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captainsblogYears ago, when Rochester had an annual late-summer tour stop on the women's professional golf circuit, the sponsors would try to sell lemonade in the wintertime, pitching packages of the following year's tournament tickets as Christmas stocking stuffers. Their theme was, what if you don't buy them and the ladies stop coming here?
Whereupon, they broke into song....
Noel, Noel, No LPGA!
A sad voice intoned:
No Nancy! No Patty!
No Sandra or Dottie!
Come buy all our tickets
Or our stop's in the potty!
(Fine, I made that last part up.)
In the end, it didn't matter; even though Wegmans took over sponsorship and the Locust Hill stop became one of the four women's golf majors, corporate sponsorship went away as the big local companies faded and the former Rochester LPGA has been, since 2010, Noel More:(
This comes to mind because my usual memories of sport never happened in 2020- at least not in a single in-person venue:
No Citi! No Sahlen!
No Frontier or Dwyer!
No road trip to Bingo
In this year's dumpster fire!
Even worse, word came that whenever sporting events DO get back to "normal," the world of those venues will be upside down or worse. At the major league level, I'm expecting smaller crowds, limited concession options, and higher prices. Meanwhile, earlier this month, the Lords of Major League Baseball carried out their plan to contract their lower league affiliates, shuffling many teams around the board while completely killing off others. This article constituted an obituary that didn't even bother naming the deceased, just their last known major league nexts of kin. I was determined to Say Their Names, at least the ones I knew, and do so again here:
The Batavia Clippers.
The Auburn Doubledays.
The Lowell Spinners.
The Norwich Sea Unicorns.
The Vermont Lake Monsters.
(I get it. They're mostly silly names. YOU try making money with kids mostly in their late teens that hardly anybody's ever heard of, no media money, and admission and concession prices a family can afford.)
The Tri-City Valley Cats. (Troy, New York being the lead Tri City- MLB didn't even bother notifying them of their demise and the owners had to find out on social media.)
The Staten Island Yankees. (I'll even shed a tear for pinstripes.)
Closest to home, then, no Dwyer, ever again:( It was the oldest franchise in the eventual NY-Penn League, an organization itself founded in Batavia in 1939, which was summarily dismissed from MLB affliation for the coming summer. Its only surviving members will be the Brooklyn Cyclones, owned by the Mets, and the Aberdeen Ironbirds, owned by Cal Ripken, Junior. Teams of young players I once saw in Batavia, or at one year's "futures" event at Fenway, have been tossed to the curb. Binghamton barely survived the cull, again probably due to their Mets connection, so there's hope for more Rumbling Ponies in our future.
In the meantime, the games, mostly, went on. Hockey was the first to fall, before resuming a post-season in a group of COVID-safe "bubble" cities, while baseball eventually cobbled together a shortened regular 2020 and an expanded playoff round with a set of new rules aimed at making the games shorter and safer. Both the Sabres and Mets just missed out on chances at their respective Cup and Trophy; the Butterknives haven't played a game since March, while the Metropolitans held forth at empty stadia (including a few games here, in Toronto's 2020 home away from home), coming a few games short of the playoff bracket. Following the season, the Mets' hated owners finally sold the team to a lifelong fan, and hopes are high for both Blues (mixed with Mets Orange and Sabres Gold, respectively) for 2021.
The NFL managed to keep an almost complete schedule, mostly with no fans in attendance, and the Bills have regained glory not seen since their AFC Championship streak of the early 90s. They've had more prime time home games than in any season in their history, and not a one of them has had a spectator allowed. We will remain optimistic that, assuming we even HAVE a Super Bowl, they've got as good a chance as anyone to be in it. In Tampa, site of their first heartbreaking loss. Possibly against Tom Brady in his new home stadium.
Fine. Shoot me now.
----
Probably the biggest component of my entertainment life for years has been seeing live music. I'll take in the occasional big act at an arena (Who?) or an outdoor summer lawn (such as one more than 106 miles from Chicago), but mostly smaller shows with performers I adore, many of whom have or would become friends in at least the Facebook sense. The last of these in the Before Times was in February, when I got word of an in-the-round session with a musician I knew and three I didn't. It was at an alcohol-free venue in a nearby village in the heart of FPT Country (I passed a house with a Confederate flag on the way there), but once inside it was a taste of home and home-spun songs:
On your left, Davey O, who I knew before; and the woman on the right, Maria Sebastian, who I'd been encouraged to go see. Although I've only briefly met her once out in the world, we turned out to have a ton of mutual friends and kind-reds of spirits, and I've been a friend and supporter of her music ever since.
Because she, and other musicians, have had this pandemic take major tolls on them. Restaurants, bars and events were once their lifeblood, and each have curtailed if not eliminated their opportunities to make a living so we can all stay alive. They have turned to technology, with Zoom shows and Youtubed performances and Facethis and Instathat with Gofundme tip jars. I've seen many that I or we have known, seen, only heard but always loved. I also made an effort to purchase as much music from their online catalogs, or from record shops that were open and had their material. My goal was to get to 20 such purchases from March 2020 on; if you count some one-offs like Maria's two-song effort with her band Adam Insult & The Injuries, I probably came close. Eleanor just came upon one of them from earlier this year- Jen Chapin's jazz-inspired reworkings of a collection of Stevie Wonder songs, which she loved as much as I did when I first got it.
Many of the venues are struggling; some won't make it. But we will always find ways to listen to the music as long as there are singers and musicians to make more of it.
----
Another outlet for such talent has always been the radio: if not the actual over-the-air signals, the online streams of stations I've come to know and love over a lifetime. Their on-air hosts and newscasters have been a constant in all the change and distraction of this year. Even as FPT supporters call their reporters "the enemy of the people," NPR's news coverage has been thorough and fair throughout. Many stations' airstaff have taken to working at home, with studio hookups making the transition seem as seamless as possible. Most of all, these stations have kept the music playing, even as concerts and other events have gone away.
It's all taken a toll on the commercial ones; I represent most of the local ownership clusters when they sue their advertisers for not paying, and I've received exactly one such claim in the entire year, because many of them aren't even signing up for the advertising in the first place. Lots of the owners have taken to laying off longtime beloved hosts or seeing them going into early retirement, or consolidating their nationwide holdings into one-station-fits-all broadcasts going to multiple cities. Here's two of those recollections- one previously posted about here, the other not:
One of the big nationwide radio conglomerates, not in our market, is one of the big owners in Rochester. They also own the syndication arm that brings Rush Limpbutt and Lumpy Hannity to market, which is a literally dying audience with COVID, and they bought out the concert performance monopoly Live Nation, which also took a big hit this year. So they've let dozens of hosts and newscasters go throughout the country on less than agreeable terms. One who got to leave on his own terms was a Rochester legend of a sportswriter, and one of the earliest to put a talk show on the radio, named Bob Matthews. I was a regular listener and caller for all my years there, and continued listening long after that until maybe the past several. I got wind of his final show coming at the end of the first week of May, and got to call in for a final farewell.
And then there's the Kerfuffle at the end of the other dial. I've listened to 107.7FM in a ton of different formats for almost 40 years: from the freeform days of WUWU, to the "lock it in and rip the knob off" straightahead rock of WBYR, through jazzish days as the WAVE to sports talk as WNSA to "just the music" I loved on WLKK "The Lake." I only bailed on their years as a country station and a brief sad period of simulcasting Limpbutt and the other AM hate-talkers. But five years ago, Rush went off the deep end of the dial and a locally programmed set of "alternative" songs began. I didn't know them at first, the artists or the voices introducing them, but they quickly gained a local reputation as the "Alt Family." Morning women from Bentley to Emily to Brandi were fun but not morning-zooey; evenings brought Axe and Kennedy; and the latter returned during our weekend dog park rounds for "Sunday Morning Coming Down," a lighter collection of music. Then, in a puff of megahertz, Alt Buffalo was Alt Your City Here: all the local talent was out, replaced by a feed from the format out of New York with a Morning Zoo bunch telling fart jokes and a sequence of "hosts" on after them who wouldn't know their Dupa from a hole in the Grand Island.
It took a month or so to get a little better. Brandi came back on, although on a midday shift, and the Noo Yawker tawker for the afternoon drive named Booker became surprisingly tolerable- so naturally, he's leaving after the first of the year. The locally programmed specialty shows are still off, and their concert series (prophetically called "Kerfuffles") has been COVIDed out of existence at least for now. I' ve returned them to a car preset, and hope Booker will get replaced by one of the dear departed, but if there's one thing I have come to learn about 107.7, it's never to get too used to it.