Tag: sports

No. 97: Joe Beimel

fartheroffthewall

This is the latest post for an ongoing media project — SoCal Sports History 101: The Prime Numbers from 00 to 99 that Uniformly, Uniquely and Unapologetically Reveal The Narrative of Our Region’s Athletic Heritage.  Pick a number and highlight an athlete — person, place or thing — most obviously connected to it by fame and fortune, someone who isn’t so obvious, and then take a deeper dive into the most interesting story tied to it. It’s a combination of star power, achievement, longevity, notoriety, and, above all, what makes that athlete so Southern California. Quirkiness and notoriety factor in. And it should open itself to more discussion and debate — which is what sports is best at doing.

The most obvious choices for No. 97:

= Joey Bosa, Los Angeles Chargers
= Jeremy Roenick, Los Angeles Kings
= Joe Beimel, Los Angeles Dodgers

The most interesting story for No. 97:
Joe Beimel, Los Angeles Dodgers relief pitcher (2006 to 2008)
Southern California map pinpoints:
Los Angeles (Dodger Stadium bullpen), Torrance

What a relief it was in 2008 — Joe Beimel bamboozled those in the burgeoning business of baseball bobbleheads, bringing it upon himself to rebrand his name, image and likeness to his liking.

As something of a left-over in a world of left-handed middle relievers, Beimel had found a place in the Los Angeles Dodgers bullpen during the 2006 and ’07 season primarily as the guy who could be called upon to bind up NL West rival Barry Bonds when he came to the plate in a key situation. With that, Beimel somehow converted an under-the-radar, cool surfer vibe into ceramic folk-lore status.

His faithful followers actually forced the Dodgers to make good on a promotional campaign promise and create a bobble replica of him — free, for those who bought a ticket to a promoted game. That’s what the people wanted. Allegedly.

With all due respect, did everyone respect the process by which this happened, and can still live with its consequences?

Nod yes if you are in the affirmative.

The context

Once upon a time, a kitschy paper-mache souvenir that represented the game’s innocence in the 1960s began showing up. It often had a generic cherub face with a disturbing grin that kids could put on their shelves and be haunted by as its head bounced up and down on coils, brandishing the team’s colors and uniform.

By the late 1990s, the nostalgic craze for baseball of yesteryear was ignited when the San Francisco Giants tested out a Willie Mays bobble figurine, and 35,000 were given away in a 1999 game.

The Dodgers, of course, couldn’t watch the giant promotional opportunity pass them by.

By 2001, the Dodgers ramped up their first offerings as a fan giveaway — Tommy Lasorda, Kirk Gibson and Fernando Valenzuela were the first three created. Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully quipped the Gibson bobblehead looked more like actor Stacy Keach.

From there, the Dodgers and their China-made bobbleheads came as a steady flow. When they expanded to four giveaways in 2007, fans were allowed to pick one to create through an Internet vote. Catcher Russell Martin was the first “winner.”

In spring training of 2008, the team announced plans for bobblehead nights recognizing incoming manager Joe Torre and All-Star pitcher Takashi Saito. Now there were two spots up for grabs for the voters. The likely candidates were Matt Kemp and Andre Ethier. Maybe Nomar Garciaparra or newly acquired Andruw Jones. Clayton Kershaw was just a 20-year-old unproven rookie. Manny Ramirez wouldn’t barge into the spotlight until months later.

Beimel, a 6-foot-3, scruffy long-haired guy from Pennsylvania came into town a couple years earlier with baggy pants to go with a baggy uniform. Given No. 97, it was, at the time, the highest number ever used by a Dodger going back to the 1930s. Beimel said 97 represented the birth year of his son Drew, his first child.

Continue reading “No. 97: Joe Beimel” →

No. 3: Scott Weiland

fartheroffthewall

This is the latest post for an ongoing media project — SoCal Sports History 101: The Prime Numbers from 00 to 99 that Uniformly, Uniquely and Unapologetically Reveal The Narrative of Our Region’s Athletic Heritage.  Pick a number and highlight an athlete — person, place or thing — most obviously connected to it by fame and fortune, someone who isn’t so obvious, and then take a deeper dive into the most interesting story tied to it. It’s a combination of star power, achievement, longevity, notoriety, and, above all, what makes that athlete so Southern California. Quirkiness and notoriety factor in. And it should open itself to more discussion and debate — which is what sports is best at doing.

The most obvious choices for No. 3:

= Carson Palmer: USC football
= Keyshawn Johnson: USC football
= Willie Davis: Los Angeles Dodgers
= Anthony Davis: Los Angeles Lakers
= Candace Parker: Los Angeles Sparks
= Chris Paul: Los Angeles Clippers

The not-so-obvious choices for No. 3:

= Josh Rosen: UCLA football
= Glenn Burke: Los Angeles Dodgers
= Steve Sax: Los Angeles Dodgers

The most interesting story for No. 3:
Scott Weiland: Edison High of Huntington Beach football quarterback (1982 to 1985)
Southern California map pinpoints:
Huntington Beach, Costa Mesa, Long Beach, Hollywood

The photo documents perhaps the only tangle circulated evidence that Scott Weiland played football — an aspiring quarterback trying to make his mark at Edison High School in Huntington Beach.

He kind of looked like a young Sean Salisbury — ready, willing and able to commandeer a team to success and fame. The hairstyle of the moment was helmet friendly.

Yet, the eventual lead voice and flamboyantly driving force in and out of Stone Temple Pilots, Velvet Revolver and Art of Anarchy, fired or otherwise bored with each venture, wouldn’t be on track to become the famous college football player as he once thought he’d like to be.

High school non-confidential: The teen years focused on self discovery, watching, listening, hatching experiments, hormones raging, expectations and lack of sleep leads to falling into groups of new fast friends and/or swallowed up by cliche cliques.

At a peak of his music fame in 2007, Weiland was asked in fan Q&A about his high school activities.

“What kind of self-respecting outcast were you?” he was asked.

He explained:

“One with a lot of cojones. I was never a jock, but I was an athlete, and I was good. (Edison High) had just won multiple state football titles; it was a hardcore football school. I had aspirations of going to Notre Dame, so I played quarterback. But also I was into music: I sang in the school choir; and the two worlds didn’t really hold hands skipping down the hallways. I got a lot of flak from the coach and the guys on the team. Then I formed a rock & roll band with my best friend, and at the start of the senior year, I decided that I was into music more.”

While there is the one football photo, there thousands more snapshots, videos and websites that celebrate Weiland’s legendary music work — nominated for six Grammys, winning two for Best Hard Rock Performance, selling 50 millions records and called a “voice of our generation” by Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corrigan.

Some critics might have thought his bands were “a shameless clone of such grunge leaders as Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Soundgarden.” But taken individually, Weiland was called “one of the towering figures in the history of rock” by Rolling Stone magazine.

Audiences and fans were captivated by a chaotic stage presence. He was a champion chameleon, amplified by a megaphone. All in all, he navigated the diversity of glam, and alt rock, and pop, and hair-metal ballads far better than he did toxic mix of drugs, alcohol and all else the came to consume him.

So when he died in 2015 of a drug overdose at the age 48, the question had to be asked: How will he be remembered?

We are left with shards of facts and quotes and guesses. And photos. Many provided by him.

Continue reading “No. 3: Scott Weiland” →

Nos. 68 and 86: Mike and Marlin McKeever

fartheroffthewall

This is the latest post for an ongoing media project — SoCal Sports History 101: The Prime Numbers from 00 to 99 that Uniformly, Uniquely and Unapologetically Reveal The Narrative of Our Region’s Athletic Heritage.  Pick a number and highlight an athlete — person, place or thing — most obviously connected to it by fame and fortune, someone who isn’t so obvious, and then take a deeper dive into the most interesting story tied to it. It’s a combination of star power, achievement, longevity, notoriety, and, above all, what makes that athlete so Southern California. Quirkiness and notoriety factor in. And it should open itself to more discussion and debate — which is what sports is best at doing.

The most obvious choices for No. 68:
= Keith Van Horn, USC football
= Mike McKeever, USC football
= Frank Cornish, UCLA football
= Ross Stripling, Los Angeles Dodgers

The most obvious choices for No. 86:
= Marlin McKeever, USC football, Los Angeles Rams
= Jack Bighead, Pepperdine football; Los Angeles Rams


The most interesting story for No. 68 and No. 86:
= Mike McKeever, USC football offensive and defensive guard (1957 to 1960)
= Marlin McKeever, USC football offensive and defensive end / fullback / punter (1957 to 1960); Los Angeles Rams tight end / linebacker (1961 to 1966, 1971 to 1972).

Southern California map pinpoints:
South Los Angeles, the Coliseum, Montebello, Long Beach

You betcha, the way Marlin and Mike McKeever’s lives started made for a nifty ice breaker when Groucho Marx had them on his TV show in March of 1961.

So it was during a blizzard on New Year’s Day 1940, on the plains in Cheyenne, Wyoming, when Marlin arrived first. Mike followed 10 minutes later.

The thing is, their parents were told by the doctor to only expect a girl. Just one at that.

“They already named her — Mary Ann I believe,” Mike told Groucho with a chuckle as he and Marlin, along with their new brides, Judy and Susie, made to NBC Studios in Hollywood for a filming of what was then called “The Groucho Show,” an offshoot of the more famous title “You Bet Your Life.”

Their days as USC All-American football giants had just ended. When the 1960 season ended, they had a double wedding ceremony at St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church in L.A., just blocks away from the USC campus. Later that month, they were drafted by the Los Angeles Rams.

Groucho Marx took a puff of his cigar, sized up the pair of crew-cut, 6-foot-1 and 225-pounders, and remarked: “Imagine getting all set for a baby girl named Mary Ann and suddenly these two show up.”

Groucho was fascinated with how their parents distinguished the two. Marlin said it was by writing their names in Mercurochrome on their stomachs.

“How do you know they weren’t confused?” Groucho asked. “How do you know they didn’t paint the wrong name?”

Mike spoke up: “I’ve thought about that — it’s pretty depressing so I don’t think about it too much.”

Added Marlin: “He can’t think too much, that’s the problem.”

Suddenly, they were the Smothers Brothers.

As Marlin’s wife Susie listed all the twins’ list of achievements at USC, Groucho had to ask: “Well how do you know all this?”

“I kept a scrapbook,” she replied.

A stuffed duck looking like Grouch dropped down from the ceiling to fanfare. She had said the secret word — book. When George Fenneman doled $50 each to the men, to split the $100 prize, they handed it over to their wives.

They were, after all, Academic All-Americans too.

The background

From a Life magazine 1959 profile on the McKeever twins at USC.

The McKeevers were most definitely the biggest men on campus at Mount Carmel High in South L.A. from 1953 to ’57.

The all-boys Catholic school took over 70th Street between Hoover and Vermont, just 20 years old at the time. The Carmelite Order that would later found Crespi High in Encino made sports an integral part of its curriculum to attract students.

Continue reading “Nos. 68 and 86: Mike and Marlin McKeever” →

No. 34: Fernando Valenzuela

fartheroffthewall

This is the latest post for an ongoing media project — SoCal Sports History 101: The Prime Numbers from 00 to 99 that Uniformly, Uniquely and Unapologetically Reveal The Narrative of Our Region’s Athletic Heritage.  Pick a number and highlight an athlete — person, place or thing — most obviously connected to it by fame and fortune, someone who isn’t so obvious, and then take a deeper dive into the most interesting story tied to it. It’s a combination of star power, achievement, longevity, notoriety, and, above all, what makes that athlete so Southern California. Quirkiness and notoriety factor in. And it should open itself to more discussion and debate — which is what sports is best at doing.

The most obvious choices for No. 34:

= Fernando Valenzuela, Los Angeles Dodgers
= Shaquille O’Neal, Los Angeles Lakers
= Bo Jackson, Los Angeles Raiders

The not-so-obvious choices for No. 34:

= David Greenwood, Verbum Dei High and UCLA basketball
= Nick Adenhart, Los Angeles Angels
= Paul Pierce, Inglewood High, Los Angeles Clippers
= Paul Cameron, UCLA football

The most interesting story for No. 34:
Fernando Valenzuela, Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher (1980 to 1990)
Southern California map pinpoints:
Dodger Stadium, East L.A., Boyle Heights, Los Feliz, La Canada-Flintridge

On November 1, 2024 — the first of the annual two-day celebration of Dia de la Muertos, a Latino-cultural event where family and friends gathering to pay respects to those close to them who have died — Fernando Valenzuela would have turned 64 years old.

But when he had died nine days earlier, it made that day, and the power of the event, even more poignant.

Valenzuela’s passing from a long bout with liver cancer came just two days before the Los Angeles Dodgers started the 2024 World Series against the New York Yankees. The Dodgers wore No. 34 patches on their shoulder in his honor.

By the time November 1 rolled around, the Dodgers were celebrating a five-game championship series victory, riding double-deck buses through the city. Many players, and fans, wore the familiar Valenzuela 34 jersey.

Also on that day, artist Robert Vargas finished the first of a three-panel project on the side of the Boyle Hotel, facing the First Street on-ramp to Interstate 101 in Boyle Heights. The multifaceted image of Valenzuela seemed to make him come to life again.

Scores of ofrendas poppedup up at the base of site, as well as near the freeway and the street. Same at Dodger Stadium and the roads leading into it.

Visiting the mural site almost became going to a religious shrine.

The experience ignited vivid memories of 1981, when fans of all backgrounds swarmed on Dodger Stadium to witness the then-20-year-old from Mexico who only spoke Spanish do things never seen before on a Major League Baseball diamond. Words, in any language, couldn’t describe it.

Especially, as this was happening on the site that once was a dilapidating housing complex for low-income Latino families who unceremoniously were evicted in the late ’50s when the City of L.A. gave the property to the Dodgers to build upon.

At the Vargas mural site, the drone of cars passing by on the freeway provided a constant soundtrack. It was broken up each day Vargas did the mural by a mariachi band, which came from nearby Mariachi Plaza, performed each day at 4 p.m. to give the artistic process a blessing.

“It’s about unity and representation and bringing different cultures together, which Fernando is still doing as we speak,” Vargas told reporters who called him off the scaffolding for interviews.

Boyle Heights born-and-raised, Vargas had, a few months earlier, depicted his vision of newest Dodger star Shohei Ohtani on the side of the Miyako Hotel in Little Tokyo. It was just a mile West of this Valenzuela site, across the bridge that spanned the Los Angeles River. The murals could now serve as cultural touchstones of the city.

As the mural inspired by “Fermandomania” was named “Fernandomania Forever, finished up by early November. To Vargas, and most others who ever saw him play, it reflects an inate feeling that Valenzuela will live forever in the minds of those who still talk about his feats in excited, as well as reverent, tones.

Continue reading “No. 34: Fernando Valenzuela” →

No. 36: Roy Gleason

fartheroffthewall

This is the latest post for an ongoing media project — SoCal Sports History 101: The Prime Numbers from 00 to 99 that Uniformly, Uniquely and Unapologetically Reveal The Narrative of Our Region’s Athletic Heritage.  Pick a number and highlight an athlete — person, place or thing — most obviously connected to it by fame and fortune, someone who isn’t so obvious, and then take a deeper dive into the most interesting story tied to it. It’s a combination of star power, achievement, longevity, notoriety, and, above all, what makes that athlete so Southern California. Quirkiness and notoriety factor in. And it should open itself to more discussion and debate — which is what sports is best at doing.

The most obvious choices for No. 36:
= Bo Belinsky: Los Angeles Angels
= Don Newcombe: Los Angeles Dodgers
= Jered Weaver: Long Beach State and Los Angeles Angels
= Jeff Weaver: Los Angeles Dodgers and Los Angels Angels
= Steve Bilko: Los Angeles Dodgers

The not-so-obvious choices for No. 36:
= Frank Robinson: Los Angeles Dodgers
= Jerome Bettis: Los Angeles Rams
= Fernando Valenzuela: California Angels
= Greg Maddux: Los Angeles Dodgers

The most interesting story for No. 36:
Roy Gleason: Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder (1963)
Southern California map pinpoints:
Garden Grove, Los Angeles (Dodger Stadium)

Roy Gleason looks at a replacement of the 1963 World Champion ring he was given by the Los Angeles Dodgers during a ceremony at Dodger Stadium, with manager Jim Tracy, before a game on Sept. 20, 2003. Gleason’s career was cut short by the Vietnam War, where Gleason received a Purple Heart and other decorations but never returned to baseball. The original ring was lost in Vietnam. (Photo by Stephen Dunn/Getty Images)

Roy Gleason made into eight games with the Los Angeles Dodgers during a September, 1963 callup, but the first seven were just for pinch-running duties. His one at bat, an eighth-inning stand-up double against Philadelphia against left-hander Dennis Bennett at Dodger Stadium, is documented in a box score. The 20-year-old hit a low inside fastball down the left field line.

That was it for the 6-foot-4, switch hitting Garden Grove High product who signed a $55,000 bonus baby contract in 1961. He had turned down a contract with the Boston Red Sox even after Ted Williams personally recruited him. But the Dodgers were concerned he was too much into the L.A. nightlife and wasn’t dedicated enough at that point.

The team was preparing for another trip to the World Series, eventually sweeping the New York Yankees in four straight. Gleason would be given a ’63 World Series ring for his contribution.

But he’d never play in the big league again. Especially after a trip to Vietnam.

He may have been a Dodger. But he wasn’t a draft dodger, even if it made no sense to him why the Army would come looking for him in 1967.

Continue reading “No. 36: Roy Gleason” →