Long Gone Summer
We can’t pretend the golden baseball summer of ‘98 was as sweet as it felt then.
I still remember, verbatim, the ads ESPN aired as that 1998 summer faded: “Who’s going to hit 62… before this season is through?” We played kickball everyday during fifth-grade recess, through August, through September, with half the entire elementary in the outfield. The other half lined up to kick. A few friends and I, the real athletes, counted up our wins, losses, and mainly home runs in a frenzy to imitate the pros. My teacher assigned us a notebook we had to fill with daily entries on anything we chose. Mine’s cover read, “Who’s going to kick 71… before this season is done?”
Seventy-one became the target, we all know, because Mark McGwire set his single-season home run record at 70, fending off a thrilling charge by Sammy Sosa. It ignited the hearts of the entire country, not least fifth-grade baseball fanatics. But apart from this nostalgia, everything that you loved about The Last Dance and Lance, ESPN’s much more prestigious documentaries this summer, went missing in action in Long Gone Summer. The scandal and conflict, the heartbeat of the story and violins in the orchestra, are relegated to the discount rack.
Steroids poison the memory of the home run race. We can’t celebrate this exhilarating season, in retrospect, without equally holding accountable the sluggers who slipped detection for so long. Where is Marina Zenovich cross-examining Lance Armstrong here? Director AJ Schnack contents himself with a brief foreshadowing and then fifteen minutes at the end on steroids.
He has opted rather for a wistful hymn to our collective boyhood’s summer of magic. The film is a celebration, and the home run chase deserves to be celebrated, but in the proper context. McGwire has admitted to using steroids after much denial. Sosa still hasn’t despite being fingered by The New York Times and a documented history of cheating. (“His bat was so corked it could float in the Atlantic,” Tony Kornheiser said Friday.) No matter; McGwire has to answer one or two questions, none pointed. “It sorta sucked,” he offers. The Cub wriggles out by stating he’s “good” with it so many times we can see him questioning himself. He’s too nice to be Lance.
More from Michael Augsberger:
These moments are far from worthless on their own. But we’ve scratched the surface where we ought to be digging for ages. We either needed more time or needed to spread it out over the full running time. We don’t ask the hard questions and fail to follow up on critical, philosophical issues.
Big Mac argues quickly that there was no formal drug-testing at the time—implying that without a rule, there is no exception. Bob Costas doesn’t judge the players on morality, he counters, but morality displaces legality here and taints their accomplishments. That’s the end of that. Wow, I thought. I hadn’t even considered the rules at the time, and dismissed steroid users out of hand. A film with a more than cursory acknowledgement of the scandal would have intensely explored this merely for the intellectual stimulation, let alone for the baseball debate. But no.
Schnack’s presented with a difficult task in the season-long run-up to the dramatic night that McGwire breaks Roger Maris’ record of 61. The problem plagues soccer reels that show only goals—seeing one after another after another, dead certain that each will go in, gets monotonous, desensitizes us to the scoring play, and robs us of the joyous disbelief that is the very reason great goals are so satisfying. Home runs are the same way. Whack whack whack. There simply isn’t time in a documentary to show each in its proper context, but home run montages don’t thrill the way other highlight reels do.
The record-breaking night itself, though, was so special it was made for documentary. The Cubs just happened to be in St. Louis in a miracle of scheduling. Sammy’s charisma throughout still shines even if he’s evasive, and contrasting him with the reserved, but more open and self-reflective, McGwire makes for compelling character analysis now just as it did then. They talk about their relationship, how everybody thought they were best buddies, when in fact their travel and playing demands limited their interaction basically to what we saw on the field and in press conferences. Just as when a young McGwire says any gym rat can buy his supplements at any counter in the country, and we know there’s more to the story, those behind-the-scenes moments are when Long Gone Summer is at its finest.
But I spent a paragraph of my space indulging my youth; Schnack wastes three quarters of his doing what amounts to the same. He sets the mood with cutaway shots of innocent babes worshipping the heroes through chain-link fences and staged clip-art of young adults cruising the plains of Missouri, their arms out the window, their radios tuned to KMOX. No doubt like Schnack did. These are wasteful in the context of what might have been in the same two hours. He should have revisited Senna, in which every shot is contemporary and absolutely none is wasted, or looked no further than Lance, in which the subject is made to explain himself during the recounting of his accomplishments.
All this creates a mood, the right one for reminiscence and awe, but not for serious reflection. Nostalgia is that powerful, enjoyable pull toward the kinds of thoughts that made Peter Pan fly. But what enhances nostalgia from a malingerer’s daydream to worthwhile study is the ability to cut through the joy and re-evaluate it against what soured it. Pan has to grow up. It is not the kind of film Schnack set out to make, he would argue. That is precisely why it will be forgotten while Lance and The Last Dance live on.
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2 of 4 today (grounded out in 1st, singled in 3rd, home run in 6th, struck out in 8th)
Unquestioningly a noir, Spacey’s return mystery treads predictably, not with great reward but with interplay between remorse and revenge.