When was Lupica good (great?)

Well slap my ass and call me Drip. Time for new material fellas.

 

I would lean toward the latter. I'm sure they get tired mentally from the grind and the pressure to be great every time out, but I would guess the status and praise gets to them more.

 

I've defended Mikey enough on this board and the previous one that I know I'm not going to convert anyone and that no one's going to change my mind about anyone whose raw copy I've seen. But consider, too, that his best years were in an all-time great era to be a sports writer in that market. Hank Steinbrenner is not his dad at his lunatic best, Joe Girardi is not Billy Martin, Jeter is not Reggie Jackson, Nadal isn't Connors or McEnroe or even Nastase, and the current columnists in the market, who are good in my opinion, are not Red Smith, Dave Anderson and Dick Young and neither are they a young Lupica. And there wasn't talk radio. And there was less moonlighting and zero tweeting, but there was a shitload of blow for almost everyone. It was a different time. Lupica's greatest stuff involved Yankees and tennis at an ususually interesting time for both. He can't duplicate it now and neither can anyone else.

 

Well said. I know nothing of Lupica other than what others say and the small bits I've seen him on TV and read.

 

Thanks for the perspective, Frank.

All I can add is generally speaking, it's just tough to sustain greatness (which, I'll point out, is in the subject line in the form of a question). Good over decades is not a given. If you can find someone who thought highly of you 20, 30 or 40 years ago, and still thinks just as highly of you, hug that person. And thank them.

 

I guess the main problem isn't his writing. It's the way he treats people, which has been documented time and again. It's possible to be a big-time talent and not big time people. Old-school guys like Dan Jenkins and Furman Bisher didn't do it. More recent guys like Wilbon, Calishaw, Andande, Bianchi and Cote are decent people. It's not Loopy's body of work. It's his attitude and mean-spirited manner.

 

No excuse for that.

 

See, that doesn't matter to me, as someone who never has to deal with him. I don't care about the quality of his person. But his columns are not good. Again, my age comes into play here, but over the past decade I've probably read or started to read 200-some columns by Mike Lupica. I can count on one hand how many I enjoyed.

Take his latest sports column, on Jason Kidd: http://nydn.us/1agGbtu
Or his previous one, an exceedingly ridiculously navel-gazing piece of work also on Kidd: http://nydn.us/1agGhBd
Or the one before that, which strings up at least three straw men and still manages to navel gaze on Biogenesis: http://nydn.us/1agGvbv

What's good about those?

 

By the time it was in the Daily News on Saturday that Kidd was having this meeting ...

This was a very good idea that you read here first.

What we thought was such a good idea here that we put it in Saturday’s Daily News sure did become the Nets’ big idea.



That shit sure does get old fast.

 

Never had the pleasure of reading his raw copy. I truly respect your perspective.

 

Lupica is going to be just up the road.

Mike Lupica to discuss latest book

MANCHESTER — New York Times bestselling author Mike Lupica will be visiting the Northshire Bookstore at 4 p.m. on Saturday, July 29 to promote his new book, "Point Guard," the third in his Home Team young adult series.

In the novel, main character Gus faces issues such as prejudice against his Dominican heritage and a new girl playing point guard, all while trying to lead his basketball team to a winning season.

Northshire events manager Tracy Davies called the book "timely," saying "it is about prejudices, about kids and how they feel about immigrants and other kids that, in their minds, might be different." A Booklist review from January praised the novel as "a whirl of fast-break hoops action threaded with provocative personal issues," and the Huffington Post called it a "fast-paced, deeply enjoyable story."

"I love Manchester [and] I love that bookstore," Lupica told the Journal. "I'm in there all the time, they let me do my podcasts there when I'm in town."

 

easy to hate, i guess, so go ahead. but lupica's stuff through the early '90s was incredible, and he -- like montville in boston, or murray in LA, or the texas boys in dallas for both papers -- for a time seemed to capture and be the voice of his town/readership. there aren't many who ever did that, anywhere. he also, contrary to all received wisdom and for reasons that remain unknown to me still, was incredibly supportive/kind to me when i had barely spoken to him and was at a lower-rung paper in another city and could do NOTHING for him. and that never changed.

so, yeah, i've heard all the stories about colleagues, etc. but all i know is what i read and how he treated me. and both were great.