VIVA CABRERA

Tennessee Williams had a brother named Dakin, a witty man who spent most of his life lawyering in Collinsville in southern Illinois. Dakin was a perennial candidate for this or that public office, a quest attributable more to his fondness for being clever in public than to any chance of winning.  He’ll be remembered mostly for getting  off one of the best political zingers ever, delivered in a 1970s Democratic senatorial primary in which he called his opponent, Adlai Stevenson III,  “the potato candidate, because the best part of him [dad Adlai II] is in the ground.”

                

That image also fits baseball, although the statistical pile it bestrides is above ground, not below. It’s a veritable mountain, and the opportunities for comparisons it provides fuels most of the game’s conversations.  In baseball the past lives vividly through stats, making every trip to the ballpark a journey down memory lane, the game’s and one’s own. That alone is worth the price of admission. 

The trouble is that, in this computer age, the mountain may be growing too fast. Writers and broadcasters seem to crank out new distinctions daily, telling us, for example, that player X may be better than we thought because he’s the only guy ever to get 10 triples, 20 stolen bases and 75 walks in a season.  It’s enough to make one’s eyes cross.

               

  Further, the deluge may obscure the occasional statistical achievement that’s really worth celebrating.   I refer to Miguel Cabrera’s hitter’s Triple Crown in a season in which he led the American League in batting average (.330), home runs (44) and runs batted in (139). No one had accomplished such a feat in 45 years, since Carl Yastrzemski did it in 1967.  Major League baseball was smaller then, with 20 teams instead of the present 30, and not every pitcher stood 6-feet-5 and could throw a strawberry through a battleship. Cabrera is some hitter, and should be recognized as such.

               

Since 1901, Year One for most modern baseball records (changes in the game make previous numbers less than comparable), the Triple Crown had been won only 13 times by 11 players. They are Nap Lajoie (1901), Ty Cobb (1909), Rogers Hornsby (1922 and ‘25), Jimmy Foxx (1933), Chuck Klein (1933), Lou Gehrig (1934), Joe Medwick (1937), Ted Williams (1942 and ’47), Mickey Mantle (1956), Frank Robinson (1966), Yaz and, now, Cabrera.  Considering that more than 16,000 players have worn Major League uniforms in that span, it’s an exclusive group.

It’s a Who’s Who list made more notable by who isn’t on it. That includes Babe Ruth, the game’s all-time greatest hitter (and player). Six times he led the American League in both homers and RBI (in 1919, ’20, 21, ’23, ’26 and ’28) but never pulled off  the triple even though his batting average topped .370 in four of those years and was .393 in one (’23), when Harry Heilmann hit .403. 

Other near misses have been closer.  The mighty Foxx missed a TC in 1932 by finishing second in the batting race by three points to a player (Dale Alexander) whose 392 official at-bats wouldn’t qualify for the title under today’s rules. Williams could have won in ’49 but went hitless in his last game and lost the batting title to George Kell, .3427 to .3429. Al Rosen led the AL in homers and RBIs in 1953 but finished second in batting average by one point to Mickey Vernon; Rosen almost beat out a chopper to third base in his final at bat when a hit would have given him the award.

More recently, individuals have led their league in two of the three TC categories lots of times since Yaz swept the board in 1967, but few have come close in the third. The main rub most often has been the batting-average race; two of the award’s three categories favor heavy-legged power hitters, but some speed afoot usually is necessary to get the eight or 10 “leg” hits that put valuable points on an average. Additionally, big hitters usually also are big whiffers, and you can’t get a hit if you don’t hit the ball.

It’s curious that Cabrera is the man to break the long TC drought. He’s been an excellent hitter since he broke in with the Florida Marlins in 2003 at age 20, with at least 30 home runs and 100 runs batted in annually since he became a full timer in 2004, and a lifetime BA of .318 through this season. But, playing in Miami or Detroit, he’s been overshadowed by the likes of Albert Pujols, who’s more physically imposing than he is, ARod, who’s richer,  and Manny Ramirez, who’s nutsier.

Cabrera is Venezuelan and doesn’t speak English well, so he doesn’t cut much of a media figure. He’s had problems with alcohol and has a DUI, a rehab stint, a bar brawl or two and a domestic dustup on his rap sheet. His jiggly middle makes him something less than a model of athleticism. He is sometimes confused with another Cabrera—Melky—who was leading the National League in hitting this year before being benched for flunking a drugs test.

Cabrera spent the season at a stressful fielding position (third base) that wasn’t his natural station (he’s a first baseman). He played the latter part of the campaign with ankle problems that reduced his never-dazzling speed. Still, he maintained his batting average while boosting his power numbers in August and September as his Detroit Tigers overtook the Chicago White Sox to win in the AL Central Division.  All things considered, his was a brilliant performance that deserves to be remembered.  I hope you enjoyed it because it may be another 45 years before we’ll see something like it again.

 

               

                  

P.U.

                The lockout of the National Football League refs has ended, and the sigh of relief at the announcement swayed large trees nationwide.  Now we can get back to watching football and drinking beer without tangential concerns. Who could ask for more?

               

                 But if the unpleasantness is over, the malady lingers on. If you were paying attention you knew that the NFL owners, who run the game, think so little of us fans that they believed we’d swallow a sub-par product without gagging.  You’ll recall that they did that once before in a more-direct way, by fielding so-called replacement-player teams when the players’ union went on strike in 1987. It took a long time for the smell of that rotten fish to dissipate, and it will take a while for this one, too.  The longer the better, I hope.

                 The treatment of the public by the owners is hard to fathom:  in what other business would a manufacturer befoul its product yet continue to offer it at full price? It would be like Mercedes-Benz losing a key engine part but fashioning a new one out of duct tape and popsicle sticks and sending the result to its dealers to peddle as though nothing had changed. I guess the concept of shame is foreign to those guys.

               

                 In true NFL spirit, let’s go to the replay to figure out what happened. What the lockout wasn’t about was money.  According to most reports the difference in the positions on salary and pensions of the league and the refs’ association when the lockout was declared last June amounted to about $3 million, an infinitesimal fraction of 1% of the league’s $9 billion annual take. The teams spend that much on Ace bandages, for heaven’s sake.

                

                To plumb what it was about will take some sociologizing, which I’m qualified to do because I have a degree in the subject (honest).  I think it’s about the chasm that separates the rich and rest in America these days, and about how little regard the former have for the latter.

               

                When I went to work as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal (Dow Jones & Co., actually) in 1963, the boss (president) was Bernard “Barney” Kilgore. He knew what I did because he used to do it himself, before holding various editorships with the paper. He made more money than I did but not by an enormous multiple; once I was driven past his home in Princeton, N.J., and it looked like one I realistically could aspire to own.

               

               Today Dow Jones is headed by Rupert Murdoch. He’s richer than the gods and probably lives better.  Currently he’s busy feeding the employees of his British newspapers to the wolves for carrying out policies adopted under his stewardship.  If he were called to account he’d probably make some remark about crumbling cookies.

               

                 The NFL owners obviously had no appreciation of the referees’ skills or the difficulty of their jobs. They probably felt it beneath their dignity to have to negotiate with such pipsqueaks, the sort of ordinary-looking people they see walking around, antlike, below their tower-office windows. The moguls may tolerate making seven- or eight-figure deals with their players because the players’ arrogance of talent matches their own arrogance of wealth, but game officials lack such cachet. Easily overlooked, they seemed as easy to replace as call-center workers. So they were, and if they didn’t like it they could lump it. 

               

              What the owners did in hiring “replacement” refs was the equivalent of going to the local municipal pool, plucking out a bunch of middle-aged lap swimmers and convincing them to jump into a river full of piranhas. Anyone who’s watched an NFL game from the field knows that analogy isn’t farfetched.

                It was only a matter of time until the owners’ blindness was exposed. Week 1 of the season wasn’t so bad because football’s return was welcomed and the idea of “everyman” officials seemed cute, but by Week 2 their gaffes had become glaring and by Week 3 they were intolerable. It wasn’t so much that they blew moving violations, which the real refs also sometimes do (the main trouble is that so much extracurricular banging around is tolerated that penalizing it often seems arbitrary), but that they couldn’t get the easy stuff right, like the downs, ball spots or the number of permitted challenges or timeouts.

                Further, it was apparent that the newbies didn’t know what they saw even after they’d seen it. Play was repeatedly halted so the game officials could consult with unseen NFL types stationed in the press box areas. Trouble was, those meetings usually resulted in bad decisions being upheld, like that of the “Fail Mary” pass call in last Monday’s Packers-Seahawks game that broke the camel’s back. Coaches and players were wantonly ignoring league edicts for silence on the subject, and just about every sports columnist or blogger in the land was describing the situation with “f” words like “farce,” “fraud” or “fiasco.” The owners had no alternative but to capitulate.

                The truth is that few people on any of our top-level fields of play are more dedicated, competent or honorable than the game officials.  To get where they are they’ve served long apprenticeships that earned them little money or celebrity (my friend the ex-ref Jerry Markbreit started by calling intramural touch-football games at the University of Illinois). Most fully understand that they succeed best when they are noticed least, a difficult posture to maintain in a me-centered era.

                That they are being noticed now is a good thing, even though the reason isn’t. I don’t expect the owners to remember this for long, but the rest of us should.

               

               

                 

TFF

                I worry about a lot of things, including ones that don’t concern most people.

   

                I worry that global temperatures are rising while sperm counts are falling. I worry that honey bees are going extinct and that rising seas will bring the Pacific Ocean to my Scottsdale door. I worry that in four million years the sun will explode and wipe out the earth.

                What’s that you say? That last thing won’t happen for four billion years? OK, I feel better, but just a little.

                I also worry about more here-now matters, like about the players in the National Football League. I worry that some of them are getting their bells rung so often that it will take a pistol shot to stop the clanging. I worry that the pummeling they receive weekly in season will turn them into old men in middle age.  And—finally and simply—I worry that a lot of them are too, uh, darned fat.

                Chances are that—of the above-mentioned three items—you, too, worry a bit about the first two.  The effect of concussions at all levels of the game has been football’s biggest story of the last year, and anyone who’s known an NFL player knows that the muscular-skeletal complaints he has in his 30s don’t show up in most men until they’re on Medicare.

                 The part about weight, though, is largely ignored. That’s odd because the increase in footballers’ size has been the most obvious trend in the sport—or probably in any sport—of the last 30 years.  According to one on-line piece I saw (which I believe because I did similar comparisons when I was working), NFL rosters had just three players weighing 300 pounds or more on opening day in 1980, but by 1990 the number had climbed to 94. In 2000 it was 301 and in 2009 it was 394. By that progression it’s certainly over 400 now and maybe near 500.

                 Almost all of those very-big guys are linemen, but the size race also has spread to other positions. Linebackers used to weigh in the 215-230-pound range but now 240-250 is more likely.  At 230 pounds Jim Brown was a huge ball carrier back in the day, but he’d be about average now.  In 2007 the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft was JaMarcus Russell, a 270-pound quarterback out of LSU. Yeah, he was bad, but I’m just sayin’.

                The need for size has been dictated by changes in the game, especially the offenses; at both the pro and major-college levels offensive football has moved from run-pass balance to an overwhelming emphasis on the pass. This means that offensive linemen function mainly as obstacles between their quarterbacks and opposing pass-rushers, and have little use for the speed afoot the position used to require.

                Football terminology has changed to reflect this development--when offensive line play is discussed today one hears about “quickness” rather than speed.  What’s valued now is the ability to stay in balance with short, rapid steps to combat the various angles at which defensive linemen attack. OLs still run 40-yard dashes in tryout camps, but that’s pro forma because they almost never run that far in games. A more apt test would gauge their dancing ability.  

                Evolution doesn’t work nearly fast enough to produce the giants modern football demands on both sides of the ball, so most of today’s behemoths are made, not born. They get that way through a combination of intense, year-round weight lifting and huge meals that often include dietary supplements, and sometimes include steroids.  Thirty years ago this process started in earnest in college.  Today it often begins in high school.

 The iron is pumped because muscle weighs more than fat, but it alone won’t suffice to create Frankenjocks. While about 2,500 calories a day are enough to nicely sustain the average American man, footballers’ intakes run from about 5,000 a day to 8,000 or 10,000. You don’t get boosts like just by adding a dessert or drinking a milkshake with lunch.

“Eating with us [he and his linemates] got to be a kind of game. We’d have two entrees each at dinner, and sometimes three,” Jay Hilgenberg told me for a story I did on him. He added: “We didn’t eat until we were full, we ate until we were tired.”

Hilgenberg  was the center on the Chicago Bears’ 1985 Super Bowl champion team. If you add about 25 pounds at each level of his development, his story is typical of today’s linemen. The scion of a family of U. of Iowa centers (“we played catch back-to-back and bent over,” he joked) he left high school at a strapping 217 pounds. That wasn’t enough to play in the Big Ten, so through diet and exercise he gained 18 pounds before enrolling in Iowa City and added around 15 more before he was graduated after a distinguished varsity run.

 Two-fifty was too small for the pros and the 6-foot-3 Jay wasn’t drafted out of college. He added 15 more pounds on his own, wangled an invitation to Bears’ camp, and made the team, playing at between 270 and 280 pounds for most of his 13 seasons in the NFL. That was about 50 pounds above his “natural” weight by most calculations.  His career ended in the spring of 1994 when he suffered a heart attack at age 35 while lifting weights in his basement. The first thing he did upon getting out of the hospital was go on a diet.

Heart attacks at 35 are rare even for overweight jocks, but premature health problems aren’t; various studies have shown that ex-NFL players are considerably more likely to die before age 50 than are males in the general population.

 In 2009 the American College of Gastroenterology reported that because of their weight footballers run a higher risk of incurring diabetes or heart or liver disease than a group of professional baseball players it included in a 224-athlete study. It noted that while an active life style generally is a health asset the footballers’ “sheer size overwhelms the positive effects of exercise.”

I like football, you like football, and the players like football, so don’t expect much about the sport to change to satisfy worriers like me.  Still, players can change their individual courses.

 I refer specifically to Alan Page, one of my sports heroes. He was one of the best NFL defensive linemen ever, 250 pounds of rompin’, stompin’ dynamite who terrorized offenses for the Minnesota Vikings in the late 1960s and ‘70s. In his 30s, though, he got tired of filling his mirror, stopped gorging and started running for exercise, and shed 30 pounds. The Vikings objected to his new regimen and cut him in 1978, but the Bears picked him up. He played 3 ½ more seasons in Chicago at his new weight, and did quite well as I recall.

Not every player is as strong minded as Page, a lawyer who’s now a justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court. Not as good on the field, either.  But if he could get off the gravy train others might, too.

It’s possible.

    

WORMS TURN

The baseball season is headed into its September home stretch as usual, but this year things seem out of whack. I refer, of course, to the National League, where the Washington Nationals lead the East and the Pittsburgh Pirates also are contending for a playoff spot. The natural order has been violated, much like if the sun suddenly rose in the west or a Republican politician had a good word for Obamacare.

Of the two disturbances in the Force, it’s hard to say which is weirder. If the Pirates just finish the campaign with a winning record it would be astonishing because they’ve been on the losing side of the ledger for the last 19 years, the longest such streak in U.S. professional sports history. From 2005 through 2010 they averaged 97 losses a season, another milestone in futility.

 The Nats’ record is all recent, because they only moved to the nation’s capital from Montreal in 2005, but they’ve yet to finish a plus-.500 season there.  And although the Expos are their biological parents their true legacy is that of the Washington Senators,  a franchise so woebegone that in the 1955 musical “Damn Yankees” a guy had to sell his soul to the Devil (Ray Walston, actually) to cop a pennant for the team, and even then almost fell short.

The fact that baseball still is doing business in Washington is surprising.  While the D.C. area has a big population (about 5.5 million) its favorite sport is politics, with much of its professional class consisting of transients who are there for a few years to pad their resumes with public service on their way to more-lucrative employment elsewhere. The city’s two previous shots at the Big Leagues missed: the Senators moved to Minneapolis-St. Paul after a 60-year run (1901-60) and the expansion outfit that replaced them departed for Texas after 12 mostly futile years in 1972. Together the two teams accounted for a grand total of three American League pennants, the last coming in 1933, and one World Series title, in 1924. That record makes even Chicago’s look good.

The Nationals’ name is borrowed from a sometimes-handle of the Senators’ first incarnation, but a more-apt moniker would be the Exemptions, after the anti-trust pass our Government still gives the National Pastime. That freebie isn’t worth what it was before the game’s so-called Reserve Clause bit the dust in the 1970s, but it still gives a legal waiver to some of the game’s dubious employment and administrative practices and packed enough clout to make the city a perennial first in the next-franchise line.

Sportswriters love uplift so it would be nice to report that the two teams grittily bootstrapped their way to improvement, if not yet success. Fact is, luck has had at least as much to do with their rise as skill. The Pirates’ surge owes mostly to the blossoming of Andrew McCutcheon, their 25-year-old centerfielder. A first-round draft choice in 2005, he’s become a star in his fourth Major League season, having a Most-Valuable-Player-type campaign. Slim and swift as well as strong, he reminds of a pre-steroidal Barry Bonds, the star of Pittsburgh’s last contending teams in the early 1990s.   

The major luck part of the Bucs’ equation has come from A.J. Burnett. The team picked the much-tattooed 35-year-old pitcher off the scrap heap after two bad seasons with the New York Yankees, and he’s rewarded them with a 15-5 won-lost mark whose plus-10 standings difference exceeds their  nine-game margin over .500 (70-61).  Hamazing.

The Nats have thrived off doing poorly, which is how it’s supposed to work with the annual amateur-player draft but rarely does. In 2008 their 59-102 won-lost record was baseball’s worst and earned them the No. 1 pick the next year. Often that’s no big deal but that time it allowed them to draft Stephen Strasburg, the most-heralded pitching prospect in memory.

If that weren’t enough they were stinko again on the field  in 2009 (59-103) and the next year got to use another no-brainer pick to corral Bryce Harper, the top-rated position-player prospect since Joe Mauer 10 years earlier. Strasburg’s now their top starter and a Cy Young Award candidate, and while Harper is no star yet at age 19 despite his All-Star Game selection in July, he’s been an everyday starter for the team in center field.

 The guy who was supposed to carry the run-producing load for the Nats is the ex-Phillie Jason Werth, whom they gave an eye-popping contract ($126 million over seven years) in 2011. That hasn’t gone well—Werth had a bad first season in D.C. and has missed most of this one with a broken wrist—but a much-cheaper Adam LaRoche, a first-baseman long on my “most underrated” list, has picked up the slack. Similarly, the young left-handed pitcher Gio Gonzalez, who was passed through three organizations (the White Sox, Phillies and A’s) before landing in Washington, has been almost as good as Strasburg and gives the Nats the second high-quality starter it takes to make serious noise.

Strasburg has been the Nats’ major “story” this season. He both wowed and worried us in his 2010 rookie year, striking out everyone in sight before going on the DL, then returning and DLing again with elbow woes that led to Tommy John surgery.  His last season was pretty much spent rehabbing, but this year he’s been great.

Amazingly again, the Nats may not let Strasburg make it to the postseason. Wary about the 24-year-old’s arm, they’ve put him on a 160-inning limit this year, and since he’s already logged 150 he’s already just about had it. Nat brass has said it figures the team will be a contender for years and wants him around to help.

A couple of points seem worth making here. One is that, given the current state of play, Strasburg and other pitching phenoms probably show up in the Bigs with stressed arms from all the throwing they did in hyper-competitive kids’ leagues starting at age 9 or 10, and anything they do as pros is incidental to that. A better prescription for professional longevity is to let gifted athletes play a variety of sports as children and hold off on specialization until they’re 15 or 16.

 The other is that things don’t always go as expected. My first sports awareness came at age 7 with the Chicago Cubs’ 1945 pennant drive, and I recall not being terribly upset by their World Series loss that year because I assumed they’d have lots of other chances. You know how that’s worked out.

NOTE: If you haven’t visited chicagosidesports.com lately, you should. It’s been running lots of lively pieces, including a few by me. A link is above. 

ACT II?

                One of my more pleasant writing assignments came about 20 years ago when an acquaintance at Lyons & Buford Press in New York told me his firm was publishing an American paperback edition of Roger Bannister’s book “The Four-Minute Mile”, and asked me if I’d do an introduction.

 I accepted quickly even after he’d apologized in advance for the pay he was offering for my 1,500 words—low three figures I now recall. The clincher was that I’d also receive an autographed copy from the author.  Truth to tell, I might have done it just for that.

I’d long admired Bannister, not just for his signal athletic achievement but for the manner in which he accomplished it and for what he did afterward.  No single-(or simple-) minded jock, he was a medical student engaged in serious study when he broke the magical mile mark in 1954. When he retired from sport later that year, after defeating his archrival John Landy at the Commonwealth Games in a mile that’s still worth replaying, he embarked on a career as a neurologist that included research accomplishments as well as private practice.  A lecture hall at his medical school is named for him, something he’s said he ranked ahead of his running honors.

 Sir Roger’s example came to mind many times as I watched the just-concluded Olympic Games. As one after another of the young winners exulted in their glories, I kept wondering what they might do for encores, and not on the playing fields.  F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there are no second acts in American lives, and while the line qualifies mainly as a cute misstatement it’s usually all too true when it comes to athletes.   Worse, I have the feeling that I care more about that than do most of the people immediately involved.

Many things have changed since Roger Bannister’s day, and for many years thereafter.  Until about 30 years ago participation in high-level sports still was considered to be an interlude between youth and adulthood, with practitioners routinely pursuing off-season education or jobs that turned into livelihoods once their playing days were done. If you frequented Chicago’s LaSalle Street during the 1980s you might have bumped into Terry Brennan, Glenn Beckert or George Seals, ex-jocks plying their new trades in the financial canyon. Old athletes were all over the area, turning a buck on their names (like the putative restauranteurs Mike Ditka, Michael Jordan and Jim McMahon) if not their labors.  Ex-Bear Bill Osmanski had a long dental career in the area, ex-Cub pitcher Rich Nye was a veterinarian and Ken Holtzman ran an insurance brokerage. The list went on.

Today, of course, so much money is available even in Olympic sports that receive scant attention at other times that any necessity to earn a living post-sports is negated for some. Michael Phelps, the swimming hero, is retiring at age 27 with a reported $40 million in the bank from endorsements and with additional contracts in hand worth that much or more.  All he needs now are some tax tips from Mitt Romney and a stockbroker who’ll  explain to him the principles of risk and reward and how they apply to everyone, including him. The cautionary tale is necessary because many (most?) jocks possess the combination of ignorance and arrogance that make them easy marks for financial predators. It’s a jungle out there.

  But there’s more to life than money, and if the prospect of retirement at 27 isn’t daunting to Phelps, it should be.  The actuarial tables say that he has at least 50 more years on Earth, and he’ll have to fill them somehow.  I remember being in Las Vegas some years ago, a few days in advance of a fight I was covering, and leaving my hotel at mid-morning on my reporting rounds. The place had a tennis complex and as I left I saw Sugar Ray Leonard, newly retired from the ring and there to make appearances, on the court smacking shots against a ball machine. Five or six hours later I returned to find him still at it. The guy is seriously bored, I told myself, and a few months later wasn’t surprised to learn that he’d reneged on his retirement, preferring the rigors of his brutal sport to idleness. A swimming pool has to look very good compared with that.

It’s better to fill the hours in interesting ways, and that’s where education comes in. Last week I chuckled at an Al Michaels TV interview with the American gymnastics darlings Gabby Douglas, who’s 16 years old, and Aly Raisman, 18.  When Michaels asked them about their future plans, both cheerfully said they’d be taking their circus on the road in the coming months and sticking with their sport thereafter.  Better answers would have been high school for Gabby and college for Aly.  Athletically speaking, maturity won’t be their friend, but it could be intellectually if they play their cards right.  Their parents should clue them in on that.

Gabby and Aly—and Michael, too— can find good examples aplenty if they choose to broaden their horizons. Seb Coe, the man in charge of the London Olympics, was a gold-medal-winning middle-distance runner in the 1980 and ’84 Games and later a member of the British Parliament. Jim Scherr, a freestyle wrestler for the U.S. at Seoul in 1988, spent 10 years as chief executive officer of the U.S. Olympic Committee.   

Dot Richardson, a star softballer in 1996 and 2000, is an orthopedic surgeon. Figure skater Peggy Fleming ran a winery and paints landscapes. Magic Johnson is involved in numerous profitable and worthwhile enterprises.  Boxer George Foreman got behind a wonderful grill. Bruce Jenner, the 1976 decathlon champion, became a Kardashian.

OK, skip that last one.

Required reading for every Olympian—and for other jocks as well—should be the Irwin Shaw short story, “The 80-Yard Run.” It’s about a man who looks back in middle age to realize that his proudest achievement was a football play he made in college. It’s a sad story, but that’s the point. Forewarned is forearmed.

 

TOO BIG TO FAIL

                

I like to check out the on-line polls newspapers run, and did so a couple weeks ago at the Chicago Tribune sports-page site. The question concerned what decision the NCAA should reach in the Penn State case. The alternatives were nothing (it’s not a sports matter), the “death penalty” (no football for a year or two), and lesser sanctions.  More than 70% of the previous voters had checked the “death penalty” box. I joined the less than 10% that opted for nothing.

             

   I did so not because I thought the offenses involved—centering on the now-well-known predations of former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky-- weren’t deserving of punishment. Quite the contrary, they were so heinous they transcended the confines of sport in which the NCAA functions. What Sandusky and the cover-up perpetrators did was a matter for the courts and the Pennsylvania legislature to deal with, and the process already had begun with Sandusky’s criminal conviction. Even the so-called death penalty would have trivialized the matter.

                The penalties that were handed down this week only underscored that conclusion. Measuring Sandusky’s victims’ travail in bowl-game bans, scholarship reductions and victory forfeitures (ha!) put them in the category of the recruiting violations and grades cheating that the organization usually handles. The $60 million fine, which will go to child-protection agencies, was a nice touch, but Penn State should have thought of that itself.

                The whole exercise illustrated the self-importance of the cartel that manages big-time college sports, and its essential nature.  Lost in just about any discussion of the NCAA’s role is the fact that it is both the promoter and policeman of the activities it governs, and when there’s a conflict between the two functions the promoter always wins. That’s also the case with our professional sports leagues, by the way.

 The idea that the death penalty might be invoked was naïve in the extreme. Any such action would have been bad for business, not only for Penn State but also for the 12 schools its football team plays annually, creating intolerable holes in their schedules and athletics-department budgets, and the NCAA is all about business.   To use a line that emerged from another, larger lapse of governance, Penn State was too big to fail. Any of the 100 or so other college-sports programs that fit the “big-time” label also fit that category.

 The usual image used by college-sports’ critics is that of the tail wagging the dog. Trouble is, these days it can be hard to tell which is which. The gag line that a university should strive to be a credit to its football team is funny because it’s so often true. At Penn State the university didn’t measure up.

The term the NCAA usually uses to justify the imposition of its harshest penalties is a lack of “institutional control” at the university in question, meaning that a school’s higher-ups didn’t properly oversee the athletics-department types. That couldn’t be claimed at Penn State, where according to the report by former FBI director Louis Freeh the university president, a vice president, the athletics director and the football head coach—the venerable Joe Paterno—were in cahoots in covering up Sandusky’s crimes.  There was institutional control aplenty in Happy Valley, all aimed at protecting the football program at the expense of the boys Sandusky raped over the 13-year span of the conspiracy. Making it all the more appalling was the fact that it concerned an entertainment enterprise that falls outside any rational definition of a university’s mission.

Many Penn Staters don’t see it that way, of course.  Neither do the millions of deluded others who equate a university’s standing with that of its sports teams. The Pennsylvania legislature, which really runs the school, should have shelved football indefinitely, out of atonement and to make the point that the sun would come up without it.  It hasn’t because the voters wouldn’t stand for it. Go Lions!

    The NCAA must shoulder blame for helping create the monster that college sports have become.  So should the nation’s sporting press for elevating Paterno to sainthood before the stuff hit the fan. We news people like to say we revere the truth, but we love an easy story line more, and buying Joe’s self-proclaimed “Success With Honor” mantra was as natural as taking a second helping at the press-box game-day buffet.  

I had no idea what Joe, et al, would hide later on, but I never bought his sanctity act. In 1984, when I was just starting my Wall Street Journal column, I took note of his repeated claim of 90% graduation rates for his footballers with a piece debunking it, pointing out that it didn’t include players who’d flunked out, dropped out, were flushed or turned pro before their senior years. As best as I could determine, the team’s real rate was a quite-respectable 60% or so, but Joe felt compelled to gild the lily anyway. Anyone who’d lie about small things probably also wouldn’t be straight about bigger ones, I figured.

The truth about Joe—and about every other successful big-time college coach—wasn’t that he was bad or good but that he was a hard man who made it in a hard business, one in which the only results that count are on the scoreboard.  The motto “Whatever It Takes” hangs on many locker-room walls, and applies to coaches as well as to players.  We should remember that before casting our heroes in bronze.

WHO'S IN FIRST?

            The Olympics begin in London in a couple of weeks (July 27), and I’ll be just where I want to be, which is in front of a television set. While it’s generally true that everyone at home sees sporting events better than anyone in the stadium, it’s especially true for the Summer Games, a smorgasbord so large that no one can down it whole.

            As a free-range columnist at five such fests (in Los Angeles, Seoul, Barcelona, Atlanta and Sydney), I would peruse each day’s crowded calendar and pick the venue I thought would yield the most interesting results. I didn’t always choose right, so I missed a lot of really good stuff.

            The joke that every Olympics news person knows is about the reporter who calls his desk during the Games. “What’s happening at the Olympics?” his editor asks. Replies the reporter, “How should I know? I’m at the Olympics.”

            A hi-def TV, comfortable lounger and clear personal schedule won’t solve all Olympic-spectating problems, however. At these Games, as at its predecessors, the question of who’s winning will be problematic, not so much in individual events as in the national standings that summarize them.

Nationalism is a touchy subject on Olympia, which like Billy Martin in the old Bud Lite commercials, feels very strongly both ways about the matter. On the one hand, the official Olympic creed proclaims that the most important thing about the Games is participating, not winning, but on the other hand their administrators stoutly resist doing anyway with the national uniforms, flags and victory-stand anthems that stir popular passions, sometimes in unpleasant ways, but are good for business. So while the national medal standings are unofficial, they’re mentioned prominently and without protest in every account of the proceedings, and followed avidly.

Trouble is, the standings can raise almost as many questions as they answer. A case in point was the last Summer Games in Beijing, where athletes from the United States collected the most overall medals—110 to 100 for runnerup China-- but the Chinese won more gold medals, 51 to 36. Further, the fairness of the whole system is questionable when one notes that a 10-second effort in the men’s 100-meter dash final counts for the same number of medals (3-- one gold, one silver and one bronze) as the basketball tournaments in which 12-person teams must prevail over a grind of eight 40-minute games. How about a count that gives the basketball-medalist nations 12 medals each instead of one, huh? Huh?

  The U.S., of course, is a large and rich nation with a deep gene pool, so it always does well in the summer standings, no matter how they’re tallied. Since the modern Games began in 1896 we lead the medals list with 2,302 overall and 929 golds to l,l22 and 440 for second-place USSR/Russia and 725 and 208.5 for third-place Great Britain. We’ll again will be in the hunt for the top spot in London, along with Chinese, whose emerging economy has been harnessed to produce athletic glory from its abundant human stock.

Do not, however, expect to see American and Chinese jocks vying head-to-head in many events; rather, they’ll mostly be playing different games, as they did in 2008. The Summer Olympics encompasses 302 medal events spread over 26 sports. They’re really not one event but many, and which are most important depends on where you sit.

 For example, Americans traditionally have been very good at track and field and swimming. That’s fortunate for us because T&F (called “athletics” in Olympic parlance) is the main medals source in the Games, with 47 events offering 141 medals, and swimming is second with 34 and 102. In ’08, we won 23 medals in track and 31 in swimming, while the Chinese, with 2 and 6 respectively, were pretty much a non-factor in each.

So why weren’t we runaway victors in the medals count? Because the Chinese put their energies elsewhere, collecting a total of 36 medals in diving, weightlifting, badminton and table tennis, sports in which the U.S. registered a big “O.” You can bet that those activities received mucho TV time in the People’s Republic, maybe as much as T&F and swimming got in our land.

The Chinese approach to the Olympics is reminiscent of that of the former East Germany, another odious regime. With a population of less the 20 million people, the East Germans set out to demonstrate the superiority of their system by pouring their resources into winning big on the Olympic stage. They succeeded by finishing second or third in the medals count in four Summer Games (1972, 1976, 1980 and 1988) and collecting more metal than the U.S. in two of those (’76 and ’88).

They did it mostly by zeroing in on sports where participation and performance standards were relatively low, namely women’s track and field, women’s swimming, rowing and canoeing. They eschewed team sports because these yielded too few rewards (see above). And—oh, yeah—they doped like crazy.

About the only sport that’s important in both the U.S. and China—and where the two nations will clash directly for superiority in London—is gymnastics. The Chinese got the better of that contest in Beijing, winning 18 medals to the U.S.’s 10, but the U.S. will field strong squads on both the men’s and women’s sides this year, and should make a game of it. I’m sure you’ll be tuned in.

As usual, women’s gymnastics will get lots of TV time in the U.S. That’s because its participants are young, tiny and cute, and do the sort of circus tricks that boggle the mind. But while gymnastics is fun to watch it’s brutally hard to do, and its fearsome injury rate makes its label of “football for girls” apt. I watch, but through the fingers that cover my eyes. Real football is getting to be like that, too.