The Second Act

I thought I would lead with a truly bad idea from the archives of Magazine History. I'm sure that even back in 1950 the idea of a 'Woman's Magazine For Men' was a bit of a crap shoot. It oddly predates by two years the introduction of the first Man's men's magazine labeled as such. I can only imagine the pitch session as...

Pitcher: Ernie, how would you like to lose 20 grand? I mean flush, pal. As in gone, spent with nothing to show for it whatsoever.

Publisher: Damn, that's a great idea! What I need is a title with a broad enough appeal to alienate everyone. I know! A woman's magazine for men!

The Second Act

Michael Jordan is bitter. What Michael Jordan has to be bitter about is beyond me, but bitter he is. The Yahoo headlines are pretty clear about that. It seems His Airness took a little quality time during the Basketball Hall of Fame induction ceremony to settle a few old scores. Nike King is still mad at various folks and let it fly when it was his time to talk.

Way to be. Like Mike. If only I could be a bitter middle-aged rich man Like Mike.
One would think that the numerous championships and a million buckets of dollars might have somehow acted as a balm to the Bald Wonder’s bruised egomania, but it has not. Nor does it seem has the passage of time. Jordo is still bitter. There he is on the dais, a place he was sharing with lesser lights also being inducted, spewing his derision on obscurities for long ago slights. His Airness would like to tell you that he overcame you. There. In. Your. Face.

Psst! Mike, can I let you in on a secret? Besides the ‘no one cares’ secret that your self-center-ness will never get. (As the commercial goes, “sometimes I feel he hears me.”) You haven’t exactly been a raving success since you and the Bulls parted company. They aren’t the ones who robbed you of 50% of your net worth. (That would be Juanita, your oft cuckolded wife who got sick and tired of the whole ‘oft cuckolded’ thing.) Believe it or not, they had nothing to do with your ‘porn and strippers’ addiction, which your now grown children can read about. Nice life you had there, Jordo.

Mike still has his jock sniffing media yes men lurking about, especially here in Chicago. Even before the bile His Airness spewed had dried, sportstalk radio was abuzz, waxing poetic on how poetic Jordo is, even in his many flaws. It has only lately drifted in from the outside how uncalled for the venom fling really was. How very Ty Cobb of him.

Michael Jordan and Ty Cobb are probably not equivalents, except in terms of dislike engendered by their contemporaries. (And being bad gamblers.) Cobb was actually the more revolutionary player, someone whom if he were reincarnated could actually play his game today. By contrast, Jordan’s game was theater, exploiting a loosening of rules. With the return of zone defense and the occasional calling of traveling, all Jordan-ness has been grounded. Also, Ty Cobb stopped playing after he started to suck. Jordan spent half of his career as the Player Previously Known as Michael Jordan.

Jordo also threatened another comeback. As if we could ever forget how the last two comebacks went. Pardon me, but did I miss the championships won by the Washington Wizards? Or the Charlotte Bobcats? Oh yeah, please come back. Wheelchair basketball needs you.

Second acts are hard to come by in any field, most especially sports. A one off career in jock sniffing such as those enjoyed by the likes of O.J. Simpson, Deon Sanders and Dick Butkus is always possible, but those are usually motivated by a continual need for money-- something Jordan does not have--and are powered by the force of a magnetic personality--something Jordan also does not have. It is possible to transcend your beginnings in the way John Madden has, but it’s rare. Normally, when you leave the stage, you fade quickly. Anyone heard from Joe Montana lately? Anyone still comparing Joe Montana to Johnny Unitas?

A good second act should have something to do with the first act. It is a way of carrying those talents which don’t diminish forward. It’s difficult. Only people who have talents which do appreciably fall off the table actually need them. It’s a way of keeping the spotlight long after your talents have fled. No one did a better Designated Hitter when it came to the fame game than Frank Sinatra.

Although it may seem unbelievable, Frank Sinatra originated the role of Teen Idol. At the time it wasn’t completely obvious that Teen Idol had a use by date. This subsequently has been demonstrated by the likes of the Jonas Brothers, Britney Spears and David Cassidy. Nor was there a belief in the concept of overexposure. The weekly Songs By Sinatra radio program sounded exactly like a Beatles concert: you can only hear drips of what was being sung amidst swells of teenaged girl shrieks. Nothing said it couldn’t last forever or that either the artist or the audience would ever outgrow each other.

And they didn’t, but it wasn’t a straight line. Prior to 1945 Sinatra could sing like a bird. After 1945, his voice was shot. And it never came back. By that time Sinatra had wisely transitioned into being a middling movie star. Unlike Jordan’s dabbling in golf and baseball, Sinatra showed flashes of brilliance as an actor. Unfortunately, leading man roles also had a use by date and that too ended.

So Sinatra pulled a comeback… as a singer. Only this time, he can’t sing. He still has timing, phrasing and stage presence, but no actual vocal range. He ignores everything out of his limited vocal ability and basically invents a sort of rap. When packaged within a Rat Pack of more talented performers, Sinatra is able to hold on for many decades past the apex of his talent. Partially he became famous for being famous, but it was still a neat trick.

Most second acts are nowhere near as good. Most second acts are a rehash of your first act, only louder or directed at a new audience or a salvage job meant to reclaim a portion of your old audience. Think the Martin and Lewis split. Think the solo careers of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Think Art Garfunkle. Think Al Gore. One recent example of a second act going splat is John Hagee.

Cult leader John Hagee is a disciple of Oral Roberts. For those of you who are familiar with Hagee, his affiliation with Roberts or the fact that he is on his second act may come as a surprise. For those of you who haven’t heard of Hagee, he’s a fire and brimstone TV preacher, with an interesting twist which I will go into later. Hagee has several programs on religious television and is always in the middle of some event or crusade. Weirdly, he is very pro Israel and very pro Jew—an incredible distinction, one without precedent in the history of Christianity.

The Roberts organization has several fairly autonomous units, each with their own model and emphasis. Parts of it are very new-agey. Most of the units are television programs with a specific type of presentation. All of them copy idioms originated by other religious performers, but do not copy each other. Roberts has simply assigned flunkies to plagiarize the successful forms. His son runs the college and controls air time buys. Hagee’s portion of the franchise is in the creation of a distended shadow denomination, an actual nationwide church, still under the Pentecostal umbrella, but with money flow heading to Roberts’ coffers.

Hagee didn’t start out that way. He was originally his own man, or at least his father’s man. Hagee was the heir apparent in his dad’s mega church. In his first incarnation, he did a slightly more certain than thou Billy Graham imitation as a complimentary contrast to his father’s all hell all the time rantings. Even as the Lite version of his pappy, his style was oriented towards super moralism. Sadly for a my way is straighter and narrower than yours type, Hagee liked to slip the bone to women who inconveniently did not happen to be his wife. Eventually the whole thing exploded in his big fat face, taking his father’s life’s work down with it.

Roberts plucked Hagee off the trash heap and sent him on the tent revival circuit. One of the things the Roberts’ organization is lacking is an actual national church organization. As the tent man, it was Hagee’s job to try to organize clusters of Roberts’ followers into local church-like groups. This is hot touch, grunge work. Hagee proved to be especially good at creating a hierarchy amongst the brethren and enforcing a strict tithe slave regime.

As a reward for his success in retail religion, the Roberts organization granted Hagee his own television ministry. Given that the Roberts group is already fairly full spectrum, Hagee needed to come up with a unique approach in order not to occlude the offerings of other affiliated ministries. Hagee seems to have been very well prepared for this. He really knocked himself out.

For his second act (or third act, depending on how you count) Hagee has recast himself as Christ’s protector of Israel and the Jewish people. He’s even manufactured a cosmology wherein Jews are capable of attaining salvation through an avenue independent of Christ. (Normally a big time Christian bozo no no.) His organization held a special event for Israel in Washington and has raised money for various Zionist causes. A cozy of Likud and the Israeli right, Hagee has carved himself out a position amongst the D.C. Israel Lobby. As liberal as all of this may seem, it’s essentially deodorization for a hate act bashing Arabs, Muslims and other rag heads. For a time, it seemed to be doing land office business.

As of late the wheels have been coming off of Hagee’s enterprise--and for the same reasons that most second acts ultimately fail. Packing yourself within a team, as Sinatra successfully did, involves some risks. In Hagee’s case, most of his problems have come from being affiliated with Roberts. First, the Roberts organization is extremely lazy. Even providing materials or support for Hagee’s established regional groups has been too much work for them. Somewhere along the line it appears that collecting dollars and pennies in person is something that the Roberts group just doesn’t want to do. Second, as a TV act the Roberts group has basically restricted Hagee’s appeal so as not to intrude on their other offerings. And finally, the Roberts group has had a scandal in its core business, a college, which is proving to be a money suck from all of their groups. Hagee’s labor intense operation has been the hardest hit. If Hagee wanted to walk away from the group at this point, there is a fairly good chance that he would simply be replaced. Sometimes second acts own you.

More often than not, the second act not only outlives its usefulness, becoming a constraint unto itself, but they also have a tendency to take on lives of their own. Just to stick with religion, we have the examples of the three denominations founded by the late Garner Ted Armstrong. Like Hagee, Armstrong was the heir apparent to a proprietary religion run by his father. (Garner Ted lost his throne for allegedly the same reason as Hagee.) Once Armstrong was kicked out of his father’s Worldwide Church of God, he went onto found another church. He then got into sex trouble again, was kicked out of that church and then founded two other groups, the Intercontinental Church of God and the Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelical Association. One was founded as a church for Garner Ted to speak for and the other simply as an organization Armstrong could never be thrown out of. With Armstrong now dead it would seem that none of these entities would have any reason to continue, and yet they do.

For an example of an even more confusing half life of a second act, we need look no further than the church Armstrong’s father founded. With the heir gone, the Worldwide Church of God wound up in the hands of looting henchmen. It was then subdivided into two entities, Grace Communion International, a church, and Plain Truth Ministries, also a church of sorts. Both groups decided to blow off Worldwide’s previous teachings, but it’s the Plain Truth’s transformation which has been the most spectacular.

How Plain Truth Ministries became a separate entity is something of a mystery. It’s as if the Christian Science Monitor had suddenly not only disavowed Christian Science, but set itself up as its own religion. As originally constructed, PTM published the Plain Truth, at one time the highest circulation Christian magazine in the world. The Plain Truth was the Worldwide Church of God’s house organ and mouthpiece. It remained this way until relatively recently. Today the Plain Truth is no longer a spokesman for Worldwide, but rather for an emancipated Plain Truth Ministries. PTM no longer claims to be officially affiliated with any group and has refashioned Plain Truth as a Christian magazine directed at people who are not a part of any denomination—or that interested in organized religion in any form, for that matter. All of this has had some rather predictable results.

(See our example of Eve Magazine above.)

In the future I hope to give examples of second acts which have worked in a spectacular fashion and examine why they did so. Given the overall history of the second act, it’s probably for the best that Jordan not give it a serious try again.

When you sell yourself as a nostalgia act, as Jordan does, it’s probably not a real shrewd idea to smudge up your memory with trivial complaints. Unless he wants to really be Ty Cobb, that is.

This Just In: Unless the Green Bay Packers are descended from Zeus Himself, it looks like this is going to be one long Bears football season. Holy crap. Our stud quarterback was picked off four times. Once by a Defensive End.

Mister Fun will return to Hil-Gle.com shortly.