REVISITING WOODY

             Every so often I read something that stops me cold. One such occasion occurred a week ago last Sunday when I was reading the Arizona Republic’s account of Arizona State U.’s football victory over UCLA the previous day. The paper noted, matter-of-factly, that the win earned ASU head coach Todd Graham $330,000 in bonuses-- $100,000 because it was his team’s ninth of the season and $230,000 more because it clinched a spot in the PAC-12 title game. If ASU wins that game the $230,000 bonus would double to $460,000, or 20% of his $2.3 million annual salary, the paper reported.

               

             I had to read that twice before it sunk in. A guy making $2.3M per gets a $330,000 bonus for doing what he was hired to do?  And in a state that has cut education funding during the term of its present, severely conservative governor?

 I can summarize my first thought thusly: teeeesh.

            

                My second thought was of Woody Hayes. Somewhere in my memory file was the fact that the most he ever earned in a season during his 28 years as head football coach at Ohio State U. was $43,000, and even though that tenure ended 30-plus years ago—in 1978—it isn’t exactly ancient history. Moreover, while Graham’s rep and credentials are modest, Hayes was a giant in his field, with multiple national titles to his credit and mythic status on his home campus.

                Woody was offered raises but turned them down on ground that his pay was OK for a college faculty member. When he got bonuses for signal victories he’d divide them among his staff.  If you’d have told him that in 2013 big-time college football coaches would become lordly CEOs routinely being paid in the $2 million-$5 million annual range, he’d have said you were nuts.

                It’s interesting even to me that I’m citing Hayes favorably here, because I didn’t like him much when he coached.  That was partly because his teams usually beat mine (Illinois), but also because I never cared for the way he compared football to war, a much more serious enterprise.  Further, he was the sort of man who demanded discipline from his troops (oops, players)  but couldn’t exercise it himself,  aiming his frequent sideline tantrums at photographers, game officials and inanimate objects such as first-down markers.  He got the gate at OSU when he finally went too far in that department, punching an opposing player who’d strayed into the Buckeye bench area during a game.

                My negative impression of Woody had its origin with my first encounter with him. I was in the press box during the OSU-Illinois game in 1958, making myself useful in various ways, when Bert Bertine, my boss at the Champaign-Urbana Courier, dispatched me to shag a few post-game Buckeye quotes for his story.  With a few minutes remaining I went down to the field, and when the Ohio State players streamed into their locker room at the gun, I streamed with them, as I’d done before with other teams after other games. Notebook and pencil in hand, I was talking to a player when I was confronted by Woody, red-faced angry even in victory.

                “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.

                “Er, I’m press,” gulped the 20-year-old me.

                “Well get the hell out of here until I let you guys in,”   the great man barked.

                Woody was reputed to be a man of parts, however, and years later, as a grown-up columnist (sort of), I thought it might be worthwhile to check in on the old lion in his winter of retirement. I visited him the Friday before the 1984 Ohio State-Michigan game. We spent more than an hour talking in his office in the ROTC Building on the Columbus campus; a longtime student of military history, he was given a faculty appointment in the department after he was bounced as a coach. Then we had lunch in the university’s faculty club, where he seemed to know most of the other diners.

 After that we walked over to the football stadium, where he gave a talk at the Senior Tackle, an OSU ritual in which graduating-senior players take a last, ceremonial whack at a tackling dummy. About 2,000 people showed up to watch in very cold weather, and they gave him ovations coming and going.

At age 71 Woody’s fire still burned, albeit a bit lower than when he was coaching. In his office he told me he was up for the Michigan game as much as in days of yore. “Us versus Michigan! Best doggone rivalry there is!” he said. “Competition is what makes you go, you know? You beat nobody, what have you got? You beat somebody and you’ve done something. Yessir!”

He mused that teaching history to ROTC cadets meant that his life had come full circle from his younger days. The son of a school superintendent in small-town Ohio, he’d grown up thinking of becoming a classroom teacher before football sidetracked him. As far as he was concerned, coaching was more teaching than anything else. “I spent more time with my players in a week than most professors do with their students in a year,” he noted.

He went on: “Football teaches things you don’t learn elsewhere. A player learns to get up after he’s been knocked down. He learns to run the play that’s called, whether he’s carrying the ball or not. And he learns that nothing in life comes easy.”

He left his desk to get a book from a case on a wall. It was a volume that contained the Irwin Shaw short story, “The 80-Yard Run.”  Said he: “Some people think it’s a sad story because that run he made in school was the best thing that fella ever did, but I look at it differently. If he hadn’t made the run he’d have had damned little to look back on with pride.”

That afternoon he expanded on that theme in his talk at the Senior Tackle. “This morning I got a call from Fred Bruney,” he told the players. “He said ‘Coach, remember what I did 32 years ago today?’ I said I sure did. He intercepted three passes that helped us beat Michigan. He’ll smile about that on his deathbed. You do the same thing and you’ll have something to smile about, too”

 

                   

  

               

                 

                  

NEWS, VIEWS

                William Safire, one of my journalistic idols, said it took three examples to make a column, so I use his dictum to lead into what follows.  To wit:

                THE MIAMI DOLPHINS’ BROUHAHA--  The first thing that was surprising about Jonathan Martin’s flight from the National Football League team is that a 6-foot-5, 320-pound man could be bullied, harassed or otherwise intimidated by a colleague as Martin says he was, by fellow behemoth and offensive-line mate Richie (no longer) Incognito. Exhibit A in his departure was a threatening, profane, racist screed that Incognito chose to text-message to Martin. The second surprising thing was that, apparently, Incognito didn’t know that anything sent electronically these days can be shared with the world instantly.

               The initial response of many, including the Dolphins’ GM to whom Martin complained about his treatment, was that Martin should have settled his dispute with Incognito by punching him in the mouth. Martin, however, is a well-brought-up young man— the son of two Harvard graduates—who doesn’t buy that approach to conflict resolution. That led some to put him down as a wuss, neglecting the facts that he was an All-American at Stanford U., a second-round draft choice by the Dolphins in 2012 and a starter at right or left tackle from his debut in the rock-‘em, sock -‘em pro game, things that should qualify him as manly on any scale.

              What wasn’t surprising about the episode to even passing followers of football was the involvement of Incogito. He’s been such bad news since his college days that it’s a wonder any team would take him on.

                Richie first matriculated at the U. of Nebraska football factory, and played well there, but was kicked off the school’s team after his junior year for “team-rules violations,” the label colleges use to cover up a wide variety of sins. While at Nebraska he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge stemming from a fight at a party, a rap that was bargained down from three felony counts. He also wound up on the list of witnesses against a Lincoln, Nebraska, man charged in 2005 with selling steroids to Cornhusker gridders and others.  He didn’t have to testify but the guy was convicted anyway.

               Richie next turned up at the U. of Oregon to complete his college eligibility, but was bounced before he put on his pads, also for undisclosed rules violations. As a pro he’s changed uniforms three times and has stood out more for his late-hit penalties than for his Pro Bowl-level talents. In 2009, as a Buffalo Bill, he was named the NFL’s dirtiest player in a poll of his peers taken by The Sporting News, no small distinction in that well-stocked zoo.

 It’s recently been revealed that police files in Aventura, Florida, showed that last year a woman complained that Incognito had groped her sexually and otherwise molested her while she was volunteering at a Dolphins’ golf outing. No charges were filed and the woman told reporters she couldn’t comment on the matter because of a confidentiality agreement she’d signed, indicating that she’d been bought off.

                Plenty of sociologizing has been used to explain the Incognito-Martin episode, but the clear facts are that football requires of its players the kind of of aggression that’s unacceptable in society at large, and that for whatever reasons a few of them can’t turn it off when the whistle blows or the game ends. Teams hire these guys (and others cozy up to them) at their risk, as the Dolphins have discovered.

               It’s worth noting that Martin’s mother is a noted lawyer specializing in employment matters in general and workplace harassment in particular.   He thus has at his disposable able, zealous and, no doubt, free representation, something that will make him formidable in any forum.

               BIG YANKEE SPITS BACK AT BIG BASEBALL—The 13 other targets of the Biogenesis doping investigations quietly accepted and served their penalties, but not Alex Rodriguez. The game’s highest-paid performer is fighting his 211-game suspension both in arbitration and in federal court. He’s accused Commish Selig and other MLB officials of conducting a personal vendetta against him, and has played the ethnic card by siccing at least one Hispanic group on baseball’s tail.   That’s a lot nastier than these things usually get.

               ARod can do this because 1) he’s very rich, having been paid about $250 million to play baseball to date, 2) doesn’t have much else to do, and 3) at age 38, a 1 1/3-season suspension, stretching into 2015, probably would end his baseball career, which could endanger the four years (and $86 million) remaining on his Yankees’ contract. With that at stake his decision to take his best shot is understandable.

  

              Arod is a repeat steroids offender, but isn’t going into battle unarmed. The likely main witness against him, the defunct Miami “anti-aging” clinic’s owner Tony Bosch, is a con man, and much of the game’s documentary evidence either was stolen from Bosch by a disgruntled former employee or purchased from third parties whose backgrounds and motives are murky. Arod’s legal team, headed by the big-heat Washington lawyer and lobbyist Lanny Davis, no doubt will exploit those issues, both in and out of the hearing rooms. Baseball needs off-season attractions and this will be a good one.

               GIVE PEACE A CHANCE—Can you imagine an NFL game without penalties? It’s hard, but conceivable. Fact is, there was half such a game on November 4, when the Green Bay Packers played the Chicago Bears at Green Bay. The Packers were charged with no (as in zero) penalties that Monday night, while the Bears were flagged just four times.  I didn’t realize this until I saw the box score the next day, but I remember enjoying the game, and not only because my Bears won.

               I looked it up and learned that there have been four penaltyless games in NFL history. The last was in 1940, when the league possessed none of its enormous present self-importance. Penalty-free games for single teams are less rare, but happen about once a season. 

                 Can an NFL team really go 60 minutes without breaking any of the league’s fat book of rules?  No, which means that game officials didn’t see any infractions worth calling on the Pack that evening. What a precedent! If it spreads, NFL games might be watchable again.

               Football has been described as violence punctuated by committee meetings. Now it’s violence punctuated by committee meetings and law-enforcement actions, the latter including the Talmudic-style rules discussions that go on while video reviews of officials’ calls spin out endlessly. No good play can be enjoyed until the field is scanned for penalty markers; “there’s a flag on the play” have become the six saddest words in sports. More zebra self-restraint would spare us some of that.    

GET LOUD!

                Centuries from now, if our institutions still exist, archeologists wishing to learn what life was like in 2013 would do well to check out our TV commercials. No other medium better encapsulates our values and aspirations. If we don’t like the pictures of ourselves they present, it’s our fault, not its makers’. Those folks are sharp and have money to spend, a tough combination to beat.

                

                The commercials that have caught by eye especially of late are in Pepsi’s “Are You Fan Enough?” series. There’s been a bunch of them, tied to National Football League teams and games. The kickoff ad, presented in the usual zip-zip-zip fashion, showed energetic-looking men and women wearing NFL gear and waiving team flags, others with painted faces, and a young man getting a team logo (the Pittsburgh Steelers’) shaved onto his head, interspersed with images of people quaffing the sponsor’s sweet, brown beverage. It ends with a shot of a bunch of beefy guys in a crowded stadium, leaning forward, pumping their fists and shouting apoplectically. 

                

              What if anything is happening on the field while all that activity is going on—the context, don’t you know?—is unseen and unstated. That’s because there is no context. According to the ad, fan fervor is an end in itself and worth celebrating for its own sake.  The French philosopher Rene Descartes defined the human credo as “cogito ergo sum,” which means “I think therefore I am.”  If he were alive today and writing Pepsi ads he’d put “we cheer therefore we are” into Latin, and be well paid for it.

  

               It’s a whole new ball game out there, one in which I’m not comfortable because I don’t qualify as “fan enough” by Pepsi’s standards. I’ve never painted my face in a team’s colors, own no team flags, don’t have enough hair to have a team emblem cut onto my scalp and never have come close to busting a gut over any sports action, although I’ve seen plenty of it.

                I do own some team gear but received most of it as gifts, from people who think it’s the kind of thing I’d like. I’m politely grateful when I get it but promptly pitch it onto a shelf in my closet, from where it rarely emerges. I have a classic Cubs’ cap I like—blue with a red “C”—and often wear to baseball games. I have a couple Olympic t-shirts from my columnist days that I wear in public from time to time, mostly because they’re good brags. Otherwise the duds get worn only around my house, when I’m in my wood shop or doing my morning exercises.

                   An obvious reason for my unease with the current stadium scene is generational: most people my age (I’m 75) didn’t make a display of their fandom during my formative years. We went to games, all right, and cheered for the home teams, but mostly we kept quiet unless something worth shouting about was taking place on the field. Stated differently, there were the games and there was the audience of which we were a part, and the two were separate.  Ditto for plays, concerts and other forms of public entertainment.

                Now the audience considers itself part of the show. I don’t go to rock concerts but I did go to a play a few weeks ago (“The Importance of Being Earnest,” if you can believe they’re still staging it) and the young fellow seated behind me (about 30 years old, I’d guess) whooped or hollered “Yeah!” at every on-stage verbal putdown, of which there were many. I wondered what Oscar Wilde would have thought.

               

                 There always have been people who think everything is about them, but today they predominate. In sports I think their ascendancy began in the late 1970s or early ‘80s when the stadium “wave” made its appearance on the West Coast and rolled across the nation.  The wave was nice in a way—a communal expression—but it also made the statement that the sports crowd can have an agenda that has nothing to do with the game before it.

                I feel similarly about the costumes some people wear to athletic events. For pure entertainment the best show in the NFL isn’t put on by Peyton Manning or Tom Brady but by the fans in the parking lot and stands at Oakland Raiders’ home games. People there have embraced the Raiders’ biker-gang image and celebrate it with fierce face paint, real or temporary tattoos, spiked hair, studded belts and collars, and muscle shirts. And that’s just the women!

                The above two examples are harmless, as was that “Rockin’ Rolland” guy who’d show up ubiquitously on TV wearing his rainbow wig and hoisting his “John 3:16” sign. (Where is he? I miss him.) Not so the latest manifestation of crowd exhibitionism, the sustained, ear-splitting roar.

                You may be interested to know that there’s a contest going on for whose fans are loudest, and that those of the NFL Kansas City Chiefs are winning. Their top decibel level during a game last month was measured at 137.5 by the Guinness World Record folks, beating the previous mark of 136.6 for an outdoor stadium set a week earlier at a Seattle Seahawks’ home game. Both readings were about the same noise level a jet passenger plane creates on takeoff, as heard by someone standing on the runway bare eared.

                The object of those clamors is very much game-related, designed to disrupt the signals of the visiting team’s offense, and the false-start and delay-of-game penalties they cause attest to their effectiveness. Is this fair? No, but so far the league hasn’t wanted to rile the beast by telling it to pipe down. Fans want to express themselves even at a risk of hearing loss, and Commish Goodell is letting them.

                The Pepsi people no doubt would rate the K.C. and Seattle screamers as “fan enough,” and worthy of drinking their product.  Me, I don’t care what Pepsi thinks. I prefer Coke.     

                NOTE: I have a new piece on Cub and White Sox prospects in the Arizona Fall League on chicagosidesports.com, which you can check out with the link above. While you’re there see my piece on the old ogre Arthur Wirtz by finding “Wirtz Case Scenario.” 

JUST PAY THE DANGED PLAYERS?

                 When everybody says something should happen, it probably will. But this isn’t necessarily a good thing.

              

                 What everybody is saying now is that it’s about time big-time college athletes in the so-called revenue sports—football and men’s basketball-- are paid. Time magazine said so in a September cover story. Joe Nocera, the New York Times op-ed columnist who sometimes writes about the NCAA, has agreed on several occasions. Sports-blab radio hosts have been saying it for years; it’s like you can’t join their union if you don’t share that belief. You might think so, too.

               

                At least, it’s a commonsensical stance. Look around any college stadium on game day and you’ll notice that everyone who didn’t buy a ticket—sportswriters, TV folks, coaches, game officials, ticket takers, concessionaires, vendors and the people who clean up after—are on the clock. In a multi-billion-dollar business that enriches many, what could it hurt to toss a few bucks the kids’ way?   

                But think about it for a minute (I know, it hurts) and complications appear.  How much would be “fair” compensation for the hours the players put in-- $100 a month, $1,000, $5,000?   Should they be paid out of season as well as in? Should a kid who seldom plays be given as much money as a starter, or a starter as much as a star?  Should Johnny Football have a pay class of his own?

                Should players’ injuries be covered by workmen’s compensation, whose benefits can far outlast their college careers? Should the players be permitted to organize?  Should they have a voice in their conditions of employment, such as the duration and content of practices? Should they get to audition cheerleaders?

                I could go on but think the point is made. I also think it’s widely recognized that many if not most of the players already are being paid, only not by check. When I covered the University of Illinois football team for the Daily Illini in 1956 (gasp!), the players joked openly about the “$20 handshakes” they received from alums after games. According to a recent series in Sports Illustrated magazine about a long-term and far-reaching payment system in the Oklahoma State U. football program, it seems those attaboys are worth $200 these days.

                  No-work jobs from boosters were part of the OK St. package, SI averred; nothing new there, either. Ditto for free meals, beers, clothes and whatnot from friendly merchants around any campus. Agents can be counted upon to slip cash to players who might be future clients, as well as to their pals and loved ones; it’s a normal expenditure in that business. A recent piece on Yahoo Sports asserted that five current or recent Southeastern Conference football stars shared some $90,000 in agent payouts over a 15-month period ending last December.

                But even such hauls pale in comparison with the value of what athletes are permitted to receive.  The annual cash value of a “free ride” athletic scholarship to a top-division sports school-- covering tuition, room, board and books-- ranges from $15,000 to $25,000 for students at public universities to more than $50,000 for such high-toned private schools as Duke, Stanford and Northwestern. Multiply that by the four or five years it usually takes a jock to play out his eligibility and you have more-than-ample compensation for semi-skilled labor.

                The final figure is much higher for athletes who manage to emerge with degrees. If you estimate that college grads earn about $20,000 a year more than people without degrees over a 40-plus year work life, you see the basis of the claim that a degree is worth a million dollars, not to mention whatever intellectual lamps it lights.  Even those who wish to quarrel with that estimate must admit that a sheepskin is much more valuable monetarily than any salary young jocks might be paid while in school.

                The real scandal of college sports doesn’t concern what the players get— legally or under the table—but what they typically don’t get, which is the ability to pursue the education they sign up for. Playing football or basketball at the top college level is a full-time job, with players so tied up in games, travel and workouts and practices of various kinds that they have little time or, sometimes, energy for schooling.  Add that the youngsters must cope with the sort of news-media attention that would disconcert most of their elders and normal student life becomes an impossibility.

                It’s possible that a strong-minded, persistent and well-advised young man can get through the athletics’ cement mixer with an education worth its name, but most 18-to-22 year-old jocks don’t fit that description. Abetted by their coaches, most are channeled into unchallenging majors whose requirements don’t conflict with their sports schedules, and eased along further by “program-friendly” profs and “academic advisers” who relieve them of the necessity to do much coursework.  Yes, the lads often are complicit in their own exploitation, but their youth is an excuse while the adults who manage them have no such “out.” Putting players on a payroll only would increase the overseers’ leverage.

                 They’re not going to tear down the stadiums, the coaches aren’t going back to being paid like regular teachers and dumb-ass boosters aren’t about to get lives outside of sports,  so remedies are hard to imagine, much less implement. One small thing that could be done, though, is return to the former practice of denying athletic eligibility until a student satisfactorily completes a full academic year. That might discourage college attendance by players who are interested solely in honing their games and give the others a taste of what the rest of the student body is up to. Some might like it and insist on continuing.

               

                 

  

   

GO BUCS!

                The baseball playoffs start today and since my Chicago teams aren’t in them (they rarely are) it’s good to have a Plan B. This year I have one in the Pittsburgh Pirates.

                

                I lived in Pittsburgh from New Year’s Day, 1963, until Labor Day, 1966, almost four years.  I went there to take a job on the copy desk at the Pittsburgh Press, one of two largish newspapers that offered me employment after I’d completed my six months of active duty with the Army Reserve.

 Working in Pittsburgh hadn’t been my objective but getting on a metropolitan paper was; in my previous jobs in Champaign and Elgin, Ill., and Ann Arbor, Mich., I’d seen too many good newspaper people stuck in small towns past the point they could easily leave, and I’d resolved to escape that trap. My other bid was from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and for meteorological reasons Pittsburgh seemed the better choice.

It turned out that being chained to a copy desk wasn’t for me, and by the summer of ’63 I was looking for alternatives. Providentially, I got a call from the Wall Street Journal, with whose Chicago bureau chief I’d previously interviewed. I’d scarcely remembered the chat but for some reason he had, and when an opening arose in the paper’s Pittsburgh bureau he passed along my name. I didn’t know a stock from a bond (really), and never had read the paper before I went to work there, but when the Journal offered I accepted, figuring I’d at least get out of the office once in a while.

Life is a series of accidents and this one turned out happily. My new colleagues by example taught me more about reporting in a few months than I’d picked up the previous six years, and I thrived under the paper’s nurturing regime.  My late wife Carol and I liked Pittsburgh, too. It wasn’t the city our native Chicago was but it was livable on our modest budget, and a half-hour’s drive in any direction from our home in suburban Crafton got us out into some pretty, rolling countryside. We had children there, and made friends, and were sad to leave when the paper transferred me to New York.

Carol wasn’t a sports fan, and the kids kept us busy, so I didn’t do much ballgame-going in Pittsburgh, but several times I did make it out to Forbes Field, where the Pirates played. It was a big old park, a remnant of the dead-ball era when shots between the outfielders could roll forever and triples were frequent. Sometimes they’d roll under the batting cage, which after batting practice was stashed on the playing surface in deep-center field because there was no other place to put it.  You don’t see that sort of thing anymore.

I mostly followed the Pirates (or ”Bucs”—short for Buccaneers-- as they’re called in Pittsburgh) on radio and TV. This acquainted me with Bob Prince, one of the best baseball mike-men ever. Prince was smart and clever, a “homer” who nonetheless made baseball fun even if you weren’t a local. He hung whimsical nicknames on Pirate players of the era (the light-footed centerfielder Bill Virdon was “The Quail”; the tall, stooped leftfielder Bob Skinner, who ran with a bent-legged gait, was “The Dog”), crowed “we had ‘em all the way” after close wins, and sometimes interrupted his playing-field narratives to verbally admire females in the stands. It wasn’t PC but you had to smile.

 It didn’t hurt that Prince was a legend in his own time who earned his macho bones with a dive into the swimming pool of a St. Louis hotel from a third-floor balcony, and something of a night-life hero as well. It was said that his nickname “The Gunner” stemmed not from any rapid-fire delivery but from his being threatened by a gun-toting man while he was chatting up the guy’s wife in a bar.

            

            There are reasons besides personal nostalgia to root for the Pirates this fall. This season they broke an epic, 20-year run of sub-.500 finishes, a record for futility even my Cubs can’t match. Their last playoff appearance was in 1992 and ended in agonizing fashion when they blew a 2-0 ninth-inning lead to the Atlanta Braves in the seventh and deciding game of the National League Championship Series. Pirate fans still can see Sid Bream, a heavy-legged Brave, chugging home with the winning run in that one, just eluding catcher Mike LaValliere’s tag after a Barry Bonds throw. I covered that series and recall the play vividly.

              

           It’s widely held that Pirate fans are loyal and long-suffering, and thus worthy of occasional success. I agree with the conclusion even though only the last part of that description is true. The steel mills are long gone but the Pittsburgh area remains blue-collar in spirit, an agglomeration of towns around a smallish central city (population about 300,000) where people are careful with their dollars and wary of enthusiasms.

 Sure, they love their football Steelers, but who wouldn’t? The team long has been one of the NFL’s best, and you can fill a big football stadium even in tiny burgs like Clemson, S.C. The Pirates, on the other hand, have topped the 2 million mark in season home attendance just five times in their century-plus history, and this season are averaging only about 28,000 spectators a game, 19^th in the majors. The team draws better on the road than at home.

But the people who do show up like what they see and for the nonce, glad to reclaim my Pittsburgh past, so do I.  Go Bucs! Win one for The Gunner.

CAVEAT FOOTBALLER

                The National Football League has settled the lawsuits against it by the retired players who claim it misled them about the risks of the head injuries they suffered in its employ. The preponderance of journalistic opinion is that the deal is a big win for the league.

             

             The plaintiffs in the suit—some 4,500 of them—are to split $765 million. That seems like a very large sum until you divide it by the number of teams in the league—32—and the 20-year period over which it will be paid.  Although payment will be front-loaded, with half the money to be distributed during the first three years, each team’s average annual payout will come to about $1.2 million, which is about what it spends for Ben Gay and Ace bandages.

 When you note that the NFL’s revenue last season was about $10 billion, and the figure is expected to rise steeply in the years immediately ahead, the conclusion that it made out like a bandit seems inescapable.

And as the TV pitchmen say—Wait! There’s more! The settlement covers all ex-players, not only those who signed up as plaintiffs, so if one of them develops neurological symptoms years down the road—a not-uncommon occurrence with head injuries—he’ll have to share from the existing pot. Current and future players aren’t included, but they are parties to labor-contract provisions that will subject their claims to arbitration, which typically is less generous to plaintiffs than litigation.

The NFL got off without having to apologize or admit fault, things that are dear to the stony hearts of corporate lawyers.  Additionally, the settlement saved it the considerable legal costs trials would have entailed and spared it from having to produce for cross-examination its dubious experts who until recently were telling the players and the rest of the world that there was no proven link between playing football and ailments like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and dementia, even though studies to the contrary have existed for more than 30 years.  Again, rack up a “W” for the Big Team in Suits.

So why did the players agree to such a deal? Because many of the afflicted retirees are broke and hurting, unable to wait out the years that litigation would have taken and justifiably leery about their prospects of proving in court that their illnesses stemmed from injuries they sustained as professionals, not as high-schoolers or collegians.

  The “broke” part pertains mostly to ex-NFL bit-parters who never made much money in the game, but it’s notable that the plaintiffs’ list also included such recent-year stars as Bruce Smith, Tony Dorsett, Art Monk, Harry Carson, Leroy Butler, Fred Taylor, Andre Reed and Jim McMahon, whose medical and care requirements eventually could strain even their once-ample bank accounts. Perhaps they and others looked at the head-injury-related suicides of Junior Seau, Dave Duerson and Andre Waters and decided that if help didn’t come soon it might be too late.

Still, the belief that the NFL got off cheap may be premature. Yeah, the league admitted no guilt, but the Latin phrase “res ipsa loquitur,” meaning “the thing speaks for itself,” seems to apply, with 765 million reasons to back it up. In paying the settlement, the league ratified the idea that playing football has serious potential health consequences.  The action takes the sport out of the category of a healthful exercise that might be appropriate at the school as well as the adult level and ranks it with auto racing and downhill skiing as a daredevil pursuit that should be undertaken only with full appreciation of its risks.

A similar recognition is inherent in the recent changes the league has made to prevent head injuries and better treat ones that occur. While laudable, they also underline the fact that something dangerous is going on between the sidelines, which the evidence of our senses confirms every Sunday.  

  What’s the chance of incurring a debilitating neurological injury at age 50 after, say, 10 or 12 years of playing organized football—1%, 5%, 20%?  How about after four or eight years in the sport? We don’t know now but the data is out there and one day it will be tabulated definitively. If the results don’t deter the players themselves—young athletes are strong and cocky, and think that injuries are things that happen to other people—it might make an impression on the parents who have to approve their participation in schools and colleges.

 These parents might note that young, developing brains are more susceptible to trauma than the more-mature ones of the NFL behemoths. They also might heed some recent research that concludes that an individual needn’t have sustained a “big bang” head blow resulting in a verifiable concussion to suffer lasting neurological damage—that the numerous, smaller “dings” he shrugs off in practice or games can have a cumulative affect that can amount to about the same thing.

 You love football, I love football, and the players and their moms and pops love football, but maybe something similar will happen to perceptions about the game. It may take a while but if it does the NFL won’t be celebrating its “victory.”

BASTA!

                I hate to see people suffer, so as a sports columnist I avoided events such as marathons and triathlons, whose main point seemed to be to determine how much punishment humans could endure. Even the winners of those things looked like they’d been through a wringer.  Good manners dictated looking away.

               

                I feel the same way about some of the men’s matches in the U.S. Open tennis tournament, now unfolding at the old World’s Fair grounds in the New York borough of Queens, and on your TV screens. The tourney’s best-of-five set format—like that of the other three tennis “majors” (the Australian and French Opens and Wimbledon)—often results in four-or-five hour contests that can leave their contestants stumbling, gasping, cramping and generally hanging on for dear life. It’s an anachronism whose time has passed.

                Fact is, best-of-five already is history in the big majority of tennis tournaments—men’s as well as women’s—where matches go to the first winners of two sets. It survives in the men’s majors because… well, just because. Tennis, after all, is the sport in which “love” means nothing, and the roots of whose points system—15, 30, 40, game—are lost in antiquity.   I asked around about that “love” thing once, and was told it stemmed from the French “l’oeuf”, which means “the egg.”  But though an egg is roundish, like a zero, it’s too thin a joke to be repeated endlessly.

                Tennis does alter its scoring rules occasionally—about every half-century. The last big one came in 1970 when it changed the win-by-two requirement by adapting the first-to-seven-points tiebreaker to end sets that are tied at six games each. Typically, though, the change has been less than universal, and the U.S. Open is the only major to apply it to a fifth set. That means that while sets no longer can go on indefinitely in Melbourne, Paris and London, matches can.

                  It was only a matter of time before Murphy’s Law, which holds than anything that can go wrong will, would bite tennis with a vengeance. In 2011 at Wimbledon the American John Isner and the Frenchman Nicolas Mahut went at it in a first-round five-setter that lasted 11 hours and five minutes and sprawled over three days, with two continuations for darkness. The game score of the last set was 70-68, if you can believe it.  Because Isner needed a couple of days to recoup for more singles, and both players had doubles commitments that had to be postponed, it screwed up the tourney’s schedule for a week.

                The year 1970 was pivotal for tennis for other reasons. That was about the time when the wooden racquet, the game’s standard forever, began to give way to ones with steel or aluminum frames. Those materials gave players more bang but were only a taste of what would happen when more-exotic substances like graphite, boron and Kevlar came on the scene, sometimes in combination. They allowed racquet frames to become far stronger, lighter and more flexible than previously.  

                Back in “woody” days,   racquets had faces that measured about 65 square inches, weighed 13 ounces and had “sweet spots”—the hitting areas of maximum power and control—about as big as silver dollars. Now face measurements run to 145 square inches (although most pros use smaller), weigh 10 or 11 ounces and have sweet spots as big as grapefruits.  Add the improvements in strings and stringing and the difference between today’s racquets and old-style ones is about the same as that between an Uzi and a B-B gun.

                The early expectation was that the power surge would most benefit big servers, allowing them to blow their foes off the courts. It didn’t turn out that way. Equally well-armed defenders nullified their thrusts by retreating a few feet from the baseline and slinging serves back almost as hard as they came in. That killed serve-and-volley tennis, once an enlivening stylistic staple, and turned every point into a duel of baseline rockets that continues until one player falters.  It’s made matches longer but not, by me, better. When players don’t wear different-colored clothes it’s hard to them apart.  

                Other factors have made tennis a more grueling game than it once was. The sport these days has a year-round schedule, and its most-used surface is “hard court,” which can mean several things but usually boils down to playing on asphalt. As any recreational runner can tell you, pounding away on hard surfaces is tough on legs and feet, and the better traction they provide means more wear on joints.

 Also, there are more good players than there used to be, meaning that the early rounds of the grand-slam events can be testing even for the top seeds. Back in the day those worthies could count on skating through the first three or even four rounds without much resistance, but today some young Slovenian ranked No. 116 can keep numbers one or two scrambling for hours before succumbing, or not. It’s no wonder that just about every top player must play through pain, and few envision grinding on into their late 30s, the way Ken Rosewall or Jimmy Connors did. Roger Federer, the best player of this era, just turned 32 and can’t get through a press conference without being asked about his retirement plans.  Rafael Nadal, Federer’s closest pursuer, is 27, and given his all-out style and injury history isn’t a good bet to be playing at 30.

Best-of-five might have made sense in Jack Kramer’s time, when players played a dozen events a year, but no more. Two and a half or three hours of tennis—the usual length of a well-contested three-setter—is more than enough to determine who’s best at any level. The way it is now, someone should call OSHA on behalf of the guys, or the SPCA.