TITLES X - Y - Z

The Yogi Book
I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said
Yogi Berra
Humor
Non-Fiction
Rating 4
Workman Publishing
1998



Yogi Berra, beloved catcher of the New York Yankees on their world championship teams from the late 1940s to the 1960s, plus former manager of both the Yankees and New York Mets, is perhaps best known for his inadvertent witticisms. He is famous for the sayings, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over” and “90% of the game is half mental” as well as myriad other miscues that have been attributed to him that he never actually said. This book is more of a joke-and-picture book, instead of a regular book, but it is still entertaining in its own way. The pictures, and text that goes along with the pictures, are interesting, amusing and nostalgic. This is a small, fun and light-hearted book by a sports icon who is universally adored and revered by fans, family, teammates and celebrities worldwide. It has a lot of fun baseball stories, plus cute family memories. My favorites of his sayings are, “The future ain’t what it used to be” and “We’re lost, but we’re making good time.” At the end of the book are more “Yogi-isms” that were actually said by his wife, children or grandchildren instead, and my favorites of those are “I double-checked it six times” and “I knew exactly where it was, I just couldn’t find it.” Written in a lively, informal style, this short book leaves you wanting much more. A very fun, happy little book.


You Gotta Play Hurt
Dan Jenkins
Drama
Fiction
Rating 3
Simon & Schuster
1991



Jim Tom Pinch is a sportswriter with “The Sports Magazine.” The magazine sends him and other staffers to cover the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck. The book is written vignette-style with short, punchy chapters. Along the way, we are introduced to the colorful characters in Jim Tom’s world, including his colleagues at the magazine, the Chief Editor, the horrible publisher, other sportswriters, athletes and managers, venue staff, his three ex-wives and his no-account son, who appears to be a professional student. Although many of the characters are unlikable, they’re all highly entertaining and the pace never lags. After the Olympics, it’s off to the Final Four and one of the funniest skewerings of college basketball and the people involved in it. Next up is The Masters, with its own amusing anecdotes. There are also occasional chapters interspersed as letters to his book publisher, about the progress of the book as it’s being written, which creates a very humorous book-within-a-book sub-plot. Somewhere between The Masters and the Indy 500, Jim Tom discovers there are two women in love with him: Long-time editor and co-worker sensible Nell Woodruff, and Jeannie Slay, a young and bouncy sportswriter with the L.A. Times. Jim Tom angles for a big promotion for Nell, and she seems to have the inside track, but then he covers the U.S. (golf) Open with Jeannie, for the most part fending off her advances. It gets more complicated when all of them converge at Wimbledon, that bastion of tradition that comes in for some ferocious ribbing. Also amusing are Jim Tom’s efforts to procure “friendly companions” (hookers) for the magazine’s big advertisers, a job that he hates, but for which the delighted magazine big-wigs reward him richly. It’s at Wimbledon that Jim Tom finds out the “coziness” between the big-wigs and the advertisers involves a lot of dubious insider trading and stock manipulation shenanigans. When everyone arrives in Paris for the Summer Olympics, Jim Tom is under pressure to finally make a choice between Nell and Jeannie. He chooses Nell and lets Jeannie down gently – she decides to accept an offer from CBS-TV Sports and give up her column. The next big hullabaloo is when the horrible publisher is fired by the magazine ownership, after he and another executive (who died) were discovered engaging in bizarre and sordid sexual practices. Everyone on the executive ladder moves up a notch and it looks like there’s a possibility of a big advancement for Nell, except for the useless and incompetent (but very well-connected) deadwood in her way. In the end, Jim Tom’s alma mater, Texas Christian University, has a rip-roaring Cotton Bowl appearance, Nell gets the big job, and everyone ends up happy. This author also wrote “Semi-Tough,” a very entertaining sports novel and even a pretty good movie. Many years of writing for Sports Illustrated have given him a real insight into the business of journalism, sports and the people involved with it. It starts out better than it ends up, sort of running out of steam midway, and it turns out more linear than well-rounded. But it is extremely well-written and entertaining throughout, and it seems almost too real to be fictional.

The Young Clementina
D.E. Stevenson
Drama
Fiction
Rating 5
Holt, Rinehart & Winston
1938



Charlotte Dean and her sister Kitty grew up at the parsonage in Hinkleton Manor and although Charlotte had an understanding with Garth Wisdon, the heir to the title, he unexpectedly married her sister. Things went horribly wrong and after they were divorced, Kitty died unexpectedly. Garth asked Charlotte to oversee the Manor and his daughter Clementina while he went on safari to get away from bad memories at home. Their relationship, rocky at first, became smooth and finally warm. They received the news that Garth had been killed abroad and Charlotte was instructed to write his memoirs from his diaries. This is how she found out what really happened with their “misunderstood understanding” and why he married her sister, which she felt wistful about, now that it was too late to mend the break between them. But it turned out he wasn’t killed and everything ended up wonderfully. A very sweet and sentimental story without being cloying. An unexpected pleasure.