She Wouldn’t Be Trapped by the Garvey PR Machine
Recently, while channel-surfing, I flipped to an infomercial hosted by Steve Garvey. The retired baseball player was sporting a bronze tan with not one hair out of place. Garvey was beaming, engaged in conversation with an equally info-plastic female counterpart.
The former Dodger and San Diego Padre, the ‘70s golden boy with the golden glove, was now promoting the Fat Trapper. As Garvey proclaimed the wonders of the miracle diet pill, the show highlighted dozens of delighted, scantily clad partyers eating mounds of fatty foods.
The average viewer might have watched momentarily, but I viewed the entire program. My focus was on Garvey, not the Fat Trapper.
For me, Garvey, who was seventh in Hall of Fame voting announced Tuesday with 176 votes, represents more than an aging ballplayer relegated to peddling metabolic snake oil for the calorically challenged. As I watched, I recalled my heart-stopping encounter with him more than 20 years ago and the lessons he taught me about celebrity, conformity and the eagerness of a small community to grab a modest newspaper headline.
I learned about Steve Garvey when I was a seventh-grader, living in the tiny Tulare County town of Lindsay. One morning, my school principal corralled the Abraham Lincoln Junior High student body in the school cafeteria.
Mr. Edwards announced that the school would be renamed. He gave students three choices: Taco, Burrito, or Steve Garvey. Garvey proved to be the winning name among my bewildered classmates, many having never heard of Steve Garvey.
After its re-christening in 1977, my junior high began a dramatic head-to-toe make-over. Paint was splattered everywhere; all walls, halls and bathrooms were colored Dodger Blue. The school library was renamed the Tommy Lasorda Library, honoring the gregarious Dodger manager. The counseling center was named in honor of Garvey’s beautiful wife, Cyndy. And the school trophy case was cluttered with Garvey memorabilia and photos of the handsome 29-year-old Dodger the media had dubbed “Mr. Perfect.”
When Garvey made his first pilgrimage to his freshly painted namesake, the media invaded Lindsay. News accounts portrayed the name change as the idea of the student body, desiring to rename the school in honor of a contemporary sports hero exuding an uncommon combination of physical prowess and personal piety.
The media also reported that the name change had cured the predominately Anglo and Mexican-American student body of bad behavior and boiling ethnic tension. Students were depicted as alcoholic, knife-wielding delinquents, redeemed only after the golden Garvey name miraculously inspired a massive surrender of liquor and weapons.
A media-friendly agenda supplanted academics as a priority at Garvey. In the frenzy of name-change activities, someone had forgotten to order classroom textbooks. Steve Garvey Junior High was not a conducive learning environment for nerdy bookworm types bent on getting educated. Nor, as I soon discovered, was it friendly to nonconformists.
For two years, I was the unremitting antagonist of the school principal. I protested the fabricated discipline problems, the failure to order textbooks and any mandated allegiance to Steve Garvey. I wanted to choose my own heroes.
During the eighth grade, just before Garvey was about to make his second visit, my English teacher read an administrative edict requiring all students to enter an essay contest, the subject to be “Why I Like Steve Garvey.”
From the get-go, an intuitive cynicism pervaded my view of this charismatic first baseman. Garvey’s image seemed contrived, almost too perfect. Even at 12, I simply could not believe that he, an ambitious athlete eyeing a future in television and politics, was without character flaws.
I decided to comply with the school’s compulsory essay exercise. But I failed to laud Garvey’s chivalry. Bordering on sacrilege, I claimed that I did not like Garvey and that the name change was a public relations ploy. And I declared the unspeakable: that Steve Garvey was fraught with frailties, vulnerable to mistakes and indiscretions, like the rest of us.
Expecting a verbal thrashing for my uncharitable essay, I was shocked when my homeroom teacher announced that I was a contest winner. Mr. Edwards warmly congratulated me and informed me that I would be personally introduced to Steve Garvey on the day of his visit.
On the morning of “Garvey Day,” when the dashing Dodger rolled into town in a white limousine, accompanied by his youthful chauffeur and prominent-looking TV reporters, skepticism regarding the name change dissipated. The few students and teachers who had rallied to my side were now star-struck, enamored of Garvey, enchanted by the chauffeur, and mesmerized by the television cameras.
It was to be expected. Lindsay had not been graced by a celebrity of Garvey’s caliber for several months, not since Richard Nixon had come to visit his elderly aunt, the town piano teacher.
After Garvey gave a rousing pep talk to the student body, I soon heard Mr. Edwards praising me as a “Why I Like Steve Garvey” essay winner.
I slowly meandered toward the auditorium stage to receive an award from the athlete I had so brazenly chastised. I wondered whether he had read my essay, published in the town’s special “Garvey Day” edition and presented to Garvey.
I shyly approached Garvey, hastily shook his outstretched hand, grabbed my certificates and tried to avoid eye contact. Garvey smiled, saying “That was so sweet, Donna,” referring to the essay which I was now certain he had not read.
He then puckered to plant a kiss on my cheek. Panic-stricken, I ducked, but I also dropped my certificates, which I frantically tried to retrieve as they flew across the auditorium stage. A flustered fan overcome by Garvey’s kiss was how the media described it.
Shortly after Garvey’s visit I was told by my English teacher that she had been angrily approached by the school principal demanding to know how my essay had been chosen as a contest winner. Apparently, he’d read my essay in the local newspaper, hours after the Garvey Day festivities had ended.
Never again would I receive a Steve Garvey Good Citizenship Award.
Today, Steve Garvey Junior High remains standing, painted Padre Brown after Garvey’s trade to San Diego. After a nasty divorce, a confessed extramarital affair and two paternity suits, Garvey descended from saint to sinner in the eyes of a once-enamored public. His dream of a glorious career in Republican politics was shattered.
I suspect that after Garvey’s trade to San Diego, the school library dumped the name of the former Dodger manager-turned-Slim Fast pitchman.
Likewise, I would bet that the counseling center no longer bears the name of Garvey’s first wife, Cyndy, who gained notoriety after her divorce when she was arrested for making false stalking charges against a former boyfriend.
But I doubt that Lindsay has any intention of stripping Steve Garvey’s name from the junior high. After all, if every school had to drop its name because it paid homage to an individual tainted by scandal, there would be few schools named in honor of anyone. Certainly there would be no schools bearing the names of such illustrious figures as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin or Martin Luther King.
But unlike Jefferson, Franklin and King, Garvey had a school named after him at the tender age of 29 because of his All-American image and his popularity as a sports celebrity, not because of any lasting contribution he’d made to society. And because Garvey does not hail from Lindsay, the renaming did not honor a local boy who’d made good.
As I sat listening to Garvey’s cheery phrases about the marvels of the Fat Trapper, I wondered how today’s students at Garvey Junior High perceive this man in his post-scandal state, his luminous athletic career now a faint memory. I would think that today’s students view Garvey for what he actually appears to be: a likable and talented former athlete with feet of clay and a mob of kids to support. Hence, the Fat Trapper commercials.
At one point in the infomercial, Garvey acknowledges that there are many skeptics unwilling to accept the miraculous nature of the Fat Trapper.
I remain one of them. I can’t help it. Skepticism was one of the greatest skills I developed as a student at Steve Garvey Junior High.
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Donna Morel is an attorney living in San Diego.