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A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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Recycling Clyde
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram used a buttload of last Sunday’s cover to mark the upcoming (June 27) anniversary of David Clyde’s debut with the Texas Rangers. (For those not following along at home, it was one of baseball’s more notable disasters, right up there with interleague play and Bud Selig’s backbone). The 80-inch story told of revisiting Clyde 30 years after the fresh-out-of-high-school wunderkind came to the Rangers. It chronicled the pain of Clyde’s great potential being wasted, noting that “only recently has Clyde been able to look back and talk about his career.’’
“Recently” is a fairly vague term. But it is seldom used to mean “10 years ago” — which is when the S-T ran another Clyde anniversary piece. In her June 13, 1993, story, then-S-T staff writer Jennifer Briggs (now a free-lancer who writes often for Fort Worth Weekly) told of Clyde recounting, in the cracking voice of a man still in pain, the anguish of divorce and career disillusionment. The two writers took different tacks — although Briggs’ story said Clyde had been “just about the best high school baseball player on the planet’’ and the S-T’s 2003 version called him the “best amateur pitcher on the planet.”
Newspaper editors love anniversary stories, of course. If they do this one again on the 40th, maybe Clyde will really open up for the first time. To the Star-Telegram, of course.
And Now the Other Clyde
There was one name conspicuously absent last week when new hizzoner Mike Moncrief realigned the power at City Hall by appointing city council members as committee heads based on “interests” rather than the traditional seniority system. Ever suspicious, Static noticed that ol’ Landslide Clyde Picht, the maverick who put his money and his mouth behind Moncrief’s mayoral-race opponent Cathy Hirt, didn’t get an appointment. Did Clyde feel the sting of retaliation from the snub? “Not at all,” he said, “The mayor and I had a nice talk the other day about politics and the council processes. ... I don’t think Mike holds grudges.”
But there was one little thing Picht didn’t tell the new chief during that oh-so-cordial meeting. Clyde’s about to appoint Hirt to the board of The T, giving the defeated mayoral candidate high visibility on one of the most important boards in the city, overseeing public transportation. “I guess I forgot,” Picht said, without a trace of irony in his voice.
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