The National?...I fucking miss the National. Even with the reprehensible Frank DeFord, a mealy buffoon if there ever was one, The Nat' was pretty much everyone's first flirtation with excellent sports journalism. Everything else blows goats, but the baseball coverage in the 'Nat, though not as thorough as USA Today, was the perfect match of commentary and wit. A wit sparing and wry, mostly, but sparing nonetheless. I remember some fat guy with glasses named Paul, I think. His Krusty The Clown look roped me into seeing just what a true geek would write. But that DeFraud...oy.

And what was with the Mickey Spillane shit. The hat, the Adolphe Menjou-brand moustache (from RonCo, $8.98). Since they just couldn't show him out-and-out smoking, they made sure he had the head-wrinkles correct for subconscious association with being a smoker. And he loved it. In his most Geraldo influenced pathos, he spewed forth lame commentary as though he thought he was ringside at Caeser's assassination, with the weigh-in footage from Brutus. You just can't let a man cop the jive from both Ring Lardner and Dan Duryea from Pride Of The Yankees and give him any form of audience. Perhaps that's why we don't see him in the dailies as frequently.

By far, the key lime to that pie was the writing of Scott Ostler. He was so "The Man". While everyone was hung up on the whole Dave Barry scene, Ostler was dropping similar 'K on a different page. Hell, I was so happy when I moved to S.F. to find Ostler was writing for the Chronicle. Having weaned myself on his SoCal. work, I spent a few years not realizing that he was one of the only hack-scribes out there with a sense of humor. The off-hand quips, Brady Bunch references, pop-culture mockery, he had it all during his National tenure.

It seemed so absurd even back then that the U.S. had a newspaper, a daily newspaper, devoted strictly to sports. The 8 pages we had become accustomed to for a lifetime (often including two full pages of tire ads, or Classifieds, or Weather, or Religion...), expanded to tabloid format?...You gotta be kiddin' me?! How they gonna fill it? Well, with classifieds, batting glove ads, and stats...how else? More editorials than you could shake a shtick at, complete coverage...you get the picture.

Anyway, it kicked ass, and I miss it. Baseball Weekly is very, very, weakly done. USA Today is still USA Today, no matter how you slice it. So what else have we got? Uhh, nothing? The Nat' unfortunately collapsed under the indomitable weight of its unprecendentiality. No one was expecting a daily with such intense coverage, so either no one thought it would last (causing a lack of support), or the sensory overload was too much for any market to bear. They were at least five years ahead of their time. Bummer, cuz with the lack of good non-USA Today writing out there, we could surely use them nowadays.

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