One of the neatest things about getting old – and contrary to the prevailing sentiments of popular culture there are neat things that somewhat offset the dreary aspects – is that I can easily admit to all kinds of stuff that I might not have been willing to confess to many years ago.
  
   With that preamble, I do hereby confess that it was a major treat to visit a Barnes & Noble bookstore the other day and find the book that I authored and our company published, Legendary Yankee Stadium, right there available for an eager public to wrestle over.
  
   I hadn’t really expected to find it, since the scheduled release was in early May, but I always check the sports section anyway, and there it was, nestled snugly between two other books about the Stadium that I know had come out nearly a year ago. I wanted to share the moment with somebody, anybody, but the only other person there was a middle-aged woman who might have misinterpreted my enthusiasm, and so I restrained myself.
  
   I know this makes me sound like something of a hayseed, but I obviously don’t care. It’s not even the first time I had a book in Barnes & Noble, since the 1994 True Mint book with Alan Rosen was sold at major bookstores as well.
  
   And it wasn’t even the most excited I’ve ever been to find my own handiwork in print in some fashion. Just about 30 years ago I was working for a daily newspaper in Plattsburgh, N.Y., and angled to get my goddaughter employed at age 2 as a model for a Mother’s Day front-page color photo.
  
   We planted Nicky on the pool table, surrounded her with about three dozen stuffed animals and the photographer took the shot. Her dad and I got up around 5 a.m. to rush to the newsstand the morning it came out, and in the 1970s I wasn’t much inclined to be getting up that early. He and I bought about 50 copies.
  
   Now that was a thrill. But finding the Yankee Stadium book last weekend wasn’t too shabby, either.

   The story in this week’s Sports Collectors Digest about a professional gambler winning $888,000 on the golf course over the span of just one month reminded me about the vast difference between modern golfers (for example) like Tiger Woods who play for almost unfathomable amounts of money every week and golfers who have to scramble around for less, uh, structured bounty.
  
   I use golf as an example, but the observations would apply to other individual sports like billiards and tennis as well. I got a real kick out of the story that long-retired PGA pro Al Besselink told me for that SCD article about Mike McLaney winning the aforementioned $888,000 in cash in a month-long series of matches many years ago with former Kentucky Governor John Y. Brown.
  
   It tickles me because television commentators expend so much time and energy babbling about “pressure” situations on the modern tour, but old-timers who were involved in the less glitzy side of the PGA Tour a couple of generations ago tell stories that sound to me like a better description of true pressure.
  
   It’s the intrinsic nature of gambling, which means you are risking something for what is often a disproportionate reward. While Besselink’s world is the golf course, I have a good deal more personal understanding of gambling in the world of professional pool players.
  
   I have seen guys jump into Nine-Ball games with less than $100 in their pocket and walk away with $10,000 or more. Now just exactly how much pressure that would entail could vary greatly from situation to situation, but in almost any circumstance where you are extracting cash from a fellow human being there’s some chance that you’ll lose. And if you lose and you don’t have the money in your pocket, that’s a fairly seriously pressurized moment.
  
   I know from whence I speak. I have seen guys sprint from pool rooms who were faced with just that dilemma. Not me, mind you, but guys I’ve known.

   There are a zillion reasons why writing about your hobby is a helluva way to earn a living, and one of the best is that focusing on a particular subject brings back to life great memories from another era.

   Such was the case last week when I did a cover feature for Sports Collectors Digest about Sandy Koufax. Few baseball greats of the postwar era have kept a lower profile than the reclusive Koufax, so it was neat to have an excuse to dig back into his history in preparing the article. I had read Jane Leavy’s marvelous book, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy (HarperCollins, 2003), several years ago, but this afforded yet another chance to meet the greatest hero of my youth who wasn’t named Aaron.

  (Sandy Koufax original artwork by acclaimed sports artist Ron Stark; www.ronstarkstudios.com)

I followed Koufax’s incredible run from 1961-66, and anguished with the rest of the nation when he retired prematurely after that 1966 season. For virtually that entire span, in the days when the newspaper was the way you followed your favorite teams and players, I would quickly scramble to the box scores to see if he had pitched a shutout. The win was always assumed. To get to watch him on television was a special, if rare treat, a situation made even more intolerable by the fact that his World Series appearances would often come in the middle of the school day. I know it doesn’t match political correctness to say this, but I am certain there was nothing taking place at Johnstown High School in 1963, 1965 or 1966 of even remotely equal importance to watching the greatest pitcher of my lifetime on the grandest stage.

   It was that kind of allegiance that prompted me to blow off any kind of a reasonable examination of the World’s Fair in New York in 1964 because Koufax was pitching in a doubleheader at Shea Stadium. True, I may have missed something (at the very least a chance to shake Bill Russell’s hand at the Schaefer Beer Pavilion), but it’s not a decision I regret in the least.

   I offer one morsel from the Koufax article (in the May 15 issue of SCD):

  It seems some of the greatest players often have to contend with the odd paradox here and there: Lou Gehrig, one of the greatest players in baseball history, is most often remembered for showing up for work; Joe DiMaggio played on 10 pennant-winning teams but is most often remembered for a silly hitting streak that bears little relation to winning or losing; and Sandy Koufax, the most dominant hurler of his generation, whose name often evokes a recollection of a game that he didn’t pitch rather than those he did. Koufax would not pitch the opening game of the 1965 World Series against the Twins because it fell on Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish holidays.

   I've gotta tell you, I've had more fun working on a two-part story about the 1962-64 Auravision Records (in the April 17 and May 15 issues of SCD) than I've had in quite some time, all because of the principal character in the drama, Mike McLaney.

   It's a massive understatement to say that McLaney was a colorful gambler and casino operator with a résumé that could have been crafted by Damon Runyon, including a link to mobster Meyer Lansky and a history of trying to overthrow or even assassinate a certain pesky communist dictator in Cuba, and you have some of the ingredients of the story. In doing research for the piece, McLaney's name pops up alongside that of President Kennedy, his brother Bobby and his father, Joseph P., Mickey Mantle, Marty Glickman, Avery Brundage, Jim Thorpe and a cast of congressional investigators and subcommittees, just to name a few.

   The larger-than-life  quality of McLaney’s persona extended to yet another legendary sports figure, former PGA Tour player Al Besselink, who befriended a Who’s Who list of the famous and infamous through the rough-and-tumble early days of the postwar PGA Tour.

   “He was my best friend,” the 86-year-old Besselink said in a phone interview. Like his friend, Besselink was inextricably linked to gambling at a time when the glossy veneer of modern times hadn’t been completely applied to the professional golf arena as yet.

   “Mike was a flamboyant gentleman and a fabulous human being,” recalled Besselink. He even remembered the Auravision Records that his friend produced, though in keeping with the murky history of the odd collectibles, the details even for Besselink are a bit sketchy.

   “Somebody came to Mike with the idea and he put up the money for (printing the Auravision Records),” said Besselink. He didn’t know much more about McLaney’s forway into our zany world of sports collectibles, but he did have a good deal to add about the gambler’s most infamous deed: the $3 million plunked down on the Baltimore Colts to win the 1958 NFL Championship Game.

   “I know all about it,” Besselink said when asked about McLaney’s shadowy role in “The Greatest Game Ever Played.” Besselink was in Los Angeles to watch the game on television with another golfing buddy, then 49ers quarterback John Brodie, who not coincidentally was a world-class golfer himself.

   “Mike bet $3 million on the game, divided between himself, his friend and partner Louis Chesler (from the resort in the Bahamas) and Rams owner Carroll Rosenbloom.” The trio had given between 31/2 and 51/2 points for the privilege of betting on the favored Colts, and Besselink noted that his friend had given him a piece of the bet for free, amount undisclosed.

   Bessie, as he was known, told Brodie that he had a bet on the game, and they watched it head into overtime. Brodie told him he was out of luck, since a tie score would likely mean that the winning team would probably ending up securing the NFL crown via a field goal, which was not enough to cover the spread.

   “I told him Baltimore was not going to kick a field goal,” Besselink recalled with a laugh. After the Giants were stopped in the first drive of the overtime, Unitas began the march down the field that helped install the young quarterback into the pantheon of lower-case giants of NFL lore and legend, and seemingly helped propel the National Football League down the road to a prominence that might have been previously unimaginable.

   But once the Colts reached the 8-yard line, a field goal seemed to be looming. At second and goal, Unitas elected to pass, completing the heart-stopping toss to end Jim Mutscheller, who was brought down on the 1-yard line.

   “Brodie couldn’t believe that pass,” laughed Besselink, who simply recited his line once again that the Colts would not kick a field goal. On third down, Unitas handed it to Ameche, who plunged in for the score, and the rest, as they say, is history.

   But not necessarily the history that winds up in traditional NFL tomes. “We won every bet,” is the way Besselink finished the story. Colts coach Weeb Ewbank always claimed that Unitas had called the daring pass play, and further insisted there had been no interference in the play calling from on high.

   And it’s not widely part of the historical record, but the following weekend Besselink’s next touring stop was in New Orleans, where he acted as a bagman for McLaney, picking up cash throughout the city for his friend. He met McLaney that weekend on the golf course, handing him a bag containing between $300,000-$400,000.

    One the same day I wrote about some of the early season travails of the two New York teams (New Yankee Stadium home run barrage, and just the opposite problem at Citi Field, or Shea II), I also commented about a widespread view among many Mets fans (guilty as charged) that the modern club pays scant attention to the great stars and teams of the past.

   The next day the New York Daily News was reporting that a kind of pathetic spat had unfolded between the Mets’ front office and my favorite player of the 1980s, Doc Gooden. Seems Doc had signed a wall at the Ebbets Club bar at the stadium at the behest of fans, and the front office promptly announced it would be removed, which caused an uproar.

   Dr. Freud might suggest there’s some significance to the irony of a front office that so admiringly fusses over the Brooklyn Dodgers (gone west five years when the Mets were born in 1962) while seemingly shortchanging its own history, but I’m no psychotherapist.

   The row was mercifully short lived, but the mere fact that it developed at all offers a glimpse of the underlying discontent with how the old geezers and teams have been regarded by the Mets front office every year.

   It’s not a precise analogy, but the once Brooklyn-based card maker Topps was much the same in terms of its philosophical outlook about its own storied past. When our hobby took off in the 1980s, getting Topps officials to pay much attention to its remarkable history was difficult if not impossible, but fortunately for collectors that view has ebbed quite a bit over the last 15 years or so.

   In Topps’ defense, the company for decades considered itself as marketing confectionary products (and cards) to children; the hobby boom made it clear that there was a significant adult component, one that has doubtless grown in relative importance with each succeeding year.

   I just finished a story about Bill Russell for this week’s issue of Sports Collectors Digest and I thought I’d offer a little preview of it here on the blog with excerpts about Russell and his Hall of Famer teammate Sam Jones.

   It was part of an interview with Rich Altman, friend and autograph agent for both players, among others, who was telling me about Russell’s abiding sense of loyalty to those within his circle.

   It is that quality of loyalty that so permeates the great teams of any generation and so is of extraordinary importance to Russell, the ultimate team player. Altman tells the story of a time during the Celtics’ championship run when the team was slated to play an exhibition game in Lexington, Ky.

   Russell and teammates Sam Jones, K.C. Jones and Satch Sanders found themselves unable to get a seat in the dining room of the Lexington hotel where the team was staying. Blacks being denied service at a swanky (or even non-swanky) dining room in the South was hardly out of the ordinary in the mid-1960s, but this this time they picked on the wrong foursome.

   All four were at Red Auerbach’s door a few moments later. The Hall of Fame coach, in boxer shorts, asked what they wanted. “We don’t want to play,” Russell stated. Once they explained the circumstances, Auerbach didn’t hesitate in putting his stars on a plane back for Boston. “That night the World Champion White Celtics played that exhibition game, and the hotel got blasted in the mainstream press,” Altman noted.

   And it wasn’t just in the Deep South where the team would collide with the insidious prejudices of the period. Auerbach ran a basketball in the Catskills and Sam Jones was playfully chasing a youngster around the parking lot, and ultimately walked over to the kid’s family waiting by their vehicle. “Sam shook hands with several family members, and then when he went to shake the boy’s grandfather’s hand, the man refused.”

   Altman cherishes the rest of the story. “Without missing a beat, Sam turned to the little boy and said, ‘We’re OK,’ and gave him a little hug.”

   Forty years later, Altman got an e-mail from the young boy, now a middle-aged man, who pointed out how the moment had changed his life. With that bold, selfless stroke a half-century earlier, the chains of generations of prejudice were broken forever. Altman took great joy in forwarding the e-mail to his two favorite clients, Russell and Jones.

   “That’s what it’s all about,” said Altman with finality.

   I had been looking forward to watching the 2009 Masters for, oh, about nine months, roughly the period between Tiger Woods’ knee surgery and his return to his favorite stage of all in Augusta, Ga. Who knew we’d end up getting a rare golf doubleheader, and in this reference I am not referring to the couple of extra playoff holes?
  
   I allude, of course, to the seemingly two separate stories provided Sunday afternoon with a delightful 56 minutes per hour from Hootie and the High Rollers (he’s now chairman emeritus): 1 – The main story, the battle between Tiger and Phil Mickelson, which was a heckuva story for about three hours before winding up with a wildly unsatisfactory “golfus interruptus” ending; and then 2 – The actual Masters’ leaders, battling for a little over an hour and then into a playoff.
  
   I don’t know about you, but the whole proceeding left me with a kind of odd, empty feeling. Nice enough finish, with Cabrera prevailing, but the celebratory quality of having the first Agentine to win the Masters isn’t quite as endearing as it might have been to have had the Kentuckian Perry nail it down on behalf of old geezers and good ole American natavists.

   One suspects that the unique staging of the Sunday version of the 2009 Masters is nothing more than the understandable unintended consequence from the nearly unprecedented situation of having a player who is almost larger than his sport. I say “nearly,” because the NBA faced a similar problem at Jordan’s peak, and that enterprise managed to find a way to go on once its marquee name ultimately stepped off the stage.
  
   Golf, too, will survive once Tiger finally gives it up some years from now, but in the meantime it’s kinda fun to watch the accommodations that end up taking place as the sport tries to undertake the difficult balancing act between the two behemoths.

Sidebar: On the same morning that the country was lauding its newest Masters champion, a judge in Saudi Arabia upheld an earlier court decision that it would not annul a marriage between a 47-year-old man and an 8-year-old girl. Sure makes our curious antiquated views on women (still no Augusta members, thank you) seem like pretty small potatoes. And no, I am not suggesting there’s a moral equivalence between the two, but merely noting that when it comes to clinging to discriminatory, outdated foolishness, it’s the underlying notions about the fairer sex that bind us, even to the mullahs.

   I know all the swell things we typically pronounce about the coming of spring and the newness of everything, but I’ve always been a guy who’s kind of attached to the older things among us. I assume this world view plays a role in my affinity for old baseball cards and memorabilia; in any event it clearly plays a part in my relative lack of enthusiasm for rookies as opposed to aging veterans.
  
   Thus when spring training ends and the players head north (or should we now say “east,” because of the massive migration of clubs to Arizona?) I have a tendency to watch the old guys looking for some final redemption, as opposed to some untested 20-year-old in search of his first million bucks.
  
   With that backdrop, I watched as Gary Sheffield wound up with my Mets. Now there’s a guy I’ve tried really hard to warm up to over the years, in part because he’s Dwight Gooden’s cousin, and Gooden was may favorite player back in the 1980s and 1990s. He's also one homer short of 500, which is a handsome statistical curiosity likely to be met with a big hum-hum across the land.
  
   But with Sheffield it was a little tougher to rev up to actual fandom, so I had to end up merely respecting his hitting skills and enjoying the debate about whether the cousin would wind up with a plaque in Cooperstown, since Dwight obviously didn’t.
  
   I have my doubts, especially given the confluence of his best years during the steroid-soaked years, which is not to suggest any involvement but merely to note that the taint from that era is likely to affect – to varying degrees – virtually all who played during that span.
  
   In Sheffield’s case, it also doesn’t help that he’s played with eight different teams. Ultimately, however, it’s likely to be his own words that will be held against him, regardless of the fact that some of that came when he was very, very young and might otherwise have been forgiven for making the odd, utterly stupid pronouncement. Like this one about his tempestuous, failed tenure as a Milwaukee Brewer:
  
   “The Brewers brought out the hate in me. I was a crazy man. ... I hated everything about the place. If the official scorer gave me an error, I didn’t think was an error, I’d say, ‘OK, here’s a real error,’ and I’d throw the next ball into the stands on purpose.’ ”
  
   Ouch! Try picturing those words etched into a plaque in Cooperstown.

   I noticed the other day that Arthur K. Miller, one of a handful of extraordinary artists who have graced the pages of SCD over the 15-plus years that I have been here, has donated some more pieces of his original art to the Hall of Fame.
  
www.artofthegame.com

   Reading the press release gives me an opportunity to once again note that I have a rather substantial debt owed to all of the artists who have allowed their work to be used in our magazine over the years. The reliance on artwork rather than photography for so many of the covers was not a uniformly applauded strategy under all regimes here, but I am confident that over the long haul it has helped make it a better magazine than it might have otherwise been.
  
   My debt to Miller and several other great artists has increased rather dramatically with the planned May release of the book on Yankee Stadium that I authored. The book boasts equal parts of stunning artwork from the likes of Miller, Ron Stark, Andy Jurinko, Charles DeSimone, Michael Schacht and James Fiorentino, among others, and wonderful photography of cards and memorabilia.
  
   For the latter, I am going to have to provide a particular nod to famed photographer David Spindel, who made so many photographs of his own Yankees memorabilia available to me, along with some of his spectacular collages that have been a hobby staple for more than 20 years. I’ll have more on Spindel in future blogs, including an update on more-recent endeavors from this 21st-century renaissance man.

   With all of the aggravations that frequently assault us in our hobby, just as they do in our broader life itself, it’s ultimately the more elemental things that counteract those various indignities and keep us hanging in there even when there’s a tendency to say the hell with it all.
   
   Atop that list would be all of the wonderful people that you run into over the years, people like Philadelphia A’s Historical Society guru Max Silberman. Max, who has had some health difficulties from time to time, had a stroke recently and is currently recovering at home under the care of his wife, Rikki, who’s almost as famous (and beloved) as he is on the East Coast show circuit.
  
   I decided to send Max a card, and quickly thought I’d take the process quite literally in terms of our hobby, so I sent him a “card” along with the usual get-well wishes. Max is the historian for the Philadelphia A’s Historical Society, so that provided an obvious starting point.
  
   Max and Rikki have been attending card shows for 35 years, back to the days when just about everybody involved was in it because they loved the stuff and making dough was little more than a secondary consideration. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s just nice to take note of the folks who were involved before the almighty dollar became such a prominent force.
  
   Max was also a well-known contributor to the various early hobby publications, including SCD, and more importantly, just about the nicest guy you would ever run into.
  
   His great pal, Ernie Montella, reminded me that over the course of a year that Max answers thousands of questions about the early days of the hobby, baseball history and, of course, the Philadelphia A’s. “If you listed a hobby’s virtual Who’s Who, the Silbermans would be on everybody’s list of hobby icons,” said Montella.
  
   The address is: Max Silberman, 1526 Brookhaven Rd., Wynnewood, PA19096.

   If anyone had been wondering if I had been subjected to some extraordinary rendition and quietly been spirited off to Islamabad (wouldn’t that work neatly for some of the mullahs if we rendered them not to secret prison sites but to Las Vegas?), I am here to say my absence from blogville was far more innocent than that. For most of last week, I was playing some wonderful golf courses around St. Louis, and the only extraordinary rendering being done was my paying gambling debts to my playing partners ($78). I mention the amount not out of a plea for sympathy but to force the others to include their earnings on their taxes, plus now they can’t go to the Olympics, in the event that golf ever gets added to the quadrennial five-ring circus.
  
   I read in the Sunday paper yesterday that Cubs ace Carlos Zambrano, presumably in the throes of spiritual enlightenment as the Cubs played the Yankees in an exhibition at the new Yankee Stadium, had the temerity to suggest that it might be nice if the Cubbies could someday play in similar digs.
  
   According to the Associated Press report, Zambrano’s exact words were, “You wish that Chicago’d build a new stadium for the Cubs.” Yikes!
  
   By this morning ESPN.com was carrying a story where the hurler was denying he had said it, that he had been misquoted and that it was just his opinion anyway about that thing that he hadn’t actually said. I am surprised that he didn’t use the old “my remarks were taken out of context” ditty that so many players and public figures employ without having a clue what what it means.
  
   It’s hardly conclusive, but it’s a pretty fair bet that an Associated Press writer wouldn’t employ the odd contraction “Chicago’d” if he were making up a quote to sell a few extra newspapers.
  
   And then Zambrano went on to explain away the controversy, and with a nod to irony, much of his explaining seemed to hint that he really had said the original statement in the first place. To paraphrase (and shorten), he essentially said that he understands the fans’ rabid allegiance to the near-sentenarian (100 years old) Wrigley Field, but that the players would really rather play in a structure that didn’t date back to Christy Mathewson.
  
   Me, I understand both sides of the debate, and being nostalgically inclined you’d suspect I’d come down on the side of preserving Wrigley forever, but ...