The 5 Reasons Why I Hate Drug Stores

1) They make me walk in circles looking for what I want.

2) The people who work in them all act like they're medicated. (Have you every seen someone at Duane Reade smile? Me neither.)

3) They carry 50 kinds of deodorant, but never the one I want.

4) They take 45 minutes to fill your prescription.

5) They make me feel like a crystal meth dealer every time I buy sinus medication. (All I want is relief. Do I really need to produce a driver's license, write down my address, and sign my name? Seriously, in most states, it's easier to buy a gun.)

I hope that someone else sees the folly in this and sets to work on building a better drug store. Just look what Whole Foods did for grocery shopping. If you pull it off, I promise to do all my shopping with you. In the meantime, I'm going to see what I can do about this headache. Duane Reade aspirin? It doesn't seem to help.

More Dodo Than Dinosaur

I had to leave the house yesterday to clear my head. I started walking east up Main Street to Broadway, then turned right and ducked into the local tavern for a burger and a beer. As I sat by myself in the booth by the window, my head lost in a magazine, the man at the bar started talking. He was dressed in black and his face showed the wear of some sixty odd years of living, but he seemed friendly enough. He asked if I'd mind if he played the jukebox and I said go right ahead. He told me he'd been a drummer once, had played here and there in Greenwich Village in the sixties and a time or two in the same California venue as The Doors. In 1968, he'd moved to L.A. from NYC, met a woman and married her. The adventure had ended soon thereafter when she lost the child she was carrying. "Don't know if it was a boy or a girl," he said. "You don't look back. What's the point? You can't change a thing."

He stood up from his bar stool and walked to the jukebox in the back. Moments later, the sadly outdated opening guitar lick from Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love" filled the air.

I've been waiting so long
To be where I'm going

I had to smile. It was oddly appropriate. The man, you see, is now a Pentecostal minister and I had been thinking a lot lately about the Apocalypse. Not the end of the world. Just the end of my world. The signs are everywhere. Ninety thousand journalists lost their jobs in 2009. My employer closed six magazines. I spent a good bit of the holidays trying to evaluate the declining worth of my skill set. And then, just this week, I read in the Los Angeles Times that some freelance writers are accepting work for sixteen cents a word. That's right. Sixteen cents a word. For as long as I can remember, the industry standard has been two dollars. Are things really changing that fast?

I suppose so. And it's not like I don't welcome the change. There's a part of me that thrills to the prospect of what could be. I've spent far too long toiling under the thumb of the baby boom generation. I'd like nothing more than to break with that tradition. Yes, I've been waiting so long to be where I'm going. But I'm wise enough to know that the keys to the kingdom long since promised to me are more likely to land in the hands of the millennials once this revolution has run its course. And so, I'm doing all I can to learn the new tricks of the trade.

I'm open to embracing your vision of the future if you'll permit me to share some wisdom from the past. Let's find new ways to tell important stories. Let's do what we can to reward the good writers and the good editors for quality work. And let's not forget that change is hard. It might take some pushing and some patience from both sides to come up with the ideal solution.

I don't feel like a dinosaur. Maybe just a dodo bird—eager to learn how to fly again.

The Courage of Curt Flood

Every ring has a story to tell, but the one that will be auctioned off in Louisville, Kentucky, tomorrow is more significant than most. It's a 1964 World Series ring that once belonged to Curt Flood. From 1963-1969, Flood won seven consecutive gold gloves as the center fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals. He left the game with a lifetime batting average of .293. But he's best remembered today as the man who sacrificed his career to challenge major league baseball's reserve clause.

It was 40 years ago last month that Flood learned that he had been traded with teammates Tim McCarver, Byron Browne and Joe Hoerner to the Philadelphia Phillies. Unlike those men and scores of others who had gone before him, however, Curt Flood refused to pack his bags. Instead he wrote a letter to commissioner Bowie Kuhn asking to be declared a free agent and when Kuhn refused, Flood took major league baseball to court. It was a courageous stand that cost him what remained of his career—he played only 13 more games (for the Washington Senators in 1971)—and soon left him bankrupt. He ultimately fled to the Spanish island of Majorca where he played guitar and painted portraits.

On June 19, 1972, the Supreme Court voted 5-3 in favor of major league baseball, thus ending Flood's challenge. But his peers in the game, encouraged by what they had seen and heard, soon took up the fight. In 1974, Catfish Hunter was awarded free agency by an arbitrator due to a contract violation by Oakland A's owner Charles Finley. And one year later, Andy Messersmith of the Dodgers challenged the reserve clause by playing out his option year without signing a new contract. Retired pitcher Dave McNally joined him in the cause. Both were granted free agency by arbitrator Peter Seitz.

When Flood left the game in 1971, the Senators had agreed to pay him $110,000 for the season. The average player was earning less than half that. As George Vecsey writes in Baseball: A History of America's Favorite Game, baseball paychecks increased by leaps and bounds in the wake of Flood's stand: "The average salary kept jumping from $51,000 in 1976 to $371,000 in 1985 and $489,000 in 1989 and $880,000 in 1991." When Flood died of throat cancer in 1997, the average major league ball player could expect to earn $1.3 million—all thanks to free agency. And, with little reason to worry about paying the electric bills, players were free to obsess about championship rings.

The ring Curt Flood won in 1964 is expected to fetch at least $15,000 at auction. The copy of the famed 1972 Supreme Court decision that he signed? Well, that should sell for a mere $500-$700.

A-Rod Gets His Ring

So it sounds like Alex Rodriguez is a changed man. To hear people talk, he's undergone this incredible transformation. He started the baseball season as a self-centered, steroid-taking "fraud" (as his former manager Joe Torre famously let slip in The Yankee Years) and in the course of 139 games, he became this likable, magnanimous, clutch-hitting champion.

Such is the magic of the championship ring.

I know this because I've studied it for years. Back in the mid-1990s, when I was a senior editor at ESPN The Magazine, I read a lot of newspapers searching for story ideas. The New York Times. Washington Post. Chicago Tribune. Dallas Morning News. Atlanta Constitution Journal. It didn't take long—or any particular genius—to notice how infatuated sportswriters have become with championship rings. They love to use them as shorthand. "Tom Brady has three... Derek Jeter has five." That sort of thing.

The more I read, the more I came to view the people who own them as royalty—members of the most select fraternity in America. Forget about Skull & Bones, the Yale playground of George W. Bush. This club boasted Michael Jordan, Joe Montana and Wayne Gretzky.

Dan Marino wasn't good enough to cross the threshold.

Neither were John Stockton and Karl Malone.

Ted Williams? Sorry, but that name doesn't appear on the list.

This is an absurd way of thinking, of course. How could anyone question the athletic achievements of those men? Marino holds 17 NFL passing records. He was an eight-time All-Pro, the MVP of the league in 1984, and his chiseled chin now graces a bust in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. And yet, thousands of people—on sports talk radio, in newspapers and on the internet—continue to debate Marino's legacy. One even suggested that the quarterback's name be added to the urban dictionary. The definition: "Someone who possesses no jewelry." As in: "That fool is broke, he's Dan Marino."

Now come on. Do you honestly think that Marino sits around wishing he were more like Charlie Batch, a man who earned two Super Bowl rings as Ben Roethlisberger's backup?

Still, flawed though it may be as a standard of measurement, the championship ring is hard to dismiss. Even great athletes buy into its mythology. Junior Seau returned to New England last month for a 20th season of pro football—at age 40—because he does not yet have one. "If I had a ring in place," he said, "I'd probably think otherwise." And Ray Bourque surely must endorse that decision. He requested a trade after 21 seasons with the Boston Bruins, tipping his hat to his teammates and jetting off to Colorado. Why? Because he desperately wanted to leave the game with a ring full of diamonds on his finger. He called it quits a year and a half later—17 days after earning his prize.

The first championship rings were handed out in 1922 to the New York Baseball Giants, a team that soundly defeated the Yankees in five games to win the World Series. (Want some idea of how long ago that was? Game Two ended in a 3-3 tie. It was called after 10 innings on account of darkness.) The Giants players weren't exactly overwhelmed by the gesture. One year earlier, outfielder Casey Stengel had pointed out the game's true spoils when he said, "I'm going home with the winner's share of that old World Series coin!" For winning the 1922 classic, he and his teammates each received a $4,545 bonus, a princely sum when you consider that Yankee first baseman Wally Pipp, a proven home run hitter, earned only $6,500 a year. And pitcher Bob Shawkey, a three-time, 20-game winner, pulled down $8,500. Even the great Babe Ruth kneeled before the Almighty Dollar. He was suspended for the first six weeks of the 1922 season for defying baseball's ban against barnstorming World Series squads.

The Yankee powerhouses of the forties and fifties were no fonder of their rings. In 1951, after winning three titles in four years, Yogi Berra requested a pocket watch. In '52, he took home a silver cigarette case.* Frank Crosetti, the team's shortstop, preferred rifles with World Series Champions stamped on the barrels. Two decades later, Roy Blount Jr. of Sports Illustrated would write of Crosetti: "He is said to have become wealthy from 23 World Series purses gathered as a player and a coach." In that very same issue, Oscar Robertson rejoiced after finally securing his one and only world championship without making a single mention of a ring. In fact, the earliest reference I have found to the much-heralded talisman appeared in a 1976 Sports Illustrated profile of Jack Lambert who, Robert F. Jones wrote, won "two rings in his first two years." It was those same Steelers, the team of the decade in which athletes' salaries took the first great leap into the stratosphere, who put the championship ring on the map. Free to quietly pocket their $18,000 Super Bowl bonuses, they assaulted our consciousness with a dreadful disco fight song...

We are the Steelers, the Super Steelers,

We know how to get the job done.

We are the Steelers, the Super Steelers,

We'll have one for the thumb in '81.

The gods of football were no doubt appalled. It took Pittsburgh 26 more years to win that fifth ring.

Will owning a championship ring truly transform A-Rod's life? Who can say? It did very little to save Sweet Lou Johnson from heartache. And it certainly didn't rescue those Steelers of the seventies from tragedy. Rocky Bleier sold his four Super Bowl rings for $40,000 in 1996. Two days later, he filed for bankruptcy. Backup Joe Gilliam lost two to cocaine and heroin while living in a cardboard box beneath a bridge. He died of a heart attack at age 49 on Christmas Day 2000. And Mike Webster was a defeated man suffering from brain damage and depression when his heart gave out on him in an Iron City hospital room on September 24, 2002. He was so dependent on Ritalin he was arrested for forging prescriptions. His 18-year-old son Garret had to look after him as if he were a child. There were days, he said, when his father simply could not lift himself off the couch.

* Years later, George Steinbrenner presented Yogi with a complete set of 10 replica rings to make amends for firing him as Yankee manager.

Hoop Dreams

http://www.flickr.com/photos/laffy4k/ / CC BY 2.0

Baseball wasn't Sweet Lou's first love. Like most every boy raised in Lexington, Kentucky, he dreamed of playing basketball for Adolph Rupp at UK. The oldest of five children, four boys and one girl, Louis Brown Johnson graduated from Dunbar High in 1951—three years before the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in Brown v. the Board of Education. His father was a laborer, a custodian at the university. His mother earned what she could as a cook in the fraternity houses near campus and in a local high school. "We didn't starve," said Johnson in the March 1966 issue of Sport magazine, "but there wasn't any caviar or silver spoons either."

The Lexington of his youth had a community of black merchants, doctors, lawyers and insurance salesmen. It had a black-owned baseball team—the Lexington Hustlers—that fielded a few white players. But Sweet Lou was acutely aware of the boundaries of his world. "You learned Yes and No. Weren't no Maybes," he said.* "Yes, you can. No, you can't."

As a child, Sweet Lou idolized Alex Groza and Wallace "Wah Wah" Jones of the Kentucky's back-to-back championship teams of 1948 and '49. But the lavish perks that Adolph Rupp, the Baron of the Bluegrass, dangled in front of star athletes—the education, the future, the glory—were not open to young guards from Lexington's Pralltown neighborhood. Boys like Johnson were not permitted to freely walk the campus much less set foot in the arena. Rupp paid plenty of lip service to the ideals of integration, but he refused to do anything that might upset the South's precious status quo. He walked Pralltown's streets, handing out tickets to the circus, but refused to part with a single basketball scholarship. Long after his peers in the Southeastern Conference had advised him to integrate the team, after the president of the university had pressured him to do it, he did not have the courage to do so—not even for a once-in-a-lifetime recruit like Connie Hawkins. "I'm sorry he didn't see fit to open the door to blacks," Johnson's high school coach S.T. Roach said.** "With his stature, he could have made all the difference in the world."

No, to set foot inside Rupp's famous arena, Sweet Lou Johnson had to dress himself up as a janitor. In his early teens, he donned a white jacket, grabbed a latrine brush and made his way across campus to the Coliseum. "I got to the floor of that arena," he said.* "Got to the floor with that white jacket. But I had no voice. I cheered silently."

In 1950, Johnson piloted Dunbar High's basketball team to a state championship. The all-white squad from nearby Lafayette High won a state title, too, the very same year. Johnson and his Bearcat teammates tailed them all over town, pleading for a showdown. The state's true champ was ultimately decided on a playground. "We beat their asses," Johnson said.


Source List:
*After Jackie: Pride, Prejudice, and Baseball's Forgotten Heroes: An Oral History by Cal Fussman

**And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Basketball Game That Changed American Sports by Frank Fitzpatrick

Sweet Lou's Story

I have this idea for a book about Sweet Lou Johnson.

Sweet Lou knows the value of a World Series ring.

He knows it better than Lenny Dykstra, the self-described financial wizard who hocked his 1986 ring in early October for $56,752.50. He knows it better than Jose Canseco, the best-selling author of Juiced who sold a World Series ring for $40,000 in 2005. In fact, Sweet Lou knows the true value of a championship ring better than any man alive.

When he joined the L.A. Dodgers on May 4, 1965, he was a nobody—a 12-year veteran of the minor leagues. A wispy outfielder with limited power and minimal speed. But Sweet Lou had one asset the managers of the 17 teams he'd played for failed to exploit—a huge heart. What followed was a storybook season, the six months when he endeared himself to Dodger fans with his timely hits, his daring steals, and an indomitable spirit that rallied the team to a National League pennant. On October 14, he completed the fairy tale by hitting the home run that decided Game Seven of the World Series.

For a man born in the South of the Great Depression, a black man who'd spent a lifetime battling the specter of racism, it was a delicious moral victory. Sweet Lou was a champion now, a member of the most select fraternity in America. No one could deny him that. But as he soon learned, a World Series ring can not save a man from misery. In 1971, two years into retirement, Johnson pulled his most prized possession from his finger and handed it to a drug dealer for $250 worth of cocaine.

That huge heart, the one that once pulsed with the joy of playing baseball, was now sick, so sick that Johnson felt compelled to silence it with alcohol and drugs. For nine years, he lived in a haze. And then he picked up the phone and dialed Don Newcombe.

Newcombe knew just how Sweet Lou felt. A league MVP, a Cy Young Award winner and the 1949 Rookie of the Year, the star pitcher had curtailed his own career with the Dodgers with alcohol. "I've been waiting for your call," he said.

Newcombe steered Sweet Lou to a rehab program in Arizona and, two months later, hired him to work in the Dodgers' community relations department, where the former outfielder labors to this day, teaching minor league players and teens about the horrors of addiction.

The saga of Sweet Lou Johnson might easily have ended there, but fate had another fairy tale finish in store for him. In 1999, nearly 30 years after Sweet Lou had parted with it, his World Series ring turned up in an unclaimed safety deposit box in Seattle. A Dodger fan spotted it in an auction listing and notified Sweet Lou's teammate Ron Fairly, who was working as an announcer for the Mariners. The Dodgers community quickly rallied to bring Sweet Lou's long lost trophy home to L.A.

"That's my history," a teary Johnson told Bill Plaschke of the Los Angeles Times after he'd been reunited with his ring. "That's my life."

Great story, right? You can see the movie now. Here's the problem: Sweet Lou played only one more season of memorable baseball and I'm no Stephen King, which means the book would have to sell on the merits of the story alone. A number of publishers have already expressed doubts that Sweet Lou's life is rich enough to do that. I disagree, of course, but I won't argue. Not now. Instead I'll let you decide. Over the next few months, I'll share what I know about Sweet Lou's incredible run to the 1965 World Series, his subsequent trials and triumphs. If you like what you see, keep reading.

Here goes...