Tommy Can You *@#$%*&!-in' Hear Me?

If the sacred torch of Olympus can be used to light a cigar, then Tommy fits the contemporary mold of the Olympic ideal. The international competition is now all about media tact and manufactured soap-opera story lines, most of which never stray from maudlin features about athletes overcoming emotional and physical obstacles, standard handicaps and motivational sandbags. In the end, it's an annoying Jim Gray standing way too close to triathletes who just want some oxygen.

Among all the predictable hoopla, Lasorda is bound to put his cleats in his mouth. He is, remember, a Dodgers front office employee. It's only a matter of a few innings before his non-p.c. ways are exposed by the international press. Besides, much like his protege in Queens?Mets conductor Bobby Valentine?Tommy just can't keep his wide ass off the field. He's out of the dugout to greet a successful double play or a routine foul out. After big plays, he's always the first one out of the dugout and onto the field. It's all about him. Couldn't he just once allow the players to celebrate their own greatness?

You want good press for the baseball team? Fat chance, literally. There will be little to chew on in that department?the U.S. Olympic team is Pat Borders, the veteran catcher, and a bunch of li'l shavers?aside from the feature stories about how an obese Italian-American became a baseball celebrity via old-guy trash talk, pompous senility and bad ethnic jokes.

Why not take a look back at one of Lasorda's finest postgame moments? I've written about this before, but for Lasorda rookies, let's revisit Mother's Day 1978, following a Dodger loss to the Cubs at Dodger Stadium. Dave Kingman had a particularly good day for Chicago, hitting three monster home runs. The Cubs won 10-7 in 15 innings. Reporter Paul Olden, who would later work Yankee games locally for WPIX, ventured into the Dodgers' clubhouse to do his job.

Olden was then a stringer for Associated Press radio, and he just wanted the usual postgame soundbite from the losing manager. The day's game had been anything but quick. L.A. was gripped by Tampa-style heat that day, and Lasorda had watched his sweat-soaked blue crew blow several leads. Kingman's three-run HR in the top of the 15th sealed the deal for the Cubbies.

After first asking the future Hall of Fame manager a general question about the loss, the young Olden followed up with this query: "What is your opinion of Kingman's performance?" After repeating Olden's question several times, Lasorda, perhaps suffering from carbohydrate deprivation, suddenly dusted off the expletives:

What the [BLEEP] do you think is my opinion?... I think it was [BLEEP]in' [BLEEP]. Put that in... He beat us with three [BLEEP]in' home runs...

His minute-long answer featured nearly 15 bleeped combinations of "fuckin' fucker," "goddamn" and "shit," all sandwiched between Lasorda's expressions of disbelief that Olden would ask such a question.

"I just wanted some basic comments the way we always do after a game," recalls Olden, who now does radio play-by-play for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. "Then he went off. He even paused at one point to say goodbye to another sportswriter, and then got right back into it."

Soon enough, MLB general managers were craving copies of the tape for home and office use. Before long, both the bleeped and nonbleeped versions of the Lasorda tirade were circulating through the baseball underground.

Sure, there were other famous tirades, like Earl Weaver's "tomato plant" postgame rant on a call-in show in Baltimore (a woman called in to ask Weaver something about the tomatoes in her garden, and the Baltimore skipper basically told her to shove them up her ass). But the Olden/Lasorda tape was a groundbreaker in terms of capturing managerial fury and foulmouthed overkill from one of the game's most quoted characters. To this day, the Lasorda/Olden exchange inspires giddy laughter in even the most jaded fan or press-box curmudgeon.

"You've got to remember that there was no Howard Stern or Don Imus back then, and to hear a respectable manager talking that way and going on and on, well, it became one of those crazy tapes that producers like to use," Olden said. The Kingman performance piece even made it onto the top-10 list of Lasorda's career highlights during his 1997 Hall of Fame induction. "When Tommy retired, the Kingman interview ranked number eight on the list,'' Olden recalled. "By the time he was going into the Hall, it had moved up to number three."

In 1988, Rhino Records contacted Olden and he sold them the rights to the tape for $300. Rhino promptly put the Tommy tirade on its compilation CD Baseball's Greatest Hits.

After earning his stripes as an AP stringer, Olden went on to do play-by-play for the Angels, Cleveland Indians and Yankees. He said the verbal barbs from Lasorda were not the strongest dressing-down he's experienced. That came from another Hall of Fame Dodger manager?Walter Alston?a few seasons before the Lasorda encounter.

Olden was determined to get Alston to talk about a press-box scrap the manager had with another L.A. sportswriter. His questioning came after the Dodgers had just lost four crucial games to the Reds. Alston basically told Olden to cease and desist or else the manager would take Olden's tape recorder and break it over his skull. Cooler heads prevailed, and eventually Alston yielded an exclusive response to the press-box fight later on that day.

Olden, with a trademark basso profundo, has yet to get in trouble with Davey Johnson, current manager of the Dodgers, or Larry Rothschild, who skippers that purple mess of a team in Tampa Bay. He's been the public address announcer at the last seven Super Bowls?a Kingmanesque gig if ever there was one. At least he didn't draw the assignment of going to Sydney to cover the Olympic baseball team.

Lasorda's entire bleeped Kingman rant can be heard at [www.davekingman.com/lasorda.wav](http://www.davekingman.com/lasorda.wav).