If you truly love your father, then Mr. Skin has the perfect Father's Day gift for the old man, Benchclearing: Baseball's Greatest Fights and Riots (The Lyons Press). Written by Spike Vrusho, a long-time contributor to the New York Press and editor of the sadly shuttered New York Sports Express, this is a chillingly hilarious look at the boys of summer.Even if your father doesn't like sports he'll love Benchclearing, the equivalent of the best kick-ass action movie only with no heroes and everyone's in pinstripes and cleats. Vrusho not only writes with the skill and precision of an expert craftsman, he knows his subject passionately and that enthusiasm is contagious.
Hell, buy dad a copy and one for yourself. Who knows, one day you might be the father of a young boy and he'll want to pick up the bat and hit a few with his pops. Nothing bonds a couple of guys closer than sharing some bloody baseball diamond carnage. Vrusho may be responsible for launching a new genre of parenting books. Lets hope there are basketball, football and soccer sequels in the works.
Why should even non-sports fans read Benchclearing?
Because it is about adrenalin, misguided machismo, clumsiness, bad manners and public misbehavior, to name a few things that might interest an anti-sports dork. The "sport" has stopped in these instances, and the fight is on and each incident must be treated like the chariot race from Ben Hur.
Back in the mid-'80s to the late '90s you edited a punk-rock baseball zine called Murtaugh. Is Benchclearing a natural progression from that Xeroxed digest?
The book is a little more fancy, but there is a germ of Murtaugh-style sarcasm beneath the entire tome. I'm still denouncing the baseball establishment on most fronts and much of the "mainstream" media and the insane, bloated marketing departments that make up MLB.
Danny Murtaugh [Pittsburgh Pirates player and manager] is actually mentioned in a few incidents. He ended up getting spiked in the neck during a melee. No one seemed to know how that happened, but he soldiered on, of course.
Editing Murtaugh, the zine, prepared me for writing Benchclearing.
There are tales fostered by a gossiping Internet about Murtaugh reaching the hands of some of famous readers, such as?
Back then it was good just to have something to hand to various celebs when I worked the door at a trendy restaurant in Manhattan's East Village. Matt Dillon was a big fan. Martina Navratilova got her copy. So did Jim Jarmusch, who is a big Cleveland Indians fan. The rest of the B-listers I can barely remember.
Regale readers that are unaware of Murtaugh and the unusual gang of idiots involved in its publication of those heady days at the Towers in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
It was a sweatshop without the sweat or the shop. McSweeney's didn't exist.
Tony Millionaire was drawing Drinky Crow for drinks at the 612 Bar on Metropolitan Ave. We had five bucks between us, but I had a ratty Nissan Sentra and that thing got us out of any tight jams with his landlords or ex-girlfriends.
Happyland publisher Selwyn Harris for some reason thought Murtaugh was so strange that he had to like it, during a time when he was denouncing everything and everybody.
We lived in the "Rainbow Towers" loft amidst welders, cartoonists, wayfaring bankers, Dutch Goths from Pratt, bass player/architects, sexy librarians, Canadian milliners, local soft-ballers, German crashers, the occasional visiting dominatrix and a kick-ass wood stove.
In the center was the "Pillar of Technology," which was scrapped circuit boards picked up off our street from the countless TVs, VCRs and other electronic junk dumped there on a nightly basis.
At the top of the pillar, though, was a lone horseshoe crab shell. So nature prevailed in the end, as usual.
Are any of the fights detailed in Benchclearing a result of one player sleeping with another's wife?
There was a Dodgers locker room incident in which a wife was mentioned and that lit the fuse. It was Don Sutton against Steve Garvey. Garvey had all kinds of difficulties fronting this All-American image when his teammates knew it was all ego and that he had kids from a chippy down in San Diego on the side and all that.
Do any of the fights have a sexual angle?
There were a few involving naked players, one in particular involving Reggie Jackson during which he bickered with a teammate over a mutual female interest and then Billy North called Reggie a "faggot" and it was on.
Goose Gossage also fought a naked Cliff Johnson in the Yankees shower. Let's see if he mentions that in his Hall of Fame induction speech.
What'd your favorite fight in the book?
For sentimental reasons I'd have to go with Ed Ott's Mexican wrestling style destruction of Felix Millan after a collision at second base. If only because it is a Pittsburgh Pirate destroying a New York Met, and that I like to see.
Though a self-acknowledge anti-sports homo, I was present at one spectacular fisticuff between Bud Harrelson, popular short stop from the NY Mets, and Pete Rose of the Cincinnati Reds at Shea Stadium in 1973. I couldn't see a thing, as the crowd instantly went to its feet to pitch garbage at Rose, but thankfully my grandfather had a transistor radio glued to his ear.
Is this fight included in your tome?
Pete Rose versus Bud Harrelson is featured prominently in the book as one of the more colorful incidents in postseason play.
So you had playoff tickets? Of course you did, as you were an East Coast heavy hitter from the early days. You were probably sitting next to Toots Shorr.
Fighting is fine, but sexual scandals are what pay the bills here. Do you remember the first nude scene you saw in a mainstream movie growing up?
Probably Mrs. Robinson's boobs in The Graduate. Or the girl running into the water in the opening scene of Jaws (Picture: 1). But that was pretty dark.
What do you consider the sexiest baseball motion picture?
Hands down it is Squeeze Play (Picture: 1 - 2) on early Cinemax. A mattress factory forms a coed softball team, and things go awry in a comical fashion. It was absolutely brilliant and worthy of opening its own fantasy camp.
You live in Upstate New York now, a family man, married with a young daughter. How does this affect your drinking and baseball?
I don't get to watch many games because cartoons dominate the TV or I am working driving a cab. And the bars close so early I barely get a buzz on.
Will you let your daughter read this interview?
When it is translated into Sanskrit and delivered on Kindle technology to her college dorm on Venus.
