Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning | Jonathan Mahler | Talks at Google

Today we welcome Mr. Jonathan Mahler to authors at Google New York City. Jonathan's latest book, ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning is a story of New York in 1977. The fight between Reggie Jackson and team manager Billy Martin, as well as the battle to become New York City mayor between Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo. Also at this time, New York was faced with the Son of Sam murders, the opening of Studio 54, the evolution of punk rock, and Rupert Murdoch purchasing the New York Post. This book has recently been made into an eight week miniseries on ESPN which began this week. Jonathan is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and Jonathan will be signing books after the talk. And please be sure to use the microphones during Q and A as well, since we're seeing into other offices.

All right, let's give a big Google.

Welcome to Mr. Jonathan Mahler.

Hello everyone, can you hear me?

Okay.

So I'm going to talk a little bit about the book and I'm going to read a little bit from the book, give you kind of some.

Flavor of the book.

I don't know if any of you caught any of the, I guess just the first episode this week, it was, it actually started late because of the Home Run Derby, so a lot of people fell asleep before it began. And the show is actually, the miniseries.

Is actually.

In many ways it's obviously based on the book and obviously there are a lot of similarities, but it's really foremost a story about the baseball season. And the book really is maybe half about the baseball season and half really about New York and what was happening in New York in 1977. So, you know, I guess for understandable reasons, ESPN couldn't really get into all the kind of the backdrop.

But so I'm just going to start.

By telling you a little bit about how I got interested in this period of time. I actually was born in New York, but grew up in California. And my father had grown up in the South Bronx and was a, a big Yankee fan. And I sort of grew up a Yankee fan as well. I mean, I think, you know, in the book I write that basically that baseball loyalty is more generational than geographic. So, you know, even though I was in California, I sort of inherited the Yankees from my father. And we came to New York really for the first time in 1977. And you know, I was just a young boy then and I'd heard all these stories from my father about what life in New York was like. And he had kind of conjured these images of this sort of middle Class utopia with the sort of brownstones and playing stickball in the streets in the Bronx and kind of the quintessential like, you know, Jewish middle class upbringing. And then we got to New York in 1977 and the city just looked completely different than I'd expected. I mean, it was, you know, I guess most of you probably were not around then, but it was like covered in graffiti. It was, you know, it was filthy, it was crime ridden. Literally every time we got into a taxicab, my parents would put up the windows and lock the doors and, you know, there were squeegee men, you know, washing windows on every corner. There were guys dealing three card money on cardboard boxes, basically, you know, stealing money from people. And we went up to Yankee Stadium and I had these kind of visions of what Yankee Stadium would look like, also informed by all the stories my father had told me. And instead I'm kind of confronted with this. Basically this concrete fortress and the whole neighborhood around it, of course, was kind of the South Bronx was at the time really the center of sort of urban decay in America. And I looked around at all this and couldn't quite believe it. So years later, after I graduated from college in 1990, I moved to the city and lived here as a journalist in the 90s. And this was obviously, this was a completely different time in the life of the city. And sort of Giuliani had done his thing and the city was suddenly safe. No more three card money, no more squeegee men. And obviously it was a much nicer place to live. But I still kind of felt almost nostalgic for this period of time that I had really kind of only caught in these fleeting childhood glimpses. And so when it was time to write a book, I really felt like, well, this is kind of the period of time that really has kind of most captivated me. And I kind of instantly gravitated to the Yankee story.

And.

That'S primarily because I was, you know, at the time, I was such a huge baseball fan and such a huge Yankee fan. And that sort of team in that year had just, had been just kind of amazing. And just to give you some sense of what was going on, Reggie Jackson had basically free agency had just arrived in baseball. And 1976 was the very first free agency draft. Up until this point, players would sign contracts with teams and the teams would then renew their contracts, and it was up to the team to renew their contracts or not. But players couldn't just simply become free agents. So Reggie Jackson had become.

One of.

The first group of free agents. And George Steinbrenner, in his soon to be inimitable style, decided he had to have him and went out and bought him. And at this point, Reggie was already, he was sort of at the peak of his career and he was already this kind of celebrated superstar who was very outspoken, very arrogant. And he came to New York against the wishes really of the team's blue collar manager, Billy Martin, who thought that Reggie wasn't going to be a team player and that he was the kind of guy who was going to draw attention to himself. All of which was true. And so, against Billy Martin's will, George Steinbrenner signs Reggie Jackson and he comes to New York for a big press conference. And instead of saying all the things you might expect someone to say, how honored he is to be here, or how much he's looking forward to playing for this team with all this history, he instead utters the line that you heard in that trailer, I didn't come to New York to be a star.

I brought my star with me.

So meanwhile, the captain of the team, Thurman Munson, is sitting up there on the podium in his hideous plaid jacket thinking, how is this guy making three times what I'm making? I'm the captain of the team. So things sort of got off on the wrong foot.

And I'm going to just sort of.

Read very briefly a short section from the book which sort of will give you some context. Basically, things sort of started out, started out tense and then it was about six weeks into the season, an interview was published in a magazine that no longer exists called Sport Magazine, in which Reggie had really kind of shot his mouth off. And this happened this interview he gave during spring training. So the season had begun, the interview hadn't been published because it was written for a magazine, hadn't been published yet, and things were just kind of starting to calm down and people were just kind of getting used to Reggie when this interview was published. And then, then the shit really hit the fan. And I'm just going to read a passage from the book about that interview.

If Sports Illustrated was the Time magazine of the sports world, sport was its Esquire, a slick monthly filled with well marinated profiles and straight to the wall photographs, dispatches from the American dreamland. When it first sprang to life in 1949, a smiling Joe DiMaggio and son.

Joe Jr. On its cover, sport was.

In the business of Heroes. By 1977, the magazine was more concerned with satisfying the public's increasing appetite for celebrity. That was why Dick Schapp, sports editor in chief, had sent Robert Ward down to Florida in March to profile the newest member of the Yankees. It was a perfect match of author and subject. Ward was a surging, scenic writer who went on to make a small fortune.

Writing for the television shows Miami Vice and NYPD Blue.

Reggie initially refused to cooperate with Ward, claiming he'd been burned by sport before. They wrote a piece that said I caused trouble on the team, that I have a huge ego. Ward started on the piece anyway, hanging around the clubhouse watching Reggie as he moved through camp, asking his various teammates.

To comment on their new right fielder.

After a few days of this, Reggie agreed to a drink as long as Ward agreed to tell him what the guys were saying about him. They met at a bar called the Banana Boat. Reggie showed up in a windbreaker, which he promptly ditched, revealing a blue T shirt on which the word Superstar was spelled out in silver letters across the chest. It was from the TV show that he hosted, but the implication was clear. Ward began by telling Reggie that some of his teammates had expressed reservations about him. You see, reggie said as they started in on their first round, I've got problems the other guys don't have. I've got this big image that comes before me, and I've got to adjust to it. Also, I used to just be known as a black athlete. Now I'm respected as a tremendous intellect. They were just getting going when the old Yankees, Rat Pack, Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford and Billy Martin settled down at a backgammon table at the other end of the bar. Reggie told the cocktail waitress, who was decked out in a green Tinkerbell costume, to send over some drinks on him. She returned with a message. Whitey Ford appreciates your offer, but says he'd rather have your superstar T shirt. Ward glanced over and noticed Mantle and Martin cracking up. They had obviously put Ford up to.

This bit of hazing.

Reggie stripped off his T shirt and delivered it to Ford, who in exchange gave Jackson his sweater, a pink cashmere V neck that must have been three sizes too small for the slugger's thick torso. The encounter, coupled with Ward's report on Reggie's unpopularity among his new teammates, tripped something inside Reggie. Back at the bar, he stirred around the fruit in his pina colada and delivered himself of an unforgettable soliloquy. You know, this team, it all flows from me, he told Ward. I'm the straw that stirs the drink. It all comes back to me. Maybe I should Say, me and Munson, but really he doesn't enter into it. I've overheard him talking about me. I'll hear him telling some other writer that he wants it to be known.

That he's the captain of the team.

And when anybody knocks me, he'll laugh.

Real loud so I can hear it.

I'm a leader and I can't lie down. But leader isn't the right word. It's a matter of presence. Let me put it this way. No team I'm on will ever be humiliated the way the Yankees were by the Reds in the World Series. That's why Munson can't intimidate me. Nobody can. There's nobody who can put meat in.

The seats the way I can. That's just the way it is. Munson thinks he can be the straw.

That stirs the drink, but he can only stir it bad. Just wait until I get hot and hit a few out and the reporters start coming around and I have New York eating out of the palm of my hand.

He won't be able to stand it.

All the essential Reggie Jackson contradictions were here. The swaggering free spirit versus the self conscious brooder. The supremely sure exterior versus the vulnerable interior. The desire to feel loved versus an unconscious need to feel alone, embattled by way of motivating himself. Thank you, God, was all Ward could.

Think as he scribbled furiously. So that gives you some idea of what the summer was going to be like for the Yankees. So as I said, when I sort.

Of set out to write this book.

I was really seeing the Yankee story as kind of. That's what I initially gravitated to. And I did intend to set the Yankee story against the backdrop of New York City during this period. This New York that I had kind of first seen as a child when I came here. But as I started doing my research, I just became so absorbed and really obsessed with what was going on in the city that I felt that the city kind of had to move into the foreground. And really what happened, in a sense, was that the two stories really merged into one and it became a book about New York and the Yankees and Reggie and Billy and George Steinbrenner and Thurman Munson. They were characters in this sort of New York drama, really. And I kind of came to see this tension, this great tension between Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin as kind of emblematic of this sort of larger tension that was happening in New York at the time. The city had always been this kind of social democratic place. With these dreams of being kind of all things to all people. There was this great public university system. There were these subsidized subways, There were these subsidized municipal hospitals.

And that had sort of been the.

City, the New York that my father had grown up in. But along the way, the city started to run out of money. And that's what really happened in the 1960s and 70s, and middle class people started leaving New York.

And the city.

Kind of needed to find a new way forward. And the new city that kind of emerged out of this chaos is the city we kind of live in today, the city of hedge fund managers and real estate developers and Internet companies. And there was, I think that in a sense, Billy Martin, who was this old kind of scrappy, blue collar guy who had actually played for the Yankees in the 1940s, was kind of.

Emblematic.

Of what New York had been. And Reggie Jackson, who was this big spending guy who, you know, lived on, lived on the up, lived on fifth Avenue overlooking the park, and, you know, went out to dinner at fancy restaurants. And he was kind of this emblematic of what New York was becoming.

And just in terms of what else was.

Happening in New York at the time. And the events that kind of really kind of overtook the book in a way, and one that actually they do try to deal with in the ESPN miniseries was the Son of Sam. And this was the first serial killer that New York had had in many decades. And he was, in addition to this sort of strange practice he had of targeting young women in the outer boroughs, generally with long dark hair, he also sent a couple letters to, one to the chief detective, one to Jimmy Breslin, who was at the time celebrated city columnist. And for months, I mean, really for a year, in fact, the cops were unable to find him. They eventually caught him in August of 1977. And they caught him because the scene of his last attack out in Brooklyn was he had actually was illegally parked. And they went through the parking tickets from that night, and they found they followed up on all the people who'd been given parking tickets in the area of the crime. And they found his name and tracked him down in Yonkers. And it led to a great joke at the time, which was, in New York, you can get away with murder as long as you don't park near a fire hydrant. So the other events that were happening at the time included, as Kee mentioned, a great mayoral race which featured Mario Cuomo, who was at the time entirely unknown, and Ed Koch, who was also really pretty much unknown. And it was an incredibly bitter campaign that in many ways kind of mirrored the bitter feuds going on on the Yankees. And culturally, it was also kind of an amazing time for New York. It was actually the year that Studio 54 opened. And more broadly, it was this great period of disco. I mean, great. By great, I mean this significant period of disco. And in fact, a journalist at the time described the summer of 1977 as the summer of our discotheques. And while the disco movement and Studio 54 in particular, was this kind of incredibly over the top and sort of cheesy, I mean, Studio 54 was like. You wouldn't believe what it looked like inside there. I mean, they were. There was like an enormous coke spoon that was basically like, part of the decor. There were guys in satin shorts on trapezes. There was a balcony where people were.

Just, like, openly having sex.

I mean, it was just like an insane, insane place. And, you know, I think we all think of disco as this, you know, this as a cheesy movement. But one of the things that I actually was really kind of amazed to find during my research was that it had really grown out of a real kind of urban underground. In fact, it was the same kind of movement that led to hip hop, was how disco started. It was kind of a dance culture, an underground dance culture in New York that really began in housing projects, in abandoned lofts and warehouses, in old hotel ballrooms. And to me, it was kind of meaningful, that kind of, in the face of all this decay in New York, that this kind of cultural movement had flowered, really. And, you know, the same is true of the punk movement, which grabbed this moment, and of graffiti as well, which was really kind of becoming an art form as well as the bane of the subways.

And.

The other event that really became a major focus of my interest was the blackout. And actually, this summer is the 30th anniversary, obviously the summer of 1977. And a lot of newspaper. I've been getting calls from newspaper reporters. A lot of people are doing anniversary pieces on the blackout. And it was. You know, I happened to be researching the blackout after 911 or on 9 11, really. And, you know, there are obviously these two very distinctly different events. But I was so struck by how differently New York dealt with these two events and how differently the world kind of viewed New York in the context of these events. After, you know, after 9 11, there was this kind of feeling of that New York was going to survive, that we were going to be okay. And after the blackout and this just massive citywide looting that followed, there was a sense that, like, my God, what is. Like, what has become of New York? What's going to happen to New York? And I'm going to read just another short passage to give you a sense of really where, how bad the looting was. I decided that I would focus in particular on a single neighborhood because I felt it would be a more effective way to kind of really show what happened that night. So I actually got to know a bunch of cops who worked in a neighborhood in Brooklyn, Bushwick, who all worked that night and dealt with this, what was ultimately really a riot. And so I'm going to just read briefly from this passage about what these cops saw that night.

Officer Robert Locklear was already on duty when the lights went out. He remembers people hanging out on Broadway, Bushwick's main strip, playing cards, drinking beer, vainly trying to catch a flutter of breeze.

It was also close to 100 degrees on the night of the blackout.

Now and then, a train would rumble across the elevated tracks overhead, momentarily drowning out the sounds of salsa and disco emanating from the boomboxes below. Locklear, one of a small group of minority cops in the 8:3, and his partner had collared a murder suspect earlier in the evening. They found the guy frying chicken with his door open at the top of a tenement stairwell in plain view of the dead body at the foot of the stairs, and were hoping the rest of the shift would be relatively quiet. Locklear can't remember what he heard first, the sound of shattering glass or the store alarms, but he'll never forget what he saw when he looked down the block moments later. Mobs of people materializing in the darkness. A local woman called the police department in a panic. They're coming across Broadway like a herd of buffalo. Cops gathering at the 83 Station House found it dark. The batteries were missing from the emergency floodlights that were supposed to kick in the moment the power went out. Hats, bats and jeans, riot helmets, billy clubs and dungarees were the norm. Officers were assigned to combat cars of four men using every marked and unmarked vehicle at the precinct's disposal. They were ghetto cops. No one had to tell them to expect the worst. Still, nothing could have prepared them for.

What greeted them on Broadway.

Thousands of people were already out on the street. Thousands more were pouring in from every direction. If they had turned on the lights, one cop remembers, it would have looked like the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. According to one police report, the looting had started at 9:40pm only minutes after the onset of darkness. Marauding bands were sawing open padlocks. They were taking crowbars to steel shutters, prying them open like tennis ball can tops, or simply jimmying them up with hydraulic jacks.

And then that sounds like some looting right there.

And then wedging garbage cans underneath to keep them open. They were pulling up onto the sidewalks in tow trucks, slipping the big iron hooks under storefront gates and ripping them clean off. They were punching through plate glass windows to grab the clothed mannequins inside, first with bare hands, later with towels wrapped around their fists. Four men wrenched a parking meter out of the ground and used it to batter open the door of a jewelry store. They filled cars, vans, trucks and U Hauls, or simply carried their loot, be it sofas, television sets or refrigerators, on their backs or in their arms. In the darkness, it was especially hard to miss the white washing machines bumping along Broadway, propelled by pairs of legs poking out underneath.

So the blackout was really kind of the. Really the low point of the summer of 1977.

And, you know, what happened afterwards is.

Predictably, all of the mayoral candidates started talking about how they were going to get tough on crime. And Ed Koch in particular, who began.

Campaigning actually on the death penalty, which is, of course, an issue over which the mayor has no control. But that didn't stop him from running.

Around New York telling everyone that he supported the death penalty. And amazingly, it was actually a very effective tactic and he was elected.

And.

More generally, I think after bottoming.

Out.

There were other kind of positive things started to happen in the aftermath of the blackout, as the city kind of really got a glimpse basically inside the foundation of New York and saw that it needed to be dealt with. And.

And so the city kind of started to turn around.

And at the same time, the Yankee season was turning around. It wasn't that Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin and Thurman Munson and George Steinbrenner had all now decided they could get along. They really hadn't. But they'd kind of found a way to make it work, just like New York would kind of ultimately do. And this really climaxed in the final night of the season, which was during the world series of 1977, which I assume will also be the climax of the ESPN movie, though I have not seen the eighth episode yet. And when Reggie comes to bat in this last World Series game and hits three consecutive home runs in this kind of historic moment.

And so I'm just going to read briefly my passage about that in the.

Book, and then I'll take questions, if anyone has any.

In the days that followed, some said it had to end like this. But watching Reggie Jackson's Game 6 performance now, it seems like an odd conclusion to this long season of tension and torment. Not anticlimactic, but somehow un. Baseball, like there is none of the subtle jockeying, the foul tips and worked counts that usually accompany memorable at bats. Reggie simply strides to the plate three consecutive times against three different pitchers and, before commentators can even properly set the scene, strokes the first pitch he sees into the seats. One gets the sense that if this had been the first half of a doubleheader, he would have hit three more. Not because he was so much better than everyone else, but because something had.

Been lit inside him.

For this one night, the all too human Reggie Jackson glowed with superhuman greatness. He first appeared on center stage in the second inning, a black turtleneck under his double knits, the top button of his uniform unfastened as usual with the Yankees trailing two to nothing. Rushie had gone 0 for 4 with a pair of strikeouts against Bert Hooten in Game two, but the balance of power had already shifted. Hooten didn't throw him anything near the strike zone at the start of the fourth, the Yankees now down three to two, Reggie knelt on one knee in the on deck circle and watched Thurman Munson wrap a single to left. Expecting something hard and inside, Reggie took his usual spot in the box and then moved off the plate about 6 inches. Glancing back to make sure the Dodgers catcher hadn't noticed, Reggie tapped his bat lightly on the plate and turned his.

Gaze to the mound.

Sure enough, Hooten came inside with a fastball and Reggie smoked it, a low liner no more than 15ft off the ground. Unsure of the ball's fate, Reggie broke hard out of the box before it landed in the first row of the right field bleachers. He circled the bases briskly, his upper body bent forward, slowing to a trot about 10ft from home. As he bounded down the dugout steps, Martin, the beleaguered little pepper pot as.

Howard referred to him on abc, gave.

Him an adoring pat on the cheek. The next inning, three men were scheduled to hit before Reggie, but he pulled his 35 inch bat from the rack anyway as Elias Sosa, the right handed fastballer who had relieved Hooten, finished his warm up pitches. Three batters later, with two out and one on, Reggie came to the plate. He mashed down his helmet and turned on Sosa's first pitch, a fastball down and in, sending it screaming over the wall and right. It was another line drive, so Reggie again sprinted out of the box and started motoring around the bases between first and second. He picked at his form fitting uniform, pulling it away from his swelling chest as the baying washed over the park. The ABC's cameras found him moments later at the first base end of the dugout, the second button of his uniform now undone in case anyone at home had lost count. He held up a pair of fingers.

Mouthing the word two.

In the home half of the eighth, a standing ovation greeted Reggie as he walked toward the plate. The din continued as he smoothed the dirt in the batter's box with his spikes. Then, for a split second after Reggie reached down for Charlie Huff's diving knuckleball, a good pitch, the crowd fell silent, choking on its own disbelief. This time Reggie knew. He stood and watched as the ball sailed toward dead center, touching down about halfway up the stadium's blacked out bleachers, some 475ft from where it had collided with his bat. As Reggie glided around first, Dodgers first baseman Steve Garvey applauded softly into his glove. Reggie's last home run had put the Yankees on top, 8 to 3. The Yankees, first World Series in 15 years was almost won and the Bronx ball yard was ready to explode. The stadium had quadrupled its security for that night's game. More than 100 cops in Riot helmets now took their positions in foul territory, crouching on the field side of the wall along the first and third baselines. On the other side of the wall, officers were swinging their nightsticks above their.

Heads to keep fans back.

The public address announcements began. Ladies and gentlemen, no one is to go on the field at the end of the game. On his way out to his position for the final three outs, Reggie, his pinstripe shirt now buttoned only halfway up, doffed his cap and blew kisses to the crowd. It was a long half inning. The outs came slowly, but they came. The bleacher creatures were now sitting along the top of the outfield fence, their legs dangling over the wall in fair territory. Firecrackers and cherry bombs were exploding on the field. With two down in the top of the ninth, Reggie called a timeout and started running toward the dugout. ABC's Keith Jackson narrated. Reggie Jackson is leaving the field and I don't blame him. The home fans are chasing their most valuable player off the field, but Reggie was pointing at his head he just wanted a batting helmet. It took a couple of minutes to find one. The equipment had already been moved into the clubhouse to keep it away from marauding fans. But Reggie eventually trotted back out for the final out. In an instant, thousands of fevered fans were pouring onto the field. They came from every section of the stands, charging across the tables in the press box on their way down. The extra police and their five mounted horses were no match for this mass of swarming, shaggy haired humanity. Reggie took off his helmet and glasses and started weaving in and out of the crowd, the fullback looking for daylight. Without his specs, he had poor depth perception. He was genuinely frightened. Gaining speed now, he sent a park a plump blue jean fan sprawling with a shoulder block and disappeared into the dugout.

Okay, that is it.

I'm happy to take any questions for.

Those who have them. Thank you.

Hi, is this on?

Is that on?

I'm sure we can hear you anyway.

Okay, so obviously you couldn't interview Billy Martin and Thurman Munson, but I was wondering if you were able to talk to Reggie Jackson.

I did, yeah.

And I assume you didn't talk to George Steinbrenner.

I didn't talk to George Steinbrenner, but I talked to.

Over the course of a couple days, I went down to the Yankees. He's a coach for the Yankees now. I'm batting coach. And I went down to their spring training complex to do a magazine story, actually. So I interviewed him a couple times over the course of a couple days and then I actually subsequently emailed him and didn't hear back.

So what do you think his opinion? I mean, do you think. Has he changed at all now that he's older and wiser? What's his opinion about.

No, I don't think so. Even the way he kind of carried himself down there, it was like it was clear that he. It's like it hadn't occurred to him yet that he was no longer like Derek Jeter or something. I mean, and he actually recently complained about the ESPN series as well because he hadn't seen it yet. But he said that he was offended they hadn't consulted with him. Yes, I had a similar question.

I was wondering if you've spoken to Reggie since the book was published and if he had any reactions as to how he was portrayed.

I haven't.

And you know, I sort of feel like this may just be wishful thinker. I'm not even wishful thinking, but my.

Hunch is that he actually wouldn't be.

Unhappy with the way he was portrayed.

Because I think what I tried to.

Do was kind of write about him in the context of New York and kind of turn him into more than a baseball player, but sort of a kind of a cultural figure, really. And I don't know, given the size of his ego, I think that he might actually kind of think it elevates him in a way. And I don't think my portrayal of him is especially negative. I mean, it's not that I'm saying things about him that haven't been said before. So I think maybe he might be pleased to see himself in this kind of different context, sort of in a way. Basically, I took him out of the sports world and put him in a larger world, and I think maybe he would find that kind of edifying. I don't know. That's my guess anyway. That's sort of assuming he even reads books.

Jonathan?

Yes?

Two questions. One, who's your favorite Yankee of all time? And secondly, have you had any reactions from present day players?

I have not had any reactions from.

Present day players, though Jason Giambi actually has a cameo as he plays a New York City cab driver in. And so I don't know if any of the Yankees have seen it. Who's my favorite Yankee? That's a very hard question. I mean, the problem is that this was the sort of team that I was most attached to and they were also flawed. That it's hard to. And particularly over the course of doing my research, I learned about all of their many weaknesses. So I don't know if I really have one at this point. Anyone.

So the book, I thought was excellent.

Thank you.

ESPN is kind of, as you alluded to, is taking it to more of a baseball approach.

Yes.

And the book is a baseball book, but it deals with so much else.

Right.

Uses baseball for anyone.

Right.

What do you think about.

Yeah, I mean, it's a good question, I think. You know, I would have loved to have seen a miniseries or a movie that kind of took in.

That made more of an effort, I guess, to.

Get the sort of the story of New York. But I feel like they tried. I just think that in a way, narratively, there's not much you can do because if you're writing a book, these events all happen kind of contemporaneously. So the day that the Son of Sam was caught, Reggie was finally moved to the cleanup spot after Billy Martin had sort of been tormenting him all year, sticking them in the bottom of the lineup, take him out of games.

So you have these events that kind.

Of happen at the same time. And if you're living in New York at the time, it's not that I'm trying to, I don't think, kind of force some kind of symbolism. I'm just saying, like, if you're experiencing this as a New Yorker, you're opening your Daily News or your New York Post and you're seeing some Sam Cott and Reggie moved.

It's all happening. It's part of your experience. But if you're writing a book, you.

Can just tell it that way. If you're trying to write a movie, if you're trying to make a movie narratively, it's hard.

I don't know what you can really.

Do, because unless you establish a whole separate set of characters. And they tried to do that with Son of Sam. And frankly, most of the negative reviews that I've read have criticized that. They felt that the Son of Sam story was. And a number of my friends have said this, too, that the Son of Sam story doesn't really feel like it fits with the baseball story. So I just don't know if it had been a documentary that they could have pulled it off. But I think to dramatize it, there's sort of no way to do it. So I guess I feel on one level that. Do I feel like the miniseries captures the whole book? No, definitely not. And is that a little disappointing? Yeah, sure. On the other hand, I mean, just the sort of good fortune of even having something bought and made is kind of. I'm in no position to complain. Yes.

So were you approached by ESPN or was it vice versa? And then along the lines of the documentary, was there any thought of making it a documentary? Like, approaching an hbo?

Yeah.

Basically what happened is that ESPN emailed my agent, like. Right.

Really?

I don't even know if the book was out. It was. Was just coming out and expressed interest in it. And then actually, subsequently, I did talk to two documentary filmmakers who both wanted to do it as a documentary and tell the whole story of the city.

And I actually wanted to do both.

Because I really felt that I knew that the ESPN story was going to be the baseball story, and I felt that I wanted this other stuff in there.

And.

But what happened. And we tried, actually. But what happened ultimately is that because ESPN was planning on using documentary footage and doing promotional videos that have interviews with people like Ed Koch and stuff like that, they wanted the nonfiction rights as well, and they weren't going to do it unless they could have the nonfiction rights. So ultimately, I kind of had to choose. Did I want a documentary or did I want the ESPN thing? And frankly, what I thought at the time was that ESPN was going to just buy the option and then not do anything with it, because that's what usually happens. So I figured, I'll sell them the option, they'll sit on it for a year, Nothing will happen. They'll commission a script, they won't like it, they'll move on, and then maybe a documentary will be made. But then, lo and behold, they were like, we're going to do an eight part miniseries. So, yeah, I mean, I would have loved to have seen a documentary. Unfortunately, that they ESPN owns the nonfiction rights, so it's not likely to happen. Anyone else? Is that it?

Okay.

Well, thank you, guys.

It was fun.