Celebrity World Blog

With the sad news today of Sparky Anderson's death at age 76, I began to look up some of the interviews I've had with him over the years. The underlying theme, I discovered, was Anderson's insistence that he was merely along for the ride, that overwhelming talent is what made him a great manager.
"The public is so fooled,'' he said in 2004. "They think, 'Oh, boy, the manager won this or that. What did he win? Nothing. The players did all the winning.''
He went on to say that when it came to the manager in the opposing dugout, "The only ones I worried about were the ones with talent. The guys with no talent, I'll let them be Einstein; they're not going to beat me.''
Of course, there is some truth to that sentiment. The Big Red Machine helped make Sparky look like a genius, and so did Jack Morris, Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker et al in Detroit.
But don't let Anderson fool you -- he did a brilliant job managing the disparate personalities he was handed, and beyond that presented himself in such an endearing and charismatic fashion that he legitimately rose to the stature of legend.
Part of that, to be honest, was because no one has ever been better with the media. He belonged to a dying breed that I refer to as the racanteur/manager, a group exemplified by the one-name icons -- Sparky, Whitey, Tommy, Billy, Lou. These were guys with whom, early in my career, you could hang out in their office, hours before the game, and just shoot the breeze, talking baseball, listening to their stories, and soaking up knowledge
read more:RIP, Sparky Anderson, 1934-2010