The Thing Is, They Think They Can

Ya gotta love ‘em. These people who roll up their sleeves and pick up the bat after a whole benchful of others have struck out.

Any fool can plainly see they haven’t got a chance. But these folks don’t really believe it.

In fact, as they step up to the plate, you can almost hear them humming, “To dreeeam the impossible dreeeam, to fiiight the unbeatable foe. . . .”

To dig the undiggable subway?

Let’s face it:

Who would marry Liz Taylor after, say, divorce No. 5?

Who would take the coaching job at that perennial punch line of a football team, Northwestern University?

And who on earth would smile and say “Sure!” when invited to unscrew the very screwed-up situation at our Metropolitan Transportation Authority?

As the third director in four years--three years of sinking sidewalks, cost overruns, worker injuries and alleged corruption, mismanagement and shoddy workmanship--the MTA would seem to be the last place a man with a really good rep would want to hang his hard hat.

Yet last week the MTA board may have found such a suck-, er, candidate.

Theodore G. Weigle Jr. is the name. And subways are his game. In fact, while the board was naming him, Weigle was sound asleep in Greece, where he’s overseeing construction of a subway system for Athens. It is not yet clear whether Weigle really wants the Los Angeles transit job. And our question today is: Why would he?

Why would any person at the top of his field, who’s respected worldwide, walk into a job that’s potentially a bigger sinkhole than the one that slurped up the El Sombrero bar in North Hollywood, which literally sank toward the city’s bowels as subway builders tunneled beneath it?

It could be that there’s some Don Quixote us all. Or at least in a fearless few.

“Don Quixote was totally delusional,” says Stuart Fischoff, professor of psychology at Cal State Los Angeles. But “research shows it helps to be somewhat deluded about one’s chances of success. It makes sense to come to Hollywood and believe you will sell your screenplay, for example, because if you don’t believe that, you’ll never sit down to write it. You could not take on that heroic task.”

Pepper Schwartz, sociology professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, says people who take on seemingly insurmountable challenges “need a little bit of Don Quixote in them. Plus, most have a kind of messianic feeling. They think they have something special and new that will create a different outcome than before.”

And sometimes those people are right, she says.

“If you don’t believe you are going to do it, you surely won’t. And nobody would ever take these jobs.”

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The meeting in which Weigle was chosen throbbed with angry tensions, petty jealousies, deep indecision and separate agendas of the board members. “Mess transit director” would be a more apt description of the job Weigle’s being offered.

But if he says yes, Weigle’s answer will be yet another testament to the strength of the human ego. Like the “Little Engine That Could,” he may just be able to think he can and think he can until he actually does.

Gary Barnett must have had some of those same feelings when he took over Northwestern’s perennial loser football team in 1992. How dorky was that? But nobody laughed when he led them all the way to the Rose Bowl in 1996.

And what about all those authors, producers and actors who play “can you top this?” with tales told many times before, either very well or very badly.

After nine books had already been written on the life of Humphrey Bogart, what did authors Eric Lax and A.M. Sperber decide to do? Write a book about Humphrey Bogart! Why? They believed that with great research and writing, they could bowl over readers. And they were apparently right. Reviews for their “Bogart” (Morrow, 1997) have been excellent.

The other side of the coin: people who know when to back away.

Producers eager to make a TV miniseries of Stephen King’s “The Shining,” for example, found actors so reluctant to take the leading role played by Jack Nicholson in the 1980 film that it looked like the project would have to be tabled. Nicholson had been just too memorable and too good, most said.

Then a guy named Steven Weber, of “Wings,” walked in, possibly humming that hackneyed tune. (“To plaaay the malevolent nut case. . . .”)

“Who me, worry?” Weber said, in effect, taking the gig. The miniseries is airing this week.

*

And there’s the tale of Donald Trump, who loves Manhattan (and owns much of it).

This man simply couldn’t believe that New York’s beloved Wollman Memorial ice skating rink, in the heart of Central Park, was still closed after six years of city-led reconstruction that cost $13 million of city funds.

Trump was told by then-Mayor Ed Koch that the job was undoable in a shorter time and for less money. The rink had too many problems.

Trump said, “I can do it better, faster and cheaper.” And he did.

Starting from scratch, and building right over the previous work, he created a new rink in only five months, for less than $3 million.

In a heady interview after the new rink opened to the cheers of the public, Trump mentioned that he would like to take over the New York subway system and refurbish that too.

No one’s taken him up on it.

We wonder if he’d consider L.A.

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Winners and Losers

Win some: They laughed when Gary Barnett took over Northwestern University’s traditionally lousy football team in 1992. But four years later, he led them all the way to the Rose Bowl.

Lose some: After meeting the much-married Elizabeth Taylor in rehab at the Betty Ford Clinic, Larry Fortensky became her seventh husband. Five years later, he too became an ex.

Wait and see: Who would dare to try to fill the shoes of Jack Nicholson in TV’s remake of Stephen King’s “The Shining”? Steven Weber would. The verdict will be in by week’s end.