Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Fame and Fortune

It finally happened. After a lifetime of softball games, innumerable comebacks, upsets, big hits and yes even some blunders in the field and failures in the clutch, I am finally Famous.

That's right, my picture was in the newspaper. Just this last weekend. Playing second base of all places, and turning a double play. It was a tremendous action photo. There was dust from the runner sliding and trying to take me out. Never mind it looks like I am about to unleash a candy-ass throw to first. Pay no attention to that at all. It just turns out that the world finally discovered me.

OK it wasn't Sports Illustrated, ESPN the Magazine, or the Chronicle. It was the Jweekly.com (the community Jewish newspaper) online edition, in an article about the Sunday morning Jewish league starting the season now. OK, I only played one season in that league, last year, and gave it up this year because with my sore shoulders I had to give up a league. And I wasn't that good at getting up at 7 on a Sunday to play ball with a bunch of my (hopefully very) distant relatives. Insert ethnic joke here.

But still there it was staring at me, making a play captured for posterity in a public forum.

Except.

Except, they had someone else's name and team identified in the caption. WHAT???

They had Michael somebody, playing for the league champion whose-its. No one ever called me Michael, or Mike or even Mikey before. So I concluded that it must be someone else. But damn it sure looked like me.

Then my friend Gerry sent a note to another teammate and me saying it was me in the picture. Ah - corroboration! I looked again and damn if I wasn't still labeled as someone else. A normal person would just let this go, but could the heffinator? No Way. I did what every journalist with any integrity would do. I signed up as a member of jweekly.com, so I could leave a comment in the Forum. I told them that indeed it was me in the photo. In a matter of hours I got an email reply from the Managing Editor of the jweekly, telling me it has been corrected and even a thank you.

Now however there are two problems: 1) I still am listed on the wrong team. Journalistic integrity demands a correction for that too, so I just had to write back. I haven't heard back on it yet.2) Now that they have corrected it, it looks pretty damn nerdy that I commented on the name being wrong, under a picture with me correctly identified. Should I retract my comment? Should I comment on my comment and thank them for correcting it? And by now every last one of you says, under your breath or not, "this guy has wayyyy too much time on his hands."

Getting your 15 minutes of fame can be a very complicated process. Now that Fame has come my way, I am awaiting Fortune with bated breath. It can't be far behind.

1 comment: