BLONDE BOY MASHUP
THE BLUE MAX and THE NATURAL are both old-ass movies about blond, blue-eyed pretty boys who think they're so special. Now it's time for some get-back. Please comment nicely!
Golden-boy slugger Roy Hobbs had a secret. He wasn't really the All-American farm-boy who came out of nowhere to lead the last-place New York Knights to a baseball championship. In actual fact, Hobbs was a German flying ace named Bruno Stachel.
"Put me in, Pop! I'm blonde and blue-eyed. Therefore I'm American. And baseball is America's game!"
"Sure, you've got blonde hair and All-American good looks," said crusty Pop Fisher. "But you're too old. Mister, you don't start playing ball at your age, you retire. What are you, thirty four? Thirty-five?"
"That's young to me." Roy Hobbs had to kill Pop Fisher. He killed him by strangling him on his own massage table when he was getting a rubdown after the game. It caused a scandal, but Hobbs beat the rap by blaming everything on a bunch of legendary colored baseball stars. They played in the Negro Leagues because they were too talented and would make him look bad.
"Get Josh Gibson! Kill Cool Papa Bell! I'm an American! I have blue eyes and blonde hair! That makes me the good guy!"
Hobbes laughed the haughty, Germanic laugh of an arrogant ace as the great players of the Negro Leagues were snuffed out one by one. "No one's ever making a movie about you guys!" He laughed. "Watch me hit a home run and make all the stadium lights explode as I glide around the bases in very slow motion!"
Hobbs was all ready to win the big game and live happily ever after, but right before game time sports writer Max Mercy cornered him alone in the Knights' darkened dressing room.
"Look at this, Hobbs." It was a hospital photo, of a German ace in a hospital bed after being shot by his girlfriend. There was a picture of a dark-haired girl, too, lying on the pavement dead.
"It was suicide," Hobbs muttered. "She couldn't take it when I told her she looked kind of . . . Jewish."
"Well, tell you what, Hobbs. You throw tonight's game, and set me up with one of your new blonde girlfriends – preferably the sexy bad girl Memo, and not that drippy Iris – and I might just forget to mention this in tomorrow's newspaper column. Kids need heroes, right?" Max Mercy laughed softly, looking oily and foreign and evil.
Roy Hobbs didn't know what to do. He wanted to win the big game! But he was afraid of being exposed as a haughty, arrogant German ace when he was trying to come across like a clean-cut American hero to millions of gullible American kids. Having blonde hair and blue eyes had given him a second chance, and he was genuinely grateful. With blonde hair and blue eyes any American could accomplish anything. Was there a finer country anywhere?
"Batting now, Number Nine, Roy Hobbs!"
Hobbs stepped up to the plate, sized up the pitch, and swung.
"My eyes! My eyes!" Exploding in a shower of glass, the press box window dissolved into a thousand jagged shards, blinding Max Mercy and causing him to scream and scream in dire agony.
Afterwards, Roy stopped by the hospital and pressed a scrap of polished metal into the hands of the blinded sports writer.
It was the Blue Max, Germany's highest medal for valor.
