fred klein on sports

LAST MEN STANDING

2012-01-14T20:08:00.000-08:00

The National Football League playoffs are in full swing and I’m sure you’re wondering who I think will win. Sorry to disappoint but my crystal ball is out of order, as always. Except at the racetracks I don’t pick winners (and there not enough), and have no patience with commentators who do. If they knew who was going to win even a bit more than half the time they wouldn’t have to work. Nobody who could would.

But I will make one prediction: No NFL team will go all the way with its No. 1 quarterback on the sidelines. That’s about the nearest thing to a “lock” I can imagine.

A review of league action to date fully supports that view; teams whose QBs have gone down have gone home, or will soon. Indeed, even ones whose signal callers were partially impaired will watch this weekend’s games on TV, like the rest of us.

The list starts with the Indianapolis Colts, whose nonpareil helmsman, Peyton Manning, hasn’t taken a snap all season because of a neck injury that, it seems, resulted from no particular blow but from the cumulative effects of his 13 NFL campaigns. His loss transformed the Colts from one of the league’s best teams to its worst. Nuf said.

The Chicago Bears’ season turned to ashes in Game 10 when it lost Jake Cutler to a broken thumb. Yeah, the injury came not from a sack but from his attempt to be a real football player and tackle a guy who’d intercepted one of his passes, but with the pummeling he was taking behind a weak O-line it was only a matter of time before he was hurt. Cutler was bashed as a wimp when a knee injury knocked him (and his team) out of a playoff game last season, but his fortitude in the face of adversity in this one should have put that rap to rest. Maybe from now on he won’t feel obliged to prove his manhood.

The Arizona Cardinals spent big money to bring in QB Kevin Kolb, but because of concussions and a foot injury hardly got to see him play. Concussions ended the Cleveland Browns’ Colt McCoy’s season prematurely and, maybe, his career as well. The Miami Dolphins’ Chad Henne lasted four games before going out with a separated shoulder. The Houston Texans lost Matt Schaub to a foot injury in Game 8 and his backup, Matt Leinart, to a broken collarbone the next week. The Texans soldier on behind QB3, the rookie T.J. Yates, but you’ll get really good odds if you think he’ll take them past this weekend.

Quarterback injuries that weren’t season-ending spoiled other teams’ hopes. Michael Vicks’ midseason hiatus with broken ribs hurt the Philadelphia Eagles, the Dallas Cowboys’ playoff bid was sabotaged by Tony Romo’s broken hand, and the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Ben Roethlisberger looked like he was running on stilts after a late-season ankle injury ended his year in playoff defeat.

Such stories are all too typical of a sport that, against all reason, exposes its most-important (and highest paid) performers to the greatest injury risk. In the act of passing, which they do on most plays, quarterbacks usually are stationary and their attention is on their receivers downfield, not on the behemoths bearing down on them. Even getting the ball away in time doesn’t always save them from getting creamed.

It’s instructive, I think, to compare the league’s treatment of quarterbacks with that of punters. The latter are the lowest-paid players on most teams, and the most-easily replaced, but if they are molested during or immediately after they carry out their task the punishment is swift and severe. Hence, their injury rate is low.

On the other hand, it’s always open season on QBs, the players around whom every team’s offense revolves, so those guys take more blows than Evander Holyfield on a bad night. Indeed, a legal tackle after a pass has been released is so common that there's a boxing-like statistic for it—the “hit.” Further, the line between a legit “hit” and a penalizable “late” one is thin and the reward for stepping over it is high. Is it worth 15 yards to sideline a Tom Brady or a Drew Brees? Need I ask?

In recent seasons the league has moved to increase quarterback protection by instituting the “in the grasp” rule that stops a play before a QB has been wrestled to the ground and banning below-the-knees tackles by would-be sackers. That’s fine but not enough. Limiting to six the number of defensive players who can rush the passer on any play would help. So would a blanket extension of the “intentional grounding” rule. Trading a few quarterback sacks for more ambulatory QBs would be a good deal, I think.

Whenever the subject of protecting quarterbacks comes up on sportsblab radio or TV somebody coughs up the line that you might as well put those guys in skirts. Football’s a rough game any way you slice it, and it’s played by volunteers who willingly accept the risks, so let the boys be, the knuckleheads say.

But that argument weakens with every new study of the long-term effects of football-related injuries, and as a fan I’m tired of watching backups play as every season’s schedule unfolds. If the league won’t shield its players for their own sake they might consider the people who pay the bills.

OMG!

2012-01-01T06:46:00.001-08:00

Despite an unprepossessing matchup, last fall’s baseball World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and Texas Rangers was a honey, a seven-game struggle of the sort we haven’t seen for years. Game Six was a classic, featuring do-or-die comebacks from each team in an 11-inninger that ended with the Cardinals winning, 10-9, and, eventually, taking the championship.

Just as remarkable, though, was the quote given to espn.com after the sixth game by the Rangers’ Josh Hamilton, whose two-run home run in the 10th inning gave his team a 9-7 lead and, at the time, looked to be a game-winner. It concerned a conversation Hamilton says he had with God just before his memorable swing.

“He told me, ‘You haven’t hit one [a homer] in a while and this is the time you’re going to,” said Hamilton .

I still was digesting that revelation when I came across a story in the New York Times of November 2 about the horse trainer Larry Jones, whose filly Havre de Grace was favored in the Breeders Cup Classic a few days hence. Jones had been out of the sport the previous year because of burnout and physical ills, but had returned fit and, again, successful. He described what led him out of retirement thusly: “The Good Lord had a conversation with me. He told me that He had given me a talent, a blessing, and it was time for me to get my butt off the couch and start training horses.”

The quotes and their treatment caused me pause on a couple of grounds. The first was that they were buried in the body of the stories that contained them, not even rating a headline, and spurred no later discussion. You’d think the news that “God speaks to man” would cause a stir, but it didn’t.

Second, Hamilton’s assertion indicated that God not only was helping him but also was up on his stats, particularly the one showing that he’d gone homerless in his 65 previous post-season at-bats. With seven billion people on the planet and the usual array of wars, natural disasters and personal tragedies playing out, you’d think God would have plenty to occupy Him (or Her) besides our fun and games, but apparently that’s not the case.

Fact is, of course, that sports and religion are connected so closely in this land that the spectacle of athletes, etc., claiming intimacy with the deity doesn’t cause us to blink. If someone we actually know would tell us that he acted in such and such a way because of specific direction from Above we’d probably think he was daffy, but when an athlete (or a Republican presidential candidate) says that we smile benignly and continue the conversation. Decades of watching batters cross themselves before facing a pitcher, or jocks of all stripes pointing skyward after a signal achievement, have made the connection seem both natural and inevitable.

It’s not difficult to figure out why this should be so. If it’s true that there are no atheists in foxholes it’s also true that there are few in locker rooms, and for pretty much the same reason. Like war, all sports are games of inches, with barely measurable differences regularly separating success from failure. Even the most talented athlete knows full well that his day often will hinge on, say, the smidge by whether a line drive off his bat is caught or falls safely, and there’s enough randomness in the process to make it wise to propitiate the Almighty to help the breaks go his way. And—hey!—when the snoopy media drop by to talk, a shoutout to the Big Guy Upstairs might not hurt, either.

The rub comes when ostentatiously religious athletes like Tim Tebow take the field. Tebow, the Denver Broncos’ Lil’ Abnerish quarterback, has been in the playin’- and-prayin’ spotlight since his college days, punctuating his considerable gridiron feats with scriptural citations and prayerful poses that have come to be called “Tebowing.” In the process he’s become at once a celebrity with the extracurricular income to prove it, and a lightning rod for those on both sides of the religion-in-public issue that plays out in many American venues.

People who wince at Tebow’s doings often are hard pressed to explain why, but they shouldn’t be. Even granting his sincerity and good intentions (as I do), it’s enough to point out that his occupation consists of zero- sum games in which someone’s success always comes at someone else’s expense. Thus, for an athlete to imply that he enjoys God’s favor demeans his foe, who may believe himself to be equally worthy. That, I think, is what those Detroit Lions players were saying a few weeks back when they “Tebowed” after sacking or intercepting the Denver QB, although they might have expressed themselves better.

Indeed, the fact that failure and defeat are recurring themes in just about every athlete’s life probably goes farthest in explaining the group’s bent toward pietism. While most of us labor in obscurity, and rarely know if we’re winning or losing (or, even, how to keep score), the athlete’s failings are public and, thus, impossible to conceal. Every day in every sport half the teams lose, and even the best baseball hitters bat around .300, which means they fail about 70% of the time. Under those circumstances it’s tough to keep one’s chin up.

I read the other day that Plaxico Burress, the New York Jets’ pass receiver, has the motto “Everything Happens For A Reason” tattooed on his back. That’s a theological statement if there ever was one. Failure, defeat and even disgrace can be acceptable if they are seen as having the divine purpose of preparing one for greater tests to come. If Burress can believe that shooting himself in the leg in a nightclub with an illegally concealed weapon can have redeeming value, the rest of us can take heart from our own trials.

SOUR GRAPES

2011-12-14T20:25:00.001-08:00

One of the cinema’s best lines came in the toga comedy “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” when the slave Pseudolus, played by the great Zero Mostel, picked up a bottle of wine and asked , “Was 1 a good year?”

I can’t recall the answer but I can tell you that when it comes to baseball’s version of immortality the coming year 2012 won’t be vintage. The crop of first timers on the game’s Hall of Fame ballot, just out, is among the weakest in memory. Chances are that few of them will garner the 5% of the sportswriters’ vote needed to appear on next year’s ballot, much less set sculptors to work chiseling reliefs.

It works that way sometimes. Like in other things, there are good years and bad in baseball, and since ballplayers retire more or less randomly there’s no assurance that H of F spots will be filled in a steady manner. Election to Cooperstown in a player’s first year of eligibility isn’t the norm, and we present or former baseball writers who make up the 575-member electorate usually can rally around someone (1996 was the last year no one received the required 75% vote), but I can’t recall a less apt group of new eligibles than this one.

The 13, all of whom retired after the 2006 season, are as follows: Jeromy Burnitz, Vinny Castilla, Brian Jordan, Javy Lopez, Bill Mueller, Terry Mulholland, Phil Nevin, Brad Radke, Tim Salmon, Ruben Sierra, Bernie Williams, Tony Womack and Eric Young. All played the in the Major Leagues for at least 10 years, have been retired for five and were nominated by at least two of the Baseball Writers Association of America’s six-member committee formed for the purpose, the sole requirements for appearance on the ballot.

All had careers that ranged from good to very good and many were (are) nice fellas as well. Still, I’ll vote for none of them and can see only two—Lopez and Williams—even passing muster for a continued ballot presence. If you ever mentioned in the same breath the Hall of Fame and Burnitz, Jordan, Mueller, Mulholland, Nevin, Womack or Young, I’d be astonished. I never did.

It’s true, of course, that the line between good and great in a complex sport like baseball can be thin, and subject to interpretation. That the Hall doesn’t lack for members whose qualifications can be questioned is one of the things that enlivens the voting process and the commentary that always follows it. On every ballot are players whose accomplishments aren’t much different from those of, say, Bill Mazeroski or George Kell, whose plaques hang in Cooperstown, and there always are people who’ll say that if those guys are in there so should good old so and so, naming their choice of the moment.

In my editing days at the Wall Street Journal I’d occasionally find it necessary to tell a writer his piece wasn’t fit for publication. When he’d reply that we’d published worse, I’d tell him that I found that argument unpersuasive. So, too, do most of the Hall’s voters, which is why the Veterans Committee was formed to reconsider players we’d passed over in their permitted 15 years on our ballot. If you have a bone to pick regarding Maz or Kell, or quite a few others, take it up with the Vets, former players, managers and execs whose standards are less stringent than those of us scribes.

Withal, though, what’s bad news for some is good news for others. I’ll be voting for five players this year, all of whom I’ve supported before, and it’s likely that the absence of compelling new names will ease some paths to Cooperstown.

I’m hoping that one of those will be Jack Morris, who’s been knocking on the Hall’s door for 13 years now without being admitted. Why this is so is a mystery to me; he has a sterling won-lost record (254-186) and a mantle full of trophies including a World Series MVP (for 1991), and was a big-game pitcher without peer. His 10-inning shutout for the Minnesota Twins against the Atlanta Braves and John Smoltz in game seven of the ’91 Series was the best such performance I’ve seen.

I have a soft spot in my heart for shortstops, who are the best athletes on most teams, and I’ll be voting for two of them—Barry Larkin and Alan Trammell. The marvelous Larkin, a career Cincinnati Red, came up third in the voting in his first year on the ballot last year—at 62% behind selectees Roberto Alomar and Bert Blyleven-- and is a good bet to make it this time. Trammell’s election would be a surprise because he was mentioned on just 24% of last year’s ballots, but he was at or near the top of his position in most of his 20 big-league campaigns with the Detroit Tigers, and I find him no less worthy than Larkin.

I’ll vote for Lee Smith, a dominant relief pitcher with several teams, and Edgar Martinez, the Seattle Mariners’ peerless designated hitter. I’m not crazy about the DH in general, but it’s here to stay and I see no reason why its best practitioners shouldn’t be honored. On the same ground I’ll be backing Jim Thome when he comes up for a vote several years down the road.

I’m hoping my aforementioned five do well this year because the going is due to get tougher. As dim as this year’s new eligibles were, next year’s will be brilliant, including Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, Mike Piazza, Curt Schilling and Craig Biggio. Room on that bus is going to be scarce.

BASKETBALL JONES

2011-12-01T06:39:00.000-08:00

The National Basketball Association lockout has been settled and the league says it will resume play on Christmas Day. Good. I enjoy basketball in all its forms and that includes the professional one. No doubt about it, those giraffes can play, and it’s a treat to watch them.

Nonetheless, the delay of the NBA season didn’t much distress me. Our sports calendar is so crowded that entertainment aplenty always is near at hand, and the last several weeks have been no exception. I’ve even tuned in to a few of the international soccer matches that a couple of Fox cable channels regularly offer. I can’t say I watched them whistle-to-whistle, but I liked what I saw. We Yanks stick up our noses at The Game the Rest of the World Loves Best, but we shouldn’t. Those guys can play, too.

So what are we to think of the agreement that ended the NBA unpleasantness? Nothing much that hasn’t occurred already. Conclusion No. 1 is that it’s their game (the owners’ and players’), not ours, and no matter how much we might love our favorite teams we shouldn’t believe otherwise. No. 2 is to remind ourselves that in big-time pro sports the real economic warfare isn’t between the owners and the players but between the owners and the owners, and that their so-called labor agreements are aimed mainly at restraining their own competitive urges. “Stop me before I spend again!” the owners plead, and at some point the players always say “okay.”

That said, though, we must resist the cliché that no one wins in a strike or lockout. Make no mistake, the owners won this one. Raising their cut of their league’s revenues (reportedly about $4.3 billion last season) to about 50% from 43% puts at least $300 million more into their pockets annually over the agreement’s 10-year term, or about what they say they’ve lost collectively in each of the past few seasons. Considering that those losses probably were overstated for bargaining purposes (they always are), the suits will be well ahead of the game.

But the longer the lockout continued the worse it would have been for the players. That’s because youth is fleeting while wealth endures, giving the owners a large and intrinsic edge in all such contests.

The real-world proof of that came from the lockout that cost the National Hockey League its entire 2004-05 season. The year before that showdown players’ salaries accounted for a reported 76% of NHL revenues. The settlement knocked that down to 54% and resulted in pay cuts averaging about 25% for every player then under contract. Team salary caps were instituted with fewer exceptions than the ones that survived the latest NBA settlement. Rookie salaries were severely capped. Add in the loss of an entire year’s salary, or about 20% of the average pro athlete’s career take, and you had a very cold winter in Hockeyland.

We fans know this, of course, but sympathy for the NBA players was scant during the recent bargaining. With an average annual salary of $5.1 million, and a median of about $2.3 million, they’re by far our best-paid team jocks, typically earning more in a year than most of us do in a lifetime. Comments made during the talks by a few players—and their union’s general counsel, for heaven’s sake—comparing the league to a plantation and its employees to slaves drew guffaws all around, undermining their cause and causing many to wonder what planet they were living on..

The talk these days about the 99% versus the 1% doesn’t do justice to the basketball pros’ singularity. In terms of physical attributes as well as income they’re in the top .001%, genetic geniuses whose height and agility set them apart in the most obvious of ways. Yeah, they must “work” to hone their skills and conditioning, but most of that consists of doing things regular people do for fun.

Today’s professional athletes like to compare themselves to entertainers whose unique talents entitle them to lush compensation, but that’s misleading all around. Movie stars can’t shine without the expensive accoutrements of their productions and even a song-and-dance man like Michael Jackson needed a vast array of musicians, other dancers, sound and lighting technicians and special-effects experts to put on a show worth big bucks at the box office.

The athlete’s context is more elaborate still, requiring not only a stage for its proper exhibition but also strong teammates, worthy opponents and contests with historical meaning. This the league provides. I suppose LeBron James could barnstorm with his version of the Washington Generals, but I think the public quickly would tire of that, as would he.

And so the basketballers will be back on court soon, and should be glad of it. The pro-football owners and players signed a new accord a few months ago amid much sturm und drang, and the baseballers are in the process of inking one without it, meaning that an era of labor peace lies ahead. That’ll free up the sports pages for more-interesting stuff, like box scores. Who says there’s no good news?

SEX, LIES AND JOE PA

2011-11-10T18:59:00.000-08:00

Back in 1984 I was still clearing my throat as a sports columnist but had already made a recurring topic of the crimes and deceptions of big-time college sports. My November 9 column of that year was about schools that hoked up their jock-graduation rates for public consumption.

Exhibit A was Penn State. In interviews and in university publications Nittany Lions’ head coach Joe Paterno and his aides, and other university officials, noised it about that the school graduated more than 90% of its varsity football players, a very high figure. As was (is) their wont, most sporting news mediums repeated those claims without verifying them, which amounted to endorsements.

To see what was doing I phoned the Penn State athletics department. I was shuffled around until I wound up with one Dave Baker, its information director. He told me the 90% figure was “pretty accurate,” but only if one counted players who’d reached their senior years at the school. “Actually,” he hedged further, “the figure used to be 90%. We think it’s dropped a shade the past few years but we don’t know. We haven’t calculated it lately.”

I asked about players who flunked out, transferred or otherwise dropped out before their four years of athletic eligibility expired. Baker said Penn State had never kept track of those, yet in the next breath he contested as too low one published report that had put the school’s overall football graduation rate at 67% because he said it miscounted dropouts. He took issue with an NFL Players Association finding that 61% (24 of 39) of the Penn State products who were in the NFL the previous year (1983) were degree holders, on grounds it was based on self reporting. Why he thought anyone with a degree would claim not to have one, he didn’t say.

In the piece I nailed a few other schools for similar fibs, including Alabama and Nebraska, but I’ve since regarded Penn State athletics with special skepticism. That’s because outfits that lie about small things will lie about larger ones. Also, under Paterno’s “Success With Honor” banner, it was one of a handful of universities that make, or have made, special claims to sanctity, a “We Do Things Right” Club that sets itself above the common scrum.

Michigan was part of this group until it was revealed that Ed Martin, a Detroit racketeer, was the sugar daddy of its Fab Five-era basketball teams. Notre Dame’s long membership has been punctured many times, most lately by episodes involving a young woman who committed suicide after the university didn’t promptly pursue her claim to have been raped by a Notre Dame football player (no charges have been brought against the player, partly because the woman isn’t alive to testify against him) and another in which a student died after coaches sent him up in a cherry-picker during a wind storm to videotape football practice, and the thing blew over. It doesn’t get worse than that, and it’s beyond me why no Domer heads have rolled as a result.

Strictly speaking, the current Penn State scandal, involving a long-time top assistant of Paterno’s who is accused of sexually molesting (so far) eight boys over a 15-year period, isn’t about sports. Rather, it’s another example of the corporate “damage control” mentality at work in institutions that, supposedly, are devoted to higher things than profit and hierarchal protection. The Roman Catholic Church’s leaders in many countries have fit that mold during the seemingly endless revelations about sexual-predator priests. So has the Boys Scouts of America in its handling of similar matters.

The involvement of Penn State coaches and officials in the alleged predations of former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky pivots on a night in March, 2002, when a graduate-assistant coach, visiting the football locker room to complete some chores, reportedly witnessed Sandusky raping a boy in a shower room. Rather than go to police immediately (or punch out Sandusky), the young man reportedly went home to mull his options. The next day he told his boss, Paterno, who told his boss, the school’s athletics director, who told his boss, a university vice-president, who told his boss, President Graham Spanier.

Apparently, none of them told the cops, meaning that, for at least the last nine years, they engaged in a coverup, allowing Sandusky to pursue his pleasures at the expense of boys involved in the youth charity he’d organized. For that entity’s events he was given the use of Penn State facilities, and he was spotted in the football complex as recently as the week before the allegations surfaced.

Knowing what they did, the thought that the Penn State honchos allowed ol’ Jer to go on doing what he was doing—maybe even under their noses-- boggles the mind. Paterno was rightly fired, along with the AD, VP and prez. Along with Sandusky, the AD and VP face criminal charges for not reporting his violations. Based on available evidence one must wonder why Paterno and Spanier haven’t been charged, too.

Among the many appalling things in this appalling episode was the reaction of some Penn State students. They chanted in Paterno’s support before he was fired on Wednesday night, and rioted in protest after the move was announced. The college-sports Establishment, including its governing body the NCAA, is ruled by the principle that the show must go on, no matter what offenses surround it. Now it seems that some of our young believe this, too.

EXPERTS SHMEXPERTS

2011-11-01T08:07:00.000-07:00

What’s up with this National Football League season, now firmly underway? If I knew I’d tell you, but I don’t. What I do know is that the “experts” (note the quote marks) have been wrong, as usual. If I said I knew that would make me an expert, and I’d be wrong, too.

One needn’t look past the standings to make that point. The team that went into the campaign as a Super Bowl favorite as a result of last season’s performance and between-seasons maneuverings was the Philadelphia Eagles. They seemed so well put together someone labeled them the “Dream Team.” Now they are 3-4 in the lost-won column and tied for last in their division.

Ditto, almost, for the New York Jets. Widely picked to finally recapture Namath-era glory, they are having trouble on both sides of the ball and trail both New England and Buffalo in the AFC East. The Atlanta Falcons, tabbed as the up-and-comer on the NFC side, are having similar difficulties gaining traction

Wronger yet have been the experts’ assessments of the likely affects of the owners’ lockout that suspended team activities from last March through July. The talking heads on ESPN and elsewhere unanimously decreed that that period of enforced idleness would weigh heaviest on rookie players and teams with new coaches seeking to install their “systems.” The mavens further intimated that without the endless string of rookie camps, mini-camps and “voluntary” workouts teams use to keep their charges busy during the off-season, the oh-so-sophisticated game would fall into a general state of disorganization.

Regarding the latter, the football still looks like football to me. Regarding the former, the best “stories” of the current season have been the revival of the San Francisco 49ers under first-year-head-coach Jim Harbaugh and the excellent play of Cam Newton, the rookie quarterback of the Carolina Panthers.

It’s noteworthy that Harbaugh, who’d spent the big majority of his previous coaching career in the collegiate ranks, easily is the least experienced of the league’s eight new head coaches, and that Newton, with only two full college seasons as a starter under his belt (one of them at a junior college!) is the rookiest of the rookie QBs. Obviously, some guys just know how to coach or play football.

A couple of other things about the NFL have caught my eye this year. To wit:

PLEADING FOR PENALTIES-- Every year for the past several I’ve been dismayed by the blizzard of penalty flags NFL officials generate, and this season’s storm seems to be the worst so far. For this I blame the league’s growing instant-replay culture. With every play subject to microscopic video scrutiny and analysis, field officials are pushed to err on the side of caution, escaping possible criticism by calling penalties when only the hint of them exists. That raises the unhealthy suspicion that they, not the combatants, most determine scoreboard outcomes.

Last April I wrote about the book “Scorecasting,” by Tobias Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim. Its key thesis, backed by research, is that the home-field advantage that’s universal in team sports results mostly from official bias caused by the human desire of refs, umps, etc., to be agreeable to the people closest at hand; i.e., the home fans.

It seems that many NFL players and fans also have read the book. Instant uproars over adverse calls, or the lack of favorable ones, have become the norm around the league, especially regarding the most-odious call of pass interference. Moreover, such demonstrations seem to be working.

I refer especially to a play in the Pittsburgh Steelers-Arizona Cardinals game on October 23 in suburban Phoenix. When a contested pass to Cardinals’ receiver Larry Fitzgerald fell incomplete, Fitzgerald raised his arms in protest as the current script dictates, and the home crowd howled in agreement. After a good 30 seconds, and an officials’ huddle, a yellow flag against the Steeler defender fluttered to earth.

When do officials confer over a pass-interference call? When the home crowd wants them to, I guess.

HOW MUCH IS ONE PLAYER WORTH? Plenty when the player is Peyton Manning. After a 3-13 rookie break-in season in 1998, the nonpareil quarterback led the Indianapolis Colts to victory in 72% of their regular-season games over the next 12 years (138-54) and into two Super Bowls. This year, with him out with a neck injury, they’re 0-8 and, seemingly, headed toward 0-16.

True, these Colts have defects elsewhere than at quarterback. Their offensive line, long a bulwark, has sprung leaks and there must be something wrong with a defense that allows 62 points in a game, as it did against New Orleans a couple of Sundays ago. Still, Manning’s absence has been the main cause of the abrupt 360 in their fortunes.

There’s a nice touch of irony to the Colts’ situation. If they do go 0-16 (or, even, 1-15) they’ll probably have a crack at the clear No. 1 pick in next April’s draft-- Stanford QB Andrew Luck. The only thing that might bother them about taking Luck is that the experts agree he’s a future star, a Manning in the making. That should give anyone pause.

BEANE BALL

2011-10-12T19:00:00.000-07:00

Wife Susie and I saw the baseball movie “Moneyball” last week. It starred Brad Pitt, normally not my favorite actor, but I thought he was good in the role of Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s general manager whose adoption of Bill James’s statistical slants on the game helped turn his low-payroll team into a winner in the first years of the present century. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s script excellently captured the content and rhythms of baseball speech, no small feat for an outsider.

We saw the movie in the company of a couple of non-fan friends, and afterward they asked me if I knew which parts of the movie were true and which weren’t. A few discrepancies occurred immediately, but I later did a bit of research and discovered several more. I pass them on here in the interest of sports education.

Let me say first that I understand the difference between life and art and the urge to sometimes improve on the former in the interest of the latter. The movie’s producers wanted to tell a compelling story and, for the most part, did. That’s the business they’re in, and good for them. Still, one shouldn’t confuse “based on truth” for the real thing. It’s not good for one’s mental health.

A main invention of the film was the character of assistant general manager Peter Brand, whom baseball-guy Beane hired to install Jamesian technology into the A’s field operations. Brand’s real-life counterpart is Paul DePodesta, who after his A’s stint became the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers and now works in the New York Mets’ front office.

Character Brand, played by the actor Jonah Hill, held an economics degree from Yale. DePodesta has an economics degree from Harvard. Hill is plump and nerdy. DePodesta may be nerdy but his photos reveal him to be quite fit looking, and his Wikipedia biography says he played baseball and football at Harvard. Obviously, making Brand a schlub helped the filmmakers cast the movie A’s into a “Bad News Bears” mold, a tried-and-true movie device.

A more-basic and related divergence between film and truth had to do with the makeup of the 2002 A’s team that was the film’s focus. In the movie the A’s had been devastated by the loss to free agency of stars Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon and had to scour the castoff lists to replace them. It portrayed as the new stars of the team the weak-winged first-baseman Scott Hatteberg, the over-the-hill outfielder David Justice and the funny-throwing relief pitcher Cory Bradford, none of whose true value was apparent to anyone but the Beane braintrust.

While Hatteberg, Justice and Bradford were useful role players, the real ’02 A’s had a heckuva lineup otherwise. It included shortstop Miguel Tejada, whose .308 batting average, 34 home runs and 131 runs batted in won him election as the American League’s Most Valuable Player that season, and third-baseman Eric Chavez, another young power hitter (34 homers, 109 RBIs) of All-Star caliber.

Oakland’s starting-pitching rotation that year featured the young stars Barry Zito, Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder, whose combined won-lost record was 57-21. Zito (23-5) was the AL’s Cy Young Award winner, giving the team the league’s best pitcher as well as its best overall player. The Bad News Bears they weren’t.

It’s noteworthy that Tejada, Chavez, Zito, Hudson and Mulder (none of whose names I recall hearing in the movie) all were products of the Oakland farm system, signed as draftees or free agents by the team’s scouts, some before the Beane regime began in 1998. The scouts were portrayed in the movie as Neanderthals, sitting around spitting tobacco juice into paper cups and spouting baseball saws. I guess they weren’t so dumb after all.

Equally misleading, I thought, was the relationship between the statistical underpinnings of the “Moneyball” slant on baseball and the feats of the ’02 A’s, especially the 20-game winning streak that propelled them into that season’s playoffs. The streak was a great achievement, all right, but it was a fluke and not the result of sort of calculations on which Beane’s roster was built.

Much of what James contributed to baseball back then (he’s moved on since) stemmed from his fresh focus on on-base percentage (OPB; hits plus walks divided by times at bat) rather than straight batting average as the prime measure of offensive efficiency and defensive emphasis. As Beane succinctly put it in an interview I did with him for a 2003 piece in Sports Business Journal, “we look for batters who take balls and pitchers who throw strikes.” Often, that kind of player was undervalued on the baseball market, giving an edge to teams in the know.

Baseball is the game of the long haul and the small difference, and the difference between a hitter with an ordinary OBP of .330 and one with a quite-good .380 is five hits or walks in 100 plate appearances. That works out to one more scoring opportunity every four or five games, producing, maybe, an extra run or two over that span. A lineup of walk-taking hitters and walk-stingy pitchers might add a half-dozen or so wins for a team over a 162-game campaign. That’s a nice addition but alone is hardly the stuff of epic winning streaks.

The Beane-led A’s had a great run from 2000 through 2006, winning almost 59% of their games and several divisional titles. Alas for them, everyone else now knows what they do, and they haven’t had a winning season since. Now that his daughter is older, divorced-father Beane no longer is tied to the Oakland area, and no one would be surprised if he bails for a larger-market club.

Truth is, “Moneyball” is fine but being rich is better.

511, 309, 36

2011-10-01T07:10:00.001-07:00

When the New York Yankees’ Mariano Rivera broke Trevor Hoffman’s baseball regular-season career saves record of 601 a few weeks ago, a considerable fuss was made, and appropriately. Rivera is a great relief pitcher and we might not see his like again for quite a while.

But the suggestions that his mark (which still is abuilding) might never be broken seemed way off the mark. Yes, he has almost 300 more saves than any other active pitcher (Francisco Cordero is next with 326), but never is a long time, which is why the adage “never say never” is, well, an adage. Rivera isn’t Superman, so some day someone will beat it. Of that you can be sure.

The same can be said of just about every other baseball record. Ty Cobb’s career hits mark of 4,189 stood for 57 years but Pete Rose took it down in 1985; eventually, someone will take down Rose’s 4,256. Joe DiMaggio’s consecutive-games hitting streak of 56, set in 1941, is widely seen as eternal, but heck, it’s already been topped in the minor leagues and the colleges, and it, too, will fall.

However (my favorite word), a few diamond records are highly unlikely to be surpassed, because of the way the sport has changed over the decades. Foremost among these is the 511 wins that Denton “Cy” Young posted in a 22-season Major League career that began in 1890 and ended in 1911. Less noticed, but no less noteworthy, I think, are the marks for the most three-base hits, or triples. For multiple reasons, none of them reversible, the three-bagger has become an endangered species. That’s a sad fate for this most-exciting of baseball’s recurring plays.

First, let’s look at Young’s mark. His towering win total spanned some fundamental changes in baseball’s rules, such as the 1893 movement of the pitcher’s rubber (actually, it was a “box” before then) from 55 feet 6 inches from home plate to its present 60 feet, 6 inches. It came at a time when starting pitchers performed at least every fourth game instead of every fifth or sixth as at present, and were expected to finish what they started. The game’s so-called “dead-ball era”—before the introduction of cork-centered baseballs in 1911 (Young’s last competitive year) — boosted pitchers’ egos by keeping scores low.

Still, no pitcher even then came close to Young’s achievements, making them a unique product of the man and his time. A big right hander, officially listed at 6-foot-2 and 210 pounds although he grew heavier as he aged, the young Cy had such a blazing fastball that his nickname was short for “cyclone,” for the reputed force of his deliveries. His velocity slowed with time, as all pitchers’ do, but he compensated with a rubber arm and the always-superior control that gave him a 1.5 walks-per-game average that few others have matched. “I aim to make the batter hit the ball, and throw as few pitches as possible,” Young noted as his career wound down.

Besides his wins record, 94 greater than anyone else’s, the Ohio farmer holds the career marks for innings pitched (7,356), starts (815), complete games (749) and (uh-huh) loses (316), all also invulnerable. He had 15 seasons with 20 or more victories and five with 30 or more. He threw the first pitch in World Series history, in the 1903 matchup of his Boston Americans and the Pittsburgh Pirates (Boston won it, five games to three), and in 1904 recorded the first perfect game in the new century. Wrote the poet Ogden Nash:

“Y is for Young
The magnificent Cy;
People batted against him
But I never knew why.”

The decline of the triple has so long been part of baseball life that few fans today know the records for the feat, or their holders; they are 309 for a career, by Sam Crawford (1899-1917), and 36 for a season, by the Pirates’ John Wilson, in 1912. The unlikelihood of their being surpassed is seen by the facts that only three currently active Major Leaguers—veterans Carl Crawford, Jimmy Rollins and Johnny Damon— have hit as many as 100, and that no player who performed after 1928 has hit as many as 200. A dozen by one player in a season these days can lead a league.

Lots of triples were the result of an era in which batted balls didn’t carry well, outfielders played shallow and wore little, flat gloves quite unlike the baskets their present-day counterparts tote, and ballparks were huge and, often, oddly shaped. The centerfield fence in the Polo Grounds in New York was a distant 483 feet from home plate; at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field and Cleveland’s League Park they were 460-plus feet away. Balls that got past outfielders there rolled and rolled, and allowed batters to run and run. Inside-the-park home runs were about as common as one’s hit over a fence.

Most baseball statistical records are just that—statistics. Aside from its historical significance Barry Bonds’ 73rd home run in 2001 wasn’t much different from his first that season, or his 22nd, or 46th. The triple, though, is the kind of play-- beginning with a sharply hit ball between the outfielders and, usually, ending in a cloud of dust and an umpire’s close call—that engenders intrinsic and unique excitement. Its eclipse by modern trends is to be mourned.

To appreciate what we’re missing we must turn to the arts, specifically to Philip Roth’s 1973 baseball-themed book “The Great American Novel.” In it Luke Gofannon, Roth’s fictional superstar, had just completed a strenuous bout of lovemaking with a famous beauty. Under her questioning, he professed that she thrilled him more than a stolen base, a shoestring catch or a home run. (“Smack a homer and that’s it, it’s over,” he said.).

But when the woman asked him if she’d been better than a triple, his evaluation changed. “I can’t tell a lie,” he said. “There just ain’t nothing like a triple.”

THAT'S INCREDIBLE!

2011-09-15T07:30:00.001-07:00

Al Michaels qualified for the TV-broadcaster hall of fame when, at the end of the stirring victory of the U.S. national hockey team over the one from the Soviet Union in the 1980 Winter Olympics, he cried “Do you believe in miracles?!”

In fact, of course, the outcome of the game involved no overturning of physical laws and so, strictly speaking, wasn’t miraculous. Rather, it was the unlikely triumph of a group of collegians over a seasoned and skilled unit that was professional by any definition save its own, the sort of reversal of form that happens every now and then in sports.

Still, the standards of the arena differ from those of the Vatican, and I’m sure that a poll of Michael’s audience would have revealed the belief that the victory was, indeed, supernatural. And thus it has remained.

So I am invoking Michael’s definition by declaring that at least two miracles have occurred during the Major League baseball season now winding down, one positive and one negative. The positive one involves the Arizona Diamondbacks, who represent my new home town of Phoenix. Last season they finished a distant last in the National League West with a 65-97 won-lost record. In this one they are romping to victory in the same alignment, on pace for 95 regular-season wins and with a playoff spot all but assured.

Worst-to-first reversals aren’t all that unusual in today’s professional leagues, where abrupt changes in team spending can combine with player free agency to quickly alter standings. These D’Backs, though, are the same cheapskate bunch they were last year, with an opening-day payroll (of $53.6 million) that ranked 25th among the 30 Big League teams, and they made no big-name additions to their largely anonymous cast of players. Further, their current rankings in such key statistical categories as team batting and earned-run averages (.250 and 3.86, respectively) both place them in a mid-pack 9th in their league, indicating a .500 team rather than a pennant contender

As miracles go this D’Back team’s showing has to take a back seat to that of a previous Phoenix unit, the 2007 one that won a divisional title despite a league-worst batting average that led it to be outscored by its foes overall. How that gang won 90 regular-season games and advanced to the playoff semis still mystifies. But this one’s run isn’t completed yet, and could wind up being stranger.

The turnaround can be traced in part to the team’s hiring of Kevin Towers as its general manager. A straightforward sort quite unlike some of the Secret Squirrels who typically man that post, Tower is no magician, but he does know talent and how to improve it, albeit marginally. His best move, I think, was the trade of Mark Reynolds, a scruffy slugger whose world-record strikeout habit and “What, me worry?” attitude typified D’Back teams of the recent past, for David Hernandez, a useful relief pitcher.

With Hernandez and the reclamation-project closer J.J. Putz as a base, Towers changed a terrible bullpen into a good one, anchoring the revival. The fortuitous success of Ian Kennedy and Daniel Hudson, young starters who have risen from prospect status to joint winners of 35 games so far this year, also has helped

Towers has lucked out similarly in the performances of such as Willie Bloomquist, Aaron Hill and Geoff Blum, journeymen infielders picked up for a wing and a prayer. On-field leadership has come from old-footballer Kirk Gibson, the team’s manager. I think that physical intimidation is underrated as a managerial asset in the male society of sports, and Gibson and his muscular coaches Matt Williams and Don Baylor look as though they could put erring players over their knees if they chose to.

Lately, every reserve Gibson fields contributes a key play and every pinch hitter a hit, just like such fellas did for manager Bob Melvin in ’07. The D’Backs look to go into the playoffs with the Phillies, Brewers and Braves as the NL’s lowest-rated team, but as I used to tell my kids, the best teams don’t win, the teams that play best do, and AZ could be one of those. Stranger things have happened.

Miracle No. 2 is a downer, the performance of Adam Dunn of the White Sox from my ex hometown of Chicago. The left-hander showed up in the Windy City this spring as one baseball’s best and steadiest power hitters, having averaged 40 home runs, 100 runs batted in and 100 walks in his previous seven seasons with Cincinnati, Arizona and Washington. At age 31, prime time for sluggers, he seemed to fully justify the four-year, $56 million contract the Sox laid on him to DH. He and resident muscleman Paul Konerko were supposed to make the team a pennant threat.

Alas, Dunn has plunged to depths yet unfathomed in his game’s statistical sea, and the Sox’s fortunes sunk with him. His batting average (.162) is down almost 90 points from his previous norms. His power numbers (10 HRs and 40 RBIs) have been similarly dismal.

It’s rare that any baseball regular hits below .200; Figure Filberts had to go back to the 1909 Brooklyn Superbas (no kidding) to find a full-season mark-- catcher Bill Bergen’s .139-- lower than Dunn’s present one, and Bergen is said to have made his living as a gloveman. Also, he earned much closer to $1,400 a year than to Dunn’s $14 million.

Some of Dunn’s breakdown stats are even more mind-boggling. He’s batted just .159 in home games this season, .036 (3 for 83) against left-handed pitchers and .127 (13 for 102) with base runners in scoring position. His strikeout total is so high (160) that Sox fans took to cheering when he merely hit the ball.

Various reasons have been advanced for Dunn’s sudden ineptitude. His move to the American League is one and his switch to DH from full-time position player (at first base) is another. Some say he took too little off-season batting practice, some say too much. Maybe he needs a shrink.

My observation is simpler--at 6-foot-6 and, apparently, more than 300 pounds he’s too fat, and seems to have reached an age when he can no longer handle such suet.

The Sox should sign him up with the Jenny Craig folks. I’m told they can work miracles.

"PAY FOR PLAY"?

2011-09-01T07:45:00.000-07:00

Whenever someone takes big-time college sports to task for their failings—as I do frequently— some are ready with a cure-all answer. Just pay the players, they say, and all will be well.

It’s the remedy du jour, every jour. You hear it not only from casual fans but also from the “experts” who hold forth endlessly on the subject on sportsblab radio and TV. On any college-football Saturday, these folks note, everybody in the stadium—coaches, ushers, ticket-takers, vendors, cops and the kids who sell programs—is getting paid, so why shouldn’t the stars of the show? It’s only FAIR! they cry.

To that I say “teeesh.” Founded on the dubious premise that the poor are more easily corrupted than the rich, paying the players would cause more problems than it would solve while opening up a vast new area for potential abuse. Worse, it would increase the subservient status of college athletes that’s at the root of the real problems of the present, deplorable system.

Let’s look at what’s wrong with the proposal, starting with the easy stuff. Pay the players, you say? Okay, who do you pay? Footballers and basketballers for sure, I guess, but how about baseballers, lacrossers, wrestlers, swimmers and fencers? Just the men, or the women jocks, too? They all put in their time.

What would you pay them-- $100 a month, $500, $1,000? In season or year-round? Should starters receive more than reserves, or stars more than mere starters? Should the athletes themselves have a say in setting pay scales (can you spell U-N-I-O-N?)? Would injured players be eligible to receive workmen’s compensation payments, which could continue long past their college careers?

And how about the tax-exempt status of contributions to university athletics departments, without which big-time programs couldn’t be maintained at near present levels? If the players are salaried how would, say, Ohio State football legally differ from that of the NFL? If you think no one would be so bold as to raise that question, think again because it’s already surfaced.

Further, college athletes already are being paid, and terrifically well for teenagers or young adults whose marketable skills still are being developed. The cash value of the full-ride scholarships (tuition, room and board) they receive ranges from $20,000-to-$25,000 a year at state-supported institutions to as much as $55,000 per at such posh private schools as Duke or Northwestern. If you’re scoring, that works out to between $100,000 and $200,000 over the normal, four-year academic run.

Beyond that, even in these parlous times holders of bona fide college degrees can look forward to a lifetime of higher earnings than their degreeless counterparts. Even positing a difference of just $10,000 a year over a 40-year work life, that works out to $400,000. Not bad recompense for a few years of game-playing on some leafy campus, I’d say.

The rub, of course, is that the time and energy demands of big-time-college revenue sports can preclude the young men who play them from taking advantage of the promises they’ve been made. Often coming from poor homes, and lacking basic academic skills, they’re funneled into Mickey Mouse courses designed to preserve their eligibility, then cast adrift when their use to their institution ends. Many of them buy into the system because they believe it serves their desire to get a lucrative professional contract after college. For all but a few hundred out of many thousand, that’s a vain hope.

Turning the athletes into employees would exacerbate this situation by making them more chattel-like than they already are. Right now a strong-minded jock (I’m sure there are some) can opt for a serious course of academic study that might conflict with his coaches’ victory goals, involving, say, a lab course that interferes with his team’s practice schedule, but putting the lad on the payroll only could complicate such a stance.

The answer, then, is to make the system better serve the long-term interests of the young people involved in it, which is what college is supposed to be about. The optimum solution would be to tear down the stadiums, disband the conferences and turn the games into vehicles for healthful student recreation, which is what the rest of the world does. That ain’t gonna happen, so I propose the following steps, none of which would spoil the public fun:

ELIMINATE FRESHMAN ELIGIBILITY— Mandating that a student complete one-fourth of his degree requirements before beginning varsity competition would establish the primacy of education in the student-athlete equation. Future eligibility should hinge on the student’s continuing academic progress. An athlete still could compete for four years, but the fourth would come as a reward for achieving grad-student status. This would mark a sea change in a process that now allows a freshman football player to complete a full season of competition before earning a single academic credit. Incidentally, it also would eliminate the “one-and-done” phenomenon that now pollutes college basketball.

RESTRICT TEAM PRACTICES TO A SPORT’S SEASON— Such sessions should last no more than two hours a day and be conducted no more than five times a week, beginning two weeks before a team’s first intercollegiate game and ending with the last. No more spring football. Summers should be free, allowing athletes to take the sort of jobs other students use to finance their incidental (and sometimes other) campus expenses. Hey, they may even learn something in the process.

NO MORE ATHLETES’ DORMS, TRAINING TABLES OR EXCLUSIVE TRAINING FACILITIES--- In college, like at every other level of formal education, kids learn at least as much from the other kids as they do from what goes on in the classrooms, and ghettoizing jocks cuts them off from much of this good stuff. There’s a big world out there and it’s not all about sweat. Re the training tables, don’t worry, they won’t starve.

By the way, I’m available to any university that would like to take me on as a consultant to implement the above measures. My rates will be reasonable. Whatever I make will be more than I’m making now.

ESP (no N)

2011-08-15T07:46:00.000-07:00

I’ve never held much with what’s called extrasensory perception, the notion that some people have the ability to see, or otherwise sense, things that aren’t apparent to the rest of us. Certainly, some are better observers than others, but that stems from the application of the senses we all have, not the possession of additional ones. I regard claims to the contrary as hokum.

Nonetheless, as autumn approaches I often sniff a whiff of sulfur in the air, and I’m not sure everyone else does. It coincides with the beginning of preparations for the college football season, annually the grandest of the entertainment offerings of our institutions of higher education. It ain’t the football (or its co-“major” basketball) I’m smelling but the hypocrisy that surrounds it.

This year the odor is especially strong. In months past the list of universities that have been fingered as athletic wrongdoers is long, and includes some of the major brands on the national scene. Ohio State is on it, along with Southern California, Tennessee, Oklahoma, UConn, Auburn, North Carolina and—yes—even Duke. I could go on but I think the point has been made.

If your alma mater isn’t mentioned above, or isn’t on any similar current list, I’m sure you’re smiling, if not smirking. Unfortunately, the claim that “my school does things right” stems from ignorance, not virtue. All the college sports big-timers are in the same stew, recruiting and exploiting the same kids with about the same methods. There are no good guys or bad guys in this play, only ones that have or haven’t been caught off. Every president of an NCAA Division I school goes to bed praying that the next sports scandal won’t be his to deal with.

I wrote about this state of affairs frequently in my professional sports-writing career—proportionally more than most of my peers, I’d wager—but my experience with the subject dates back farther. As an undergrad at the U. of Illinois (1955-59) I covered football for the student newspaper The Daily Illini, and helped out around the university’s press boxes as a fledgling pro. I knew some of the players and other actors in the shows, both there and at the U. of Michigan, where I was a grad student (1961-62).

Even then, in times that now seem rosily innocent, stuff happened. I knew about the $20 handshakes between players and alums after games and could tell you which courses enlisted jocks in search of eligibility-ensuring A’s or B’s. I knew that, say, Bobby Mitchell didn’t wind up playing football at Illinois because he innocently wandered astray from his native Arkansas.

Filling in as a reporter on the police beats in both Champaign, Ill., and Ann Arbor, Mich., furthered my education. Arrests of jocks for off-campus fighting and DUI weren’t infrequent, but by gentlemen’s agreements (which I accepted) they weren’t reported. The notion of “no harm (i.e., no one killed or maimed) no foul” obtained in such matters. Boys will be boys, you know.

Now, of course, the stakes are higher, the spotlight is brighter and the phone-book-sized NCAA rule book ever fatter, the last because schools don’t trust one another to follow simple regulations. Indeed, the very number of rules, and their intricacy, has created a widespread myopia about violations, allowing many to be shrugged off as technicalities while ignoring other, more serious transgressions.

The recent Ohio State football scandal provides a perfect case in point. To the ostensible cause of it-- football players swapping their memorabilia (jackets, game jerseys, championship rings) for tattoos (?!) — one’s immediate reaction is “So what?” The gear, after all, belonged to the players, and they could have sold or traded it without penalty the day after their football service to their university had ceased. Still, cashing in the way they did violated the NCAA rule about athletes receiving benefits not available to the student body at large, so the offending Buckeyes had to pay with suspensions.

According to a piece in Sports Illustrated magazine, though, darker forces were involved. The tattoo parlor in question was owned by one Edward Rife, a drug dealer and money launderer, and the place doubled as a players’ social center, somewhere they could “order in chicken” and “play tunes” under pleasant auspices, the article noted.

Any professional athlete accepting the hospitality of a lowlife like Rife would at least have some ‘splainin’ to do, but the NCAA rulebook doesn’t prohibit this sort of thing so it wasn’t on the bill of particulars the players or university had to answer for. Meanwhile, do you think Tattoo Daddy might have placed an occasional bet on an OSU game based on the info gleaned from his guests?

Huh?

But the real crime of big-time college sports isn’t what’s done for the so-called student athletes, but what’s done to them. Often ill-prepared for college to begin with, they’re saddled with full-time jobs and then some, then hustled through “gut” courses designed to protect their eligiblity, not prepare them for the 21st Century economy. While the handful who land pro contracts are—or ought to be—okay, many of the rest are up the creek without a paddle when their playing days are done. Keep that in mind while you’re rooting for Old Siwash in the months ahead.

LOCKS AND BAGELS

2011-08-01T07:15:00.000-07:00

Back in the 1970s the Chicago Bears were noising about the possibility that they might move to a new stadium in the suburb of Arlington Heights, Ill. That disturbed Richard J. Daley, Chicago’s mayor at the time.

Fine, let ‘em go, Daley said, in effect. But he added that if the team moved there he’d see to it that it would have to call itself the Arlington Heights Bears.

Everyone had a good laugh at Da Mayor’s declaration, because neither he nor any other municipal authority owned a copyright on a city’s name, and it was available to any rock band, pizzeria or dry cleaner that wished to use it. Perhaps inadvertently, though, he did raise a worthwhile question: What do professional sports entities owe to the cities and fans that sustain them?

Alas, while the question is interesting the clear and self-evident answer ain’t. It’s nothing, nada, zilch. You may think that the Bears, or Cardinals (baseball or football), or Lakers are “our” teams, but they aren’t. They belong to the people who own them, and to no one else.

That is—or should have be-- the clear message of the lockouts that have dominated the sports pages these last several months. When our national professional football and basketball leagues failed to get the give-backs they demanded from their players’ unions (a broader trend, in case you haven’t noticed), they closed their doors and suspended doing business. I didn’t get to vote on it, and neither did you.

Last week the footballers bridged their differences and went back to work in time for their games to proceed, as everyone figured they would. Their enterprise, with annual revenues of about $9 billion, is just too profitable to stay closed when money is to be made. The owners started by asking for an additional $1 billion off the top of the league’s revenue pie before it’s divided. They wound up increasing their slice to 53% from 50%, a more-modest gain, while also agreeing to institute annual team-salary floors as well as ceilings.

The part of the contract that most interested fans—the owners’ bid to increase the regular season to 18 games from 16—was put off until at least 2013. Players balked, partly on ground that the move would increase injury risks, but their union historically has sacrificed health issues for more do-re-mi, so look for it to cave eventually in return for some kind of sweetener.

The lockout in the National Basketball Association is regarded as more likely to draw real blood. The NBA has about half the total revenues of the NFL (reportedly about $4.3 billion yearly) and team owners claim their combined bottom line showed a $300 million loss last season, with more than half their 30 clubs in the red individually.

The players pooh-pooh that, and we should, too. Few sports teams are publicly owned so they don’t have the auditing or reporting requirements public companies do. Further, basketball is a second (or third or fourth) business for most NBA team owners, so they can shift expenses (such as their own salaries) between or among these to suit themselves. For bargaining purposes it suits them to claim poverty, and they are demanding things like a “hard” team-salary cap and limits on contract lengths and guarantees that, theoretically, would hit players in their wallets.

But the thing to remember about today’s sports-money conflicts is that most of them aren’t owner-player but owner-owner. Team owners may be partners for some purposes, but they’re big-ego competitors for others, and bitter ones at that. The rules they seek are intended to restrain their own competitive instincts, with the players little more than interested observers. Yeah, the average NBA player salary is an eye-popping $5.15 million a year (the median is much lower), but the adage that nobody who works for somebody else is overpaid fully applies.

The NBA already has a team-salary cap, but it has so many exceptions and exemptions (all owner-approved) that it resembles a target on a police pistol range. Last season’s cap was about $58 million, and teams were taxed for exceeding $70 million, but actual payrolls ranged from the L.A. Lakers’ $95.3 million to the Minnesota T-Wolves’ $37.6 million, a Grand Canyon-like gap. Posture as the owners might, it’s unlikely that anything they’ll agree to will seriously alter the drives that account for the upper end of that imbalance.

But posture they will, and the players are taking it seriously. Several hoops stars are dickering with European teams for fallback employment and one—Kevin Love—says he might play professional beach volleyball.

You also might make plans to seek alternate entertainment come basketball time. It may be their game, but it’s your money.

LIVING LEGENDS

2011-07-14T07:40:00.000-07:00

Wife Susie and I visited New York in early June, sopping up the sights and sounds of the big city for a week and then heading west to Buffalo for a few days with son Andrew, who lives there. The trip reminded me that, despite its many pleasures, few places are more uncomfortable than Gotham when the temperatures top 90. I also learned that Buffalo is a lot more interesting than I suspect most people suspect.

Along the way, Andrew in tow, we stopped in Cooperstown to see the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. It was my third time there, the first coming as a 12-year-old with my parents in 1950 and the second, with my own children, in 1980. If the progression continues my next visit will come around 2040, but I’m not taking bets I’ll make it.

They say—correctly-- that you visit the Hall to relive baseball’s past but wind up reliving your own. It’s a wonderful place, full of the relics of the sport whose roots run deepest into American soil and soul. It’s in out-of-the-way Cooperstown—30 miles from any major road—because baseball is said to have been invented there, in 1839, by Abner Doubleday. That all three of those claims have been debunked takes nothing away from the red-brick shrine or its bucolic setting.

The place I toured last month was quite different from the one I’d seen 30 (and 60) years before. I recall the old Hall as a messy sort of place, its mountains of memorabilia unartfully arrayed in store-window-type enclosures along dim corridors. Now its displays are much-better lighted, labeled and framed—more “user-friendly” in the current phrase.

That’s good in a way, but in a way not. Unlike the updated Hall, which telegraphs its punches, the old place had the capacity to surprise and, in doing so, delight. I remember coming across, unaware, things like Ty Cobb’s cracked little glove or Shoeless Joe’s battered bat, and thinking how their haphazard display added to their allure. When something is too neat the “Wow!” factor dissipates.

The visit also clarified something I’ve been telling hardheaded Pete Rose fans for years-- that while their hero does not have a plaque in the Hall (baseball bars him from the sportswriters’ ballot for his crimes against the game) he is amply represented in photo and film, and his records are celebrated. No amount of grousing can obscure the fact that bad-boy Pete is getting his due immortalitywise, maybe and then some.

As one strolls the Hall, the current game naturally comes to mind, as does the question of which active players someday will be honored in its galleries. It’s fashionable to declare that today’s players lack the grittiness of those of days past, and that the game’s talent level generally ain’t what it used to be, but once it comes to list making many names present themselves.

A half-dozen of the current performers, I think, qualify as first-ballot shoo-ins when their playing days are done, if they can keep their noses clean. By my order of distinction they are Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Omar Visquel, Albert Pujols. Ichiro Suzuki and Pudge Rodriguez. That, of course, assumes that Visquel and Rodriguez eventually will retire as active players, which they may not.

After that comes some present and recent-day stars that might be called the asterisk group because of their links with revelations of steroid use, which is to say cheating. ARod is on it, along with the recent retirees Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Manny Ramirez and Roger Clemens. There’s nothing keeping them off the Hall ballot when they are five years removed from the fields, but there’s also nothing to require that the writer-electors vote for them.

To date (and happily), juicers haven’t fared well with the scribes, with the bloated slugger Mark McGwire never topping 24% of the vote in his four years of eligibility (75% is needed to elect) and Rafael Palmeiro, a 500-homer, 3,000-hit guy who normally would have been an easy “yes,” getting just 11% in 2010, his first year. Some of the above-named fellas might fare better than those two; one could argue that Bonds was a Hall-caliber player before he turned to the needle. Chances are, though, that they’ll all have to sweat to get in no matter what their accomplishments were.

Finally, there’s a larger category of players who are still cooking, showing Hall potential but having borderline stats or lacking the large body of excellent work usually required for admission. Vlad Guerrero is on it, along with Jim Thome, Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, Joe Mauer, Ryan Braun, Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee and Tim Lincecum.

Before some of them get in—mainly the pitchers—standards might have to change. Halladay is the best current-day starting pitcher but checks in with 180 wins over an already-long career of 14 seasons. Lee, the second best, has just 111 in 10. Five-man rotations and managers’ quick hooks have changed the parameters for pitching greatness. Still, it makes you wonder how Greg Maddox and Randy Johnson won 300 plus, doesn’t it?

CUBSANON

2011-07-01T07:54:00.000-07:00

It’s no news that the 162-game baseball regular season is too long by any reasonable standard. It’s also no news that it never will get shorter, no matter how many new layers of playoffs are added. That’s because the schedule is guided by the dictates of commerce, not competition, and reducing it would violate the first rule of business, which is that you can’t make any money if the store isn’t open.

For the followers of some teams, though, the schedule can be too short. One of those usually is my Chicago Cubs, who again this season are out of it even though the campaign is only about half completed. Yogi said (or is said to have said; Joe Garagiola invented many of the so-called Yogiisms) “It’s never over ‘til it’s over,” but he was mistaken.

Fact is, the Cubs have been OOI from the outset this year, and I could have written this piece any time since opening day. I’ve attended their spring training games in Mesa, Arizona, for, maybe, 25 years now, and I’ve never seen Cubdom as dispirited as it was this March, or for better reason. No amount of the innate optimism that is a requisite for being a Cubs’ fan could survive the sloppy play and dead-ass decorum the team displayed during its vernal exercises. To think that would change with the start of serious hostilities would have been delusional.

Expectations were low to begin with coming off last year’s 75-87 won-lost record, and weren’t helped by the team’s naming Mike Quade to succeed Lou Piniella as manager. With an inflated and unproductive payroll leaving little room for roster maneuver, a new manager with some pizzazz might have helped rouse the faithful, but Quade had gathered so little celebrity in his 35-plus years in the game that many couldn’t pronounce his name (it’s kwa-dee). At the rate he’s going he’ll be gone before they can.

General Manager Jim Hendry’s bad personnel decisions brought about the current mess. Alas, they didn’t end with the Major League club. That was apparent as soon as the team needed to fill early-season openings created by the sort of injuries every team has. The best Hendry could do to fill a starting-pitching hole was to dredge up the veteran punching bag Doug Davis, and his first outfield call-up was Luis Montanez, a 29-year-old minor-league lifer whose upside was negligible. If Montanez is the best the farm system can offer, our epic title drought only will continue.

I’m sure that by now you’re thinking “enough, already.” Cubs’ fans’ laments are old stuff and I can’t pretend that mine adds much to the genre. This time, however, I offer a solution as well as a complaint. It comes by way of Eddie Cohen, a pal from our long-ago days at Roosevelt High School.

As those who know him can attest, Eddie is a Cubs’ fan without peer. He is venerable, with his allegiance dating from the 1940s. He is knowledgeable, able to call your Ransom Jackson and raise you a Peter LaCock. His good nature and cheerfulness are legendary, despite the blows regularly delivered by the objects of his baseball affections.

But along the way Eddie also acquired some wisdom, and put it to use. His epiphany came in 1997 when the Cubbies, despite a lineup that included Ryne Sandberg, Sammy Sosa and Mark Grace, opened the season with a 14-game losing streak that killed hope aborning. “I was miserable,” Eddie recalls. “I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat.”

He adds” OK, I ate, but I didn’t enjoy it much.”

From this depth of despair Eddie founded Cubs Anonymous, a 12-step program to cure Cubs addiction. He opened a website and, for a relative pittance, offered t-shirts, membership cards and bumper stickers to those in need. He even convened a meeting in which CA members confessed their failures and professed their determination to overcome them, although an excess of laughter discouraged repeats of such sessions.

Eddie laughed along because—of course—CA was meant to be fun, but he says the venture helped put his misery into perspective and allowed him to better roll with the punches. You, too, can share his improvement by going to cubsanonymous.com and clicking on “join.” There you can peruse and contemplate the 12 steps and learn how following them will improve your life.

The website often is balky, so if you can’t make it work you can send $14 to Eddie at Apparel Resources, 1125 Lake Cook Rd. #208, Northbrook, Ill., 60062, and he’ll mail you a handsome CA t-shirt.

It’ll turn heads when you wear it at Wrigley Field.

HEROES

2011-06-16T20:20:00.000-07:00

Newspaper reporters don’t have heroes among the people they write about, or, at least, aren’t likely to admit it if they do. That would break the objectivity rule that governs most American news organizations, one that’s honored far more strictly than most believe.

Also, we newsies aren‘t worshipful types, a trait that sometimes gets us into trouble around the house.

However (my favorite word), in my travels in the world of sports I did encounter people I thought were worthy not only of praise but also of emulation. Mostly, these were not the big-time athletes who attained fame by capitalizing on inborn, genius-level physical attributes but never would admit as much, or the control freaks who directed their movements. I preferred sports folks who’d thought about their places in the Great Scheme of Things and concluded that the sun didn’t rise to see them get out of bed. Here are three of them, and you have to be a real fan to recognize their names.

-- The winningest college-football coach ever isn’t Joe Paterno, Bobbie Bowden or some other CEO of a football “program” at one or another Enormous State U. It’s JOHN GAGLIARDI, who, at age 84, still coaches the sport at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minn., where he’s been since 1953. His teams have won 478 games—77 more than Joe Pa’s-- and four national small-college championships. He’s done it by breaking just about every rule in the coaches’ handbook.

Gagliardi got his first coaching job—and framed his philosophy—as a 16-year-old high schooler in his native Trinidad, Colorado, where, in 1943, he was elected by his teammates to replace the coach who’d suddenly been drafted into the military. With teenage chutzpah he decided he’d run the show by jettisoning everything the previous coach did that he didn’t like. That included contact scrimmages, heavy calisthenics and long drills of any kind. His judgment was confirmed with a league title.

Gagliardi added to his “no” list when coaching became his adult occupation. He eschews compulsory running and weightlifting, informing players that it’s up to them to get in shape. He limits players’ film viewing to game-before successful plays that affix a positive image. He spurns the title of “coach,” preferring that his players call him “John” (“when one calls me ‘coach’ I want to call him ‘player,’” he says). His players, none of whom are on athletic scholarship (NCAA Division III doesn’t permit them), run through their plays 90 minutes a day four days a week in season, period. When appropriate, some of those minutes are spent in his “nice-day drill,” where they lay on their backs admiring the sunny sky.

He’s had offers to leave St. John’s, including one from the Minnesota Vikings, but turned them down. “I doubt if I’d find better kids elsewhere, so why move?” he reasons.

Why,indeed.

-- DOT RICHARDSON was an athletic genius, so good at softball that at age 10 she was playing on women’s teams. The shortstop was even better when she grew up, becoming the best softballer of her era and starring on two gold-medal-winning U.S. Olympic teams. The photo of her rounding bases after hitting the home run that won the 1996 O Games final, arms raised and face alight, remains a glowing image of that fest.

When she wasn’t playing games, though, Dot was doing things that she came to believe were more important. She got through college (at UCLA) and medical school, eventually becoming an orthopedic surgeon. She became a full-time doc after her 2000 athletic retirement and now, in addition to a private practice, is medical director at the U.S. Triathlon Training Center in Florida and a member of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. In her spare time she gives motivational talks to adults and kids.

I spent the best part of a day with her in 2000, and sports talk occupied, maybe, an hour of it. She said she probably was lucky that she played a sport that offered few financial opportunities, because otherwise she might not have developed her other talents. “My parents raised me to believe that gifts should be shared, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have two,” she said. And who knows? she added-- maybe as time goes by she’d discover others.

--- DICK BAVETTA wasn’t much of a basketball player, but he loved the game so much that, in full adulthood, he quit a good-paying stockbrokers’ job to referee in the Eastern League, a circuit that was so tough he had to bring along his brother, a New York cop, for post-game protection. When Dick’s wife complained about his travel he decided he liked basketball better than her, and the pair split. This might not have been admirable, but it was honest.

For nine years he was rejected as an NBA ref, partly because of his scrawny physique. He finally made it in 1975, at age 36, when the base pay for new refs was $200 a game (it’s about $130,000 a year now, but vets make a lot more). His first 30 years in the league, he never missed a game while moving from the bottom of the efficiency chart to the top. He’s still at it at 71, staying in shape by running eight miles on his off days and in the summers, in addition to the four or five miles a contest he logs over the eight-month season. He takes a day off after each campaign “just so nobody can say I never take a vacation.”

Unlike many sports figures, Bavetta has a sense of fun. That was on display during the 2007 NBA All-Star Game weekend, when he and Charles Barkley, 25 years younger but many pounds heavier, engaged in a foot race on court, for a charity purse. Barkley won—he always has been quicker than he looked—and afterward kissed the top of Bavetta’s bald head. Bavetta stood still for that, too, enshrining himself forever in the Good Sport’s Hall of Fame.

NO BOYS ALLOWED

2011-06-01T06:51:00.000-07:00

As a nation we are into the new, always eager to declare the latest to be the greatest. The annual antidote to this error is the NBA playoffs, the current edition of which now is entering its final stage.

When the playoffs began some weeks ago many believed they would signal a changing of the guard in our basketball major league. The best record in the regular season was earned by the Chicago Bulls, led by their whirling dervish guard Derrick Rose, at age 22 the league’s youngest-ever MVP. In the West the up and comers were the Oklahoma City Thunder and their duo of precocious 22 year olds, Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook.

The notion that a new age was aborning was underscored when the two best teams of the last decade—the L.A. Lakers and S.A. Spurs-- were shoved aside rudely in preliminary rounds.

But here we are at finals time and who’s still standing? The Dallas Mavericks, surely one of the oldest aggregates ever, and the Miami Heat, a younger but still solidly veteran crew. As I’ve been noting for years, the NBA victory stand is no place for young men. Another name for a “good, young” NBA team is “also ran.”

This state of affairs stems in large part from basketball’s status as our best-played sport. Those of us with memories of times long past can only marvel at the skills and athleticism of today’s players, which dwarf those of previous eras. High-school teams today would beat top college teams from my younger days, and the wonders the pros perform routinely surpass understanding.

Television has spurred basketball’s growth by turning every game into a clinic for young players, but I think that by scaling it down to screen size the medium also diminishes the sport. Only when viewed “live” from courtside can the size, speed and strength of NBA players be fully appreciated. I know that such seats are expensive (us press got ‘em free), but sitting in one once is worth a place on every sports fan’s bucket list.

If you play in the NBA you almost certainly have the combination of agility and spring the players call “hops”—at least initially-- but the game has evolved far past the point where that alone suffices for success. A range of skills must be cultivated, along with judgment, which translates roughly into the ability to know when to do what. They take time to acquire.

Michael Jordan, the best basketball player (and maybe the best athlete) ever, was in his seventh season in the league before he hoisted a championship trophy. The Heat’s LeBron James, the current best, already has played in eight without earning the privilege. Dirk Nowitzki, the Mav’s ace and one of the all-time most-versatile offensive big men, is a 13-season vet still vying for his first ring.

Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen, All-Pros all, put in a total of 36 seasons before the basketball gods allowed them to combine to win in 2008 in Boston. Lakers’ great Kobe Bryant won his first championship in his fourth pro campaign, but he had help from guys like Shaquille O’Neal, Glen Rice, Ron Harper and A.C. Green, who’d been around the block a time or three.

It’s not just a team’s starters who require seasoning; when a coach peers down his bench late in a playoff game he’s not looking for dewy youth but for the grizzled likes of Robert Horry, who could sit on his butt for two hours, then step on court and immediately nail a three, grab an offensive rebound or plant a strategic elbow. Horry collected seven NBA rings with three different teams over a 16-year career, most of them in latter-day supporting roles.

It’s often asked around Chicago how new-hero Rose stacks up against old-hero Jordan at the same, early stage of Rose’s development. Pretty evenly, I’d say. Both came into the league with hops a mundo and the ability to see openings and angles to the hoop invisible to lesser basketball intellects. Jordan went on to improve his straight-on shooting ability, as has Rose, although so far to a lesser extent.

But six or seven years into his career Jordan developed the fade-away jump shot that rounded out his game by making him lethal from mid-range—the same shot, by the way, that has sustained Nowitzky and Bryant in productive hoops maturity. Young Derrick ought to give the shot a try while he’s sweating through his summer drills. Like many a good young baseball pitcher, he’ll soon be realizing that his fastball alone won’t get him and his mates where they want to go.

THE SOUTHWEST SIDE

2011-05-14T20:22:00.000-07:00

One of the nice things about living in the Phoenix area is that there are many real people—i.e., Chicagoans—here; so many, in fact, that the place would pretty much empty out if we all had to go back.

Just about anything you can get in Chicago, you also can get here. My favorite lunchtime treats, including Chicago-style hotdogs, Italian beef and gyros, are close at hand, often at places with “Chicago” in their names. Besides excellent brisket sandwiches, Goldman’s Deli at Hayden and Indian Bend in Scottsdale has Cubs, Sox, Bulls and Bears photos on its walls. I’m in one of them, watching a patented Michael Jordan slam dunk at a long-past NBA All-Star-Weekend contest.

Although the natives don’t like to hear it, we Chicagoans also feel right at home in Arizona when it comes to politics. Pocket-stuffing politicians are as much a part of the desert landscape as they are on the gray streets of the famously corrupt Windy City, and maybe more so.

There’s a difference in the latter regard, though, and an important one. Chicago pols look, talk and act like crooks, and don’t much care who knows it. In Arizona they come off as family-values, law-and-order pillars of the community; as my mother would have put it, “butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths.” Still, when it comes to pillage, they can hold their own in any league.

Some of the scams pulled off here have been breathtaking even by Chicago standards. Topping the list is the so-called alternative-fuels caper of 2000. Jeff Groscost, then the blow-dried State House speaker from suburban Mesa, snuck through the legislature a bill to give rebates from state coffers of up to 40% of the price of new SUVs and pickup trucks to buyers who had propane or natural-gas systems installed in the vehicles, whether or not they ever used them. Then he spread the word among friends and neighbors, along with the name of a henchman whose company did such installations. Before the whistle was blown this crowd bilked the state treasury out of $200 million, a Haul of Fame haul. Best, even after it was revealed, nobody went to jail, proving that, in Arizona, if you make the law you aren’t breaking it.

Now fast-forward to the present past numerous similar episodes, including the current investigations of our beloved “World’s Toughest Sheriff” Joe Arpaio for, among other things, misappropriating $100 million in county funds. Maybe you’ve read about our Fiesta Bowl scandal, which didn’t approach the alternative-fuels mess in depth but certainly exceeded it in breadth.

The Fiesta Bowl was begun in 1971, partly as a way to make sure that our local U., Arizona State, had a New Year’s date; the Sun Devils played in its first three editions, and in four of the first five. From there it clambered to big-time status, eventually joining the long-established Rose, Orange and Sugar bowls as venues for the annual national championship game for our nation’s football-playing scholars. In the process it brought many tourist dollars to the Phoenix area.

But while the Fiesta Bowl was doing good it also was doing well for those in and around it. It turns out that the non-profit, tax-exempt bowl corporation was a goodie bag for those in the know, providing excessive salaries and expense accounts to its administrators and game tickets, junkets, backdoor campaign contributions and other nifty gifties to pal-pols. Among its internal beneficences were a four-day, $33,000 birthday bash at Pebble Beach Golf Club for its executive director, John Junker; $13,000 in wedding expenses for a Junker aide; and a $1,200 outing for visiting firemen at a local strip club.

The names of the politicians on the bowl’s freebies list included the president of the State Senate and the speaker of the House. They, and others, have been busy writing belated reimbursement checks and updating their financial-disclosure forms in an effort to wash off some of the resulting publicity stink. In that category is Jim Lane, the mayor of my home city of Scottsdale. The bowl hosted and catered a fund raiser for him while he was running for the office in 2008, and he only lately got around to paying for it. He didn’t pay sooner because he never got a bill, he’s explained.

The hits kept on coming even after the scandal’s first inklings broke in the Arizona Republic. The bowl paid $55,000 to Grant Woods, a former state attorney general, to conduct an internal audit of its operations. He swiftly produced a document that found no wrongdoing by anyone. When continuing reports of misdeeds finally forced a fuller investigation, it came out that Woods had paid $20,000 from his fee for assistance to a bowl lobbyist, who went on to “prep” the employees Woods interviewed. “Key people may have lied to me,” Woods sheepishly told The Republic.

Incidentally, that newspaper’s publisher, John Zidich, should have had a front-row seat for the shenanigans because he’d been a Fiesta Bowl director for six years before resigning last month.

Yes, the sun shines here every day, and the area sparkles with a day-before-yesterday newness foreign to cities Back East. But the winds carry the same odors we Chicago transplants are used to.

In a way, it’s comforting.

EXACTLY

2011-05-05T07:15:00.000-07:00

Usually, there’s good news and bad news about trying to pick a Kentucky Derby winner, and this year is no exception. It’s always difficult because the entrants are equine adolescents who are still growing and developing, none will have run the Derby distance of 1 ¼ miles, and the big field of 20 horses makes bumping and jostling inevitable, putting a premium on racing luck. The good news is that, in the absence of a strong favorite, the above factors conspire to ensure a good payout no matter who wins.

Betting on favorites isn’t much fun, so I’m planning to ignore the likely, lukewarm betting choices—Dialed In and Uncle Mo—in favor of a four-horse, $2 exacta box of mid-range picks, costing me $24. My selections will be Archarcharch, the Arkansas Derby winner whose morning-line odds are 10-1; Shackleford, who should be at or near the early lead at 12-1; Midnight Interlude (10-1), who won the Santa Anita Derby from a far-outside post after being momentarily knocked off stride in the home stretch; and late-running Nehro (6-1), who came up just short in a couple of 1 1/8-milers and should benefit from the added distance, despite a poor post position.

That’ll be a 1-14-15-19 ticket. In order of preference my picks are 1. Nehro, 2. Archarcharch, 3. Midnight Interlude and 4. Shackleford. The exacta should be worth more than $100 if any of the four finish 1-2.

I’ll also put a what-the-heck $5 win ticket on Pants on Fire, who won the tough Louisiana Derby. I like his odds of 20-1 and his rider, Rosie Napravnik, who’d be the first female jockey to win the race.

The best idea, of course, is to make your own choices, but even if you don’t, try to watch the race. It’s always a great show.

CROWNED

2011-05-01T05:47:00.000-07:00

Never is a long time, during which many unlikely things can happen, so the saying “never say never” probably is apt. Still, when applied to thoroughbred racing’s annual Triple Crown series, it’s hard to avoid using the “n” word.

No horse has won the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont since Affirmed did it in 1978, and from the looks of things none is likely to do it in the cycle that begins with next Saturday’s Derby (May 7). That’s not so much a commentary on the immediate field as it is on the general state of my favorite participant sport (when you bet, you participate).

Few enterprises anywhere are as badly run as the erstwhile Sport of Kings, and its clinging to tradition in staging the Triple Crown races, its best yearly shot at attention in an ever-more-crowded sports’ calendar, is the best evidence. That’s because the timing and conditions of the TC’s components, established willy-nilly in years long past, run directly contrary to recent and current trends at the ovals. The fact that everyone in the sport knows this has made not a whit of difference.

To win a Triple Crown today a colt or filly (a colt officially becomes a horse and a filly a mare at age five) would have to overcome his or her own history in addition to strong competition and the vicissitudes of racing luck. Worse, given the fate of some of those who have vied seriously for the honor of late, owners and trainers risk the careers or even the lives of their most-valuable animals to even try it.

The Triple Crown never has been easy to win, which is one reason it’s one of sports’ most cherished prizes. Since 1930, when the writer Charles Hatton of The Daily Racing Form coined the name, it has been captured but 10 times, and that number jumps by just one if you go back to 1919, when Sir Barton won it unawares.

It starts the first Saturday in May with the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs in Louisville, which at 1 ¼ miles is the farthest by 1/8-mile any competitor will have run. Two weeks later comes the 1 3/16ths-miles Preakness Stakes at the old Pimlico Race Track in Baltimore. The final leg, staged three weeks after that, is the hardest—the Belmont Stakes in New York, which, at 1 ½ miles, covers a longer distance than all but a few American thoroughbreds ever run. Winning three grueling, highly contested races in a five-week span becomes all the harder when it’s noted that the three-year-olds that are eligible for the series are the equivalent of 16-year-old humans, well short of their mature strength and development.

In years long past, such a feat was at least thinkable. Race horses then, well, raced. Citation, the 1948 TC winner, came to Churchill Downs on Derby Day with 16 starts under his cinch. The great Secretariat, the 1972 champ, had 12 pre-Derby races and Affirmed 13. By contrast, most of the entrants in Saturday’s go will have stepped on a track in earnest only four or five times, all at distances shorter than that of any of the Triple Crown tests.

That’s mostly because the economic focus of the sport long since has changed from racing to breeding. Racing may be in permanent decline on these shores, but it thrives in parts of Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and bidding for elite equine prospects has gone global. That’s meant that just about any horse that scores big on the track is whisked off to the breeding shed, post haste. Consequently, thoroughbreds these days are bred for speed, not stamina, meaning not only that they can’t stand up to frequent racing but also that they’re more prone to catastrophic breakdowns.

American racing’s biggest story of recent years was a sad one—of the colt Barbaro, who decisively won the 2006 Derby but broke a leg trying to win the Preakness and later died of the injury. One recent winner of the Derby and Preakness-- Smarty Jones in 2004—never raced again after failing in the Belmont. Big Brown accomplished the same double in 2008 but dragged in last at the Belmont and raced only twice more before being retired. “Too much too soon” applied to them all.

There’s a simple way to make the Triple Crown viable again. That would be to put more space between its parts, keeping the Derby in its traditional first-Saturday-in-May slot but running the Preakness the first Saturday in June—four week later—and the Belmont on July 4, about four weeks after that. That would give the contestants time to catch their breaths and, maybe, heal from the small hurts that can turn into larger ones.

I’m not nearly the first to propose this, but racing being racing, what makes sense counts for little in the decision-making process. Tradition is one obstacle to progress, as is the politics that always surrounds the awarding of racing dates in states with more than one track (including Kentucky, Maryland and New York). The fact that the sport lacks a national governing body with clout is a third.

But overriding is the plain ineptitude that kept from happening a match race in 2009 or 2010 between Zenyatta and Rachael Alexander, two sensational fillies who singly put a rare spotlight on the sport in those years. Like an updated Triple Crown series and the attention a winner would bring, that could have been a lifeboat for an activity that’s drowning, but in racing the only sounds you hear are “glub, glub, glub.”

DUMB, DUMBER, DUMBEST

2011-04-14T15:00:00.000-07:00

At times during my journalistic career I was told after misfiring in print that “you guys never get anything right.” I would answer that we reporters did make mistakes, but that our error percentage probably was no worse than that of the practitioners of other professions. It was just that we made our mistakes in public, where anyone with the four bits (it’s two bucks now) to buy my newspaper could see them, whereas others err pretty much in secret.

The same can be said for sports figures. It may seem that they do dumb things in extraordinary numbers, but it just may seem so because they’re public performers with no place to hide when they go awry.

During these past few weeks, though, sport’s dumbness quotient seems to have gone way up—so high that one suspects that something unusual is afoot. Maybe it’s the cold spring in many climes, or the radiation wafting across the ocean from that damaged nuclear plant in Japan, but the movie “Dumb and Dumber” appears to be replaying madly on our playing fields, sort of like “Groundhogs’ Day.”

There’s no difficulty in identifying one guy who has ranked high on the dumbness scale of late. He’s the one-time slugger Manny Ramirez, who last week announced that he was retiring from baseball rather than serve a 100-game suspension resulting from his testing positive for using a performance-enhancing drug. This was the second drug test Ramirez had failed, the first —of 50 games-- coming in 2009.

That first conviction came four years after baseball announced it finally was going to start testing in earnest for the substances that had warped its playing fields for the previous 15 years. Before 2005, taking steroids in baseball was a good percentage play for the talented, balancing a real but probably manageable long-term health risk against the sure riches a “big” season or two would bring. Afterward, with the risk of detection higher, the calculation was closer, even given the technological edge users always have over testers.

Steroids still exist in baseball but the guy who usually gets caught these days is the poor teenager from the Caribbean looking to impress the scouts rather than the established star. Big-star Manny could afford the best chemistry and guidance but, apparently, didn’t pop for it. With one strike against him he should have, but, I guess, that was “Manny being Manny.” It’s said that only dopes get caught doping. Now we’ll have to think of a name for someone who gets caught twice.

Vying with Manny are people who should have known better, the Federal prosecutors in the San Francisco case against another one-time slugger, Barry Bonds, for lying to a grand jury about his steroids use and obstructing justice in a previous case against the drug lab BALCO. The Feds’ case, in the works for years, was circumstantial but substantial, involving testimony from Bonds’ former teammates, business associates and, even, a mistress. These folks said they witnessed physical changes in the player that could only result from steroids use, or dealt in drugs with Bonds’ former personal trainer and boyhood pal, Greg Anderson. One witness, described as Bonds’ personal shopper, said she saw the trainer give Bonds a shot, directly countering the player’s claim that no one except physicians did that.

Then the prosecution put on the stand Dr. Arthur Ting, Bonds’ orthopedist. Steve Hoskins, Bonds’ ex-business manager, had testified he’d discussed the player’s steroid use with Ting many times, but Ting denied having had such conservations. And -- oh, yes—the good doctor volunteered that he’d prescribed “legal” steroids for Bonds that could have had caused the changes described.

What were those prosecutors thinking? A simple Google search of Ting would have revealed his run-ins with California medical overseers, one of which resulted in him serving a five-year probation for allowing others to write prescriptions in his name and keeping inadequate records for “dangerous” drugs he’d prescribed. It also would have informed them that two of Ting’s sons had quit the U. of Southern California football team amid allegations of steroid use.

Any watcher of “Law and Order” knows that no lawyer puts up a witness whose testimony he can’t predict. The government got a “guilty” verdict on their obstruction charge but the jury, probably confused by Ting’s statements, deadlocked on the lying counts, with some concluding that maybe Bonds really did believe that flaxseed oil accounted for the adult growth spurt that caused his head, feet, muscles and home-run numbers to swell. It’s possible, huh?

Exhibit C in this little exposition (it takes three examples to make a column) is my favorite baseball team, the Chicago Cubs. I nominate them not because of their history of futility that impresses Tibetan monks, Australian aborigines and others with a longer time perspective than ours, but what they’ve done lately. They enter the current season with the game’s sixth-highest payroll but, by all indications, the 15th or 20th best team. They owe that discrepancy largely to their general manager, Jim Hendry, whose judgment consigned more than a third of their $125-million payroll (37% to be exact) to three players who’ll be of little or no use in the campaign ahead.

One is Alfonso Soriano, who’ll make $19 million this year. Hendry signed The Fonz to an eight-year, $136 million contract in 2007, and got only two decent seasons from him before he lapsed into mediocrity at the plate and ineptitude in the field. In 2008, the GM made a similar blunder by wooing Kosuke Fukudome from Japan with a four-year, $48 million deal. Fuku was mediocre from the outset and now is a fourth outfielder earning (as it were) $14.5 mil.

The worst, however, was yet to come: the 2009 deal that brought in Milton Bradley, an addled outfielder who was bad news both on the field and in the clubhouse. Bradley was peddled after the season to the Seattle Mariners for starting-pitcher Carlos Silva in a swap of bad contracts. Silva turned out to be a modest find, going 10-6 in wins and losses after an 8-0 start, and had been penciled into this year’s rotation, but was cut from the team after a few bad early outings in spring training. He’ll draw a $12,750,000 salary from the Cubs this year while playing elsewhere, if at all.

Hendry, et al, no doubt thought they could get along without Silva, but a week into the season two members of the Cubs’ five-man starting-pitching rotation were down with injuries, forcing the team to scrounge the minors and retirement lists for live-body throwers. Hey, the Cubs didn’t get where they are by being smart.

So who’s your pick for dumbest— Manny, the Feds or the Cubs? You can’t make a wrong choice.

NOING

2011-04-01T07:30:00.000-07:00

I don’t know about you but I can’t remember getting much out of school. I had a good-enough time, I guess, and escaped more or less unscathed, but can’t recall any teacher doing or saying much that struck a chord. That led to my belief that school mostly is a place where kids get together with other kids, from whom they learn. The continuing national hysteria over education goes down easier with that in mind.

However (you knew there’d be one), one line from my years at Roosevelt High on Chicago’s great Northwest Side has stayed with me. It was uttered by Captain Seabury, the school’s band director, whose military title, which everyone used, stemmed from his WWI service.

I was thoroughly unmusical but encountered the droll captain in a freshman study hall he monitored. Sometimes apropos and sometimes not, he’d ask us kids “Do you know what you know?”

Now as then, it’s an excellent question. Much of what rattles around in our brains is garbage, the residue of stereotypes, wishful thinking and downright misinformation. Along with the few actual facts we’ve managed to absorb, it’s all mixed together into the goo that makes us the lovable creatures we are.

The sub-world of sports, my usual focus of discourse, is not immune to conceptual distortion; in fact, a case can be made that its conventional wisdom contains more nonsense than that of most subjects. Now come Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim to make that case with the book “Scorecasting; the Hidden Influences Behind How Sports are Played and Games are Won” (Crown Books, New York, 278 pages).

Using statistics from many sources—not the least of which were the major sports leagues themselves-- boyhood chums Moskowitz, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago, and Wertheim, a writer for Sports Illustrated magazine, put to the test many things that sports fans and participants think they know for sure. They concluded that, often, they really don’t.

In a way I found the book satisfying, and in a way not. The satisfying stuff, naturally, came when the duo’s data confirmed examples of sports’ home truths that I’ve long suspected were wrong. For instance:

-- Batters always should “take” a 3-0 pitch. Not so, the authors concluded from voluminous data; umpires increase the strike zone enormously in such instances, so the “taking” batter probably just concedes a strike. (Conversely, the zone narrows on 0-2 pitches.)

--- A punt usually is the best fourth-down call. Nope; risk-reward analysis (you can read the book for details) usually dictates that it’s best to go for it on fourth down, even in a team’s own territory. I liked this chapter particularly because it cited approvingly the example of the Tennessee high school coach Kevin Kelley, whose teams never punt and have compiled an overwhelmingly winning record and won several state titles. The remarkable Kelley was the subject of my blog on Jan. 1, 2009. You can find it by scrolling down.

-- When a basketball player gets within a foul of fouling out in the final quarter, it’s a good idea to bench him so he’ll be available during a game’s final minutes. No again. The average NBA player with five fouls picks up a sixth just 21% of the time, and a “star” (defined as one who has been among the top 10 in any year’s Most Valuable Player voting) just 16%. Either way, taking him out deprives his team of his services for as long as he sits and lessens its chance of winning

--In football and basketball a good offense is nice but (as Michael Jordan always declared) defense wins championships. Actually, offense-- as determined by statistical rankings-- turns out to be an equally good a title predictor in both those sports.

--It’s smart for a coach to call a timeout to “ice” a shooter or kicker just before a key free-throw or field-goal attempt. Actually, “iced” and “uniced” competitors succeed at almost exactly the same rate.

But harder for me to swallow was the book’s showiest thesis: that the home-field advantage-- sports’ unquestioned central verity—is caused not by such things as home cooking, familiar routines and playing conditions, and the encouragement of friendly crowds, but by game-official bias. The last, the authors assert, accounts for almost everything that measurably favors home clubs.

Moscowitz and Wertheim have stats aplenty to back up that contention, including home-visitor differences in foul calls in basketball and football, ball-strike calls in baseball and the awarding of injury time in soccer. Moreover, they say their data shows that the more crucial the game situation, the more umps, refs, etc., help the home team.

It’s not that officials are instructed to be ‘homers” or that the phenomenon is part of any conscious intent, the authors say. It’s because of a psychological concept called “influence conformity.” This holds that in pressurized situations decision makers will lessen the pressure on themselves by siding with what feels like the majority view of any issue. In other words, in sports they get along by going along with the home crowd. It’s human nature, the authors aver.

Maybe so, but I have my doubts. It’s been my observation that a certain personality type— let’s call it a “screw you” guy or gal—tends to gravitate toward certain occupations. Policing is one, also news reporting. Sports officiating is a third. These are people who enjoy going against the grain, who’d just as soon say “f---, er, screw you,” as make nice. In the ninth inning of game seven of a World Series, with the home team down by a run, two outs, the bases loaded and a 3-2 count on the batter, my money would be on the ump calling a borderline pitch “Strike three!” instead of “Ball four!”.

I have no data, of course, just a gut feeling.

If you don’t agree, screw you.

BARRY AND ROGER

2011-03-15T07:24:00.000-07:00

Double features long since have disappeared from the movie theaters, but we’re about to get one in our court rooms over the next several months.

One will star Barry Bonds, the best baseball position-player of the last 25 years. The other will feature Roger Clemens, the best pitcher of that period. Separately, they’ll face charges that they lied when denying they knowingly took steroids during their illustrious careers—Bonds to a Federal grand jury and Clemens to a committee of Congress.

In the dock alongside them, albeit invisibly, will be the sport that enabled and abetted them in their nefarious pursuits of greatness, but the fact that a guilty verdict already has been delivered against baseball in the court of public opinion shouldn’t overly affect the trials’ ratings. We stuck with “Law and Order” all those years even though the verdicts were predictable, didn’t we?

Bonds will get first bats in a trial scheduled to begin Monday (March 21) in San Francisco, if it isn’t pleaded out first. It probably won’t be because many chances to do so have been bypassed in the years the case has been kicking around. The charges against Bonds stem from statements he made before a 2003 grand jury investigating Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO), the Burlingame, California, steroids brewer and peddler whose exposure—along with that of its clients the sprinters Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery, the boxer Shane Moseley and the baseball players Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield and Bonds, among others—put an overdo national spotlight on drug use in American sports. BALCO founder Victor Conte went to prison as a result of the probe, along with several associates. These included Greg Anderson, who doubled as Bonds’ personal trainer.

The case against the all-time home runs king would have been adjudicated long ago if not for the silence of Anderson. He’s served about a year behind bars for refusing to testify against the ballplayer, on top the six months he put in for his BALCO convictions. That he potentially faces further charges of obstructing justice in the Bond matter easily qualifies him as Buddy of the Century. Mostly as a result of his noncooperation, the number of criminal counts against Bonds has been reduced to five from the original 14.

But Anderson’s continued absence may prove to be a mixed blessing for Bonds. That’s because the judge in the case has ruled it opens the way to testimony against him by former associates and teammates who stand ready to relate conservations about steroids they had with him or Anderson, and about the physical changes Bonds underwent while he allegedly was juicing. The juiciest of these witnesses may be Kimberley Bell, the player’s ex-mistress. It’s been reported she’ll say that while some of Bonds’ parts got larger as he forged the Michelin Man physique of his later playing years, other parts were shrinking. Ouch!

The case against the 354-game-winner Clemens, due to be heard in July in Washington, D.C., seems both stronger and weirder than the one against Bonds. The weird part is that while Bonds was subpoenaed by the BALCO grand jury, the Rocket Man showed up voluntarily to make his “I never took ‘em” statements before a 2008 House Committee. And while Bonds’ trainer Anderson isn’t talking, Brian McNamee, Clemens’ fitness guru from 1998 to 2001, has lined up as the main witness against him. Additionally, the careful McNamee is said to have retained some vials, syringes and, even, gauze that he used while he says he was injecting the pitcher, and the DNA thereon looms as hard-to-refute physical evidence.

Why the two players put themselves into their current binds is a matter of conjecture. My take is that both are prime products of a culture that lionizes top athletes almost from birth and shields them from the sort of choices that help turn most of the rest of us into reasonable human beings.

Athletes always have been a privileged group in this land but in recent years that has increased exponentially with their salaries. While team jocks used to at least have to relate to teammates who might not buy their acts, present-day demigods in the class of Bonds and Clemens can surround themselves with business advisors, trainers, nutritionists and an array of other yes-men and -women who cater to their every whim (Bonds had a personal shopper, for heaven’s sake). The idea that anyone might not accept their versions of things probably never occurs to those guys.

Both, it seems, are banking on star-struck jurors to give them a pass once again. They promise to tacitly invoke the Richard Pryor defense: “Who you gonna believe—me or your lyin’ eyes?” And indeed, who among us would forfeit a photo-op with a top-drawer celeb and an invitation to a really good acquittal party in order to uphold some nebulous idea of justice? It worked for O.J., didn’t it?

Trouble is, though, that by denying the obvious, and trying to cover it up, Bonds and Clemens already have blown it in the immortality department, which is what it’s about for the handful of jocks who can pass the highest performance tests. Guilty in court or not, they’ll be followed by mental asterisks forevermore.

And so should baseball for its head-in-the-sand stance during Bonds’ and Clemens’ period of dominance.

THE LAST UNIONS

2011-03-01T06:49:00.000-08:00

“North Dallas Forty” was a good movie about pro football with a number of very good lines. One of them came in a scene in which a group of players were sitting around grousing about some stunt management had pulled at their expense.

“They can’t do that to us-- we’re the team!” exclaimed one player.

“No we’re not,” said a wiser player. “They’re the team. We’re the equipment.”

The line seems especially apt these days as the National Football League’s owners and players’ union close in on the March 3 date (Thursday) when their current labor contract expires. Maybe they’ll reach an agreement before then, and maybe they won’t. Maybe the next NFL season will start on time next September (it’s a long way off), and maybe not. Either way, though, the showdown provides an opportunity for some musings about the state of labor-management relations in these United States, and the balance of power therein.

For starters, there’s no small irony in the fact that in 2011 A.D. America’s most-potent labor organizations are those composed of professional athletes, relative newcomers to organized labor’s ranks. With no little help from their unions, the jocks have waxed rich beyond their own and everyone else’s imaginings, while many of the people whose dollars make their prosperity possible (us) struggle in an ever-more-unforgiving economic climate.

Back in the 1960s, when I broke in as a business-news reporter (covering labor, among other things), much of the nation’s economic drama stemmed from the clashes between the major domestic industries of day—steel, autos, appliances, coal—and the muscular unions that represented their employees. Now, those industries are fragmented and puny, and what’s left of their unions are reduced to trying to hold down whatever cuts in pay and benefits the companies are demanding in the name of competitiveness.

What companies mostly are demanding—and getting—is no unions at all. Union membership in the U.S. last year fell to 12% of wage and salary earners, from 20% in 1983 and 35% or so during the post-war-boom years of the 1950s. If the governor of Wisconsin and like-minded pols have their way, that figure will shrink further in the years ahead. Why shouldn’t states extract 24/7 performance from their workers (with no overtime pay) the way private employers do? Hey, you don’t like it, there’s the door, and there are 15 people waiting to take your job.

Professional athletes had no unions to speak of through most of their history, and lived under contracts that bound players to their teams until the teams chose to trade or release them, so they pretty much had to take what they were offered. Some teams, like the New York Yankees in their 1950s’ glory days, hired private detectives to seek out pecadillos that could be used to blackmail recalcitrants into line.

That began to change in 1966, when the Major League baseball players hired Marvin Miller to head their association. Miller was a real union guy—the United Steelworkers’ chief economist—and a smart one to boot. He saw what some others saw—an industry whose employees possessed skills that were both rare and potentially valuable—but he also recognized that those assets couldn’t be exploited fully unless a base of solidarity could be secured.

Miller’s first major achievement was obtaining binding, outside arbitration of contract disputes, a role the game’s commissioner, an owners’ proxy, formerly filled. In 1975, the cases of the pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally led to the arbitrator’s ruling that threw out baseball’s “reserve clause” and led to the free agency that has fueled spectacular player gains across the team-sport spectrum.

Miller’s second and biggest accomplishment was to convince players to sublimate their short-term interests for broader objectives, no small matter in a profession where careers can be brief and chancy. It took strikes in 1972, 1980 and 1981, and lockouts in 1973 and 1976, to make the point, but it finally took. The upshot has been that the average baseball player’s salary last year stood at $3.3 million, up from $19,000 in 1966, while the game’s minimum salary rose to $400,000 a year from $6,000. Other sports unions marched in baseball’s footprints, and while the footballers haven’t done as well at the bank as the baseballers (they play a much-shorter schedule, after all), they’re doing okay, too, with annual salaries that average $1.8 million and a $260,000 minimum. We all should do as well.

In what may be the biggest irony of all, it turns out that the well-entrenched football players’ union’s most-potent weapon isn’t unionhood, but its lack. Team by team, it has voted to decertify in case of a lockout, something that’s counterintuitive unless one understands that the NFL is a monopoly and its player-control cornerstones—the draft, team-salary caps, free-agency limits and “franchise” tags—are legally acceptable only if they are arrived at through collective bargaining. If there’s no union there’s no collective-bargaining agreement, in which case the whole edifice collapses. Cute, huh?

I’ve just finished reading the novel “The Given Day,” by Dennis Lehane. Its central event is the 1919 Boston police strike, which the Beantown Establishment used to squash the nascent union movement among the city’s much-put-upon cops. Babe Ruth is a character in the book, and his sublime talents allow him to float to a life of wealth and privilege while others in his social class remained mired in the grimy scrum. “What goes around comes around” is a familiar saying, but it ain’t necessarily so. Sometimes, what goes around just keeps on going.

GO ARTICHOKES!

2011-02-15T06:13:00.001-08:00

Yes, I know, you have to hold your nose to enjoy college sports, but there are saving graces. One of them is the names that history or accident have bestowed on some schools’ athletic representatives.

While it’s true that most colleges have found their team names in the same generic zoo that stocks our professional clubs, the difference in numbers between colleges and the pros means that the former have had many more opportunities for creativity. That’s particularly evident during the basketball season, when some 1,500 senior colleges field squads, plus at least as many more junior or community colleges. Give enough chances, even academic types can get things right once in a while.

The kinds of college nicknames worth savoring cover a wide gamut. There are occupational names tied to a school’s academic mission, such as the Purdue Boilermakers or the Leigh Engineers. There are names with a meteorological tilt, like the Miami Hurricanes, the Iowa State Cyclones and the Arizona State Sun Devils. There are whimsical names (the Hampshire College Blacksheep) and neo-whimsical (the California-Irvine Anteaters, the Cal-Santa Cruz Banana Slugs and the Fighting Artichokes of my beloved Scottsdale Community College). They are plays on words like the Pace University Setters and the Bryn Mawr Mawrters.

There are a couple of commercial tie-ins but they aren’t irksome because they’re either appropriate or non-commercial in result. Stetson U., in Deland, Fla., calls its teams the Hatters because both it and the hat maker had the same founder, John B. Stetson. Converse College, a woman’s school in Spartanburg, S.C., used to call its athletic reps the All-Stars even though it had no connection with and received no special treatment from the shoe company of the same name. Indeed, the last time I checked its basketball team wore Reeboks. The kidding must have gotten too great, though, because it recently changed its moniker to the Valkyries, indicating that someone in the place knew a little opera.

Usually, college cheers echo team nicknames, but sometimes the reverse is true. Georgetown U. calls its teams the Hoyas after its old “Hoya Saxa!” cheer which, the school says, is a Latin-Greek amalgam meaning “What rocks!” Virgina Polytechnic Institute dubbed its teams the Hokies because of a cheer composed by a student in 1896, the year the institution’s name was changed from Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College. That chant began “Hokie, hokie, hokie high/ Tech, Tech, VPI.”

Catholic-run Manhattan College names its teams the Jaspers after Brother Jasper, the faculty member who was its first baseball coach. The school asserts that it was Jasper, not President Taft, who initiated the seventh-inning stretch in the diamond sport. The University of Idaho names its teams the Vandals, not for the ancient Germanic tribe but because a long-ago sportswriter wrote that its basketballers had “vandalized” an opponent.

Several of the better nicknames are steeped in regional lore, however vague. The University of North Carolina traces its Tarheels appellation to a couple of stories. One involved North Carolinians dumping tar into a river near Rocky Mount to impede British troops during the Revolutionary War. The other has a troop of local Confederate soldiers during the Civil War claiming that their battlefield tenacity stemmed from dipping their heels in the plentiful North Carolina gunk.

The roots of the term “Hoosiers,” Indiana U.’s marvelous nickname, are equally murky. One version traces it to the Anglo-Saxon word “hoo,” meaning hill, making Hoosiers early hillbillies. Another contends it first meant followers of Harry Hoosier, a frontier evangelist. Still another contends it’s what early homesteaders in the state hollered when strangers knocked on their doors. Whatever, it made a great movie title.

There’s nothing vague about the origin of the University of Oklahoma’s Sooners nickname. It honors the less-than-honorable gang that jumped the gun in the April 22, 1889 free-land rush that helped open the state for settlement. By such logic, jumping off-side in football should be cheered as a show of initiative, but there you have it.

For my money, however, the award for best college-sports nickname, for reasons of local color and amiable obscurity, goes to the St. Louis U. Billikens. A billiken, it seems, is an elfish, round-bellied figure of Asian origin, statues of which used to be considered good-luck charms. Around 1910 a St. Louis sportswriter decided that John Bender, the school’s football coach, looked like one of those and took to calling the team “Bender’s Billikens.” The name stuck.

You don’t get that kind of name from a brainstorming session, or from taking a poll. Aren’t you glad they didn’t have those way back when?

COLLEGE CAPERS

2011-02-01T06:37:00.001-08:00

The main question writers are asked by non-writers is where we get our story ideas. It’s usually asked with a trace of wonder, as though we possess some special or even secret knowledge.

I always laugh at the query. Then I’ll say that if one looks at the world in the right (or wrong) way it teems with things that are deserving of comment because they are so wonderful, terrible or, simply, interesting.

Like most columnists, I kept a list of subjects that caught my eye, and as a blogger I still do. Contrary to public perception, it’s a list that tends to grow rather than shrink. I’m sure that once I finally pack it in –either by choice or necessity-- it will be with many opinions or observations unexpressed.

The past week was a case in point. I entered it with what seemed like a perfectly good blog idea only to see it superseded not once but twice. I won’t tell you what the discarded ideas were because I might choose to revisit them. The winner, though, shone through like the headlights of an 18-wheeler coming ‘round the bend on a foggy night.

The subject was big-time college sports, an old punching bag of mine. Every time I think it can’t get worse, it does. That happened last week, with exclamation points.

Exhibit A was a hoot-- the news that Robert G. Burton, a businessman from Greenwich, Conn., asked for a refund of the $3 million he’d contributed to the University of Connecticut’s athletics department a few years earlier to build on its campus an office-locker-workout facility named the Burton Family Football Complex. His gripe is that he wasn’t sufficiently consulted before the school hired a replacement for Randy Edsall, the football coach who recently left the Storrs job for one at the University of Maryland.

Burton’s demand came in a single-spaced, five-page rant he sent to Jeff Hathaway, the UConn AD. Naturally, it wound up on the Internet. In it, Burton tore poor Hathaway a new one, declaring him to be unqualified for his post because (among other failings) he lacked the skills to “manage and cultivate” fat-cat donors like himself. He declared Hathaway’s choice of ex-Syracuse coach Paul Pasqualoni to replace Edsall an “embarrassment” not only to him but to his entire family. Apparently, Mrs. Burton also is mortified.

Burton wrote that he’d be withdrawing future support for UConn athletics. He helpfully reminded Hathaway that this would include his purchase of a $50,000-a-year football-game box, $8,000 for his ad in the school’s football program and the $20,000 he’d kicked in annually to help fund Edsall’s coaches’ clinic, one of the ways universities pad the salaries of their already-overpaid coaches without the sums appearing on their books.

The incident offered a peek into the world of college-athletics “boosters,” people who may or may not be alums of the institution they support (Burton isn’t) but who believe that their earthly happiness depends on the school fielding really good major-sports teams year in and year out. Depending on their level of largess they can be rewarded with such perks as the ability to call the coach the day before the game to get his view on whether his team will cover the spread, and a voice in the school’s councils.

The most common reaction to Burton’s demand, on UConn websites and elsewhere, was that he’s a rich jerk who deserves to be rebuffed; after all, colleges are supposed to run their own affairs in the name of “academic integrity.” To that I say “Nonsense!” Big-time college sports have little to do with academics and institutions forfeit their integrity when they get into the entertainment business. UConn should give the guy his money back. He didn’t get what he paid for.

Exhibit B was, simply, appalling. It was the hospitalization of 13 University of Iowa football players after what only could be described as a brutal workout that included prolonged, high-poundage, high-speed weight lifting, under the supervision of the team’s so-called “strength” coaches. The young men came down with something called rhabdomyolysis, a condition that occurs when too-strenuous exercise causes muscle breakdowns that release substances harmful to the kidneys. Some of the players were confined for as much a week, and the extent of their injuries still is unclear.

Almost equally distressing was that the revelation of those injuries—several days after they happened-- came from the victims, not the university, via emails and tweets. Several players reported being unable to walk before being hospitalized, one said he’d fallen down some stairs. “Just thinking about it [the workout} makes me vomit,” wrote a third.

The university initially tried to downgrade the matter, with an athletics department spokesman calling the workout “allowed and routine.” Later he backtracked some, saying that if “due diligence” (ugh!) showed they were required “steps would be taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again.” In other words, “we did nothing wrong but we won’t do it any more.” Great. Can you spell l-a-w-s-u-i-t?

Football head coach Kirk Ferentz was out of town during the incident. He’s returned but the university said he wouldn’t answer questions publicly until after tomorrow (Feb. 2), the national signing day for new recruits. First things first, right?

One thing besides Iowa’s callous attitude should be obvious: it’s that the kids were killing themselves in January for a sport that isn’t played until September. The workout in question may have been called “off-season,” but, in truth, there is no off season for the collegiate big-timers. It’s an exhausting, year-round grind that, for players, amounts to a full-time job and then some. Anyone who emerges from the jock mill with an education worth the name deserves a medal as well as a degree.

And maybe a Purple Heart.

VIVA TOMSULA!

2011-01-14T17:45:00.000-08:00

Unexpected pleasures are the best, which is why I was delighted soon after tuning in to the NFL game between the San Francisco 49ers and Arizona Cardinals a couple of Sundays ago. Among the pre-game shots was one of Jim Tomsula, the ‘Niners’ interim head coach, entering the stadium, grinning broadly at and shaking hands or swapping high-fives with just about everyone within reach on his way to the field.

On the greensward, the gaiety continued. The rotund, mustached Tomsula, the team’s defensive-line coach before being elevated to replace Mike Singletary for the last week of the regular season, ranged his bench area, hugging players and functionaries.

Even the commencement of hostilities didn’t cool Tomsula’s enjoyment of the occasion; once foot met ball he seemed as much a cheerleader as a coach, taking obvious delight in his team’s good plays. These turned out to be many as the once-uptight ‘Niners, 5-10 in wins and losses going in, turned in their best performance of the season and emerged with a 38-7 victory. When it was over they gave their coach a Gatorade bath, putting a happy ending on an otherwise unhappy year.

I was happy, too, even though my new-home-city team came out the loser. When, I asked myself, had I seen an NFL coach exude so much genuine good feeling before or during a game? That others shared my view was evident the day after the contest, when I tapped into the NinersNation fan website and found that, in a poll on whether or not to make Tomsula the team’s permanent head coach, yeas outnumbered nays 668 to 90.

That wasn’t going to happen, of course; Tomsula’s credentials and repute were too modest for such an august appointment. Having at least the requisite half a brain, he must have thought so himself or he wouldn’t have behaved the way he did. “Sober as a judge” used to be the common expression of grim probity, but, these days, “sober as an NFL coach” is more apt.

Fact is, a judge-like stance doesn’t do justice to the overwhelming sense of self-importance with which the NFL and its minions regard themselves and their activities. To them, brain surgery is penny-ante poker compared with their, um, game. A few seasons back, when the league was legislating against players’ on-field celebrations, some sportswriters dubbed the NFL the No Fun League. The label still holds even though the players seem to have won the above-mentioned tussle.

The NFL, after all, is the outfit that puts Roman numerals after the editions of its annual title contests, as though the appellation “world’s championship” isn’t grandiose enough. It’s the one that, years ago, sponsored a high-school essay contest on its role in American history, as if it had one.

And it’s the gang that pioneered and champions the practice of reviewing via video replay the decisions of its field officials, putting microscopic analysis to such things as ball spots in the name of fairness and the American Way. It’s like it thinks the republic would crumble if a first down were awarded improperly.

The on-field avatars of the Imperial NFL are its coaches, and a more sour-pussed bunch is hard to find. With few exceptions, such as the Seattle Seahawks’ Pete Carroll and the New York Jets’ Rex Ryan, both of whom occasionally show some animation, the football mentors have the collective personality of a boiled turnip, or worse.

Coaches are the most imitative of sorts, and the guy they currently are imitating is Bill Belichick, the chief honcho of the New England Patriots. He’s been hailed as a genius since his team won three Super Bowls during the past decade (in 2001, ’03 and ’04), but he wasn’t so smart when he bombed out after five mostly losing seasons (1991-95) running the less-talented Cleveland Browns.

In 1999 the curt, unsmiling Belichick made history by serving the shortest tenure of any NFL head coach—one day with the Jets, for which he’d been an assistant—before bailing for Boston. His gracious resignation note there exemplified his notion of communications. “I resign as HC of the NYJ,” he wrote (honest).

Belichick roams the sidelines dressed like a construction worker on the job. Not only is he’s the model of coachly paranoia when he covers his mouth with his play chart when mumbling into his head-set, he’s also a partial cause of it. A few seasons ago he was fined $500,000 when one of his assistants was caught taping an opponent’s defensive hand signals for future decoding and use. It’s been alleged that he’s miked his defensive linemen’s shoulder pads to record other teams’ audibles, but that’s never been proved.

Belichick has a 63% victory rate in the league (177 wins-104 losses), proving again that jerks can succeed in his business, but he’s looking up at Tomsula, whose 1-0 head-coaching mark works out to 100%. I find that a pleasant fact.

REASONS TO SMILE

2011-01-01T05:21:00.000-08:00

A new year is beginning but it’s hard to find many big-picture things to smile about. The U.S. economy sputters in a Catch 22: joblessness won’t improve until people loosen their purse strings, but that won’t happen until they’re convinced their jobs and incomes are secure. Who can blame them?

We remain stuck in unwinnable wars in irredeemable places. “Beliefs” trump science. Shortsightedness is regarded as a virtue; no politician dares to look past the next election, no CEO past the next fiscal quarter.

Thus, we are forced to seek personal solace, finding small pleasures to distract from larger concerns. Fortunately, these are abundant. Here are 10 of mine, in no particular order:

HI-DEFINITION TV. Wife Susie and I bought ours (a Sony) almost three years ago, but I’m still dazzled by its sharpness and clarity. It’s not just a technical improvement, it’s a whole new medium! It’s especially good for sports; the argument for watching games at home instead of in person never has been stronger.

GOOD MARINARA SAUCE. It used to be scarce, even in Italian restaurants, but it’s everywhere now. I give much of the credit to the Food Network, my favorite daytime-TV outlet, which I think has lifted cuisine generally in this land. It used to be said that anyone who could read could cook, but now literacy isn’t required.

TRANSITION LENSES. They turn regular glasses into sunglasses and back again with no effort on the part of the wearer. No need to shlep sunglasses or leave them around to be lost or broken. As the ads say, they protect eyes from harmful UV rays, and look cool to boot. Why doesn’t everyone wear them?

AMAZON.COM. Through it you can get just about any book ever written, often at a bargain price, and delivered to your home. Yes, Kindle, et al, eventually will make books obsolete, but I’m betting I’ll be obsolete before they are. One caution: never pay up for quick delivery. Amazon will pocket your money and deliver when it pleases.

NEW YORK TIMES CROSSWORD PUZZLES. You might recall I devoted much of a previous blog to their excellence, but I feel an encore is needed. I work the Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday ones. They’re testing but doable and, almost invariably, clever. Will Shortz, their editor, is a great man. He should get a Nobel Prize for contributing to human betterment.

NETFLIX. Another new-age marvel whose postal delivery of movie and TV-show DVDs is all but seamless. No runs to the video store, no late fees, and customer reps who are based in the U.S. and whose native language is the same as mine. Claiming to offer some 100,000 titles (OK, the number is disputed), it almost always has the movies I want, and you can take it with you on vacation.

TOYOTAS. Susie and I have owned or leased six of them in the last 13 years, and none has seen the inside of a repair shop except for tire problems or brake jobs. They’re dead solid reliable and have a lot of juice besides. I thought the flap over their supposed unintended accelerations early last year was a classic case of mass hysteria. After a couple weeks of leading the national news, such complaints stopped, cold. No recall eliminates 100% of any problem

ROBERT CARO— The biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson is a marvelous historian, one who never fails to captivate with a writing style that turns a mountain of painstakingly gained detail into a cohesive and griping narrative. Three volumes of his four-part series on Johnson have been published: “The Path to Power” (1982); “Means of Ascent” (1990); and “Master of the Senate” (2002). If you haven’t read them, you should. The fourth, “The Presidency,” isn’t due out until next year, but I will spend this one happily anticipating it. Caro is 75 years old and I wish him good health.

HBO DRAMAS—“The Sopranos” was the best thing on TV, ever (“Lonesome Dove” was second-best), and while the network’s recent original offerings have fallen short of that lofty standard they’re still better than anything else around. I never missed an episode of the war drama “The Pacific” or “Treme,” the one about post-Katrina New Orleans, last year. Ditto the just-concluded “Boardwalk Empire,” despite wondering what delicate-looking Steve Buscemi was doing playing a rough-tough political boss. I’m glad to see that “Big Love” is coming back for another go-round. Even though that series gets progressively nuttier I find hilarious the premise of an ordinary guy humping to keep up with three pretty wives. I especially like the blond one, Nicki.

THE McDOWELL SONORAN PRESERVE. It’s across the street from where I live and from the nearest trailhead I can walk for 15 or 20 minutes and enter a world of desert serenity that’s as different as it can be from the hubbub of the city around it. It’s free, and I can poke around for as long as I wish. You might not live in Scottsdale, AZ, and be able to go there, but I bet there’s somewhere like it reasonably near you.

A 'NO' AND SOME YESES

2010-12-14T18:09:00.000-08:00

Baseball doesn’t like to be reminded of its bungling of the steroids issue, but it will be during next few weeks, and even more around this time the next few years. That’s because December is when Hall of Fame ballots go out to members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America for consideration of the following year’s potential inductees. By virtue of my 10-plus years of active membership during my columnizing days, I’m one of them, and get to vote. It’s one of my few remaining distinctions.

On the current ballot for the first time is Rafael Palmiero, who normally would be a shoo-in for the Hall. In his 20 seasons (1986-2005) with the Cubs, Rangers and Orioles, the first baseman and outfielder exceeded two of the statistical milestones that used to guarantee the game’s version of immortality: 3,000 hits (he had 3,020) and 500 home runs (569). He also was adept enough afield to have received several Golden Glove awards, a nice cherry on his sundae.

Raffy’s name, however, was raised by steroids whistle-blowers during the latter years of his career, so much so that he was called to testify at the broader Congressional hearing into the matter in March, 2005. There, loudly and in no uncertain terms, he said it wasn’t so.

Absent other evidence the denial might have earned him a pass on the issue, but in August of that year, as an Oriole, he tested positive for steroids and was suspended from the game for 10 days. Since he’d already established his legend by that time, getting busted marked him as a dope as well as a doper. Further, the substance that turned up in his urine sample was the potent anabolic stanozolol—real weight-lifter stuff—indicating that he was no mere dabbler in the arcane drug-taking art.

But dopers (or dopes) aren’t excluded from the Hall ballot, so Palmiero is one of 19 first-time nominees in this year’s go-round, and it will be up to us scribes or ex-scribes to make the judgment about his place in the sport’s history. This passing of the buck is all too typical of Major League Baseball, which delayed putting teeth in its anti-steroids rules until 2005, more than a decade after it had been established that use of the drugs was widespread and had definitively altered the way the game was being played.

Thus, baseball deserves the bad ink it will get, and this will increase in future Decembers when the likes of Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa appear on the ballot. Unlike Raffy’s, the cases against those guys are circumstantial, but that only ensures a livelier and seamier debate. Swell, huh?

In case you haven’t figured it out, I won’t be making Palmeiro one of my 10 permissible Hall choices in this or probably any other year. Ditto for 17 of the other first-timers, most of whom won’t be admitted to the Cooperstown, N.Y., shrine without a ticket. I gave serious attention to just four of them—Jeff Bagwell, John Franco, John Olerud and Larry Walker—and voted only for the relief-pitcher Franco, whose 424 career saves are fourth all-time and first among left handers. Also in Franco’s favor was his 1.88 earned run average and 2-0 record in 15 post-season appearances, all with the Mets, and the fact that he didn’t allow an earned run in four appearances in the 2000 World Series, the only one in which he competed. The guy got ‘em out when it counted.

The other players I’m voting for I’ve also supported in the past. Roberto Alomar, the best second-baseman of his era (1988-2004), came within a few votes of being elected as a first-timer last year, and probably would have been if not for the 1996 incident in which he spit on umpire John Hirschbeck during a home-plate dispute. He and Hirschbeck made up soon afterward, and the year’s delay in Alomar’s election seems more than adequate further penance.

Also likely to be elected with my help, in his 14th year (of a permissible 15) on the writers’ ballot, is Bert Blyleven, the old Twins’ pitcher. A fellow who was good but not great for most of a very long time (22 seasons), Blyleven was an acquired taste for me, but I finally decided that his 3,701 career strikeouts, fifth on the all-time list, was an achievement worthy of honor, not to mention his 287 victories.

I’m partial to shortstops, who usually are the best athletes on any baseball field, and voted for two of them--the Tigers’ Alan Trammell and the Reds’ Barry Larkin. Both excelled at the plate as well as at their demanding position.

I voted for Edgar Martinez, the longtime designated hitter; even though I’m not crazy about the DH, it’s here to stay and nobody ever handled it better than he. I voted for Lee Smith, a dominant reliever with several teams over 18 seasons

My last choice wasn’t last in any other sense. He’s Jack Morris, the right-handed pitcher, and I can’t figure out why he’s never been mentioned on more than last year’s 52% of the ballots in his 11 years up for election. (It takes 75% to get in.)

Morris won 254 games in his 18 seasons (1977-94) and his 58% victory record has few betters. Even though he pitched at a time when quick hooks were coming into vogue, he completed 175 of his 527 starts. His 162 wins were the most for any Major League pitcher during the 1980s. He was great for the Tigers in the 1984 World Series and better yet for the Twins in their epic victory over the Braves in the 1991 event.

He had one of baseball’s best mustaches, ever. Even though he was from Minnesota, the Coen brothers could have cast him in “True Grit.”

Who could ask for more?

LeBOO

2010-12-01T06:18:00.001-08:00

The parsons of the press box have been working overtime of late, raising weighty questions that impinge upon our enjoyment of the world of fun and games.

How, for instance, should we regard the renewed gridiron brilliance of Michael Vick, the quarterback notorious for his crimes against the canine species? Should we cringe at the prospect of an ex-con becoming an NFL MVP, as do some ink-stained moralists?

Does Tiger Woods’ dismal play over the past year reflect divine retribution for his taste in women? And how about Brett Favre, the renowned good guy and family man --a grandfather, for heaven’s sake!-- propositioning a female New York Jets’ employee during his 2008 season in the Big Apple? Should it at least cost him a jeans’ commercial?

During my columnizing days I took a pass on most such issues, partly because my newspaper generally ignored transgressions of the flesh and partly because I had few illusions about the character of many of the men whose athletic exploits we follow. On an aesthetic level, I have no problem separating the art from the artist and can, say, enjoy a Wagner opera even though the composer was an anti-Jewish putz. Further, no one who has passed a stadium players’ entrance after a big-league game of any sort can doubt the sorry state of monogamy in jockland

However (there’s always a “however”), I confess to being intrigued about the low esteem in which the marvelously talented LeBron James has been held since his July decision to exercise his free-agent rights and, along with fellow free-agent Chris Bosh, jump from the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers to join already-there star Dwayne Wade with the Miami Heat.

Cheers used to follow LeBron wherever he went. Now boos do, and not just from the fans of the team he jilted. The outfit that publishes the “Q Score” popularity ratings puts him on its short list of most-disliked current-day athletes, right up there with the aforementioned Vick and Woods and the blatant me-first guys Terrell Owens and Chad Ochocinco, of football fame. James is a bonafide public enemy, and if he’s not No. 1 (Vick is) he’s close.

What’s up here, anyway? As far as I know, James has committed no crimes, and his domestic situation (two kids by his “girlfriend”) is par for the course among big-time athletes. If he’s been playing in the bimbo league his partners have yet to reveal themselves to the tabs.

The manner in which he announced his decision to change teams—on an over-hyped and overblown prime-time “special” on ESPN—certainly weighs against him, but he’s a young guy (he’ll turn 26 on Dec. 30) who’s never been to college, so I chalk that one up against his advisors, who should have known better.

Public statements surrounding his move fanned the flames. Cavs’ owner Dan Gilbert’s idiotic rant, in which he called the player “callous,” “selfish,” “heartless” and “cowardly,” among other things, fit into that category. So did James’ own assertion that he was moving primarily because he wanted “to be able to win championships.” Fact is, the Cavs were a good team for most of his seven-season tenure in Cleveland, and made the NBA finals in 2007, so he just as well could have accomplished that by staying. If he’d merely said “Where would you rather work—Miami or Cleveland?” he would have gotten a laugh, and some sympathy.

James has opined that his race has been a factor in the reaction against him, and he’s right—it always is in such matters. But he also was black when he was lionized. The mediocre play of the James-Wade-Bosh Heat has subjected him to criticism, but that followed the furor over his signing and, thus, couldn’t have contributed to it.

Alas for LeBron, his sin isn’t in any book, or easily atoned. It’s against our sense of fandom and taps the unease many have felt since the advent of player free agency. Most of us root for the teams we do for reasons beyond reason or, sometimes, even understanding. Fairly early in life we form an attachment to a team, usually one based in or near a city where we live, and that’s it—we’re stuck with it forever. We can no more change it than we can our skin color, shoe size or other intrinsic attribute. Perversely, failure can strengthen the bond; otherwise, no one would be a Cubs’ fan.

Our allegiance is to the name on our team’s jerseys, not to the players who wear them, and it can blind us to the inequities our team sports perpetrate in the name of competitive balance. If when we left college we’d been told we’d been drafted by, say, a newspaper or accounting firm in Fargo, ND, and had to work for it for several years before thinking of going elsewhere, we’d have called a lawyer, but we smilingly accept it when jocks are so treated.

It’s OK for teams to trade players, whether or not they want to be traded. It’s also OK for the New York Yankees to flex their wallet and sign just about anyone they desire; that’s what teams do and we only wish ours could. But woe be unto the player who picks the team he wants to play for and –horrors!—persuades another good player to join him. Where does he get off doing that?

I mean, it’s downright UnAmerican!

Well, it should be.

HOLIDAY NOTE—‘Tis the season for giving gifts, and I have a recommendation for some really nifty ones. They’re my books in the “For the Love of…” series, published by Triumph Books, wonderfully illustrated by Mark Anderson and suitable for fans of all ages. Titles include the baseball Cubs, Yanks, Mets, Red Sox, Cardinals and Tigers, baseball Hall of Famers, golfing greats, the Green Bay Packers, Ohio State Buckeyes and Georgia Bulldogs. To check them out, click on the Triumph Books or amazon.com links above.

FALL BALL

2010-11-14T20:56:00.000-08:00

The Valley of the Sun, which is what Chamber of Commerce types like to call the Phoenix area, has four seasons like most other places, but they’re different from those elsewhere.

Early Summer is the March-April period, when daytime-high temperatures start in the 70s and end in the 90s. It’s our equivalent of spring. Real Summer begins in May and lasts through September. It starts hot and gets hotter, with the later months featuring uncomfortably high humidity (carried on southern winds) as well as daily triple-digit readings. Except for sun-deprived Northern Europeans, visitors generally stay away during these months, and Phoenicians who can head out.

Late Summer is October and November, during which daily highs fall from the 90s to the 70s—the opposite of Early Summer. Winter, as it were, is December, January and February-- highs in the 60s, lows in the 40s. It’s really cold at this time Up North, so it’s the main tourist season. You can spot the outlanders because they wear shorts and t-shirts, while the locals have their parkas on, zipped up.

Late Summer is my favorite season. The air is dry, the sky is blue and while it’s warm the sting has gone out of the heat. Better, it’s time for Arizona Fall League baseball. From early October until late-middle November, young professional players cavort in the spring-training ballparks around the area in a kind of pick-up league with nothing at stake except the day’s final score and (of course) their individual stats. It’s baseball at its purist, shorn of the hassle and hype that surround the diamond sport during regular-season hostilities.

If you follow this space you probably know the Fall League’s nuts and bolts, but I’ll zip through them anyway. Six teams, each with 35-man rosters, play 32-game schedules. Each of the 30 Major League clubs chips in seven promising players, mostly Class-A or –AAers but with a few AAAs and young Major Leaguers in need of innings added for good measure.

Tickets are cheap-- $6 for adults and $5 for seniors—and you can park right in front of the stadiums, free. Attendance usually runs between 200 and 300 people a game. This includes about 50 scouts, a dozen or so predatory baseball-card-autograph seekers and about the same number of players’ girl friends, who add charm to the proceedings. Most of the rest are retired guys like me, with nothing better to do.

It’s a great scene. You can sit where you want and spread out into adjoining seats and rows. If you’d like to share your opinions with the players, umpires and other fans, just raise your voice a notch. Indeed, the audience is part of the show, especially Superfan Susan, a solid, 50ish blonde who regularly sits behind the Scottsdale Scorpions’ dugout and, in a high-decibel baritone, pours praise upon the Scorps with cries like “UNBELIEVABLE!” “AWESOME!” “OUTSTANDING!” and “BEST IN THE UNIVERSE!”

She does the same thing during the regular season at Diamondbacks’ home games. Some people smirk at her antics, but I smile because she’s always upbeat and so obviously pleased with herself.

The real fun at Fall League games is talent-scouting, something most of us fans think we’re pretty good at. Most of the players are in the 21-to-24-year-old age range, and two or three years from the Bigs, but most seasons a few are such standouts that it doesn’t take a Paul Krichell to see that they’ll excel On High, and soon. In that category of late have been the Tampa Bay Rays’ third-baseman Evan Longoria, Atlanta Braves’ pitcher Tommy Hanson, Chicago Cubs’ shortstop Starlin Castro and Washington Nationals’ pitcher Stephen Strasburg.

This year the main focus of attention has been on Bryce Harper, the Nevadan who, as the top choice in last June’s draft, commanded a five-year, $9.9 million contract from the Nationals. At 18 years old he’s the second-youngest Fall Leaguer ever, and has done only part-time duty with the Scorpions, but I saw him play Wednesday afternoon in front of a larger-than-usual crowd in the Peoria ballpark. He went 2-for-5 at the plate, with the two hits being triples, one to right field and the other to left-center. Moreover, his cannon throw from deep right field to third base trying to catch a tagging runner drew oooohs even though its target slid in safely.

At 6-foot-3 and 225 pounds Harper is a big boy, and has a powerful, left-handed batting swing. He’ll probably start next season at Class A and not be brought to the big club until 2012, earliest. Still, it’s easy to see what the Nats, et al, saw in him.

There are other good-looking prospects here, although none has shone as brightly as the young men listed above. Ben Revere is a little (5-9, 175) outfielder from the Minnesota Twins chain who can hit some and run a lot. Brandon Belt, a 6-foot-5 first-baseman belonging to the San Francisco Giants, hits for power and has a great baseball name.

The Chicago White Sox have a quick, switch-hitting Venezuelan shortstop named Eduardo Escobar who can do it all; he went 3-for-5 with a couple of doubles when I saw him the other day, and his two outs were hard hit. Brandon Barnes, an outfielder in the Houston Astros’ system, last week hit a home run that cleared a 30-foot-high centerfield backdrop 410 feet from home plate, a drive than had to measure at least 440 feet end to end. Yeah, the wind was blowing out, but the blast still was Mantlesque..

That’s the great thing about baseball-- you never know what you’ll see when you go to a game. Early Summer, Real Summer or Late Summer.

WONDER WOMAN

2010-11-01T06:48:00.000-07:00

So much of the high-level sports competition we watch is extraordinary that we come to expect it and often don’t remark about it when it happens. That’s why I want to tip you off about a coming event that’s sure to produce something truly memorable.

I refer to the Breeders Cup Classic, the annual highlight of Saturday’s Breeders Cup card that’s regarded as the world’s championship of Thoroughbred horse racing. In the field will be Zenyatta, a 6-year-old bay mare who’ll be trying to repeat her winning performance in last year’s race. She’s undefeated in 19 career starts, an unprecedented achievement. Saturday’s outing is likely to be her last, and your last chance to see her in action. Better do it while you can.

A heads-up is necessary because, these days, horse racing gets about as much Sports Center time or sports-page ink as volleyball or water polo. ‘Twasn’t always so; in the first half of the last century the erstwhile Sport of Kings ranked with baseball and boxing as America’s favorite sporting interests.

You might be interested to know that this nation’s first sports superstar was equine, not human. Dan Patch, a record-setting pacer (a horse that pulls a buggy), wowed ‘em on the state-fair circuit in the first decade of the 1900s, regularly drawing paying crowds of upwards of 100,000 people for his races. Tens of thousands of folks would come just to watch him work out. Products were named after him, starting with things like animal feed and harness and branching into cigarettes, chewing tobacco, a soft drink and a washing machine, among other items. “The Great” Dan’s owners were said to have reaped some $13 million from him before he died in 1916, a barn-full of money in those days.

In today’s urban society, of course, one rarely encounters horses, and being a serious fan of their endeavors is the sort of scholarly pursuit that’s no longer in vogue. I’m a Saturday regular at the horse book at Turf Paradise race track in Phoenix, and, at 72, I think I bring down the average age of the clientele. It’s occurred to me that in 15 or so years just about all of us will be gone, and few replacements are in sight.

But you don’t have to be a Racing Form nerd to appreciate Zenyatta. For starts, her perfect record is unmatched in racing’s long history, the closest to it being Man o’ War’s 20 wins in 21 starts during his brief, long-ago career (1919-20). By contrast, Citation, another contender for greatest-ever honors, was 32 of 45, Secretariat was 16 of 21 and the late-blooming Seabiscuit was 33 of 88. Furthermore, 14 of Zenyatta’s wins have come at the Grade I level, the sports highest. That’s a record for fillies and mares (a filly becomes a mare, and a colt a horse, at age 5), as are her lifetime earnings of $6.4 million.

Zenyatta’s sex also plays a role in her singularity. Unlike in humans, physiological differences between male and female horses for purposes of running aren’t great, and, indeed, Zenyatta is both taller and heavier than was the famously muscular Secretariat. But while it’s not unheard of for a gal to beat the guys in horse-racing classics, it is highly unusual. For instance, only 39 fillies have started in the Kentucky Derby’s 136 runnings, and just three have won, the last being Winning Colors in 1988. Similarly, Zenyatta’s victory in last year’s Breeders Cup Classic was the first for her sex since the event was inaugurated in 1984.

Lastly, Zenyatta’s running style is the sort most people love to watch. She’ll trail the field most of the way, seemingly out of it, then charge down the home stretch to pass all and sundry. Her 2009 Breeders Cup win, against an otherwise all-male (and quite accomplished) field, fit this mold. Check it out on web video; I get a chill every time I see it.

It wouldn’t be a racing story without a screw-up element, and this one’s is large. Last year’s racing co-sensation was another freakishly fast female, the filly Rachel Alexandra. She beat top-flight colts several times en route to a triumphant season that culminated with her edging Zenyatta in Horse-of-the-Year voting. Rachel’s owners, however, ended her campaign before the Breeders Cup, so the two didn’t meet.

A Zenyatta-Rachel match race this year would have drawn a national and even worldwide spotlight racing sorely needs and rarely gets. Unfortunately, but typically, the doofusses who run the sport couldn’t or wouldn’t make it happen. Rachel returned to the track but never quite matched her 2009 form and wound up being retired in September, still never having faced Zenyatta..

So the best we can do is watch Zenyatta take on the boys again in Saturday’s Classic, with a total purse of $5 million at stake, but that’s okay. History will be made, and you should take the opportunity to be there, if only via TV.

Don’t wait for the movie.

HELP WANTED

2010-10-14T20:46:00.000-07:00

There are, the joke goes, three things every man thinks he can do better than anyone else: build a fire, run a restaurant and manage a baseball team. I’m not sure about the truth of the first two of those, but the last is beyond dispute.

Just about all of us guys have played baseball at some point in our lives, and feel that the knowledge gleaned thereby transfers easily to the highest level of the game. Silly as that sounds, the repeated evidence of our senses makes it plausible. Again and again we sit before our TV screens, urging our team’s manager to do or not do something, then see him come to grief when he goes against our wishes.

That’s particularly true if you’re a Cubs’ fan, by the way.

Now, it seems, we might get our chance to prove our mettle. No less than 10 Major League teams have had managerial openings since the recent end of the regular season, and while three have been filled (by the Dodgers, Diamondbacks and Braves), seven remain—with the Cubs, Mets, Brewers, Pirates, Mariners, Blue Jays and Marlins—and more could follow. That’s quite a help-wanted list in these job-tight days, and if the lineup of applicants is long it’s surely no longer than that for many less-interesting positions.

Go ahead and send in your application. It couldn’t hurt.

Don’t feel deterred by a lack of baseball smarts, because they’re more common that you might think. Plenty of people inside and outside the professional game know full well when to bunt, steal, hit and run, squeeze, pitch out, change pitchers and do all the other managerial stuff, even the super-difficult double-switch. Most of us easily can do what the ex-pitcher Bill Lee considered the job’s most-frequent duties, namely “sitting on your ass, spitting tobacco and nodding at stupid things.”

Managerial candidates need some positive attributes, of course. One is locker room “cred,” which is helpful in gaining players’ attention. A common way to get this is by having had a good Major League playing career. Two of the fellas who’ve landed managerial jobs of late—Kirk Gibson with the Diamondbacks and Don Mattingly with the Dodgers— qualify on that ground.

But there are other roads to the same destination. Baseball’s is a male society where physical strength and pugnacity are respected, and some of the best managers of yore could go nose-to-nose with players 30 years their junior and not come off second best. Walter Alston, Chuck Tanner, Ralph Houk and Frank Robinson were said to excel in that category, as does the Angels’ Mike Scioscia among present-day skippers.

Billy Martin was in a class by himself here. “A lot of people looked up to Billy. That’s because he’d just knocked them down,” noted Jim Bouton, the ex-Yankee pitcher and author.

If you’re a little guy, nastiness can fill the same purpose. “He cussed so awful last year I didn’t want to sit next to him,” Orioles’ pitcher Scott McGregor once said of his famously diminutive and cantankerous manager, Earl Weaver. “The Lord was going to strike him dead if he kept talking like that and I didn’t want to be there when it happened.”

Communications skills help, too, but not in the usual business way. A manager may have wisdom to impart but conveying it to players whose minds are likely to be elsewhere can be difficult. This was true back in The Great McGraw’s day. “One per cent of ballplayers are leaders of men,” he lamented. “The other 99 per cent are followers of women.” Decades later Mayo Smith averred, “Open up a ballplayer’s head and you know what you’d find? A lot of little broads and a jazz band.”

Substitute “rock band” and you’re right up to date.

One thing some players have no trouble concentrating on is their manager, and why they don’t like him. This requires manipulative skill on his part. “The secret to managing a club is to keep the five players who hate you away from the five who are undecided,” Casey Stengel said.

Like in any field, a manager has bosses who must be placated. “Me and my owners think exactly alike,” Jim Fregosi said. “Whatever they’re thinking, that’s what I’m thinking.” Support from your team’s fans can’t be expected; as the football coach Duffy Daugherty put it, “Coaches are responsible to an irresponsible public.”

You live or die not by your own efforts but by those of others. Job security hardly exists--“If you’re looking for job security, drive a mail truck,” said Alvin Dark—and even relative success is no guarantee of continued employment. “They get tired of seeing you. Really, that’s all it is,” said Sparky Anderson.

Still want the job? Sure you do, so you’d better hurry. The line forms on the left.

DEREK, TYLER AND JAMOOK

2010-10-01T07:19:00.000-07:00

NEWS—Derek Jeter fakes being hit by a pitch. Gets away with it!

VIEWS-- On September 16, in a road game against the Tampa Bay Rays, Ray’s pitcher Chad Qualls threw inside to the New York Yankees’ Jeter, who spun away from the plate as though the ball had struck him. He was awarded first base by umpire Lance Barksdale.

Videos clearly showed that it was Jeter’s bat that was struck, not his person. Jeter later admitted as much. An uproar ensued, partly because of Jeter’s good-guy reputation and partly because Jeter rhymes so nicely with “cheater.” One website I saw took a poll and 57.5% of those responding said they thought the Yankee captain had sinned, while the rest thought that his “acting” was a legitimate part of baseball.

As usual, the majority is wrong. Getting away with what you can, and pretending to be in the right no matter what the circumstances, are time-honored parts of all our major team sports. While golfers and tennis players descend from a “gentlemanly” tradition and are expected to call fouls on themselves, the base runner who, say, knows he was tagged out but still is called “safe” while advancing would risk his teammates’ scorn and an umpire’s rebuke should he offer an immediate confession.

That’s okay because sports are considered to be little worlds unto themselves, subject to their own customs, and as long as no one gets hurt one should be able to follow them without being seen as dishonorable in the society at large. Remember that the team-sport model—not golf’s and tennis’s—prevails in the broader community. When’s the last time you sent the state a check because you found yourself speeding and no cop was around to ticket you?

NEWS—The Chicago Cubs’ Tyler Colvin is hospitalized after being speared by a piece of a teammate’s broken maple bat while on the third-base line. Baseball continues to “study” the bats issue.

VIEWS—Bats have been exploding all over the Major Leagues since maple, shorter-grained and more brittle than traditional ash, became the game’s wood of choice a decade or so ago. Flying-bat injuries have been numerous, including ones to fans, umpires and coaches as well as players. Several of them have been scary but none more so than Colvin’s, with the bat splinter puncturing his left upper chest and threatening to pierce his lung. He was released from the hospital three days after the September 20 incident in Miami, but the rookie’s season was declared over.

Baseball’s response was the same as it’s always been--“we’re studying it.” That’s what it says when it wants to wish a problem away. Truth is, the players union is as much to blame as the commissioner’s office, because many of its members like maple bats’ combination of hardness and light weight. That’s the same sort of shortsightedness the union displayed for all the years it opposed steroids’ testing on privacy rounds, forcing players to make the Faustian choice of endangering their long-term health for the short-term performance gains steroids can bring.

A few inches up and Colvin might have caught the projectile in his neck. A few inches down and it might have found his heart. Alas, it looks like that’s what it will take to get baseball’s head out of the sand on this one.

NEWS—The Arizona Diamondback’s Mark Reynolds could be the first every-day player whose strikeout number is higher than his batting average for a season.

VIEWS-- Reynolds, the D’Backs’ third baseman, has been my least-favorite ballplayer these past few seasons. That’s partly because he epitomizes the careless, swing-for-the-fences ethos that infects many players today. Just as bad, when he’s asked about his proclivity to whiff, he answers with a rhetorical shrug. That’s his style, he says, in effect. Live with it.

The D’Backs do because he hits more home runs than most, but while power hitters often strike out a lot the not untalented but muscle-headed Mark has taken the negative side of the equation to new heights, or depths. In the 107 years that began the modern game, no player ever struck out 200 or more times in a season. Reynolds did it with 204 in 2008, his first full year up, then upped his record to 223 the next season. So far this year he’s fanned 208 times, bringing his career total to 764 in 2,238 total times at bat. That’s an atrocious once every 2.9 trips.

And while he’s hit 32 home runs this season, his current batting average is.198. That’s below .200-- the so-called Mendoza Line which is the game’s bench mark for ineptitude. It’s named for Mario Mendoza, the utility infielder who dipped below it several times in his nine seasons (1974-82) with Pittsburgh, Seattle or Texas. But Mendoza made his living with his glove, while Reynolds, erratic afield, can’t claim distinction there.

About the only ameliorating factor for Reynolds is that many of his teammates are almost as bad as he is. Five of them have more than 100 Ks so far this season, and with 1,495 of them all told as of yesterday the D’Backs already have set an all-time team swish record, by about a furlong. Strung together that’s enough outs for 55 complete games—more than one-third of a season-- without making contact.

This week the genius who covers the D’Backs for the Arizona Republic did a piece seeking the reasons for their last-place divisional standing and 95 losses to date. He concluded, with player quotes for support, that a “losing mentality” was to blame.

Losing mentality? Maybe, but hitting the ball more often wouldn’t have hurt.

HEARING VOICES

2010-09-15T07:22:00.000-07:00

One of the good things about life these days (the list is shrinking) is Major League Baseball’s Extra Innings package, which for $160 puts on my cable-TV menu just about every ballgame that’s televised anywhere-- more than 2,000 over the course of a season.

That works out to about 12 cents a game, a bargain by any measure. While my viewing is heavily tilted towards the Chicago Cubs and White Sox, my 1 and 1A favorite teams, I’ll sometimes skip around of an evening, watching a couple innings of this contest and a couple of that. That’s particularly true at this time of year, when the pennant and wild-card races are being decided. It puts me into baseball in a way that’s not possible otherwise, something for which I’m grateful.

Extra Innings also has enabled me to listen to most of the broadcasters of the day, a mixed blessing. I’m sorry to report that the state of their art is less than brilliant, consisting mostly of generic TV voices, unreflective homerism and incessant complaining about how the umpires are screwing the broadcasters’ teams. If I didn’t watch most games with half an eye, depending on the broadcasters’ vocal inflections to determine when to look up from my crossword puzzles, I’d turn off the sound altogether.

Part of my problem with today’s baseball voices no doubt stems from my being spoiled in that regard early in life. The first games I heard, on radio, were described by Bert Wilson, the Cubs’ announcer of the 1940s and early ‘50s. Wilson was a blatant homer whose signature line was “I don’t care who wins as long as it’s the Cubs,” but that was okay with my pre-teen and teen selves, which saw baseball just that way. Wilson died of a heart attack while still in his prime, something I blame on the frustrations of having to watch the terrible Cub teams of his later years. I still mourn him.

In 1955, the year of poor Bert’s demise, I went off to college at the U. of Illinois in downstate Champaign-Urbana. There, on St. Louis station KMOX, I was introduced to the jolly, raspy voice of Harry Caray, then the Cardinals’ broadcaster. I hated it when he mouthed the gloating line “the Cardinals are coming tra-la, tra-la” when the Redbirds surged, but came to love him in similar poses in Chicago, both with the White Sox (1971 –81) and Cubs, for whom he held forth from 1982 until his death in 1998.

Harry also was a homer, but his favoritism was that of a fan, not a shill; nothing quite matched the derision in his voice when he’d say “Heeeee popped it up!” after a Cub or Sox player failed with runners in scoring position. He exuded bonhomie, and, after spending an evening with him on Rush Street in the ‘80s, I can attest it was no pose. I also can tell you that his drink of choice was scotch and soda, not the beer he was paid to hawk.

I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1961 and ’62, when Ernie Harwell was breaking in as the Detroit Tigers’ voice. No one made baseball sound friendlier or more welcoming.

I worked in Pittsburgh from 1963 until mid-1966, where I got to listen to the great Bob Prince. No one made baseball more fun than “The Gunner,” so nicknamed not for any rapid-fire delivery, as many supposed, but because an irate husband once approached him weapon in hand while Prince was chatting up the guy’s wife in a bar. I could do a whole column on Prince. Maybe someday I will.

I lived in New York from mid 1966 into '69 and loved it when Phil Rizzuto would get so wrapped up in one of his goofy stories that he’d miss entire half-innings of the Yankees’ games he called. Rizzuto made scorekeeping history with his notation “ww”—for “wasn’t watching”— which he used for players’ turns at bat he missed.

Next to those giants, most of today’s broadcasters look small. You can’t tell one from another from their voices, their homerism grates rather than amuses, and if you removed the words “incredible” and “unbelievable” from their vocabularies, they hardly could speak. The other day I was watching a Detroit telecast of a Tigers-White Sox game when, in the drowsy second inning of a 0-0 game, Tiger pitcher Max Scherzer slipped a slider past a Sox hitter for a called second strike. “What a pitch! Unbelievable!” cried the Tigers’ announcer, Mario Impemba. “Wow!” chimed in his sidekick, Dan Dickerson.

“Unbelievable!” and “Wow!” for a strike two in a nothing situation? What do those jokers say when something really exceptional happens? Would they know it if they saw it?

This is not to say that all of today’s broadcasters, uh, suck. Jon Miller, who does the San Francisco Giants’ and ESPN national games, is concise and witty, and a nice counterpoint to his peevish ESPN partner, ex-player Joe Morgan. The L.A. Dodgers’ Vin Scully does a radio broadcast on TV but brings it off with his fine phrasing and elocution. The New York Mets’ Ron Darling is an able analyst, destined for bigger things on the tube

Far and away the most-interesting guy out there, though, is Ken Harrelson, the White Sox’s voice for most of the last 30 years. I have to admit that “The Hawk” is an acquired taste. He’s an awful umpiring whiner and was something of a bully with previous broadcasting partners Tom Paciorek and Darrin Jackson, although his present sidekick, the astute and acerbic Steve Stone, doesn’t let him get away with that. Every other word out of Harrelson’s mouth is a catch-phrase; how many “duck snorts” or “chopper two-hoppers” can you take in a nine-inning game, dadgummit?

Yet much of his shtick is funny and his enthusiasm for the game is infectious. One Saturday afternoon last month I was in a South Lake Tahoe sports book, playing the horses, while an Oakland A’s- Tampa Bay Rays game was running in an adjacent TV lounge. An A’s player hit a home run and two young men—apparently locals in a town that roots for Bay Area teams—arose as one and emitted Hawk’s signature cry, “You can put it on the board, YES!”

I had to laugh, as did everyone else within earshot. And you don’t often see such lines migrate in this era of parochial tastes and interests.

RICKY FOR THE HEISMAN

2010-09-01T07:59:00.000-07:00

I’ve never paid much attention to the awarding of the Heisman Trophy, given to the young man voted best college football player for a particular season. Begun in 1935 as an exercise in self-promotion by the Downtown Athletic Club, a now-defunct Manhattan men’s club, it honors individual performance in the quintessential team sport, and is more a product of hype than anything else.

Like many things in our culture, it’s gotten more objectionable as it’s gotten bigger, with the ESPN program that announces its awarding resembling nothing so much as a cheesy game show (“And the winner is….”). Caring who gets it is a sure sign that something’s lacking in your life.

However (and you knew there’d be a “however”), I have a candidate for this year’s award-- Ricky Dobbs of Navy. Not only was he the best and most exciting collegiate player I saw last season, and promises to be that again this year, but there’s every reason to believe that he’s an actual student at a university that exists for reasons other than fielding a football team. If those things eliminate him from consideration by the actual electors, so be it. I’d rather lose with Ricky than win with a more-conventional candidate from some Enormous State U.

The Heisman is about football, so a few words about Mr. Dobbs’ qualifications in that activity are in order. He’s a quarterback, the right position for the award (almost all the winners have been QBs or running backs), but not a usual sort of one, just as Navy isn’t your typical big-time football team. It runs what’s called the triple-option offense, which is based more on deceiving opponents than overpowering them. That’s because Navy doesn’t field the dozens of stud-jock aspiring pros that some of its foes do.

In the triple-option, the quarterback (Ricky) gets the ball from center and then must decide whether to pass it, pitch or hand it off, or run with it himself. It’s a reaction call based on what the defense does, and thus requires decision-making skills as well as physical ones. In practice, Navy’s is a running offense, and last season, en route to a 10-4 won-lost mark, it ran the ball about eight times as often as it threw it, a most-unusual ratio. It depends on crafting long drives with 4-, 5- or 6-yard gains, thus controlling the ball and keeping foes’ offenses off the field.

That doesn’t sound very interesting, but it can be. The best college game I saw last year was Navy versus Missouri in the Texas Bowl. Navy thoroughly flummoxed lummoxy Missou, going through, around and over it for a 35-13 victory, with the bouncy Dobbs running for 166 yards, passing for 130 more and scoring three touchdowns. He scored 27 TDs over the season, a national record for quarterbacks. In other games against the big boys last season, he helped Navy beat Notre Dame and lose narrowly to Ohio State.

It’s remarkable in itself that Navy can compete with the likes of Missouri, ND and OSU. While athletes undoubtedly get preferred treatment for admission to the U.S. Naval Academy (as they also do at Ivy League and other schools that award no athletic scholarships, per se, but still field varsity teams), by all accounts they get no breaks once they’re there. Freshman year at Annapolis begins with seven grueling summer weeks of what amounts to basic training, and every midshipman (that’s what a student is called) has to complete a four-year course load heavy with math and the physical sciences in addition to military subjects.

School days begin with 6:30 a.m. reveille and end with lights out at 11 p.m. Uniforms are worn everywhere and there’s lots of marching and formations. Dorm rooms must meet white-glove neatness standards. (Yours did, too, right?) After graduation there’s a five-year service obligation that can involve getting shot at. You have to wonder how those guys keep their minds on football even part time.

If anyone can juggle multiple obligations, apparently it’s Ricky. Not only is he captain of this year’s Navy team—a signal honor-- he’s also vice-president of his senior class. In high school in his native Douglasville, Georgia, just west of Atlanta, his nickname was “The Mayor,” indicating an active and gregarious nature.

His Navy web-site biography notes that his birth date, January 31, 1988, was the day Doug Williams of the Washington Redskins became the first black quarterback to lead a team to a Super Bowl victory. Young Mr. Dobbs says he’d like to do that, too, once his Navy stint is ended, then go on to be president… of the United States.

The kid doesn’t make it easy on himself, does he? That alone deserves a trophy these days.

DECLINE AND FALL

2010-08-14T08:57:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago—when summer was starting—I prayed for an end to the Gulf oil-leak disaster. I reasoned that the daily gush of bad news it engendered was souring the national mood and preventing a return of some much-needed optimism.

Now the leak has been plugged, but the mood is no better. Alas, the hits to our pride just keep on coming.

Among the latest was relayed by the New York Times’ sports page last Sunday. The headline was innocuous enough--“New Strength Atop the PGA Tour”-- but the body of the story related how “international” players, meaning those from countries other than the U.S. of A, had won 17 of the first 34 tournaments on our leading golf circuit, an unprecedented number. It went on to note that “internationals” had captured two of the men’s sport’s first three majors, that 12 of the Tour’s top-30 players were Europeans against 10 Yanks, and that youth appeared to be on the side of the foreigners, portending future setbacks.

Ohmygosh, thought I. If we’ve lost golf, what’s left?

The news was especially bad because it signaled the end rather than the beginning of our surrender of the so-called “country club” sports to alien hordes. Middle-class America used to produce top-flight competitors galore in those polite activities, but, apparently, not so much any more. Arizona could pass a law to fix things—and probably will-- but it wouldn’t help. When, as the poet says, the center cannot hold, we’re in deep doo-doo.

Exhibit A in this regard is tennis, and has been for some time. Where Jimmy, John, Andre and Pete once ruled the men’s side of the sport, a Swiss (Roger Federererer) and a Spaniard (Rafael Nadal) now hold sway, with no end in sight to their reigns. Worse, no American was among the top 10 players in the latest ATP rankings for the first time since the measure was introduced 37 years ago. Andy Roddick was the top Yank at No. 11, and he’ll turn 28 in a couple of weeks, not a good thing in a young man’s game. Behind him are only Sam Querrey and John Isner, a couple of misplaced basketball players with little chance for “major” glory. The outlook isn’t brilliant.

Women’s tennis looks better, but only on the surface. The Williams sisters Venus and Serena (African-Americas and, thus, hardly typical country-club types) still are slugging it out successfully with the Olgas and Svetlanas in WTAland, but Venus turned 30 in June and Serena will be 29 next month, and age probably will mean the same thing to them that it does to Our Andy. Beyond Venus and Serena you have to drop all the way to No. 45 to find the next American in the rankings, and to No. 80 after that.

The best women golfers of this century’s first decade were Annika Sorenstam of Sweden and Lorena Ochoa of Mexico. Now, mostly South Koreans lead the pack. In the early years of the Asian influx a proposal made the rounds that LPGA Tour players be required to speak at least some English. That was shouted down as un-PC and the Tour decided to join rather than fight the trend. Once the LPGA was a just-about all-American affair. Now, 12 of its 27 events are played outside the U.S., and that number grows annually.

The internationalization of men’s golf also has been in progress for some time, but until this year it’s been obscured by the sport’s recent domination by Tiger Woods. Alas again, the bimbo eruption that punctured Our Tiger’s cherished cocoon of control has meant that he no longer can sink his putz (oops, putts) like he used to, and “internationals” have moved quickest to fill the void he left. Maybe Tiger can get his mojo back, maybe not. Meantime, the likes of Northern Ireland’s Graeme McDowell (June’s U.S. Open winner) and South Africa’s Louis Oosthuizen (the British Open champ) are thriving.

There’s no mystery about what’s going on here. Tennis and golf require access to expensive facilities and instruction, tying them to the better-off economically. Talent being spread about equally around the globe (as I believe it is), success thus goes to the youngsters in that group who commit early and put in the hours on the practice courts or tees that almost no one thinks of as fun. Our middle-class kids, with their multiple-choice lives, aren’t willing to put aside their video games and Blackberries long enough to do that. Unless or until that changes, we’d better get used to hearing other national anthems played on the “country-club” victory stands.

DUMB AND DUMBEST

2010-08-01T07:29:00.000-07:00

What’s the worst idea in sports? There are so many contenders it’s hard to know where to start.

There’s baseball’s designated-hitter rule, which alters the game’s time-honored rhythms in exchange for a few extra runs. There’s the tie-breaker process in soccer’s World Cup that has important games decided by the equivalent of a free-throw shooting contest. There’s the failure of three of tennis’s four “majors”—Wimbledon and the Australian and French Opens—to adopt the last-set tiebreaker, which led to the ludicrous 138-game set, three-day match in the last Wimbledon go-around. Murphy’s Law is as solid as Newton’s.

By me, though, the prize goes to the National Football League’s summer-training regimen, now gearing up in sweaty encampments around the land. It has the league’s behemoths slugging it out in four so-called pre-season games in preparation for its 16-game regular season. Football being the brutal game it is, the pre-season action insures that, at best, every team will enter for-real combat dinged in some way. At worst, it’ll lose a quarterback or other key player to injury, a loss that will, effectively, end its season before it begins.

The fervent prayer of every pro-football fan is that that last, inevitable outcome-- Murphy’s Law again-- happens to some other team, not his.

It doesn’t have to be that way. College teams, which have bigger rosters than their pro counterparts-- and, thus, require more winnowing-- get by fine without meaningless warmup contests, although big-time teams typically schedule a “cupcake” or two before getting down to serious business. The NFL pre-season schedule itself has varied in length, once stretching to six games before reverting to its present four in 1978.

Further, the evolution of professional sports generally has made any league’s final preparation period far less important than it used to be. Back in the day, when pros were part-timers, the notion of “getting in shape” for the season ahead had merit, but with today’s seven-figure average salaries jocks are jocks full-time, ready to go on short notice. The NFL’s off-season rookie camps, “mini-camps” and “voluntary” group-workout periods underline that broader trend. Class is in session year-around, and the coaches have good books on all their players.

Every sport has a large component of tradition, and—for reasons no one much ponders-- pro football’s dictates that summer training be as unpleasant as possible. Players are bused off to godawful places like Bourbonnais, Illinois, where they shoehorn their massive frames into tiny dorm rooms, bunk with room mates who have objectionable personal habits, and made to do hard physical labor in punishing heat.

If August is, indeed, the “dog days” month, the footballers are the dogs. It’s no wonder that players with a modicum of clout maneuver their contract signings so they’ll miss as much of summer camp as possible. That’s what Brett Favre’s annual will he-won’t he charade mostly is about.

You could, of course, preserve the sacred summer-camp-torture ritual without the pre-season games, but here is where economics come in. Even though each team’s two pre-season home outings don’t count, NFL owners charge their customers full price for them. They do it because they can—one of many things in that category.

The revenue thus obtained is what keeps the four-game pre-season intact despite good-sense considerations. There’s a move afoot to reduce the pre-season by two games but add them to the regular schedule, increasing it to 18 games. That wouldn’t help at all—the season is long enough to begin with, especially when a team can play as many as four playoff games.

The central fact about life in the NFL is that every player hurts starting with Game 1, pre-or regular-season. Without Advil or (much) stronger, the game could not exist. Sure, the players are volunteers, but they still need protection. The league last week finally ditched its flat-earth stance on head injuries by posting notices in its locker rooms recognizing their impact and urging players to report them immediately. But concussions aren’t the only way players wind up with serious, long-term health problems, and less football is the only remedy.

The NFL players’ union, traditionally as short sighted as its counterparts in other sports, should wake up and get behind this. A 16-game schedule without the pre-season wouldn’t be hard to put into effect because the owners could regain most of their lost revenues in the usual way, through higher ticket prices and TV-rights fees.

They do that almost every season anyway—just because they can. This time, for a change, it would be in a good cause.

MIND GAMES

2010-07-15T07:18:00.000-07:00

Watching the baseball All-Star Game Tuesday night, my mind wandered…back, back, back to the distant past, and another kind of All-Star game, one I played myself as a kid, lots of times.

This one was a board game—All-Star Baseball by Cadaco. It consisted mainly of a cardboard baseball diamond and a spinner, over which you placed a disc for each player in your lineup, in turn. The circle’s 360 degrees were divided into 15 or so parts, each representing an outcome for a time at bat. For example, “1” was a home run, “2” a groundout, “3” a base-on-error, “4” a fly out, and so on. You’d flick the spinner and record outs, base moves and runs as chance dictated. All the rules of baseball applied.

Described like that, it doesn’t sound like much of a game. It certainly wasn’t by the standards of today’s electronic marvels, which, I’m told, include “virtual” contests as vivid as the real things. Really, though, I remember the board game as captivating. On each disc was the name of a notable player, and its divisions conformed to his career batting statistics. When, say, you had the National League All-Stars, and Stan Musial was your batter, his chances of hitting a single, double, triple or home run—or making an out—were the same as they’d be in real life.

What’s more—and more important—when Stan was on your team, he was YOUR man. You could see him in the batter’s box, in his menacing, coiled stance, waiting like a cobra to strike at the next pitch. It was theater of the mind, a common exercise in those radio days, and at least as real as anything today’s computer mavens can produce.

Further interest could be gained by mixing lineups. Most of our games matched the then-current National League All Stars (circa 1948) against the Americans, but you could obtain discs from players of previous eras and use them as you chose. Thus, your first baseman could be Johnny Mize, and your centerfielder Ty Cobb. Or Tris Speaker. What talent at your call! What fun!

You’re only young once but you always can be immature, so I reached for pen and pad and began to jot my own All-Star lineups, unfettered by the calendar. The effort was a bit taxing because comparing players of different eras is difficult. I subscribe unreservedly to the idea that today’s baseball players—and other athletes—are better than those who went before. That’s because of advances in nutrition and exercise physiology, and because today’s high salaries enable jocks to be jocks—and train--- year around. But some of the old-timers could play in any era, and deserved attention.

My All-Star first basemen are Lou Gehrig for the American League and Albert Pujols for the Nationals. Gehrig is a BMT (before my time) guy, but his stats reveal a power hitter with few peers, and he was a real gent to boot. Still, I’d give the nod to Pujols, the game’s current monster, who averaged almost 40 homers a year in his first nine Big League seasons against higher-powered pitching than Gehrig faced. That last thing is what most distinguishes the current game from that of the past.

At second base I’d have old-timer Rogers Hornsby for the Nationals and Rod Carew for the Americans. Hornsby was the best right-handed hitter ever (with a lifetime average of .358), and can’t be ignored. Carew was a good glove and great singles guy, albeit not as good as Ichiro in the latter department. If Ichiro played second base I’d slot him here. Alas, he’s a right fielder, where the competition is tougher.

At third base I’d have Mike Schmidt for the Nationals and ARod for the Americans, edge to the latter. The steroids use of ARod and others muddies one’s judgment about some present-day stars, but we’re playing a board game here so I’ll shelve that issue for now. The NL shortstop would be Honus Wagner, the best player of the 1910s, with Cal Ripken for the AL’s, edge to Honus. If I were picking a team in the playground I’d choose Ozzie Smith, the best glove man ever, as my shortstop. But only hitting counts in the Cadaco game, so Wagner’s da man.

At catcher I’d have Johnny Bench for the NLs and Yogi Berra for the Americans, edge to Bench. My NL outfield would have Barry Bonds in left, Willie Mays in center and Hank Aaron in right. Their AL counterparts would be Ted Williams, Cobb and Babe Ruth. Edge to the AL, if only because of Ruth. He was the best baseball player ever, a great pitcher as well as a great hitter. His power numbers were astonishing for his time; in 1920, when he hit 54 home runs, the entire American League hit only 369. His contemporaries must have thought he was an alien.

Pitching didn’t count in the board game, but I picked some nonetheless: Walter Johnson for the AL and Warren Spahn for the Nationals. Johnson pitched before speed guns, but could hum ‘em anyway. “Something went by me that made me flinch,” said Cobb (who was not much given to complimenting foes) of his first at-bat against the young “Big Train.” Johnson won 417 games, with mostly mediocre Washington Senators’ teams, and finished an amazing 531 of his 666 career starts with a 2.17 ERA. ‘Nuf said.

Lefty Spahn never won a Big League game before age 25, but wound up winning 363 of them. I once shared a cart with him at a celebrity golf tournament and was charmed by his friendly manner and nonstop dumb jokes.

If you’d like to play the game I’ve outlined, or one of your own devising, you can; an Internet scan reveals that Cadaco (or someone) still is out there selling them. Some things, though, are better left to the imagination.

PUGS, SCRIBES AND BALLERS

2010-07-02T06:39:00.000-07:00

One of the best things about life these days is the website amazon.com. Through it you can order just about any book ever written, usually at prices well below those at which it originally was offered. Even some of my old books still are kicking around on it, one for as little as 69 cents. Shipping, of course, is extra.

I mention this not to promote my chestnuts but to recommend other books you may have missed the first time around. The joke has it that the shortest book ever was “Great Jewish Sports Heroes,” but any reputable list of sports books worth reading would be shorter yet. The four to follow belong on it, and in any proper sports-book library. Check them out on Amazon and you won’t be sorry

The first is Volume 1 of “Boxiana,” by Pierce Egan, one I’ll bet none of you has read. Egan-- born 1772, died 1849-- was perhaps the first modern sportswriter. His specialties were boxing and horse racing, the dominant sports of his day, but in writing about them he also chronicled the racy side of the London he knew, and with style and flair. Dickens was said to have been influenced by him. So was A.J. Leibling, whose great, later-day book on boxing, “The Sweet Science,” was in part a tribute to the Englishman who invented that phrase.

Many another common sports-page usage can be traced to Egan; remember that today’s cliché originally was thought to be brightly apt. He coined the adjective “game” to denote fortitude, a “set-to” was a fight, “stuff” meant skills, and a fighter who was knocked down was “floored.” Most people think the word “fan” is short for “fanatic,” but it ain’t. It stems from Egan’s milder word “fancier,” which he helpfully defined as “any person who is fond of a particular amusement.” In Egan’s prose, the fight crowd was “the fancy,” no matter how fanatical it might be.

“Boxiana” is a four-volume compilation, published between 1818 and 1824, but Vol. 1, at a hefty 497 pages in paperback, will give you an ample sample of Egan’s oeuvre. It’s worth perusing even though the pugilists he writes of are long forgotten.

The segue from the first sportswriter to the best moves us easily to Walter Wellesley Smith, known universally as “Red, ” whose prose graced American sports pages from 1928 until his death, at age 76, in 1982. Two excellent books recall him: “The Red Smith Reader” (Random House, 1982), and “Red; A Biography of Red Smith,” (Times Books, 1986), by Ira Berkow, a Smith colleague on the New York Times.

Should one first read the writer, or read about him? The former, probably. “Reader,” a collection of Smith’s columns, shows his range across the sports spectrum as well as the command of language and deft, lively touch that made his work stand out even in the part of the newspaper that gives writers their best showcase.

Unlike many of his colleagues past and present, Smith didn’t regard his subjects —or himself—with undo seriousness, and while he saw them warts and all he usually managed to find something likeable about them. In “Reader,” I recommend especially his piece on “Papa Bear” George Halas, which in about 1,000 words renders that profane, cheap, irascible, determined gent as roundly as others could in a book-length treatment.

It’s tough to write about writers because their work-a-day activity is anything but dramatic, but Berkow’s biography shows Red at work as well as could be done. Berkow was helped by the fact that few people have written or spoken as well or amusingly about writing as Smith.

“I’ve read about Flaubert rolling on the floor for three days, groping for the right word,” Smith said. “I haven’t rolled on the floor. I can’t afford three days. I’ll blow two deadlines if I do.” He joked on another occasion: “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.”

My last recommendation is a quite-different sort of work-- “Heaven is a Playground,” by Rick Telander, which I recently reread after a gap of 30-or-so years. Telander, now a Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist, was just out of Northwestern in the summer of 1974 when he took his pony tail, note pad, camera, tape recorder and middling jump shot to Foster Park in ghetto Brooklyn to hang with the teenaged hoopsters who frequented the place. The result was a portrait of the boys and their relationship to basketball that’s yet to be matched.

Despite its upbeat title, “Heaven” is a sad story. Telander’s playground kids may have been wise and tough in some ways, but they were remarkably naïve in others; even Manhattan, a 20-minute subway ride away under the East River, might as well have been in another country. Their lives were so circumscribed by their circumstances—and the expectations they engendered—that they saw basketball as their sole “way out,” and not much of a way at that. Telander emphasizes that point by interweaving their stories with those of such New York playground legends as “Fly” Williams, “Goat” Manigault and “Helicopter” Knowings, whose manifest talents were undermined by the chaos inside and around them.

Have things changed much at Foster Park and places like it since the book was published in 1976? Not for the better, I fear. From what I see and read, “hoops dreams” are as alluring now as they were then, while surer but less sparkly paths go untrod. One wishes that “Heaven” were out of date, but it doesn’t seem to be.

MORE NEWS AND VIEWS

2010-06-15T07:06:00.000-07:00

NEWS— Nebraska joins the Big 10, Colorado jumps to the PAC 10, other conference changes are predicted.

VIEWS—The tectonic plates of college sports are shifting again, promising a thoroughgoing change in the landscape. With Nebraska’s addition, the erstwhile Big 10 now has 12 teams, and could add more. Ditto for the PAC 10, which besides Colorado might expand further in the days ahead. The SEC also could grow, while the Big 12, the former domicile of the Huskers and Buffs, seems destined for the dust bin of history.

What’s up? Jim Delaney, the Big 10 commish, got off a good one when he said his league’s marriage with Nebraska was all about their shared “culture and values.” That’s like a guy saying he hooked up with Miss Universe because they both enjoy Bach. The addition increases the Big 10’s size to 12 schools, the threshold at which the NCAA permits a conference to split into divisions and stage a post-season football championship game. That’ll give member schools another big pay day at the gate plus whatever comes from the sale of TV rights to the event. Ditto again for the PAC-10.

Also—but not incidentally—expansion increases the range of the Big 10’s very own, round-the-clock TV sports network, which it launched in 2008. It’s been a bonanza for the conference’s members, adding a reported $20 million a year to the athletic-department coffers of each. That hasn’t escaped the notice of the other college major leagues—and, maybe, Texas all by itself--who are looking to also get into the TV business directly. That’s entertainment!

Will the jock-meisters cut in their English Department colleagues? Not likely. Big-time college sports always have been about sports, not college, and the trend only goes in one direction.

And a thought: At this writing the Big 10 has 12 members and the Big 12 has 10. Shouldn’t they switch names?

NEWS—Ben “Who, me?” Roethlisberger, quarterback and playboy, promises to change his ways.

VIEWS-- Big Ben’s so-called social life has twice earned headlines in the past couple of years, once resulting in a civil suit for sexual assault by a woman who worked in a Lake Tahoe hotel where he’d stayed, and more lately in a criminal rape investigation based on the complaint of a college student after her encounter with the footballer in a small-town Georgia bar. No indictment was brought in Georgia, and both women ultimately withdrew their charges, but we’re free to draw our own conclusions about why.

Anyway, Ben last week gave a brief press conference at the training center of his employer, the Pittsburgh Steelers, and while admitting to nothing said the fusses caused him to ponder his ways. He declared: “I’ve put a lot of thought into my life, the decisions I’ve made in the past. I’m evaluating what I need to do and be smarter when it comes to certain things.”

That’s cant at its best, or worst. A bad decision is what I made last week by fishing on the Wisconsin-Michigan border, freezing my butt and other parts in the rainy, 50-degree weather that can happen Way Up North in early June. Decisions that lead to rape charges are of an entirely different order. Ben’s moral compass—if he ever had one-- is broken. Nothing short of a year or so in the wilderness, complete with sack cloth, fasting and self-flagellation, seems apt to smarten him up.

NEWS—Blackhawks win the Stanley Cup!

VIEWS-- Normally I root for any team with the name “Chicago” on its jerseys, but I’ve long made an exception for the Blackhawks. That wasn’t always the case; I used to be a fan, and in the late 1960s and early ‘70s had a piece of a season ticket for their games. But that introduced me to Arthur Wirtz, the team’s greedy owner, and his yearly price increases on everything in or around its Chicago Stadium home made me spit out the tix.

When Wirtz let Bobby Hull, Chicago’s greatest-ever hockey star, jump to a new league rather than pay him a salary that quickly proved to be a pittance ($100,000 a year), I swore off the team for good. Later, when the National Hockey League turned its game into a punch line by winking at on-ice brawling, I said good riddance to the entire sport. As a columnist, I wrote about the NHL only to mock it and remark about how it had fallen while its seasonal rival, the NBA, flourished.

Wirtz died in 1983 and was succeeded by his son Bill, who was both greedy and dumb. Nicknamed “The Commodore” for his yachting interests, Bill let the team run down while finding new ways to alienate its fans. By the time he exited in 2007, the franchise was pretty much moribund.

Then Bill’s son Rocky took over. Maybe he’s really someone else’s son because he turned things around promptly, and this year’s Stanley Cup run resulted. I paid little attention to it until the playoffs, but once back in I became hooked and was quite pleased at the Hawks’ triumph. Still, when I hear that they now will win lots of Cups because their stars Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane are only 22 and 21 years old, respectively, I recall that Hull was 22 and his brilliant co-star Stan Mikita was 20 when the team last won the trophy in 1961, and they never got to hoist it again.

NEWS—World Cup gets underway.

VIEWS—It’s mostly been fine so far, with tight (albeit low-scoring) games and excellent TV coverage on ESPN and ABC. But what’s with those plastic horns the South Africans continuously blow? The games sound like they’re taking place in a hornets’ nest. Enough, already.

And I hope you noticed that son Michael correctly predicted the U.S.- England tie. That’s my boy!

THE ONE-SPORT OLYMPICS

2010-06-01T07:32:00.000-07:00

By Mike Klein

With the few non-artificial snowflakes of Vancouver 2010 having long since melted, it’s time to look at this year’s really most-important sporting event, the football World Cup beginning this month in South Africa.

The World Cup is a one-sport Super Olympics, eclipsing the O-Games’ disciplinary breadth with its unparalleled fan fervor and journalistic over-analysis, and the economic paralysis caused by the billions of people worldwide who will drop their tools for the duration of its 62 matches. Anyone who’s tried to hail a cab or buy a meal in any European or South American city when the national team is playing knows exactly what I mean.

I first became a football fan in 1982 in my native Chicago; I call the sport “football” because I now live in Europe and prefer to avoid the mockery associated with the use of the word “soccer” there. (When I lapse and call it “soccer,” the response is “saaahhhccer…that’s a girl’s game, isn’t it?” offered back in a flat, fake-American accent.)

Football wasn’t easy to see in Chicago circa ‘82—the World Cup was offered only in tape delay on a newly minted, Spanish-language UHF station with dismal reception. I didn’t have to wrap the antenna in foil but I did have to stay up until 2 a.m. to watch the likes of Irlanda del Norte and Corea del Sud. I vividly remember Italy’s Paolo Rossi, who was the event’s best player, and Argentina’s Jorge Burruchaga, who had the best name. (Forget about “goooooooooool!” Try“Buuuuuurrrrrrrrruuuuuuuuchaaagaaa!”)

I watched that World Cup on the basis of a Chicago Tribune sportswriter’s recommendation, following the U.S.’s biggest-ever international sports victory, the ice-hockey win over the USSR at the 1980 Winter Olympics. Wrote he: “Did you like the U.S.-USSR hockey game? Well, the World Cup is just like that. Every match.” I couldn’t pass on that. Still can’t.

In this World Cup, the U.S. will open its play with a potential “Herb Brooks moment” against England, a perennial power in the sport. (Brooks, for the uninitiated or non-American, was the coach of the Commie-beating hockey team of ‘80). The England match will be the U.S.’s first in its four-nation, round-robin group, the other two members being Slovenia and Algeria.

While most commentators think the U.S. will lose to England and beat Slovenia and Algeria, group play is extremely hard to predict. Part of this has to do with expectations; in countries where football is the only sport that matters, the main goal is to out-perform them, which usually means reaching the 16-team, single-elimination round. In 2002, Ireland came home to a parade for making the round of 16, while higher-touted England made the quarterfinals and returned to a sequestered section of an out-of-the way airfield.

This drives tactics. Underdog teams (i.e., most of the 32 in the field) typically play defensively, hoping to keep things close enough to luck out a low-scoring tie or victory. Sometimes it works: Greece, which is in the current field, managed to win the 2004 European Championships with an entirely defensive approach, conjuring up just enough goals to move through the tournament. Its example is not lost on other teams, particularly America’s group rival Slovenia, which has a similar roster makeup.

This World Cup won’t be all defense; there will be some spectacular players, the kind that people watch the sport to see. Brazil, as usual, reloads rather than rebuilds, and one could make up a viable Cup contender from the players it’s leaving behind. One such is the former World Player of the Year Ronaldinho, who didn’t merit a spot on its bench.

England’s Wayne Rooney, still nursing a dodgy ankle, is expected to be ready to contend for the “Golden Boot,” the award for most goals scored in a tournament, along with Argentina’s Lionel Messi, whose club team is Barcelona, and Ivory Coast and Chelsea’s Didier Drogba.

Little is expected of host South Africa, particularly after a deal to have Matt Damon come in and captain its team was scrubbed after Damon kept picking up the ball and running with it. Still, in a lackluster group with Uruguay, Mexico and long-in-tooth France, it could make the next round.

Here are a few other predictions:

1) U.S. Draws With England, Then Slips Against the Slovenes

Even in its dismal 2006 Cup showing the U.S. managed a draw against eventual-champion Italy. In a similar vein, the U.S. will do what it takes to get a point from England in their first match, shocking the American public. However, post-draw euphoria will be short-lived as tough, defensive-minded Slovenia grinds out a one-nil upset, sending the U.S. into an all-or-nothing match against Algeria, with Algeria carrying the vociferous support of the Arab and Muslim worlds.

2) D = Death

My vote for most competitive group is Group D, comprising Germany, Serbia, Ghana and Australia. While the Germans are favorited, they are a beatable side. Ghana is one of the best African teams and will have strong home-continent support, and the Serbians never have been known to lack fighting spirit. Further, Australia is a real wild card—indeed, one of the more interesting pre-tournament exhibition matches will be between Australia and the U.S.

3)The New Zealand All-Whites Will Become the Surprise Package

Australia’s defection to Asia for qualifying left New Zealand as the remaining “power” in the Oceania group, even though New Zealand had to go into a playoff with Bahrain for the last position on the World Cup table. Success in the playoff has the country in a frenzy for the “All-Whites” (in chromatic contrast to the country’s long-time rugby stalwarts, the All-Blacks), and an agreeable pairing with Slovakia and Paraguay, along with defending-champ Italy, puts NZ within a couple of good results of the second round.

4)Brazil Wins

Not an adventurous projection, I know, but there’s simply no one out there with the talent or consistency to be seen as a credible challenger to the Samba Kings. Of the 18 World Cups contested since 1930, Brazil has won five, and unless the unexpected occurs (and I hope it does), on July 11 it’ll win No. 6, beating Spain in the final.

NEWS, VIEWS

2010-05-15T07:51:00.000-07:00

NEWS: Arizona’s new anti-immigrant law jeopardizes the 2011 baseball All-Star Game for Phoenix, where I live.

VIEWS: After Obama won the presidency, Janet Napolitano, Arizona’s Democratic governor, abandoned the last two years of her second term to go to Washington to head the Homeland Security Department, turning the state’s government over to her Republican No. 2 and the Republican-controlled legislature. They’ve proceeded to enact their brand of right-wing sharia in the Grand Canyon State.

Most of the stuff they’ve done mainly affects Arizonans. Among other things, they’ve made it okay to pack guns—openly or concealed—just about anywhere without a permit, ordered the removal of the photo-radar cameras that have calmed traffic and saved lives on the state’s major highways, and filed lawsuits to block implementation of the new Federal health-care law.

They’ve also passed a law requiring local police to demand proof of citizenship or immigration documents from anyone whom they might “reasonably suspect” of being here illegally; having brown skin or speaking Spanish might qualify someone for such treatment. That one has caused an uproar in many precincts, accompanied by threats to boycott all things Arizona. This includes Arizona Iced Tea, which is made by a company based in New York.

In reality, the “show ID” law is political theater, pure and simple. A couple of years ago Arizona passed a law making it illegal to employ illegals, but hasn’t bothered to enforce it. The sheer number of people residing in the state without “papers” (an estimated 400,000 to 500,000, mostly from Mexico or elsewhere in Central American), long winked past the border to provide employers with a malleable work force for dirty or poor-paying jobs, precludes any serious enforcement of the latest statute. If such were attempted every restaurant in the Phoenix area would have to close.

Still, chest-pounding can have its price. It’s easy for people not to do something, and enough of them are deciding not to have any truck with Arizona to put a dent in the state’s tourist business, a pillar of its already-weak economy. This probably won’t include removal of baseball’s All-Star Game, but in a sport where some 30% of the players come from Hispanic countries and another sizeable chunk are U.S. citizens with Hispanic roots, a player boycott of some sort seems likely. At the least, it’s sure to keep the flap over the law, and its repercussions, in the news for the foreseeable future.

But y’all nice folks needn’t be put off, so come on down. Just remember to be armed (if you can’t get your guns through airport security you can buy ones here), carry your passport (especially if you’ve got a tan) and bring a crash helmet. And rest assured that we’re not all bigots—only 60%.

NEWS: John Calipari, who last year signed a long-term contract to coach basketball at the U. of Kentucky, has been mentioned in the whispers over who’ll be the next to coach the NBA Chicago Bulls or Philadelphia 76ers. This spurred Kentucky to reopen, and possibly sweeten, his pact there.

VIEWS: Calipari took his trail of recruiting slime to Lexington from his previous jobs at UMass and Memphis. His specialty is luring top-drawer phenoms who haven’t hit the NBA-mandated age of 19 for “one-and-done” college seasons that allow them to hone their hoops skills without being much troubled with academics (few schools flunk out anyone in just a year). For that he’s reportedly being paid $4 million a year, tops for the college-coach rat pack and probably more than the salaries of the math profs at all the Southeastern Conference schools combined.

But is he satisfied? Noooooo. He’ll likely pull the flirtation scam annually until he cuts loose from UK for greener pastures. And you know what? Kentucky is getting what it deserves.

NEWS: The Kentucky Derby is run in the rain with its favorite on the sidelines. And that’s not all.

VIEWS: The news for thoroughbred horse racing, my favorite participation sport (when you bet you participate), usually is bad, but lately it’s only gotten worse. Not only was Derby Day, the sport’s annual showcase, a soggy downer with the likely clear favorite Eskenderaya out with injury (for good, it turns out), but a potentially enormous future race now is in danger. That’s because of the mediocre performance so far this year of Rachel Alexander, the filly whose sensational 2009 campaign earned her Horse of the Year honors.

You may recall that the elegant Rachel won all eight of her starts last year, including victories over the boys in the important Preakness, Haskell and Woodward stakes. Those last feats, highly unusual in the equine world, earned her attention beyond the sport’s normal public. Wonder of wonders, so did the doughty filly (now mare; she’s turned 5) Zenyatta, who’s unbeaten in 16 career starts and put on maybe the best show in recent memory with her last-to-first run against the strongest possible male competition in the Breeders Cup Classic, the sport’s fall championship.

A Rachel-Zenyatta matchup—maybe in a prime-time, womano-a-womano format—would have turned the country on its ear, but Rachel has been beaten by other girls in her two 2010 outings (while Zenyatta has gone a triumphant 2-for-2), taking the shine off such a race. It’s possible that Rachel might regain her top form and allow a match to be staged, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards now. Woe is us.

BETTER BASEBALL

2010-05-01T06:46:00.000-07:00

Baseball changes about as frequently as the faces on Mt. Rushmore, but every once in a while it entertains ideas to improve itself, and this is one of those times.

Last December the Major Leagues formed a 14-member committee to tweak its format, including such diamond wisemen as Joe Torre, Tony LaRussa and Frank Robinson. The political columnist George Will also is involved. Will throws right but I’ve long thought highly of his intelligence, especially after he gave one of my books a generous blurb. His participation bodes well for the endeavor.

As you might expect, I, too, have pondered such issues, and have reached a few conclusions. Here they are, for the committee’s (and your) consideration:

STAY OFF THE MOUND; STAY IN THE BOX— A persistent criticism of baseball is that it’s too slow, and that its pace turns off the action-craving young. That’s in part unavoidable—it’s a waltz-time game in a hip-hop era—but it’s partly correctable, at least when it comes to clipping the no-action parts.

I’d start by eliminating trips to the pitcher’s mound by everyone—coaches, managers and other players—while an inning is in progress. What the heck can those guys tell a struggling pitcher, anyway: Settle down? Throw strikes? How to pitch to the next batter? If a pitcher is on a big-league mound he ought to be able to figure out those first two things for himself, and managers can deal with the next hitter by relaying pitch signs through the catcher, as they’re probably doing anyway. Furthermore, the pitcher is on the bench half the time (while his team bats), leaving more than ample opportunity for advice to be imparted.

Especially wasteful is the manager’s ritual trip to the mound to change pitchers; a simple call or wave from the dugout would accomplish the same thing quicker and spare us fans the sight of the likes of Lou Piniella hauling his huge gut across the foul lines. If managers stayed in the dugouts they wouldn’t have to wear uniforms, which make even the slimmer ones look silly.

The game also would lose irksome down time if, once in his box, a batter would be required to stay there until his turn is resolved. I guess he could step out with one foot while he tugs on his batting gloves, but umps could discourage this by calling strikes for excessive tugging. The gloves are merely affectations in the first place. Ted Williams never wore them, nor did anyone else until about 20 years ago, and batting averages haven’t improved with their use.

SHORTER REGULAR SEASONS; MORE PLAYOFFS; BALANCE THE LEAGUES-- Everyone agrees the 162-game regular season is too long, but reducing it would violate the first rule of any business, which is that you can’t make any money if the store isn’t open. I’d cut it to 148 or 150 games nonetheless, but balance that somewhat by qualifying 16 teams for the post-season, thus adding the extra layers of games needed to run the extended playoffs that would be sure to stir more excitement than the obligatory September exercises of teams going nowhere.

Taking two weeks off the schedule would allow the season to end around September 15. Add a month of playoffs and the World Series could conclude around October 15. That would reduce the chance of teams playing through snowflakes, as they’ve done with the present late-October, early-November Series finishes Up North. Abner Doubleday never intended that, I’m sure.

My expanded playoff format would work best with two16-team leagues divided into four divisions in each, instead of the current 16 (NL)-14 (AL) setup. Each divisional winner would qualify, along with the teams in each league with the next-four-best won-lost records. The asymmetrical setup we have is unfair to National League teams in general (each starts with a 1 in 16 chance of winning a pennant against 1 in 14 for each ALer) and to members of the NL Central Division in particular. There are six of them, meaning that each of their chances of winning a division title is about 9 percentage points worse than teams in the AL’s four-member Western Division. Whose idea was that?

Where should the two new teams be placed? Northern New Jersey could support one, and for the other I think the time might be ripe for a two-city franchise, maybe Las Vegas-Salt Lake City, Charlotte-Nashville or Indianapolis-Columbus. Hey, half a loaf is better than … well, you know.

I’ve got other ideas. I’d like to see more day games, in part to woo young fans. I’d like to see the Saturday national TV game abolished so fans wouldn’t be blacked out of watching their local teams during that time. And I’d like to see play calls based on TV replays ended, forevermore. The replays generally are inconclusive and always waste time, and both demean and demoralize the human arbitrators.

Sure, replay-based judgements now are limited in baseball, but unless they’re nipped they’ll spread. Pretty soon electronic gadgets will replace the umps altogether. Then robots will replace the players. Why not? They’ll be easy to maintain, won’t have agents and won’t join unions. Think about that the next time you pass through an automated highway toll booth.

NIX THE FIX

2010-04-15T06:55:00.000-07:00

The National Basketball Association playoffs start this weekend and I have it on good authority that they’re fixed for the New York Knicks to win.

What’s that you say? The Knicks aren’t in the playoffs and haven’t been since 2004? Oh well, never mind. Maybe I misheard and they’re fixed for the L.A. Lakers to win.

Whatever.

The idea that the NBA pulls the strings to facilitate a predetermined outcome in its playoffs—and instructs its game officials to tailor their foul calls accordingly— was strongest when the Knicks were serious contenders, but it never goes away entirely. It’s a full-blown urban legend, right up there with the giant white alligators in the New York sewer system and the fiends who booby-trap kids’ trick-or-treat candies at Halloween. You’d think that the every-day realities of big-city life would be scary enough, but apparently they aren’t.

Like all legends, the one about the NBA’s “fixed” playoffs has a plausible base. The nation’s largest metropolitan areas have the most TV sets, so it follows that success by their hoops representatives would translate into higher TV ratings, more profits for the networks that carry the games and, ultimately, bigger rights fees for the league.

It’s credibility is heightened by the nature of play in the NBA, which has become so physical that most contact between players necessarily goes unwhistled. Some fouls (such as palming the ball on the dribble) rarely are called and others (3 seconds in the free-throw lane) are called only intermittently, and when a dribbler and defender collide it’s often unclear whether it’s a charge or a block. Either way the call goes someone is likely to have a beef, and it’s tempting to ascribe ones that go against your team to ulterior motives. That tendency is underlined when coaches and players berate the officials off-court, as is their wont at playoff time.

But a “fix” that would involve the NBA’s entire, 67-person officials’ roster, plus a half-dozen administrators? Please. It’s tough enough to keep a secret involving just you and me without cluing in 70 other guys. If Nixon and Clinton had kept that in mind they could have ended their presidential terms more gracefully.

Notions of a “fix” also commonly occur when the sport of horse racing is fresh in mind, as it always is at this time of year as the Kentucky Derby nears. Last year’s Derby was won by Mine That Bird, a truly outlandish 50-to-1 shot, and when this blog expressed shock over that overcome I got a call from a reader eager to chasten me for my naivete.

“Wake up, Klein! The race was fixed for Mine That Bird to win,” the guy said.

“How do you figure that?” I inquired.

“Everyone loves it when long shots win big races. It’s great for the sport,” he replied.

I pointed out to him that the racing odds are set by the public’s wagers and that when a horse goes off at 50-to-1 he carries only 2% of the betting pool. That means that when he wins roughly 98% of the bettors lose, hardly a formula for widespread happiness. I also noted that a fixed race requires the connivance of the other competitors, and asked what motive they might have had to forego a chance at the $1.2 million winner’s share of the $2 million Derby purse so a long shot could make a one-day headline.

I can’t recall the guy’s exact response, but it was dismissive. “Don’t bother me with facts when I’m arguing,” he said, in effect.

Fact is, though, that for all the “fix” talk you hear bandied about involving big-time American professional sports, darned little of it has much basis in fact. Steroids aside, baseball has been “clean” since the Black Sox scandal of almost a century ago, and it’s been 64 years since “fix” rumors (unproved, involving the 1946 championship game) scarred pro football. NBA ex-ref Tim Donaghy spent 15 months in prison for fixing games in 2006 and 2007, but his treason was a first and by all accounts it served to benefit no one but himself.

And while it would be genuinely naïve to think there never has been any other hanky panky involving the above activities, much less horse racing—never say “never”—even dedicated conspiracy theorists can find a bright side. I mean, for all they know, the games could be fixed for their teams to win.

FUTBOL

2010-04-01T08:30:00.000-07:00

We Americans don’t often think about it, but in terms of our sports preferences we’re like the Galapagos Islands, inhabited by species that scarcely exist elsewhere. Football, our opinion-poll fan favorite, is played nowhere but in the U.S. and Canada, and baseball’s international appeal is so narrow it’s been pulled from the Olympic schedule. Among our Big Three sports only basketball has a world following, and it’s of recent origin.

The real world sport is real football—which we almost uniquely choose to call soccer. It thrives in just about all of the planet’s 200-odd nations and is the major sport in most of them. It is at once a game, a passion and a common language shared by humans of all stripes and polka dots. To be truly “globalized” means to be counted in that number.

It’s easy for us Yanks to shrug off the above with a “so what?” After all, our sports calendar is nicely filled and needs no further padding. In every fourth year, however, it’s possible to be a citizen of the larger world for a time investment of no more than a month. That opportunity again is fast approaching. It’s the 32-nation final rounds of the soccer World Cup, which will be held in South Africa from June 11 to July 11.

The World Cup is one event that always lives up to its hype. I covered two of them—in the U.S. in 1994 and France in 1998—and they rank 1 and 1A as my most- memorable sports, uh, memories. The competition was fierce, the quality of play was amazingly high and the crowds were uniformly large, colorful and festive. People cared who won to a degree that was exponentially greater than that exhibited in our own annual showdowns such as the Super Bowl and Final Four, its force pulling everything around it into its vortex. To be in Paris when France claimed the ’98 Cup was to walk on air, Frenchman or not. It must have been close to what VE Day was like in that magical city 53 years before.

Americans historically have resisted soccer’s allure. No doubt that’s partly on purpose, expressing the exceptionalism that caused our forbears to reshape English cricket into baseball and rugby into football before embracing them. It’s partly semantic, I think, a reaction to the word “soccer,” which was clunkily derived from the term “association football” (“soc”—get it?) to distinguish it from our domestic variety. An uglier word hardly exists.

I’d also offer a mysterious, biological reason: American children enjoy soccer well enough to make it a leading youth sport, but when they turn age 13 (especially the boys) a genetic change seems to take place that turns them into football players and fans. The NIH should look into this.

Then there’s the nature of the game itself, which is low-scoring and tactical rather than All-American slam-bang, but the tactics are appealing if understood, and the rarity of goals makes each one all the more thrilling. Soccer is the simplest of games to understand, and anyone who is sports-savvy and takes the trouble to watch one good contest from beginning to end will not only soak up its plot but also will appreciate its drama. Try it and you’ll like it, I guarantee.

A final reason for us not to like soccer is that our men never have been much good at it, but that’s changing. Partly because of the interest stirred by the ’94 Cup on these shores, the American game has been improving, and while the pace of that improvement hasn’t been even (our 2002 national team reached the Cup quarterfinals but the ’06 unit laid an egg) it’s been solid nonetheless. Major League Soccer, our domestic pro league, finally seems to be on solid footing, and Americans now perform on good teams in various European major leagues.

The U.S. men’s team placed first in its Cup qualifying group, beating out perennial regional power Mexico, and in a tournament in South Africa last summer it defeated world No. 1 Spain and lost by a goal in the final to always-powerful Brazil after leading, 2-0. Some desultory international showings since have dropped the U.S.’s world ranking to 18th, but it probably deserves to be several notches higher.

Even so it’ll be the second-highest-ranked team in its four-nation Cup division (behind England and ahead of Slovenia and Algeria), so it has a fair chance to advance to the knockout rounds. It has an able veteran leader in the midfielder Landon Donovan, and the 20-year-old forward Jozy Altidore, Florida-born of Haitian parents, is the sort of young star it’s long sought. The team likes to score and is fun to watch, a good combination.

All the games in the tournament will be televised live by ESPN. Eastern starting times will be 7 a.m., 9:30 a.m. and 2 p.m., which ain’t terrible for an event so far away. My son Mike, who lives in Belgium and follows soccer on a daily basis, will handicap the World Cup field in this space come June, but, meantime, I urge you to point your antennae in its direction.

Believe me now, thank me later.

FORGIVE, FORGET

2010-03-15T09:13:00.000-07:00

Spring training is underway here in Arizona and, as usual, I’m going to games. It’s one of the good things about living here. I’ve seen the Cubs three times so far and have tickets for two more of their contests, among others.

I wish I could update you on the Cubs’ progress or lack of it, but you can’t tell much about a team from a few games, spring or regular season. Generally speaking, no news is good news at this time of year because, when news happens, it’s usually about injuries, which aren’t good. It looks like relief pitcher Angel Guzman is lost for the season with arm woes, but that’s been it so far in Cubbyland. If that’s its last such setback the team can consider itself lucky.

But one thing I have noticed around HoHoKam Park—as I have in previous years-- is Cubs’ fans’ attachment to their team’s past. A lot of them show up wearing uniform shirts with players’ names on the back, and ones inscribed with the likes of “Banks,” “Sandberg,” “Grace” and even “Wood” far outnumber those honoring current team members. That’s curious, because Cub history has been famously unhappy, and while the above-named individuals usually played very well (except for the knuckleheaded Wood) their eras were anything but glorious.

We’re stuck with the history we have, of course, but it’s hard to see how dwelling on it can help present prospects. Cub players often are questioned about the burden of their team’s unique record of failure, and always reply that they give it little thought. How can it not weigh on them, though? It’s a bigger and darker cloud than the one Milton Bradley dragged around last season.

Look at the team’s annals and what do you see? Babe Ruth’s “called shot.” The Collapse of 1969. The Collapses of 1984, 2003 and 2008. The dreaded “Billy Goat’s Curse.” The black-cat incident of ’69 at Shea Stadium. The Bartman Goof. It’s enough to depress Mary Poppins.

Worse, it’s all such silly stuff. Ruth homered against everyone. Plenty of teams have contended for pennants and fallen short but haven’t let such things define them. The famous curse didn’t emanate from a goat but from its owner, saloon-keeper Sam Sianis, who was peeved that the Cubs wouldn’t allow his pet into a 1945 World Series game, but nobody could blame the team for expelling a smelly, four-legged animal from its premises. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to sit next to it.

Black cats? They’re all over the place and we’d all be dead if encountering one were immediately fatal. A cat didn’t cause the Mets to win the 1969 National League pennant and World Series title, Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, Tug McGraw and timely hitting did.

As for poor Bartman, one can only be sorry for the guy. My feelings for him run so deep I’ve put them to rhyme, to wit:

ODE TO BARTMAN

The ball traced an arc
Through the inky night air.
The fans watched its flight—
Was it foul or fair?

Alou drifted right,
Almost touching the wall.
He stuck out his glove,
But where was the ball?

Bartman reached it first
From his seat in the stand,
And deflected its course
With his outstretched right hand.

The fans first were stunned,
Then reacted with boos.
Bartman fled the scene;
Each boo left a bruise.

He made for the El,
Went home, packed a case.
Donned false nose and mustache,
Checked out of his place.

He’s still on the lam
And his life is no garden,
Up in Tora Bora
With Osama bin Ladin.

But isn’t it time
We eased up on the guy?
Give him a break.
Let sleeping dogs lie.

Because, ask yourself,
Just what was his shame?
If you’d been there instead
You’d have done the same.

Let’s repatriate Bartman and have a day for him at Wrigley Field. Give him a new glove and a season ticket, although not on the left-field line. Forgive and forget; we’d all feel better for it.

Maybe the Cubs would, too.

TIME OUT!

2010-03-01T06:12:00.000-08:00

Avery Brundage was less than admirable in many respects. The former head of the U.S. Olympic Committee (1929-52) and International Olympic Committee (1952-72) was a fan of Hitler and instrumental in awarding Olympic Games to all three members of the original Axis of Evil (Germany, Japan and Italy). He stood for a brand of amateurism that amounted to social elitism. He thought women’s sports had no place in the Olympics, or anywhere else.

He wasn’t nice, either; despite his image of starchy rectitude, it was revealed after his death in 1975 that he’d had two children by a longtime mistress, and left them all out of his will.

But even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and I agree with Brundage about one thing: he thought that while coaches might be allowed on the practice fields, they should have to buy tickets to get into the arenas on game days.

OK, maybe that’s a bit extreme. Some coaches are decent-enough people and ought to be given a free seat on their teams’ benches, down at the end. Come NCAA basketball tournament time, however, I often wish they’d go away altogether, and leave their players alone.

This desire emerges especially in the last few minutes of any college-hoops game that’s competitive. Although timeouts seem plentiful enough while the contests unfold, they’re downright ubiquitous in the home stretch, stopping play every few seconds for coachly strategizing. Action grinds to a halt, toilets flush throughout TVland, and the question changes from how the game will end to whether it will. By the time things are decided I’ve sometimes lost interest.

Overcoaching is particularly a problem for school sports, I think. While our professional leagues exist solely to entertain the public and enrich their participants, the games schoolkids play are supposed to have an educational component, preparing young athletes to make their way on later-life stages.

The rest of the educational process is—or should be—geared to this end. Students read, attend lectures and engage in give-and-take with their teachers, but at “crunch time”-- when papers are written and exams taken—they’re on their own. That’s turned on its head in sports when the teachers (that is, coaches) take over decision-making when a game’s outcome is at stake.

What lesson is being taught— when in doubt look for some boss to tell you what to do? What’s practice for, anyway?

Furthermore—and Dick Vitale to the contrary notwithstanding-- the efficacy of time-out play calling is anything but clear. I have this on the authority of a couple of coaches I came to admire during my columnizing days.

My favorite college basketball coach was Abe Lemons, a droll character whose 599 career victories came mostly at institutions in Texas and Oklahoma, states in which, he said, “men love their families and football, not necessarily in that order.”

Abe claimed he never went in much for X’s and O’s, noting “If my X is Michael Jordan, your whole team of O’s won’t stop him.” He’d add: “I don’t have any tricky plays. I’d rather have tricky players.”

And anyhow, “There really are only two plays: ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘put the darned ball in the basket.’ I don’t need to call a time out to give my kids that last one.”

Dale Brown, who spent many years coaching basketball at Louisiana State U., agreed, pretty much. “I’d call time out late in a game, draw up a play and give every player an assignment,” he once told me. “Invariably, just before they’d run out on the court, at least one of them would ask me what he was supposed to do.

“The play never would run as planned, and a kid would wind up taking a terrible, off-balance shot. I’d go ‘No…No…No… Great Shot!’ Afterward I’d tell the reporters it happened just the way I’d laid it out.”

BRRRRR!

2010-02-15T05:57:00.000-08:00

The Winter Olympics are on and I am watching them, at least when there’s nothing better on TV. That’s worth saying, I think, because I have no affinity for ice or snow, or the games played thereon. I like the cold so little that, a dozen years ago, dear wife Susie and I picked up stakes and moved to the Phoenix area, where it’s always warm. For us, winter now is something that happens elsewhere, and a frequent subject for gloating over our wise choice. That we will watch sports we otherwise wouldn’t cross the street to see—especially an icy street—is testimony to the power of the five-ring Olympic symbol.

As a sports writer I sometimes needed to cover winter sports, and did so at three Olympics—at Calgary in 1988, Albertville, France, in 1992, and Lillehammer, Norway, in 1994. My strongest memories of those stints have nothing to do with the things I was paid to watch and write about.

My main recollection of Calgary is of sitting on the balcony of my apartment basking in sunshine and temperatures in the 60s while officials scrambled to stage skiing events amid melting snow and blowing dust. In Albertville I discovered a quiet little restaurant just outside the perimeter of the press center that featured the local Savoyard cuisine, which is delightfully heavy on cheeses and cream sauces.

The Lillehammer Games prided itself on being “green,” which in practical terms meant that the city didn’t salt its streets or sidewalks after the almost-nightly snowfalls. This led to crashes of various kinds and degrees of severity. I took a flop one evening on an icy sidewalk outside the hockey arena, to the vast amusement of a group that had gathered to witness such mishaps. After I brushed myself off I joined the throng to laugh at the misfortunes of others. Great fun.

While no one doubts that many winter-sport competitors fully embody the athletic virtues, the question of whether the Winter Games are necessary has been raised by many. Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic movement, didn’t like them because they lacked universality, which is to say that most of the world’s 200 or so nations don’t have the frosty regions needed to foster participation.

Events also are lacking. Television’s desires dictate that the Winter Games span the same 17-day, three-weekend period as the summer ones, but while the Summer Games burst at the seams, winter schedules are sparse. Thus, organizers have been forced to pad them with Evel Knievel stuff like snowboarding and freestyle skiing, which belong more in a circus than in a sports fest, and the slo-mo game of curling, a sort of animated shuffleboard.

The best example of the cobbled-together nature of some Winter O events is biathlon, a combination of cross-country skiing and rifle shooting that resembles nothing so much as the Russo-Finnish war. An apt way to turn it into a “tri” would be to add the destruction of an armored car with a hand grenade.

Even perfectly good winter sports turn weird when passed through the Olympic sausage grinder. Speed skating is a favorite pastime of rosy-cheeked types of many lands, but instead of lining up these guys and gals on a big frozen lake, shooting off a gun and declaring the first one across the finish line a winner, Olympic honchos have decreed a pairs-against-the-clock format with lane-changing rules that defy explanation, and put it in giant indoor facilities that cost many millions of dollars to build and sit idle once the Games are over. If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, “metric” speed skating is a sport designed by a committee of camels.

All the downhill ski races, and many others on the O card, are run in an individuals-against-the-clock format in which the drama isn’t on the course but in the seconds ticking away in a corner of your TV screen. Too many events involve judges, most of whom are prejudiced against our fine, wholesome American athletes. The main question in the ice-chute events of bobsled and luge isn’t who’ll win but who’ll survive.

There are a few good things about the Winter Games. Every four years they prove that hockey can be played without punches being traded, and it’s fascinating watching the icicles form on competitors’ noses and mustaches during the cross-country skiing races.

And who can resist the figure skating? Sequined costumes! Radical makeup and hairdos! Dazzling smiles!

And that’s just the men!

MESSIN' WITH MESA

2010-02-01T05:57:00.000-08:00

My team, the Chicago Cubs, has been much in the news lately in my new home state, Arizona. For six decades they’ve been a baseball spring-training fixture in the Phoenix area, but as their contract with their home base of Mesa neared an end they began making eyes at upscale Naples, Florida, about a possible move there.

Creating competition is a common bargaining ploy but an effective one, especially when the alternative is credible. In the old Jack Benny skit, the robber poked a gun at Jack and demanded “Your money or your life!” The joke was that it took Jack a while to make up his mind. This was no joke, though; similarly confronted, Mesa promised to fork over and, this week, the Cubs promised to stay.

A happy ending, right? Not really. Times are tough everywhere but especially here in the Valley of the Sun, where growth is the No. 1 industry and the housing collapse has knocked the props out from under the economy. Governments in the area, including Mesa’s, have been hard hit, reducing or eliminating services and laying off employees by the hundreds. The state of Arizona is in such bad shape that its doofus legislature has taken time off from its usual priorities of extending gun rights and promoting school prayer to close parks and sell office buildings in a so-far-vain attempt to make ends meet.

Still, although several steps remain, the betting is that somewhere, somehow—probably through new taxes on tickets and tourists— these entities will find the $84 million it’s supposed to cost to build the new stadium and up-to-date practice facility the team demanded.

It’s tempting to cast a pox on all the actors in this only-in-America drama—on the Cubs for their rapacity and on the Arizonans for their spinelessness— but it ain’t that simple. Those who’ve followed my writings know that while I generally disapprove of public spending for new stadiums on grounds they aid only the team, not the local economy as a whole, I make an exception for Sunbelt spring-training facilities. Not only do most short-term revenues they produce come from out of towners, but there’s also the more-profound effect of encouraging visitors to buy first or second homes in an area, thus stimulating further important spending (on furniture, appliances and the like) and supporting local property values. It’s a gift that keeps on giving, big time.

Arizona woke up to this in 1993, when the Cleveland Indians abandoned Tucson for Florida, reducing the Cactus League to eight (of the then-28) Major League teams and threatening the critical mass of clubs needed for the league to exist at all. Countywide tax funds were created in the Phoenix and Tucson areas, the two main spring-training focuses, to help communities build or improve baseball facilities, and local boosters also got into the act. The upshot has been that 15 (of the now-30) teams currently make Arizona their spring home, and no one would be surprised if the number rose further in the next few years.

Of those 15, none are more important than the Cubs; no matter how woeful they may be once the games begin for real, their legion of lunatic fans make them the Kings of Spring. March baseball elsewhere might be a casual affair, but at the Cubs’ base of HoHoKam Park (named for an ancient Indian tribe) it’s all crowds, traffic jams and ticket scalpers. The team annually leads the Cactus League in home attendance and Cubby lovers spread their largess to the other Arizona ballparks when their darlings visit. The circuit is a horse-and-rabbit stew, and the Cubs are the horse.

Such economic power makes it too much to expect the team to exercise restraint when it comes to making a spring-training deal. The nice-guy thing for the Cubs to have done would have been to put up with their current, not-so-bad digs without complaint for another couple of years, waiting until long-faithful Mesa got back on its feet before holding them to the fire. But—hey—in sports you know where nice guys finish.

There’s a joke in there someplace.

POSTING A COMMENT-- Much of the fun of blogging is in readers’ ability to air their own views without having to go through the dreaded elitist filters, so feel free to sound off. Here’s how to do it here: At the end of the column click on the word “comments.” That will take you to another screen. Write your comment and, if prompted, copy the “verification” letters in the box that’s provided. Skip the stuff about “user name” and “password”—you don’t need them. Put your name where it’s asked or click on the “anonymous” circle. If you wish, click on “review” to check what you’ve written, or go immediately to “publish.” You can do it!

SAY WHAT?

2010-01-15T06:35:00.000-08:00

I used to read the newspaper sports pages at breakfast, but no more. So many items caused me to chuck my Cheerios that I now read them before or after my morning meal. With fewer cleanups to contend with, I’m a happier man.

I mean, sports figures say the darnedest things, and they’re not nearly as cute or funny as the kids’ quotes Art Linkletter used to trot out. Some of the stuff they come up with is so incredible it’s unbelievable. They do it, I guess, because in the “Me” universes they inhabit they never are contradicted and rarely are questioned seriously. Some sportswriters view the circus they cover with a jaundiced eye and occasionally puncture their bubbles, but too few.

Exhibit A in this regard was a story I came across a couple of weeks ago. It seems that the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles annually vote to give a teammate a “courage” award and named the ex-con quarterback Michael Vick, of dog-fighting infamy, as this season’s recipient.

It got better from there. Instead of mumbling his thanks and hurrying offstage, Vick saw fit to declare himself worthy of the honor. “I’ve overcome a lot, more than probably any single individual can handle or bear,” said he.

Overcome a lot? You’d think he’d battled back from brain surgery or being hit by a truck. The fact that nobody put him in prison but himself seems to escape him.

Then, this week, I read where Pete Carroll abruptly quit as the head football coach at the University of Southern California to take a similar job with the NFL Seattle Seahawks. That wasn’t shocking—it’s what coaches at his level do. It also wasn’t surprising that his departure from academe came at a time when the NCAA was investigating his USC program, or that his move will increase his annual salary to $7 million from the $5 million he was earning as a humble prof.

The kicker was Carroll’s goodbye press conference in Los Angeles, where he said he was wooed away from the school and players he loved not by the 40% raise, or by the threat posed by NCAA gumshoes, but by the “challenge” the Seattle job presented. Meaning, I guess, that he considers coming out on top from among the 32 NFL teams a greater achievement than besting the 100-plus college football big-timers for that national title.

Sure.

But the recent sports-blather champ is Mark McGwire, the Sultan of Squat. In several lengthy and sometimes teary interviews orchestrated by Ari Fleischer, who was schooled in disaster management in the Bush 43 Administration, McGwire this week fessed up to the steroid use he’d refused to discuss since his retirement from the game after the 2001 season.

Sort of.

McGwire said he wished he could have made his confession at the 2005 Congressional hearing where he famously announced he intended to look forward, not back, but was dissuaded by his lawyers. This is despite that fact that no major jock has been prosecuted for using steroids, only for lying about it under oath. He also said his confession was delayed by the pain it would cause “family members, friends and coaches,” as though they couldn’t look at his Blutto-like physique and adult-onset acne and reach the same conclusion everyone else did.

McGwire gave a time line for his steroids use designed to minimize it. He said he used them “very briefly” after the 1989 season, when he was recovering from an injury, and again for the same duration and purpose in 1993. And—oh yeah-- “on occasion” throughout the 1990s. But what does “on occasion” mean, and didn’t the ‘90s include 10 of his 16 big-league seasons, including his 70-homer 1998 campaign?

He said he wished he’d never played during baseball’s “steroid era,” thus blaming the times for his sins and ignoring that more than anyone else he defined them.

Big Mac’s biggest whopper, though, was his claim that he took steroids strictly for health purposes. “There’s no way I did this for any type of strength use,” he averred. Ye gads—what did he think when he looked in the mirror and saw that his chest was six inches bigger around than it used to be, that his arms had gained two or three inches each and that his collar size had jumped to 21 from 18? That he was literally bursting with good health?

I’d like to end this with the “Say it isn’t so, Joe” line some kid supposedly laid on Joe Jackson of the old Black Sox, but I know I must adjust to the times. When an athlete these days is moved to say it isn’t so, you know that it is.

PEY-TON, PEY-TON

2010-01-01T07:17:00.000-08:00

The National Football League playoffs are upon us and, as usual, my team—the Chicago Bears—isn’t in them. In a weird season made no less weird by their upset win over the Vikings last Monday night, the Bears went from hopeful to hopeless in about 6.4 seconds. It’ll take a smarter person than I to figure out that bunch. Also smarter than Jerry Angelo or Lovie Smith, I fear.

But the NFLers will soldier on for a while, leaving open the question of a rooting interest for those of us whose favorites have been sent home. My solution is two-fold: I’ll root for the teams I bet on, and for the Indianapolis Colts.

The second of those criteria requires explanation. I have no history with the Colts and, although I’ve enjoyed Shapiro’s Delicatessen there many times, no great affection for its home base of Indiana-No-Place. The reason I like them can be summarized in two words: Peyton Manning.

By me, Manning is the best at what he does, which is play quarterback. I can’t say with confidence that he’s the best ever, because the likes of Sammy Baugh, Otto Graham and Sid Luckman did their best work before I was paying attention. But I can say he’s the best I’ve seen, and that’s saying quite a lot because I’m quite old. I love the guy— in a properly masculine way, of course.

Previous to Manning’s blossoming I’d been undecided in the best-QB department. The best passing arms I’d seen belonged to Sonny Jurgensen and Joe Namath; both could put the ball any place, any time. The best at getting the job (winning) done howsoever was Joe Montana. While the scrawny ex-Notre Damer might not have been the perfect model for a QB statue, no opponent’s lead was safe with him on the field.

Manning, though, throws like Sonny and Joe N. and wins like Joe M., and is statuesque besides. At 6-foot-5 and 230 or so pounds, he’s the exemplar of what a quarterback should look like, and he makes good use of every inch and pound.

Ordinarily, a bunch of statistics would go here to help prove my point. I’ll let you off with a few: Manning has passed for at least 4,000 yards in 10 of his 12 pro seasons and annually throws twice as many touchdowns as interceptions, and his Colt teams have won more than twice as many games as they’ve lost. It hasn’t mattered much who his receivers have been. In his early days in Indy he and Marvin Harrison formed football’s best pitcher-catcher partnership. Now Harrison is gone and Manning is throwing mostly to Reggie Wayne and Dallas Clark, no problem.

Manning is more than just an arm. Although he looks kind of klutsy afoot and almost never runs on purpose, he’s also rarely sacked, which indicates that he’s fairly agile. His durability is attested to by the fact that’s he’s never missed a start. The NFL is the world’s most coach-driven entity, but Colt coaches apparently give him exceptional latitude when it comes to calling or changing plays; hey, all that barking and gesturing he does at the line of scrimmage must amount to something. I’d like it better if he’d kneel down and draw a play in the dirt once in a while, but today’s football fields don’t lend themselves to that sort of thing.

My boy Peyton has a pleasing off-field image as well. His persona in his many TV ads is that of a half-smart country boy, but although this clashes with his on-field accomplishments he brings it off well. He’s hosted Saturday Night Live, no mean standup feat, and his “commercial” mocking the NFL’s syrupy ads for United Way—in which he knocks kids down with bullet passes and then berates them for performing poorly— not only is a classic but also showed his ability to mock himself. You’ve never seen Tiger Woods do that.

It’s possible that Manning could pull a Tiger and wind up in the tabloid headlines in an unflattering way. The internet is full of rumors that he and Ashley, his wife of eight years, are headed for Split City. It’s been observed that, unlike many high-profile players’ wives, Ashley Manning rarely attends Colts’ games, or, at least, is rarely photographed doing so.

But maybe there’s a good explanation for that. Maybe she’s a pacifist, or a Tom Brady fan.

He must have some.

WORD NERD

2009-12-14T07:33:00.000-08:00

John Updike said that life was too short for golf and crossword puzzles, but he played golf and wrote about it, and, I’d bet, worked crosswords, too. As a wordsmith, how could he not?

I used to play golf, and not badly, but stopped when the demands of a young family dictated that I no longer could disappear for the best part of a weekend day. Quitting golf was a lot easier than quitting smoking; once away from it I rarely looked back, and quickly cultivated other recreations that provided actual exercise.

I still do crosswords, though, and wouldn’t think of giving them up. Hey, I’m a wordsmith, too, and a sportswriter at that, and no group is better at synonyms—which is what most crossword answers are-- than we sportswriters. You know, the guy didn’t just pitch the ball, he also threw, heaved, hurled, chucked, tossed, flung, slung, fired, pegged or catapulted it. God forbid that we should use the same word twice in a story.

Fact is, I’m something of a crosswords snob, limiting my application to the Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday puzzles in the New York Times and the one in the Wall Street Journal’s Friday Weekend section, which I save for early the next week. The Journal puzzle doesn’t quite match the Times’ offerings; my usual reaction to getting its joke is “oh, no” instead of “aha!” But it gives me something to do on a Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, days when the Times’ puzzles are beneath my notice.

The reason the Times is superior in this regard is Will Shortz, its crosswords’ editor. A man of all word games, Shortz took over the job in 1993 from Eugene Maleska, and quickly created something of an earthquake in Puzzlerville. Maleska’s products tended to be exercises in arcana, requiring knowledge of Mahler symphonies and the names of rivers in Finland. Shortz is hipper, frequently tapping such contemporary subjects as rap music. I’m pretty much in the dark about rap, but most of its performers’ names are mercifully short.

Shortz doesn’t write the puzzles but his hand can be seen in their clues, which differentiate difficult from easy ones. Difficulty can be added by using deep definitions of words (such as the infamous “gob” for “lot” in one Times puzzle last week), but it’s much more fun when clues are oblique, forcing the puzzler to look at things from odd angles. For instance, the answer to the recent clue “it’s well-positioned” was “oil rig,” and “athletes’ foot applications” was “knee socks.” Cute, huh?

I thought I was pretty good at the activity until I saw the movie “Wordplay” a few years ago. A documentary set at a national crosswords contest, and featuring the great Shortz himself, it introduced me to supernerds (I’m just a regular one) who could whip off a Saturday Times offering (typically the hardest) in something like seven minutes and 40 seconds. It often takes me hours to do one of those. My main strength is doggedness, not brilliance; I’ll keep staring at the darned things until they reveal their secrets. I don’t give up, never ever. Well, almost never.

Like most puzzlers, I have my own rules about what’s kosher and what isn’t in seeking solutions. I think it’s okay to look up an answer in the dictionary if I think I know it but must check its spelling, and to ask for help from someone within the reach of my voice (my wife is especially helpful with answers related to food). But it ain’t okay to phone outside experts, and definitely not to type the clue into the Google search box and hit “enter.” Yeah, I’ve done that a few times, but only in rare instances when I’ve been absolutely, positively stuck. I do it as a last resort, to scratch my curiosity itch, and take no pleasure from the solutions reached thereby.

The best puzzles are the ones where I can fill in only “s’s,” “er’s,” and “ed”s” on first scan, and have to scratch out the rest, box by box. That’s masochistic, I know, but I guess there’s that side of me. I told you I played golf, didn’t I?

ALSO: My 2010 Baseball Hall of Fame ballot arrived last week and I sent it back with eight names checked. They were holdovers Bert Blyleven, Andre Dawson, Jack Morris, Lee Smith and Alan Trammell, and ballot newcomers Roberto Alomar, Barry Larkin and Edgar Martinez. Alomar and Larkin were easy picks; they were the best at their demanding positions for most of their long careers.

My choice of Martinez might raise some eyebrows because he spent most of his career as a designated hitter, and, thus, performed only half of baseball’s requirements. But the DH is a real and apparently permanent baseball role and I can see no reason to discriminate against those who fill it. No one has done it better than the ancient Mariner, a true student of the batsman’s art, who is one of only eight players ever with at least 300 home runs (309), 500 doubles (514) , a lifetime batting average of over .300 (.312), an on-base percentage of over .400 (.418) and a slugging average of more than .500 (.515). And he was a nice guy besides.

LITTLE ANDRE, HAPPY AT LAST

2009-12-01T06:30:00.000-08:00

I didn’t like Andre Agassi through most of his tennis career. I thought he was a brat who squandered his immense talent with vain display, a rebel without a clue who professed to be a free spirit while slavishly following the dictates of his corporate sponsors. In brief, I wished he’d go away.

I’ve never liked jock biographies, considering them a pure waste of time. The typical compliant that their authors “pull their punches” usually isn’t true because they never throw any punches to begin with. The books mostly are a way for their subjects to pick up a few dollars, pay off some non-monetary debts and prolong their times in the spotlight.

But here comes Agassi with a jockography, and you know what? I liked it. It’s a darned interesting book that appears to live up to its title of “Open.” It’s now on a (very) short list of recent-year sports books I’d recommend, along with Jane Leavy’s biog of Sandy Koufax and Tom Callahan’s marvelous “Johnny U,” about Johnny Unitas and pro football’s gritty 1950s. I feel like the fussy kid Mikey in the old cereal commercial, whose eyes were opened by an unexpected treat.

I wouldn’t be a reviewer if I had no complaints about a book. Like most of its genre, “Open” spends too much space recounting details of matches long forgotten, and doesn’t lack for self-justifying whines by its author. Prominent in the latter category is Agassi’s professed bewilderment that some people reacted negatively to the “image is everything” line he recited in a widely viewed camera ad. While it might have been true that someone put those words in his mouth, it was he who didn’t spit them out.

Those things, however, are quibbles, and “Open” is a pearl among pebbles. One very good thing about it is the work of Agassi’s co-author, J.R. Moehringer, although you have to make your way to the acknowledgments at the end of the book to learn his name. I’d never read anything by Moehringer, but will in the future. His writing brings a spontaneity to the book that makes it come alive.

Another is the undeniable fact that, for a jock, Agassi has had an interesting off-field go of it. That’s led by a tabloid-friendly social life that included dates with Barbra Streisand (he calls her a “passionate friend,” whatever that means) and marriages to the actress Brooke Shields and his now-wife Steffi Graf, who has a bigger trophy cabinet than he does.

Most of the attention the book has gained has focused on Agassi’s admission that he got high on crystal meth for a time during his career and (successfully) lied about it when the tennis tour asked him to explain a positive drug test. Several of his tennis contemporaries have demanded that he be stripped of some titles for the lapse, but that’s off-base. Agassi was stupid to try the brutally addictive stuff, but it hurts rather than enhances athletic performance and is the proper province of the police, not the sports cops.

More revealing by far is Agassi’s account of his childhood, one made no less Dickensian by the relentless sunshine of his native Las Vegas. He depicts his ex-boxer father, a captain in a Las Vegas showroom, as a domineering bully who forced him to spend his childhood on the practice courts and used him to pick up spare cash by hustling matches with unwary adults. Agassi hated tennis (or, as he wrote in several places, “hated hated” it), and stuck with it only for fear of his father’s wrath and lack of alternatives. As an eighth-grade dropout, he had few of the latter.

To be sure, no one can succeed at anything without some enthusiasm for the task, and Agassi admits to that, albeit mostly because he found losing intolerable. When he chose to exercise it his work ethic was impressive, as was his record, which includes eight Grand Slam titles. But so too was the degree of silliness to which he confesses; for instance, his multicolored mullet hairdo, long his public signature, was enhanced by a hairpiece that covered his growing baldness, and he lost his first Grand Slam final partly out of fear the rug would slip on-court and reveal his awful secret.

Mostly, the book is a description of Agassi’s journey from brat to mensch that would do credit to an early Tom Cruise movie. The transformation has been impressive: Andre today is an apparently happy, gracious husband and father of two whose charitable work—most notably his sponsorship of an academy for at-risk kids in his hometown—reflects his appreciation of the education he never had. It’s a tale worth writing, and reading.

BUSINESS NOTE: And speaking of books, those in my “For the Love of…” series make an excellent holiday gift. Titles include the Cubs, Yankees, Red Sox, Cardinals, Mets, Tigers, Packers, Ohio State and Georgia football, golf and Hall of Fame baseballers. You’ll love the illustrations. To see them click on the Triumph Books link on this site or go to amazon,com.

GETTING DINGED

2009-11-15T08:06:00.000-08:00

In the summer of 1997 I drove from Chicago to Madison, Wis., to visit with Al Toon. In his home office whose windows overlooked Lake Mendota we spoke about his eight-season career with the National Football League’s New York Jets, during which he’d achieved All-Pro status several times.

We also talked about the last play of that career—on Nov. 8, 1992—when he caught a pass and turned upfield, only to be crunched between two Denver Broncos’ defenders. He had no memory of that collision.

“I saw the films and it wasn’t that big a hit,” he recalled. “I think most of the damage came when my head hit the ground.”

Toon said the resulting concussion was the seventh, eighth or ninth of his football life, “depending on how you counted them.” Some of the others, dating from high school, sidelined him for a game or two, some for just a couple of plays. But the symptoms of last one got worse instead of better, and he spent much of the next three years in darkened rooms enduring headaches, dizziness, acute sensitivity to light and lapses of memory and concentration.

He thought he was pretty much back to normal at the time of our meeting. Indeed, he’d invested his football earnings wisely and was well into a business career that included ownership of commercial real estate in the city where he’d gone to college, a directorship and vice presidency of a local bank and a partnership in a company that owned 18 Burger King franchises.

He had no illusions about a trouble-free future, however. “I’m told that with head injuries, you never can tell,” he said quietly.

I’ve been thinking about Toon as the impact of football concussions has gained news-media attention of late. Having written a page-one story on head injuries for the Wall Street Journal, I’m something of a journalistic expert—and early whistle-blower-- on the subject. That piece was titled “The Silent Epidemic,” because head-injury victims often didn’t appear to be hurt and treatments for their widely varying complaints were elusive. Despite some advances, that’s apparently still the case.

It’s especially surprising that many people still aren’t fully aware of the risk of head injury that football poses at all of its levels. The violence in the NFL, which tops the sport’s pyramid, is truly frightening, and becoming more so as the game evolves. Not only are the players ever bigger, stronger and faster, but the surfaces on which they’re playing produce far-better footing than the old grass fields, increasing the force of the collisions thereon. To fully appreciate this you have to witness the game from ground level, but it’s obvious even on television.

It’s well known that the effects of head blows are cumulative, but the extent to which they occur in football remains underappreciated. This came through clearly in a story in the Oct. 19 issue of the New Yorker magazine that, in part, described a University of North Carolina study that monitored with helmet-placed sensors the school’s football team members in games and practices. It said that if you drove your car into a wall at 25 mph and weren’t wearing a seat belt, the force of your head hitting the windshield would register 100 on the applicable scale. In one Tarheel practice—and not a “full-contact” one —eight “hits” registering between 82 and 53 were recorded. “Mini-car crashes” were taking place all over the field, with consequences one can only guess, the author wrote.

Another recent study hinted at those consequences over the long haul. A University of Michigan phone survey of about 1,000 retired NFL players showed that 6.1% of those aged 50 and older reported they’d been diagnosed with dementia, Alzheimer’s disease or other memory-related conditions, a rate five times higher than that of the general population, and the rate for ex-players in the 30-to-49-year-old range was 19 times above the national average. If that’s not bad enough, the kind of self-reporting the survey relied on typically understates a problem’s severity.

To the inevitable question of “What’s to be done?”, good answers are few. Better helmets might help but, given size limitations, there’d be a limit to how much. The league should be tougher on the kind of helmet-on-helmet hits that thrill the TV commentators; expulsion from the game seems more appropriate than the present yardage penalty and (sometimes) fine. A quicker recognition of concussions, and slowing the rush of the injured to return to action, would be a plus, albeit not a cure.

But we who watch, and those who play, like the game too well to press for the only sure cure, abolition. So let’s hope the boys are careful out there.

A bright note: Al Toon’s current Wikipedia biography says he competed in a triathlon a few years ago, and is now a Green Bay Packers’ director, so it seems his recovery has continued apace.

GONE ILLINI

2009-11-02T06:13:00.001-08:00

The unfairness of life is brought home to me every spring and summer by the performance of my favorite baseball team, the Chicago Cubs. They always come through in that respect. In recent years, however, the punishment has continued into the fall, delivered by my favorite football team, that of my alma mater, the University of Illinois. Now THAT is unfair.

I’m feeling especially put-upon these days because the erstwhile Fighting Illini are in the throes of a season that’s bad by even their standards. At this writing they are 2 and 6 in the won-lost column with four games to play, and despite Saturday’s welcome win over so-so Michigan, it’s hard to see how they can wind up better than 4 and 8. I’ve put my orange-and-blue gear into storage, and it’ll take a heckuva good basketball season to persuade me to uncrate it.

It’s not as though we Illini expect much from our gridiron representatives—a six- or seven-win season and a dot-com bowl game would satisfy us nicely. But even that modest goal has been elusive. Illinois hasn’t put together successive winning seasons since 1989-90, and have been on the plus side in just five campaigns since then. Over four recent seasons (2003-06) it had a combined won-lost record of 8-38.

It probably wouldn’t be so painful if we were perennially terrible, like Indiana. Then we could simply ignore football and save our enthusiasm for basketball, where we’re usually decent. About once a decade, though, we have a quite-successful year—such as 2007’s 9-4 record and Rose Bowl appearance—and convince ourselves that some magical corner has been turned. Inevitably this proves illusory and we’re back in the pits, where we started.

Why this should be so is a mystery. Illinois is a populous state with a rich annual crop of football talent. Trouble is, the best of it matriculates at places like Notre Dame, Michigan and, lately, even Southern California. Yes, Champaign-Urbana, where the U of I is situated, is widely viewed as a dull, rural place, but it’s not any worse in that regard than Iowa City, Ia., South Bend, Ind., or godawful State College, Pa., for heaven’s sake. Iowa and Wisconsin, which have fewer athletic resources than Illinois, consistently have managed to field good-to-excellent football teams in recent years. If they can do it, Illinois also should be able to.

The usual key factor in such a situation is coaching or the lack of it, and the chair of Illinois’s incumbent headman, Ron Zook, has become quite warm. Zook formerly was the coach at Florida, where he posted a 23-14 won-lost mark over three seasons. While that would have been fine in Champaign it got him fired in Gainesville, where expectations are higher. At Illinois, he’s had but one winning season in five, with the arrow pointing down..

By all accounts Zook’s industry has been exemplary; he’s your typical workaholic football coach for whom putting in a half-day means working 12 hours. He’s said to take his cell phone into the shower for fear of missing a call, and probably sees his family no more than a few hours a week in season. He’s gotten high grades as a recruiter, but this year’s woeful gangs on both sides of the ball put that rep into serious question.

Most disheartening has been the play of quarterback Juice Williams, the team’s leader on offense. He was sprightly as a sophomore during the ’07 Rose Bowl run but before Saturday had been sodden as a senior, a flat-footed and inaccurate passer and heavy-legged runner who had more turnovers than TDs. His regression speaks ill of Zook’s ability to develop talent, a college coach’s primary charge. Zook never has been much praised as a game-day strategist.

So fire the guy, right? OK, but then what? Recruiting (as it is) will be set back further and a new “system” (whatever that is) will have to be installed, meaning at least a couple more very bad years before any turnaround can be expected. And if the new guy succeeds there’s a good chance he’ll be lured away by a stronger program, as was the live-wire basketball coach, Bill Self. No matter how you look at it, the outlook isn’t brilliant.

But so as not to be totally negative, I do have a suggestion for short-term improvement. Illinois is known for slotting players out of position, such as Bobby Mitchell, an NFL Hall of Fame wide receiver who was an underutilized running back at Illinois, and Ray Nitschke, the all-time great pro linebacker who was a second-string fullback in Champaign. At 6-foot-2 and 235 pounds, Williams is bigger than the current Illini linebackers, and, probably, stronger and faster as well. His pro prospects as a QB are slight so let’s try him there next Saturday. It couldn’t hurt him or the team.

TAKE A HIKE

2009-10-15T06:03:00.000-07:00

Most places have the usual four seasons, but the Phoenix area, in which I live, has only two. One, from April through September, is The Big Heat, when daily triple-digit temperatures keep sensible people hunkered down in ACed confines. The other, October-through-March, is Hiking Season, or regular summer in other climes.

Hiking Season now is here, and I couldn’t be happier. Mornings there’s a chill in the air, and even if the daytime highs reach into the 90s it’s not so bad because it’s “dry heat,” as we ‘Zonans like to say. At least twice a week I lace up my hiking shoes and head into the desert, immersing myself in its soothing stillness. Hiking is good for both body and soul, an excellent exacta.

One might think it strange that a city boy like me—Chicago born and bred—would have such a yen for the wilderness, and one would be correct. You can roll a bowling ball from one end of Chicago to the other, and few there wish to walk much in such monotonous environs.

I never took to the trail until 1985, at age 47, when Ray Sokolov, the estimable editor of the Leisure & Arts page of the Wall Street Journal, where my sports columns appeared amid the book, theater, movie and dance reviews, proposed an outing in the Rocky Mountains near Aspen, Colorado. Ray, an experienced hiker and climber, painted an alluring word picture of the adventure, and sealed the deal when he said our destination would be the summit of Mount Massive, at 14,421 feet the third-highest peak in the contiguous U.S.

“Mt. Massive!” I thought. “What a name! What a brag!” Considering myself in decent shape from my regimen of tennis and racquetball, I signed on.

Alas, as often was the case, Ray was as short on practical advice as he was long on rhetoric. Knowing no better, I neglected to do any serious training, and undertook the hike wearing Hush Puppies and cotton socks on my unwary feet. Furthermore, I’d never been higher than mile-high Denver, and the air in the 12,000-to-14,000-foot range of the upper Rockies is much thinner than it is there.

We did the hike, all right, getting to within a couple hundred feet of our goal before finding ourselves in a cul-de-sac of boulders with threatening clouds approaching, but I felt anything but wonderful. My feet were brutally blistered, my legs ached and my breath came in short pants. But you know what? Once healed I concluded that I’d loved the experience, and couldn’t wait to do it again.

In the years since I’ve hiked all over the U.S., especially in Arizona; in fact, the lure of the desert was a big reason wife Susie and I decided to set up permanent shop in Scottsdale. We live virtually across the street from a mountain preserve that has many beautiful and interesting trails, and dozens more are within an hour’s drive in any direction. Phoenix is a hikers’ paradise in season; I daresay no U.S. metro area is better.

I’ve taken courses in the local flora and fauna, achieving near-mavenhood on the subjects. I’ve led hikes under various auspices, and this fall, after the local community college cancelled (among many others) a hiking program I led, I ’m continuing it on my own. Tomorrow’s the first outing, and I’m psyched.

Hiking has much to recommend it. Athletically, it requires nothing more than the ability to put one foot in front of the other. It’s cheap, with the basic equipment being only hiking shoes (I buy a $50 pair online from Sierra Trading Post every couple of years) and a $20 fanny or back pack in which to carry water. It’s low-impact, meaning that it’s easy on the frame, and noncompetitive. It enables you to see things you can’t see from your car; indeed, the farther off the road you get the prettier the scenery becomes.

If you get down this way give me a call and I’ll take you out. If you live in or around Chicago you can get started in the Cook County forest preserves, and for a treat drive to Starved Rock State Park, where there are many good trails.

Try it. You’ll like it.

REMINDER: I’ll be speaking at 9:30 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 1, at the book fair at the Jewish Community Center on Scottsdale Rd. just north of Cactus.

IT'S IN THE BAG

2009-09-30T08:12:00.000-07:00

Friday (10/2) is the big day and I’m excited. The International Olympic Committee is meeting in Copenhagen to vote on the site of the 2016 Summer Olympics and my beloved native city of Chicago is in the running, along with Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo and Madrid.

By me, it figures that Chicago will prevail. Rio is best known for crime and immense slums, Tokyo for $150 airport-to-hotel cab rides, and Madrid for being the seat of the Franco government, which far outlasted those of his buddies Hitler and Mussolini. Looks like a slam dunk right there.

Chicago has many positive things going for it as well. International sports honchos love the U.S.’s restaurants, five-star hotels, limos and rental cars, telephone systems, stadiums, luxury boxes and fans able and eager to buy tickets for whatever event is on tap, and Chi-Town has those in abundance. Anything you can get anywhere you can get there, and I mean anything. Who could ask for more?

The Olympics would look great in the City by the Lake. I can see the TV cameras focusing lovingly on Buckingham Fountain, Michigan Avenue, Millennium Park, Belmont Harbor and other tourist magnets. Chicago hot dogs and Italian beef sandwiches, the city’s major contributions to world cuisine, finally would get the attention they deserve. So would 16-inch softball, Chicago’s gift to the world of sports; I’m sure they’ll be able to work it into the Olympic schedule. Thillens Stadium would be the perfect venue.

Yes, I know there are naysayers. Their argument is the same as it always is for such endeavors, centering on the immorality of spending millions (billions?) of dollars on a sports extravaganza when so many societal needs go unmet. But hey—why limit that to sports? One can make the same case that a better use could be made of every buck we spend on booze, cigars, cigarettes, chewing gum, candy bars, lattes, comic books, bad movies, massages and cocaine, but the world doesn’t work that way.

As you know if you follow this space, I’m against spending public money for new stadiums for our domestic sports staples of baseball, football and basketball. That’s because the vast majority of the revenues those facilities generate are local and they serve only to funnel money away from other local entertainments and into the pockets of team owners. Money spent on Olympic installations would be different because the Games would be a tourist bonanza for Chicago that would continue well past the time the athletes leave.

Further, from what I’ve seen of the city’s Olympic plans, relatively little money would go into building new facilities. Existing structures would accommodate most events, with the main exception being a sort of erector-set stadium for track and field and the opening and closing ceremonies, slated for Washington Park. After the Games it would be disassembled and a smaller stadium built on the site for local use. That would be a lasting plus. So, too, would the considerable sum of federal cash that would go into updating Chicago’s public-transit system to better serve visitors, and, of course, residents.

The main reason for my optimism, though, has nothing to do with bricks and mortar, civic spirit, or, even, Italian beef. It’s the natural affinity between the two main legislative bodies that would be involved in a Chicago Olympics, the Chicago City Council and the IOC. Although municipal graft wasn’t invented in Chicago, and certainly exists elsewhere, it was brought to such an art in the City Council that the late Royko held that the English translation of the city’s Latin motto—“Urbus en Horto”—is “Where’s mine?” The IOC has a similar rep, similarly well earned; no IOC member ever has been seen exiting the rear door of an airliner.

The good-old boys from Georgia greased many an IOC palm to obtain the 1996 Summer Games for Atlanta, as did Salt Lake City’s agents in landing the 2002 Winter Games. A couple of SLC people resigned in disgrace after that vote, as did 10 IOC members. But the bottom line was that the Games stayed in the virtuous Beehive State.

I see where President Obama plans to be in Copenhagen to make the city’s final pitch to the IOC. That’s great—he’s persuasive. But smart as he is I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a delegation of city councilmen—past and present—surreptitiously accompany him to seal the deal. He should include Alderman Eddie Burke from the current council, and get a prison furlough for ex-Ald. Eddie Vrdolyak so he could make the trip. If those two can’t swing it, nobody can.

I’m just sorry Tom Keane isn’t still around. If he were, it’d really be a slam dunk for my home town.

POSTING A COMMENT: Getting in your two-cents worth via comments is a big part of blogging, and I welcome yours. Several people have told me they’ve tried to comment on my efforts at various times but failed to get theirs posted, so here’s a how-to:
At the end of the column click on the word “comments.” That will take you to another screen. Write your comment in the box, then copy the “verification” letters in the box that’s provided. Skip the stuff about “user name” and “password”—it’s not required. Click on the “name/url” circle. Put your name in the box that’s provided or click on the “anonymous” circle. If you wish, click on “review” to check what you’ve written, or go immediately to “publish.” You can do it!

BUSINESS NOTE: If you’re in or around Scottsdale on Sunday, Nov. 1, you might drop into the book fair at the Jewish Community Center at 12701 N. Scottsdale Rd. I’ll be speaking about my “For the Love of…” books, and other things, starting at 9:30 a.m.

TYSON

2009-09-15T07:28:00.000-07:00

Being misunderstood is a chronic condition these days, one that many people—famous and not—richly enjoy. Indeed, the plaint that “nobody really knows me” may be the real national anthem in a land where navel gazing outranks TV watching as a source of mass entertainment.

Thus, it wasn’t surprising to hear Mike Tyson, the subject of a recent James Toback documentary movie that bears his name, deliver an opening monologue to his unseen (and unheard) interviewer that asked the question “Who am I?” and answered it by saying “Nobody really knows Mike Tyson.” The fact that “nobody” includes the ex-boxer himself is what gave the movie its punch. He’s always been as much a spectator as a participant in his chaotic life, and as morbidly curious as we are to learn what’ll happen next.

I first met Tyson in February, 1986, when I went to a college hockey arena in Troy, N.Y., to see him fight the journeyman Jesse Ferguson in his 18th professional bout. Tyson, then just 19 years old, had dispatched his previous 17 foes by knockouts, most in the first or second rounds. The tall Ferguson proved a tougher nut, but only because he dedicated himself solely to such survival tactics as running and holding, and in the sixth round was duly disqualified. Still, Tyson showed enough to make the trip worthwhile and presage the more-significant ring triumphs that were to follow.

Ask somebody today about Tyson the fighter and he’ll probably label him a primitive brawler who got by mostly on muscle. That simply wasn’t true. Even as a teen Tyson possessed advanced skills in all facets of his brutal sport. Moreover, he had the fastest hands of any fighter I’ve seen, in any weight class. In my view he’s the only man who could have given Mohammad Ali a good fight if both were in their primes.

At 5-foot-10 or -11 and about 215 pounds, the young Tyson was among the smallest heavyweights of his day, but punching upward from his powerful haunches he could deliver blows of unmatched speed and ferocity, and bobbing and weaving from the hands-high “peekaboo” stance taught to him by his mentor, Cus D’Amato, was hard to hit as well. Ali might put him away if he were able to hold him off for seven or eight rounds, but, by me, that would be a big “if.”

Alas, the Tyson most people remember is the wild man who bit Evander Holyfield’s ear in a fit of frustration during a losing effort, and the one who wrecked his life with choices so self-destructive as to suggest insanity. His downward spiral began with the death of D’Amato in 1985, just as his pro career was being launched, and turned into freefall when Jimmy Jacobs, the ex-handball champion who was his first manager and could speak to him athlete-to-athlete, unexpectedly followed D’Amato in 1988.

Unanchored, Tyson put his professional affairs in the hands Don King, a scoundrel without peer, and devoted himself personally to the scheming actress Robin Givens. The fact that everyone (literally) told him that King would rob him and Givens would use him seemed only to increase his commitments to them. Inside the ring he forgot the precepts that enabled him to unify the heavyweight title at the rare age of 21. Outside of it, problems with women, booze and drugs, and a three-year prison term for a rape conviction, stripped him of his dignity.

Gone, too, is just about all of the $300 milllion (no typo) he grossed during his fistic career. The subject of where it went concerns him so little that it’s barely mentioned in the Toback movie. While allowing that King took much or most of it—“He’s a wretched, slimy motherfucker. He’d kill his mother for a dollar”—he quickly absolves the electric-haired one of blame. “I loved leeches. I associated myself with leeches. I allowed that to happen,” Tyson says with an offhand shrug.

The “why?” of it all wasn’t asked or answered directly in the film, but it’s always been there for those who would listen. In interviews Tyson often would relate how just about all of his partners in crime during his days as a child street thug in Brooklyn were dead, in jail, or hopelessly hooked on drugs, and express the view that he expected a similar fate. Why plan for the future when there probably wouldn’t be one?

“My past is history, my future is a mystery,” the erstwhile Iron Mike tells Toback in conclusion. That’s one of those glib rhymes silly people love, but in this case it contained more truth than poetry.

BUSINESS NOTE: “For the Love of the Bulldogs,” about University of Georgia football, is on the market, the 11th in the “For the Love of…” series published by Triumph Books. Written by me, and beautifully illustrated by Mark Anderson, it’ll make a great gift for Dawgs’ fans of all ages. Barnes & Noble has ‘em, as does amazon.com. Buy a bunch!

TENNIS ANYONE?

2009-09-01T07:40:00.001-07:00

The U.S. Open tennis tournament is underway in the big complex at the former World’s Fair site in the New York borough of Queens, but I am more concerned with other things, such as the homestretch of the baseball regular season (bye-bye Cubs and Sox) and the start of the NFL’s.

Such wasn’t always the case. During my columnizing days the tournament was a highlight of my year, and not just because it meant I got to spend two weeks in glorious Gotham on an expense account. A tennis player myself then, I loved watching the game in any way, shape or form, and pursued it in as many venues as I could.

The first week of the Open was my favorite because there was action all over the multi-court grounds, involving not only the certified stars but other players, both up-and-comers and old timers on their way out, and I was there watching whether or not I planned to write about what I saw. When I scanned the small-print results of the first- and second-round matches I had well-rounded pictures to go with names that meant little to more-casual fans. Heck, I even knew the juniors, and could converse knowledgably about which might succeed, and which not.

Unfortunately, though, top-flight tennis has changed since, and not for the better. Advances in racket technology have all but erased stylistic differences among players, turning every match into a virtual copy of the one before, and the one after. When the players don’t wear different-colored outfits it’s tough to tell them apart.

The racket revolution began around 1970, when traditional wood frames gave way to steel or aluminum. The initial change was widely noted and much commented upon, and gave players a bit more bang for their bucks, but its effects were small compared with what was to follow. Starting around 1990 such exotically named materials as titanium, boron, Kevlar, graphite and Hypercarbon increasingly came into use, often in combinations. This allowed racket frames to become much bigger, stronger, lighter and more flexible than before, and “sweet spots” (areas of maximum impact) to grow. Grips and strings improved, too, magnifying the results.

In “woody” days, the typical racket had about a 65-square-inch frame and weighed about 13 ounces. Today’s frames run to 145 square inches (although most pros use ones smaller than that) and weights have dropped to 10 or 11 ounces. The term “trampoline effect” has come into use, vividly describing what the new weaponry has wrought in the hands of the athletically gifted.

Most observers initially predicted that better rackets would give the edge to big servers and cause the serve-and-volley game to flourish. The reality has been quite the opposite. Sure, service speeds are up, but today’s top players nullify that by retreating behind the baseline a step or two, then trampolining the serves back faster than they come in, relatively speaking. Rushing the net has become akin to charging a machine-gun nest, and about as productive. It has all but been abandoned as a regular offensive tactic.

The great tennis rivalries of the recent past were between serve-and-volleyers and baseliners, which translated neatly into the puncher-boxer dichotomy that enlivens many sports: think McEnroe-Borg, Navratilova-Evert and Sampras-Agassi. Now there are only baseliners, hitting back and forth, ad infinitum.

Stylistic contrast hasn’t been the only casualty of the new era. The term “touch” is little heard any more, and smallish players like Ken Rosewall, Tracy Austin and Martina Hingis, who depended on it, are all but extinct. The top level of the women’s game has come to be the sole province of such strapping bashers as the Williams sisters and the East European “evas” and “ovas” who have the muscle to stay on the court with them.

Among the men stamina is all, with matches in the brutal, best-of-five-set Grand Slam format often topping three grueling hours. Injuries are rife and just about everybody has them some of the time. To me, the most remarkable thing about Roger Federer’s recent dominance of the sport hasn’t been his considerable skill but his ability to soldier on as those about him falter.

Golf also has undergone a technological revolution but has accommodated itself to it by lengthening and tightening championship courses. Tennis can’t change its dimensions, and with the money at stake in its equipment business it’s not about to turn back the clock, so like it or not only more of the same is in prospect. I’ll probably be watching the Open finals, but not much until then.

VICK'S RUB

2009-08-14T07:12:00.000-07:00

Remember Hillary’s 2008 campaign ad that asked whom you wanted to answer when the White House phone rang at 3 a.m.? The joke was that she’d be best at it, because she’d be waiting up for Bill to come home.

Middle-of-the-night calls are a trial for coaches as well as politicians, especially coaches of the football variety. Few of those fellas crawl between the sheets without fearing that their slumber will be interrupted with the information that one of their players had drunkenly wrapped his Escalade around a tree or been arrested for being involved in a bar fight, beating up his girlfriend, or worse. Wise coaches keep an all-purpose statement at hand, expressing concern for both victims and perps and promising that the team would make a thorough inquiry into the matter before commenting further.

Football players being what they are (overmuscled and overamped), that’s ever been so. I recall in my 1950s reportorial salad days learning that the newspapers in my beloved college home of Champaign, Illinois, had a gentleman’s agreement with the local authorities to keep quiet the less-than-felonious antics of University of Illinois athletes. A main beneficiary of this policy was Ray Nitschke, the linebacker who enjoyed taking on all comers in townie bars before moving on to a more menschlike existence as a pro in Green Bay.

These days tabloid values rule and mum isn’t the word where jock misdeeds are concerned. True or not, it also seems as though there are more of them. Outrage of all sorts is up, too, and the leaders of our sports leagues feel moved to respond to it by doing, well, something. Thus it is that they have become self-appointed extensions of the law’s long arm, kind of like the pincers grocers use to get cans off their top shelves.

This is a windy way to get around to the cases of the footballers Michael Vick, Donte Stallworth and Plaxico Burress, which currently are vexing many. Vick and Stallworth committed criminal offenses and have served prison or jail time for them—Vick 18 months for staging dog fights and Stallworth 24 days for killing a pedestrian while driving drunk. (Make what you will of THAT difference.) Roger Goodell, the corporate lawyer who is commissioner of all the NFLs, piled on by banning the released Vick for the first five games of the league’s current season and docking Stallworth a full year’s play.

He’ll be doing much the same for Burress once the regular law gets done dealing with the wide receiver for carrying an unregistered handgun into a New York nightclub and wounding himself with it there. You’d think that prison and the title of World’s Biggest Doofus would be punishment enough for the guy, but I guess it won’t be.

Where Goodell, et al, get off wielding extra-judicial power for the laws that govern us all is beyond me. Their charge—subject to players’ union acquiescence—is to enforce their league’s rules, which puts penalties for offenses such as on-field fights, gambling and the use of performance-enhancing drugs within their proper scope. That, plus negotiating multi-billion-dollar TV contracts and arranging team-owners’ meetings in fetching places, ought to be enough to kept them busy.

The fact is that while quarterback Vick’s dog-fighting business was illegal, and disgusting to many, it had nothing to do with football’s integrity or his ability to play the game. It’s not like he’s in the animal-shelter business. Similarly, receiver Stallworth never should be permitted to drive a school bus or even a cab, but—by me— he can catch as many passes as he’s able to if someone will hire him to do it.

Professional sports are entertainment, pure and simple, and to hold its practitioners to standards higher (or lower) than the rest of us makes the enterprises more important than they are. It’s also worth noting that our outrage tends to be short, and selective. What’ll happen with Vick will be what’s happening now with the baseballer Manny Ramirez, whose offense was against his sport: if Vick plays well he’ll be cheered by the fans of whatever team he plays for, no matter how others may react. Our desire for retribution runs a distant second to our lust for W’s.

LOL

2009-07-30T13:32:00.000-07:00

I used to be able to get a regular chuckle out of the newspaper funny pages, but not so much these days. For, I’m sure, reasons of economy, papers have shrunk their cartoon strips to the point where their word balloons are tougher to read than the stock tables. It’s tough to laugh when you’re squinting.

Not to worry, though, because the sports pages can be counted upon to produce full-throated yuks. I had one such the other day when I read a piece headlined “Paterno Hopes Bowden Can Keep Wins.” It was about Joe Paterno, the Penn State football coach, opining that his fellow-old-guy colleague, Bobby Bowden of Florida State, was being mistreated because the NCAA was considering removing 14 wins from the school’s—and Bowden’s-- record after 25 FSU football players were caught in an exam-cheating scandal involving athletics department employees. That penalty was deemed appropriate because some of the players would have been ineligible if not for the ill-gotten grades.

It’d be downright unfair to penalize Bowden for the misdeeds, declared the venerated Joe Pa, who’s known in part for long claiming to have graduated 90-plus percent of his players but not including flunk-outs, drop-outs and run-offs in the calculation. “I’ve known Bobby for 40 years. He’s my kind of guy,” Paterno said. “He’s a very humble and very, very religious guy. He’s just a good person and a heck of a football coach.”

Bowden agreed with Paterno’s conclusion, but on different ground from personal virtue. “Why do we [he and the other-sport FSU coaches whose players also were snagged] deserve it [being docked wins]?” he asked the Orlando Sentinel. “We didn’t know anything about it.”

Didn’t know anything about it? HA HA HA! This guy probably can tell you that his third-string fullback has a right foot that’s a half-size bigger than his left, likes cold spaghetti for breakfast and has a girlfriend whose youngest brother’s name is Jerome, yet he didn’t know that about one third of his squad was being coached to cheat by their so-called academic advisers. You believe that and I have a piece of land in Cave Creek I want to show you.

Funnier still-- but not in a ha-ha way-- is that the folks in charge will pretend to believe Bowden. That’s despite the fact that the latest scandal is the umpteenth during his tenure at FSU, an institution that seems to exist mainly to fill a football stadium six or seven Saturdays a year. When the stuff hits the fan, coaches like him (winners) stay clean, with the blame falling on some assistant coach or athletics department flunky whose salary is maybe 1/50th of theirs. That’s the way things are done at the big-time college level.

A head coach occasionally gets nabbed, but only when he does something truly stupid. Kelvin Sampson got the boot as Indiana University basketball boss when about 1,000 impermissible long-distance calls to recruits were traced to his phones, and Tim Floyd just quit as Southern Cal hoops coach in the wake of allegations that he’d slipped $1,000 to O.J. Mayo, the recruit who caused more damage in L.A. than a Hollywood Hills mudslide. If Sampson had watched “Law and Order,” he’d have known that the first thing detectives do when they identify a suspect is check his “luds.” If Floyd hadn’t slept through that class in Coaching 101, he’d have known to keep his fingerprints off the cash.

Do not weep for Sampson or Floyd; the former is serving his penance as a well-paid NBA assistant coach, biding his time until the dust settles and some win-hungry school calls, and the latter no doubt will do the same.

But usually there’s no penalty for rule-breaking, and the wicked flourish like so many bushy green bay trees. Exhibit A in that regard is John Calipari, who left a trail of slime from his previous jobs at U Mass and Memphis to the basketball throne (and a $4 million-plus annual salary) at the U of Kentucky, one of college sport’s premier perches. I check my wallet every time I see him, even on my television screen.

As much as I despair about ever seeing the coaching stable cleaned, there may be a symbolic remedy. I read that there’s a Spanish judge who indicts prominent wrongdoers from other lands, willy-nilly; maybe he can be prevailed upon to issue a blanket charge against every big-time U.S. college football or basketball coach for violating laws against soliciting minors for immoral purposes. At the least, it’d keep those guys from visiting Spain.

WE KNOW YOU, AL

2009-07-15T07:13:00.000-07:00

To Cubs’ fans, this year’s All-Star Game break brings to mind the story about the man who incessantly banged his head against a wall. Asked why he did it he’d reply, “Because it feels so good when I stop.”

The annual respite, however, can have other purposes, such as to assess the baseball season to date and the portents for its remainder. In that department, there’s a good possibility that the present campaign could stand out in a most-auspicious way, by producing the game’s first Triple Crown winner in quite a long time.

You don’t hear much about the Triple Crown because this most difficult of batting feats is such a rarity. Since the Red Sox’ Carl Yastrzremski last did it in 1967, few hitters have come close to leading their league in batting average, home runs and runs batted in during the same season, and the few bids that have occurred weren’t sustained enough to get the kettle drums of hype in full rumble.

But now comes Jose Alberto Pujols Alcantara, aka Albert Pujols, of the Dominican Republic and St. Louis, Missouri, with aptitudes and accomplishments that suggest that a breakthrough might be in the cards, or, at least, a Card. At this writing Sr. Pujols leads the National League in homers (with 32) and ribbies (with 87), and his .332 batting average is just 17 points behind that of the league leader, the Marlins’ Hanley Ramirez. Two and a half more months of similar results and Pujols will be bidding fair to hit the elusive Tri.

If he does it he’ll join the 11 men who achieved the distinction over 13 seasons. They are Nap Lajoie (1901), Ty Cobb (1909), Rogers Hornsby (1922 and 1925), Jimmy Foxx and Chuck Klein (1933), Lou Gehrig (1934), Joe Medwick (1937), Ted Williams (1942 and 1947), Mickey Mantle (1956), Frank Robinson (1966) and Yaz. All of them were among the best of their eras, a distinction Pujols clearly shares. They’re also Hall of Famers, and he’ll be there, too.

There are a lot of interesting things about the Triple Crown, enough to fill a book. In fact, I proposed just such a volume several years ago, and even enlisted an agent (hi, John) in the quest. Alas, there were no takers, but nothing is lost to a writer, and thus this blog.

One name you might have noticed as missing from the above list is that of Babe Ruth, the game’s all-time best batsman (and player, by me). He led the American League in both home runs and RBIs in six different seasons, but never claimed a TC even though he hit between .372 and .393 in four of those years.

Williams, the second-best hitter ever (by me), missed a third TC because he went hitless in the final game of the 1949 season and lost the AL batting championship to Detroit’s George Kell, .3427 to .3429. The Cardinals’ Stan Musial won NL batting and RBI titles in 1948 but was one blast short of tying for the HR crown. Cleveland’s Al Rosen led the 1953 AL in HRs and RBIs, but finished a point behind Washington’s Mickey Vernon in the BA race, .336 to .337. If Rosen had been a half-step faster on a chopper to third in his final at-bat of that season, he’d have had it.

A Cubbie, Henry “Heinie” Zimmerman, made the TC list for a while years ago with his 14 HRs, 103 RBIs and .372 BA in 1912, but an official revisit to his stats shaved his RBI count to a less-than-league-leading 99. That was probably just as well, because Heinie was kicked out of baseball in 1921 for being part of a game-fixing scheme and wound up as a partner of the gangster Dutch Schultz in a New York speakeasy.

The near-miss list goes on, but not in recent decades. That’s at least partly because the modern game’s accent on power has batters of all sorts swinging for the fences, not a prescription for getting the kind of batting average that might supply the third leg of the TC stool. The massively built Pujols, who fills a batter’s box like few others, swings big, too, but when the situation calls for it he also swings smart, and is the rare power hitter who walks more than he strikes out. That’s why he’s been a TC threat since he came to the Major Leagues at age 21 in 2001.

Indeed, what leaps out at you from Pujol’s baseball biography (along with the fact that he wasn’t picked until the 13th round of the 1999 draft)is his consistency at the plate. In his first eight seasons in the Bigs he never batted below .314 or hit fewer than 32 home runs. Moreover, while big guys often are poor fielders and base runners, he’s come to excel in both those areas, a tribute to his dedication to his craft.

Yes, he’s a Cardinal, a wearer of the hated red, but let’s be big and put that aside. He’s one of the greats and we should consider ourselves lucky to share the planet with him just now.

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1 and 1A

2009-07-01T07:22:00.000-07:00

Popular Wisdom has it that there are two kinds of Chicago baseball fans: Cubs’ fans who hate the White Sox and White Sox’ fans who hate the Cubs. The view gains credence whenever the two teams play (as they did last week) and the TV cameras roam the sports bars in search of incendiary statements from supporters of each side. There’s no lack of them, loudly voiced.

Look to the sides of the pictures, though, and you’ll see people hunched low over their drinks, keeping mum. They are members of the tolerate minority that wishes both teams well. Silence is a good strategy for them because it saves them from dealing with the zealots, and they know the TV types won’t use their quotes anyway. But they do exist, and probably in greater number than you’d expect.

I know because I’m one of them. Yes, having grown up a short bike ride from Wrigley Field, I’m primarily a Cubs’ fan, and a Cubs’ win is enough to make my day. But I like the Sox, too, and when both Chicago teams prevail it’s a great day, made all the better by its rarity.

Like most Northsiders, as a youngster I considered the South Side as terra incognita, and dangerous to boot. But once I grew up a bit and got my own wheels (a much-used Ford, around age 19) I began visiting Comiskey Park and watching the likes of Nellie, Little Looie, Jungle Jim and Big Klu do their things. What was not to like, especially in a prolonged era of Cub decline?

Some of my most-memorable baseball moments came at what has come to be called “Old” Comiskey Park. The most impressive home run I ever saw was hit by the wayward slugger Dick (“Don’t Call Me Richie”) Allen in a 1971 or ’72 game at Comiskey against the Yankees, an awesome blow that started low and seemed to be still rising when it cleared the left-field wall 370-or-so feet away. Years later I spent a day with Allen reporting a column, and told him of the memory. “I hit a lot of them like that,” he said with a smile. “If they cleared the shortstop, they were gone.”

Chicago has been a Cubs’ town for the last 20-plus years, and many assume that’s always been the case. Not so. The Sox were the better and more-popular team through most of the 1950s, ’60s and ‘70s, and even outdrew the Cubs in 1984, the Wrigleys’ break-through, divisional-title year. The Sox lost their edge because of two fateful decisions: going to cable (and off “free”) TV in the ‘80s, before many people had it, and the civic-minded choice of the South Side of Chicago over the west side of Florida when a new ballpark became imperative.

They’ve reaped precious little good will for the latter action. The team did enjoy a several-season attendance spurt after New Comiskey Park (now U.S. Cellular Field) opened in 1991, but soon the stadium’s legislature-mandated location in an expressway wilderness dragged it down, and despite Chicago’s first-in-a-century World Series title (in 2005) it’s in the position of having to win to draw. That’s somewhere no sports enterprise wants to be.

To the Sox’ credit, they’ve done their best with what they have. Despite being a middle-market team in a major market, they’ve paid up for players, and their GM, Kenny Williams, isn’t afraid to pull the trigger on moves that might improve their lot. They’ve visited the post-season about as often as the bigger-payroll Cubs during the playoff era, and done much better once there. That includes last season, when they not only matched the Cubs’ noisier divisional title but also won a playoff game.

This season has been painful for followers of both Chicago teams, but more so for Cubs’ fans. When I think of the Cubs these days I think of Milton Bradley, batting .230 and mad at the world despite being paid $10 million a year to play baseball. When I think of the Sox I think of Steve Stone back in the booth and of such bright young prospects as Gordon Beckham, Aaron Poreda and Tyler Flowers, the latter a catcher currently battering fences in the minors. It’s not much to smile about, but it’s something.

TOM, GREG AND JOHN

2009-06-13T16:12:00.001-07:00

A baseball milestone was passed about a week ago, and few people noticed it. When the Atlanta Braves released Tom Glavine it became the first time since 1987 that either he, John Smoltz or Greg Maddux were not on the team’s roster.

Although some may argue the point, I believe that Glavine, Smoltz and Maddux were the three best pitchers to perform for the same team at the same time (1993-2003), which is saying quite a lot. The Braves won 14 divisional championships with two or more of them on board, and five National League pennants, in 1991, ‘92, ’95, ’96 and ’99. The fact that only one of their World Series appearances (in ’95) ended in victory was as much a product of the baseball vicissitudes as anything else.

I’m not a Braves’ fan but I’ve always been a fan of their erstwhile Big Three. I like athletes whose actions debunk the conventional wisdom in their sports, and Maddux and Glavine certainly did that. The past 30 years have been (among other things) the “Radar Gun Era” in baseball, with young pitchers judged primarily by how high they can make the gadget’s electronic digits jump. Any kid who’s shorter than 6-foot-4 and can’t throw a strawberry through a battleship hardly gets a glance from scouts any more. Maddux and Glavine—both ordinary-sized fellas with extraordinary “stuff”— put the lie to such nonsense.

Maddux was particularly unjockish in appearance. His program height was six-feet even, but I am (or was) that tall and stared him in the forehead many times. Off duty, he often wore glasses. He’d have looked more at home in a cubicle in front of a computer screen than on a pitcher’s mound.

At 6-foot-3 and 200-plus pounds, Smoltz just about fit the cookie-cutter mold, and his high-90s fastballs thrilled the gun-toters. But he also had guile and “heart” in abundance, and could be counted upon to stick around the locker room until the last question was asked. Maybe that last thing shouldn’t count in assessing players, but we news guys are human (really).

Which of the three was best? The usual answer would be Maddux, and it’s hard to dispute. His 355 career regular-season victories rank eighth on the all-time list, and his trophy annex (I’m sure he has one) contains four Cy Young Awards. Watching him pitch was watching an artist at work. His fastball may have topped out in the 80s, but no matter—he worked batters high and low, in and out, fast and slow. He rarely delivered consecutive pitches at the same speed or in the same place

Ask the typical knuckleheaded thrower (think Kerry Wood) to describe his perfect game and he’d likely say 27 Ks. Maddux would say 27 first-pitch grounders to the shortstop. Still, his deliveries were so elusive that his 3,371 strikeouts are 10th on the career list. Why the Cubs let him go to the Braves via free agency in 1993 will remain one of the game’s enduring mysteries.

Maddux kept hitters off balance with his variety. Lefty Glavine’s trick was tougher: he got most of them out with the same basic pitch, a slider or changeup on the outside corner of the plate at the knees. Glavine would throw his first pitch there, and if he got the call he’d throw the next one an inch farther outside. And the next an inch farther. Batters waiting for him to come to them would wait in vain; in 22 seasons he never did. He was the 24th pitcher to top 300 wins. If he doesn’t return to the game, he’ll finish with 305.

Smoltz’s win total of 210 is a furlong behind those of his ex-mates and golfing buddies, but he did something few other pitchers have done, which is switch successfully to relief after a successful starting career. He became a bullpen closer after elbow surgery cost him the 2000 season and part of 2001, and in 3 1/2 seasons in the role was among the best, recording 154 saves. Then he returned to starting with nary a hitch.

Moreover, Smoltz was one of the best big-game pitchers ever, posting a 15-4 post-season record, and a 2.65 ERA. He was among the parties of the second part in the best World Series game I’ve seen, Minnesota’s (and Jack Morris’s) 10-inning, 1-0 win in the seventh game of the 1991 Classic, throwing a shutout into the eighth inning. I’ve voted for Morris for the Hall of Fame several times, largely off that performance.

If I’m around I’ll cast the same vote for Maddux, Glavine and Smoltz when their times come. I’m in no hurry; Smoltz is still at it (he’s now with the Red Sox, rehabbing) and I wish him luck.

TIGER, TIGER

2009-06-03T14:06:00.000-07:00

They’ll play the next U.S. Open golf tournament in a couple of weeks at the penitential Bethpage State Park course on Long Island, and Tiger Woods will be favored to win. That’s because he’s favored to win every tournament he enters.

Tiger is unquestionably the best golfer of his era and, to my mind and that of many others, the best ever. Your position on the latter issue depends largely on how you compare modern athletes with those of previous periods, and, by me, it’s no contest. Thanks to advances in nutrition and exercise physiology, and the fact that their remuneration allows them to devote themselves to their sports year-round, today’s jocks are uniformly better than those of the past. A golfer is like a baseball pitcher in that he spends all his time perfecting a single motion, so all the athletic virtues aren’t necessary for his success. But they don’t hurt, and no golfer has them to the extent Tiger has.

Add to that a single-minded dedication to golf and a literal lifetime spent in honing his skills and you have a combination that can’t be beat. Tiger is 33 years old, young for his sport, but because he’s been swinging a club since he was in diapers he has an edge in savvy over players eight or 10 years older.

Victory in professional golf’s “majors” (the Masters, PGA Championship and U.S. and British opens) is how golfing greatness most often is measured. Tiger has 14 of those titles, just three fewer than Jack Nicklaus. Jack won his last major at age 46 while Tiger still is going strong, so short of a catastrophe he’ll break Jack’s record. But even if Tiger’s career ended tomorrow he’d still be No. 1 all-time on any other objective scale.

The above paean, however, doesn’t mean I root for Tiger. In fact, on the occasions when I tune in golf and he’s in contention, I usually pull for the other guys. Maybe that traces to a young life rooting against the Yankees. Maybe I’m a crypto racist—crypto even to myself-- but I don’t think so. There’s always been something about the guy that puts me off.

Part of it is my visceral reaction against the way he was raised, which seems more like an experiment in conditioning than what’s normally thought of as a childhood. Many are charmed by the tales of daddy Earl, a former Army officer, handing Tiger a sawed-off club at age six months, taking him to the driving range at 18 months and beaming as he broke 50 for nine holes at 3, but I think it’s weird. Worse, the example has caught on and we now frequently read about kids being channeled into high-powered sports-training regimens while still in grade school. Lots of ambitious parents are thinking that what worked for ol’ Earl might work for them.

Further, the Tiger who first appeared on the PGA tour in 1996 was no ordinary young man embarking on a great adventure but one with multi-million-dollar endorsement contracts in hand who’d been packaged for maximum financial return by IMG, the sports-agency and promotional octopus. Like his fellow tourists, Tiger usually would show up in the press tent after rounds to review his day’s shots, but any journalist wanting more would have to go through IMG, and the answer usually would be “no.”

That’s still the case, I’m told, and even those permitted to ask don’t get much in the way of answers. Tiger’s an adult now—married and the father of two—and spent two years at Stanford U., an estimable educational institution, but he’s still in the IMG cocoon, and if he has opinions on anything besides golf he keeps them to himself. Hey, they might hurt business. Similarly, while he must have friends (just about everyone does), they apparently take a vow of silence to stay in his circle. What goes on with Tiger stays with Tiger, or so it seems.

Tiger’s domination has been a mixed blessing for golf. There really are two PGA Tours: the regular one and the Tiger Tour, which has about half as many events. When Tiger plays the crowds are large and TV ratings are high, and when he doesn’t, they’re not. Other guys out there can play— probably more than in any past era—but the spotlight is so focused on him that they’re in permanent shadow. Sean O’Hair, Nick Watney, Paul Casey and Geoff Ogilvy probably could stump a “What’s My Line?” panel, but they were among the Top 10 on the year’s PGA money list last month.

It’s not just me that’s lukewarm about Tiger. As excellent as he is he suffers from a charisma deficit, and while his galleries always are large they lack the emotional connection to him that “Arnie’s Army” had to Palmer or “Lee’s Fleas” had to Trevino. People love an underdog and there’s nothing about Tiger that suggests that quality. Chances are, there never will be.

Indeed, his career so far recalls the line from the old shampoo commercial, where the gorgeous blonde pleads “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.” While the parallel isn’t perfect, that also applies to Tiger.

NEWS, VIEWS

2009-05-15T07:54:00.000-07:00

NEWS: Mine That Bird wins the Kentucky Derby at odds of 50-to-1.
VIEWS: When a long shot wins a race and a handicapper doesn’t have him, he’ll go back to the Form to try to see what he might have overlooked. Then he’ll either smack his head in frustration for missing clues or shake it in disbelief that such a thing could happen.

Each of the two 50-to-1 shots that have won the Derby in the race’s last five runnings fits into one of those categories. Giacomo, the 2005 winner, had won just one of seven pre-Derby starts, but he’d challenged in several other good races while consistently staging late rallies that indicated he might be helped by the 1 ¼-miles Derby distance, 1/8-mile longer than any contestant had run. Further, he’d recorded four over-90 scores, topped by a 98, in the Beyer speed ratings that are the most-reliable gauge of a horse’s ability. He was the first Derby winner not to have achieved at least a 100 on that scale beforehand, but he’d been close. He was an underappreciated horse, and anyone who bet on him (alas, I didn’t) could take a bow.

Mine The Bird wasn't underappreciated. Yes, he’d won four of his eight previous starts, but all the victories had come in slow times against so-so opposition at Woodbine Park in Canada, a track that doesn’t rate with the best in the U.S. He’d displayed no consistent running style, meaning either he was hard to control or his trainer didn’t know what to do with him. Moreover, his highest pre-Derby Beyer was an 81, for heaven’s sake, the sort of score posted by contestants in $10,000 claiming races. How the guy won I have no idea. There oughta be an investigation.

Also, Mine That Bird is a terrible name.

NEWS: New York Yankees cut ticket prices on the best seats in their new stadium.
VIEWS: To the many reasons not to like the Yankees, a couple more were added when they opened their new stadium in the Bronx last month. One is that, like many other teams before them, they extorted public funds and credit to build themselves a new playground and then priced John and Joan Q. out the place. The other was their audacity in pricing the tickets in their new digs, with a breathtaking top of $2,500 per.

Mulling the idea of paying $2,500 to watch a single sporting event is discombobulating, giving us middle-class Americans a sense of what it’s like to be a Somali goat herder watching a rerun of “The Price Is Right.” I’d consider writing a four-figure check for a ringside seat to see Muhammad Ali fight Mike Tyson if were both magically restored to their primes, but certainly not to watch the Yanks play the Orioles on a chilly Wednesday night in May. The Yanks offer a comfortably padded chair with a good view of the action and easy access to food and lavatories, but that sounds like watching a game on television from home, doesn’t it? Hey, for twenty five hundred bucks you can buy a state-of-the-art TV set and watch all 162 Yankee games on cable, plus the playoffs should they qualify. And you could flick over to Nickelodeon between innings.

But now, faced with the recession and embarrassing rows of empty prime seats, the team has halved its top to $1,250 and reduced other “premium” tiers accordingly. That’s much better, don’t you think? Just kidding. My idea of a properly priced evening at the ballpark is paying $20 for an upper-deck, behind-home-plate seat to watch the D’backs at Chase Field here in the Desert Metropolis. If they raise it to $25, they lose me.

NEWS: Manny Ramirez gets a 50-game suspension after a drug that restores gonad function after steroid use is found in his medical records.
VIEWS: Revelations about ballplayers using steroids or related drugs are old stuff, but the Manny affair is different. That’s because his drug use came this season, not in the pre-2005 days before Major League Baseball began making a serious show of combating the potent muscle builders. It showed that “juicing” is alive and well in the erstwhile National Pastime.

That should come as no real surprise because the rewards for successful cheating remain high, as witnessed by the Dodger slugger’s current two-year, $50 million contract. This very definitely was true during the game’s long head-in-the-sand period. It still holds because the dopers always are ahead of the testers technologically. Steroid use is as smart a move now as it was then, albeit a riskier one.

Before the Manny bust, many people regarded baseball’s Steroids Era as a 1990-2005 phenomenon. Power-hitting records of that period are suspect; now the suspicions expand. It used to be that juicers like Mark McGwire were seen as exceptions to the “clean” rule, but a couple of veteran players of that time told me (off the record, of course) that they guessed that about one-third of their fellow Big Leaguers were users, and the true figure could have been higher. Users once were seen as edge-seekers, but maybe they were just trying to keep up with the competition.

Maybe they still are.

NO PLACE FOR YOUNG MEN

2009-05-01T07:57:00.000-07:00

The Kentucky Derby is tomorrow (Saturday, 5/2) and I’ll be there as usual-- or, at least, my money will. I’ll be at a table in the clubhouse at Turf Paradise in Phoenix, my local track, watching the proceedings through the miracle of simulcast. The experience doesn’t beat the real thing at big, barny old Churchill Downs in Louisville, where I’ve been many times, but it’s a respectable second.

The Derby is America’s foremost horse race, which is kind of too bad because it isn’t the best contest the sport presents annually. It’s in the spring, near the beginning of the racing season, and its field is limited to three-year-olds, who are equine teenagers. The Breeders’ Cup Classic, an open-age event staged in November, is a truer championship test, but it lacks the Derby’s weight of tradition and hype and so goes off less sung.

But because the Derby is an Event with a capital “E” it has something no other horse race can match: an audience whose demographics pretty much mirror that of other mass entertainments. By that I mean it attracts people of both sexes and all ages in the adult range. Especially welcome at Churchill or the simulcast outlets are young or youngish women, often bedecked in the elaborate hats that have become part of the Derby scene. There’s nothing like a fashion show to bring out the ladies.

That’s in marked contrast to the usual racing crowd, which is overwhelmingly male and dowdy and predominantly, uh, elderly. Okay, old. I’m a regular in the TV carrels at Turf Paradise on Saturdays, when many of the better races are run, and at 71 I think I bring down the average age of the house. It doesn’t take a crystal ball to foresee a time when the erstwhile Sport of Kings will be in even worse shape than it is now.

It’s no mystery why racing has become the preserve of the long in tooth. Picking winners is a scholarly pursuit that involves the diligent study of the Daily Racing Form, whose dense pages of numbers contain the histories of every horse running at every track in the nation on a given day. It requires an iron butt and the ability to concentrate, two things notably lacking among today’s young. Generations brought up on video games that deliver kills or their equivalent every few seconds—and with easy access to casino games that offer payoffs at a similar rate—are not about to strain their eyes and brains trying to dope out the third race at Santa Anita.

By me that’s too bad, because the reward of being right at the track goes beyond any monetary return. Most gambling games are exercises in statistical probability, with the only skill being the ability to recognize the true odds of any choice. Picking a winner at the track involves weighing such diverse factors as speed, distance, venue, age, weight, track condition, the fitness of the animals and the relative abilities of their human connections. When you’re successful you have real reason to pat yourself on the back.

I got my schooling in the handicapper’s art from the best possible source, Sam “The Genius” Lewin. Sam, a smart man and an expansive character, made a nice living living up to his nickname at the East Coast tracks in days past. In 1968 I did a feature story on him for the Wall Street Journal, and a publisher saw it and ordered up a book written by me in Sam’s voice. The product, titled “The Education of a Horseplayer,” came out the next year. Used copies—some fetching more than their original price-- are still offered on the internet. The book’s approaches remain valid even though its examples are long out of date.

Space prohibits me from relaying much of Sam’s wisdom here, but I can pass on his guiding principle. It’s the motto “Pace Makes the Race.” That means that the manner in which a race is run determines its outcome.

To elucidate, horses generally exhibit one of three distinct running styles: they like to take the lead in the early going, stay with the pack or trail the field before making their runs. A front-runner who goes unchallenged almost always wins. When two or more horses vie for the early lead, the late runners come into the picture.

Cigarette holder jutting, Sam would pore over the DRF tables, seeking to envision which horse or horses would move out smartly, which would challenge at mid-race, which would surge late. When his mental picture was clear he’d put his money down, sometimes quite a lot.

As I’ve said, it’s usually more complicated than that, but sometimes it’s less so. On some days the numbers just sit on the pages, unresponsive, but on other, rarer, days—when you aren’t diverted by the tote board, your companions’ conversation or your dinner plans-- they seem to talk to you. You become powerful, omnipotent. You float to the windows to collect. You fill out the IRS forms required of big winners.

A day like that is wonderful in a way that never gets old. It keeps you coming back far more often than it should.

BUSINESS NOTE: If you’d like a sports-world speaker for a business or other gathering, check out the roster managed by my friend Ira Silverman. It’s at www.silverman-media.com

YOU COULD LOOK IT UP

2009-04-15T09:02:00.000-07:00

The Cubs’ best hitter last season wasn’t Derrek Lee or Alfonso Soriano, who were paid to hit. It was Carlos Zambrano, who was paid to pitch. Z’s .337 batting average (in 83 official times up) led the team, as did his .554 slugging percentage. Still, every game he started his manager, Lou Piniella, put him ninth and last in the order, the worst batter’s place. Why? Because Zambrano is a pitcher and pitchers always bat last.

The conclusion is inescapable: much of what passes for wisdom in baseball really is just calcified habit. If John McGraw always batted his pitchers ninth, so did Connie Mack, Joe McCarthy, Walter Alston, Sparky Anderson, Bobby Cox, Piniella and just about every other great managerial mind. Even though Tony La Russa sometimes breaks the mold, the point still holds.

The same can be said for beliefs about the game’s mechanics. Do curve balls “break”? Can an overhand fast ball rise on its way to the plate? Does a ball hit with topspin pick up speed when it skips off an artificial playing surface? Are home runs necessarily hit harder than singles or doubles? Will a “corked” bat propel a ball farther than an uncorked one? If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, you’ve chosen to believe folklore over science.

I have that on the very good authority of the science in a couple of books, “The Physics of Baseball,” by Robert K. Adair, a professor of physics at Yale University, and “Newton at the Bat,” edited by the science writers Eric W. Schrier and William F. Allman. They went into the laboratory to test some baseball saws. Their findings include the following:

--Curve balls don’t “break,” if that means changing direction abruptly during flight. They do curve, but in a smooth arc, in the direction of their diagonal spin. If there were no gravity the typical curve would transcribe a circle with about a 2,000-foot diameter and wind up back in the pitcher’s hand, but because of gravity the pitch loses velocity and drops as well as curves as it approaches the plate, creating the illusion of “break.”

--Fastballs don’t really rise, or “hop.” Like the curve, the overhand fastball follows a smooth and downward trajectory to the plate, but the backspin imparted by a hard thrower will somewhat offset its predictable loss of speed as it travels, and that can be perceived by a batter as a rise. A ball thrown by a knuckle-dragging “submariner” will rise as it begins its journey, but, typically, will be on a downward path by the time it reaches the hitter.

--Topspin will propel a ground ball faster than one hit without it, but the ball still will lose velocity once it strikes the ground, no matter how slick the surface.

--The force applied to a batted ball is a result of the weight (mass) of the bat, the speed with which it is swung and the speed of the pitch coming in. Those are independent of the trajectory of the swing, which determines the ball’s flight path. Singles hitters like Rod Carew, Wade Boggs or Ichiro Suzuki employ or employed “flat” swings that deviate upward from the horizontal by about 10 degrees through the strike zone. Home-run hitters usually have swings that follow an upward path of about 35 degrees. So while the likes of, say, Adam Dunn, may drive a ball 400-plus feet, that doesn’t mean he hits it any harder than his singles-hitting colleagues. Also, since an uppercut swing intersects a pitched ball’s path for a shorter time than a flatter swing, the uppercutter is likely to strike out more.

--Some players, like our old friend Sammy Sosa, illegally drilled about a six-inch-deep cylinder into their bat’s barrel and filled it with cork or hard-rubber balls, substances with more elasticity than the bat’s wood, and then recapped it to avoid detection. The theory was that the change would impart more “spring” to the bat and drive the ball farther. Trouble is, taint so. Drilling the bat and filling it with a lighter material reduces its weight, enabling the batter to swing it faster, but this is at least offset by the bat’s reduced mass. Further, the ball is in contact with the bat for only about 1/1,000 of a second, making any “spring” effect negligible. Prof. Adair suggests that batters could achieve the same feel by loping about ¾-inch off the ends of their bats or by choking up their grips about an inch from the handles.

Choking up on the bat? Barry Bonds, the all-time home run leader, did that, but few other players follow his example. Why is that, do you suppose?

TEED OFF

2009-04-01T09:29:00.001-07:00

In my columnizing days I had a round of important sports events I covered annually. It included the World Series, Super Bowl, NCAA Final Four, Kentucky Derby, U.S. Open golf and tennis championships and the Masters Golf Tournament. Now that I’m retired I’m sometimes asked if I miss going to any of them. I give the most-emphatic “yes” to the Masters.

The main reason I loved the event was where it was played—- the Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia. The place is so beautiful they could charge admission even if they weren’t playing golf there. The grass is the greenest, pine needles soften the foot paths and the dogwood, azalea and other flowering plants are in glorious bloom during the tourney’s early-April staging.

In the odd year when the weather doesn’t cooperate, no problem-- the club picks up the phone and orders potted plants by the thousands to be arranged around its course. Those guys are so rich they think nothing of transplanting fully grown trees if they think it might improve the looks of their pampered acres.

Additionally, Augusta National treats the press well. The press center is first rate, the food is okay and everyone connected with the club is cooperative and Southern-gracious. Favored reporters (I was one) were allowed to buy (for $90 at the time) a coveted tournament pass for an accompanying friend. My wife Susie, who always made the trip with me, doesn’t care much for golf but would use it to ogle the fairway flora on opening-day Thursdays, and I’d have golf-loving pals down for the other three days. That created much good will and some nice IOUs.

But—and there’s always a “but” in pieces like these—the fly in the ointment was buzzard-sized. It was the knowledge that, once the tournament was over, I and my fellow scribes would be shooed from the club like so many aluminum-siding salesmen. I could think of several reasons that would bar me from membership, and there probably were others I wasn’t aware of. You have to be on the inside to get the full flavor of things like that.

Other golf tournaments are held at “exclusive” country clubs, but ANGC stands out even in that company. That’s because of the standing of the Masters, the prominence of many of the club’s members and the code of silence that surrounds its policies and practices. Clifford Roberts, the dour banker who founded the club in 1933 with the “Grand Slam” champion Bobby Jones, long exercised dictatorial control over every aspect of its operation, and any member who publicly questioned him could expect to see his locker emptied forthwith. Roberts died more than 30 years ago but his successors as chairman continue to exercise such authority. George Schultz, Melvin Laird and Sam Nunn spoke out forcefully on matters of national import while helping lead our great republic, but they and their fellow members keep their mouths shut when the subject is Augusta National. They shame the Mafia when it comes to observing omerta.

For most of its history ANGC closely followed a 3W (white, WASPy and wealthy) membership policy, and is men-only to boot. A dozen or so years ago, under pressure, it admitted a small handful of blacks, but it pretty much has resisted further change. The National Council of Women’s Organizations (which, its name suggests, doesn’t object to women-only groups), launched a full-frontal assault on it in 2001 and 2002, but was repulsed. ANGC may admit a woman or two some day, but in its own sweet time.

Lots of others are on the outside looking in. A few years ago USA Today published the names of the club’s 292 members along with the ages and corporate affiliations of most. Surnames can be misleading but only two could readily be identified as Jewish and just three others ended in vowels, indicating a paucity of men of Italian or Hispanic origins. Names pointing to Southern Europe, Asia or the Middle East were similarly lacking

The most-discriminated-against group besides women were men under age 40: there was just one of those, and just five under age 50, for heaven’s sake. Golf pro-ams teem with show-biz types, but no one prominent in Hollywood or the theater was on the ANGC roster. A few members listed academic affiliations but it’s safe to assume they were administrators, not profs. No artists, musicians or men of letters (much less journalists) were included. High-tech entrepeneurs also were absent, except for Bill Gates. The dominant profile was that of a 70ish WASP who made his pile lawyering, in an old-economy corporation or in one of those banks that lately have been screwing things up for all of us. It doesn’t sound like scintillating company.

There are two ways to react to this. One is to grab a picket sign and head for the ANGC gates when Masters play begins next Thursday. The other is to join Groucho Marx in declaring that we wouldn’t want to be part of any club that would have us as a member. I favor the latter course, if only because you don’t have to leave home to take it.

COMES THE REVOLUTION

2009-03-15T08:30:00.000-07:00

Cubs’ pitcher Sean Marshall had thrown two perfect innings in an early-March spring-training game in Mesa before coming to bat in the bottom of the second inning with runners on first and second and one out. He tried to bunt the runners along but instead put the ball in play in front of home plate, allowing the catcher to start an easy double play. On his way back to the dugout, Marshall was roundly booed.

Okay, it was a bad bunt, but a barrage of boos? In a spring-training game? After the young lefty had set down six batters in order? Clearly, this is going to be an unusual Cubs’ season.

If you’ve been a Cubs’ fan for any length of time you’ve known two things. One is that your favorites are hopelessly and eternally doomed. The other is that to survive with such knowledge you have to take pleasure in small things, like the occasional victory or brilliant individual performance. Having a realistic outlook is what Cubs’ fandom is all about. Life, too, mostly.

But here we are in the year 2009 C.E.—101 years past the last Cub “world” championship—and the paradigm seems to have changed, as the eggheads would put it. The 2007 Cubs won their division and made the playoffs. Last season’s team did that and led the National League in victories (with 97) to boot. Despite our boys’ post-season swoons both years, that’s heady stuff. A period of rising expectations is at hand, and it won’t be pretty.

I’m not saying that Cub fans will become like those in, say, New York or Philly, ready to boo the Easter bunny if one of his eggs is cracked, but it could get close to that. No matter how well the team does this term it will be judged a failure if it doesn’t make it to at least the seventh game of the World Series. Every Cub strikeout with runners in scoring position will be seen as unforgivable, every error a betrayal, every two-game losing streak a disaster. Cub players had better line their caps with aluminum foil because if the going gets tough the Wrigley Field vibes will make their fillings ache.

The contrast with past attitudes will be marked. Ernie Banks, Billy Williams and Ron Santo never have had to buy themselves a drink in Chicago even though the best they ever did in their long Cub careers was finish second, and never a close second at that. Heck, Jose Cardenal was a fan favorite just because of how cute his cap looked perched atop his afro (what kept it on, bobby pins?). This season will be bottom-line driven, with less wiggle room than in a worm hole.

Making things better (or worse) is the fact that the Cubs again seemed primed to do well. There are four proven veterans in their starting-pitching rotation when most other teams have two or fewer, and their eight-man lineup appears similarly well fortified. The Milwaukee Brewers, their main divisional rival the past two seasons, have lost without replacement their two top starting pitchers, and the St. Louis Cardinals, the division’s longtime masters, also are in decline. The Pittsburgh Pirates and Cincinnati Reds remain mired in Small-Market Hell, leaving only the Houston Astros to contend. If the Cubs can’t beat out the Astros they’ll deserve whatever obloquy they get.

But the Cubs being the Cubs, there are reasons to worry. One of their Big Four starters—Carlos “Big Baby” Zambrano—needs steam vents in his hat, and another—Rich Harden—comes stamped “Fragile” and “Remove After Five Innings.” Lou Piniella is the only man in the world who thinks Alfonso Soriano should bat leadoff, and the bullpen has been stocked largely with so-so vets acquired in the hope that one or two of them have something left.

The Cubs’ biggest off-season move was the signing of Milton Bradley—for a handsome $30 million over three years-- to fill the right-field hole that’s existed since Sammy Sosa’s 2004 departure. Bradley’s left-handed bat fills a widely perceived Cub need, and it’s hoped his “edgy” personality will make the Cubs less cuddly, but his injury history makes his availability suspect and a better word to describe his personality might be “nutsy.” In the latter regard it’s noteworthy that the main objects of his considerable wrath over a checkered career haven’t been opposing players but umpires, his own managers and—yes—fans who didn’t suitably appreciate his efforts.

The mix of the combustible Bradley and the newly critical Cub faithful could be explosive. One can easily imagine Milton having a bad day, being booed by the right-field bleacherites, and scaling the ivy to attack them.

Stay tuned. It’ll be interesting.

KING RAT

2009-03-01T07:35:00.000-08:00

I know I spend a lot of time ragging on big-time college sports, but I can’t help it. Every time I want to take a break I come across something else that’s appalling.

That’s what happened last week while I was waiting in my orthopedist’s office to get the last in the annual series of shots that keeps my right knee more or less functional. There I picked up a Sports Illustrated magazine and was introduced to Lane Kiffin, the new head football coach at the University of Tennessee.

I’d subscribed to SI for most of my life, and it’s, but let it lapse several years ago after it began editing itself primarily for ADD sufferers. But this piece, by John Ed Bradley, was meaty enough. The most remarkable thing about it was what its subject, uh, volunteered, apparently without undue prompting. When trailed by a magazine writer taking notes, most people try to put their best foot forward. Not old Lane. This guy is a piece of work, and not a pretty one.

I’d heard of Kiffin before, but sketchily. He’d made his coaching bones as an assistant to Pete Carroll at the University of Southern California, so impressing Al Davis that in 2007 he made him head coach of his NFL Oakland Raiders, when Kiffin was but 31 years old. That gig lasted one full season and first four games of last one, after which Kiffin was bounced with a cumulative 5-15 won-lost record.

Not only did Davis fire him, he also made a point of saying it was “for cause,” meaning that he wouldn’t willingly be paying what was left on Kiffin’s contract. That’s unusual. Among the things Davis called Kiffin in an all-around-unusual press conference was a liar. Davis is 79 years old, and some believe he’s a bit dotty. Even so, a stopped clock is right twice a day.

In some professions such an ouster would raise red flags, but not in coaching. Kiffin immediately jumped to the head of the college game’s “A” list and was interviewed for the top jobs at Clemson, Syracuse and Washington, among other schools. In late November he got the nod at Tennessee. That fiiine institution had just bum-rushed Phillip Fulmer, who’d sinned by posting his second losing season in 17 in Knoxville, a span in which he’d won almost 75% of his games (152 of 204), taken teams to 15 post-season bowls and won the 1998 national championship.

Kiffin’s Tennessee salary arrangement, as outlined in SI, is worth noting. Despite his youth (he’s 33 now) and meager credentials the magazine said he might have vaulted immediately to near the top of the head-coaching pay scale in the Southeastern Conference—the $4 million that Alabama’s Nick Saban makes annually—but instead accepted a mere $2 million per with a higher-than-usual allowance for assistant coaches’ salaries. Among the assistants he lured with this lucre were ones from LSU, South Carolina and Mississippi State, Tennessee’s rivals in the SEC crab bucket. Then he crowed publicly about “stealing” the opposition’s “best guys,” calling it “addition by subtraction.” So much for collegiality among gridiron foes.

Once he’d hired the aides, though, Kiffin canned the compliments and moved several into the temporary living quarters he’d taken so he could personally enforce the 5:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. workdays he demands. “I don’t have to be their buddy,” he told Bradley. “I don’t have time to watch some TV show with them.”

There’s no doubt Tennessee is getting a hard workin’ man for its money. When he took his new job in November Kiffin left his wife and two young children in California. He’s visited them but once since-- for the birth of child number three in January. While he was present in body, however, his mind was elsewhere. “I was in labor and Lane was in the room with me, but he was on the phone the whole time,” his wife, Layla, told SI. “I’m having the baby and he’s recruiting.”

If it’s any consolation to Layla, Kiffin treats others worse. When he returned to Knoxville from California the person who was supposed to pick him up at the airport was 25 minutes late. Kiffin said the first thing he did when he got to his office was fire the man who’d sent the tardy driver. “Here’s the point: We need to win,” he explained. “That was 25 minutes that Nick Saban and Urban Meyer [the Florida head coach] had that I lost because somebody was late picking me up at the airport.”

He showed similar regard for members of the university’s athletics-department support staff he inherited. “You can’t count the number of people we’ve run off because they couldn’t keep up, and I’m including secretaries,” he bragged. “They had to go because they weren’t going to make it, and they knew it.”

There was more along the same lines in the article, but you get the idea. My guess is that Kiffin differs from most of his big-time-coaching colleagues more in style than in substance, but that’s difference enough. I don’t much care about the SEC, but from now on I’m rooting for one S.O.B. there to lose

BUSINESS NOTE: Two new books in my “For the Love of …” series for Triumph Books—on the baseball Mets and Tigers—are on the shelves, or will be soon. They’ll join the eight others already there, on the Cubs, Yankees, Red Sox. St. Louis Cardinals, Ohio State U. football, Green Bay Packers, golf and baseball Hall of Famers. All are illustrated by Marvelous Mark Anderson. Check them out on amazon.com. They make swell gifts for less than 15 bucks and you can say you know the guy that wrote them.

WHITE MEN DON'T JUMP

2009-02-15T08:24:00.000-08:00

They play the NBA All-Star game in Phoenix today (2/15), and some of you might have noticed something about the rosters of the teams that are contesting it. Of the 24 players involved—the best of the world’s best basketball league—20 are African-Americans and four are natives of other countries, specifically China, Germany, Spain and France. No Americans of the Caucasian persuasion are represented.

If you did notice that you probably refrained from mentioning it in any open forum. Public observations on the racial makeup of our more-prominent sports teams and leagues aren’t much circulated these days; at best you can be labeled a racist jerk for making them and at worst you can lose your job, as my late pal Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder did some years back.

Still, something definitely is up, and it deserves comment. I confess that race in sports is a subject I didn’t much tackle in my Wall Street Journal columnizing days, when I had two million readers instead of fewer than 200. I did this both out of caution and for reasons I thought were principled.

I recall particularly my coverage of the 1987 NFL playoffs, when the African-American Doug Williams was leading the Washington Redskins to the Super Bowl title. The strongest story line of the period was the novelty of a black quarterback in a Super Bowl-contending role. I consciously avoided the tack, reasoning that even to mention it would support the belief that such a feat should be considered remarkable at that late date. My editors on the Journal’s op-ed page disagreed and, after the game, ran a contributor’s piece celebrating Williams’ blackness. I considered that to be pandering, but maybe I was wrong.

Anyway, the main reason the subject is avoided is that it inevitably hinges on theories about the “natural” superiority of one race over another in athletics in general and quick-burst sports such as basketball and sprinting in particular. “Bar-room” science is full of these, generally holding that, by virtue of millennia of fighting or fleeing ferocious animals in Africa, and surviving the rigors of slavery on these shores, American blacks have it all over whites genetically in terms of size, speed, strength and other athletically useful traits.

Some black bar-room denizens second these views but don’t often press them publicly for fear of devaluing the dedication and hard work that their racial brethren put into high-level athletic achievement. Still, the idea of the racial “edge” has worked its way into American culture through such as the movie title “White Men Can’t Jump” and the nickname “White Chocolate” that was affixed to ex-NBAer Jason Williams because he had “moves” whites weren’t supposed to possess. Getting beat by an “Opie,” the stereotypical white kid personified by the Ron Howard character in the old TV sitcom “Mayberry RFD,” is said to be a disgrace in black athletic circles.

Trouble is, real evidence to support claims of black athletic superiority is lacking. Many of the older studies in the field were, simply, hokum, while others failed to take into account such obvious factors as diet and the quality of available health care. The few seemingly solid physiological differences that have been uncovered amount to a pinch of testosterone here or a centimeter of muscle or bone there, hardly enough to account for black domination of entire sports. Those wishing to pursue this subject might read the book “Darwin’s Athletes,” by John Hoberman. The title is meant to be ironic.

Further, one needn’t be much of a sports historian to recall white American basketballers like Jerry West, Larry Bird, John Stockton and Bob Cousy, who had both “hops” and “chops.” The growing European presence in the NBA further debunks racial myths. Maybe the “blackest” player ever in terms of on-court flair and showmanship was a white guy, Pete Maravich.

Evolution doesn’t move fast enough to erase whatever DNA produced “Pistol” Pete, but today’s American white kids don’t seem moved to explore their capacities. One only can conclude that the idea of the black “edge” has become a self-fulfilling prophesy that discourages young whites from competing seriously in some sports, to their detriment.

More injurious has been the African-American community’s response. The athletic chauvinism that exists there has encouraged several generations of boys to grow up believing that to show physical prowess is to be “black” while to succeed academically—or even to pay attention in school—is to “act white.” The unrealism of many young blacks’ “hoop dreams” is seen in the statistic that 90 people in this land are killed by lightning in the average year while only 50 or so join the NBA as rookies. One must hope that the “smart is cool” message new-President Obama exudes will resonate.

WRETCHED EXCESS

2009-02-01T09:06:00.000-08:00

The big news of the baseball off-season has been the New York Yankees dishing out $423 million to sign long-term contracts with three free-agent players—pitchers CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett and first-baseman Mark Teixeira.

Four hundred twenty three million dollars! That’s almost enough to bail out Lehman Brothers. As Andy Rooney would say, “Don’t you just hate it when they do that?”

By me, their largess doesn’t mean the Yankees are World Series shoo-ins in the coming season. While they look good on paper they still have to play 162 games like everyone else, and such things as injuries, bad bounces and below-par individual performances could derail them. The Yanks had baseball’s biggest payroll the last eight years and not only didn’t win a pennant in that span but also didn’t make the playoffs last season. And those who yearn for the low-salary “good old days” should remember that the New Yorkers dominated the game more then than they do now.

It’s interesting to note that among those who say they do hate the team’s big-spending ways are some New York politicians. The Yanks are about to open a new Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, next to the old one, and while they’re paying the $900 million-plus cost of the structure itself the bonds that finance it are municipally backed, meaning that the team will pay less interest than if they issued them themselves, and that the city has that much less credit to devote to other needs. Additionally, the city popped directly for $660 million for the infrastructure costs (land acquisition, road work, sewers, etc.) the project entailed.

If that weren’t enough, the Yanks lately have said they want another $372 million in tax-free financing to upgrade their original stadium plan with things like plusher “luxury” boxes, a fancier scoreboard and a top-of-the-line steak restaurant on site. That stirred a political wasps’ nest at a time when recessionary cutbacks in essential government services are the rule in Gotham and everywhere else. A vote on the request pends, and it may not be approved. “Maybe CC Sabathia can pay for the scoreboard,” State Rep. Anthony Weiner suggested.

Alas, such displays of backbone are too little and too late. Arguments over government handouts to sports hustlers long since have been decided in favor of the hustlers. Governmental units—yours and mine—have been bending over for those guys for the last 30 years, with no end in sight. Study after study has shown that the economic case for public new-stadium spending is bogus. Just about all the jobs the facilities create are part-time and seasonal (the jocks who profit most take their money and spend it on mansions in places like Windmere, Florida, and Paradise Valley, Arizona), and the revenues they attract overwhelmingly come at the expense of restaurants, theaters and other local places of entertainment.

And gratitude? Ha! A few years back Glendale, Arizona, an on-the-make suburb of Phoenix, built the hockey Coyotes a new stadium outright. Now that the team is in the red it’s crying about how “unfavorable” its lease terms are.

The worst thing about taxpayer-financed stadiums is that the games staged therein typically are priced beyond the reach of all but a relative few of the people whose money went to build them. Exhibit A in the gougers’ repertoire is the charming institution of “personal seat licenses,” the four-figure fees that some teams have charged long-time season-ticket holders to retain their seats in the new halls, over and above steep per-game prices.

The Yankees didn’t do that but otherwise they’ve taken gouging to a new level in their new digs. The team never was shy in this regard, putting a $1,000-a-game top on its best tickets in recent seasons, but it’s jacked that up to $2,500 (gasp!) in the new place, and about tripled the number of seats so designated. Tickets that used to sell for $100 to $250 now will bring $400 or $500, and so on up and down. We’re talking thousands of seats here, not dozens, and fans must commit to several-season packages to get them.

Rest assured, however, that the team will deliver value in return. In a letter to prospective haut monde customers Lonn Trost, its chief operating officer, asserted that seats in the new stadium’s “premium areas” will be “an exclusive experience for those with discerning taste who seek the very best that life has to offer.”

He continued: “You will delight in the premium amenities, including cushioned seats with teak arms, in-seat wait service, private restrooms and a delectable selection of all-inclusive food and beverages.”

He concluded: “[Yours will be] the most-coveted ticket in sports.”

Don’t you just love it when those guys talk dirty?

FIRST AMONG WORST?

2009-01-15T08:00:00.001-08:00

One of the best things about living in my adopted home area of Phoenix, Arizona, is the ease of attending Major League baseball games. Just about any evening in season my wife and I can drive downtown to the Arizona Diamondbacks’ Chase Field home and buy two tickets in the behind-home-plate section of the upper deck we prefer. Their cost-- $20 per at current rates-- is reasonable as those things go. Parking is easy if we arrive at least 30 minutes early, as we always do.

We’re able to do this because Phoenix doesn’t support the D’backs the way other cities support their baseball teams. Chase Field holds about 49,000 bodies but recent-year attendance has averaged only about 60% of that, despite some pretty good clubs. Fact is, people here don’t support most of their teams especially well. It’s a bad sports town all around.

Is it the nation’s worst? That’s hard to say. Certainly, the metropoli of South Florida—Miami and Tampa-St. Pete— are perennially strong contenders for that title; I’m sure that many of the locals who attended last fall’s Tampa Bay Rays’ World Series home games needed directions to the ball park. I lived in Pittsburgh for several years and can testify to that city’s ho-hum fan attitude, even towards the Steelers in rare down periods. Seattle lost a basketball team and doesn’t do well by the baseball Mariners despite a very nice, new stadium. Ditto in the latter regard for Baltimore and Denver after new-stadium honeymoons.

Folks in Minneapolis-St. Paul are cheap as well as apathetic. I recall standing in front of the Humphrey Dome on game night trying to sell-- for face value!-- a couple of tickets for the seventh game of the 1991 World Series (it’s a long story how I got them), and meeting considerable sales resistance. In any other town, I’d have been mobbed.

But Phoenix can hold its own in that crowd, and then some. The NBA Suns, who have fielded consistently excellent and interesting teams of late, sell out regularly, but they’re the exception. That there’s a hockey team in town called the Coyotes might come as news to many. It’s annually among the bottom few NHL teams in attendance, reportedly has been losing money at the rate of $30 million a year and is in search of new ownership suckers. That’s despite the presence behind the bench of Wayne Gretzky. If “The Great One” can’t sell hockey, who can?

The football Cardinals brought up the NFL’s attendance rear almost from the time they moved to Phoenix in 1988 until 2006, when they opened a retractable-roofed stadium in nearby Glendale. They’ve sold out since but, this season, just barely a few times. The current Cards made the playoffs for only the second time in their local history, but with an 9-7 record, and interest in their first home playoff game two weeks ago was so scant they didn’t achieve sellout status (and lift a threatened local TV blackout) until 2:30 p.m. the day before the game. The locals are excited now that the team is in the Super Bowl Semis, but it owes its sudden ascent mostly to NFL parity, and a return to form would bring a return of fan apathy, it says here.

Exhibit A in my indictment is Phoenicians’ treatment of the D’backs. Baseballwise this town has been treated royally, with a World Series championship (in 2001) and four divisional titles in the team’s 11 years of existence, but it hasn’t reciprocated with much loyalty. The team’s best year at the home gate was its first, in 1998, when it drew about 3.6 million people, but it’s never come close to that level since. In 2007 it finished with the best record in the National League yet was 20th in MLB attendance. Last year it was in the playoff race until the season’s final week but was playing to half-empty houses in September.

Once inside the park, D’back fans are the quietest, sweetest individuals extant. The vile oaths that foul the air in other stadia never are heard here; Phoenix folks rarely even cheer unless urged to do so by the electronic scoreboard. Sometimes large humanoids will arrive in the second inning and plunk themselves down in the row in front of my wife and me, causing us to have to crane to view the action. When wife Susie says let’s move I tell her to be patient. Sure enough, by the fourth inning they’re usually gone, off to forage in the food courts. They could have saved the price of admission by spending the evening at Pizza Hut.

What’s up? Several things. Phoenix has the reputation of being a golden desert oasis but it’s really mostly a low-wage Sunbelt burg with lots of families just scraping by. Corporate headquarters are few and so are takers for the “luxury” boxes that fuel the modern sports engine. Just about everybody comes from somewhere else and most (like me) root for teams from their former homes. The weather is so nice from October through April that people would rather be outdoors playing than indoors watching, and so beastly hot the rest of the year that just going from house to car and back is more than many can bear.

I mentioned those factors a few years ago to Jerry Colangelo, the transplanted Chicagoan whose ownership of the Suns and D’backs made him Phoenix’s foremost businessman. He agreed that the city wasn’t an immediate sports bonanza but said it inevitably would become one when (not if) area population hit 6 million in 2020 or so (it’s about 3.5 million now).

I’ll buy that but I’m in no hurry to see it. For now I’m grateful for the way things are, especially during baseball season. It’s like the way I feel about vegetarians: they leave more meat for me.

GO 4 IT!

2009-01-01T09:34:00.000-08:00

I love sports people who go against the grain, so I was delighted to see a story in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago about a football coach whose teams never punt.

That’s never, as in not ever. Fourth and 15 from his own 10-yard line? This guy says “Go for it!” How can you not love that?

Not surprisingly, the guy—his name is Kevin Kelley—coaches at the high-school level. He probably always will. Our sporting establishment is one of the most risk-averse of any occupational group and there’s zero likelihood of that changing. Coaches would rather lose going by the “book” than win breaking some fraternity rule. That mindset has to do with the possibility of looking foolish, which any jock avoids like a pulled hamstring. Jocks grow up to be coaches and take their highly developed sense of vanity with them. Hey, some girl might be watching.

The Times’ article was short so I went online to seek further intelligence on the remarkable Mr. Kelley. It turns out that his iconoclasm doesn’t end with his eschewal of the punt. After his team scores it almost always tries an onside kick. Why not? he reasons-- there’s about a 20% chance of the maneuver succeeding, and he thinks that more than makes up for the 20 or so yards of gridiron position his team would surrender with a conventional kickoff and return.

Kelley’s teams at Pulaski Academy in Little Rock, Ark., have been winners—otherwise he wouldn’t still be employed even there. In his six seasons as head coach they’ve compiled a 68-13-1 record and have captured two state divisional championships, the last coming in the just-completed season.

In online interviews the coach acknowledges that more than his own brilliance has accounted for his teams’ success. He says he’s had some good players at Pulaski--always a nice thing-- and notes that any new wrinkle can discombobulate foes who will face it only once a season.

But he insists that breaking his sport’s three-downs-and-punt orthodoxy is solidly founded, and that its rewards exceed its risks. Obviously, a team has a better chance of keeping the ball—and eventually scoring—if it always gives itself four tries at a first down instead of three. But he says that more important is his sense that attacking relentlessly changes the psychology of the game in his team’s favor on both sides of the scrimmage line.

“Our offense goes out there with one aim—to move the ball—whether we’re at our own 10-yard line or our opponent’s 2. Yeah, there’s disappointment in going four and out, but converting a fourth down is almost like creating a turnover: it pumps up your kids while deflating the opponent,” he says. “Our defense knows it must stop the other team no matter where it is on the field. Period. Viewed like that, football is a simple game, and simple is good.”

I agree wholeheartedly. In fact, I’d take Kelley’s approach a couple of steps further. I’d remove the foot from football altogether and let the boys slug it out between the goal lines

You could call the sport “battleball,” thus eliminating its present international confusion with real football, which we Yanks oddly call “soccer.” There would be no kickoffs, punts, kicked extra points or field goals. You’d start the game by putting the ball on the 50-yard line, lining up a player on each of the 40s and letting them dash and claw for possession. The winner’s team would possess the spheroid until it goes four-and-out or scores a touchdown. Then the other guys would give it a go, and so forth until the clock expired, with the usual quarter- and half-time breaks.

For extra points teams would run a regular play from the 2- or 3-yard line, just like they do now for two points. Kicked PATs have become so automatic at all levels of the game they should be dispensed with on lesser grounds than my proposed revolution. Ditto for field goals, which are copouts and dull to boot (they’re either good or not). No punting would heighten the importance of every play, not just fourth downs. It’d be a better game all around.

If you agree with me—and I’m sure you will—forward this column to Roger Goodell at the NFL. If he adopts my idea I’ll let him keep his job. I’d expect a 10% royalty on all future revenues, of course.

FAME

2008-12-15T08:24:00.000-08:00

Few duties remain from my days as a working sports writer, but one of them I especially cherish. It showed up again in my mailbox the other day in the form of my annual ballot for the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

I get to vote because of my 10-plus active years in the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, the estimable organization that oversees the election of players who recently have retired from the game. Even though I’m retired I’m still a “lifetime honorary” member with hall-elector status, one of about 575 people so designated.

When I was working I was pestered constantly to vote on all sorts of jock awards. I pitched most such pleas on the ground that those guys already were too-much fussed over. I place the Hall ballot in an entirely different category. Baseball is the sport whose roots go deepest into America’s soil, and the game’s depository of relics in charming Cooperstown, N.Y., uniquely conjures up its glories. It’s said that you visit the Hall to discover baseball’s past and wind up discovering your own. I’ve been there as boy and man and can vouch for the truth of that.

The most interesting thing about the Hall’s election process is how few statutory requirements govern it. To be eligible for the ballot someone must have played at least 10 Major League seasons, be retired five years and be nominated by at least two members of a six-member BWAA screening committee. Period. That means every voter must define greatness in his own way. It’s a challenging task. Kind of daunting, too.

In practice, some statistical accomplishments virtually assure a player’s election, such as 300 career wins for a pitcher or 3,000 hits for a position player, but times change and so do such standards. For instance, 500 home runs used to be a sure ticket to Cooperstown, but the game’s steroids era (roughly 1990 to 2005) ended that. The Bluto-like Mark McGwire showed up on the ballot last year with 583 homers to his credit but was mentioned by just 23% of the voters (and not by me), far short of the 75% required for election. His chemical odor makes him a long shot ever to get in. The same fate may await another accomplished juicer, Rafael Palmeiro (3,020 hits, 569 home runs), when his Hall eligibility begins in 2010. Pending future developments, Barry Bonds may have a tough time, too.

Ten new names are on this year’s ballot: Jay Bell, David Cone, Ron Gant, Mark Grace, Rickey Henderson, Jesse Orosco, Dan Plesac, Greg Vaughn, Mo Vaughn and Matt Williams. Henderson, the all-time stolen bases leader and smacker of 3,055 career hits, should be a first-ballot shoo in. I look forward to his installation speech and hope that in it he’ll refer to himself in the third person, as he often did in interviews. Of the rest, Cone, Grace and Mo Vaughn have the best chance of getting the 5% mentions needed to remain on the ballot for another year. The rest, I’m afraid, are history in another sense.

Electors can put from none to 10 names on their ballots, from the total list of 23. Besides Henderson, I’ll be naming Jack Morris, Andre Dawson, Alan Trammell and Bert Blyleven.

I’ve enthusiastically voted for Morris since he became eligible 10 years ago and can’t understand why many other of my colleagues haven’t (he got just 43% mention last year). Besides a win-heavy 254-186 career record he was one of the best big-game pitchers I’ve seen, the biggest being his 10-inning, 1-0 win for Minnesota over Atlanta in the seventh game of the epic, 1991 World Series.

Dawson was a powerful batsman (he’s 23rd in all-time extra-base hits, 25th in total bases, 30th in RBIs), a heck of an outfielder and had a great nickname (“The Hawk”). I’m partial to shortstops, who generally are the best athletes on a baseball field, and Trammell was one of the best of the best during his 20 seasons in Detroit. He was World Series MVP for the 1984 Tigers, one of the game’s greatest teams.

I’ve wrestled with myself over Blyleven’s qualifications, sometimes including him, sometimes not. He was a good pitcher for a long time (22 seasons), and won 287 games, but never quite reached the sport’s pinnacle. However, I’ve finally concluded that his fifth-place in all-time strikeouts (with 3,701) is an achievement worth honoring.

Among those I’m leaving off is Jim Rice. In his 15th and final year on the writers’ ballot ( a veteran-players’ committee considers candidates 20-plus years out), he fell just short of election last year at 72.2%, and might have been in before if he hadn’t made a habit of stiffing writers after games (yes, some count that), but by me he doesn’t quite measure up overall. Ditto for such other present-ballot notables as McGwire, Lee Smith, Dave Parker, Tommy John, Harold Baines, Dale Murphy, Don Mattingly and Tim Raines.

Think I’m wrong? Let me know. I have a couple more weeks to change my mind.

Or not.