Hello again, blog faithful. Welcome to yet another Thursday Blog Day as we near the two-year mark for this version of my blog, after 10+ years over at NHRA.com. One week ago I was getting ready to fly to Las Vegas, and about to dive into a new book, “Bull In The Ring” by fellow St. Louis U. High alum Joe Castellano. It’s been a remarkably interesting week.
My flight to Vegas was uneventful, which is almost always a good thing. The highlight of the trip was my chance to dive into “Bull In The Ring” and it blew me away. Some of the nicest and most satisfying reviews I’ve gotten for my book “Bats, Balls, & Burnouts” have been the ones wherein the reviewer makes it clear that he or she is either disinterested or does not like one or more aspects of my story, in terms of the sports I’ve been involved with. Whenever I read something like, “I don’t even like baseball, but I found those parts of the book to be fascinating” I smile. That was the biggest challenge I faced when I sat down to write.
On January 5, 2016 when I sat at my desk and got started, I clearly remember thinking, “If I’m doing this chronologically, I’m going to have be at my best form to even get a drag racing fan through the first two-thirds of my life, before we ever get to a page about NHRA and Funny Cars.” That was constantly on my mind as I wrote, as well as the reverse thought of, “I hope I can keep a baseball fan interested once we get to racing” and I’ve earned a few 5-Star comments about that side of it, as well.
For Castellano’s book, I knew going in that he is a fine writer. I figured it would resonate a great deal with me because we were at SLUH for one year together, and I looked up to those football players as grown men I deeply admired. I was interested to see how Joe would deal with the fact only a segment of his market would be classmates. He knocked it out of the park.
You don’t have to have gone to SLUH to love his book. You don’t need to be a football fan. It’s probably more relatable to someone near our age, because a great part of his book is the retelling of the strife America was going through then, with the Vietnam war, demonstrations, riots, and assassinations, but I believe the book would be an eye-opening tale for younger people, who only learned about that time in history books. His class, which graduated in 1971, was right in the middle of that. But, frankly, it’s such a masterpiece I’d recommend it to anyone. He truly wrote a masterpiece. This is not a cliche when I say I couldn’t put it down. The only time I did put it down was when I walked to the gate and boarded the plane. It came right out of my backpack then, and stayed in my hands until we touched down at McCarran.
As opposed to the phonebook-like heft and page count of my monster, Joe’s book can indeed be read in one sitting. I was sad when it was over.
Joe Castellano, class of ’71, bravo sir. Bravo! I finished it just as we touched down. And I may read it again. It was that good.
When I checked in at the J.W. Marriott the young clerk said, “I apologize Mr. Wilber, but all I have right now are doubles. I can see if we have anything that’s still being cleaned or you can take one of the doubles now.” I asked him to take one more look. True, you can only sleep in one bed, but there’s a reason a guy like me prefers only one. The standard rooms themselves are all the same size, so a second bed usually displaces at least one other piece of furniture, and that piece is usually a large comfy chair, perfect for watching the World Series. After a few moments he said, “For the inconvenience, I’ve moved you to one of our executive suites, on a high floor. You’ll be comfortable there.” And yes I was. A very nice room.
One of the things I like about the J.W. Marriott out there, located in Summerlin, is the fact you have the option of walking through the casino to get to your room, but you don’t have to. There are self parking areas near both hotel towers and you can just go straight to the elevator without even hearing any chimes, bells, or shouts. That, of course, doesn’t mean I didn’t go to the casino. I just wasn’t forced to do it.
After dinner I did venture to the main floor and for the first 10 or 15 minutes I just cruised around, to see if any of the slot machines sent me a vibe. Just when I was about to give up (it’s weird, I know, but I need to find machines that give off good vibes because I go broke in a hurry if I play any old machine just to play it) I found a pair of identical $1 machines tucked in a corner. They didn’t have any bonus wheels (something that’s usually a magnet for me) but after a few spins I noticed that the machine I was on did one thing well. It gave me enough small winners to keep me going. And, even though it was a $1 machine, it played more like a $5 machine because the “Max Bet” was nine credits. Don’t play slots if you don’t want to play the maximum bet. It’s the only way to win big. That level of commitment qualifies as a “high roller” slot, and they tend to pay off the best.
At $9 a spin, though, it was a very good thing the machine kept throwing me bones. Whether they were $5 or $20, they were bones. I remember thinking, “If I hang in here, this thing will pay off for me.” It did. I doubled the money I had put in and took the payout slip. So what did I do then? Did I go to my room? No, I just changed seats and played the other machine. I tripled my money there, very early in the session (the best way to win big!) At that point, yes, I did retire to my room. I had only used half of the money I brought with me, and I had payout slips worth more than three times as much as I had arrived with. That’s a big win.
On Saturday morning, I tried to stay in bed as long as possible but with the two-hour time difference it was hard to just lay there until 8:00 because my body thought it was almost 10:00. So I headed for the track. The Strip at LVMS is about 25 or 30 minutes from the hotel, around the northwest side of town on the outer loop, and with some construction going on it took me a little while to get there. When I did, and the line to exit off the freeway was already backed up at least a half-mile, I knew we’d have a good crowd on our hands. We did.
After I parked, I strolled into the pro pits and was still early enough that quite a few Top Fuel and Funny Car teams were only just then getting their cars out. And the pits were already packed. By the time the first session rolled around, I took this photo. You might want to click on it to enlarge it just so you can count the crowd. Good luck with that!
It was great to be there, and it was great to sign quite a few more copies of the book. One woman bought three copies. One for herself, and two for her sons, who will get them as Christmas presents. Which is a good idea in my mind because, well, I’m the author and that’s how I get royalties. If you have anyone on your Christmas list who might like a book about life, baseball, soccer, drag racing, and adventures both near and far, you know where to find it. And if you don’t know where to find it (c’mon, man) you can just click here:
And speaking of royalties, I got my first check from our trackside souvenir people today. I know when we sell a bunch at the track, because I then tend to sign a bunch, but I really didn’t know what to expect. And, we’d only ever talked in generalities about my percentage of the sale. They told me, “You’ll be happy, because we want Tim to be happy with how we handled your book” but I didn’t know I’d be as happy as I was when I tore open the envelope. I was thinking, “This should be no less than X” and yet it was basically twice what I thought X would be. It’s going in the bank as soon as I post this blog.
I had to duck out a little early Saturday, because we had a firm 7:00 date with the Hujabre family. Yes, all your favorite Hujabres, from Buck to Mary to Gibson and Hudson. We met at The Cheesecake Factory, which was conveniently located less than a mile from my hotel. And I didn’t pick the place. Buck and Mary let Gibson and Hudson pick where they wanted to eat and for the second consecutive year they chose The Cheesecake Factory. The food was fabulous, and the conversation was rollicking. Buck and Mary were so interested in talking about the book, and what it was like to write it, publish it, and now publicize it, we had a hard time eating! It was great fun, and I once again managed to fail to take a selfie with all of us. Maybe it was so much fun I deleted the photo thing from my mental must-do list.
I did get to ride in Buck’s Tesla, though, and that was beyond cool. He loves his car, and rightfully so. It’s about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen, and all we did was go out to it in the parking lot in order to drive it back to the front of the restaurant to pick up Mary and the boys. I gave his Tesla a 5-Star verbal review. That’s a “rave” of the highest order.
On Sunday, it was back to the airport. I thought my flight was at around 12 noon, but when I checked in on Saturday I noticed it was listed as a 2:15 departure. I needed to check out of the hotel, though, so I ended up getting to McCarran around 12:15. There’s no Delta Sky Club there, but there is an American Express Centurion Lounge, and those are really nice places. Lots of comfy chairs and booths, hot food, and an open bar. All you need to get in there is a Platinum card. When I walked in, I couldn’t believe how packed it was. So crowded it took a while to find an empty seat and I ate my lunch off the plate on my lap. I’d never seen the place that jammed.
It turned out, as I learned talking to the folks around me, that a big storm was pounding the east coast and they were all on various airlines that had delayed or even cancelled flights to New York, Newark, or Boston. Once again, I felt fortunate to have an on-time departure on Delta. No airline is perfect, and I can only speak from my own experiences, but Delta has been pretty outstanding since we became customers, after the merger with Northwest. The only problem we had on my return flight was that we were so early into MSP we didn’t have a gate. We had to wait out on the tarmac for 15 minutes and were still five minutes early when we stepped onto the jet bridge.
Moving on to a different subject, the photo to the right was one of a bunch I posted on Facebook yesterday. I had a strange thought that I might find the old nameplate from my Paintsville Hilanders locker if I dug down deep enough in all the baseball duffel bags I have on the top shelf of our utility room. It wasn’t easy getting them down, and I did have fun digging through all of that old stuff, but alas there was no name plate. There were, on the other hand, multiple jerseys, uniforms, gloves, and warm-up jackets dating back to the summer between junior and senior year in college. Including these pants.
I wore these Toronto Blue Jays pants when I was in my first year with the organization, as a scout. Right after the draft, in June, they sent me to Utica, NY to be a coach for their Class-A team in the New York – Penn League. Like many organizations, the Blue Jays used the “hand-me-down” method for putting uniforms on minor league players assigned to teams that didn’t have their own look and colors. I put these away in my Blue Jays duffel bag after that summer, and just kind of rediscovered them yesterday.
I wondered who they might have belonged to before I got them, and despite there not being any names written in Sharpie inside the waistband, there was a way to figure it out.
On the label, inside that waistband, was the Wilson Sporting Goods logo and then some embroidered numbers. The numbers were 47-23-78-2. And that would mean they were worn by the Blue Jays player who wore number 47, they had a 23-inch inseam, the year was 1978, and they were in Set 2 of that player’s uniforms. Each player gets multiple sets and any part of each set can be easily replaced if torn or damaged.
So all I had to do was find out who wore 47 that year for the Jays, and that sort of thing is what the internet does best. It took me all of 15 seconds to find out that Victor Cruz was the guy.
And it’s even possible, although I’m not sure if it’s likely, that the pants he is wearing in this photo are the pants I found at the bottom of my duffel bag. Pretty cool, actually. He’s also sporting a nice wad of Red Man or Levi Garrett tobacco in this old shot. Most of us did, back then.
When the Blue Jays joined the American League in 1977, they did so with some creative new uniforms and I’ve always been a big fan of them. They used that unique double-piped print, both at home in their whites and on the road in their powder blue uniforms, which had TORONTO on the front instead of BLUE JAYS. And the bird logo was centered below the letters, which was also unique.
A few years later, when they switched to buttons instead of pullover style jerseys, they moved the bird to the left chest, so as not to interrupt the logo with buttons and a seam.
For a while, starting around 2004, someone in marketing had the not so brilliant idea of trying to improve upon what was already a pretty flawless logo and look. They tried to modernize the bird and they changed the uniforms and hats completely, even going so far as to just have “Jays” on the front. In my mind, it was a real mistake. There was never anything wrong with the original design. Especially the bird over a baseball with a Maple Leaf.
Around 2012, they admitted as much and went back to the double-piped letters and something very close to the original bird. And they look great again.
Speaking of all this baseball stuff, how about the World Series! I got the impression during the playoffs that America was ready to totally embrace the game and the playoffs, and the record ratings showed it to be true. But more than that, I just got the vibe from people around me, folks I never thought would sit down to watch full games of baseball featuring teams they didn’t even root for. The World Series, and all of the amazing and thrilling games within it, took it to a whole different level. It was thrilling, and for a guy like me it was heartwarming. Congrats to the Astros and all their fans, who filled their ballpark last night to watch it. Why is that noteworthy? It’s noteworthy because the game was in Los Angeles. In Houston, a capacity crowd watched the game communally on the big-screen scoreboard, and they went nuts when it ended. That’s pretty cool.
So now, a weekend off before heading to Pomona for the final race of the 2017 NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing season. Should be an intense one!
As always, if you read this blog and enjoyed it, please do me a favor and hit the “Like” button at the top.
And, don’t forget, if you read my book and liked it, you can always buy more on Amazon as Christmas presents! Let’s keep this sales train rolling!!!
Bob Wilber, at your service and still digging those Blue Jays uniforms.