Sunday Lunch with Jim Palmer
There's an old adage about how, if someone makes you nervous, you should just visualize them in their underwear, and they won't be nearly so intimidating.
It doesn't work.
The idea behind it, I guess, is that we all look rather ridiculous when stripped down to our skivvies. But the truth of the matter is that not everyone looks silly and harmless. Some people look really, really hot.
And I happen to remember Jim Palmer, the major league pitching legend and Jockey underwear pitchman, as one of them. I used to cut out his ads from my dad's Sports Illustrated magazine and pin them up on the cork board in my bedroom.
So thinking about him in his underwear isn't making me less anxious. It's making me feel like a giddy kid with a pathetic crush.
And when he walks into 437 Rush for our lunch together, looking eerily like he did 20 years ago, I am reduced to near speechlessness.
Fortunately, this doesn't matter much because Palmer, the Hall of Famer and broadcaster, is a pro and hardly needs to go through the motions of being asked actual questions. I barely have to choke out a topic -- "food?" -- before he is winningly spinning a perfectly media-genic series of well-crafted anecdotes.
Superstitious 'Cakes'
"Everyone used to call me 'Cakes,' " he says, "because I'd always eat pancakes for breakfast before pitching."
Banishing from my mind any reference to the obviously degrading term "beefcake," I continue to listen and scribble diligently as he explains how he missed the ritual meal once, catching an early-morning flight, and how, after losing that game, he vowed never to skip his pancakes again.
Pitchers are, of course, notorious for superstitions like these, and Palmer had his share.
"I'd do a thing where you put nine balls on a pool table, and if you sink nine, that means you'll pitch nine innings," he says. "And if you only sink one or two, you start over."
He'd also chew three pieces of bubble gum at a time and once won 10 games in a row wearing the same T-shirt under his uniform.
Now that I know all of this about him, I should be feeling a bit more comfortable. I should take the interview in hand and ask penetrating questions about the state of the great American pastime.
Instead, I offer up a fawning remark about how fascinating I find weird pitching rituals and the fetishization -- inner monologue: Oh, God, did I really use that word? I did. Quick: Picture him in his underwear. No, wait, don't! -- of The Arm.
He orders the grilled halibut and gamely keeps talking.
"In sports," he's saying, as I re-focus my attention, "there are a lot of variables you can't control, so you try to control as many as you can."
Work around the house
Naturally right-handed, Palmer protected his pitching arm by learning to do as many other things as possible with his left hand: playing tennis, carrying his suitcase, doing work around the house.
Carrying his own bag? Working around the house?
"Life was a lot different back then," he says when I point out that these do not sound like things a superstar athlete would generally be caught dead doing.
When he and his wife first moved to Baltimore, at the start of his career, he says, "We bought the $26,000 house because we couldn't afford the $28,000 house. And, on my off days, I painted it myself."
Palmer laughingly agrees that it's hard to imagine Mark Prior wielding a paint brush with his million-dollar arm, but it's a laugh with the tiniest hint of an edge. Though he himself was lucky enough never to suffer from the chronic injuries he calls "Prior-Kerry disease," Palmer did miss two seasons with a rotator cuff injury.
"I won 250 games after I had that torn rotator cuff," he says, "There's luck and there's genetics in that. . . . In a way, one of the greatest things that happened to me was getting hurt. It made me appreciate God's gift."
In Chicago for the White Sox-Orioles series and to make an appearance at a Kane County Cougars game as part of a cholesterol-awareness campaign sponsored in part by drug-maker Merck, Palmer is slightly bemused by the city's love affair with the dreadfully performing Cubs.
"I think the whole Cubs thing is very charming," he says diplomatically, but he makes it clear that he's an American League guy. "The White Sox are there for the long haul," he predicts.
He is clearly a fan of Ozzie Guillen, whom he likens to his old manager, the riotously hot-tempered Earl Weaver.
'You get used to it'
"You know, if I was Ozzie and I got to manage this team, I'd be a bit full of myself, too," he says. And, looking back on it, "Would a lot of American League umpires like to have had Earl take an anger-management class? Yes, but it would have ruined the fun."
Palmer doesn't think intense media scrutiny causes much of a problem for Ozzie or his team.
"You have a bad day at work," he says, "and if you're a pitcher, or a manager, or an athlete, you read about it in the paper. But, after a while, you get used to it."
Really? I ask, you really reach a point where it doesn't get to you anymore?
"Yeah," he says.
And I wonder if I will ever get to a point where visualizing an interview subject in his Jockey briefs will cease to be a serious distraction. I'm certainly not there yet.
