Seymour Cassel, Familiar Face in Cassavetes Films, Dies at 84
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@Machiavelli Seymour Cassel also had one intriguing supporting role---he played the fictional stand-in for
New York Daily News sportswriter Dick Young in
61*, Billy Crystal's HBO film about Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, and the 1961 chase to tie or break
ruthsrecord. Dick Young, most notoriously, was the writer who gave then-commissioner Ford Frick the insidious asterisk idea over Frick's paranoia that
ruthsrecord (so help me God that's how they said it back then) could be broken in the first 162-game season. (A decade and a half later, of course, Young would be the sportswriter who did the most to drive Tom Seaver out of town when Seaver haggled with the Mets in 1977 not just over his own contract extension but Seaver's critique that then-Mets chieftain M. Donald Grant refused to dip into the free agency waters to help improve the struggling Mets.) There's always the chance that even the cantankerous Young was half kidding about the idea but Frick pounced on it, even though the commissioner actually had no power to impose such a distinction on the records, just as there was the chance that Young was dead serious.
And Seymour Cassel
did sort-of resemble Dick Young as Young was by 1961. Crystal may have fictionalised the writers of the time even though several who covered the Maris-Mantle quest in 1961 were dead at the time he made
61*, including Milton Gross of the
New York Post, the one New York writer above all others who refused to run with the pack in trying to paint Maris in an automatically negative light because Maris wasn't the type to sell himself as a media type compared to Mantle who'd learned the hard way how to play the press. (Gross was also the writer who left the press box early during the 1956 World Series to catch up to battered Don Newcombe, drive home with him, and write a very poignant column about Newcombe's depression after losing yet another World Series game.) Richard Masur played Gross's stand-in in
61*, but Masur didn't resemble Gross as strongly as Cassel resembled Young.
