Tommy Can You *@#$%*&!-in’ Hear Me?

Among all the predictable
hoopla, Lasorda is bound to put his cleats in his mouth. He is, remember, a
Dodgers front office employee. It’s only a matter of a few innings before
his non-p.c. ways are exposed by the international press. Besides, much like
his protege in Queens–Mets conductor Bobby Valentine–Tommy just can’t
keep his wide ass off the field. He’s out of the dugout to greet a successful
double play or a routine foul out. After big plays, he’s always the first
one out of the dugout and onto the field. It’s all about him. Couldn’t
he just once allow the players to celebrate their own greatness?

You want good press for
the baseball team? Fat chance, literally. There will be little to chew on in
that department–the U.S. Olympic team is Pat Borders, the veteran catcher,
and a bunch of li’l shavers–aside from the feature stories about how
an obese Italian-American became a baseball celebrity via old-guy trash talk,
pompous senility and bad ethnic jokes.

Why not take a look back
at one of Lasorda’s finest postgame moments? I’ve written about this
before, but for Lasorda rookies, let’s revisit Mother’s Day 1978,
following a Dodger loss to the Cubs at Dodger Stadium. Dave Kingman had a particularly
good day for Chicago, hitting three monster home runs. The Cubs won 10-7 in
15 innings. Reporter Paul Olden, who would later work Yankee games locally for
WPIX, ventured into the Dodgers’ clubhouse to do his job.

Olden was then a stringer
for Associated Press radio, and he just wanted the usual postgame soundbite
from the losing manager. The day’s game had been anything but quick. L.A.
was gripped by Tampa-style heat that day, and Lasorda had watched his sweat-soaked
blue crew blow several leads. Kingman’s three-run HR in the top of the
15th sealed the deal for the Cubbies.

After first asking the future
Hall of Fame manager a general question about the loss, the young Olden followed
up with this query: "What is your opinion of Kingman’s performance?"
After repeating Olden’s question several times, Lasorda, perhaps suffering
from carbohydrate deprivation, suddenly dusted off the expletives:

His minute-long answer featured
nearly 15 bleeped combinations of "fuckin’ fucker," "goddamn"
and "shit," all sandwiched between Lasorda’s expressions of disbelief
that Olden would ask such a question.

"I just wanted some
basic comments the way we always do after a game," recalls Olden, who now
does radio play-by-play for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. "Then he went off.
He even paused at one point to say goodbye to another sportswriter, and then
got right back into it."

Soon enough, MLB general
managers were craving copies of the tape for home and office use. Before long,
both the bleeped and nonbleeped versions of the Lasorda tirade were circulating
through the baseball underground.

Sure, there were other famous
tirades, like Earl Weaver’s "tomato plant" postgame rant on a
call-in show in Baltimore (a woman called in to ask Weaver something about the
tomatoes in her garden, and the Baltimore skipper basically told her to shove
them up her ass). But the Olden/Lasorda tape was a groundbreaker in terms of
capturing managerial fury and foulmouthed overkill from one of the game’s
most quoted characters. To this day, the Lasorda/Olden exchange inspires giddy
laughter in even the most jaded fan or press-box curmudgeon.

"You’ve got to
remember that there was no Howard Stern or Don Imus back then, and to hear a
respectable manager talking that way and going on and on, well, it became one
of those crazy tapes that producers like to use," Olden said. The Kingman
performance piece even made it onto the top-10 list of Lasorda’s career
highlights during his 1997 Hall of Fame induction. "When Tommy retired,
the Kingman interview ranked number eight on the list,’’ Olden recalled.
"By the time he was going into the Hall, it had moved up to number three."

In 1988, Rhino Records contacted
Olden and he sold them the rights to the tape for $300. Rhino promptly put the
Tommy tirade on its compilation CD Baseball’s Greatest Hits.

After earning his stripes
as an AP stringer, Olden went on to do play-by-play for the Angels, Cleveland
Indians and Yankees. He said the verbal barbs from Lasorda were not the strongest
dressing-down he’s experienced. That came from another Hall of Fame Dodger
manager–Walter Alston–a few seasons before the Lasorda encounter.

Olden was determined to
get Alston to talk about a press-box scrap the manager had with another L.A.
sportswriter. His questioning came after the Dodgers had just lost four crucial
games to the Reds. Alston basically told Olden to cease and desist or else the
manager would take Olden’s tape recorder and break it over his skull. Cooler
heads prevailed, and eventually Alston yielded an exclusive response to the
press-box fight later on that day.

Olden, with a trademark
basso profundo, has yet to get in trouble with Davey Johnson, current manager
of the Dodgers, or Larry Rothschild, who skippers that purple mess of a team
in Tampa Bay. He’s been the public address announcer at the last seven
Super Bowls–a Kingmanesque gig if ever there was one. At least he didn’t
draw the assignment of going to Sydney to cover the Olympic baseball team.