Tag Archives: Los Angeles

Modern Prometheus In Dodger Blue

by Woody

Woody’s award-winning novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available at Amazon (click here), other online retailers, and orderable at all bookshops.

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Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the fictional scientist who created a monster from reanimated body parts collected from human corpses in the 18th century, has outdone himself in 2025, in real life, by perfecting his newest Prometheus.

In Mary Shelly’s famous novel fully titled “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus,” the unnamed monster measures eight feet tall and is covered from face to foot with horrifying stitches used in assembling the hodgepodge of anatomy, including a brain from the University of Ingolstadt.

This new 21st century Modern Prometheus stands eye-to-eye with the mighty Paul Bunyan, has a physique like Michelangelo’s David that likewise seems carved from Carrara marble, and somehow has been electroshocked to life. It should have a pet named Babe The Dodger Blue Ox.

Shohei Ohtani the Modern Prometheus!

Unlike in the cinematic adaptation, this Modern Prometheus has a baby-smooth face free of scars, no electrode bolts emerging from its neck, nor does it lumber like a drunk walking on stilts on an uneven cobblestone street.

Rather, this monster is as graceful as a Keats poem and fast as the wind – or Ricky Henderson on the base paths – thanks to having been assembled with Hermes’ winged feet and Usain Bolt’s gold-medal legs.

The other appropriated appendages used in constructing this Modern Prometheus include Nolan Ryan’s right arm, albeit with the elbow of Zeus surgically inserted, that throws lightning bolts – straight or veering – with the accuracy of Robin Hood’s arrows.

The only “being” who could possibly hit these bullet-fast projectiles is the new Modern Prometheus itself. Thanks to one eye transplanted from a peregrine falcon and the other coming from Ted Williams, this monster can read the date on a flipped coin from 60 feet, 6 inches away and deciphering the gyroscopic red seams of a baseball is as easy as making out the top letter on an eye chart.

Additionally, this updated Modern Prometheus was injected with a magical serum of mongoose blood mixed with rattlesnake venom. The result is turbocharged reflexes that make a cannonball in flight seem to be in slow motion.

Thus, squeezing a bat in Muhammad Ali’s southpaw fist, which is connected to Hank Aaron’s blacksmith wrist and Hercules’ left forearm and bicep, this monster could smack into orbit every baseball pitched to it if it so chose, but what would be the fun and drama in that?

Instead, like a card shark playing possum before winning the night’s biggest pot, this Modern Prometheus purposely fails time and again until the moment calls for a Hollywood-worthy home run – or three! – and then delivers a skyrocket on cue. Roy Hobbs was “The Natural,” but Shohei Ohtani is “The Supernatural.”

This monster ballplayer’s face is also a conglomerate. On the mound, he has the steely-eyed countenance of an Old West gunslinger. In the batter’s box, he displays Bjorn Borg’s “Iceman” unflappability. In the dugout and circling the bases, he flashes Magic Johnson’s “Showtime” – Shohei-time! – smile that requires no translation into another language.

Ohtani is a great-great pitcher and a great-great-great hitter; as both stitched together, with no apologies to Babe Ruth, he is the G.O.A.T. unicorn.

If not a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein-ian creation, the only other plausible explanation is that Ohtani comes not from Japan, but arrived on earth in a pod sent from a distant planet.

Shohei Ohtani next plays in the World Series – or, in his case, the Out-Of-This-World Series. For fairness sake, Toronto Blue Jays pitchers facing this Superman in a blue L.A. cap with a No. 17 Dodgers jersey covering his red cape should be allowed to doctor the baseball with spit and kryptonite dust.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

Make The Fresh Spaghetti Sauce

by Woody

Where I read it I cannot recall, but the lesson remains indelible: “Make the fresh spaghetti sauce.”

The anecdote was about a woman unexpectedly, and far too prematurely, widowed. Months later, she was walking in a park with a friend and, among chitchat, asked about dinner plans.

The friend nonchalantly said her husband that very morning had mentioned a craving for her homemade spaghetti sauce. But the day had gotten away from her without going to the store for fresh tomatoes and she didn’t feel like stopping on the way home. Sauce from a jar would suffice.

The two friends continued their strolling visit for a while when, out of the blue, the widow said softly, but with weighted feeling: “Make the fresh spaghetti sauce.”

As she was picking out fresh tomatoes at the grocery shortly thereafter, the friend realized the widow was not really talking about a homemade dinner. The wisdom had been about making the little extra effort for someone you love, whenever you have the chance, because that special person could disappear from you life — by death suddenly, yes, but also simply growing up and moving away.

In other words, bake a cake even if it’s not their birthday; play a board game or go on a walk when you’d rather read; take them to a concert you wouldn’t choose.

This past weekend, I made the fresh spaghetti sauce for my 33-year-old son by taking him to his first NFL game. This may seem surprising given that I was a sports columnist for three decades and you would surely imagine I had taken my son to countless pro football games over the years. As the maxim has it, the cobbler’s children go barefoot.

Truth be told, my son and daughter were so busy, busy, busy with their own sports games and running races growing up that there just never seemed time to go to pro sporting events together.

Also at play, however, is that when they were in their early teens I was rear-ended by a speeding drunk driver at the 2003 Super Bowl in San Diego. Nerve damage in my neck and hand forced me to leave sports writing. In fact, that was the last NFL — or NBA or Major League Baseball — game I attended because I have had no desire to not sit in the press box and not have the rush of deadline pressure.

What changed Sunday? The Cleveland Browns, my beloved team since boyhood and still, were playing the L.A. Rams in SoFi Stadium and for his birthday gift my son, who likewise bleeds burnt orange, wanted to go.

While I have covered a handful of Super Bowls, even more NBA Finals and a few World Series, I dare say this regular-season game instantly ranks as my all-time favorite because of my companion. Despite being conditioned to “no cheering in the press box,” I became hoarse from yelling and high-fiving and chest bumping my son through the first three and a half excitingly close quarters…

…before the Browns showed their true colors by boinking a game-tying PAT kick off the upright and promptly fell apart in trademark fashion to get blown out.

A Browns’ victory would, naturally, have been wonderful. All the same, my son and I could not possibly have had a more masterpiece day. As dyed-in-the-wool Brownies fans, there is even a certain charm in a fourth-quarter meltdown.

Indeed, I am so glad I made the fresh spaghetti sauce — even if it figuratively wound up spilled all over our brand-new throwback No. 32 Jim Brown jerseys.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Rooting for “Howaboutthat!” Super Bowl

by Woody

Who are you rooting for in Super Bowl LVI/56?

It is a coin toss for me, not of indifference but rather different reasons of passion for the Los Angeles Rams and Cincinnati Bengals.

Let me begin with the Bengals because my rooting roots to them reach back to their very beginning as an expansion franchise in the American Football League in 1968. They were crummy that first season, losing 11 of 14 games, but something really “Crummy” happened the next year that made me pull for them nearly as dearly as I did my beloved Cleveland Browns.

Jimmy Crum, affectionately called Jim Crummy by us school kids, was a popular local TV news sportscaster famous for his trademark plaid sports coats and one-word catchphrase “Howaboutthat!”

As good luck would have it – mine, not Crum’s – he suffered a gallbladder attack or appendicitis or something else that required surgery and my dad performed it. As a thank you, Crum arranged for Pops to bring my two older brothers and me – ages 14, 12 and 9 – to the Bengals training camp at Wilmington College about 70 miles from our home in Columbus.

It was a “howaboutthat!” kind of day. Not only did we get to watch practice from the sidelines, we also ate lunch shoulder-to-hulking-shoulders with the players. Our seatmates included hotshot rookie quarterback Greg Cook; star running back Paul Robinson, who the previous season finished second in the MVP voting to Joe Namath; and menacing middle linebacker Bill Bergey.

While I remain a die-hard disappointed Browns fan, the Bengals were always my second-favorite team…

… until the Rams leapfrogged them two decades later.

While “no cheering in the press box” is an unwritten rule for sportswriters, I nonetheless rooted silently for the Rams while covering them from 1987 to 1994. After all, a winning team is a lot more fun to write about than a bungling one.

My favorite memory from those days happened during the 1989 season, during halftime of a game against the Atlanta Falcons, when legendary columnist Jim Murray asked me if he could sit next to me at lunch in the Anaheim Stadium press box.

“Y-y-yes, of course, M-M-Mr. Murray,” I stammered.

“Please, call me Jim,” my writing idol said and a friendship was born, although I never could bring myself to call him Jim.

Rams quarterback Jim Everett, who had thrown 31 touchdown passes the previous season and had not slowed down now, threw two TD spirals in the first half against the Falcons. In response to my gushing comments about Everett, Murray smiled wryly and knowingly and said in a don’t-get-carried-way tone: “He’s not Bob Waterfield yet.”

Waterfield, it should be noted, led the Rams to two NFL championships on his way to the Hall of Fame. Everett, it shortly turned out, was on his way to being a flash in the pan. It was a lesson, one of many from Murray, I have never forgotten.

Indeed, this season I have said more than once of the Bengals’ young star quarterback Joe Burrow: “He’s not Ken Anderson yet.” Anderson was the league MVP while leading the Bengals to their first Super Bowl victory in 1981.

Since I will not be in the press box at SoFi Stadium on Super Bowl Sunday, I will be openly rooting for the Rams…

…but, in my heart of hearts, I think I will be rooting a little louder for the Bengals; rooting like a 9-year-old kid; rooting for a “howaboutthat!” game where Joe Burrow may not be Bob Waterfield yet, but is Ken Anderson already.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com