GAMING NAMING

               The anti-racism protests that have roiled many American cities these last few months may or may not result in substantive changes in our society, but they have claimed at least one “W” of a symbolic nature.  That would be the decision of the Washington National Football League team to, finally, drop the “Redskins” appellation it has hauled around since 1937. Other teams with Native-American-inspired names still cavort on various playing fields but none of their monikers is as all-around-objectionable as the ’Skins’. It will be missed by few.

               The Washingtonians’ move no doubt will spur examination of more of the above-mentioned names, all of which have been under some sort of fire. The baseball Cleveland Indians have said they are mulling a change, and the Atlanta Braves have indicated they may move to nix the tomahawk-motion cheer that has become their trademark. My alma mater, the U of Illinois, some years ago dropped its Chief Illiniwek symbol, after prolonged strife. Dumping the school’s Fighting Illini nickname has been urged by some, but that might also require changing the name of the state, which is of native-inhabitant origin. So too, by the way, are 25 other U.S. state names, 26 if you include Hawaii.

               One Amerind name that probably will hang on is that of the Florida State U. Seminoles. Since 1978 the schools’ mascots have been Osceola, a noted Seminole chief, and his appaloosa horse Renegade. Before every FSU home football game an Osceola impersonator rides Renegade onto the field and casts a burning spear into the ground around the 50-yard line. The names, and the capering, have the okay of the Seminole tribe, but that approval might stem in part from its gratitude that the school had dropped previous Indian mascots, among them Sammy Seminole, Chief Fullabull and Chief Wampumstompum.

The desire not to offend turns many athletic entities towards the zoo when it comes to naming or renaming, with results that are drearily generic. How far schools will go to avoid that pitfall is best exemplified by Stanford University, which in 1972 changed its teams’ name from the Indians to the Cardinal. That’s Cardinal singular, as in the color, not the bird. (Gotta watch them touchy bird lovers.) The school’s mascot runs around dressed as a tree. Who could object to that?

But Stanford aside, college team names generally have it all over those of the pros, probably because here are so many of them that some have to get it right. There are occupational names tied to the school’s mission, such as the Purdue Boilermakers and the Leigh Engineers, and ones with a meteorological tilt, like the Miami Hurricanes and Iowa State Cyclones. There are whimsical names like the Hampshire College Blacksheep, and neo-whimsical ones, such as the Cal-Irvine Anteaters and the mighty Artichokes of Scottsdale Community College in my AZ backyard. There are plays on words, like the Pace College Setters.

Usually, college cheers echo the institutions’ names, but sometimes the reverse has been true. Georgetown U. calls its teams the Hoyas after its “Hoya Saxa!” yell, a Greek-Latin amalgam that the school says translates to “what rocks!”  Virginia Polytechnic Institute dubs its teams the Hokies after a turn-of-the-20^th century chant that began “Hokey, hokey, hokey high/ Tech, Tech, VPI.”

Catholic-run Manhattan College names its teams the Jaspers after Brother Jasper, its first baseball coach. The University of Idaho’s Vandals nickname comes not from the ancient Germanic tribe but from a sportswriter’s exclamation that a long-ago school basketball team “vandalized” an opponent.

The origins of the University of North Carolina’s flavorful Tarheels nickname are lost in time. One version has it that state residents dumped tar into a river to impede British troops during the Revolutionary War, another has Civil War soldiers from the state telling detractors they would fight better if their heels also had been dipped in the plentiful gunk.  Indiana U.’s “Hoosiers” name is similarly obscure; it might stem from what early homesteaders in the state were said to have hollered when people knocked on their doors.

My favorite is the Billikens of St. Louis U. It seems that a billiken is an elfish, round-bellied statuary figure of Asian origin that used to be a popular good-luck charm. In 1910 a sportswriter decided that John Bender, the school’s football coach, looked like one and started calling the team “Bender’s Billikens.” The name stuck.

I have no expectation that Washington’s ownership will come up with anything clever or even interesting to replace Redskins. They’ve moaned publicly that a name change for an organization as august as theirs is no easy matter, requiring considerable thought and research. Executive brains must be taxed, focus groups convened. For the coming season (if there is one) the name “Washington Football Team” must suffice. Speculation has “Warriors” in the rename lead. Then it’s off to the zoo for “Red Wolves” and “Red Hawks,” although I read that somebody has copyrights on those names and would have to be paid off before they could be used

If the zoo it must be, I favor “Hogs.” Yeah, it has negative connotations, but it’s genuinely local, that being the team’s well known offensive-line nickname during its 1980s glory days. How about the “DisCos,” for a D.C. play? Or the “Lobbyists” or “Swamp Creatures” for a capital connection? If those don’t scare opponents, nothing will. 

 

 

 

                

IN THE SWIM

               Eons ago—way, way back when—a fish with stumpy fins took a deep gurgle, humped himself out of the ocean and began to explore the land. He liked it and stayed, bidding some of his mates to join him. Eons more later the evolutionary cycle turned again and people emerged, no longer fishlike. Nonetheless, deep in our genes there must remain a trace of fish because I’m never happier than I am in the water. These days my four-times-a-week swim is the center of my calendar; it is, in fact, my answer to the “what do you do?” question retirees often are asked.

             I swim, therefore I am.

This is a good time to write about exercise, I think, because our semiconfinement to ward off the corona virus puts a premium on it. Sitting around indoors all day isn’t good for us; it’s boring as well as unhealthful. In the Arizona desert where I live, where summer daily high temperatures regularly top 110 degrees, just getting out can be a problem. The inviting waters of our outdoor pools make that easier.

And by all accounts swimming is about as good an exercise as one can do. It’s a low-impact, whole-body workout, and it’s cheap— a 30-swim card at the Scottsdale municipal pools, which I frequent, costs $72, which comes to $2.40 per. For equipment one needs only a suit— little Speedos are best for swimming laps even though they don’t flatter most of us, uh, mature guys—and goggles, to protect the eyes from the chlorine in the water. Total cost for both is around $40. I also use $25 fins— so-called “trainers.” They improve the quality of the workout and give me a little, much-needed speed.

Lap swimming is supposed to be good for the heart and lungs and helps control blood pressure. It’s said to reduce the chances of catching colds or the regular flu in the winter. I sleep better when I swim.  I swear I read somewhere that it makes people taller and better looking. I’ve tried to look that up, and couldn’t, but I believe it anyway. It’s especially appropriate for this virus-ducking time because lane dividers keep swimmers separated and chlorine kills germs indiscriminately. Get in and out without being social and you’re OK.    

As a kid growing up in Chicago I couldn’t get enough of the city’s Lake Michigan beaches. The lake’s water temperatures rarely top 70 degrees—too cold for many—but they felt fine to me. I first swam in a pool at a day camp at age 11 and quickly discovered I could swim. Bike-driven outings to the wonderful Whealan Pool in the county forest preserves were a highlight of my pre-teen and teen summers, as were plunges into the big lake off “the rocks”—i.e., the breakwater-- at Waveland Avenue. Pals and I would dive for balls in the scummy, muddy water hole at the Waveland public golf course, and sell the balls when we could. It was a miracle we didn’t catch typhus.

I spent a year on the swimming team at Roosevelt High School but wasn’t fast; the best I ever did in a race was a third-place finish in a four-swimmer field in a 50. Our coach was Mr. Marx, whose claim to fame was that he coached 1936 Olympic backstroke champion Adolph Kiefer, the best athlete the school ever produced. I don’t recall Mr. Marx providing any coaching; indeed, I don’t believe he spoke to me during my team tenure.  I’m guessing he didn’t say much to Kiefer, either.

While I was in college I spent a couple of summers as a day-camp counselor, among other things helping little kids learn to swim. My main discovery was that any kid who would put his face in the water and blow bubbles could be taught, while those who wouldn’t couldn’t. From this I concluded that fish DNA might not be universal in the human genome.

I’m sorry to say I neglected swimming post-college, seeking more competitive and social sporting outlets. At one time or another I played softball, golf, tennis, racquetball and handball, and hiked. Alas, they’re all on my “used to” list now. Lured by Scottsdale’s lovely municipal pools, I took up lap swimming to supplement my hiking in 2005, and when strangled nerves ended the hiking seven years later it became my sole exercise outlet.  My initial workouts as a spry 67-year-old were 60 laps of 25 meters each. They’re 44 lengths now, or about two-thirds of a mile, equally split between stroking and kicking.

  I’m in the water for about 33 minutes, and for fun I worked out that I go 50 meters in about 80 seconds. That’s about four times the 20-22 seconds of world-class swimmers. That means the difference between duffers and the pros is a chasm; they’re a whole different species. At Scottsdale’s Cactus Pool I’ve been in the water with collegiate-level swimmers and they zoom by me like torpedoes. It’s an awesome experience.

Submerged as the competitors are, swimming isn’t much of a spectator sport. (What do you call people who attend swim meets? Parents.) It surfaces (ha-ha) only every four years, during the Olympics. There, people who are built for speed prevail-- tall ones with broad shoulders, long arms and hands and feet like shovels. The Aussie Ian Thorpe was one such model, Michael Phelps is another. They also must be willing to endure long, solitary hours of practice in a foreign medium with little to distract them. Americans have long dominated the international sport. I don’t know what this says about us, but it’s not all bad.

                

LOCO PARENTS

               I delight in quirks of language, even in languages not my own. Take, for example, the phrase “in loco parentis.”  In Spanish, where “loco” means crazy, it seems to mean something like “crazy parents,” but in Latin, its intended tongue, in loco means “in place of,” and applies to people or institutions that might assume parental responsibilities for youngsters. Quite a difference, huh?

               The phrase often is, or was, applied to schools or colleges. In ancient times, when I went to college at the U of Illinois, it was aimed mostly at women students with such rules as 10 p.m. weeknight curfews (men had none) and the notorious “three feet on the floor” dictum for couples who were, uh, necking in dorm sitting rooms and such.  Times change, though, and such strictures now are in history’s dustbin.

               But “in loco” has come up with a vengeance in regard to college sports during the present pandemic. Members of the “Power Five” football conferences (the SEC, Big Ten, Pac 12, Big 12 and ACC) called their teams back to campus last month for so-called “voluntary” workouts in preparation for the scheduled season ahead, with eye-opening results. At LSU 30 football players in an initial group tested positive for the coronavirus, at Clemson the score was 23 and at the U. of Texas 18, to name a few examples. Some schools cancelled their workouts, others put them off until better conditions prevailed. To say that it was an inauspicious start to the season would be to put it mildly.

               Trouble is, things are likely to get worse given the recent virus surge, and more appalling.  Asking young men in the 18-to-22 years-old age group to endanger their health and the health of others in the name of sport by institutions that should be protecting them strains credulity.  The double meaning of the “in loco” line never has been more apparent.

               If you follow this blog you know that I view skeptically the chances of any our major team sports to successfully open or reopen their seasons while the virus persists; for details scroll down to my offering of June 1. My basic argument is that the exercises will contain too many parts that could fail, and whatever can go wrong probably will. Of our Big Three professional sports, I think that basketball (the NBA) has the best chance of making a go of it, followed by MLB baseball and NFL football. That judgement is based on the numbers, the NBA having the smallest casts and the NFL the largest.  The NFL also trails because its sport negates any kind of “social distancing,” in practice as well as during games. The league probably will require players to wear some sort of face shield, but many kinds of bodily fluids fly after foot meets ball.

               But if the NFL will have a tough time meeting its schedules, the colleges will have it tougher. For starters, “Power Five” conference teams have squads of more than 80 players in season compared to the 57 permitted in the pros, and while most professional players can repair to private homes when work is done collegians generally live in dormitories or shared apartments, in close quarters with others. College campuses are fertile grounds for the spread of diseases such as meningitis during ordinary times, and the pandemic multiplies the risk.

               The NBA will try to create a “bubble” around its players at Disney World in Orlando, Florida, during its renewed season. MLB and the NFL discussed but rejected such a course on grounds of practicality because of their bigger squads and the greater geographical spread of their operating plans. The idea of a college-campus bubble is ludicrous; those places will be full of “civilians” when classes are in session.

 The subject of what to do when the inevitable “positive” hits arrive is similarly fraught; where will infected collegians quarantine and who will take care of them when they do?  Going home to the folks won’t be a good option. Youth and good health will save most collegians from the worst effects of the virus but their parents have no such protection.

The differences between the pros and the colleges continue, also reflecting poorly on the latter. Professional athletes are adults who at the major-league level are well paid for what they do and for any risks they may take. They have unions to represent them as a group and agents who to do that for them individually. Collegians don’t have either and they’re not paid, at least by check.  More basically, professional sports exist to entertain and turn a profit for their owners. Period. Colleges pretend to other, more-exalted goals, although you wouldn’t know it from the way many of them behave.

It's not clear how much parenting people in their late teens and early twenties require, but the answer surely is some. The stereotype of a coach in recruiting mode has him promising mom and dad to treat their boy “like a son” while he’s at Gigantic State U., but too often the guy has more in common with Charles Dickens’ Fagin than with the Robert Young character in the old TV series.

Colleges’ failure to protect can touch the criminal, as in the cases of the Michigan State University team physician who was sentenced to 60 years in prison for sexually abusing women athletes in his charge over 20 years, and the Ohio State University doctor who did the same to male athletes, including wrestlers and football players, for a similar period. My alma mater, Illinois, fired a head football coach a few years back for belittling injured players and pressuring them to play. A spate of college coaches, both women and men, have lost their jobs in recent years after complaints about verbal abuse arose.

Perhaps worse are the cadres of “academic advisors” who steer young jocks into easy, low-content courses that keep them eligible, rather than toward more-demanding but more-rewarding offerings. Don’t be misled, every big-time sports-school does it.  Asking the kids to risk their health for Old Siwash is a short step from that. With “parents” like those they don’t need enemies.

              

SPEAK UP AND DRIBBLE

               In this extraordinary time of illness and anger, a couple of statements stand out. One was by the conservative commentator Laura Ingraham, who in an interview a couple of years ago told the basketball star LeBron James to “shut up and dribble” after he’d voiced criticism of President Trump. The other, just last week, was from Roger Goodell, commissioner of the National Football League, our most-buttoned-down sports entity. Videotaped from his basement and looking penitent, he said the league now encourages its players to speak out on public issues that concern them.

               Those pronouncements represent the two ends of the spectrum of athlete activism in America, or the lack thereof. The subject has been with us for many years, but never as vividly as these past few weeks during the protests over the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. As the turnouts at the nationwide rallies have shown, the vented outrage isn’t strictly a black-white matter, but they looked for leadership from African-American communities. Well-known athletes are among the most-visible members of these. 

               It’s long been apparent that the role of social activist doesn’t fit well with many sports standouts. Excellence in sports can be an all-consuming proposition, beginning very young and thriving in a hot-house environment that all but excludes other interests. In team sports unity is all, so subjects that may interfere with it are all but banned in locker-room talk, by tacit understanding rather than executive fiat.

 Over the years a few top athletes have ventured into social-political scrums, but mostly after their playing-field careers have ended. The basketball player Kareem-Abdul Jabbar and the football great Jim Brown come to mind in that respect, as do the tennis players Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova. A handful of athletes have had careers in electoral politics after they’d hung ‘em up, with ex-footballer Jack Kemp, the 1996 Republican vice-presidential candidate, and old-Knick Bill Bradley, a three-term U.S. senator, the most-prominent recent examples.

The dominant model, however, has been one of public neutrality, especially when commercial interests also are involved. Basketballer Michael Jordan, the best athlete and sports-gear model of his or, maybe, any era, steered clear of political frays with the memorable line “Republican buy sneakers, too,” and Tiger Woods, golf’s undisputed king as the centuries turned, followed a similar path. The boxing champion Muhammad Ali, a uniquely global sports figure, was not only apolitical but also antipolitical. He was an adherent of a religious sect that frowned on civic engagement and considered white people to be devils, although in later life he modified his views and came to be regarded as a benign figure.

The pressure to change has come from the racial nature of many current national issues and the left-right political divide that has been exacerbated by the Trump presidency. African Americans make up about two-thirds of the players in the National Football League and about three-fourths of those in the National Basketball Association, making those entities politically relevant whether they want to be or not. When the cameras roll, or when a microphone is thrust faceward, comment has become increasingly imperative. Noted Danny Trevathan, a Chicago Bears’ linebacker, after the football team’s meeting on the recent demonstrations, “you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable these days.”

That the main focus of the protests is police brutality gives it a special sports turn. The issue has a long history in the U.S. but of late it’s been linked in the public mind with the football player Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling posture during the playing of the National Anthem before games in the NFL 2016 season.  Kaepernick’s action was aimed at calling attention to the police shooting deaths on consecutive days that July of the unarmed black men Alton Sterling (in Baton Rouge, Louisiana) and Philandro Castile (in the St. Anthony suburb of Minneapolis), but the backlash led by President Trump, abetted by the NFL, turned it into a debate over respect for the anthem. Kaepernick, a San Francisco Forty Niner quarterback, lost his job in the aftermath, and has yet to be hired by any NFL team.  Whether or not he plays again will be a test of the league’s professed new attitude toward outspokenness.

The recent protests have dwarfed those that went before for a couple of reasons. One is the drumbeat of black lives lost in police hands, lately etched into painful memory by video recordings. The other was the school shutdowns caused by the coronavirus outbreak, which left millions of high-school or college-aged students free to march and march again.  The sheer weight of the protests seems to have created the sort of impetus for action that heretofore has been lacking.

As a young newspaper reporter I wrote that something or other “remains to be seen.” The phrase was exorcised by an editor who told me that just about everything does. That seems especially pertinent to the prospects for success of efforts to effect long-term changes in police conduct. New Federal or state legislation might tilt the seesaw in favor of change, but American law enforcement is mostly a local matter, with some 800,000 officers employed by about 1,800 different police or sheriff’s departments. Each has its own history, culture and leadership that will have to be addressed, one at a time. 

County sheriffs are elected, making them pretty much laws unto themselves. In Maricopa County Arizona, which includes Phoenix, Joe Arpaio was elected to six four-year terms in the office despite thumbing his nose at directives to stop things like racial profiling for arrests and immigration “sweeps” that netted citizens as well as the undocumented. He was voted out (in 2016) only after a Federal contempt-of-court conviction and the county’s bills for lost lawsuits over jailhouse deaths and injuries topped $100 million. Overcoming the likes of him in many places will require the kind of stamina the best of athletes possess on a physical level. Free to do so, maybe our sports heroes can help out there.

              

              

WHISTLING DIXIE

               I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Edward Murphy, an otherwise obscure gentleman who was the reputed author of the “law” widely attributed to him, the one that holds that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. A little research revealed that he was a U.S. Air Force engineer who, in the 1950s, was seeking to measure how gravitational forces affect pilots but whose tests were constantly thwarted by malfunctioning equipment.  It makes sense that the saying has military roots; the similar term “snafu” also traces back to the armed forces.

               The people who run our major spectator sports should be giving particular attention to Mr. Murphy’s dictum as they prepare to go back into business. By me their pronouncements to date on the subject amount mostly to wishful thinking, detached as they are from what just about everyone knows about the pandemic that’s keeping much of the world shut down. I like sports as much as the next person, and maybe more than most, but I am not holding my breath that they’ll return for long in any form before a vaccine makes it safe to go back in the water, as it were.

               Even without fans in the stands, and putting aside the seemliness of playing games while about 1,000 Americans die each day from the COVID-19 virus, most of sports’ back-to-work protocols are complex affairs, with more moving parts than a moon rocket. At the controls won’t be Elon Musk but team execs whose specialties are assembling playing-field talent and selling tickets for people to watch it. Certainly, most of the working components will be turned over to outside contractors, but only the sports guys will have all the reins in hand.

               The difficulties involved in saving the teams’ seasons have begun even before those plans can be implemented. Major League Baseball and its players’ union currently are in negotiations to determine how players will be paid for a truncated schedule. An informal deadline of this week has been set if play is to resume by July 4, but reports indicate that the two sides are far apart. The latest management proposal reportedly calls for pay cuts of up to 75% for the highest-paid players, hardly an attractive proposition for jobs that will involve a clear health risk. Basketball and hockey, the two other sports whose returns dictate shrunken game cards, have yet to begin serious pay talks.

               Another obstacle could be the availability and efficacy of tests to identify those in the teams’ retinues who carry the virus and, therefore, have the capacity to infect others. The number of tests required would vary by the size of rosters, with the NBA at the low end with its 15-man squads and the NFL at the top at about 50.  But add in coaches, trainers, equipment managers, refs or umps, TV and radio people and other supernumeraries and those figures would be multiplied by a factor of two or three. If daily testing were the rule, as it should be, the 30-team NBA would require more than 1,000 tests and test results a day. Multiple that by about three for the NFL.

The issue of availability is heightened by the fact that testing isn’t widely available in the U.S. at large. Money can buy just about anything, and the leagues no doubt can shoulder their way to the head of that line, but it can’t make the tests more reliable. There are a lot of different tests out there and, reportedly, false positives and negatives are a problem with some.

Social distancing is a key to containing the virus, and it goes without saying that there isn’t much of that in team sports. Of our Big Three, baseball affords the most, but MLB still will have to stand on its head to separate its players. No-high-fiving and no-spitting rules are in its proposed protocol, and players may have to dress and shower in their hotel rooms. Between innings and at other times, some players will have to occupy seats in the stands rather than share dugouts or bullpens. In basketball and football, forget it—they’re contact sports where the players just about live in one another's pockets in season. In the first few minutes of every basketball game all 10 players on the court will have handled the same, sweaty ball.

All of the plans to resume play have the players and their satellites squirreled away in hotel “bubbles” for the season’s duration, safely away from contagion. Trouble is, those bubbles are only figures of speech. Confining dozens of young, wealthy and willful men to a monastic existence for months on end strains credulity. The veteran NBA player Jared Dudley said on the radio the other day that “every team has a Dennis Rodman, even if his hair isn’t blue or green.” My guess is that several Rodmans per is more like it.

Keeping people out of the bubbles also might be difficult; fans likely will gather around the empty ball parks or team hotels, jockeying for a look at their heroes. Social isolation could be eased in part by allowing family members in, but that would raise as many problems as it solves. How about girl friends? Or school kids, who’d have to come and go daily if schools reopen? Further, while the players would be kept busy baseballing or footballing, how would their wives, etc., pass the time? A no-shopping rule would be as tough to enforce as the one banning spitting.

And if the pros will have a tough time returning to action, what about the colleges? Unless the NCAA finally fesses up and admits that college has nothing to do with college sports, how could teams separate their athletes from daily contact with the rest of the student body, were classes in session?  If Edward Murphy were alive he’d be licking his chops.

 

              

                

              

GOING, GOING ...

               The Phoenix horse track Turf Paradise halted its “live” season and shut down all operations on March 16, but to regulars of its Players Club race book, including me, the season effectively ended several weeks before. That was when TV simulcasts and betting on the races at Santa Anita Park in California and Gulfstream Park in Florida, hosts of the nation’s best winter seasons, were cut off to the track and its satellite sites, leaving a menu that was thin, to say the least.

               The cause of the shutdown was a dispute between the company doing the televising and the racing authorities in several states, including Arizona. The beef, which continues, is over money, of course, but a principle of sorts also supposedly is involved, namely the provider’s contention that entities that are OTB only, conducting little or no actual racing, should pay more for their feeds than bricks-and-mortar tracks.

 It’s an issue that’s of zero concern to race goers, but that seems to make no difference to the people immediately involved. The TV provider, Monarch Content Management, is owned by Frank Stronach, the Canadian zillionaire who also owns the Santa Anita, Gulfstream, Golden Gate Fields, Laurel and Pimlico tracks. If anyone should be interested in promoting racing generally it’s he. Ditto, locally, for the people calling the shots at the AZ tracks.

If either group had chanced to look around the Players Club right after the cutoff, it would have seen that business was down by about half from previous levels, which themselves were less than robust. Then the virus orders kicked in and the total shutdown now enters its third month. I think it’s safe to say that some of the people who are locked out won’t come back when business reopens. Once broken, a habit can be tough to resume.

If ever there were a sport that doesn’t need self-inflicted wounds, it’s horse racing. Time was when it was among America’s Big Three sporting enterprises, along with baseball and boxing. Now it’s not on any such list, a nonentity that most people notice but one day a year-- Kentucky Derby day.

Racing has much to recommend it. It’s long in color and tradition, and few things match the excitement of a neck-to-neck homestretch duel, especially when you have a few bucks riding on one of the necks. At the same time the sport is an acquired taste, the serious pursuit of which requires the sort of study that’s out of favor (way, way out) these days. Its clientele is aged and aging, a trend that shows no sign of turning. If it weren’t for the tax revenues the sport provides to the 38 U.S. states that permit it, it’d be much reduced from its current state.

But racing suffers particularly from problems of its own making. One is the recurring concern over equine safety that reached a recent-year peak in the winter of 2018-19, when 30 horses died from race-related injuries within a few weeks at Santa Anita. A lengthy investigation into the cause of the outbreak produced no firm conclusions, and the spotlight dimmed, but a remedy was there all along: synthetic track surfaces. These mixes of sand, synthetic fibers, rubber and wax have been in use for more than a dozen years at Arlington Park near Chicago and Woodbine in Toronto, with fatality rates consistently coming in at about half the usual rate of two for every 1,000 starts. It is, in fact, a solution in search of anyone willing to apply it.

Safety, as well as the integrity of the sport, also is involved in the recurring scandals over the use of illicit drugs that hype equine performance or keep ailing horses on the tracks. In March a Federal indictment was returned against 27 individuals, including seven trainers and 11 veterinarians, for a long-running scheme to illegally “dope” more than 100 horses in a half-dozen states. One of the trainers named is Jason Servis, whose colt, Maximum Security, crossed the finish line first in the 2019 Kentucky Derby only to lose it to a stewards’ ruling. Maximum Security went on to win four of his next five starts and $12 million in prize money.

At least equally disturbing was the  report that Justify, the 2018 Triple Crown winner, had tested positive for the banned drug scopolamine, a bronchial dilator and heart stimulant, after he won the Santa Anita Derby that year, but that California authorities sat on the information, allowing the colt to qualify for the Triple Crown races. Taking up the matter in closed-door meetings later in the year, the California Racing Board gave the horse a pass on grounds that an active ingredient in the drug might have been naturally ingested in jimson weed, which can get into horse feeds and bedding. It never revealed the positive test. The New York Times article that exposed the episode quoted experts as saying that nibbling the weed wouldn’t produce nearly the concentration of the drug that was found in Justify’s system.

 Justify’s trainer, as well as that of American Pharaoh, which won the Triple Crown in 2015, was Bob Baffert, for two decades the sport’s most-prominent personage. While he’s outspoken on many issues, Baffert has been mum on this one. It well might be concluded that the “too big to fail” dictum applies here.

 At the center of racing’s woes is the hodgepodge of rules and rulers that govern it; it shares with boxing the distinction being the sport that needs the most regulation but gets the least. Each state that permits it has its own governing board, and these differ greatly in honesty and competence.  It might have used the suspensions of this virus period to get its house in order, but no such thing is occurring. Meantime, the number of people who care continues to diminish.

BOOKISH

               Six weeks into our confinement and, unhappily, the end looks about as far away it was when we began. The news is grindingly repetitious and except for that nonevent the NFL Draft nothing much has been happening in sports. Deprived of the present we must retreat into the past with entertainments like ESPN’s many-part rehash of the 1998 Chicago Bulls’ championship season. I was around for that, and while as a Chicagoan I cheered the Bulls, as a reporter I was obliged to keep some distance. That became easier after watching the internal squabbles of that great basketball team, reminding us that except for their otherworldly skills our sports idols are human.

               The nice thing about the past is that there is plenty of it, always permitting our further exploration. This led again to my wonderful sports library, collected largely from freebies accumulated in my years as a columnist and book reviewer. The 500-odd volumes that line my office walls look more impressive than they should because I haven’t read nearly all of them. A plus about these trying times is that they’ve allowed me to do some catching up.

               One book that I previously only scanned is “PROPHET OF THE SANDLOTS;  JOURNEYS OF A MAJOR LEAGUE SCOUT,” by Mark Winegardner, published in 1990.  It’s a record of a year’s travel by the author with Tony Lucadello, a former minor-league infielder who was a 46-year scout (1943-89) with, first, the Chicago Cubs and then the Philadelphia Phillies. In that span he signed 52 future major-leaguers, including the Hall of Famers Mike Schmidt and Fergie Jenkins. The number would be 53 if it included Ernie Banks; the scout wouldn’t count him because the future Mr. Cub was a young pro in the Negro leagues when he first saw him, but Banks always credited Lucadello with bringing his star to light.

               The book is a look at baseball as it was, not is. Lucadello made his rounds of the Midwestern high school, American Legion and college fields without the radar gun or stopwatch no scout would be without in the current, data-driven age. He prided himself on being a “projector,” someone who could foretell how the teenagers he watched would look three to five years hence, when they were of age to aspire to the Bigs.

 To say that Lucadello went his own way would be an understatement. He was a loner, keeping to himself on the Motel 6-Denny’s circuit baseball scouts still travel. He was a bit of a secret agent, too, the better to keep his evaluations from opposition eyes. One thing he didn’t keep secret was his tenet, uttered only partly in jest, that 87% of baseball was played below the waist. By that he meant that the hips, legs and feet are what generate the power, speed and balance that made major leaguers.  He looked for youngsters who might be puppies in high school but full-grown German Shepherds down the road.  His observations on the game are as pertinent now as they were when the book was written 30 years ago.

               “SECOND WIND; THE MEMOIRS OF AN OPINIONATED MAN,” is an unusual kind of jockography, first because its subject is the star basketball center Bill Russell, an unusual kind of athlete, and its coauthor is Taylor Branch, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose intellectual credentials are a cut above the sort of writers who usually write such works. Published in 1979, when Russell was 45 years old (he’s 86 now), it contains a lot of  forgettable material about the games he played but some truly fascinating stuff about his early life and later struggles with celebrity that all great athletes face but rarely address, in print or, probably, with themselves.

               Russell’s perspective was unique, partly because, unlike the big majority of his NBA peers, he wasn’t a growing-up-entitled natural athlete but a self-made one. A gangly, clumsy teen in Oakland, California, he was the 15-and-a-half man on a 15-man jayvee team in high school, splitting the team’s 15^th and last uniform, and the scant playing time that went with, with another student. He made the varsity as a junior off his height and jumping ability, but wasn’t all-anything, and got his hoops scholarship to the University of San Francisco (his only offer) by virtue of his performance on a summer-league team that he made by accident. At USF, with teammate and long-time cohort K.C. Jones, he painstakingly built the defensive and offensive moves that fueled his epic career.

              Russell had a prickly personality; he eschewed giving autographs and receiving honors, even insisting that his jersey-retirement ceremony with the Boston Celtics be held in an empty Boston Garden with only ex-teammates present. He reminded strongly of another Boston sports idol, the baseball great Ted Williams, who was portrayed in a memorable John Updike New Yorker piece as a perfectionist “quixotically desiring to sever [his] game from the paid spectatorship and publicity that surrounds it.”

Russell resisted being defined by his sport, considering fans’ cheers as hypocritical and ultimately destructive to his self-image. “I’ve tried to handle my ego the way I would any other part of my character: to acknowledge it but not let it control me or make me into something I don’t like,” he wrote. The man-against-himself theme, rare in sports, makes this book worthwhile.

 A little levity is especially valuable these days and there’s that aplenty in “GOLF DREAMS” by the aforementioned John Updike. Published in 1996, it contains 30 pieces on the sport by the late, world-class man of letters. Updike was a champion writer but a so-so golfer, an 18-handicapper (I once read). Indeed, he was living proof of the adage that one never will be good at any game one takes up as an adult.

 Like most duffers, Updike is both torn and fascinated by the fact that a gloriously perfect shot or two can transform any ordinary round, pulling the golfer back to the links despite abundant evidence that his time might be better spent elsewhere. “Golf is not a hobby… hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue,” he writes. Rather, it’s a “trip” that can “so transforms one’s somatic sense” that it can “debunk the fabric of mundane reality.” 

A couple of pieces alone make the book worthwhile. “Drinking from a Cup Made Cinchy” mocks golf instruction by comparing tea-drinking mechanics with those of the golf swing. In “Farrell’s Caddy,” a fictional player follows the muttered advice of a boozy, taciturn Scottish bag-toter to leave his wife and back off from a business merger as well as transform his swing.  There’s a good trifecta if there ever was one.