Watchdog

I wrote a brief story in the Thursday newspaper about my visit to the Yogi Berra Museum Wednesday.

I'm not sure how interesting it is. Actually, I am. It's not. But definitely check out my review of the first three episodes of the upcoming ESPN mini-series "The Bronx is Burning'' in the newspaper of July 8, because from what I'm hearing this could be a keeper of a TV event. (It debuts July 9.)

The quality of movies coming out of ESPN Original Entertainment has been spotty, but it's clear a lot of time, money and effort has been poured into this one, starting with the intriguing choice of John Turturro to play Billy Martin.

I saw "Do the Right Thing'' on TV the other day, which came out when Turturro and I both were much younger, and you could see even then the guy had the goods as an actor.

I was living in Queens when that movie came out and saw it with a female friend who was living in Manhattan but we chose to see it in Commack. I'm embarrassed to admit that we had some concern about the potentially volatile atmosphere we might find seeing it in a theater in the city.

Remember, those were far more racially charged times in New York than these, and the movie itself was intentionally provocative on that subject. Anyway, like I said, I'm not proud of it, but that's what I did. (The crowd in Commack was docile.)

Of course, I wasn't as impressed with the several actors in attendance Wednesday as I was with Yogi himself and even more so the veteran beat writers who covered the 1977 Yankees: Steve Jacobson of Newsday, Phil Pepe of the Daily News and Maury Allen of the Post.

(By the way, they were not called beat writers back then, Jake told me. They were just called reporters who covered the Yankees.)

One thing that struck me was how little has changed in the business of beat reporting after all these years. I'm going to discuss that in another post because this one is getting too long and readers hate long blog entries.