Coaching wisdom?

It comes as news to me that I am a coach. But the email to my personal account starts, “Hi Coach. Hope you are doing well.”

Doing fine, thanks. Do I know you? Do you know me?

“I’m reaching out,” the email goes on, “because I’m interested in private boxing lessons for my child. I found your program online and really liked what I saw.”

I have a boxing program? Boxing!?!? Never have pulled on a pair of gloves and certainly never coached boxing, or anything else, for that matter. I did briefly work as a volunteer basketball referee for a PTA-sponsored league for grammar school kids. No fisticuffs there, though; only the occasional unintentional foul. Slap-on-the-wrist stuff.

Back to that email: “I wanted to check if you’re accepting new youth students for one-on-one sessions, and if you could tell me a bit about your training style, your schedule, and your gym location.”

Hmmm. Don’t have a style, nor a schedule, nor a gym. Don’t even have a basketball hoop above my garage anymore.

Interesting, though, that this wasn’t the first out-of-the-blue email inquiring about my availability to be a sports mentor. One was from a parent—apparently—seeking a figure-skating coach for a child. Another for a youngster’s guidance in lacrosse. Two more sports in which I never have participated.

As a career sports journalist, I have covered such events. On the staff of Long Island’s Newsday, I was assigned to multiple Olympic Games, which included chronicling the preparation and ultimate gold-medal success of 2002 skating champ Sarah Hughes. But I’m still not especially confident about telling a Salchow from a toe loop from a Lutz. The competition music was always good, though often reminiscent of classical compositions that accompanied Bugs Bunny cartoons.

Lacrosse? A bit like ice hockey, without the ice. Or the fighting.

Which brings us back to boxing which, I accept, offers inherent drama, with many vivid characters and compelling examples of the human condition. The sport has been a favorite topic for the best wordsmiths—Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, H.L. Mencken, Richard Wright, George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, on and on—by offering its primal contest inside the ropes and crazy carnival world outside them.

But, frankly, I am mostly put off by the so-called Sweet Science. By any civilized standard, boxing is a ticking time bomb of physical and mental impairment, and if I were to offer any instruction to a child regarding the sport, I would advise absolute abstinence. I have witnessed pugilists attempting to separate an opponent’s soul from his body, leaving the “knockee” prone and unmoving, like some chicken who had just had his neck rung.

There is much bleeding in boxing bouts—and surely unseen internal damage inflicted. There was a 2014 compilation of chilling statistics by the Health Research Funding web site, that 90 percent of boxers will experience at least one brain injury during their career; that the force of a professional boxer’s fist is equivalent to being hit with a 13-pound bowling ball traveling 20 miles per hour; that, at any given time, as many as 40 percent of ex-boxers had symptoms of chronic brain injury.

The singular goal of boxing is to leave an opponent with little imaginary birds twirling over his head. There is, unmistakably, fortitude required of the sport’s one-on-one dual. But isn’t a brain a terrible thing to waste?

Meanwhile I found, by putting in a request with Mr. Google, there are various sources for identifying youth coaches. Coachup.com. Findsportsmentor.com. Icoachkids.org. Some good teachers out there, surely.

Myself: I don’t coach kids. No training, first of all. Which is not to say that I don’t believe sports is a fabulous outlet, a terrific benefit to young people—as long as they don’t get sideways in the conviction that it is only about winning. My daughter played field hockey, volleyball and cross country in high school and has remained physically active through adulthood. I run. (Sort of; not like in my younger days.)

If I had a training style, it would be: Have fun.

New Mexico

We New Mexicans need to take to the ramparts in the face of the latest delusional Trump attack, daring to rebrand the state “New America.” I say “we New Mexicans” for having lived contentedly in The Land of Enchantment during my high school years in Hobbs; surely that gives me standing to demand a hearing. I am not just a bystander or observer in this matter.

Let’s start with the Current Occupant’s obsessive xenophobia. If we “New Mexicans” are now to be considered “New Americans,” doesn’t that make us fresh arrivals to the nation? In other words, immigrants? Isn’t it a well-established fact that the Blockhead in the Oval has a remorseless aversion to immigrants, yet his harebrained proposal would be creating approximately two million such newbies?

Another thing: If the administration’s agenda really is about taking the U.S.A. back to an earlier—theoretically but dubiously—better time, then what about the fact that New Mexico got here first, in existence long before the first 13 states ratified the Constitution, before General George Washington crossed the Delaware, before the Mayflower sailed toward Cape Cod?

Not only was there no United States, but there still was no Mexico when the southwestern territory was christened “Nuevo Mexico”—a title with roots in the Aztec language—in the 1500s. Santa Fe, America’s oldest capital city, was established more than 150 years prior to the birth of the U.S.

It’s difficult to argue that this dotty Trump proposal isn’t one more example of his sadistic opposition to DEI. New Mexico, after all, is one of nine majority-minority states, with the largest percentage of Latinos and the most federally recognized Native American tribes in the United States. Sarah Noss, a native New Mexican and non-profit executive, pointed out to The Guardian that, “In [Trump’s] mind, the word ‘Mexico’ has some kind of connotation of people of color, and this just feels like the whitewashing of our state.”

Santa Fe jeweler Elizabeth Tapia told the New York Times that the “New America” tag “sounds white.” And New Mexico’s state historian, Rob Martinez, went so far as suggesting to the Times that fellow residents’ reaction to the “New America” tag surely would “start another Pueblo Revolt.”

The Pueblo Revolt, in 1680, was the first successful uprising against European rule in the Americas, expelling Spanish colonizers from the New Mexican territory. Long after the United States acquired that land (which includes present-day Arizona) as part of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, civil war general William T. Sherman was still rattling on about how the government ought to “declare war on Mexico and make it take back New Mexico,” and Yank lawmakers resisted statehood for New Mexico and Arizona until 1912.

Here’s something that never was addressed in my Hobbs High School history classes: In the early 1920s, some civic groups wanted to rename New Mexico “Coolidge,” after then-president Calvin Coolidge.

Obviously didn’t fly. Because there’s a better way to rechristen a long-established entity (and it happened in New Mexico): In 1950, the small city of Hot Springs in the Southwestern corner of the state—just down the road from where the world’s first nuclear device was tested in July 1945—became Truth or Consequences, N.M., partly because of a goofy challenge by NBC radio host Ralph Edwards. But mostly because city residents voted for it.

For his quiz show’s 10th anniversary, Edwards had announced that he would broadcast from the first town in America to assume the program’s title. Hot Springs citizens, by 1,294 to 295, were in favor, and became Truth or Consequencers.

But “New America” is not on any ballot. And now is the time for all good New Mexicans to come to the aid of their state. As a New Mexico ex-pat, I am confident of being among the overwhelming majority in saying “thumbs down.” 86 that 47 hallucination.

In the southeast corner of the state where I once lived, there were frequent sandstorms and almost no precipitation. And, trust me, you don’t want to try digging a ditch in the local caliche—the impenetrable layer of calcium carbonate that resists erosion and excavation. We lived on the Caprock, an escarpment roughly 3,600 feet above sea level, where typical mid-day summer heat regularly reaches 100 degrees but is offset by chilly, clear mornings.

Variety. Not so far away are the scenic Rocky Mountains, and our annual high school trips to Albuquerque—A-L-B-U-Q-U-E-R-Q-U-E—for the state basketball tournament afforded some playtime in the snow.

New Mexico is home to Roswell, where the 1947 discovery of debris, apparently from a military balloon, triggered speculation—still alive—of a flying saucer crash. Talk about immigrants.

New Mexico is home to Taos, the Pueblo town known for its art colony and white bohemians. (I was still too young, in high school, to have been a bohemian.) New Mexico is home to the bat-filled Carlsbad Caverns near the Texas border. (Carlsbad was a high-school sports rival of Hobbs; its teams were the Cavemen.) New Mexico is home to Gallup in the Northwest corner, “the Heart of Indian Country,” on the edge of the Navajo reservation and home to several other tribes—right there along celebrated Route 66, the 2,450-mile highway from Chicago to Santa Monica, Cal., called the “Mother Road” in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”

New Mexico is desert and grasslands, mesas and snow-capped peaks, heavily forested mountain wilderness, with just 17 people per square mile. With a perfectly good—and historically representative—name.

And I haven’t even gotten around to pointing out that New Mexico’s flag, with its ancient Zia sun symbol of red in the center of a field of yellow, is the best in the nation. That’s according to me as well as the North American Vexillological Association.

The official state pledge goes: “I salute the flag of the State of New Mexico and the Zia symbol of perfect friendship among united cultures.”

Not an attitude that the Guy With the Nuclear Codes appears to endorse.

In fact, at the White House, there is the sort of cultural, geographical and identity gap similar to what my high school friend Larry recalled in an email this week, that “there were people in the rest of the USA who thought they needed passports or a visa to visit New Mexico.” When I went off to college in Missouri, several fellow students considered it somehow brilliant to address me as “Gringo.” Not enlightened, apparently, either on where I was from or where they were living.

Rewriting history

As an alum of the University of Missouri Journalism School, where I apprenticed for my half-century as a sports reporter, I naturally took note of the school’s recent announcement that it will declare itself national football champion. Of the 1960 season.

This trip backward in time, for what the college’s officials believe will right a past wrong, feels similar to, and just as bizarre, as when Superman—by flying faster than the speed of light to reverse the earth’s rotation—resurrected Lois Lane from her death in an earthquake.

A doozy of a do-over, in other words. The back-story to this football alteration is that, despite a thorough beating at the hands of rival Kansas in the final 1960 regular-season game, Mizzou has forever claimed a perfect 11-0 record that year because Kansas was found to have used an ineligible player in its 23-7 victory on Nov. 19. Now, 66 years later, the U.S. Senate has passed (with no objections) a resolution by Missouri Republican Eric Schmitt to accept the Tigers’ assertion to that long-ago title. Mizzou’s heretofore unlicensed use of the upraised index finger—the No. 1 thing—is being formally recognized.

Sort of, anyway. Based on calculations of various polls back then, no fewer than four other schools—Ole Miss (10-0-1), Washington (10-1), Minnesota (8-2) and Iowa (8-1)—also insist on ownership of the NCAA’s 1960 football crown. But Sen. Schmitt has a reputation of not leaving well enough alone. As Missouri attorney general from 2019 to 2023, he filed or joined lawsuits seeking to invalidate the Affordable Care Act and to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election.

As if the past ought not to be left where it belongs.

It happens that the ineligibility of the Kansas player—running  back Bert Coan, who scored two second-half touchdowns against Missouri—had been known before the Missouri game; it was related to a recruiting violation upon Coan’s transfer from TCU the previous year and Coan played in all 10 Kansas games in ’60. But the Kansas athletic department delayed a hearing by the old Big Eight Conference for more than a year before Missouri at last was awarded the forfeit victory that went into the school’s records. Coan then was banned from the Kansas team for the start of the 1961 season, subsequently broke his leg in practice and didn’t play football again until he turned pro in ’62.

During my student days at Mizzou, in the mid- to late-‘60s, there was a vague awareness of that controversy, although then—and even now—the university’s only provable, undisputed national sports team title was attributed to the 1954 baseball team, whose enduring coach, John (Hi) Simmons, also mentored NCAA runners-up three times during his 36 years on the job.

Overlooked, somehow, were a dozen or so individual Missouri national champs over the years—track-and-field athletes, wrestlers and such. Updated lists on the school website now include the names of those champions, as well as the startling fact that Truman the Tiger, the anthropomorphic Bengal tiger named for the only president born in the state of Missouri, has been honored as national champion three times!—in 2004, 2014 and 2024.

No, I don’t know exactly how a mascot wins such acclaim. A fixture around campus since he first appeared in his gold and black-striped duds in 1986, Truman twirls his tail during the marching band’s playing of the “Missouri Waltz,” does pushups after Tiger scores, rides around in a 1950s fire truck, makes appearances at various functions and parties around the state.

He is quite impressive, and there are no extenuating circumstances regarding his national titles, no tales of ineligible Jayhawk or bulldog or gator competitors.

As for my own rooting interests in this football matter: In 1960, I was in eighth grade in suburban Los Angeles, with no clue where I would attend college. I did watch that winter’s Orange Bowl game on TV, though freely rooted for a Missouri loss against Navy and the game’s one player with whom I was familiar, Navy’s Heisman Trophy winner Joe Bellino.

Missouri won that day and apparently, until the drastic editing set in motion by Sen. Schmitt, finished the season 10-1. Given that an accepted characteristic of sports is that games have a final score, and that several of the principals of that season—including Missouri head coach Dan Devine, Mizzou’s first two Black scholarship players, running backs Norris Stevenson and Mel West, as well as Bert Coan—are deceased, wouldn’t it require another Superman counter-clockwise, faster-than-the-speed-of-light chronological reversal to bring new life to the affair?

Does anybody know what time it is?

That 2:01 a.m. finish of the Sofia Kenin-Venus Williams U.S. Open match this week really was just a new twist on the event’s after-midnight folklore. Ever since it became the first Grand Slam tournament to introduce night tennis, in 1975, the Open has produced an almost predictable late-evening/early-morning Dracula-like transformation that for years has turned Arthur Ashe Stadium into a vampire-state building, the carnivorous dog-eat-dog tennis causing fans (and players, too) to howl at the moon.

Maybe it has something to do with New York City’s DNA. The 20th Century journalist, novelist, essayist and poet Christopher Morley called Gotham “the nation’s thyroid gland,” and with the ratcheting up of tension in an extended, no-end-in-sight tennis dual —not to mention the presence of adult beverages among the spectators—the scene rendered can be worthy of a Stephen King work. During day sessions at the Open, polite tennis etiquette mostly prevails, but past the clock striking 12….

Of this phenomenon, a personal favorite happened 18 years ago, when American Andy Roddick and Latvia’s Ernests Gulbis, in a second-round match, battled each other so long that both players literally aged a year in the process. They had begun play at 10:41 pm on Aug. 30, when Roddick was 25 years old and Gulbis 19, and didn’t wrap up until 1:34 a.m. on the 31st, which happened to be Roddick’s 26th birthday and Gulbis’ 20th.

The hour when Roddick at last prevailed did not approach the Open’s still-standing last-call record of 2:26 a.m., first set in 1993 by Sweden’s Mats Wilander over countryman Mikael Pernfors. Those two wrangled in the first iteration of Louis Armstrong Stadium before Ashe Stadium opened six years later and Armstrong was rebuilt in 2018.

And neither did Kenin-Williams carry on as long as Wilander-Pernfors after their calendar change this year, though the Kenin-Williams conclusion was the latest in a first-round Open match. And was the latest-ever start of an Open match: 12:13 a.m.

It should be noted that tennis, possibly more than any other spectator sport, is notorious for its lack of punctuality. A 7 p.m. evening start, for instance—even when previous contests have long been over and weather conditions (and closed roofs) are favorable—often doesn’t even commence player warmups until 7:20 or so. But the crowds remain (possibly because they have forked over so much money for tickets ranging from $65 to more than $20,000).

Fashionably late? It’s not anarchy, exactly, but the magnitude of the Open—its expansive rolling-with-punches comparison to something like the 24-book “Odyssey”—does lend itself to keeping an open mind regarding personal schedules. Even before one stirs New York City and Happy Hour into the mix.

The best attitude toward all this likely was demonstrated by Roddick after that 2018 exhibition of endurance. “This is kind of what people come to expect of night matches here,” he said then. “You get in there and it’s kind of a brawl and the atmosphere is great. I looked up [during a changeover] and there are girls on the [stadium’s] big screen dancing on top of their tables in the suite and some guy and girl dancing in the corner. I love that. I’m having a blast out there, watching that. The atmosphere is a little crazier with the New York crowd, so that’s actually something that’s an advantage for me.”

Gulbis, who was a fourth-year pro ranked 40th at the time, had expressed a certain embrace of the situation as well. “I hope the people enjoyed it,” he said then. “I think they did.”

Venus Williams, now 46 years old and 32 years after her professional debut, noted that she “never played a match that late before, but I was happy to see that so many people stuck around for that. It was a real honor to play in front of them.”

Just waiting for the moon to say “Good night.”

Elbowing way to the top

Tommy John—whose 26 big-league seasons are second most among pitchers in the so-called modern era—died Saturday at 83. But Tommy John Surgery lives on at 52. The innovative elbow reconstruction pioneered by Dr. Frank Jobe (who died in 2014 at 88) still is saving countless ballplayers’ careers.

If induction into baseball’s Hall of Fame really is about Forever, acknowledging individuals who put a permanent imprint on the sport, why is neither man enshrined in Cooperstown? I’m all-in with Mark Whicker’s Tommy John appreciation in his “The Morning After” Substack, recommending “a shared plaque” at the Hall “with John and Jobe as an entry.”

It is possible that more people out there are aware of Tommy John Surgery than the man first subjected to it. The procedure—replacing a torn ulnar collateral ligament in the pitching elbow with a tendon harvested from elsewhere on the patient’s body (in John’s case, the right wrist)—reportedly has been performed on 40 major-league pitchers just this season, and in excess of 2,600 MLB players since its original, eponymous victim. That’s a lengthy roll call of the patients of Jobe.

In 2013, John and Dr. Jobe were invited to Cooperstown during induction weekend and appeared together during a brief press opportunity. There was some irony to the fact that Tommy John Surgery might have been considered a form of performance enhancement at a time when baseball was up to its eyebrows in the nefarious aspects of augmentation.

Among the eligible former players on that year’s Hall ballot were Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mike Piazza, Craig Biggio, and Sammy Sosa—all of whom had been tainted by, or accused of, doping. And for the first time in 48 years, members of the Baseball Writers Association of America—with their St. Peter-at-the-Pearly-Gates function—had barred the gates to all.

“There’s a myth out there that after Tommy John Surgery, you can pitch better than you did before,” Jobe said during that appearance. “Well, that’s not true. All it does is put it back to where it was and, if they have a good rehab program, they may pitch better than they did just before they got hurt, when they were beginning to go downhill. In their mind, they think, ‘I’m better than I ever was.’ But they’re not.”

John was 31 years old, 12 seasons into his big-league career when he tore the ligament in his elbow in 1974, and Jobe gave him roughly a one percent chance of returning to the mound after the then-experimental operation. “He said, ‘You don’t need surgery; you’ll be fine,’” John recalled Jobe telling him. “He said, ‘You can play catch with your kids and throw batting practice to your kids, but you’ll never be able to pitch major league baseball again.’

“I wanted to pitch major league baseball.”

So Jobe grafted the tendon from John’s other wrist, while admitting he wasn’t sure if the transplanted tendon would be rejected as a foreign body “or would wear out and break loose. That’s why I told him he had only about a 100-to-1 chance.

“This was the age,” Jobe related during that 2013 Hall of Fame weekend, “when surgeries were just being developed for athletes. And they weren’t life-saving.”

But John pitched another 14 seasons, three times winning at least 20 games.

“I didn’t do another one for two years,” Jobe said, “and then when he was pitching pretty well, we had Brent Strom [a journeyman who was the second player to have Tommy John Surgery] come in. So I did another one, and another year went by and Tom Candiotti came in. He was just a Single-A player at the time, and I had to decide whether this should be done on everybody that has a torn ligament, because you can live without it. Or should it be done just on major league players?”

Candiotti, a knuckleballer, convinced Jobe he was a big-league “prospect.” And post-surgery, he indeed spent 16 years in the Majors with five teams. “So I fixed a prospect,” Jobe said.

So a torn ulnar collateral ligament had become a curable disease. Victims regularly proceeded apace with their careers. But even John worried, years later, about a downside, that the operation’s availability could eliminate reasonable caution in young pitchers and their parents, and the “epidemic of kids from 12 to 17 pitching year-round can mean “they’ll probably be seeing a doctor down the road to do Tommy John Surgery.” A large percentage of those procedures now are done on high school, college, minor league and amateur pitchers. And Jobe agreed: “That’s a sad thing.”

Still, in the right hands (elbows?), the John-Jobe collaboration was Hall of Fame stuff.

Holy moly!

This is about the separation of church and sport. Just this week, former Newsday colleague Bob Keeler, via his Substack newsletter “Peace of Mind” (you should check it out), thoughtfully questioned the Chicago White Sox one-game promotion of offering specially ticketed spectators a papal miter—it’s a pointy pope hat—emblazoned with the team’s insignia, based on the fact that new Pope Leo XIV, a native of Chicago’s South Side, is known to be a Sox booster.

There was a lengthy report in the New York Times about the characteristic connection of an American lad to his hometown team, as it applied to the former Robert Prevost. And how the Sox, in a typical bit of American capitalism, have seized on what the Times described as a promotional and marketing “Godsend.”

Keeler, citing “a pope who loves baseball and hates war”—and a U.S. president who “clearly loves war”—wrote that he is “rooting for the Chisox” because of that Leo link. But that “the unusual promotion [of the pope’s miter] leaves me with mixed feelings, to put it mildly. Those pointy hats have always turned me off. They seem sharply out of keeping with the way Jesus described his vision for the leaders of his movement. Somehow, I can’t get it into my head that this bit of show-off haberdashery was what Jesus had in mind when he prescribed servant leadership.”

A parable: As a sixth grader, I signed up for the Little League team at my Catholic grade school, my first participation in organized sports. One of the first admonitions from our gangly, soft-spoken coach, Mr. Buck, was that there would be no supplications for the Almighty to come to the aid of our team. (And, by extension, work against our opponent.)

That lesson actually predated the increasingly common custom of baseball players gesturing toward the heavens after hitting home runs, NFL players praying in the end zone after scoring, victorious jocks in various sports thanking The Lord for helping them make winning plays.

William J. Baker, in “Playing with God,” argued that such public displays amounted to “an athlete using a moment to sell a product, like soap”—in effect merely calling attention to the athlete’s accomplishment. Such conflating of godliness with an athlete’s heroics once led to a British newspaper posting the headline, “Leave me out of your petty games.—Love, God.”

Just to be clear: Victory and personal stardom hardly are against my religion. And when University of North Caroline students ask, “If God isn’t a Tar Heels fan, why is the sky Caroline Blue?”—isn’t that more like acknowledging another member of the appreciative audience (i.e., a fellow fan) as opposed to invoking the Puppet Master? It doesn’t work as a boast of salvation.

To trivialize faith and religion by hinting that God confers success on the more moral team, the more moral player, may not be staying in one’s lane with athletic endeavors.

I would argue that my Little League coach—God bless Mr. Buck—understood that if the outcomes of at-bats and games indeed are determined by God, wouldn’t that equate athletic failure and defeat with somehow already being on the road to hell? Isn’t that getting into the foothills of a flimsy evangelism?

In 1959, my then-hometown team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, were about to commence play in the World Series. (Against, by the way, those self-same Chicago White Sox. The future Pope Leo was only two years old at the time, so his interest in the eventual outcome is unknown—and not to the point, anyway.) There I was in my seventh grade class at Our Lady of Peace grammar school, where the nun who taught the class determined that it wouldn’t hurt anyone if we all listened to the first game on the radio.

There absolutely were no prayers offered. It was just baseball. And when the White Sox scored two runs in the first inning and seven in the third, on the way to an 11-0 victory, Sister’s reasonable reaction was to switch off the radio and get on with our general education.

That the Dodgers ended up winning the Series in six games was exciting stuff. But redemptive? Soul saving? If only.

Cuba. Si.

The billboard said, “Bienvenidos a Havana.” Welcome to Havana. A kindly greeting. And, sure enough, a more hospitable experience it could not have been.

This was just last week, at the entrance to the Broadway musical “Buena Vista Social Club.” So, no, not actually Havana. But a New York City happening that transported me 35 years and more than 1,300 miles back to Cuba. It summoned a long-ago afternoon when a couple of us Yankee newspapermen, taking a brief break from covering the Pan American Games, stepped into El Floridita, the historic fish restaurant and cocktail bar in Old Havana that was famous for having been one of Hemingway’s favorite hangouts.

We walked in to find a live band performing, with a sound and energy that is so impeccably rendered by the 2026 “Buena Vista Social Club,” in which the assembly of musicians prominently own the stage throughout the show. Intense percussion, complex polyrhythms, call-and-response vocals. There are bongos, pianos, guitars (especially the tres, the Cuban variety of a Spanish guitar), a base, a trombone, a trumpet, a flute, woodwinds.

As I often offered apologetically during that 1991 trip to the real Havana—“No entiendo muy bien el español”—I spent the entire production of “Buena Vista Social Club” only vaguely understanding some of the Spanish lyrics. Hardly a loss there. “Remember,” the show’s music consultant Juan de Marcos wrote in the Playbill’s introduction to the various numbers, “the music speaks for itself and comes straight from the heart. Enjoy the moment!”

There have been, in recent days and weeks, plenty of reports on how Donald Trump is predicting Cuba’s collapse; how he has imposed an oil blockade that has pushed the island into its worst-ever energy crisis; how Cubans clearly are suffering yet continue to demonstrate an extraordinary talent to adapt. As they have for nearly seven decades of U.S. political pressure, they are defying the odds, with a grit and resourcefulness to make do.

And that was so obviously in evidence during my sample of the actual Cuba in ‘91. Back then, as now, there was severe rationing of bread to citizens. Almost no traffic because there was almost no fuel to be had. Yet those natives who, despite being mystified by the U.S. government’s apparent intent on starving folks 90 miles from Miami, cordially interacted with us Yanqui visitors. One cabbie invited a colleague and myself to have coffee at his home. Another happily shared his knowledge that Hemingway “always wrote with a No. 2 pencil.”

Upon flying 600 miles East of Havana to Santiago de Cuba, which was serving as a second site for the Pan Am competition, we found more tumble-down buildings, more neglect and rubble. But also a nine-piece band waiting at the airport, pounding out toe-tapping local music. “Everybody,” a local greeter told us, “dances here.”

We made an excursion to the Bay of Pigs, where the doomed, ill-conceived Kennedy administration’s 1961 military attack not only failed to oust dictator Fidel Castro but cemented Fidel’s emergence from that victory as a charismatic leader. He had, after all, originally brought doctors and schools to pockets of extreme poverty following the rule of Fulgencio Batista, who had been aligned with the wealthiest sugar-plantation landowners and the American Mafia.

During my old adventure, some of us wondered if, post-Fidel, Cuba would evolve away from Castro’s anti-U.S. rule and his intolerance of homegrown dissent, or whether Cuba might merely digress to the Batista days, featuring a small upper echelon of the super rich and affluent tourists while again consigning the majority of Cubans to be an underpaid and under-educated servant class. It would represent the sort of regime change that appears to be Trump’s goal, seeking economic opportunities for U.S. businesses and, especially, based on his well-documented greed, himself and his family.

He is selling his strategy by labeling Cuba a “threat to national security,” a highly unlikely circumstance for a mostly destitute island, with roughly 32 times fewer residents than the United States. Especially since Cuba’s sugar daddy, the Soviet Union, collapsed in late 1991. And, even if Trump were aware of the existence of Cuba’s distinct, soaring music, he likely would be inclined to cast that as subversive as well. Another abject prevarication.

Anyway. Seeing and hearing “Buena Vista Social Club”—it’ll make sparks fly around your head—was for me a thoroughly engrossing (and educational) trip back to El Floridita and Santiago de Cuba. A respite from the xenophobia and ignorance that has become so prominent among our so-called leaders.

Bienvenidos a una comprension mas amplia. Welcome to a wider understanding.

Should you read this?

There is too much to read and too little time. Emails and texts—from friends and work associates and politicians and total strangers and would-be influencers. There is endless breaking news, available in the Antediluvian manifestation known as a newspaper, and especially online. The updates and parsing of everything from AI to midterm elections to Canadian wildfires to the evil influence of lettuce on diarrhea outbreaks—cyclosporiasis!—to the prime minister’s bloodless coup in the United Kingdom. Not to mention accounts of the many angles, far beyond soccer, associated with the recent World Cup.

And here comes this thing you’re reading now, just one more in the proliferation of Substack posts that flood inboxes. Something like a letter to an imaginary friend. Don’t be discouraged; most of those out there are fascinating, reporting and ruminating on so many levels of human existence. For me, there is plenty of content available on personal interests such as the state of journalism (the source of my employment over a half-century), grade inflation (I’m giving up my 17-year teaching gig), the disappearance of manual transmission cars (but I still have mine), arguments confronting the idea of a “just war” with Iran.

There is plenty of humor to digest and examples of optimism to be found in these dispirited times, thoughtful mullings by former colleagues and other masters of composition. So, so much to read. Attention must be paid, long past two cups of coffee each morning.

It’s ironic that, while on this hamster wheel of attempting to catch up with all the tidings and scuttlebutt and scandal (and with the conviction that I might learn something), the August issue of The Atlantic magazine arrived, announcing in its cover headline, “The Age of Reading is Over.” Author Rose Horowitch, citing the growing dominance of phone scrolling, video, X, Tik Tok and Instagram as primary information sources, posited that America hasn’t exactly devolved into being illiterate so much as becoming “postliterate.”

Which is one more topic to pore over. Horowitch noted the disappearance of newspapers as a central factor. (According to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, the United States continues to lose print newspapers at a rate of more than two per week, roughly 800 having ceased printing since 2000, while my former employer, Long Island’s Newsday, has lost 90 percent of its print circulation in less than a decade).

Horowitch wrote that “reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society,” one element leading to Donald Trump becoming “our first postliterate president,” the product of an electorate “where information is primarily spread through text.” (With questionable punctuation, according to another Atlantic piece.)

She quoted media theorist Joshua Meyrowitz’s belief that, with the decline of print media, the public shuns “authority and institutions in favor of the candidate who [makes] good television.” Voters have come to focus on “dating criteria” instead of “resume criteria” in picking their leaders.

And AI contributes enormously in threatening the “continued existence of writing,” Meyrowitz was quoted, jeopardizing critical thinking and judgement.

Still, there is no stemming the flow. In that latest Atlantic issue alone, there are 13 articles, beyond Horowitch’s, to tackle. In my house, there are roughly 500 books—probably 490 that have been read by my wife but maybe 50 by me—so there is a lot of catching up to do. It’s not as if I have the problem of that 31-year-old fellow in New York City who was faced with an eviction notice because his landlord objected to him housing 10,000 volumes in his studio apartment.

But I only now got through Richard Wright’s unsettling memoir of poverty, racism and hunger in the Jim Crow South, “Black Boy,” a mere 81 years after such an important tome was published. I didn’t get around to “War and Peace” until Covid dictated a lot of down time a couple of years ago. On another bookshelf, Shakespeare’s plays—I think our daughter read them all—seem to accusingly await my attention. As a member of my wife’s monthly library book discussion group, more immediate reading adventures also loom.

And now, with all the fuss over that new “Odyssey” movie, is there an obligation to finally read Homer’s original 3,000-year-old poem? Unless Monica Hesse unwittingly offered me absolution in a recent Washington Post column by arguing, “You can’t read everything, and it’s never too late to read something.”

OK. Bring on the words. But I do need more time.

Illegal aliens

The unsettling thing about the annual UFO festival in Roswell, N.M., recently detailed in a New York Times report, is that it reminds of our federal government’s current demonization of “illegal aliens.” At Roswell’s carnival, the cosplay of attendees dressing up as visitors from outer space—little green folks; “people of color!”—feels a little like some frightening invitation to be riddled with bullets by ICE thugs.

The event is the result of Roswell having come to fancy itself the nation’s UFO capital, playing on the 1947 “Roswell Incident” in which a discovery of metallic and rubber debris, apparently from a military balloon, triggered speculation of a flying saucer crash there.

I spent my high school years during the mid-1960s in Hobbs, N.M., roughly 100 miles away but connected to Roswell by our sports teams’ regular duels, without the “Incident” ever coming up in conversation. It wasn’t until the 50th anniversary of the happening, in the late ‘90s, that the then-mayor of Roswell helped launch the commemorative UFO fair that now draws tourists from across the country. They participate in “Incident” tours, check out the local UFO museum, take in a laser-light show and a parade, wear funny bulbous glasses and, in some cases, arrive in cars modified to look like flying saucers.

And—sign of the times—many deal in conspiracy theories that U.S. officials aren’t telling us what really happened 79 years ago, harboring suspicions that the deep state is hiding a long-ago inability to secure the intergalactic border, that some Commie plot may have consisted of hiring spacemen to invade our homeland.

It has been reported that Steven Spielberg’s fascination with that still-mysterious event has influenced his film work, including his latest science-fiction blockbuster, “Disclosure Day,” though other reviews cite, as that movie’s genesis, Spielberg’s stargazing when he was growing up in Arizona, one state to the west of New Mexico.

I shot a text to my old Hobbs High School buddy Larry Schear about the long-ago UFO situation, based on the fact that Larry attended the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell—on his way to the Naval Academy and his real-life Tom Cruise-like stint as a Top Gun. No revelations there; Larry did not remember “anyone at NMMI talking of the UFO Roswell incident,” nor or any knowledge of it in our Hobbs High days. It was just a vague thing in the distant past, no more personally impactful than the failure of the Spanish Armada.

I’d guess I spent maybe half a day in Roswell back then, when our football team finished the 1964 season there—a loss—and I sat on the bench. A year earlier, on the evening that President Kennedy was shot, the decision was made to go on with our home football game against Roswell—also a loss—after we were assured that Kennedy “would have wanted it that way,” though it occurred to me that Hobbs officials could not have discussed that with the President either before, and certainly not after, his demise.

Beyond that, the only specific memories of Roswell were of its high school basketball team defeating our Hobbs lads two consecutive years in the state tournament—each time by a single point! So, no special warmth for the inhabitants of that burg.

Anyway, here’s the tale of the ’47 Roswell Incident to be found on Google and other depositories of history….

The Roswell Daily Record of July 8 headlined:

RAAF Captures Flying Saucer

On Ranch In Roswell Region

 

Subhead:

No Details

Of Flying Disc

Are Revealed

 

The U.S. Army Air Forces’ original announcement of finding said “flying disc”—the debris discovered by a rancher was actually 75 miles north of Roswell—was retracted within a day. The wreckage may have been from linked balloons and assorted equipment that was part of a top-secret program to detect Soviet nuclear tests, or perhaps was merely from a conventional weather balloon. Some 30 years later, a retired U.S. Air Force officer said the weather balloon was a cover story and that the debris was on extraterrestrial origin. (E.T., call home.)

A 1980 book added speculation of involvement by multiple governments, of grey aliens—What? Not green?—fueling the conspiracy theorists (dogs chasing their tails?) that the military in fact had discovered a craft from outer space and captured its occupants.

Interplanetary and ufology intrigue aside, there is a haunting, earthly 2026 reaction at work here, best expressed in the cartoon of two obviously extraterrestrial beings, standing outside a sign for “Roswell,” pondering a close encounter. One says to the other, “Let’s give it shot. I hear it’s a sanctuary city.”

Pyrotechnics

Accidentally—thanks to my wife setting the agenda—I found the ideal way to mark America’s 250th birthday weekend. Two Broadway revivals, “Ragtime” and “Death of a Salesman,” that dealt with the status of the American Dream. Plus abundant World Cup action on television that included the American nightmare of Donald Trump’s buzzkill interference in soccer protocol leading into the Yanks’ much-anticipated match against Belgium.

As a spectator sport, the theatrical performances in New York City, one a musical and the other a drama, were as exhausting as witnessing England’s survival—down a man, gasping in the heat and altitude of Mexico City, desperately holding off the home team—and Norway’s late rally against Brazil behind frightening striker Erling Haaland, and Argentina conjuring a 3-2 victory after being behind Egypt by two goals with 11 minutes to play.

Talk about fireworks.

The thing about the World Cup that clearly escapes Trump is the observation that American poet/writer Rowan Ricardo Phillips expressed in a New York Times opinion discussion, that political nationalism “too often struggles” to accept that “soccer nationalism asks you to love your side; it doesn’t require you to deny the legitimacy of the other.”

Trump’s meddling with the sport’s governing body FIFA, in overturning the red-card suspension of U.S. scoring threat Folarin Balogun, essentially took the air out of the American-Belgium tilt. And conjured the themes of both “Ragtime” and “Death of a Salesman.”

The first recalled how, at the turn of the 20th Century, the cards were stacked against Blacks and immigrants, which felt like a meditation on the Trump administration’s current priorities, the restricted Trump vision of who belongs in America. In “Wheels of a Dream,” John Clay III (as “Ragtime’s” featured Black pianist Colehouse Walker Jr., seeking dignity and justice against prominent racist attitudes), sings of his baby’s future, “When he is old enough I will show him America.”

Of course the audience could see the dead end ahead, just as for the play’s penniless Jewish artist Tateh, a proxy for the many faceless immigrants at the time. And for those now, again, in the news.

Same with the portrait in “Salesman” of Willy Loman (Nathan Lane), clearly faced with no future, relieved of his lifetime vocation, strapped for money, too proud to admit it, constantly fooling himself about his very worth. The acting—and in “Ragtime,” the dancing and singing, choreography and so on—is so energetic and emotional as to be draining, excruciating. Possibly because of a sense, 250 years on—decades since Arthur Miller wrote “Death of a Salesman” and E.L. Doctorow penned “Ragtime”—that the nation is stuck in its failure to assure that all men are treated equally and provided a realistic pursuit of happiness. Or, worse, is going backwards.

So many outside the privileged elite straining to score that elusive goal.

More from Phillips in the New York Times: “I don’t think it’s a mistake to look at the World Cup politically….What it can do, however, is show us something politics often obscures: conflict conducted under shared rules, rivalry that requires the legitimacy of the opponent, grief and joy that people enter into freely. The World Cup isn’t a mirror of politics so much as a reminder of what politics has forgotten how to stage—great acts of empathetic togetherness.”

One review of “Ragtime,” when it most recently was revived during the last presidential election, called it “apt timing for a show that rummages through an American moment to interrogate the American soul.” “Death of a Salesman,” too, examines not just where we were during its original iteration in 1949, but where the country is now.

So the Yanks lost to Belgium, with no thanks to Trump for providing the Belgians with added motivation by disregarding the rules. That particular sporting challenge, the fairly riveting World Cup action and a pair of gripping Broadway history lessons aside, it’s pretty clear we have been down this patchy road before, reminders that 250 years on, perhaps America can consider itself in stoppage time. Still, theoretically, with a shot at the universal Dream.