My Charles Osgood viewing on Sunday morning was interrupted by a commercial starring Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who was stumping for Nassau Legislator Craig Johnson, who is hoping to fill the state Senate seat vacated by our new Homeland Security czar, Republican Mike Balboni.
I read an interesting twist on the story in the Albany Times-Union, which reported that Spitzer told Balboni he wasn’t allowed to get involved in the race to succeed him. Not that Balboni listened. His wife, Stephanie, appears in an ad for the Republican candidate, Maureen O’Connell, so all’s fair.
With a win, Johnson, a Democrat, would take a seat in the mostly impotent Democratic minority in the Senate, but more important, he would leave a vacancy in the county Legislature. The Democrats and Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi will appoint a successor, but that Democrat will have all of six months of incumbency — which Long Island voters seem to view as the sole measure of a candidate’s worth — when he runs for a full term in November.
Assuming the rest of the Legislature is re-elected — again — the winner of this seat will give control of the Legislature to his or her party.
Suozzi can thank Spitzer for his latest headache. Several of his other headaches, alas, are self-inflicted.
On Sunday afternoon, some friends and I attended the golf expo at Queens College. Hidden in the back, next to the Koreans offering massages (no kidding), was the booth sponsored by Commerce Bank, title sponsor of the Commerce Bank Championship, played on Eisenhower Park’s Red Course.
Not that the people manning the booth knew anything about the golf tournament. For starters, they couldn’t tell me when it would be played. “June, I think. It’s too soon to tell,” said one guy, sounding like a sixth-grader who hadn’t done his homework.
The Commerce Bank Championship is supposed to be the big payoff for all the tax dollars pumped into the Nassau County parks department. In a year with no New York-area U.S. Open, this event on the PGA’s over-50 Champions Tour — played the last weekend in June — is the biggest thing around. Yet it’s remarkable in that it fails to create any buzz beyond the community of golf addicts. This is the nation’s largest media market, and the Commerce Bank event has only the Barclays in Westchester, on the PGA Tour (which Tiger typically skips), to compete with.
Few senior tour events draw much interest in terms of who’s winning. It’s all about the personalities of the players, and last year the Commerce Bank had a pretty decent field, including Gary McCord, who is on the CBS broadcasting team at the Masters and a total hoot, and Ben Crenshaw, a two-time Masters champion who delighted the fans by making the cut last year at Augusta at age 54. They were joined by such Champions Tour headliners as Hale Irwin and Curtis Strange, who have five U.S. Open titles between them, and Rick Rhoden, the former Yankees pitcher.
Yet the publicity pictures we at the Herald receive leading up to the event inevitably feature Tom Suozzi, Commerce Bank executives and Parks Department commissioners. No word on when they’d be signing autographs.
It’s not fair to talk about attendance or TV ratings, since it poured rain all weekend last year. A better gauge is all the Eisenhower Red Course swag you see. We’ll cut to the chase: It barely exists.
Since Bethpage State Park hosted the U.S. Open in 2002, everyone who’s ever hoisted a golf bag owns at least one (and usually several) Bethpage Black Course hat, shirt, towel, visor and jacket. Those goodies, for sale in the Bethpage pro shop and online at fantastic markups, bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, which funds not only Bethpage’s upkeep but the other parks under the state’s control. The other golf courses at Bethpage — the ones for the rest of us — are kept in peak condition despite maximum use, thanks to the dollars Bethpage Black merchandise brings in.
Golfers are addicted to labels and are notorious showoffs. Offer us stuff and we’ll buy it.
But Eisenhower’s Red Course, which once hosted the PGA Championship, doesn’t even have a logo, let alone a clothing line. This unclaimed revenue costs everyone. Improvements to the other courses at Eisenhower, the Blue and the White, have been steady but slow. The greens are smooth and the fairways pristine, but last summer the sand traps on the Blue Course still felt like gravel.
I asked Suozzi about this during his re-election bid, but he dismissed the issue as unimportant. With all the issues he has to deal with, I suppose, it probably would seem like it.
But for people like me who pay a fortune in taxes and ask little in return in services — my child is not yet in school, my wife and I pay for our own health insurance and we’re rarely arrested — public parks are the only government service we use.
The county can do us a solid by promoting the famous players who will be at the Commerce — Hello! Seve turns 50 this year! — and coming up with some kind of a merchandising plan.
The extra revenue could offset whatever other self-inflicted headaches that are on the horizon.
Monday, January 29, 2007
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
The tree that wouldn't let go
Walking off the 18th green at the Lido Golf Club last Sunday, stripped down to shorts and a short-sleeved shirt on an average 60-degree January afternoon, I had another typically brilliant idea. Since it was throw-out-the-Christmas-tree day, I would douse it in hair spray, nail polish remover, lead paint and bug spray and set it on fire in our driveway. If Al Gore is as right about global warming as he insists, the Viking funeral I imagined would not only honor our departed tree but also extend Long Island’s golf season to 12 months.
I didn’t, of course.
Instead I spent 45 minutes and burned through two Sawzall batteries trying to get the bottom four inches of the stump off. Collecting and decorating our Christmas tree stumps is a family tradition that goes back to the 1970s. I don’t know how my father had the patience to do it every year with a hand saw. I guess people just did it that way.
This year it was especially slow going, since the stump — and the tree growing out of it — was still very much alive, even after a month of standing in our living room next to a radiator. At one point I switched to a circular saw — at almost 9 at night, so I hereby apologize to my neighbors — and then hammered a flathead screwdriver into the cut. No good. The handle shattered and the metal shaft bent at a right angle. This tree wasn’t ready to let go.
Finally, using the claw end of the hammer, I managed to free the screwdriver and pry the stump off. It had been held on by a defiant knot that was reinforced by several ounces of sap.
I told my wife about the fight the tree had put up. She looked sad, and I knew why. She felt sad for the tree, and I did, too, and I wondered, science and logic aside, about what the tree had gone through. After all, it was a living organism with circulatory and respiratory systems. It responded to external stimuli. It gave off an aroma.
But it did not have a central nervous system, at least not as I understand the term. It had no consciousness or opinions. It knew nothing of species or class or jealousy. It had no phobias or mood swings or estrangements.
The tree had — has — a spirit, which is just as eternal but not as corruptible as a soul. Nothing could have given so much and not been a part of God. My little daughter loved the tree, almost as much as her grandfather’s trains, which ran almost constantly for a month in an oval around the tree. She liked the smell of the branches and that there were candy canes hidden within. She told everyone at school on Monday about her tree leaving.
The tree, by now certainly headed for tree heaven, such as it is, will continue to give once it gets there. I imagine it decorated with red bows and tinsel, in the nurseries of young children who left their families too early, providing shade to dogs who served faithfully and memories of home for dead soldiers.
It represented a great month in the life of my daughter, and I hope they appreciate it as much as we did.
This Christmas we visited some of my cousins, who I see far too rarely. Eight years ago, one cousin gave birth to a son with Down syndrome, and after a few hectic years of almost monthly surgeries, her husband told me that life has become more serene.
Their son was born with two holes in his heart, which continues to murmur, but now his visits to the doctor are mostly for routine maintenance. Today he is completely vocal, attends public schools in Pennsylvania full-time and, like every other 8-year-old, loves Disney movies. (His mother was dressing him one morning when he folded his arms, scowled and said, “Don’t you turn your back on me, Scar!” It’s a line from “The Lion King,” they later realized.)
The boy’s also got a gun for an arm, as I learned when we played catch. His father said his specialty is carnival games. “You know those ring tosses?” he said. “He’s money. And I think I know why: They’re pure luck, and at this point he doesn’t have just one guardian angel, he’s got a whole team of them. He must.”
And now that team has a tree.
I didn’t, of course.
Instead I spent 45 minutes and burned through two Sawzall batteries trying to get the bottom four inches of the stump off. Collecting and decorating our Christmas tree stumps is a family tradition that goes back to the 1970s. I don’t know how my father had the patience to do it every year with a hand saw. I guess people just did it that way.
This year it was especially slow going, since the stump — and the tree growing out of it — was still very much alive, even after a month of standing in our living room next to a radiator. At one point I switched to a circular saw — at almost 9 at night, so I hereby apologize to my neighbors — and then hammered a flathead screwdriver into the cut. No good. The handle shattered and the metal shaft bent at a right angle. This tree wasn’t ready to let go.
Finally, using the claw end of the hammer, I managed to free the screwdriver and pry the stump off. It had been held on by a defiant knot that was reinforced by several ounces of sap.
I told my wife about the fight the tree had put up. She looked sad, and I knew why. She felt sad for the tree, and I did, too, and I wondered, science and logic aside, about what the tree had gone through. After all, it was a living organism with circulatory and respiratory systems. It responded to external stimuli. It gave off an aroma.
But it did not have a central nervous system, at least not as I understand the term. It had no consciousness or opinions. It knew nothing of species or class or jealousy. It had no phobias or mood swings or estrangements.
The tree had — has — a spirit, which is just as eternal but not as corruptible as a soul. Nothing could have given so much and not been a part of God. My little daughter loved the tree, almost as much as her grandfather’s trains, which ran almost constantly for a month in an oval around the tree. She liked the smell of the branches and that there were candy canes hidden within. She told everyone at school on Monday about her tree leaving.
The tree, by now certainly headed for tree heaven, such as it is, will continue to give once it gets there. I imagine it decorated with red bows and tinsel, in the nurseries of young children who left their families too early, providing shade to dogs who served faithfully and memories of home for dead soldiers.
It represented a great month in the life of my daughter, and I hope they appreciate it as much as we did.
This Christmas we visited some of my cousins, who I see far too rarely. Eight years ago, one cousin gave birth to a son with Down syndrome, and after a few hectic years of almost monthly surgeries, her husband told me that life has become more serene.
Their son was born with two holes in his heart, which continues to murmur, but now his visits to the doctor are mostly for routine maintenance. Today he is completely vocal, attends public schools in Pennsylvania full-time and, like every other 8-year-old, loves Disney movies. (His mother was dressing him one morning when he folded his arms, scowled and said, “Don’t you turn your back on me, Scar!” It’s a line from “The Lion King,” they later realized.)
The boy’s also got a gun for an arm, as I learned when we played catch. His father said his specialty is carnival games. “You know those ring tosses?” he said. “He’s money. And I think I know why: They’re pure luck, and at this point he doesn’t have just one guardian angel, he’s got a whole team of them. He must.”
And now that team has a tree.
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