Tuesday, December 06, 2011

How Not To Pick Your Spots

I don't know if this story is apocryphal or not but it sure is a good one and is instructive on many levels. 

Years ago, tennis star Andre Agassi was playing in the Legg-Mason tournament which is held in Cincinnati.  His private plane touched down at 1 AM at an airstrip in rural Kentucky across the Ohio River from Cincinnati.  Andre, then solidly in the avis rara stage of his career, supposedly got freaked out by the lack of security in attendance (or more accurately NOT in attendance) when he got off the plane.

"Andre," the lady the tournament sent to pick him up supposedly said. "It's 1 in the morning and you are in rural Kentucky.  Unless you play basketball or are on Hee Haw, nobody around here has a clue who you are."

Which brings up to the recent news of the arrest of mega head case Mindy McCready, who was arrested in Heber Springs, Arkansas by the authorities (State and Federal) on a warrant out of Florida where she is engaged in an exquisitely nasty custody fight with her parents over her child and from whence she had hit the trail. 

Now, if I am on the lam and am a country music singer of some fame if not notoriety, I think that the last place I would try to make myself invisible would be Cleburne County, Arkansas or any other small town in the South where you probably can't swing a dead cat without hitting a country music fan. 

Good thinking!  What?  She didn't have the gas money to make it clean on to Nashville? 

As for Andre, he has settled comfortably in a relatively conventional life of husband and father.  But I think if he ever needs to take a powder somewhere, I bet nobody knows him to this day in rural Kentucky.

Or Heber Springs either.  If Mindy ever reads this, she could profit from his example.  If she ever has to hide from the authorities again that is.

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