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Politics & Government

Pundits, Giants Fade to Black

This week marks the end of the 2011 San Francisco Giants' season in much different fashion than a year ago, as well as the retirement of Andy Rooney, whose pithy monologues were preceded by many years as a stalwart war correspondent.

“I was hoping Aubrey Huff would get hot,” Bill Seifert says about his faded hopes for the Giants outfielder and the entire 2011 team as he waited with son, Kyle, for San Rafael’s Flatiron Restaurant and Sports Bar to open Wednesday afternoon.

Seifert, a Corte Madera marketing professional, Tony Robbins acolyte and CEO of 15Billion.com, was dressed in shorts and a cream-colored Hawaiian floral shirt. Able to keep his own hours, Seifert promised his son lunch at the Flatiron to at least commemorate an unsatisfying and unspectacular baseball season, particularly compared to last year’s epic World Series triumph.   

It is 1 p.m. before Sean, the Flatiron’s bartender, unlocks the door on the corner of Fourth and “B” and lets us in. It's also already the second inning of the Giant’s season finale and they are already down 2-0 in an essentially meaningless game against Colorado. This finale gives Giants' fans like Seifert some solace, or at least one more opportunity to root for a team that has missed the playoffs but can still claim to be being baseball’s World Champions until a new winner is crowned. 

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What a difference a year makes. At this point in the 2010 season, the Giants had just won the National League West, knocking out and completely turning the tables on a Padres team that had dominated them in the early part of the season. Giant’s announcers John Miller, Mike Krukow and Dwayne Kuiper sounded noticeably fatigued, having gone through a season with a team that never seemed to coalesce around a theme, like last year’s “torture,” or even around a line-up that could help the Giants pull out a playoff appearance.

The word "bittersweet" was on a lot of people's lips over the past month as the Giants seemed unable to hit their way back to the playoffs. Forgiveness seemed to be the order of the Giant’s final day. On his way out from lunch, Bill Seifert wandered over to note that manager Bruce Bochy “was a genius for his ability to juggle a lineup hurt by injuries, slumps and a bench full of new players.”

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In retrospect, Bochy’s feat was all the more comment-worthy in the face of the doomed, distressed season that went south in late May when phenom catcher Buster Posey broke his leg and the fans' hearts. At the Flatiron, as with life in general, things are in the process of moving on. Long before the game ended, Sean had already flipped a couple of the televisions in the bar to international soccer.

Things “were a little more exciting last year,” Sean said. But the end of the Giants season turns our attention to Sunday, with the end of the labor dispute between NFL owners and players allowing the Flatiron to broadcast 10 different NFL games each week. Sean hopes a resurgent 49ers squad can pick up the slack from the now-sadly-over baseball season. 

This Sunday also marks the of end of the era of Andy Rooney on 60 Minutes, as the 92-year-old American Aesop and essayist is retiring. Rooney has spent the last 32 television seasons gently nudging America towards its better nature or at least away from its worst. Even more than that, Rooney represents the very best in radio and television broadcasting beginning as a war correspondent who, with Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Charles Collingwood, Herb Caen and others, provided the sounds and images of America’s 20th Century “great war.”

Rooney, who like so many WWII veterans simply calls it “The War,” covered the Normandy invasion and wrote more than 200 stories for the U.S. armed services newspaper, Stars & Stripes. He was one of the American journalists who accompanied the U.S. Army Air Corp in highly-dangerous bombing runs over Germany. In his book, My War, Rooney noted that “Life is real at war, concentrated and intense,” and that writing about it was “a cathartic experience.”

He insisted “once you’ve put it down on paper, you can dismiss it from your mind.” The latter wasn’t entirely true, however. Rooney’s son, Brian, was a classmate of mine at a New England prep school, Loomis-Chaffee, when his dad came and spoke in the school chapel in the late 60s. Rooney was then a well-known CBS producer and practicing journalist who was regarded as one of Ed Murrow’s legendary “boys.”

At Loomis, Rooney talked about life as a journalist and made it seem like a worthy and interesting profession to pursue. His son Brian went on to become a stalwart for ABC in Los Angeles while others of us became journos at least in part because of Rooney’s pep-talk. Still writing at 92 seems to be a tonic for survival. It certainly has kept Rooney fresh and eager, each week taking on subjects with an angle that is nearly frighteningly simple and able to evoke the journalist’s ultimate cry in the wilderness, “I could have written that.”

Could have, but didn’t. 

And so now, like old soldiers and the 2011 Giants, Andy Rooney will simply fade to black. His consolation is that he will be missed by fans and seekers of the simple, and sometimes not so simple, truths that tie together life, journalism and, yes, even Giants baseball. 

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