was employment-at-will. The team paid his travel expenses to away-games at stadiums around southern states via horse-and-buggy in all sorts of weather. The food consisted of bean soup, hog jowls and grits.

Throughout his baseball career, Cobb behaved badly in various ways to get attention and his name known and remembered. He took full advantage of every opportunity to make his own stats look good, although he himself was a social outcast on his own team. He was a man of supernatural ability in both hitting and fielding, and he groomed his legend to the maximum.

Early on, Cobb got himself thrown out of the game for shoving, and spitting on the umpire. He began many a bench-clearing brawl. He repeatedly, anonymously wrote letters of shameless self-promotion to then-famous sports writer Grantland Rice at the Atlanta Journal to get his name in the paper, because his team was too low-level to be covered by the media.

Cobb pioneered various kinds of slides while base-stealing, in ways that would intentionally plant his sharpened metal cleats into basemen’s legs, to injure them, and make them drop the ball. No rule against that dirty trick was imposed during his career. He acted the drama queen– moving the second-base bag closer to third base by kicking it a few inches in mock frustration. Cobb would loudly comment on the game in order to psychologically rattle opposing players.

Americans were shocked when they learned a couple of years after the scheme was executed, that some Chicago White Sox players sought to financially benefit from deliberately losing the 1919 World Series because organized crime figures organized gambling on the games.

In 1921, Cobb simultaneously played for and managed the major league Detroit Tigers. He was a hypocrite, banning his team (except himself) from playing golf, and during spring-training, ordering practice on Sundays. He himself didn’t show up for the latter, as he was visiting the minor league teams he co-owned in Rhode Island and Georgia.

“One corrupt game in every 300? Club owners blanched at that news. They had covered up the rewards systems, allowing it to pervade a game believed by millions of Americans to be on the square. Now, the outcome was shameful disclosure.”

Just as dishonesty waxes and wanes over decades in various areas of American life, it’s time to clean it up again in politics. BUT– only after one big burst of phony outrage spikes media ratings in the next few months, as American society values overpaid noisemakers (talking heads) on the idiot box and sports figures, more than: passionate teachers, sincere public servants, whistleblowers, and muckrakers pushing for social justice.

It is no accident that it’s more expensive than ever to be an idiot these days. Prior to cable TV (beginning in the 1950’s), the price of a TV set included the vast wasteland of entertainment and ads via pure broadcasting. For most Americans, watching TV now entails the purchase of an overpriced monitor and on top of that, payment of a monthly installment forever (!) to receive that vast wasteland (which still includes ads!), for more choices. That installment helps pay the obscene salaries of the said overpaid noisemakers and sports figures. The idiot box and radio pay people to talk. And certain politicians pay people not to talk.

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about Cobb’s family life and career– the man, the myth, the legend.

Cable News Confidential

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Foreword

Hannah Arendt, in an essay on Socrates, wrote that a statesman of high caliber listens— meaning, attempts to understand another speaker’s views. Charles Lindbergh and Joseph P. Kennedy obviously failed to listen to signals from their own countrymen; for, they hitched their star to Hitler. They figured if he won the war, they’d reap the spoils. Strangely, in 1968, even Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was fooled by the “new Nixon” who was actually the same old vicious, wily, power-hungry criminal. It pays to listen to the other side to see historical behavioral patterns that aren’t going to change.

Post

The Book of the Week is “Cable News Confidential, My Misadventures in Corporate Media” by Jeff Cohen published in 2006. The author was born in the 1950’s in the Detroit area. He detailed the now-expected, and standard: hypocrisy, shenanigans, unfairness and imbalance he encountered while appearing as a political commentator at three different cable channels into 2004.

Beginning in 1997, the author appeared as a Left-wing panelist on the TV show, Fox News Watch. Also present were a Right-winger and a Centrist. On Fox, Cohen was allowed to bite the hand that fed him– criticizing the media for its biases, profiteering, smears and lies, etc. during his five-minute appearances on political shows. He believed that the commentary was actually politically balanced for about a year. Thereafter, Right-wingers became the majority.

In the summer of 1999, George W. Bush’s cousin John Ellis wrote in a Boston Globe column that his covering the 2000 presidential-voting results on election night in November would be a conflict of interest. Nevertheless, Ellis was doing exactly that, on Fox News, wrongly announcing, at 2:16am Wednesday, the day after election day, that Bush was the winner in Florida and therefore, Bush had won the presidency. Unsurprisingly, Cohen personally witnessed Ellis’ kind of unethical behavior over and over again.

From January to August 1998, MSNBC covered Bill Clinton’s sex life with Monica Lewinsky. Too bad, Lewinsky missed a valuable opportunity to become a political activist. Instead of allowing the media to shame her, she could have engaged in a public relations coup with the right messaging.

Anyway, in May 2001, Chandra Levy– a female intern– went missing, at which time the major cable “news” stations put her boss Democrat Congressman Gary Condit under the microscope nonstop until September 10, 2001. Other “news” stories the idiot box could have covered instead included:

  • On September 9, 2001, secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld was demanding billions of dollars to fund the creation of weaponry to defend against America’s enemies’ ballistic missiles. But, contrarily, he was saying that the president was opposing the U.S. Senate’s proposal that would shift the funding of said weaponry to fund counter-terror measures.
  • On September 10, 2001, U.S. intelligence agents heard al-Qaeda members utter the phrases, “the match begins now” and “tomorrow is zero hour.” But, contrarily, head of the Justice Department, John Ashcroft opposed the FBI’s request to add tens of millions of dollars to its budget to hire additional personnel to counter terror threats.

Cohen was constantly backing up his arguments with facts, such as when Chris Matthews basically denied that the United States did not send its military into other countries willy-nilly– that Iraq in 2003 was an exception. Cohen countered with occasions after 1945 during which America was an aggressor, that included 21 different territories into the single-digit 2000’s.

Read the book to learn much more about the author’s dismay with his employers’ practices that included much, much more Right-wing commentary than Left, and lack of fact-checking.

Endnote

By agreeing to debate and softening his rhetoric, Donald Trump is showing he has reached the bargaining stage of grief, in the death of his political career. DO NOT BE FOOLED BY HIS “NEW NIXON” ACT.

The Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told

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The Book of the Week is “The Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told, A True Tale of three gamblers, the Kentucky Derby, and the Mexican Cartel” by Mark Paul, published in 2020.

Sidenote: Speaking of gambling, in May 1988, Paul Laxalt, a Republican from Nevada, and in June 1992, H. Ross Perot, an Independent from Texas: jumped into the race for president. The latter exceeded many people’s expectations.

Anyway, the author described the American horse-race gambling environment of the late 1980’s. At that time, off-track betting was putting smaller racetracks out of business, because gamblers could watch the races on which they bet, live– simulcast on video screens at racetracks and casinos; in other words, wherever gambling was legal. They did not need to be physically present at the racetrack.

Through the decades, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) got wise and cracked down on gamblers’ financial crimes such as tax evasion and money laundering. The author described one guy at the racetrack who illegally paid cash to winning bettors who wanted their money immediately, who were willing to pay a twenty percent fee to him rather than to the IRS.

The suspenseful part of the author’s story began when he and his best friend identified a talented filly– a female horse– that was running in major races. Practically all horse races had previously featured colts because on the whole, they were bigger and stronger and so more likely to win races, and were worth more money because they could be hired out to breed more race horses like themselves at a much higher volume than could females.

The author and his friend took what turned out to be a life-threatening risk by driving down from California to a casino in Tijuana, Mexico, to place a bet months in advance, on the said filly that was to run in the Kentucky Derby. He explained that by placing bets on events to take place far into in the future, gamblers get tremendously advantageous odds; for instance, 50 to 1 odds three months in advance, rather than, say, 2 to 1 odds on race day, on a horse to win– because that horse has become the favorite. However, if the horse doesn’t run in the race, regardless of the reason, the gamblers will lose all of the money they bet.

Read the book to learn of the gamblers’ activities before, during and after their fateful bet on their favorite horse in the Kentucky Derby.

naomi osaka (sic)

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The Book of the Week is “naomi osaka (sic), Her Journey to Finding Her Power and Her Voice” by Ben Rothenberg, published in 2024. In this large, wordy volume the author showed how in chasing big money– noise from the incestuous relationships among the industries of: sports, media (which includes social media), entertainment and politics– has reached a screaming crescendo.

As a member of Generation Z, a professional athlete, a biracial individual, and a frequent poster on social media– Naomi was treated as a Very Important Person when she put her two cents in.

Born in October 1997 in Osaka in Japan, Naomi and her family moved to Long Island, New York State when she was three years old. Her Haitian father and Japanese mother were inspired by the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena– professional tennis players– to push their two daughters to also become professional tennis players, beginning when they were pre-schoolers.

As is well known by its fans, singles tennis is a super-suspenseful game because either player has plenty of opportunities to make a comeback. It’s always unpredictable. Upsets happen all the time. Even when “It’s gotten late early” (as Yogi Berra would say) because a match seems to have been won already, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

After a socially isolated childhood in which her parents made extreme sacrifices for her career, Naomi kept professional tennis exciting by making amazing comebacks in tournaments. Although she began to earn obscene amounts of money from tournament winnings and sponsorships, she still expressed her dissatisfaction with various aspects of professional tennis. And the media. And politics. However, Naomi and Serena Williams (a fellow tennis rival) needed to learn how and when to protest to maximize their desired results.

In 2018, Serena Williams argued with a line judge during a match, when she was losing. So she appeared to be a sore loser, regardless of whether she was right or wrong. In 2021 during the French Open, Naomi sent out a message that she would refuse to talk to the media. She was biting the hand that fed her, as her making money required the publicity the media gave her; she was in effect, an employee of the governing tennis organizations because their rules required that she talk to the media. At less emotionally charged times, the governing tennis bodies might have been more receptive to the players’ proposals to change the rules.

BUT, the bottom line is the bottom line. The governing entities subjected to complaints in a push for change, must consider how much money they would lose, or how more money they would make, in effecting the change. It seems celebrities who push a message persistently and have a sufficient number of friends in high places can make a small change.

In Ross Mathews’ case, in around 2012, a certain fast food outlet re-introduced a butternut squash menu item because Mathews and his social media friends bombarded the restaurant with messaging that appeared to show how popular the item was. In 2019, a bit of legislation was finally passed due to Jon Stewart’s long-time rigorous activism to compensate 9/11 first responders who had been harmed.

It is unclear whether other kinds of protests work, because they involve ideology rather than money. Due to the overwhelming propaganda that smears violence in the streets committed by brainwashed youth protesting a war, it is impossible to prove whether the war was stopped sooner by the protesters, or even how much the course of the war was affected by them. Of course in a war, there are hugely complex interactions of profit-seeking entities that throw a wrench in the works.

Another aspect of messaging in most situations, is that the bulk of the most active commenters are people whose jobs are on the line if they don’t weigh in with positive or negative coverage, in a way that is financially or ideologically advantageous for their employers.

At any rate, in late August 2020, in the wake of a number of emotionally charged, law-enforcement actions against people of color, Naomi wielded her tremendous power and influence as an individual professional athlete– jumping on the bandwagon of a protest among team-efforts of other sports– to postpone a very important tennis tournament in order to make a political statement. She was able to postpone it, due to the way professional tennis is governed internationally.

Naomi spurred hours of stressful phone calls among the chief executives of the major tennis organizations– the USTA, WTA, and ATP. But it is hard to prove whether that kind of political activism has actually worked in stemming violence and racial incidents.

Read the book to learn everything you ever wanted to know about Naomi and her adventures in professional tennis.

Winchell

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The Book of the Week is “Winchell, Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity” by Neal Gabler, published in 1994. Two cliches that apply to the likes of Walter Winchell’s role in the evolution of the American entertainment industry include: THERE IS NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN, AND DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN.

Born in April 1897 in East Harlem, Winchell got into Vaudeville as an adolescent. In the 1920’s, there were about six major New York City newspapers, and readers had their favorite columnists. In August 1924, Winchell got his own column, specializing in Broadway gossip in the newly launched Evening Graphic.

Winchell’s career took off. By summer 1929, he was writing for the Hearst-owned paper, the Mirror. The following spring, he launched a radio show, and the following summer, he acted in a movie. He associated with Mobsters, advertising their night clubs while he received protection from them.

Winchell vacillated between suffering from imposter syndrome, and behaving like an alpha male with hubris syndrome. He was a dream dispenser for his readers; they aspired to adopt the lifestyle of “Cafe Society.” In the 1930’s, this set consisted of star-struck social climbers, heirs and heiresses who had done nothing to merit their own celebrity.

Winchell acquired significant power to make or break peoples’ fame with his column, by promoting or smearing them. During the Depression, he honed his showmanship and propaganda techniques, becoming a strong political influencer. Beginning in 1933, he flacked for FDR and smeared Hitler. His rhetoric was anti-Communist, anti-Fascist and anti-isolationist.

Lacking significant formal education, Winchell rode a wave of success based on envy, anger and vengeance, into the 1950’s. The author wrote, “The real grievance was the control he exercised over his social and intellectual superiors and what that control portended for the elites.”

Read the book to learn a lot more about Winchell and others that smacks of other public figures whose rises and falls have been largely similar, in the history of this country.

Will

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The Book of the Week is “Will” by Will Smith with Mark Manson, published in 2021.

Born in September 1968 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Will described in detail what he learned from the people in his life, from the cradle onward. His life has not always involved the wealth and privilege conveyed in his hit song, “Parents Just Don’t Understand.”

Smith related anecdotes in which, like his father– he displayed poor impulse control. Smith’s father could be a mean drunk, while he himself sublimated the traumas he experienced from his family’s dysfunctionality through constant goal-oriented activity.

If Smith took even a short break from his fantasy life, and later, his working life, he would be forced to acknowledge other people’s emotions and possibly even face his own shortcomings. So he laser-focused on competing to be the best at whatever he was doing, in completing a mission.

The lowest point in Smith’s existence came in the early 1990’s, when he was saddled with crushing debt load. To make matters worse, his association with gang members posed a life-threatening situation. Law enforcement had caught up with them. Smith got in trouble when a friend protected him with a knockout punch to his attacker: “But as I sat in that jail cell, facing aggravated assault, criminal conspiracy, simple assault, and reckless endangerment charges for a punch I hadn’t even thrown…” He obviously grew from experience, but didn’t elaborate further.

Smith earned bragging rights for making movies that allegedly made more money than any other Hollywood actor’s movies, including Tom Cruise’s; he spent a longer amount of time than anyone else in promoting his movies in foreign countries, and performing in free concerts for his fans.

Read the book to learn many more details about: Smith’s childhood, the people who guided his careers, his wrongheaded notions that led to love-life failures, and some of his misbehaviors and extraordinary achievements.

Impresario

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“He was clearly in the early stages of what his colleagues referred to as Alzheimer’s, although it was never diagnosed as such. Whatever it was, it didn’t prevent him from functioning effectively much of the time, yet by this point…”

–Around 1969, Ed Sullivan began having “senior moments.”

The Book of the Week is “Impresario, The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan” by James Maguire, published in 2006.

Born in 1901 in East Harlem, Ed Sullivan grew up in the New York metropolitan area. He had a burning desire to become famous and rich. Therefore, beginning in his teen years, he met as many people as he could, and hung out at all the city’s hippest social clubs (celebrity hangouts) that featured alcohol and performances.

In 1948, he finally got to host his own show on TV, after paying his dues failing at radio shows and succeeding at writing a newspaper gossip column. Even so, he got lots of hate mail. His CBS-TV show, Toast of the Town was partially sponsored by Lincoln Mercury (car) dealers in Southern states. They were livid that he refused to stop shaking hands with and hugging black performers. Sullivan was racially egalitarian, but politically, rabidly anti-Communist.

With the 1955-1956 season, the show was renamed The Ed Sullivan Show— as the host had achieved his goals of wealth and stardom; media ratings, really. He began talks with Warner Bros. to make a movie of his life. In preparing the script for that endeavor, unsurprisingly, the clashing of egos resulted in back-and-forth shenanigans; summarized thusly: “When Jack Warner realized that Sullivan had completely thrown out Wallace’s second version… hearing of Sullivan’s plans for still more rewriting… He cancelled the film.” That was eight months after signing the contract.

In summer 1967, the CBS Standards and Practices department was strict about performers’ not saying specific words that smacked of sex or drugs. The band The Doors got away with “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher” in its song “Light My Fire” because the show was live, and the lead singer disobeyed the censors.

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about: how The Ed Sullivan Show was able to stay wildly popular and attain high ratings for decades despite its host’s lack of charisma; (Hint: It changed with the times in featuring guests who entertained audiences of all ages, until advertisers’ demands changed); the people who helped make it so; and the secrets of Sullivan’s success.