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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Welcome to the Senior Professional Baseball Association, where the crack of the bat meets the creak of the bone. Founded this year by Arizona real estate developer Jim Morley, the S.P.B.A. is into its first three-month season, fielding eight Florida teams of ex-major leaguers 35 or older (catchers may be 32). Most of the superstars are missing: Reggie Jackson is occupied with his classic autos, Jim Palmer with his underwear, Pete Rose with hawking his tarnished name. But enough good ole boys of summer are participating to help ease the winter of discontent every baseball addict endures between...
...Hill Gang. Last week's waltz between Sugar Ray Leonard, 33, and Roberto Duran, 38, was the top-grossing fight in history. Next month George Foreman, now bigger than Mount Rushmore and twice as old, will face perennial white heavyweight Gerry Cooney. Someone will get hurt -- probably the first one who throws a punch -- and people will pay to watch. Like rock 'n' roll, sports used to be a young man's game. But with the graying of America, the Stones go rolling on, and geriatric jocks are big business...
Well, maybe not big Senior Baseball business. The eight S.P.B.A. owners, each of whom staked a reported $850,000 for the first season, are not expecting quick profits. With some games attracting as few as 100 paying customers, a team or two may fold before the scheduled February play-offs. The players, whose salaries average $23,000, won't get rich either. But what they want is to prove, to themselves and others, that there is life after Fan Appreciation Day. "Hell," says ex-Yankee Graig Nettles in the S.P.B.A. yearbook, "if I can stay in baseball, I may never...
...Durham) directs Blaze with plenty of pungent wit, but from a high, disinterested view. He never gets steam into the affair. Paul Newman approaches Earl from the outside too, as a growly-bear clown who doesn't realize he's King Lear. Lolita Davidovich, making the most of her first big break, plays Blaze as a sensible, loving career gal with an overripe body. But the picture is not mainly about sex or even love; it is about an aging man's loss of sexual, political and personal power...
...just slips under the wire as the first large-scale Civil War film of the decade. And it may be the last of the millennium, so far out of favor (and economic viability) have historical epics of all kinds fallen. Maybe one's good response to Glory derives from the sheer novelty of the thing and from admiration for the producers' gumption in flinging it in the face of the movie audience's indifference to the pretelevised past...