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Thursday, September 22, 2005 |
The Team Player
In An Officer And A Gentleman, Richard Gere's character (and the hero of the story) Zack Mayo has a nice little side business selling shiny new belt buckles to the newbies who desperately need them as part of the ritual hazing that is Officer Candidate School. Naturally, at one point the virtuous-but-poor Perryman needs his assistance just before inspection, but Mayo's a sharper and so insists on the buck. All the same, the venture's illegal -- each candidate must buff his own brass -- and Mayo gets found out. While the audience doesn't for sure discover who ratted Mayo out, we have a pretty good idea that it was Perryman.
All of which is an indirect way of providing a setup for today's Darin Erstad quote in the Times:
"When it comes down to it, we have a lot of confidence in the team," Erstad said. "We don't care what's happened in the past. For example, Steve Finley, I'd take him with the bases loaded in a tight game any time. The type of players we have, the competitors we have, those are the things that feel right."I've always wondered if, in Officer, Mayo had just given in one time to Perryman whether he would have skated through undetected. That's the benefit of being a team player; it's about politics. Erstad's keenly aware that he's no longer the power threat he was even three years ago. It costs him nothing to talk up a piece of flotsam like Finley. The only worry is that Scioscia will start to take such talk seriously.
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