May 13 2008 02:43 PM
May 13, 2008
TV Sports
‘Zen of Bobby V’ Follows a Familiar Face in a Foreign Land
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
The Bobby Valentine on view in the documentary “The Zen of Bobby V” is both familiar and alien to those who recall him managing the Mets and the Texas Rangers. As the manager of the Chiba Lotte Marines, he is still loquacious and maddening, a grand ham who cannot accept losing.
And he still gets cranky with reporters, who are much kinder in Japan.
Now he speaks Japanese pretty well. He rides his bike around Chiba. He is mobbed wherever he goes. A beer and a hamburger are named for him. He lectures to universities about leadership, which he says Japanese baseball needs to survive.
“Commitment and passion transcend language,” he said in the documentary, describing his style while playing down his skills with the Japanese language. “A commander can take a group into battle without saying a word.” (Still, he is shown uttering many words.)
He remains an intriguing, polarizing and amusing character, who is seen ballroom dancing on the field on one of many promotional nights at the Marines’ stadium. But as connected as he is to his job — his second stint with the Marines — it is impossible to watch him without sensing a bit of the expatriate’s loneliness, like Bill Murray’s character, an American film star in Tokyo, in “Lost in Translation.”
Manager Bobby Valentine at a shrine in his honor near Tokyo.
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The Valentine documentary (shown Tuesday at 9 p.m. Eastern, on ESPN2) owes its existence to three New York University film students. The students — Andrew Jenks, Jonah Quickmire Pettigrew and Andrew Muscato — spent seven months with Valentine and the Marines, living in a hotel in Chiba and traveling with the team. The 90 minutes culled from 500 hours of footage show Valentine as an unlikely idol in a country that is not his own at a time when some of the best Japanese players are signing to play in the country of his birth.
The interest in Valentine began a few years ago when Jenks, then an 18-year-old freshman, read an article about him and was immediately smitten. “The idea of Bobby V as a superstar halfway across the world sounded cool,” he said by telephone. He e-mailed Valentine, who Jenks said responded by saying that “as long as I accurately portrayed what was going on and didn’t make something outdated like ‘Mr. Baseball,’ he’d be all for it.”
But without a natural avenue to pitch the Valentine idea, he and Pettigrew moved on to make “Andrew Jenks, Room 335.” Jenks, then 19, moved into a nursing home in Florida and mingled with its elderly residents. The film was acquired by HBO and was first shown in January on its Cinemax network, where it will be repeated on May 24.
With one documentary done, the group pitched ESPN on a rugby film, which the network rejected. But ESPN liked the one on Valentine. “They said, ‘Bring Bobby and bring a budget,’ ” said Muscato, who on Monday was studying for a test the next day on the history of the Roman empire. On Wednesday, he and Pettigrew are to graduate.
Jenks kept Valentine updated on his idea but first met him when he, Muscato and Pettigrew, now 21, got together at Valentine’s sports bar in Stamford, Conn., in December 2006.
“He told us it would be difficult to make the film in Japan,” said Jenks, who has a year left at N.Y.U. “He said access is very restricted, that you can’t just interview players whenever you want. He detailed how difficult it would be. He even used the word impossible. But he’s a big fan of the underdog and liked the fact that we were kids.”
Muscato, 22, recalled that Valentine suggested using old photos and footage. “We said we could only do it if we followed you in the country all season,” he said. “He kept saying it couldn’t be done, and we said we wanted to do it. I think that appealed to him.”
Jenks declined to say how much financing ESPN provided. But John Skipper, ESPN’s executive vice president for content, said Monday that “The Zen of Bobby V” suited the empire’s strategy shift from producing dramatic films for a few million dollars each, like “Ruffian” or “Hustle,” to making documentaries for a few hundred thousand.
“I can make a lot of documentaries for the price of one ‘3,’ ” he said, referring to the network’s film about Dale Earnhardt.
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The N.Y.U. group picked a fortunate time to follow Valentine and the Marines with its two cameras (sometimes on one bicycle while Valentine pedaled his). The Marines went to the Pacific League playoffs, but struggled enough so that Valentine could look miserable, toss inanimate objects and contemplate whether he loves baseball as much as he loves his wife, Mary, who visits every other month.
But viewers may be as intrigued by the culture of Japanese baseball: fans who seem to chant and sing nonstop, rigorous hours-long practices, players who wonder how they will adapt to the United States if they sign with a M.L.B. team, and the pep rally where Valentine, who turns 58 on Tuesday, sings, “We love, love, love, love the Marines.”
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