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.  

              

                

              

WHEN?

There isn’t much sports news these days and what there is isn’t good, mostly cancellations and postponements. Wimbledon, the British Open and the Olympics are gone—kaput—until next year. The Kentucky Derby has been put off until September, the Masters Golf Tournament until November.

I put a big “maybe” after those last two things, as well as other tries to get sports-as-we-know-them back on some sort of track while the calendar still reads 2020. It’s nice to be optimistic during these dour times, but it’s hard to find reasons to support that stance.

It’s been about a month since the current stay-home dictates have been in place in most places, and they have yielded results. New York, the hardest-hit state, shows signs of flattening its curve of hospital case increases, the stated purpose of the national effort, but that goal remains aspirational in other states and some areas of the U.S. are only beginning to feel the force of the plague. We should keep in mind that that is a very limited goal and has succeeded only because most of us have been following isolation and social-distance recommendations. The virus isn’t going away and if we get antsy and start breaking out prematurely, the “second wave” we’ve been hearing about will kick in and we’ll be back to where we are now. Indeed, it will be worse because we’ll be angrier and more frustrated.

Some ideas for resuming or beginning the seasons of our four major spectator sports are making the rounds. None of them envisions people returning to the stadiums in numbers; few of us will be willing to rub shoulders with our fellow citizens before a vaccine kills the bug, something that’s deemed unlikely in much under a year. And even the plans that have the games proceeding in front of empty seats have more holes than a screen door.

The NBA, which played its last game and sent home its players on March 11, seems to have given up on its regular season about 20% short of completion, but is said to be thinking about assembling its top 16 clubs in a single city—Las Vegas probably-- for some sort of playoffs, sans spectators. That would retain some TV revenue.  One problem is that this couldn’t be done without some sort of training period, probably beginning no sooner than a month from now. Another is that the players, et al, would have to get to LV somehow, and nobody wants to fly these days.

 A bigger drawback is that the whole circus would have to be sequestered in a hotel or hotels and tested maybe daily for the virulent virus, and one positive test would wreck the whole scheme. Further, the kind of quick-response testing regime required doesn’t exist currently, and when it does others more worthy will get first crack at it, one hopes. The NHL is supposed to be thinking along similar lines, but it has another problem—the lack of suitable ice. Any big city has dozens of proper basketball venues but far fewer ones for hockey.

Major League Baseball is reported to be taking the sequestration idea a big step farther, bundling all 30 teams off to Arizona beginning in May or June for some sort of training, a regular season (fewer than 162 games, of course) and playoffs. It’d use the Diamondbacks’ Chase Field and the 10 spring-training ballparks in the Phoenix area.  Most of the above-mentioned difficulties would apply to that, plus several more. One-hundred-degree-plus temperatures persisting well past sundown are daily summer fare around Phoenix, and among the stadiums there only Chase Field is air-conditioned. Arizona is on West Coast time in the summer, which would knock television times out of whack for most of the country.

  And under the plan the baseball players, coaches, trainers, equipment people, umpires, grounds crews, etc., would be locked away without friends or families for four or five months. That long without, uh, female companionship would weigh heavily on the lusty young men who play the game, among others.

    Football pro and college, our most self-important sporting entities, have been mostly mute about alternate plans, figuring, I guess, that the pandemic will abate in time to accommodate them, but that seems unlikely. Physical contact is the essence of both the sport and the contagion it’s hard to imagine how the teams could safely assemble in mid-July (the NFL) or early August (the collegians) to begin their training camps. Then and later, football’s battalion-like squad sizes would multiply whatever contagion problems face the other sports.

The economics of the plague also will work against sports, both in the short and long terms. Sports are supported by discretionary income and that will be in short supply for the millions of people who are suddenly unemployed or find their incomes shrunk because of stay-home edicts. The stock-market decline is bound to affect the luxury-suite crowd, either directly or by making the rich feel less rich than they were just a few weeks ago.

One of the few sport-page smiles of recent weeks was supplied in the unlikely place of Brest, Belarus, a land in which the president Alexander Lukashenko has decreed that professional soccer can continue, the virus be damned. The FC Dynamo club there hasn’t been able to lure a “live” crowd so it collected portrait photos of some of its fans and pasted them over the faces of mannequins, which it placed around the stands.  I fear that’s the best it’s going to get for many months anywhere.

ATTACKING THE STACK

               Two weeks into our collective house arrest the search for diversion becomes more urgent. “Live” sports have vanished and how many “Chopped” or “Shark Tank” reruns can one watch?  Reading is a logical outlet but in Scottsdale, AZ, where I live, the libraries are closed and trips to the local Barnes & Noble, which is observing reduced hours, are chancy. Who knows who else has browsed the books we might browse there? Such is the state of dread in Coronavirus USA.

               Luckily for me I have my own library, consisting mainly of sports books. Not to brag but I consider it world-class, with close to 500 volumes. Most of them were accumulated in my years with the WSJ, where I was a frequent sports-book reviewer as well as a reporter and columnist. As such, I was the recipient of much publisher largess.      

               Back in the day, a fair-sized library was useful to a journalist for reference purposes. No more in this computer age, where a few taps in a Google box can summon up just about any stat or other fact. It makes me sad to think that compendiums like The Baseball Encyclopedia, all 1,700 pages of it, have been reduced to electronic blips. The last edition of that noble publication came out in 1996.

               Literature, however, lives on, albeit tenuously, and my library contains numerous examples of that. I received far more books than I could read at any given time, so many wound up in a “for-later” stack. Alas, “later” easily becomes “never,” and if nothing else the current siege finally has allowed me to reduce that daunting pile.

One baseball biography I just got around to is “THE LAST YANKEE; THE TURBULENT LIFE OF BILLY MARTIN,” by the estimable David Falkner, published in 1992. To say that the subject’s life was turbulent was an understatement; Martin scraped and brawled through an 11-season playing career and another 17 years as a manager, leaving a trail of black eyes, fat lips and empty liquor bottles in his wake. Victories, too: his teams—and not just the Yankees, he managed four others —won, sometimes against the odds.

That Martin had a baseball career at all was remarkable, Falkner writes. At 5-foot-10 and about 160 pounds he was small for a big-leaguer, and was neither fleet afoot nor slick with the glove. His lifetime batting average was .257, below par for his time. He compensated with his aggressive play and tactical feel for the game, things he would pass along to his teammates and men he managed. With the Yankees in the glorious 1950s he was a special favorite of his manager, Casey Stengel, who saw him as a kindred spirit-- a “holler guy” in the diamond idiom.

That was fortunate because Martin’s after-hours habits didn’t endear him to many managerial types. He was, said teammate Phil Rizzuto, a great road roommate because he never spent much time in his room. Martin’s drinking and hair-trigger temper kept him in trouble with the Yankee brass and eventually led to his 1957 dismissal from the team after a celebrated brawl at the Copacabana night club in New York.

His carousing continued as a manager, keeping him in dutch with his bosses even while his players responded to his take-no-prisoners brand of leadership. He was “the greatest manager I ever saw from the first pitch to the last. It was the time from the last pitch to the first the next day that got him into trouble,” said Roy Eisenhardt, president of the Oakland A’s during Martin’s managerial tenue there (1980-82).

Drinking contributed to difficulties in Martin’s off-field life, which included four marriages. It led to his death at age 61 in 1989 when the pickup truck in which he was riding (driving?) spun off an icy road in rural upstate New York after he’d spent a day in the bars with a friend. Falkner concludes that we won’t see his like again, for better or worse.

“DAYS OF GRACE: A MEMOIR,” by Arthur Ashe, Jr., and Arnold Rampersad, concerns a quite-different sort of athlete. Ashe was a tennis star of the 1960s and ‘70s, the first African-American or black-male player to occupy the top echelon of his country-club sport. The book’s title has a sad double meaning; it was written just before Ashe’s 1993 death from AIDS contracted from a blood transfusion, at age 50, and the word “grace” best described his journey through life.

Ashe was a gentleman and a scholar, as his post-tennis authorship of the three-volume work “A Road to Glory,” about African-Americans in sport, attested. His swan’s song touched many other facets of American life and is unsparing as well as enlightened. He was especially hard on the emphasis on sports in the black community, eclipsing just about all other forms of endeavor. It’s an observation that’s as pertinent now as it was when he made it.

Ashe also was unsparing in his assessment of race in American culture. Despite his success, wealth and social acceptance, he confessed that race, not illness (besides AIDS he’d had two heart attacks) had been his heaviest burden. He wrote, “When I find myself in a new public situation, I count. I always count… the number or black or brown faces present…”

Anything A.J. Liebling wrote is fun to read, and that goes double for “A NEUTRAL CORNER,” a collection of some of his boxing essays written between 1952 and 1963, the year of his death. Most of them first appeared in the New Yorker magazine, where he worked for 25 years. Liebling wasn’t a sportswriter, he was a writer who sometimes wrote about sports, mainly boxing and horse racing. He did so with great erudition; what other writer could quote Ibn Khaldun, a medieval Tunisian historian, and Harlem’s Father Divine in abutting paragraphs? And he was funny—his pieces had a laugh in every graf if you had the vocabulary to appreciate it.

Liebling found in boxing a treasure trove of characters, not only the fighters but also their promoters, managers, trainers, cut men and sparring partners. Not without irony he called the sport “the sweet science” whose intellectual home was the battered old Stillman’s Gym on Manhattan’s West Side, which he dubbed the University of Eighth Avenue. “The sign on the building says ‘Training Here Daily,’ and in smaller letters ‘Boxing Instruction—See Jack Curley.’ This is the university’s nearest approach to a printed catalogue,” he wrote. “Doctor Lou Stillman, the president, knew when he put out his sign in 1921 that an elaborate plant does not make a great educational institution. In the great schools of the Middle Ages scholars came to sharpen their wits by mutual disputation. Prizefighters do likewise.”

Liebling admired craft in a fighter and bemoaned the sport’s post-World War II decline. His beau ideal was the ageless veteran Archie Moore, whom he called “a virtuoso of anachronistic perfection in an age when boxers in general are hurried along like artificially ripened tomatoes, and with similarly unsatisfactory results.” He liked but did not admire the erstwhile heavyweight champ Floyd Patterson, whom he said was “either a good fighter among mediocrities or a mediocrity among incompetents.” He caught Muhammad Ali while he was still Cassius Clay, approving of the fighter’s “flashy, sleight-of-hand style” while finding his poetry wanting. Nobody ever said that of Liebling’s prose. 

BACK TO EARTH

               On November 24, 1963, with the nation stunned and grieving over the Kennedy assassination of just two days before, the National Football League decided to go ahead with its full, seven-game Sunday schedule. The games were played even though many of the players later said their hearts and minds weren’t in them.

               The argument was made that football was a welcome counterforce to the national pall, but it was widely rejected, even (although much later) by NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle, the man who made the go-ahead decision. It was, rather, the league’s assertion of self-importance and the notion that the world of fun and games stood outside and above the “real” world of mundane concerns.

               That idea, which persists in some circles, took a huge hit this week in a quite-different context-- the scary spread of the corona virus. This time just about every active sporting enterprise has been forced,  however reluctantly, to do the right thing. After first responding to the situation with such goofy half-measures as banning news media reps from locker rooms, games of the National Basketball Association, National Hockey League, Major League Soccer and Major League Baseball’s spring training were curtailed for the duration of the emergency.

               The NCAA cancelled its national-championship tournament, but only after 13 of its conferences had cancelled their own season-ending go-arounds. The group’s initial stance would have held the competition in gyms without fans. That wouldn’t have done much to protect players, who would have had a better likelihood of catching the illness from one another in their locker rooms or on the sweaty courts than from any paying customers. Baseball conducts its business out of doors, where contagion is less likely than in enclosed arenas. MLB just said it will delay the March 26 start of its regular season, but its hand was forced by state and local actions such as the California ban on gatherings of 250 or more people.

               The cessations may go beyond the formal games; NBA people have talked about keeping teams together for practice until the disease runs its course, but the fact that its two players who have tested positive for the virus play for the same team (the Utah Jazz) should scotch that. 

               No games mean no live sports on television, a prospect that many in the population will find painful. The TV networks no doubt will rebroadcast past contests, but they can’t get far with that. Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers in movie theaters is another unattractive prospect. Netflix and Amazon Prime will do good business, and the electronic-game and, maybe, the board-game makers will see an upturn. I hope the libraries will, too, but that’s probably too much to expect. Meantime, putting sports in their proper (secondary) place even temporarily can only have a salutary effect.