The $16-MILLION DOLLAR QUESTION MARK : Mark Lanston Has Never Won 20 Games a Season or Pitched a Team to a Pennant. But the Angels Are Gambling Big Bucks That He Can.

THE STORIES out of Montreal last summer--the ones about pitcher Mark Langston--are, um, curious.

Larry Bearnarth, the Montreal Expos pitching coach, got a call from Seattle manager Jim Lefebvre last May 25, the day the Mariners dealt Langston to Montreal for three young pitchers. The two men traded information.

“What you should know about Mark is that on days he pitches, he doesn’t sit on the bench,” Bearnarth remembers Lefebvre telling him. “He sits in the tunnel with a towel over his head meditating, or something. And he throws cups of water over his shoulder, too. Don’t let it worry you, but don’t disturb him either.”

It was kind of tricky--Bearnarth’s needing to talk to his pitcher but not knowing just when. “The mound was not a good place to communicate with him,” he says. And between innings, he didn’t want to interrupt whatever it was Langston was doing under that towel. “So I tried to get a word in before he sat down,” Bearnarth says. “It worked out OK.”

Maybe for Bearnarth it did. But the news photographers didn’t like it one bit. In the habit of walking through the tunnel to get to their station next to the dugout, they now found a guard posted on Mark Langston pitching days. Hey, bud, can’t go through here. Man doesn’t want to be disturbed. Words like that. Langston says it wasn’t his idea, and he felt bad for the photographers. “They hated me,” he says. “I got kind of a bad rap, I guess.”

The reporters had problems, too. After games, Langston, who owns a lethal left arm, kept writers cooling their heels while he spent 45 minutes massaging his weapon. Not with a conventional massage device. No, this was something called a Wright Linear Pump, $5,000, which Langston insisted on having and which the Expos picked up. The contraption wrapped around his arm like a blood-pressure sleeve and was thought to improve circulation.

Meanwhile, the no-nonsense Michelle, Langston’s young and bejeweled wife, was stirring up Gallic hostility because of the time a Montreal grocery store wouldn’t accept her check, much less her Tennessee English, and when she tried to explain that her husband pitched for the Expos--her credit was good --a local writer dubbed her “The Prom Queen.”

“You could say it wasn’t the best summer of our lives,” Michelle concedes.

Not to mention that after setting the mound on fire for nearly two months, going 10 and 3, keeping the Expos a threat--once, after filling the bases in Philadelphia, striking out the side in a blaze of blue thunder--Langston, like the rest of the team, fell apart, winning 2 and losing 6 in August and September.

But that was last summer, and this summer a new curtain will go up on the Mark Langston saga. Which--meditation, flying cups of water and space-age contraptions aside--is an interesting one. Particularly noteworthy is Langston’s new contract. After five seasons and six weeks with Seattle and most of last year with Montreal, Langston comes to the California Angels with a hellish slider, a dogeared Bible and, even by today’s exorbitant standards, a contract from the gods.

Gene Autry, a sort of Ponce de Leon of world championships, has given the 29-year-old pitcher $16 million for five years--guaranteed, no matter what --and a no-trade clause on top of it. The way it breaks down, Langston gets $1.5 million this season, plus a $1.5 million signing bonus designed to tide him over in case the owners locked out the players, which they did, and $3.25 million every year thereafter. “The only contract I like better is Will Clark’s with San Francisco,” says Arn Tellem, Langston’s breezy Santa Monica agent. “He gets $15 million for four years, or $3.75 million a year. But Mark’s is the highest totally guaranteed package in baseball.”

What makes Langston’s contract so startling is that he has never carried a team to a pennant, pitched a no-hitter or finished a season with 20 wins. And in August, he will be 30. “He’s at his peak now,” Tellem says. “But the truth is, by the time his contract runs out, he probably won’t be anymore. “

That Langston, who has yet to rank with Whitey Ford, Lefty Gomez or Sandy Koufax, and who, in fact, has won only 10 more games than he has lost, has wangled the best contract ever for a pitcher is less a reflection on astute Tellem agenting, though it helped, than on the lunatic state of baseball money in general. It is estimated that 152 ballplayers, nearly a quarter of the major league roster, will earn $1 million this year and that 27 have been bumped into the $2-million league. Ten players have jumped up to the $3-million category, or will by the end of their contracts, according to one set of books. And the end seems nowhere in sight.

“In recent years, the industry revenues have exploded at unbelievable levels,” says Donald Fehr, the lawyer who heads the Major League Players Assn., the baseball players’ union. According to Fehr’s numbers, operating revenues for major league baseball in 1975 were $200 million. This year, they will be roughly $1.3 billion. For the next three years, they are projected to rise in excess of $100 million a year. Much of this surge of money is pouring in from TV. In addition to the estimated $12 million that each of the 26 teams will collect annually for the next four years from CBS and ESPN, every team sells rights to local stations to broadcast at least part of its schedule. Also, attendance is rising. From 1985 through 1989, attendance records were shattered every season. Last year, 55 million fans went to the park, almost 10 million more than in 1985. “People throw money at entertainment out of all proportion to reason,” Fehr says.

Given their millions, it is hard to work up much sympathy for the owners or the players. The bickering between them that wrecked the exhibition season and delayed opening day until next week for the nation’s baseball fans was made all the more ludicrous by the late-night TV pictures of gray, weary men stumbling up to a microphone to report the latest lack of progress in resolving their differences, much the way heads of state might report the latest developments in a brewing world crisis. Most of the quarrel boiled down to whether players could seek salary arbitration after two years or three.

But the quarreling went well beyond mere dollars and cents. “There is an innate hostility that has existed over the years, and a lack of trust,” says Paul Staudohar, a professor of business administration at California State University at Hayward and the author of “The Sports Industry and Collective Bargaining.” “The owners are very strong-willed, independent people. The players have a lot of solidarity. . . . Money is not the predominant issue. It’s about who’s going to rule the roost. The roost is now shared, but the owners can’t seem to accept that.”

This time, the lockout of players by owners had no martyrs, only greedy--principled, perhaps, but greedy--villains. Bank accounts have changed drastically since the early 1970s when the players first started taking on the owners. Then they were indentured servants, owned by their masters for life unless a trade did them part.

When Peter Ueberroth took over as commissioner in 1984, the owners were crying red ink, but they wouldn’t show their books to anybody, not even each other. Ueberroth shamed them into tidying up their finances. In the process, according to two recent arbitration decisions, this belt-tightening took the form of collusion: owners refusing to make offers to players who had become free agents. According to Fehr, the two decisions, based on studies of the 1985 and 1986 seasons--the 1987 season is still under review--could cost the owners “$100 million to $300 million, depending upon damages.”

Not only do the players have that money to look forward to, but Fehr’s union has a tidy backup fund. Deciding to charge rights’ fees to baseball-card people who want to use players’ pictures, the players’ union is now sitting on a $90-million reserve fund. “I’m trying to decide what to do with it,” Fehr says. “We could buy a corporation.”

The owners, meanwhile, no paupers these, displayed signs of split personalities. While collectively making heated demands at the bargaining table to limit how much money they had to pay the help, they were, individually, throwing wads of dough at players. Like Langston and Clark.

Only Langston, unlike Clark, doesn’t even play every game. He does, however, meditate daily.

I DON’T KNOW HOW to say this,” Langston says, piloting a rented red Miata around the sprawling grounds of The Pointe hotel in Phoenix on Day 13 of the owners’ spring-training lockout. “I sound stupid. But I don’t put a lot of emphasis on money. It’s not important to me. I’m just fortunate I was a free agent at this time. And it’s not like I went out and bought things. Actually, what I bought was a Toyota truck.”

A truck? Like the gardeners in Beverly Hills drive?

“It’s a great truck,” Langston says.

And what do you do with your truck, exactly?

Langston swings onto the highway, heading west to Mesa, where the Angels usually train. He smiles. “Same thing the gardeners do. I cut my grass and trim the bushes, put the clippings in the truck and run it over to the dump.”

It is late February. Although the baseball camps are officially closed, Langston and two of his former teammates, Seattle catcher Scott Bradley and pitcher Bill Swift, have taken quarters at the resort and intersperse rounds of golf with grueling, slightly obsessive workouts. The pre-free-agency winters, before 1977, of hunting and fishing, maybe selling a little life insurance and generally putting on too much weight, are as gone as the $2 bleacher seat.

Players now hunt tax shelters, solid investments and shrewd financial advisers. Sugar- and tobacco-free bodies are kept as finely tuned as a new Ferrari, which most players can now afford.

Yet for all that money, many seem determinedly middle-class in their tastes and in their lifestyles, as if their bank accounts are something that sort of arrived in the mail one day with the Builder’s Emporium flyer and the chance to win $2 million through Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes, and they’re still not quite sure where to put them.

“Bill does his chores so badly that I said, ‘Forget it, I’ll just clean the house myself,’ ” Michelle Swift is saying over dinner with the Langstons at the Olive Garden, a family-style Italian restaurant in Mesa.

“ Tell me ,” says Michelle Langston. “When Mark makes the bed, he doesn’t understand you put the zipper part of the pillow inside the pillow case.”

“Yeah, and I either put the edges facing in, when you want them facing out, or vice versa,” adds Langston somewhat helplessly.

“So I make the beds,” says Michelle.

“And I do the dishes,” says Mark. He grins suddenly. “It was about the only thing in my contract the Angels didn’t forbid. Unfortunately.”

IT IS HARD TO assess where to place Langston in the current pantheon of pitchers. Some would say he has the best slider in baseball, another Ron Guidry or Steve Carlton, almost, without quite the control. Had he spent his career with a winner, he might already have had his face on a Wheaties box, with that razor-cut, sun-bleached blond hair and swimming-pool-blue eyes. But it was the hapless Mariners, not the Yankees or the Dodgers, who drafted him out of San Jose State University in 1981. “The truth is,” Langston says, “I didn’t even know where Seattle was.”

Where it usually is is somewhere near the bottom of the American League West standings. In 13 years, the Mariners have never eked out a winning season. The Kingdome, rarely visited and without a helping wind, is not exactly a pitcher’s dream park. “Some days there’d be 2,000 fans, and you could hear every nasty remark they said,” Langston recalls.

Nevertheless, during his rookie season, 1984, he went 17-10 and led the American League in strikeouts, only one of four rookies who have ever done so. In fact, in three of his five Seattle seasons, he led the league in strikeouts and produced more than a fifth of the Mariners’ wins.

In the beginning, he killed hitters with the slider, which a Little League coach taught him when he was 9, and with his fastball, which will move up and out on a right-handed batter who has just swung futilely at a slider that broke down and in. Three and a half years ago, he added a change-up, which, when it’s working, is devastating. Moreover, Langston can pop off 120 pitches without letting up, and there were times when he’d throw 130 pitches, go nine, 10 innings and not get a win.

“Mark could always make the pitch in a big situation,” says Scott Bradley. “Sometimes in the sixth, seventh inning, you’ll see a pitcher start to wear down. But Mark always seems to have a little reserve in the gas tank.”

Langston is an emotional pitcher. Sometimes, after pitching so hard so long and not getting a win, he would stomp into the locker room and rearrange it. “I’d get mad at myself for a stupid pitch, and it would eat me alive,” he says. “I was a maniac. I paid for a door and a couple of walls. One time, I kicked my foot through a wall. I’m a very sore loser.”

In 1988, Seattle was worse than ever, slogging around in last place with no hope in sight. One Sunday, in a game against Kansas City, Langston carried a 3-2 lead into the eighth inning. He gave up three long balls to the warning track and, with 145 pitches already thrown, went tiredly back to the dugout.

In the ninth, manager Dick Williams sent him back to the mound. Which made Langston mad. Where was the bullpen? He gave up two runs and lost the game. Afterward, he was seething.

“I was mad, and I said things I shouldn’t have to reporters,” he says.

Two days later, the cantankerous Williams was fired. Although owner George Argyros assured Langston that his comments had nothing to do with the canning, Langston was portrayed as the Magic Johnson to Williams’ Paul Westhead.

“Every week,” Langston says, “Dick says something about me or Mike Moore,” a former Seattle teammate now pitching for Oakland. “Last summer, he said, ‘I feel sorry for (Montreal manager) Buck Rodgers and Jim Lefebvre for having two gutless pitchers in the middle of a pennant race.’ ” Recently, Williams was quoted as saying the Angels are “paying money to a guy who doesn’t have a gut in his body. . . . He couldn’t win a big game if his life depended on it.”

There were times, in Montreal, when some disgruntled fans wondered if Williams was right. “When he was really on, which was maybe three, four times, he looked very good,” one Montreal sportswriter says of Langston. “But sometimes he looked terrible, all over the plate. Frankly, we thought he was better than that.”

When Langston arrived in Montreal in late May, the team was in first place and thought it had, with everything going right, a chance to win the division. The fans, normally not an excitable lot, responded to the hullabaloo over Langston’s first home game by creating 22 “K” sections at Olympic Stadium to keep track of his strikeouts.

The fans were understandably expectant. Days earlier, in San Diego, Langston had struck out 12 in a dazzling debut as an Expo. “The first game was the most nervous I’d ever been,” Langston admits. “It was a new league, and I was the hot property they had just traded for. My stomach was churning. And if that wasn’t enough, they had the Beach Boys playing afterward. It was more pressure than I’d ever felt. I just thanked the Lord that by the sixth inning, we’d scored six runs.”

Langston had a one-hitter going into the seventh. He won 10-2, giving up only four hits, and called it “the greatest game of my life.”

For the next 40 days, Langston helped keep Montreal atop the National League East. Then, in September, after losing two games to St. Louis, the team went into a tailspin. The Expos finished the season in fourth place, 12 games behind the winning Cubs. “To see it all crumble was one of the most depressing things I’ve been through,” Langston says.

But--well, where was Langston, anyway, when Montreal crumbled? “You can’t just blame Mark,” says another Montreal sportswriter. “Nobody was pitching, and the clutch hits weren’t coming. But Mark did have a couple of occasions when he could have stopped an Expo losing streak, and he didn’t. He didn’t always rise to the occasion.”

Many had expected Langston to arrive in Montreal and propel the team to a division win, just as Rick Sutcliffe went to the Cubs in 1984 and strong-armed them to the top. And for a while, he did. The Expos, 23-23 when he arrived, soon were 19 games over .500. A key win or two, even during the September doldrums, the thinking ran, could have turned the Expos’ fortunes.

Someone in the Expos’ front office was more direct, complaining that Langston was never going to be a Cy Young Award winner and calling him a “17-5 pitcher, not a 23-8 one.”

Still, Mark was not entirely culpable. The Dodgers’ Mike Marshall hit a line-drive off his pitching shoulder, and it hurt like hell for his next four starts. Also, he came down with the flu. “Maybe we should have made him miss a turn,” says Larry Bearnarth. “His last eight games, he didn’t pitch well. We stopped scoring runs. His slider wasn’t as good. But his earned-run average went down. “

“I didn’t pitch great,” Langston concedes. “But I pitched good enough to win. During one stretch, I was 1 and 5. But my ERA was under 2.”

Langston finished the Montreal portion of the season with a 12-9 record, an impressive earned-run average of 2.39 and a looming question mark. Can he, given the Angels’ still unfulfilled 30-year quest for a pennant, be the catalyst who finally puts the team over the top?

Or, to put it more rudely, what do the Angels expect for 16 million bucks?

MIKE PORT, the Angels’ general manager, sounds faintly embarrassed at the other end of the line, saying, “We asked ourselves, ‘Does any player deserve that much money?’ But considering the market forces at play--and this is not intended with any disrespect to Mark--that’s what we had to bite off and chew to realize this acquisition.”

Indeed, like college students engaged in a food fight, owners were rearing back to toss whatever was on their plates at Langston once he made it known he did not want to stay in Canada. As Don Fehr sees it, “a left-handed pitcher with Mark’s talent pretty much has a silver spoon in his mouth.”

Nobody knew this better than Arn Tellem, who represents 25 other athletes, including Indianapolis Colt Eric Dickerson. Tellem began talking to Seattle a year ago as Langston entered the final year of his contract, hoping to get Langston signed before he became a free agent. Although Langston was frustrated at the prospect of pitching for a non-contender, he was happy in Seattle. He had the nice house in Bellevue, which, alongside the truck, had a Mercedes--Michelle’s--in the garage and a recording studio in the basement. He knew where to find the best pizzas in town; he was willing to stay.

So when Bruce Hurst signed a $5.25-million contract with San Diego in December, 1988--Langston was making $1 million at the time--Tellem said Langston would have been content to duplicate the three-year deal.

Seattle said no.

Soon after, Kansas City’s Bret Saberhagen, another sought-after pitcher, signed a three-year contract extension for $8.9 million. “By May, I was envisioning that $3 million a year was possible,” Tellem says. But by May, Langston, who had worked out a deal with Seattle to make $1.4 million last year, was on his way to Montreal, which was hoping it could egg Langston on to renew with its team. “He was quoted in the papers as saying, ‘Why Montreal?’ ” recalls Larry Bearnarth, “which didn’t make us feel very good at the time. Then it seemed that every game he pitched, the price on his head went up until they were talking $9 million for three years. But I don’t think he ever intended to stay.”

No, he didn’t. Although the National League rules that allow pitchers to hit tempted him, Canadian life left him cold. “No good subs, for one thing. And I have to eat a sub before I pitch,” Langston says only half-jokingly.

By last fall, he and Tellem had their list of teams--Dodgers, Yankees, Angels, Padres, Cubs, Cards, Giants and A’s--and their sights set on the moon. Like visiting heads of state, the owners or general managers of the desired teams flew into Los Angeles to court Mark and Michelle Langston. “I was really impressed with George Steinbrenner,” Langston says of the Yankee owner. “He was so smooth; you could sense the power and clout he has. He made New York sound like the greatest city in the world.” He left Tommy Lasorda’s office with two jars of Lasorda’s spaghetti sauce and platitudes about wearing Dodger blue ringing in his ears. And everyone tried to assure Michelle that there would be spectacular acting possibilities for her in their city, a subject much on Michelle’s mind these days.

“But it was the Autrys we really fell for,” Langston says. “Seeing the way the old ladies fussed over him at the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum just did something to me. And he and Jackie had a way of making us feel comfortable.” So comfortable, in fact, that the Langstons bought property in Anaheim Hills, where their new house will be completed in June. In the meantime, they plan to rent a condo close to Anaheim Stadium.

As much as the Autrys were impressed with the clean-cut, born-again Langstons, their attractive looks, their nice manners, the question remains as to why they would go sky-high to bolster what is already the strongest part of their team. Until starter Chuck Finley went down with an injured toe last season, the pitching staff was humming right along. It was the hitting that needed help. The Angels led the league last year in home runs but generated the third fewest total runs in the league and hit only .256 to rank 11th out of the 14 league clubs. The pitching staff ranked second in ERA on the arms of Finley, Bert Blyleven, Kirk McCaskill and Jim Abbott.

“We would have tried to sign Robin Yount,” Port says, “if he hadn’t decided to stay with Milwaukee. But we also wanted to strengthen our strength, so if we encounter another unfortunate circumstance, as we did with Chuck Finley, we’ll be better able to deal with it. Also, we will probably trade one of our pitchers now.” In addition to Langston, the Angels acquired two other pitchers, left-hander Scott Bailes and right-hander Mike Smithson.

Other teams Langston was considering balked at a five-year deal and a no-trade clause. The Angels didn’t. “We were hearing that Steinbrenner might be prepared to go to $18, $20 million,” Port says. “We decided, if this was what we had to do to sign him, we would.”

So the Angels grabbed Langston. A case might be made that this fancy acquisition could boost the box office, draw in fans on the nights that he pitches, put a little money back in the Autrys’ vault. But actually, few pitchers seem to have drawing power. There was Fernando Valenzuela for a while and Dwight Gooden in New York. Port knows better in Anaheim.

“When Nolan Ryan was pitching for us, we did a study,” Port remembers. “We found out, if you can believe this, that Nolan drew about 1,100 fewer fans than our club average. And in today’s world, a lot of guys making a lot of money simply don’t inspire you to go to the ballpark.”

FOR SIX YEARS, Langston was like a fine wine--kept in the cellar and known only to discerning connoisseurs. Now he’d like nothing better than to pop the cork and become a household name.

Early in March, he and Scott Bradley broke into national TV by standing in the hallway outside David Letterman’s studio and playing catch before commercial breaks. It was a start anyway. Now maybe Arsenio Hall will book him. Arn Tellem grins: “I think Mark’s got a routine memorized.”

Already, he’s begun showing up in the right places--Spago, the Kings’ locker room, where he chats with pal Wayne Gretzky, and the Lakers’ locker room, where he still has to be introduced. And one of his closest friends is singer-songwriter Bruce Hornsby, whom he met when he asked for an autograph after a concert. Now Hornsby gives him piano lessons.

Langston likes to relax with his own music, playing rock, pop and gospel guitar and keyboards and singing along in his studio, maybe jamming some with another pal, Alan White, the drummer from Yes.

“I can’t read music,” Mark volunteers. “I play by ear.”

Voice any good?

“It’s more like a serious background voice,” Michelle offers. “We’re not talking Grammy material here.”

At the Olive Garden restaurant, an unsuspecting waitress arrives bearing the requisite dessert tray. She has no idea she has encountered a table of sugar control freaks. Michelle’s eyes are moist; it is clear she wants to order. But one look from Mark takes care of that. “I guess not,” Michelle says wistfully. Then, “Oooh, I’m dying for sugar.”

Although she has done only one TV commercial, for athletic shoes with Mark in Seattle, Michelle is hoping to crack Hollywood. “I’m going to study with an acting coach,” she says. “But look, if I make it, great; if not, fine.”

Mark and Michelle met under circumstances that already have Hollywood written all over them. A native of Chattanooga, Tenn., she often accompanied her mother to watch the Chattanooga Lookouts, the local Double-A team, for whom, it happened, Langston pitched.

“One day we kind of made eye contact,” Michelle remembers. “Then I went several more times, and we kept looking at each other. One day, my mother gave my cousin a note to bring down to Mark in the dugout, which I didn’t know about. It said, ‘Will you have a drink after the game with us?’ ”

Mark asked the cousin, “With who?” The cousin pointed. They had the drink.

“The problem was, I told Mark I was 19, but I was really 17,” says Michelle, now 23. “After dating three weeks, I told him the truth, and he broke up with me. But,” she adds with a sly smile, “he couldn’t resist in the end. We were married two years later, in 1985.” They have a daughter, Katie, who is 4.

LANGSTON IS AN intriguing mix of personality traits. There is the soft-spoken, polite Langston, with his gentle sense of humor, and, he says, a certain shyness left over “from when I was a mama’s boy growing up.”

In Santa Clara, he spent his childhood playing baseball and soccer, idolizing Brooks Robinson and Johnny Bench. He wanted to be a shortstop. “But they told me a left-hander can’t be.”

At Buchser High School, he was All-State in baseball and soccer, receiving more scholarship offers in soccer than baseball. “If soccer were as popular as baseball, I definitely would be playing soccer,” he says.

A roommate in the minor leagues persuaded Langston to become a born-again Christian. “I was a bit of a carouser, and I could drink,” he says. “But I chose not to live that way anymore. I realized something was missing from my life.” He reads the Bible diligently.

But beneath the Hardy Boy exterior, one senses a man with a will of steel. “The first day we met,” Larry Bearnarth recalls, “Mark let me know in a nice way that he knew exactly how he wanted to pitch and he really didn’t need any input from me.” And Scott Bradley says, “When Mark became a free agent last fall, he knew exactly what he wanted. To play in an outdoor stadium, in California, with a contender, and to have a no-trade clause. He got all of it without sacrificing anything for the money.”

The steel extends to his rigid discipline. Langston prepares for a game the way a marathoner readies for a race. He has a special workout tailored to each day of the rotation: running hard and lifting light weights the day after a start; running hard again, maybe sprinting distances the next day; the third day more running, lifting heavy weights and throwing on the side for five minutes, and the day before a start, complete rest.

And there’s a precise menu to go with this routine: carbo-loading two days before an outing, heavy on the pastas, protein the day before, and on the big day, waffles for breakfast (if on the road) or pancakes (at home).

“Then at 2:30, I get a sandwich to go,” he says, “usually a ham-and-cheese sub.”

“And boy, are you moody on days that you pitch,” Michelle adds. “I have to leave and go shopping.”

“I’m big on preparation,” Langston explains. “I watch box scores, see who’s getting hits. I plan how I’m going to pitch to each batter. Then I like to distract myself, listen to music. But I’m not a couch potato.”

“You are,” Michelle says.

“Well, I’m not vegged-out, I mean.”

“But you were snappish,” Michelle says, “because you couldn’t find a good sub place in Montreal.”

“Not one,” Langston says, “in the whole city.”

There appear to be two other Langston fetishes. One is the meditation bit. Langston says he was pitching on a hot afternoon in Milwaukee and retreated to the tunnel to cool off.

“I noticed that sitting there alone, I had better concentration. I was never able to block out all the meaningless conversation on the bench. So now I go off by myself and meditate.”

Well, all right. But then there is this sugar thing Langston seems to have. Greeting Katie one morning as she comes bounding into the gym at The Pointe hotel, where Langston, Swift and Bradley are lifting weights, Langston hugs her and says, “What did you have for breakfast?”

“A doughnut, Daddy.”

Langston shoots a glance at Michelle. “Well, I didn’t have a doughnut,” she says defensively. “Smell my breath. I’m on a diet, remember?”

Ah well, life is sweet enough as it is, wouldn’t you agree?

“Let’s hit the pool,” Langston says.