if there’s a bright centre to the universe…

September 13, 2011September 15, 2011Leave a comment

Last weekend, we went on a family trip to the ballgame. It was both mine and my son’s first San Francisco Giants game, though my wife and her mom (big Giants fans) had been earlier in the season, when things had been going a little better for the Giants. This game however was crucial – playing the Arizona Diamondbacks, who were leading in the division, and being several games behind we really needed to win. But that didn’t matter – it was Star Wars day, and the Force would be with us!

Which side of the force was less clear. Stormtroopers escorted the umpires out, mascot Lou Seal dressed as a jedi and waved about a lightsabre, and the opening crawl on the big screen set the scene, hoping that the Giants would beat Arizona and ‘restore freedom to the galaxy’. I love Star Wars, so I loved all this. And maxibig-da-force – the first pitch to the Giants resulted in a home run straight away from Cody Ross, and the ballpark went wild. AT&T Park is a great place. Set right by San Francisco Bay, it’s one of the great stadia of the world. Behind the seat, in the ‘breezeway’ (I think I have my terminology correct, my reference is a Curious George book) are rows and rows of beverage stands and souvenir shops and beer and garlic fries and t-shirts and TVs showing the action.

"imperial troops have entered the base! imperial troops have ---"

My three year old son is a big baseball fan, though we’re on about the same page in our understanding of all the terms. It’s a simple enough game, someone throws the ball and you hit it and run, complicated by all the subtleties and statistics and terms. There’s a lot of standing around and not-much-happening, but to the baseball fan it’s tense stuff, and while there’s ample time to get up and walk around and get your garlic fries, you really don’t want to miss that three-run-homer or that spectacular catch. It’s typical to compare a big sport to the big sport you follow, but baseball is a completely different type of game to football (and I know little enough about cricket, though I kept calling the pitcher the ‘bowler’, and shouting ‘howzat!’ every time someone caught the ball). No comparison there may be to footy, but being a Giants fan is a lot like being a Spurs fan. Last year we were World Series champions/beating both Inter and AC Milan, this year we’re losing by baseball scores. It’s a frustrating life, made more so by success.

There’s my son Luke above left, and my brother in law Kris on the right, the biggest Giants fan I know. He in fact took me to my only other baseball game, at the Oakland A’s, back in 2002, the first time I came to America and the first time I tasted garlic fries. I wore a Spurs shirt that day, but here I wore a Giants top. I did however spot a guy in an Arsenal shirt (he stood out a bit); after the previous week’s 8-2 drubbing by Man United, baseball scores probably felt a little light to him. Hey, you can’t let an 8-2 Arsenal defeat go without comment, can you? (And after Spurs lost 5-1 to Man City, it was pretty much the only thing that could cheer me up!)

first page of moleskine #9 under way... top of the ninth, you might say

Decorating the breezeway walls were framed examples of old Giants kits. As a football kit fan I’m hugely excited by baseball jerseys, since they are so classic, and (usually) so unchanging. This one is from the early 60s, and the differences to today’s tops are very subtle. This aspect of the sport adds to its classic Americana feel. Baseball loves its heritage, and the Giants especially, with statues of its great players dotted around the area. Below is Willie McCovey, beside McCovey Cove, where many home runs do splash (it’s not like Henman Hill). I can’t pretend to know much about these guys, but I will say this – what an amazing view, with the Bay Bridge in the background, and baseball players really do look like lightsabre-wielding Jedi, don’t they?

The Force alas was not with us. The Arizona D-Backs (seriously, the fans sing that?) won the game, and will probably win the division. As Vader might say, “NOOOOOO!!!!!” (and don’t EVEN get me started there…) But we had a great day out, and Luke ran the bases after the game, and I got some nice sketching in, and it was a great family day out, so in a way we did win, from a certain point of view.

get shirty

July 1, 2011July 1, 2011Leave a comment

After the argument about my rights as an urban sketcher, I decided to draw other window items that I thought would look good on my sketchbook page. It’s all about balancing out the sketches on the page for me – I like my books to have that composition. After two very feminine items, it was time to move onto the sporty shirts. I don’t think I’ve ever been into the Davis Sport Shop on E Street, but if I ever decide to get a baseball jersey (and since we’re such big Giants fans now) it’s good to know there’s somewhere downtown. This item was next to an Oakland Athletics shirt, but I left that one out (though I am told that the A’s owner is a Tottenham fan, which is to be commended). Next I went down to probably my favourite shop in Davis, Soccer & Lifestyle on 2nd Street (in fact it was discovering this place, a shop which primarily sold football shirts, that swayed me towards choosing to move to Davis in the first place). I had to see the new shirts that had just arrived – Milan’s one is nice, I like the thinner stripes, but am not sure about all the white detailing. The new Barcelona kit had just arrived too, and it was the player (rather than replica) version, slightly tougher and more durable, and more expensive to boot, but I can’t say I like the odd design of the new Barça shirt, it’s either one for the ‘what were they thinking’ threads or ‘cult-design-must-have’ sections in future football kit forums. I’ll save all that for a future ‘footy-kits’ post, you get them every year on petescully.com – I am in fact a huge football shirt (or ‘soccer jersey’) geek. Keeping with the ‘in-window’ theme, I drew the current Mexico shirt; they had just beaten the US in the Gold Cup final with an amazing goal by Tottenham’s Dos Santos.

realm of the giants

June 30, 2011Leave a comment

Another drawing on Moleskine sketchbook paper with my lovely uni-ball signo um-151 pen. This is AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants, current World Series champions. I didn’t go to a game, my wife did (and they won!), but she took photos for me to do some drawing from.

they might be giants

May 22, 20112 Comments

It was a publicity-hungry preacher in Oakland who started all that ‘end-of-the-world’ May 21 stuff. The world didn’t end (as far as I can tell), but the Oakland Athletics baseball team (aka the A’s) have probably been wishing it had after three defeats in a row this weekend by local rivals, the San Francisco Giants. I watched the first on Friday evening at my wife’s mom’s house (big Giants fans in this family), and it went to a tenth inning, which is a bit like extra time but it was more like ‘next goal wins, ‘cos I gotta be home by 11 or I’m grounded’. I’ve never been to a Giants game (the one and only baseball game I’ve ever seen was the Oakland A’s back in 2002, on rootbeer float day – I mostly remember the garlic fries and the sunburn, and Miggy Tejada. Miggy has now left the A’s and joined the Giants. The Giants won again on Saturday, and, since the Rapture got cancelled due to a no-show, the world was still around on Sunday for Oakland to lose late yet again. Since that happened on the same day as the Premier League season ended with a dramatic relegation battle, I was all sported out, so never watched it. I went out and sketched instead.

giant steps

October 29, 20101 Comment

There’s a funny old game over here that people quite like, called ‘baseball’. The thing about baseball that I like, apart from the fact that its name doesn’t get confused with that of another more globally popular sport, is the uniforms they wear. They are so classic looking, untroubled by sponsors or the need to change designs every few months. Usually, teams will play in white with their opponents in grey, although soemtimes they will use their other colours – the San Francisco Giants for example sometimes play in black, and even orange, being their colours. Usually (but not always) the home team will wear their nickname (“Giants”, “Yankees”, etc) across their jersey, while the away team would have the name of their city. This classic look reinforces the classic feel of the game – that iconic ballpark design, the apparently simple yet completely complicated (or vice-versa, depending on where you’re from) rule system, the fact that its not about being macho or aggressive, but hitting a ball and running, or catching a ball (with a really big glove). Simple really.

I was never a bat and ball kid. Cricket confused me (it still does) – while they may have light, bright, colourful playing kits now, I never understood growing up why they would play this sport in the middle of summer wearing thick woolly jumpers and long trousers. Rounders? Oh I hated rounders. I couldn’t throw the ball (pitch? bowl?) and was terrible at catching it, and if you missed an easy catch in the playground it was worse than, I don’t know, being Wayne Rooney at the World Cup. And you could get easily bored, with nothing to do but stand there and hope the ball doesn’t get hit in your direction. And then there was ‘softball’, which was just like rounders but with a ball that definitely wasn’t soft. I always wanted them to call it baseball so that we’d sound American and exotic, but I think you had to wear baseball caps if you wanted to call it baseball, and we couldn’t afford them at our school.

Now I live in America, and while I have always liked baseball, I’ve been a little slow in following it. My brother-in-law is a huge Giants fan, and my wife and son too, so naturally I am as well, and have been learning a lot more lately since the Giants won their division, then fought through the play-offs to win the National League, and are now two games into the World Series against the Texas Rangers – two games which they won quite emphatically (11-7 and 9-0 are veritable cricket scores even in baseball). We’ve been glued to the set (cynics can make a sentence out of the following words: “bandwagon, on, jumping, the”), it is pretty exciting. So I had to honour the Giants before they threw it all away (now who’s cynical? hey, that’s my long years as a Tottenham fan, plus a few years as a Giants fan) with a sketch of one of their players, Brian Wilson, “Fear the Beard”. He has this odd and fake-looking black beard, and Giants fans all wear their real-looking fake beards when he comes out to close (he is a ‘closer’, which means he’s a pitcher that pitches at the end of the match – look at me learning all new words!). I was going to draw Tim Lincecum (he looks like a young Severus Snape) but The Beard was too tempting (plus it reminds me a bit of Ricky Villa).

Go Giants! Fear the Beard! Get me some Garlic Fries!

i’ve hit more home runs than you’ve had hot dinners

August 8, 2007June 18, 20101 Comment

There’s been a lot I want to blog about lately, but I’ve been a little preoccupied; the state of the healthcare system (and mr bush saying nobody wants a nationalized government-funded healthcare system, while his own operation was funded by, yup, the guvverm’nt); presidential hopeful barrack obama scaring his support away by saying he’d bomb pakistan without pakistan’s support; or maybe the weather, which has been unseasonably cool for summer in Davis, to the point of being cold and in the 70s (compared to the 110 degrees this time last year). But I thought I’d wrench myself away from the sketchbook to mention a sporting occasion tonight (no, not the forthcoming football season this weekend): Barry Bonds has finally become baseball’s all-time home-run king.

Barry who? you may be saying back in England. (Didn’t he used to manage west ham?) You probably aren’t though; I remember hearing about some baseball hitters on the ITN news back home over the years. Well anyway, the San Francisco Giants veteran slugger, with the indifferent look on his face, hit homer number 756 tonight, and he did it at home, at the AT&T Park, in fromt of possibly the only people in the country who like him. You see, every time you read about him, every time he is talked about on the news, his name is prefaced by “love him or hate him”. This is because of the allegations of (unproven) steroid use (or is it misuse? that makes it sound like he didn’t use them properly). Well, we’re Giants fans, so we are pleased about it. funny thing is, I used to know a guy in Belgium called Barry Bonds, though I think he was more cricket than baseball. anyway, well done Barry; and now we wait for the Premiership.

originally posted on 20six.co.uk/petescully

when saturday comes

July 15, 2007June 18, 2010Leave a comment

Alors, je suis de retour, considerez ceci…

Beckham has landed. Rather, The Beckhams have landed. LA Galaxy unveiled goldenballs this week, along with a brand new kit and badge, club colours, in fact pretty the only thing they haven’t done is rename the club ‘Beckham Soccer Club’. It’s all very exciting now, but I have a feeling this will turn out to be a bad move for Beckham, maybe even for the MLS. And maybe for Posh as well – recently recalled into the Spice Girls team, she may find the long commute between Hollywood and Abbey Road seriously affects her singing voice.

Incidentally, the author of this BBC article apparently has no idea who Beckham is or what year it is, bizarrely believing David was a teenager in the 1970s, saving up his cash for the latest Abba album. It also implies that the Blind Beggar pub is in Walthamstow, when it is miles away in Whitechapel. Come on, BBC, you can do better than this hackneyed twaddle.

And it’s new football kit time of year. I’ve been following all the new kits on this site – there do seem to be a lot of clubs switching to Umbro these days, don’t there? Umbro is seeing a resurgence. What I’ve noticed most this year is the way they’re all being marketed: 125th anniversary here, centenary there, Celtic are commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Lisbon Lions, Northern Ireland are celebrating 25 years since they were in the 1982 World Cup (which wasn’t even their last time there). Best of all, Arsenal have a new white away kit, marketed not as the ‘we-wish-we-were-Spurs-now’ kit, but the ‘Chapman’ kit, enticing people to buy it by associating it with their 1930s manager. Shameless.

Changing sports to baseball, this week San Francisco hosted the All-Star Game, American League versus National League. I saw some of it, on TV of course, it was quite fun, my wife tried explaining some of the rules to me, the fly-balls, the bases which can and can’t be over-run, all of that confusing fun. The most fun was reserved for the guys on the little boats in the bay, waiting for a home-run ball to come splashing their way (and from SF Bay to e-bay). There was even a little bulldog swimming around in a lifejacket. The thing I liked the most, though, was the poster for the event, a classic style.

Oh man, while I was out sketching in Sacramento last week, I lost my mechanical eraser. Listen, I had had this thing for about 18 years, it was my favourite sketching item and I just knew I’d lose it someday. I clip it to my bag or my shirt or wherever, I’m very lax, but I’ve had it since I was about 13 and managed not to lose it. So I have bought a replacement, and it’s just not the same.

I still managed to do some sketching this week: