Clairvoyance

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Know the unknown, hear the unheard, see the unseen.

Does such an authoritative forecast on the little paper tag of my tea bag qualify as wisdom? Philosophical guidance? Or something between a fortune-cookie proclamation and the daily horoscope?

Here’s another one: The brightness of your being is generated from within. A light-bulb moment? Or a vision that gives a vague (and uneasy) sense of being radioactive? Are these bits meant to be taken seriously?

Let’s think about this. It is pretty clear that humans have an inclination toward prognostication, welcoming any hint about what’s around the next corner. People want to know the future, to feel a sense of control, prepare for coming events, reduce anxiety. In my small world—a career in sports journalism—there exists a relentless hunger to prophesy winners, much of that motivated by the betting culture. And mostly doomed to failure.

As that grand baseball character Yogi Berra once said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Back to those little tea bags, produced by the Yogi Tea company (no relation), which was established 41 years ago by a yoga instructor. In Oregon. Not in China, as is so often assumed. Fortune cookies—though certainly a staple of Chinese restaurants—also originated elsewhere, reportedly in Japan, and were first popularized by Japanese immigrants in the United States, likely first served in 1908 at the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

As with tea-bag quotes, standard fortune-cookie perception is something like “Do not be afraid of competition.” Or “An exciting opportunity lies ahead of you.” “You love peace.” “You always will be surrounded by true friends.” Goofy humor is a rarity, though there was a case citing this declaration inside a fortune cookie: “Help I’m being held prisoner in a Chinese bakery.”

And then we have horoscopes, similarly purporting to provide insight, to some extent, into one’s destiny. There are prophesies of love, career and more—supposedly based on an individual’s character and philosophical traits—via a system which reaches ‘way back to the Babylonians’ deciphering astrological signs.

(Full disclosure: This rumination is being rendered in Babylon. Not that one, though; this on Long Island, N.Y., where airplanes and drones muddle any nighttime attempts to study the planets and stars.)

The thing about horoscopes, it says here, is how much they hedge their bets: Some examples from a recent day fudged their predictions thusly: “Someone close to you could change their mind, or your feelings might shift.” And “You might be able to show off your star power where you can mingle with people from diverse professional backgrounds.” And “Gatherings of friends could fulfill your desire for social contact.” And “Becoming a success could require you to exert more effort. Daydreaming might help you pinpoint exactly what you want.”

Could. Might. Hard to know in advance, no?

Anyway, there could be various shades of dedication to these things. An essayist on the website masslive.com, professes a “dislike for the usual horoscope,” yet acknowledges a “tender loving relationship with the fortune cookie and other random words of wisdom found on the tabs of tea bags….”

From thisibelieve.org, meanwhile, there is an absolute conviction that “fortune cookies speak the truth….contain some of the most profound messages to strike your brain since they told you bread could be sliced and the sky was blue. [Fortune cookies] hold the secrets of the world.”

Hocus pocus? It shouldn’t require an out-and-out cynic to at least apply an ample dose of skepticism to these forms of counsel. (From a tea bag tag: “The heart sees deeper than the eye.” Hmmm?) Consider the late John Prine’s song regarding the typical newspaper advice-to-the-lovelorn columns—just variations on tea bags and fortune cookies and horoscopes, really. Prine put to music how he imagined Dear Abby responding to an anxious soul:

You have no complaint/You are what you are and you ain’t what you ain’t.                                           So listen up, Buster/And listen up good.                                                                                                      Stop wishing for bad luck and knocking on wood.

Words to live by?

R.I.P. Student-athlete

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The student-athlete, an oxymoronic term in big-time college football employed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association to justify its thoroughly professional operation as “amateur” sport, has died under the weight of hypocrisy. It was 70 years old.

The concept had been suffering mightily for years, its impeding demise hastened by the 2021 Supreme Court decision against the NCAA that opened the door for star players to regularly bank massive payouts via “name/image/likeness” contracts. A notable nail in the coffin was the April decision by the Heisman Trust to return former USC running back Reggie Bush’s 2005 Heisman Trophy, based on the belated conclusion that “student-athlete compensation” had become “an accepted practice and appears here to stay.”

Bush’s award had been rescinded based on his family having received gifts in violation of NCAA “amateur” policies, but the current realities include the six-year-old “transfer portals” that transformed top players into free agents who are allowed to move from school-to-school in search of those six-figure NIL deals and as many as six years of college eligibility.

Just in the month of December, more than 3,000 football players had entered the transfer portal, aware that NIL compensation for quarterbacks ranges from $500,000 to $800,000; for offensive and defensive linemen up to $500,000; for running backs and wide receivers up to $300,000.

Colleges—rather, their athletic departments—now establish so-called “collectives” that pool resources to secure lucrative deals to entice players. (The University of Texas set a standard there, disclosing $20.8 million in agreements to compensate its athletes from July 2021 to July 2024.)

Not a healthy thing for the NCAA branding that was meant to maintain the organization’s hold on free labor to generate its riches. For the just-expanded football playoffs, those riches include $7.8 billion in exclusive rights purchased by ESPN through 2031.

Sick? Nick Saban—who as the University of Alabama coach, benefitted mightily at the rate of more than $10 million a year in the NCAA’s lucrative football system—recently pronounced (ironically) “the student-athlete is dead. The school is not important anymore because [players are] going to get paid….Nobody talks about the college experience anymore. Nobody talks about graduation.”

The student-athlete appears to have been birthed—or, at least, formally adopted—by Walter Byers, the NCAA’s first executive director, in office from 1951 to 1988, who promoted the jargon by insisting that “those playing for NCAA colleges have to be students at their schools. They aren’t hired gladiators.”

History would take issue with that statement. As former Notre Dame and Kansas City Chiefs gridder Michael Oriard wrote in his 2001 book, “King Football,” college football was haunted since the 1890s by “the need to recruit top athletes, irrespective of their academic soundness, all the while maintaining a fundamental fiction that college football players where student amateurs despite their participation in a multimillion-dollar business…. ‘Ringers’ and ‘tramp athletes’ began appearing on college campuses in the 1880s, often staying only through the football season before returning to whatever employment occupied them the rest of the year.”

George Gipp, the early college football legend—Notre Dame’s first All-American who was portrayed in a schmaltzy film by Ronald Reagan that recounted coach Knute Rockne’s “Win one for the Gipper” speech—was suspended in 1920 for missing too many classes and frequenting off-limits establishments. He was reinstated only after other schools bid for his football services. In two of his five years at Notre Dame, he did not receive any grades.

By 1998, the stability of the student-athlete label was in rapid decline, when Ithaca College sports media professor Ellen Staurowsky co-authored “College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA Amateur Myth.” By then, even Byers had reversed field a bit, telling Sports Illustrated that higher education likely could not “stand the strain of big-time intercollegiate athletics and maintain its integrity.”

Staurowsky suggested splitting revenue-generating sports from the educational process, saying that football players still could go to classes if they chose to, but university athletic departments should lose the role of promoters and brokers of athletic talent and mass sports entertainment.

“Maybe it makes sense,” New York City law professor Marc Edelman wondered a decade ago—still before NIL and transfer portals appeared—“if schools have to sell off their sports programs” to create a firewall between sports and academics. “Maybe there should be a football program that wears blue and maize and plays out of Ann Arbor and is separate from the University of Michigan.”

Might that be a solution for those hired gladiators who could dabble in a college education on the side—if they had the energy and the time? As former Notre Dame quarterback Brady Quinn recently told ESPN, “between practice and then NIL responsibilities for marketing [and] so forth; where does school even come into it? Like, where does it come into play?”

With no logical means of resuscitation, the student-athlete’s only survivors appear to be at the Division III level. Or playing women’s water polo.

The Truth

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Pete Seeger

Check out this little ditty from 1992—words by Calvin Trillin, put to music by Pete Seeger. (It says here that it may not feel overdue, or even especially outdated, 32 years later.) Listen:

When something in my history is found
Which contradicts the views that I propound
Or shows that I perhaps am not the guy I claim to be,
Here’s what I usually do.

I lie.
I simply, boldly falsify.
I look the other feller in the eye
And just deny, deny, deny.
I lie.

Seeger, whose decades of folk singing and songwriting trafficked in social activism—agitating for international disarmament, civil rights, workers’ rights and environmental causes—latched onto that pithy poem by Trillin, the celebrated journalist and humorist who for years has served as The Nation’s “Deadline Poet,” regularly penning rhymes on current issues.

The piece cited here was titled “The Ross Perot Guide to Answering Embarrassing Questions,” sizing up the Texas billionaire who twice ran for President (in 1992 and ’96) and who reportedly used such tactics as forcing his campaign’s volunteers to sign loyalty oaths.

Hmmm.

Trillin, now 89, still contributes relevant analyses to such prestigious publications as The New Yorker and The Nation. Seeger died in 2014 at 94. Second verse:

I don t apologize. Not me. Instead
I say I never said the things I said
Nor did the things some people saw me do
When confronted by some things they know are true.

I lie.
I simply, boldly falsify.
I look the other feller in the eye
And just deny, deny, deny.
I lie.

A 1992 Newsweek story had described Perot as “a supersalesman for whom the beauty of the deal is more important than the accuracy of the words used to close it. “

Another echo there, no? The beauty of the deal (the art of the deal).

At the time, Perot didn’t exactly release a firehose of constant and public prevarications, which seems to have been a winning strategy of 2024, but there are some commonalities that can’t be avoided. Newsweek declared then that what “protects and enhances Perot…is TV. In the talk-show format he favors, nailing a candidate for lying is next to impossible….On the ABC News town meeting, for instance, Perot, denying much involvement in a Fort Worth airport project, told Peter Jennings: ‘I never once came to Fort Worth to lobby. Rest my case. Call the mayor tomorrow and check it out.’

“When ABC News called the mayor the next day to check it out, the mayor said that Perot (as well as his son) had indeed lobbied him in Fort Worth. For months, Newsweek and others have reported that Perot hadn’t been candid about his role in this project.”

Here’s more from that old Newsweek report which now seems so familiar: “That’s one of the paradoxes of television: appearing honest is more important on TV than actually being honest.”

This sort of thing, journalism vs. An Prominent Public Figure, recalls the Thomas Jefferson quote that, if he had to choose between “a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Back to you, Calvin and Pete:

I hate those weasel words some slickies use
To blur their past or muddy up their views
Not me. I’m blunt. One thing that makes me great
Is that I’ll never dodge nor obfuscate.

I lie.
I simply boldly falsify.
I look the other feller in the eye
And just deny, deny, deny.
I lie.

Just happened to hear a recording of Seeger warbling that tune the other day. Sung in the same key as…well, I think you know.

Mentor? Svengali?

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Yes, I knew Bela Karolyi. For 25 years the Olympics, which was grand central to Karolyi’s gymnastics kingdom, were among my beats at Newsday. No, I wasn’t aware then of the odious sexual predator Larry Nassar, found to have molested female athletes while working as a team physician at Karolyi’s training center in Texas and at Michigan State University.

Did Karolyi and his wife (and coaching partner) Martha know what Nassar was up to? And, though not as damnable, did Bela’s open endorsement of the Darwinian model—pushing his young charges, almost all of them still in their teens, to their physical and psychological limits—border on abuse?

“They cannot slow down,” he insisted, “or the little ones coming behind them will swallow them up like they’ve never been there.”

There were mothers of his gymnasts who considered his system to be cruel, other parents (and most of his star students) who praised his “caring” approach even as he demanded perfection.

So it’s complicated. When he died last week at 82, all the plusses and minuses naturally made it into his obituary. But here’s the first thing that came to mind with the news of his passing: Puppies.

Leading up to the 1988 Seoul Olympics, I was assigned to spend time at Karolyi’s Houston gym and his ranch/training center in the East Texas forest an hour-and-a-half away. Having coached the previous two all-around champions in the most visible Olympic sport—Nadia Comaneci from his native Romania and Mary Lou Retton upon his defection to the United States—Karolyi had become People Magazine material, a bold-faced name.

He was 6-foot-2, an imposing, stern middle-aged figure with a gruff Eastern European accent and bad-guy mustache who dispensed bear hugs as well as strict orders. A sort of dictator who trained little girls, these wee critters conditioned to obey his every command. Puppies.

Which conjured up this story he told on himself in ‘88: Upon defecting from Communist Romania in 1981, he spoke Romanian, Hungarian, German, Russian, “a little French and sign language,” but no English. He and Martha had landed at a cheap Long Beach, Calif., hotel where he was cleaning the hotel restaurant by night to pay for his room and working the docks of the Long Beach harbor by day. At the harbor, he regularly heard fellow laborers exclaim, “Son of a bitch.”

“I am wondering,” he said, “what is this ‘son of a bitch?’ After a week is over, my wife is getting a little pocket dictionary and we are looking in there for it, but I couldn’t find ‘son of a bitch.’ So I find ‘son:’ Son of somebody. Okay, that’s good. And then ‘bitch.’ Female dog. Good, okay. So ‘son of a bitch,’ that’s a puppy. That’s not bad. That’s nice.”

Six months later, working in Norman, Okla., as a camp gymnastics instructor—he had been hired by Paul Ziert, a gymnastics coach he had befriended during international competitions—“the only thing I’m thinking nice to say to the kids is ‘good little son of a bitch,’” Karolyi said. “’That’s a nice little son of a bitch.’ And I’m patting them and being nice to them trying to encourage them and the kids eyes are big. And some are laughing, looking at me, and some are just staring.

“One day Paul heard me and explained to me: ‘It’s not a puppy.’”

And that immigrant’s tale of awkward assimilation was just one aspect of Karolyi’s embodiment of American clichés.

Raised in a Communist country, he became a prototypical capitalist. On the 53 acres he came to own in the Texas forest, he built 11 log cabins to accommodate 140 young gymnasts. There was a basketball court, tennis court, swimming pool, running track and a lake stocked with catfish, bass and sunfish; he had 12 horses, 30 head of cattle, a turkey, a peacock, a Watusi bull named Gorbachev “because he’s ugly;’’ a Texas longhorn steer, goats, pet deer, sheep, chickens and 18 hunting dogs.

He had pulled himself up by the bootstraps. Just out of high school in Romania, he had taken a job at a slaughterhouse, lived in the dorm at the local stadium, trained as a hammer thrower, rugby player and team handball player and took up boxing because his slaughterhouse boss was the national boxing coach, and the fellow who convinced Karolyi that “life is a fight. You make your life, you make your chances.”

Team handball was Karolyi’s ticket to a college scholarship, which led to a job teaching physical education to elementary students. He set up a gymnastics school for children in the town of Onesti, where a local girl—4 at the time—happened to join. That was Comaneci.

He was an advocate of rugged individualism. “It’s not the system,” he said of arguments that the old Soviet and East German sports operations were superior to democratic ones. “I’m not a political person. When people tell me these American kids won’t work hard, they’re lazy, all that; that’s a lousy lie. They’s not lazy. They’re just as excited and willing as the Romanian kids. It’s always, ‘You’re a athlete! It’s a challenge! It’s a great challenge!’ You should be able to say, ‘I’m a proud American but the athletic achievement is mine.’

“An athlete, she is the one who owns it because she put up the sacrifice, fighting like a lion. Some say, ‘Copy the Soviet system.’ That would be the ultimate disaster. That would kill the athletic achievement [in America]. All these guys saying, ‘I did it for the Communist system, the Communist system made me what I am’…Then you go throw up in the bathroom.” He dismissed sports administrators as “all these barking dogs. These people who only bark but don’t have the results.”

In that thick Transylvanian accent, he spoke Texan. (“Gol-LEE!”) He listened to country music constantly. He went to livestock auctions. He had a photo of John Wayne on the wall of his ranch house. “For me,” he said, “somebody without a country, to identify myself—‘I’m from Texas’—it’s good . You can say ‘Texas’ and that’s enough. It’s my country.”

Revolting fans

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OK, so the attempt by two New York Yankees fans to rip a baseball from the glove of Dodgers’ outfielder Mookie Betts during recent World Series action wouldn’t qualify as a rackable offense. Betts wasn’t injured in the process, the umpire immediately ruled Betts had secured an out and the two miscreants were summarily thrown out the stadium.

But it did feel like the latest example of anarchy in America. An almost proud dismissal of law-and-order. One of those fans—both were dressed to the nines in Yankee attire, apparently convinced they belonged on the team roster—bragged to an ESPN reporter that their actions were premeditated: “If it’s in our area, we’re going to ‘D’ up. Someone defends, someone knocks the ball. We talk about it. We’re willing to do this.”

The incident unfolded along the outfield wall in foul territory. Betts made a leaping catch on his side of the wall; he stayed in his lane. The fans, from their front-row seats, reached into the field of play, a clear case of “fan interference,” as described by Major League Baseball. One grabbed Betts’ wrist as the other pried the ball loose—two unlicensed practitioners of professional sport.

An obvious violation of spectator etiquette, no? But this sort of thing seems to be going around in the land: You do what you can get away with. Ignore red lights. Cheat on a school assignment. Cook the books and plead not guilty.

The occasion was just baseball (though sports prides itself on fairness, the ideal of a level playing field). And there were reminders of similar spectator entanglements during post-season games.

In 1996 at Yankee Stadium, a 12-year-old boy named Jeffrey Maier reached over the outfield wall to catch a ball headed his way and deflected it into the stands, which was ruled a home run for Yankee Derek Jeter. Baltimore outfielder Tony Tarasco, standing under Maier at the wall, appeared capable of catching the ball for an out, but the Yanks went on to a victory and ultimately the championship.

More famously, in 2003, Chicago Cubs fan Steve Bartman reached above the Wrigley Field outfield wall in foul ground and deflected a ball that Cubs outfielder Moises Alou seemed poised to catch. Maier inadvertently had benefited the home team; Bartman helped doom the Cubs’ title hopes.

But both of those were spur-of-the-exciting-moment reactions, hopes of corralling a souvenir, neither calculated to molest a player’s effort to record an out or to influence the game’s result. Neither Maier nor Bartman came anywhere close to grabbing a player’s arm or glove.

So here’s the thing. Though there was no injury to Betts, and therefore no case for assault charges against the Yankee blockheads, a New York criminal defense attorney named Martin D. Kane posted on his website that those fans nevertheless may have been in violation of New York penal code section 240.26: “A person is guilty of harassment in the second degree when, with intent to harass, annoy or alarm another person: 1. He or she strikes, shoves, kicks or otherwise subjects such other person to physical contact, or attempts or threatens to do the same….”

A conviction for harassment in the second degree, Kane wrote, “is a violation, not a crime, so it would not ultimately appear on a criminal record. However, it can result in up to 15 days in jail and the requirement to perform community service.”

Furthermore, Kane wrote, since the fans acknowledged that they had gamed out how they “would ‘D’ up” in such a situation, an injury to Betts “would have opened them both up to the greater charge of assault in the second degree, which carries a minimum sentence of two years in prison, and potentially up to seven.”

As an interesting P.S. to an informal poll taken by The Athletic—which found 62 percent of respondents suggesting a lifetime ban for the two fans, 18.2 percent for 1-5 years; 17.4 for one year and only 2.4 percent for no further punishment—a majority of students in my Hofstra University sports journalism class endorsed throwing the bums out for an extended period.

Fan behavior studies have indicated that, since the marketing of replica team jerseys to fans was cranked up in the 1980s, there has been a decided increase in spectators convinced they can affect the outcome of their heroes’ games. Too many fans think they literally are part of the team and act upon that.

But maybe those Yankee-attired knuckleheads reminded that we need to keep the jokes separate from the jocks; that all the action ought to be on the field, and the fans ought to play by the most admirable trait in sports. Which is poise—to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs.

Ole!

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Tennis might not realize what it will miss most about Rafael Nadal now that he has announced his retirement following the November Davis Cup finals. Beyond his barely comprehensible success—22 major tournament titles (second all-time among men) in spite of chronic injury; beyond his delightful rivalry with Roger Federer that somehow never included a head-to-head match at the U.S. Open; beyond the early quirky beachcomber pants and sleeveless shirts and ongoing OCD attention to assuring his refreshment bottles were precisely placed courtside, there was a Nadal humility and respect rare among elite champions.

After a shocking early upset loss at the 2015 U.S. Open to journeyman Italian Fabio Fognini, Nadal’s analysis was typical, simply acknowledging that Fognini “played great. It was not a match that I lost, even if I had opportunities. It’s a match that he wins. So, accept. Not happy that he played better than me, but that’s what happened. That’s it.”

As his career began to wind down and he stalked Federer’s then-record 20 Grand Slam tournaments championships, Nadal was both philosophical and reasonable. “As I always say to you and is true: I would love to be the one to have more, yes. But you cannot be all day frustrated, or all day thinking about what’s your neighbor have better than you. You have to be happy with yourself. You have to do your way. If you are the one to achieve more, fantastic. If not, at least I give my best during all of my career. That’s all.”

Head-to-head, he eventually came out ahead of Federer, 24-16, though Novak Djokovic—the third of the 21st Century’s Big Three in men’s tennis—has passed them both with 24 major titles. But what made Nadal so appealing was his commitment to the moment, rather than history. He always was a one-point-at-a-time, one stroke-at-a-time player, and his disposition never changed.

He surpassed $60 million in career earnings, yet old champion Jimmy Connors once noted how “Nadal plays like he’s broke.”

There was a menace in his tennis, a dastardly persistence enhanced by a forehand groundstroke that could make your top spin. John Yandell, who for years used high-speed cameras to study tennis-ball rotation, pinpointed how it took “about a second for Rafa’s ball to get to [his opponent’s] strings. From .85 to 1.2 seconds. In that time, the ball turns over 50 to 60 times”—which worked out to between 3,000 and 3,600 revolutions per minute.

“It’s hard to believe that could actually be true,” But the topspin it produced was so severe that the ball “surged up from Nadal’s toes, more of an arc,” Yandell analyzed, “heavier but just as fast….If you look at his big bolo swing…my hypothesis is he’s increasing the sidespin as well” so that opponents were forced to strike the ball “at shoulder level or higher at times, and they may be a foot off the ground when they hit it….The full effect of the spin destroys your contact point.”

And still the fascinating dichotomy was how Nadal’s charging-bull-at-Pamplona playing style—goring opponents competitively and psychologically—didn’t jive with his declaration that he was having such a great time. “I love the sport like a spectator,” he often said. “So to have a chance to go on court in big stadiums that I saw on the TV when I was a kid always is really special for me.”

Each match, each point, Nadal said, was “not about experience, not about pressure or any of that stuff. It’s always about playing well. That’s it.”

There was a lot to appreciate about Nadal, who turned pro as a teen and played the tour for 23 years. (In 2017, South African veteran Kevin Anderson, then 31, made it to the U.S. Open final only to be thrashed by Nadal and said to him, “I know we’re the same age, but I fell I’ve been watching you my whole life.”)

Nadal had hip surgery, tendinitis in both knees; wrist, back, forearm, elbow, ankle and foot maladies as well as an abdominal tear that forced him out of a Wimbledon semifinal—and still made it to 38 with a high-intensity physical style. If his body hadn’t reached the moment where, as he put it, “raises a white flag,” he said he would have carried on. “Even though your head wants to keep going, your body says this is as far as it goes.”

It’s what has been described as the “little death” that awaits all athletes, long before they will shuffle off this mortal coil. But, boy, it was fun while it lasted. And not just for Nadal. That’s it.

Taking sides

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So, what’s your team? Yankees? Dodgers? Kansas City Chiefs? Golden State Warriors?

Whatever the theater of conflict, the taking of sides is basically assumed, and given the season—baseball playoffs commencing, football in full swing, basketball and hockey gearing up—neutrality does not appear to be an option.

Democrat or Republican?

It is a cliché that sports and politics don’t mix (though decades of evidence have debunked that argument). Anyway, to have attended Lilliana Hall Mason’s recent address at Hofstra University on “The Power of Identity in American Elections” was to have been struck by the parallel worlds of sports and politics.

The talk by Mason, a Johns Hopkins University political science professor, was part of a three-day symposium on “Higher Education in an Election Year” and was chock full of we-vs.-they polarization, the thing that characterizes both party partisanship and fandom.

Listen to sports squawk radio—one host’s “hot take” so often is a blanket statement made to dismiss another’s opinion as garbage—and you are likely to hear such declarations as an old insistence by New York radio personality Chris Russo (who marketed himself as “Mad Dog”) that a “real” sports fan is required to “hate” his team’s primary rival.

That is exactly the language Mason used in her finding that Democrats and Republicans often don’t necessarily disagree about a specific policy yet describe a “hate” for the other side. She cited research that in creating any social identity leads directly to a sense of superiority over the others; about how attaching to one group involves insisting that your group to be the best. Tribalism, no?

She graphed how party identity—like team identity—leaked into adopting values of ideology, race and religion, so that any blow to that identity leads to a condemnation of others in every respect. Consider fans’ perception that they somehow are a member of their team—“We” won, etc. And how that identity is not so much a personal relationship to individuals as tribal. If you are a Yankee devotee, and the most hated member of the Boston Red Sox—“they”—suddenly is traded to your team and puts on the pinstripes, that player becomes one of “us.” Comedian Jerry Seinfeld once noted that, though we may have favorite players on our team, we ultimately are not rooting for individuals. We are rooting for laundry. Whoever is in “our” uniform.

Mason’s analyses indicated a growing gap between the political parties regarding racial resentment, regarding women’s roles and patriarchy, based on being “on the other team.” Which resembles the sort of behavior that fans—the worst fans—have been known to direct at star players on the opposing side. Race clearly has been involved in the sometimes skewed comparisons—one is an outside shooter/passer, the other in inside force, totally different roles—of WNBA rookies Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese.

Mason offered examples in the political world where differences of opinion have gone a step further—dehumanizing the other side, approving physical threats—that can be found in the seamier side of sports. And how those in positions of leadership—in sports, coaches and front-office types—can affect treatment of the other side.

To wit: Then-New Orleans’ head coach Sean Payton and his defensive coordinator Gregg Williams were suspended in 2012 for having offered bonuses to their players for inflicting a game-ending injury on opponents.

Mason pointed to the media enhancing animosity by stereotyping one side or the other, and often playing on friction because of a belief that readers/listeners/viewers are drawn to skirmishes. You want attention? Give the audience a fight, enhanced combativeness. (“If it bleeds, it leads,” went the old saw for sensational reportage.)

When ESPN executive Jason Horowitz was helping develop the network’s sports debate shows years ago, he said that “when we ask people what they’re looking for, the words that pop up are ‘independent,’ ‘original,’ ‘fearless,’ ‘thought-provoking,’ ‘defiant,’ ‘blunt,’ ‘rebellious.’” He said he was looking for people “who make the audience listen.”

A reviewer noticed that none of the words were “trusted,” “authoritative,” “reliable,” “credible,” or “knows what the hell they’re talking about.”

In her Hofstra talk, Mason further submitted that media personalities have more power than people in charge, with a listen-to-me-and-I’ll-tell-you-how-things-are bearing—flavored with too much us/them language. With politics, Mason said, less attention is paid to the so-called “undecided,” those who are not partisan. In sports, the results of which are less consequential, everyone is a partisan.

It’s called being a fan.

Soccer’s meteor

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You have to be fairly old, or Italian, or to have joined the soccer cognoscenti long before that sport made serious inroads around here, to realize the brief but somehow lasting impact of one Salvatore Schillaci, who died last week. Maybe you had to be there, at the 1990 World Cup in Italy.

He was this poor kid from Sicily, subjected to longstanding regional prejudices in his own country, who nevertheless came to prove the aphorism that “fame in Italy lies in the back of the opponent’s net.” He had entered that World Cup a bench-warmer, a last-minute edition to the home team roster, yet emerged a national hero, scoring a tournament-leading six goals—five of them game-winners—in leading Italy’s Azzurri to a third-place finish.

A comedian in Florence named Roberto Benigni had snidely declared, in the midst of Schillaci’s flash-in-the-pan heroics, that “a Cameroon-Italy final in the World Cup would mean Schillaci could play for either team.” The not-quite-one-of-us slur. But Schillaci—“Toto” to friends and ultimately to an entire nation—is being remembered as the very face of that international event, the unquestioned star. “Toto was tutto,” James Horncastle of The Athletic wrote. “An everyman who, through sheer determination, seemed capable of everything. He showed that even the fleeting can paradoxically endure.”

With Schillaci’s death at 59—a relatively fleeting life, like his soccer masterpiece—that month-long tournament is being fondly recalled by Italians as the summer of the Notti Magiche—the Magic Nights—mostly because of his lightning-strike scores that set off gleeful, frenzied celebrations by fans and Toto alike.

He was a workingman’s hero who had spent eight years on lower-division pro teams in Sicily, was virtually unknown before—and essentially disappeared from the national team after—that World Cup.

He was 25 at the time, and acknowledged “living through a moment of sheer magic. I remember very very well when Italy won the World Cup in 1982 [when he was 17]. I was one of the fans running up and down the street screaming and yelling and waving a flag.” Only to become the spark for the same 1990 response, streets filled with fans, honking horns, brandishing Italian flags and chanting “Forza Italia!”

That tournament’s primary essence was to have set the record for the lowest average scoring per game in Cup history (2.21 goals), with a championship final—West Germany over Argentina, 1-0, on a penalty kick—that the New York Times’ Rory Smith called “perhaps the ugliest in living memory.” There was the famous Cup-associated debut concert of the Three Tenors supergroup in Rome and the goofy Lego-like tournament mascot, “Ciao.” Mostly, there was Toto, punching holes in mountains, bringing out the Roman candle in the tifosi—Italy’s soccer fanatics.

So, the Schillaci Papers:

Italy, a strong pre-tournament title favorite, had its artistic, flowing play on full display in its opening game against Austria but still was stuck in a scoreless tie when coach Azeglio Vicini brought Toto off the bench with just 16 minutes to play. Four minutes later, Schillaci leaped in the goalmouth to meet a high crossing pass from Gianluca Vialli, snapping his twisting body to the right to head in the winner.

Eyes wide, arms raised, Schillaci mirrored the shocked, awed reaction throughout Rome’s Olympic Stadium. Italian fans, after all, suddenly had perfection to go with the beauty they expect from their team, though soccer doesn’t necessarily work that way.

Crew cut and slightly stocky as opposed to most teammates’ dashing, long-haired look—and not in the starting lineup until Italy’s third game—Schillaci again scored the second-half winner against Czechoslovakia. And conjured the decisive goals against Ireland and Uruguay, and the opening goal in the semifinal before Argentina’s eventual shootout victory.

He was all over television. Staring from the front page of every newspaper. In his hometown of Palermo, Schillaci’s father was hoisted on neighbors’ shoulders and paraded around the square. When the 123 entrants of that year’s Miss Italia competition were polled on which national team player they’d most like to go on a date with, 87 picked Schillaci. “He enriches his performances with masterpieces of goals,” Vicini said of Schillaci.

You had to be there.

U.S. Open bottom line

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Was the U.S. Open really in any mortal danger before Jessica Pegula and Taylor Fritz made their unexpected marches to the women’s and men’s championship finals over the weekend? It was the first time in 23 years that both a U.S. man and U.S. woman played for U.S. titles, but was that rarity—two homies simultaneously at last getting close to a trophy—illustrative of the tournament’s atrophy?

Neither Pegula, sixth seed among the women, nor the men’s No. 12 Fritz ever had been past a major tournament quarterfinal before, so shopworn story lines were trotted out as they advanced unexpectedly through the 2024 draw. Those decades-old themes, of the forlorn state of American men’s tennis and the regularly disappointing search for another Serena Williams, merely were paused when Coco Gauff won last year.

For the women, there hardly has been the kind of drought that the men, so long depicted as on a tennis desolation row, have experienced. No U.S. female reached the final between 2002 and ’07, but Serena Williams enjoyed a three-year run as champ from 2012 to 2014 and was runner-up in both ’17 and ’18. And Sloane Stephens claimed the title in ’17. All that, while Andy Roddick was the last American man before Fritz to reach the U.S. championship match, in 2006, as well as the last U.S. male to win it, in ’03.

Still, any lament that the Open suffered from lack of Yankee dominance not only has been overdone but unsubstantiated. As this year’s tournament commenced with the highest seeds coming from Italy (Jannick Sinner), Serbia (Novak Djokovic), Spain (Carlos Alcaraz), Germany (Alexander Zverev)—and, among the women, Poland (Iga Swiatek) and Belarus (Aryna Sabalenka)—a record average of more than 75,000 fans descended daily on the tournament during the first of its two weeks. By the end, more than a million had attended the Open for the first time, even as ticket prices soared to more than $8,000 for a courtside seat.

Open officials, with little expectation of an American player presence on the final weekend, rolled out their first Finals Fan Fest. That offered $28 tickets just to be on the National Tennis Center grounds on the final Saturday and Sunday to attend a watch party at the No. 2 court, Louis Armstrong Stadium, while the championship action proceeded in already sold-out Arthur Ashe Stadium next door.

So the adversity of the Open failing to guarantee an American champion has not been the least bit adverse. The event is one of those American spectacles that lures the In Crowd and In-Crowd wannabes, a place to be seen as well as to see. Furthermore, international tennis—being an individual sport—is personality-driven, celebrity stuff. So, while an added buzz indeed accompanied Pegula and Fritz right through their runner-up finishes, a player’s drawing power at the Open historically has been related more to his or her on-court success and style than country of origin.

The Open, contested on the grounds of the 1939 and 1964 Worlds Fairs, is just that—a world’s fair.

For two decades, Switzerland’s Roger Federer and Spain’s Rafael Nadal were virtual rock stars at the Open as, in the 1990s, were women’s favorites Steffi Graf (Germany) and Monica Seles (who played for her native Yugoslavia before becoming an American citizen). Just as true, more recently, were fan favorites Caroline Wozniacki (Denmark), Maria Sharapova (Russia) and Japan’s Naomi Osaka, the 2018 and 2020 U.S. champ.

Even the athletes themselves in fact are drawn to heroes and heroines with backgrounds and homelands quite foreign to them. Federer once said that his tennis inspiration came “from all around the world, and that was cool,” citing Sweden’s Stefan Edberg and Germany’s Boris Becker. Pete Sampras, the California-raised five-time U.S. Open champ, cited Australian Rod Laver as his example of greatness. And Stephens, a Black woman like the Williams sisters who called them “two of the greatest players ever to play the game of tennis,” nevertheless had Belgian Kim Clijsters as her childhood idol.

So, good for Pegula and Fritz for reviving something of an American tennis dream at the latest edition of the Open. They surely warmed the hearts of U.S. television executives by staying around so long. But the idea that only American champions keep New York’s Grand Slam tournament alive and healthy, or assure a flood of future elite players from the States—that success breeds success and fuels a nation’s thriving sports tradition—is only true until it isn’t.

The U.S. Open is doing just fine. Tickets for the 2025 tournament already are on sale.

Equal time?

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Interesting timing: We saw the hit Broadway musical “Suffs” three days after the Democrats concluded their nationally-televised convention, and the resonance was unmistakable. While one was a theatrical treatment of the women’s suffrage movement a century ago, and the other a thoroughly modern political rally, there was a persistent echo of issues and a take-it-to-the streets vibe.

There was, in fact, crossover language. Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala’s Harris’ repeated vow, “We’re not going back,” perfectly fit the theme of “Suffs,” of the long struggle of women working against generational, racial and class divides in pursuit of the right to vote. And the DNC’s opening-night speech by former Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton included a direct quote from the “Suffs” closing number, “Keep Marching:” “Progress is possible, not guaranteed.” (Clinton, it turns out, is one of a team of “Suffs” producers.)

The play, like the convention, addressed the stalking of gender equality, touching on same-sex marriage, racism and the continuum of foot-dragging by a patriarchal society. Tony Award winner Shaina Taub—who wrote the book, music and lyrics for “Suffs”—was, in the title role, singing the same songs the conventioneers had heard.

To wit: “Let Mother Vote;” “Finish the Fight;” “The March (We Demand Equality);” “Worth It;” “Show Them Who You Are;” “How Long?;” “The Young Are at the Gates” and some 20 other tunes, including a declaration of refusal to “Wait My Turn.”

Woodrow Wilson, President during the suffrage fight, was depicted in the musical as “a cartoon fop,” as a New York Times review put it, “too silly to take seriously.” Wilson indeed was long opposed to women’s suffrage until he saw it as vital to winning World War I, shortly before it became law in 1920. And, though he was a leading architect of the League of Nations and considered a progressive on such matters as foreign policy, Wilson also authorized segregation in the federal bureaucracy and gave off fumes of racism.

There is one number in the show, the duet “If We Were Married,” which hammered home restrictive 1916 laws even as it referenced 2024 conservative policies on reproductive freedom:

He: If we were married, we’d fill out our family and life would be simply sublime….

She: If we were married, I’d churn out your children ‘cause contraception’s a federal crime….

A hundred years on, with clear advancements in society, certain fundamental aspects and patterns nevertheless have endured, including current reports of voter suppression. It was French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr who wrote, “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose”—“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

That was in 1849. Given that truth of retarded evolution, “Suffs”—fun entertainment, for sure—broadcast the same frustrations (amid hope) repeatedly raised this month by Clinton, Harris et al.