Beatles' 'Get Back' a reminder of universal joy of fandom - New York Post

This column started out as an item for “Vac’s Whacks,” but appropriately enough I knew there was more to say than I could contain to a hundred-word blurb.

In its own (and, yes, I completely understand, totally different) way, it was sort of like what Peter Jackson felt as he watched those 60 hours of the Beatles’ “Get Back” footage and wondered how someone thought it could’ve been contained to the 90-minute 1970 movie “Let It Be.” ?

(With a promise from me: This column is not eight hours long.) ?

And now the question you are surely asking by now: “How in the world is he going to justify a Beatles column in the sports section?” ?

Well, watching every second of Jackson’s masterpiece this week on Disney Plus, I was struck that the feelings I hold for the Beatles are, in many ways, the same unspoken ties and invisible pulls that draw us to sports?

I have had dozens — probably hundreds — of debates with friends through the years that go like this: Beatles or Stones.

For one thing, there are no winners to debates like this.

I don’t believe for a second that “Get Back” is for everyone, in the same way baseball isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.

I could go on about its brilliance, but that brilliance speaks to me because, once upon a time, my trumpet-playing father — whose preferences were almost always jazz or big bands — told me, “You know, the Beatles are great, you should listen to them.” And I did.

Baseball is just grown men playing a game, and musical acts are just grown men singing songs?

And so, yes, in the same way I can also argue chapter and verse about baseball trivia and writing minutiae and whether the 1970 Bonnies would have beaten UCLA if Bob Lanier hadn’t blown out his knee, I can spend hours detailing why people thought Paul was dead in 1969, I can ape every one of the ad-libs on “Hey Jude,” I probably know all the lyrics, if you can call them lyrics, on “Revolution 9.” .

And so it is as if “Get Back” were an early Christmas present sent special delivery to me, and those like me.

You can be a casual Beatles fan, same as you can be a casual baseball fan, so this will not fascinate you, same as WAR and OPS+ doesn’t fascinate a casual baseball fan.

Let me put it this way: If I’d asked my future father-in-law for the hand of his daughter (LSU Class of ’92) by using the same absurd faux-Cajun accent that Brian Kelly (born in Everett, Mass.) used the other night at that basketball game in Baton Rouge, the great Bruce Hursey would have fixed his eyes on me and said, “No, son, you may not.” 

We can contort ourselves into pretzels figuring out ways the Giants can stay in the NFC playoff picture, or we can go the other way and declare that if the Giants are indeed still even on the periphery of the NFC playoff picture, then there are officially too many playoff teams. 

You know who has been sneaky great on this season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm?” Mr