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Big 2026 Coming. Meantime, the Mumbles Ruminate on Tribute Origins

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

Heartiest New Year’s greetings from the band to everyone out there in Mumbles Nation. We wanted to share some content here and encourage you to monitor this space, as 2026 is shaping up as a busy year on the ol’ gig calendar. We should soon have news about a cool April date at a new, prestige venue. Well, new to us… Also, our first Fryeburg Fair is lined up (first week in October), and several more new-venue dates are in the works.

Meantime, however, we ran across this  podcast and couldn’t help but share it. “Flightless Bird” ranges all over the map in terms of subject matter but this one, on tribute bands, hit home. Because, as some of you well know, Pocket Full of Mumbles started out as a Simon & Garfunkel tribute duo. Yes, we have evolved way from that enterprise, adding new sounds and personnel, while widening our content to include originals and covers of many different artists. Just this winter we’ve added new ones from Little Feat, REM and The Pixies.

Yet facts are facts: The band was born in the tribute milieu and this podcast discussion really got us thinking about what that meant at the time, and what it means now.

Of course, our name is enduring. Pocket Full of Mumbles refers to a specific lyric from “The Boxer,” and we don’t see that changing or evolving.

But unlike many of the tribute bands operating today — and there are hundreds working today and making good money from coast to coast — we Mumbles never much indulged in cosplay. Early on we had some fun re-creating famous S&G covers. See here some examples. But we never took that whimsy to the stage., whereas many tribute bands purposely perform, dress and promote themselves on- and off-stage in ways that pay homage to the original bands. As one pod guest put it (he performs in an AC/DC tribute ensemble), it’s often the goal to create a sort of Broadway-show version of the original lineup from night to night.

There was quite a bit of discussion regarding what distinguishes cover bands from tribute bands. This doesn’t seem a very fine line to us. Cover bands do not indulge in much cosplay; how could they? You can’t dress up and act like a dozen different bands during a single performance. I mean, think of how many wigs that might require!

Cover or “bar’ bands also seem to place more emphasis on interpreting recognizable songs in a different but effective way altogether. We often say, “You may know the Simon & Garfunkel version of America but you can’t truly appreciate the song until you’ve heard it with pedal steel.”

The Mumbles have moved well past the tribute thing but we still perform half a dozen S&G songs and we don’t judge. Tribute bands go that route today because they ‘re popular and can be lucrative, which is just another way of saying, “Many folks who patronize live music venues want to hear what they know.”

There can be great creativity in the exercise, not just dressing up but crafting the brand: Apparently, there is a tribute ensemble out there that opens with a set of Foreigner, followed by another in the “role” of Journey.  The are, naturally, called Foreign Journey. Some original acts actually mine established, skilled tribute bands to replace aging, deceased, disaffected members. Journey famously plucked a tribute lead singer (based in the Philippines!) back in 2007, when the original Steve Perry stopped believing.

In the end, a good set, ably performed, is its own reward regardless of genre. I saw an outfit called The Outsiders deliver a truly excellent Tom Petty show at Bell’s Brewery in Kalamazoo two years ago. First rate, and they didn’t do any “characters” or costumes. [If you think drunk middle-aged women go crazy when they hear a spot-on version of “Last Chance for Mary Jane,” you should experience that phenomenon in the Midwest.]

By the same token, if you play in a Grateful Dead tribute band — as Mumbles drummer Jeff Glidden has (along with an Allman Brothers outfit called Wake Up Momma) and you don’t get stoned with fans between sets, you’re not really trying.

For us, this pod reminded us of these bands, how all types of bands, are conceived. Mike Conant and Hal Phillips had played together in a couple different bands starting circa 2008. At some practice five years later, Mike started noodling the melody of “Leaves That Are Green,” off Sounds of Silence. I joined him and sang the whole thing, start to finish. We looked at each other and said, without speaking, “Well then. Here’s someone who likes S&G as much as I do.” And the rest is history…

Highway ’75 Revisited: Recapturing a Classic World Series, on my iPhone

Highway ’75 Revisited: Recapturing a Classic World Series, on my iPhone

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

It’s often argued that the 1975 World Series — contested 50 years ago this month — ranks among the finest in baseball history. In terms of legendary personalities and the competitive iconography that framed them, Game 6 featured enough fairy-tale moments all on its own: a not-yet-befouled Pete Rose bellyflopping into third then popping up to jawbone with his opposite number, Rico Petrocelli; rookie golden boy Fred Lynn propped limp and lifeless against the center-field wall after failing to flag down Ken Griffey’s RBI triple in the 3rd; Sparky Anderson on the top step of the dugout, ready to give Rawley Eastwick his trademark hook, only to let him face Bernie Carbo in the 8th; Johnny Bench short-hopping George Foster’s throw from left-field foul territory to cut down Denny Doyle at the plate, sending the game to extra innings where, of course, Carlton Fisk waved his game-winning homer just fair enough to hit the foul pole.

Taken together, those 12 innings form a universe unto itself, an heroic parade of Hall of Fame and otherwise iconic players doing impossibly dramatic things under extraordinary circumstances.

As a result, however, Game 6 also tends to overshadow what made this 7-game encounter an all-timer. This past summer I happened upon a passing reference to Luis Tiant’s epic 163-pitch, complete game performance in Game 4. I grew up in Boston and turned 11 the month before this World Series took place. I watched every second of Game 4. To my shame, apart from El Tiante running the bases in his little blue jacket, I remembered very few specifics.

Friend, let me remind you that for all its faults, the 21st century is a remarkable thing: All seven installments of this Fall Classic are available via YouTube — in their entirety, without commercials — so I watched Game 4 on my iPhone over the course of several hours in July. This sublime experience led to web-aided consumption of Games 2 and 3, in that order, as these, I reasoned, were the chapters in this epic saga that I remembered least of all.

I undertook this throwback-baseball immersion exercise at the same time I was reading Chuck Klosterman’s fine non-fiction book, “The Nineties,” wherein he posits that October 1975 was also a critical tipping point — those final cultural moments where baseball and its fans could claim “the sport held a unique place in U.S. life and would always be recognized as the national pastime.” By 1990, he points out, twice as many people watched NFL football.

Four years later, with release of his mini-series Baseball, Ken Burns presented the game as a prism through which we might better understand the American experience. A soulful, often convincing take but an excuse for the historian to treat the game like a relic, an historical phenomenon that did what it did but had since relinquished much of its civilizational juice.

So much of the American social contract came undone during the Seventies, why should baseball have been exempt? If retroactive understanding recasts the 1975 Fall Classic as a swan song, so be it. However, allowing such a raft of perfectly amazing memories to fall through the cracks unheeded and under-absorbed — when they’re all just sitting there on some Google server, waiting to be enjoyed all over again — is foolish. What follows is a YouTube-enabled report on this 3-game series within a Series, an event I first consumed as pre-teen, staying up way past my bedtime, exulting and sobbing by turn in a suburban living room exactly 13 miles southwest of Fenway Park.

•••

Game 4, Riverfront Stadium, Oct. 15, 1975

El Tiante was already a Boston legend before he took the mound in Game 4, of coursre. After doing his best to thwart Sox hopes in 1967, for Cleveland (one of four clubs with legitimate pennant hopes that final weekend of the season), he’d come over in 1971 and immediately claimed our hearts. No one knew how old this amiable, rather elfin Cuban really was; I suppose we still don’t know. He was a bit dumpy and could come off as clownish though a lot of that public persona was surely down to his idiosyncratic grasp of English. But he won — 18 times in 1975, despite back issues — and he did so with singular style. After his virtuoso performance in Game 4, his place in the Boston Sports Pantheon was utterly secure.

The Reds had jumped out to a 2-0 lead, but starter Fred Norman surrendered 5 in the 4th and that’s all Tiant would need, throwing ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-THREE pitches to level the Series and nail down another complete-game victory, 5-4.

Yet that’s mere box-score fodder. Tiant at his best had to be observed to be fully appreciated, and he proved even more indomitable 50 years on, despite my diminutive screen. While the man had shut out the Reds in Game 1 at Fenway four days earlier, familiarity helped the National League champions not a whit. Tiant bullied and confounded them by turn — nearly picking the imperious Joe Morgan off first in the 7th, twice running the bases, scoring what proved to be the winning run, and looking utterly gnomish the entire time.

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Cassette-Tape Revival? Hipsters Need a Primer on What They’re Getting Into
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Cassette-Tape Revival? Hipsters Need a Primer on What They’re Getting Into

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

In May of 2024, I was invited to start writing a monthly column for the daily newspaper serving our beloved twin cities of Lewiston and Auburn. Read the latest installment here. Be warned: Content at SunJournal.com resides behind a paywall. I would encourage readers, especially those here in Maine, to suck it up and subscribe. For one affordable price, folks get all the news from Greater L/A, the state’s second largest metro area; everything from sister paper, the Portland Press-Herald; plus access to content at the Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal. All of these local journalism operations are now owned and operated by the Maine Trust for Local News. While I strongly encourage you to support them with your money and eyeballs, the paywall does make it difficult to promote the product to non-subscribers. So I’ll be sharing the odd column here.

By Hal Phillips
It’s weird to learn via media report that specific, intimate aspects of one’s own cultural history are making “comebacks”. Maybe 15-20 years ago, a certain American demographic started collecting and playing vinyl records again, for example. Out of nowhere this became trendy. Today, folks of all ages are still giddily sourcing records from Discogs and investing in turntables, after a 20-year respite.

My Millennial son and daughter-in-law maintain a modest record collection today. Yet they have gathered these vinyl relics more or less at random, in small batches, from second-hand shops. They don’t even bother to seek out records from artists they like. Their enjoyment of this seemingly kitchy, analog activity is almost entirely ironic, like dressing as a steam punk, or churning butter.

I get it. Millennials do love their irony. But they are divorced entirely from the activities and emotions that once made vinyl-collection and record-playing irresistable.

Just last month, and in the same vein, I learned that cassette tapes are back in vogue after three decades away. I am not technically a part of this revival. I maintain two means of playing cassettes, and have for some time, because my mixed-tape collection — dating back to my own golden age of mixed tapes (1986-92) — has remained sweetly nostalgic to me. The idea of buying new tapes, or making them, feels rather anachronist, because the technical and interpersonal conditions that prevailed during this golden age no longer exist.

In short, one must have achieved a certain age — “old as dirt” is the technical term, I believe — in order to remember cassette tapes and what made them so special. But that doesn’t mean we should consign their fascinating 20th century narrative to the dustbin of history.

Until the late 1970s, there was no practical way for everyday folks to record music from vinyl — or off the only other practical music source then available, the radio. Cassette tapes changed all of that. The advance proved both technological and cultural: A friend who owned Jackson Browne’s album “Late for the Sky,” for instance, could just tape the whole thing for you. This saved money. Cassettes also stored more efficiently, in something as small as a shoe box. Critically, one could also play them in your car, if said vehicle featured a tape deck. This was huge.

Yet cassettes also transformed any schmuck into a legit DJ. Throughout the 1970s, radio was the only place where music consumers could experience a stream of individual cuts off multiple albums, from multiple artists. We take this phenomenon for granted today, thanks to Spotify, iTunes, Pandora and YouTube. Commercial radio originated this experience, however — with interruptions from advertisers. Our record players gave us commercial-free choice, but only one immutable album at a time. 

Cassette tapes cannily merged these multiple forms of music consumption. They allowed us to create those playlists for ourselves, from our own record collections. They enabled playlists using other folks’ collections, from songs highjacked off the radio, even from other tapes (if a stereo had two tape decks). This multi-valent ability, acquired during the first Reagan Administration, proved thoroughly mind-blowing and futuristic. Then Sony introduced the Walkman and we all felt like cinematic characters from Blade Runner.

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Cultural Adventures in Historiography

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

Let’s get to know Charles Beard, whose intellectual connection to 1619 principal Nikole Hannah-Jones may tar him with some people, but whose story still has much to teach us. Born in 1874, Beard was perhaps the most influential American historian of the first half of the 20th century. We’re obliged to segment his heyday in this fashion because a historian’s work is famously ephemeral. Beard’s most notable work, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, prompted much academic pearl-clutching upon its release in 1913, before forming the spine of an historical consensus that lasted more than 40 years. By the 1960s, his views on colonial America were quickly falling from grace.

This waning/waxing of historical reputations, among historical figures and the academics who study them, is de rigueur. Views are routinely raised up, then built upon or debunked as new scholarship amplifies or moots competing points of view. I’d have thought the ongoing 1619 controversies would, by now, have summoned more mention of Beard, whose work similarly challenged an existing consensus re. America’s revolutionary period. It remains to be seen whether The 1619 Project — a multimedia series from The New York Times Magazine that re-examines the legacy of slavery in the United States — will experience a similar evolution. The NYT published its 1619 package in book form back in November.

This much already seems clear: No work of U.S. history has ever been so swiftly, widely and cynically politicized. Right-wingers especially have perceived electoral advantage in portraying this work of pop scholarship as a “radical left-wing” cousin to another all-purpose bogeyman, Critical Race Theory. Even the Trotskyites who manage the World Socialist Web Site have joined the fray, on the side of Trumpists, Republican state legislators, and Fox News. This potent propagandistic cocktail (whipped up by such strange bedfellows) has resulted in spitting-mad parents showing up at school committee meetings eager to wage cultural warfare. Just in time for the mid-term elections. We should emphasize that otherwise reputable historians have also objected to aspects of The 1619 Project, while carefully praising the ambitious sweep of it. That such distinguished mainstream scholars as Sean Wilentz and Gordon Wood have seen fit to kick up such a public fuss illustrates still more politicization — from the normally left-leaning ivory tower.

But what exactly is everyone so angry about? The story of Beard’s rise and fall should help us understand what’s really going on here.

Between 1865 and the First World War, historical consensus bathed America’s founding — and the so-called framers themselves — in extraordinarily gauzy light. Beard’s scholarship changed all that, for a time. An Economic Interpretation introduced the jolting idea that our patrician colonial forebears, in particular, acted not merely out of high-minded Enlightenment principals, but in their economic self-interest as well.

To cite just one example: Beard’s scholarship reminded us that many founders were active land speculators, including George Washington. We all know the British tripled taxes following the French and Indian War, in order to pay for said war: the taxation without representation we’ve all read about. To avoid another costly military conflict, Parliament also barred land speculation in the west or “back” country, across a “Proclamation Line” designed to separate colonials from indigenous peoples. The founding class, all of them wealthy white men, objected to the massive tax increase, the famous Stamp Act of 1765. But they also took great exception to this hamstringing of their land-speculation activities. 

Beard’s work, like The 1619 Project, landed like a bombshell. The founders had never before been presented to the American public as hewing to such work-a-day, bourgeois imperatives. Eventually the demonstrable truth and rigor of Beard’s perspective, vetted over the course of decades, gained significant purchase. It became central to the U.S. historical canon. Indeed, its more clear-eyed, humanistic take on the founders and their motivations also allowed future American academics, politicians and citizens to see Washington, Jefferson and Hamilton et al. more as men of flesh, blood and standard human foibles, and less as flawless, heroic icons chiseled from marble.

This shift in American historiography, this trend in writing about the revolutionary period less sentimentally, has been slow-moving. Or rather, such a process doesn’t always bend in one direction, without interruption, toward objectivity or justice. Beard’s work fell from significant favor starting in the 1950s, when a gathering Cold War induced a great many Americans — academics, politicians, bureaucrats and citizens — to band together ideologically before a looming Red menace. In the face of what was perceived to be an existential threat, many felt our historical consensus required more spotless founders to rally around. Beard’s scholarship didn’t fit so well under that sort of jingoist cultural rubric, as that of Hannah-Jones does not today.

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Decoding Distaff Indifference Toward Women’s Professional Sport

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

Ever wondered why women’s team sports are watched and otherwise supported so meagerly by women themselves? The underlying premise here may strike one as obtuse, even churlish this week, what with thousands of women in the stands watching the 2019 Women’s World Cup in stadia all over France. But none of last week’s Round of 16 matches sold out and World Cup crowds can mislead. You’ll recall they were enormous during the 1999 Women’s World Cup, here in the U.S. That event was seen as a tipping point for the women’s game in North America, and yet three separate women’s professional leagues have been attempted in the two decades since. The first two folded and the third — the National Women’s Professional Soccer League — continues to teeter on the brink of financial collapse and cultural irrelevance.

Soccer remains a funny duck in America. More than those in other footballing nations, soccer fans here are beguiled by and pay outsized attention to their national teams — as opposed to the privately administered clubs that compete in domestic leagues. And surely there are entrenched gender biases that have worked against the serial iterations of women’s pro soccer in this country, or the WNBA, or women’s professional hockey wherein the Canadian professional league just folded. U.S. hockey international Kendall Coyne Schofield told the New York Times in April that, “People are drooling for women’s hockey. But the product we deliver isn’t being shown.”

Are they drooling for it really? And what does she mean when she says, “people”? I don’t have numbers on how many folks consume women’s hockey at the Olympics, for example, and how that audience breaks down by gender. But it might surprise you to learn that nearly 70 percent of the WNBA’s viewership is male. That surprised me.

The WNBA has been around since the late 1990s; it has never turned a profit, despite being financially backed and marketed by one of the most savvy organizations in world sport, the NBA — an organization that has every incentive to create a larger audience for both of its on-court products. The core of that new, larger audience would presumably be women who don’t otherwise follow the NBA. But women have responded to the WNBA with the same relative indifference they exhibit toward women’s professional soccer and hockey. Here’s Adam Silver on the subject in 2018:

“It’s interesting: Women’s basketball is largely supported — just in terms of the demographics — by older men, for whatever reason, who like fundamental basketball, and it’s something I’ve talked a lot to the players about,” he said. “We’re not connecting with almost the same demographic that our players are. Our players are roughly, let’s say, 21 to 34, in that age range. I’m saying [to the players], ‘Why do you think it is that we’re not getting your peers to want to watch women’s basketball?’

“So in a way I think it’s a good problem to have, in that I think the game looks fantastic, and it’s amazing where the league now is from over 20 years ago when it launched,” Silver added, “but we still have a marketing problem, and we gotta figure it out. We gotta figure out how we can do a better job connecting to young people and how they could become interested in women’s basketball.”

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When (Cartoon) Art Imitates Live (Action)

by Hal Phillips 1 Comment

I don’t want to blow anybody’s mind, but the classic cartoon Go-Go Gophers is further evidence of a little acknowledged but fascinating trend in 1960s cartooning, whereby animators actively ripped off popular live-action television shows of the time, essentially mining/co-opting them for themes, plots and personalities.

These cartoons were the stuff of my childhood — on Saturday mornings, after school — and I expect much of my cohort will read this and nod knowingly. “Ah yes,” they will ruminate, mindfully stroking their gray beards, “The Flintstones.”

Yes, but it’s bigger than that.

The Flintstones are indeed the best-known example of this dynamic and the first cartoon ever to air on network television in prime time. Launched in 1960, the show was a blatant rip-off of The Honeymooners, then a vivid-but-still-a-mere memory; its 39 episodes had aired from 1955-56 (though star Jackie Gleason would reprise the role and the show intermittently for years). Fred and Wilma Flintstone were clear homages to the lead, live-action roles played by Gleason and Dorothy Meadows. Barney Rubble was even more distinctively based on Art Carney’s character, Ed Norton. I think everyone realized what was going on here, even at the time. It was part of the imprimatur that led to featuring of The Flintstones in prime time, something unprecedented for an animated series at that time and frankly, still today, apart from The Simpsons.

But cartoonists would eventually prove some of the most facile and prolific rip-off artists in 20th century media history. They saw The Flintstones formula working and reprised the process without shame — to a degree we kids didn’t realize at the time and, I’d wager, few appreciate still today.

Exhibit A? The inimitable Go-Go Gophers, an under-appreciated cartoon and one based completely on another live action (and culturally tone-deaf) TV show from that era, F Troop. Indeed, Go-Go Gophers was the cartoon that decades ago tipped me off to and set me thinking on this weighty matter.

As a kid, I thought F Troop was sorta funny. Fittingly, each episode of Go-Go Gophers also begins with one of cartooning’s all-time great theme songs, followed by an uncanny homage to F-Troop’s fertile-if-untoward frontier theme. One wonders today how anyone could see the opportunity for such broad humor in the slow-moving genocide of an indigenous people… (We could include here a sitcom based in a German POW camp, with the Holocaust presumably taking place all around it. When Hogan’s Heroes was airing, perhaps folks were similarly dumbfounded by our bygone acceptability of black minstrel humor, like Amos & Andy, just 30 years prior. Thirty years from now, we may similarly come to grips with other such untoward manifestations of white supremacy and the patriarchy.)

Be all that as it may, the creators of Go-Go Gophers (ad guys from Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, apparently seeking to provide content during which their General Mills client’s cereals could be advertised) and their producers (Total Television then CBS, starting in 1967, as part of the brilliant Underdog Show) devised a cast of characters that does the live-action show one better. The two aboriginal characters (members of the Hakawi Tribe) are straight cribs from the TV show, but you’ll recall the cartoon Colonel inhabits a Teddy Roosevelt milieu, while the Sergeant (played by Forest Tucker on TV) is animatedly morphed into a laconic John Wayne-ish figure.

Larry Storch’s memorable TV character, “Agarn”, didn’t make the cut. Neither did the Colonel’s live-action love interest, a sort of Annie Oakley figure clearly inspired by Ellie May from the Beverly Hillbillies. (In the 1960s, when in doubt, no matter how incongruous to the sitcom premise, producers were sure to write into the show some hot young blond. See The Munsters and, for that matter, The Jetsons). Television producers did a lot of shameless things, then and now. They borrowed from any genre or competing show that worked. And so they could hardly complain when cartoon producers did the same.

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So Provincial! Central European Art Claims, on Parade

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

I can’t remember any trip of mine so richly affected by so many formal art exhibits. In the space of five Central European days in October, my family took in shows featuring Gustav Klimt, Andy Warhol, Alfons Mucha, the Maine-trained Donna Huanca, Salvador Dali and Frida Kahlo. Only the Klimt, long a favorite of mine, had been planned. The others we happened upon more or less by chance, as apparently one does in Prague and Budapest. Observations include:

Ethnography Matters: Austrians naturally claim Klimt for their own; he headlined the Secessionist Movement based in his native Vienna, so it’s no surprise his most famous works remain permanently on show at the Belvedere, an 18th century palace built by the Habsburg Prinz Eugen. Sharon and I went there straight from our morning plane, checked our bags in the cloakroom, and gadded about the grounds before meeting our son Silas and his girlfriend Rene, who’d been backpacking about the Continent since Sept. 7. We treated them to lunch then went back across the strasse to see the Klimt, who didn’t disappoint. The Belvedere curators require tourists (and the place was teeming with them) to roam through 2.5 full floors of oversized Romantic Era shite before getting to the Secession stuff, which included some Munch and Von Gogh I’d never seen. Our hosts knew exactly whom we’d come to see; the entire experience was built around it. There was even a special room where folks could take selfies with an oversized poster version of The Kiss — some 50 feet from the real thing.

We were further struck by the way Slovaks studiously maintain a different sort of claim (but still a legitimate one) on Andy Warhol, born Andrew Warhola, the son of immigrants from Eastern Slovakia. In the various placards his mother was repeatedly referred to as Ruthenian, a reference to Greek Orthodox Slavs who live outside the Rus. This show, in Prague, occupied the third floor of GOAP, the Gallery of Art Prague. The more intimate, dormered fourth floor concentrated solely on Warhol’s young life and his parents’ early days in Pittsburgh where so many Slovaks, Slavs and Poles landed (remember the wedding scene from The Deerhunter?). This was wholly appropriate — the attic is where old family stuff is meant to be stashed.

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Now It Can Be Told: When Media FAMs Go Wrong…

by Hal Phillips 1 Comment

The history of working media seeking to leverage publishing capabilities to secure various fringe benefits is long and sordid indeed. Traditionally, as befits transactions undertaken by relative paupers, these perks rarely rise above the level of heavy hors d’oeuvres. I worked at a daily newspaper back in the early 1990s where the nightly assignment schedule invariably included this reception or that event — places often devoid of news value but where free food could be had. Open bar? Well, the entire editorial staff might show up for something like that.

Lookit, reporters and editors don’t traditionally make a lot of money; they’re frequently quite young. This is to say, freeloading of this ilk shouldn’t be viewed as particularly untoward or shameful. It’s something of a necessity frankly. One of our many mascots in that same newsroom was a giant cartoon headshot of a Dick Tracy-like character, complete with ‘40s era fedora. Tucked in his hatband was an index card that might have read “PRESS”; instead it read, “I’m with the PRESS. Where’s the FOOD?”

Several links up the food chain in this realm sits the media FAM trip — FAM being short for “familiarization”. There’s no way to spin such an event according to journalistic standards or ethics. These are flat-out junkets whereby some publicity-seeking entity lures reporters and freelancer-types on some trip with the understanding that, once they’ve been wined/dined and returned home, said media will write nice stories about the resort property, the golf course or cuisine to be had there, or maybe the broader “destination” itself. In the golf and travel realm, where I’ve toiled for more than three decades now, FAM trips are the ultimate perk because, well, let’s not be coy: In addition to all sorts of free food & drink, participating media also get complementary air fare, lodging and assorted swag.

The quid pro quo nature of the FAM exercise is little discussed but well understood. One doesn’t visit a golf course or hotel, on a FAM, only to savage the place in print. That would be untoward. As our moms all told us, if you don’t have anything nice to say, say nothing at all (or concentrate on something else that doesn’t suck).

Here’s another FAM trip bylaw: Answer the bell. No matter how much free boozing and carousing was had the night before, media guests have an obligation to show up, on time, first thing the next morning (according to the itinerary) without fail.

There’s one more, less formal understanding re. media FAMs: Something is sure to go terribly wrong. I’ve been on dozens of these junkets as a working journalist. I’ve organized dozens more on behalf of various clients. When one is devising a week-long itinerary in a foreign country — for one’s own travels — something is sure to be overlooked. When organizing for a dozen people, most of whom will be drunk 35 percent of the week? The odds only increase. The mere presence of a dozen journalistic chancers eating, drinking and indulging on someone else’s dime makes the possibility of mishap a mortal lock.

Someone, someday, will write a comprehensive and hilarious book about all the great FAM trips gone awry: who got thrown in jail, what foreign dignitary got naked, and why shellfish is always a risky choice. In the meantime, writers will merely trade these yarns back and forth like war stories. In that tradition I offer up the itinerary from a single morning gone wrong, in Jakarta, during Ramadan, back in 2012. This was a trip I helped to organize and host. I promised the client I wouldn’t breathe a word until a reasonable discretionary period had passed. Still, I have changed the names to protect, not the innocent necessarily, but rather those professional reputations still in play.

•••

In most respects, this particular FAM proved a roaring success. It produced dozens of glowing, published pieces re. the awesome golf product on offer in and around Indonesia’s sprawling capital. To produce this content I had wrangled a genial and cosmopolitan group of 12 media and tour operators hailing from the UK, China, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Australia and the United States. From the Fond Memory Dept., I could just as easily cite the epic karaoke session we all enjoyed, the compelling version of “Take It To The Limit” I performed with the band at our closing soirée, the five superb rounds of golf we played, or the incredible dinner we organized for 20 at the Four Seasons.

But none of those vignettes would include the burning of tires or police in combat gear.

See below a timeline of events the morning after said banquet. I can vouch for its accuracy because, like James Comey, I was moved to take contemporaneous notes, on my phone — such was the utterly random nature of the proceedings.

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SI Memories, Developmental & Professional, Come Thick & Fast

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

The late-2017 sale of Sports Illustrated, TIME Magazine and other titles to Meredith Publishing, a deal made possible by an infusion of $650 million from Koch Industries’ private-equity arm, has elicited both howls of indignation — from those who fear the further right-wing weaponization of information — and an ongoing hail of gauzy nostalgia, from those who grew up loving SI and fear the sale will only further its fall from a decades-long perch atop the sports media food chain.

Here I will indulge in the latter, because I’d been meaning to post the above story in some way, shape or form ever since my friend Jammin’ ran across it last September. Sports Illustrated was not merely a staple of my young reading life, alongsie The Boston Globe’s superb sports section. It was where I started my freelance-writing career. Indeed, this story above was my very first freelance piece, full stop. It warms the cockles of my heart to see it lovingly preserved online in flipbook fashion deep in something called the SI Vault. Check that: Said version has been recently disappeared. Copy and paste this URL and you can find it more conventional online form: https://www.si.com/vault/1997/10/27/233677/small-wonder-the-dunes-club-our-pick-as-the-best-nine-hole-course-in-the-country-is-twice-the-challenge-of-most-18-hole-layouts#

By 1997, when this piece was published (Oct. 27 issue), I had spent some 10 years as a working journalist, first for a collection of weekly and daily newspapers in Massachusetts, then as editor of Golf Course News, a national business journal published here in Maine. Indeed, taking that job brought me to Maine. Nineteen ninety-seven was also year I left GCN to start Mandarin Media, Inc., with the secondary intention freelancing in earnest. The ensuing years would see my work appear in pretty much every major North American golf and travel magazine (several of which still exist!). That effort started here, with this Sports Illustrated feature.

I had pitched the magazine a piece ranking the best 9-hole golf courses in America, but, as often happens in the freelance milieu, the story ended up being something quite different: a feature on Mike Keiser and his 9-hole masterpiece, The Dunes Club, with a sidebar detailing the country’s other top 9s. The story itself frankly could have been better. I ended up submitting a finished draft, only to have the editor suggest a major rewrite. This I did, and then the bastard ended up running something that quite closely resembled the original version. Some old stories you read with great pride — this, alas, is not one of those. It feels cautious and dry.

[The sidebar produced a funny moment: When we agreed on this feature and brief ranking alongside, I launched into some lengthy disquisition on how we’d research and tabulate a proper Top 9 Nines list. The editor interrupted me and simply said, “This is SI. We’ll just tell people what we think the Top 9 is.” Such was the power, some would say hubris, of the magazine in those days.]

Despite my failure to reprint this on the 20th anniversary of its publication, the experience was not without its serendipities. For a Boston-bred lad, it was fabulous to be included in any issue with Larry Bird on the cover. What’s more, while I wouldn’t say I discovered Mike Keiser, one would be hard pressed to find earlier coverage of the man who eventually revolutionized the golf resort business. When I first met him in the spring of 1997, the private, 9-hole Dunes Club was Keiser’s only connection to golf development. Today, having created five, award-winning, top-ranked courses in Oregon at Bandon Dunes, he’s also had a major hand in developing additional, no-less-heralded, multi-course projects in Nova Scotia (Cabot Links, Cabot Cliffs) and Wisconsin (the new Sand Valley), with another now planned for Scotland. All are links courses fashioned from sandy sites hundreds of miles from the beaten path. Keiser didn’t just build awesome tracks; he proved that American golfers would pay top dollar — and travel to the middle of freakin’ nowhere — to play this type of golf.

I remember sitting in the modest clubhouse at The Dunes Club with Keiser in the summer of 1997, eating hot dogs and conducting our interview when, at some point, he mentioned that he’d just purchased 2,000 acres of coastal property in Oregon, 2 hours west of Eugene and 4 hours south of Portland. He said that he planned to develop not just one course but a whole complex of them. I thought to myself at the time, “I like this guy, but he’s clearly delusional.”

It would not be the last time I mistook vision for delusion.

Palestra Tales, 40 Years in the Making

by Hal Phillips 1 Comment

PHILADELPHIA — When we learned my daughter Clara would matriculate at the University of Pennsylvania, naturally her dad was thrilled: Here was my chance to make a proper pilgrimage to The Palestra, the most storied college basketball venue of the 20th Century.

As I’ve written here before, while my hoops allegiance today favors the overtly professional NBA, there was a two-decade period starting in the mid-1970s (just as John Wooden’s run at UCLA came to end) when I was a far more fervent college basketball junkie. The Palestra was central to that emerging fandom, which just happened to coincide with the sport’s surge into the national sporting consciousness.

College basketball and the NCAA Tournament are so popular today, so ubiquitous on television, it’s easy to forget their dual ascension is relatively recent. For all intents and purposes, UCLA and its 10 NCAA titles from 1962-75 effectively stunted the sport’s broader popularity (when certain teams/programs utterly dominate an underexposed sport, big cultural awareness only comes when some ridiculous win streak is snapped; think UConn, whose dominance has stunted women’ college basketball in the same way). Men’s college basketball should have taken off in the 1960s, but it didn’t because the only time anyone paid attention was when UCLA got beaten: first by Houston (1968’s famous Astrodome game), then by Notre Dame in 1973. These losses proved to be mere blips; the Bruins eventually won national titles both years. But someone finally did beat them when it counted (NC State, in the 1974 national semifinal). Then Wooden retired with one last title, in 1975. Suddenly the field was open and seeded. Take it from someone who was there: The idea that some team other than UCLA could win it all each year was novel and beguiling (!) — only then did the sport truly take off.

The Palestra (bottom right) sits directly beside historic Franklin Field, home of the Penn Relays and where Santa got booed in 1968. It also hosted the Philadelphia Eagles’ last NFL championship (1960). We visited Feb. 3, 2018, one day before the Eagles did it again.

Growing up in New England at this time, our interest had already been piqued by a Providence College team led by Ernie D, Kevin Stacom and Marvin Barnes. The Friars went all the way to the Final Four in 1973 — that year WJAR Channel 10 out of Providence started televising a bunch of PC games. The following year, rival WPRI Channel 12 took the talented University of Rhode Island teams (led by Sly Williams) under its broadcasting wing. Even obscure UHF stations like Channel 27 out of Worcester aired weekly games (each of them called by Bob Fouracre and his magnificent toupée) featuring Holy Cross mainly but also Boston College — even tiny Assumption College, led by the immortal Billy Worm (look him up; he was a stud).

Soon the national networks and their affiliates in Boston got wise and started televising big regional games every Saturday afternoon. Here is where I got to know The Palestra. Hoop-rich Philadelphia was home to The Big 5, a city series featuring local rivals Villanova, Penn, St. Joseph’s, Temple and LaSalle. Every Big 5 game was played at The Palestra and these were the games I watched with manic intensity each weekend. These were the memories dislodged to glorious effect earlier this month, when Clara, Sharon and Philly-born, erstwhile golf freak Mike Sweeney watched the Quakers beat Yale, 58-50.

When the 10,000-seat Palestra opened in 1927, it was among the largest indoor sporting venues on Earth (the name is derived from the ancient Greek term palæstra, a rectangular space attached to a training facility, or gymnasium, where athletes would compete in public, before an audience). Today it’s a bandbox but still all I could have hoped for: seating stacked steeply with front rows right on the baselines/endlines; vaulted ceilings filled with banners; exposed brick everywhere — pretty much exactly as I remember it from the mid to late ‘70s.

But there was more to our Feb. 3 visit. Quite a bit more.

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