Now, don’t misinterpret this as an attack on Mayor-elect Michael Bloomberg. I have nothing against a self-made billionaire businessman who spends $70 million of his own money to get everyone to call him “Mike.” I mean, it takes that much money to buy an election nowadays when you start an election cycle with a name-recognition of, approximately, zero.
And it doesn’t bother me that the future mayor of New York prefers the Red Sox to our hometown ballclubs. After eight years of watching a mayor turn City Hall into the Yankees’ downtown satellite office, it’ll be refreshing to remove baseball from the list of duties demanding the mayor’s immediate attention (such as kicking Arafat out of operas, ticketing illegally parked diplomats’ cars and arresting police brutality protestors).
And I’m not even suggesting that Bloomberg hasn’t fulfilled the residency requirement. Sure, he grew up in Medford, Massachusetts and went to college at a moderately renowned school in nearby Cambridge, but Bloomberg has been living in New York City since the early 1970s. If I want an example of interloping, I need only recall Hillary Clinton’s pin-the-tail-on-the-open-Senate-seat opportunism that made mere carpet-bagging seem benign by comparison.
So buying elections, improper baseball partisanship and non-native status doesn’t bother me in a mayor. But I draw the line at the Boston accent. If some rich Red Sox fan wants to buy himself an office, be my guest, but he’d better at least sound like a New Yorker.
Now, before you start sending me angry letters (and, as an aside, why are they always so angry? Do I threaten you with physical violence?), I love the Boston accent. Although the rest of the country seems content to adopt the homogenized Midwestern “standard English,” I have always cherished the Boston accent as one of the north’s last great regional dialects. From David Ogden Stiers’ Brahmin brogue in “MAS*H” to Matt Damon’s slurred Southie in “Good Will Hunting,” it’s all music to my ears.
I just don’t want it in a mayor of New York.
I first encountered Bloomberg’s accent early this year when he fired his first salvo of commercials, a 60-second biographical ad designed to introduce him to the public as a regular guy who just happened to have $4 billion in assets.
In the commercial, Bloomberg’s Boston accent had been focus-group refined into something of a generic “I-95 accent”–but it was unmistakably Bostonian when he said words like “fahtha,” as in the father who was a “hard-working accountant for a local dairy” who died when he was in college, or when he said “thirty-five dahlars,” as in the weekly salary he earned parking cars while he attended Harvard. (Listen for yourself at http://www.mikeformayor.org/multimedia.asp)
I couldn’t put my finger on what was going on, so I called sound expert Ben Rubin, who, like Bloomberg, is a native of the Boston suburbs. Today, Rubin lives in New York and runs a sound design and “audible interface” firm called EAR Studio. If Elle Macpherson is “the body” and Cindy Crawford is “the face,” Ben Rubin is “the ears.” And he told me I was onto something.
“Bloomberg sounds a little like Spalding Gray, who is from Rhode Island,” Rubin told me. “It’s a subtle accent, but it’s definitely foreign to New York. It’s jarring.”
I was willing to ignore Bloomberg’s accent until he went and won last week’s election. Now, I can’t disregard it. Wanting to give the mayor-elect another chance, I rushed to one of his first post-victory press conferences in hopes that his strong, commanding voice would change my mind.
But it only made things worse. Every time he departed from his script, the Boston brogue rose to the surface.
I rushed a tape of the news conference over to College of Staten Island linguistics professor George Jochnowitz. If Elle Macpherson is “the body” and Ben Rubin is “the ears,” George Jochnowitz is “the larynx.” This is a guy who first identified the increasing use of the letter “r” in New York speech and discovered that New York city kids had added a subtle “h” sound after the “s” in “street.”
This guy knows accents. And he heard what I heard, too.
“The way Bloomberg said ‘chairman’ was the classic Bostonian three-syllable pronunciation,” said Jochnowitz, deconstructing Bloomberg’s articulation of the word as “cha-uh-man” rather than the New York “cha-e-man.”
Jochnowitz was also appalled by the manner in which Bloomberg said the word “lifelong,” which he pronounced as “life-lahng,” not “lifelawng” as a New Yorker would.
“New Yorkers make a much stronger distinction between the words ‘cot’ and ‘caught.’ Bostonians pronounce the word almost the same.”
Jochnowitz cautioned that he did not believe that Bloomberg’s accent offered any indication of how he would govern.
I’d go further. I think he’s going to be a great mayor (although there will certainly be grumbling if he refuses to just write a check the first time the Parks Department reports a $1-million revenue shortfall). Already, in his first week as Mayor-elect, the Republican Bloomberg has met with more Democrats and union leaders than Rudy Giuliani did in eight years in office.
But someone (that’s me) has to be on record as saying that the Bloomberg accent is a bombshell that will explode at the first sign of disarray in his young administration. Mark these words (which, in this day and age, means “bookmark this Web site”): the minute that crime, unemployment or the price of obscure Portuguese cheeses at Zabar’s goes up, New Yorkers will seize on Bloomberg’s accent as evidence that he is not one of us.
Former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld thinks I’m out of my mind (and now he’ll probably think twice before returning my calls). I called Weld, who now works as a lawyer in New York as he supposedly bides his time for a New York gubernatorial bid (yeah, like that will happen), because as a guy with an out-of-state accent, he knows exactly what Bloomberg is going through.
But Weld dismissed my theory on the basis that New York chauvinism is ultimately a “myth.”
“New York is probably the least provincial city on the face of the earth,” Weld said. “No one is going to care about his accent. If there was ever a city without a chip on its shoulder, it’s New York.”
What city is this guy tawking about?
title: “Talking The Talk” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-12” author: “Richard Isaman”
You won’t find Santos’s name on the Nuggets’ roster. But he couldn’t be more valuable to the team. He holds the newest, and potentially fastest growing, job in America’s professional basketball league: translator. Hilario–the seventh overall pick in the NBA draft last year–doesn’t speak a lick of English. It’s Santos’s job to explain plays to him, to translate coaches’ tirades, to guide him through media sessions, to help sort out the finances–and even to play Nintendo soccer when called upon. “We live together, we’re friends, it’s almost like we’re siblings,” says Santos, 27.
More than a decade after NBA Commissioner David Stern launched an ambitious campaign to market basketball overseas, globalization has hit the game full press. Last spring National Basketball Association teams picked a record 14 foreign-born players. Last week the No. 1 draft pick, 7-foot-5 Yao Ming of the Houston Rockets, beat out superstar Shaquille O’Neal in the balloting to represent the Western Conference at center in the upcoming all-star game. And a record six international players–including Hilario–have been chosen to play in the all-star weekend’s Rookie Challenge on Feb. 8. With talent scouts now scouring the world from Africa to Azerbaijan, the NBA is becoming a bizarre cultural melting pot of millionaires living the American Dream before they even know the language.
That’s where the translators come in. In addition to Santos, there are at least three other active translators in the NBA, paid by the players. Their backgrounds are varied; Santos, a Toronto native of Portuguese descent, originally planned to work on Wall Street. But after September 11 he re-evaluated his life and decided to follow his passion: basketball. He met Nene (which means “baby”) while scouting for players to represent in Brazil. He promised Hilario’s family he would live with him, help manage his career and take care of the phenom.
It’s a good thing he did. At just 19, Hilario arrived as a sheltered, fresh-faced kid from an industrial town outside Sao Paulo–and promptly signed a four-year, $9.8 million contract with the Nuggets. Then he drafted Santos to work for him for a modest salary and a portion of overseas marketing deals. The arrangement provides Hilario with comfort, guidance and a taste of home. For Santos it’s the closest he’ll ever come to playing pro ball. “It’s almost like [being in the NBA],” says Santos. “You get to have conversations with Marcus Camby, and find out he’s just a great guy!”
Of course, the job involves more than schmoozing with stars. The most important interactions play out on the court–and it is here that Santos and other translators must walk a fine line. In recent weeks, coach Bzdelik has made clear that he is fed up with the slow pace of Nene’s language development. “Somewhere along the line [the translating] has to end,” Bzdelik says after practice one day. “We’re trying to expedite that.” In part, that means intensive English lessons. But a few weeks ago Bzdelik also began limiting Santos’s time in practice. He even sent Santos home after two games during a four-game road trip–with disastrous consequences. Hilario’s statistics plummeted. In the final game he fouled out after 23 minutes. “It was very simple,” Hilario explains. “I didn’t understand the language, and I need to know exactly what’s going on. With [Santos], I’m more confident and focused on the game.”
It’s a conflict all foreign players and their translators grapple with. “Practice and games, I try and stay out,” says Yao Ming’s translator Colin Pine. “I don’t want to interrupt the rhythm of the practice and the games. And he needs to develop relationships with his teammates.” Jake Tsakalidis, the bearish 7-foot-2 center for the Phoenix Suns, faced the same dilemma when he left Russia to play in Greece–then again when he came to the NBA. “I had a translator for 10 days in training camp,” he says. “But I don’t want my mind to work in Russian or Greek. It needs to work in English.”
Foreign-born players tend to rely on their translators to interpret more than just coaching instructions. On a recent Tuesday night, Santos pilots Hilario’s champagne-tinted Cadillac Escalade to a luxury apartment building and heads up to their penthouse overlooking downtown Denver. The cell phone rings. “Oh, hi, Tina,” Santos says. “No, Nene isn’t here. No, I think it’s going to be a quiet night.” After hanging up, he confides: “Lots of girls. I have to keep them at bay. He has a girlfriend in Rio.” Upstairs, Hilario is sprawled on the leather couch, reading out loud from a sheet of paper. “Are… you… talking… to… me?” he says, carefully enunciating each word. “What… do… you… want… sucker?” “Nene’s learning how to trash talk,” Santos explains. Soon the doorbell rings and it’s time for Nene’s massage. A perky woman enters, and Nene heads to the bedroom. The masseuse chirps, “Joe, tell him if he wants his butt massaged, to get naked and to get underneath the sheet.” Santos yells to Nene in Portuguese, then relays the answer: “He says, ‘No problem’.”
For now Santos remains especially indispensable at game time. With 2:25 left in the fourth quarter of the Phoenix game the next night, the Nuggets are down 70-65. Bzdelik kneels in front of Nene again. “Wait for the pass at the top of the key before you go get the screen down low,” the coach says as Santos translates. “Drive it in there.” The team heads back to the court. Nene stands at the top of the key. A teammate passes him the ball. He drives straight forward, drawing a defender, then turns and flicks the ball out to a wide-open teammate on the perimeter. The ball swishes home. Nene raises his hands and the crowd responds with a roar. It’s a scene that needs no translation.
