Pat Jordan on Chasing Jose Canseco

Pat Jordan is a great writer.

Strange man, but great writer.

 

i enjoyed the read.

 

It's like "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," only weirder.
Way weirder.

 

Loved every word. Pitch-perfect tone given the subject matter. Makes me wish my old boss had ponied up for the "spend a day with Jose" online auction. In a subtle, but also kinda cosmic way, I think it works as sendup and indictment of what we all do for a living, and why we're able to make a living doing it in the first place.

It's also a really good example of how the story behind the story is often better, funnier, and more illuminating than the story itself. Even though most of us are taught that READERS DON'T CARE ABOUT THAT. I beg to differ for many reasons, but that's probably a topic for another thread.

 

When do we stop taking a number for our turn to beat up on Canseco?

 

entertainment is entertainment, and by god, that was entertaining.

it would take a phenomenal bore to not enjoy that piece.

 

For some reason, I have had trouble getting my post to appear on this thread -- I think it had to do with trying to cut and paste from Pat Jordan's Web site. I was a fan for a long time, thought Black Coach and A False Spring were two of the best sports books I ever read and I still remember a 1988 piece he wrote on the late Jaco Pastorius for GQ. I didn't know who Pastorius was, but I read the piece because Jordan wrote it and I bought an album because of it, although I'm not a jazz fan and found the solo album unlistenable. But the writing was that good, and I was that much a fan of the writer. Now I wonder how much of any of the above was true. And how much of the Canseco piece is, especially since it's apparently unedited. I wonder if Jordan's writing is any more credible than Canseco's.

A year or two ago, I noticed weird things about his Web site. He's selling access to stories by the piece and notes that some of them were bought by magazines but never published or that some weren't bought at all. Hmmm. Very strange. How does a writer of his stature wind up with something that no magazine will buy? Then there's a "disclaimer" in which it says the unpublished stories weren't fact-checked, and he can't be accountable for the accuracy. All those years of writing, did he just kind of poop on the page and then wait for a fact-checker to call him and say whether what he just wrote happened to be, well, true? And he can't be accountable if it isn't? Because there's no fact-checker, you see. (So don't sue me. But you can pay to read it anyway. I take Paypal.)

My hero. (Sigh.)

It seems that he and blogs were made for each other: Here it is, not my fault if some of it isn't true.

 

That's an interesting observation about Jordan. But people might be surprised at the on-the-job behavior of some well-respected writers. At one place I worked, we got a call from Curry Kirkpatrick. He was working on a profile of Pete Sampras for another mag and wanted us to send him all our recent coverage to aid his research. Our senior editorial assistant told him he could go straight to hell in a hurry.

 

Well, that's only part of the point. I mean it is bad enough that a writer would be cavalier enough to not want to get the facts straight in the first place because a fact-checker will follow him with a pooper-scooper. But to acknowledge that shortcoming and offer it to the public (for a price) anyway is lazy beyond belief and disrespectful to the reader, not to mention the subjects of the stories. Clean your shit up before you fling it at us.

 

Canseco was on Stern this week and Jordan called up to complain that Canseco hadn't given him the interview after he flew out there. Jordan sounded like a complete jackass that didn't get a date for the prom. Hard to believe Canseco could come off sounding more mature than someone else.

 

Pat Jordan's new cottage industry -- writing about not getting interviews with players:

http://www.slate.com/id/2190955/

 

First time I tried to interview Seaver -- can't remember if he was with Reds or White Sox -- he turned me down flat in a spring training dugout. After all, I was working for a mid-sized metro daily several states away from where he pitched. Less than two minutes later, New York Times scribe walks up to him and Seaver gives him 20 minutes of chatting and grabbing.

I'll talk Steve Carlton turning down everyone equally over that sort of big league crap.