Alan Schwarz is a Fucking Idiot

posted by BH

The bolded sections come from Alan Schwarz's latest thing on ESPN.com.

You read about these things, you watch some hair-netted nitwit peer into Geraldo's camera and declare, "By golly, I was gonna go in that car with him" ... and you roll your eyes, numb to the tale's banality. Someone was always gonna go in that car with him. Or eat that burger. Or take that plane flight.

And then it's you.

God I hate this type of bullshit. You will discover, as the piece progresses, that this is an absolutely misleading introductory paragragh. It would lead you to believe that Schwarz called Cory Lidle on the day of the fateful flight and said, "Sorry Cory, I can't make it." Turns out...not so.

About three weeks ago, I was talking with Cory Lidle about his newest hobby, flying. My tape recorder was off. Cory and I chatted about a lot of things over the years. Playing poker. Shooting pool. His newest cell phone. We even occasionally talked about baseball. But not that often. Similar ages, similar hobbies; whenever we ran into each other in Oakland or Philly or now in New York, we'd jabber about anything but work. On this afternoon, in the Yankees clubhouse, we started talking about his new Cirrus SR20.

"You want to go up with me?" he asked.

I was a little flummoxed at the offer but intrigued enough to see if he was serious. He was.

"Where do you live?" he asked me, knowing I lived in Manhattan.

"Upper East Side," I said. "90th and Third."

"Dude" -- Cory was from Southern California -- "you should really come up with me. We can fly right past your apartment building. You've never seen Manhattan 'til you've flown right up the East River. It's beautiful. We can do it one day before a game."

He wasn't kidding. Sufficiently convinced -- and, frankly, flattered -- I mentioned how I've always longed for the guts to skydive. But I had a baby boy in May. I will barely roll craps dice, let alone those.

"My wife would kill me," I said with a wink. "Small planes, you know."

I'd said that a little too flippantly, I guess, because Cory got somewhat serious.

"Totally exaggerated," he said. "You only hear about the crashes."

Having made his point, he said more lightly, "The kind of plane I have will be safer than the cars on the FDR Drive below us."

God I hate Alan Schwarz. Starting today. This is the most ridiculous, retarded, backward, asshole way of bringing yourself into a story there is. Seriously, Lidle died in an airplane crash yesterday. The story is Cory Lidle. The story is not, "Oh, shit...that could have been me. Let me tell you why."

At this point in the piece, Schwarz rambles on about some nonsensical crap, then gets to when he heard about a crash, thought about Lidle...

I picked up the phone and called his cell, the same number he'd given me to get him in on our poker game someday. I heard his greeting -- "Hi, this is Cory ... " -- and after the beep left a clumsy message to the effect of, "Hey, I know I'm gonna be well down on your list of people to call, but if you could put me on there somewhere to tell me you're OK, I'd appreciate it. Talk with you soon."

I hung up with the increasingly ghastly feeling that I never would. And as the news was confirmed that Cory Lidle -- major-league pitcher, father, husband and, well down the list, my friend -- was dead and that building still was burning 20 blocks south of me, his final words to me about flying wafted by like the sickening smoke.

"Tell me if you change your mind," he said about that East River flight. "You can write about it. Would make a cool story."

Seriously, what the hell? What is up with people trying to make someone else's tragedy their own. No one. No. One. other than Alan Schwarz was wondering about how this affected Alan Schwarz. You have absolutley no importance in the story of Cory Lidle and this is an effort to put yourself in the story. I don't give a shit about the non-role you played in this whole thing. Basically, the vomit you spewed on to your keyboard amounted to nothing. "I wasn't about to get on a flight with Cory. Hell, I wasn't ever going to get on a flight with Cory. I just wanted to tell you why you should think about how close we weren't to losing Alan Schwarz."