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.

Sing along

What’s not to like about an international sports festival where an Argentine native who lives in Spain, working as coach of the United States national soccer team, gleefully joins his players and the celebrating spectators in post-match sing-alongs of a half-century old tune that celebrates rural America?

That coach, Mauricio Roberto Pochettino Trossero, wasn’t brought into this world until 1972, a year after “Take Me Home Country Roads” hit the U.S. charts. He hails from the South American town of Murphy, named for an 1800s Irish immigrant who became a wealthy Argentine landowner. And Murphy is a long way from Roswell, N.M., where Henry John Deutschendorf Jr.—later known as John Denver—was born and, at the height of his country/folk career, recorded “Country Roads.”

The ditty name-checks West Virginia, but in fact alludes to the comfort of a simpler, peaceful existence; it’s not really about geography as much as an emotional refuge found somewhere in a happy past. Denver’s co-authors, Bill Danoff and his wife Taffy Nivert, were inspired by affections for the rustic, very American byways in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Maryland.

What’s not to enjoy about a real all-over-the-map event? Though technically a victory anthem in this soccer setting, “Country Roads” evokes feelings for one’s beloved home, and that fits right into the World Cup’s melting pot of international visitors and the diaspora of hyphenated Americans giddily demonstrating their affection for cultural ties. And no passport required to participate in the fun.

Beyond just an elite soccer tournament, the World Cup is flags, anthems, chants, languages, geography and glimpses of citizens and life beyond these shores. Scotland’s kilted, bagpiping Tartan Army of fans. Norway’s Viking-mimicking followers pulling imaginary oars. The La Mancha Amarilla—Yellow Stain—of the Colombia fanbase gathering for matches attired in yellow. The Dutch supporters’ dress code of orange. Always orange. There is a constant global awareness, an ethnic and religious pluralism, that Americans really can use right now—maybe more than ever—at a time of rampant institutionalized xenophobia.

What could be a problem with the fact that, of the tournament’s original 48 national teams, 28 are coached by managers from other countries? According to The Athletic, of the World Cup’s 1,248 players, just under a quarter are representing a team other than their country of birth. There was a bad joke, during the 1990 World Cup in Italy, when Ireland was scouring beyond its boundaries for better soccer talent, that anyone with an Irish grandparent or long-lost ancestor—even anyone who owned an Irish setter—was welcome to play for the Ould Sod. In fact, it’s fairly typical for players to have the choice of representing their birth nation or that of their parents.

A prime example is the Americans’ early goal-scoring leader, Folarin Balogun, who was eligible to play for Nigeria (his mother’s home), England (when he was raised) or the United States, where he was born during his mother’s visit to New York. This sort of thing tends to take the jingoism out of national consciousness.

So there is the Denver recording, requested by U.S. Soccer officials when FIFA—soccer’s international governing body, which operates the World Cup—queried teams for their preferred songs to be played on stadium sound systems after victories. Reportedly, Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” and Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” were considered along with “Country Roads,” with “Sweet Caroline” eliminated because England preferred that one.

Whatever. “Country Roads” is just the ticket. It references, rather than a narrow, us-against-them patriotism, an identity to home and/or forebears. So members of Ecuadoran communities, Cape Verde communities, Portuguese communities and so on gather to celebrate teams that represent, at some point in personal histories, their people.

Whether your side wins or loses, what makes the World Cup so appealing is the mood of the John Denver song.

Country roads, take me home, to the place I belong….

Universal truths

GOAL. The World Cup format of grouped round-robin play before single elimination matches gives everybody a chance to get rolling and enjoy the opportunity to be part of massive global event. And builds tension toward the knockout phase.

YELLOW CARD. Soccer’s insistence on labeling a score on a deflected shot an “own goal,” somehow crediting to the defender who last touched the ball instead of that defender’s opponent, the fellow who actually initiated the shot and whose mates benefit on the scoreboard. And “own goal” is not necessarily a botched play and therefore thoroughly fails to describe how the score was created. Compare that statistical failure to the recent Stanley Cup overtime score by Las Vegas’ Shea Theodore, when his shot bounced off the boards, off Carolina winger Jordan Martinook’s stick and off Carolina goalie Brandon Bussi’s skate and into the net. Theodore, rightfully, was credited with the goal. Not the last-man-to-touch-it: Bussi. There is such a thing as a pin-ball wizard, who deserves the kudos for a successful attack.

GOAL. Old goalkeepers from tiny World Cup debut nations, giving us terrific athletic drama as well as a glimpse of little noticed lands and cultures. Curacao’s Eloy Room, 37, produced a World Cup-record 15 saves in a scoreless tie against Ecuador. (Curacao is a Caribbean Island within the kingdom of Netherlands, with only 156,000 residents who often are annoyed that foreigners only are aware of neighboring Aruba.) Then there is Cape Verde’s 40-year-old Josimar José Évora Dias, who goes by Vozinha—Portuguese for “Little Granny”—who shut out former Cup champion Spain and followed that with a 2-2 tie against two-time Cup champion Uruguay. Little Granny is so-called because he was raised by his grandparents. (Cape Verde—Cabo Verde in Portuguese—is a volcanic archipelago of 10 islands off Africa’s West Coast, first settled by Portuguese sailors, strategically positioned to have given it a significant role in the transatlantic slave trade during the 16th and 17th centuries.)

GOAL. Argentine superstar Lionel Messi’s ability to essentially play possum—walking, walking, walking around the pitch while his teammates defend, organize offensive build-ups—only to materialize at just the right instant, in just the right spot, with the ball, to repeatedly demonstrate an uncanny ability to conjure a score. Seemingly out of thin air.

RED CARD. The Trump administration’s repeated actions throwing sand into the gears of a global party: Withholding visas from various international fans; refusing to admit to the U.S. a soccer official from Somalia as well as several Iran team officials; ordering the Iranian team, whose games were in Los Angeles and Seattle, to relocate its original training/hotel base in Arizona to Mexico.

YELLOW CARD. Miami police reflected the Trump’s inhospitable agenda. When the Tartan Army of Scottish fans, who had charmed Boston—singing, dancing, bagpiping and partying in kilts when their team played two matches in Foxborough—arrived in Florida for their third game, local cops scuttled the Scots’ giddy ritual of placing orange traffic cones on the heads of public statues. In Massachusetts, the Scots had been embraces for their behavior and enthusiasm (and spending lots of money in pubs), as well as the coning thing.

GOAL. Reports of U.S. communities welcoming international teams and their fans, mixing with players at their training sites, hotels and restaurants. It’s the DEI ideal, uplifting antidotes to spreading xenophobia and a measure of hope that U.S. citizens can make America friendly again to outsiders. As with Scotland’s Tartan Army of fans, Norway’s followers who delighted locals with their public “Viking row.”

GOAL. Group L’s opening match between England and Croatia—won by England, 4-2—was about as theatrical as the sport can be and set the tournament tone. Goalie saves, penalty kicks, indefatigable runs up and down the pitch, another look at England’s brilliant striker Harry Kane, who can do with his feet—passing, shooting, defending—what most athletes can’t produce using both hands. Well, some athletes can do what Kane does: Messi, France’s Kylian Mbappe, Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo, Norway’s Erling Haaland, Spain’s 18-year-old Lamine Yamal, whose goal against Saudi Arabia made him only the second player that young to score the World Cup’s opening goal. (Pele was 17 when he did so in 1958.)

GOAL. Team kits. (What Americans call uniforms). The best are creative versions of national identification, such as this year’s U.S. flaggish shirt with a waying red stripe and Norway’s equally unmistakable red flag shirt, a white- bordered navy Nordic cross. Ironically, the Yanks’ first match was against Paraguay, which has a remarkably similar “home” kit with vertical red stripes though, to avoid total confusion, Paraguay was attired in its “away” shirts, a swirling mix of “new Navy” and “tropical blue” color. Argentina was nattily attired in its classic Albiceleste, the white-and-sky-blue stripes that mimic Argentina’s flag; Croatian in the red-and-white checkerboard from that nation’s coat of arms; Germany with its traditional black, red and yellow stripe on white; Brazil in yellow shirts, as always.

RED CARD. FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, banned Haiti’s kits hours before the team’s opening match because the shirt featured a small flag-raising illustration from the 1803 Battle of Vertieres, when self-liberated slaves of Haiti defeated Napolean Bonaparte’s forces to secure independence as the world’s first Black republic. FIFA called that “forbidden political imagery,” though FIFA president Gianni Infantino has been cited for “repeated breaches” of the organization’s duty of political neutrality, all in relation to the FIFA president’s public championing of President Trump. That included the bogus, first-of-its-kind FIFA “peace prize” Infantino presented Trump last winter as he has enthusiastically embraced the man who started a war in Iran, seized Venezuela’s president and vowed to militarily intervene in Greenland and Cuba.

RED CARD. U.S.-centric pre-tournament claims that “nobody cares” about the World Cup, widely argued by many American closed-door advocates, have proved to be just as ill-informed as similar rants leading up to the last time the event was in the United States in 1994. The ’94 tournament set a still-standing Cup attendance record of 3.6 million—68,991 per game—with the current Cup on pace to shatter that mark, in spite of FIFA’s roundly criticized dynamic pricing (rip-off), the Trump administration travel restrictions and building anti-American sentiment overseas. Facts on the ground: A Reuters analysis cited stadiums being 99.6 percent full. This is a hyphenated nation; every team has American citizen with roots in its country. National flags are being displayed by fans from their home nations or, in many cases, the land of their ancestors. The World Cup reminds of the positive influence of immigrants.

Call a medic. And maybe a shrink.

To a point, I understand all the howling at the moon by New Yorkers giddy-fied by the Knicks winning the professional basketball championship last weekend. It’s been 53 years since that happened and the Knicks’ title provided a certain reinforcement of the Big Town’s belief in its general global superiority. Plus, spectator sports is a form of shared entertainment, theatrical and—dare we say?—unifying.

Then there was the P.T. Barnum show outside the White House Sunday evening, attended by bold-face names, government officials and thousands of frenzied fans, with multiple reports that it was, as ESPN.com put it, “One of the most entertaining shows of the year.”

There was a lot of serious bleeding by the contestants in that Ultimate Fighting Championship program—and certainly untold brain damage. I was not tempted to watch the manosphere exhibition of punching, head-butting, kicking and the general administration of knocking the stuffing out of each other.

Here’s a confession: In July of 1979, in Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico, just outside San Juan, I was covering the boxing competition in the Pan American Games when a boxer appeared to separate his opponent’s soul from his body. The “knockee”—as the early 20th Century sports columnist and short story writer Ring Lardner described a knockout victim in his short story, “Champion”—was left lying on his back, his head dangling over the ring apron, tongue hanging out and unmoving, like some chicken who had just had his neck rung.

It occurred to me then why I chose sportswriting over a career as war correspondence. I wasn’t interested in witnessing death. The poor fellow—I can’t remember his name or country—was soon revived, but in the relatively few times I was assigned to cover boxing (both amateur and professional fights) over the years, I was reminded of the barbaric geometry of fitting roundhouse punches into a square ring. Accompanied, on almost every occasion, by fevered, exulting spectators thrilled to see a man administer a lullaby to his opponent with his fists. And boxing, essentially, is far more civil than the UFC wars it led to.

There is more than a hint of ancient Rome, when the original gladiators entertained the public by engaging in mortal combat. Fight nights are a festival of adrenaline, a celebration of testosterone, with so many “manly-art” clichés. Bow-tied referees suggest a courtliness; women in underwear and high heels, prancing around the ring to announce the number of the upcoming round, communicate a stag party.

My last boxing assignment in 44 years reporting fulltime for Newsday was at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center in March 2013, during which a welterweight named Keith Thurman gave macho voice to his “love for putting people to sleep,” and the main event featured 46-year-old Bernard Hopkins as the poster boy of prizefighting persistence at a time of growing concern over traumatic head injury in all sports.

Hopkins retained his world light heavyweight title that night and declared himself “an inspiration” to young kids. There was plenty of blood-letting in all of the evening’s bouts, while the crowd called for more of the same. Public demand, after all, was what allowed organizers of the first Madison Square Garden fight, in 1882, to skirt laws at the time against prizefighting by calling their enterprise, featuring John L. Sullivan, “an illustrated lecture on pugilism.”

It was British sportswriter Pierce Egan who, in 1813, counterintuitively termed boxing the “Sweet Science,” convinced that the endeavor wasn’t just about random pummeling but rather strategizing one’s path to victory. Except there is no getting around the fact that the singular goal of boxing—and, more so, of the savage UFC brand—is to leave an opponent with little imaginary birds twirling over his head. At the least.

Years ago, for the short-lived magazine Inside Sports, I was tasked with seeking out brain specialists and boxing physicians to describe fighting’s potential dangers and learned how the brain isn’t much more than a blob of jello, floating in a fluid and held in place by a scaffolding of fibers. Though well-housed in a skull that doesn’t crack easily, the brain is susceptible to severe damage caused by any blow, by a whiplash of that jello or its bruising from bouncing off the opposite wall of the skull and back again. There can be tremendous torque, “sheer forces,” jerking different spoonsful of the jello mass in several directions at once, tearing brain tissue. Very bad news. And, worse, an epidural hematoma, in which the skull is fractured, severing an artery, and blood fills the space between skull and brain, mashing the brain. Literally to death.

Still, on Sunday, thousands gathered gleefully to encourage the White House thuggery, both in person and at delirious watch parties, surely evidence of the public’s prevailing taste for brutality. Which may parallel Masterpiece Theater’s inability to match the ratings of shows with exploding aliens and heavy artillery. And, furthermore, could be confirmation that we are not a profound people.

As for the Knicks fans, not all the celebrants were civil, either. But that hardly links the UFC’s branding of its competitions as “Cage Fights”—so called because they are staged inside an enclosed, eight-sided chain-link enclosure known as the “Octagon”—with a long-ago portrayal of basketball players as “cagers.”

That dates to the 1890s, when the sport was played inside wire-mesh or rope cages simply to separate players from fans. Those enclosures were phased out by the 1930s, but sports journalists—it’s always the crazy media causing trouble—kept the “cagers” slang around for decades afterwards.

Pretty sure I used that label a couple of times myself in a previous era. But I never had to chronicle outright cruelty—physically or culturally.

A wholesome pastime?

Evenings, I’ve lately been making my way to the pool hall for a little relaxation.

Trouble? With a capital “T” that rhymes with “P” and that stands for “pool”? Is a game of 15 numbered balls really a devil’s tool, the first steps on the road to the depths of degradation? First, medicinal wine from a teaspoon, then beer from a bottle?

Right; those are the musical words of warning from “The Music Man” stage show, considering whether pool helps you cultivate horse sense and a cool head and a keen eye, whether it takes judgement, brains and maturity…? Or leads to something much worse.

Anyway, the venue I visit is one flight downstairs in my home, where my wife years ago gifted me with a pool table in our basement. For a while, the table went mostly untouched during a morally upright time of earning a living and so on, but the state of retirement has provided the temptation to loaf around that rectangular, green-felt-covered surface, eyeballing side-pocket possibilities, cue-ball control and the occasional employment of English. (I am not bilingual.)

There is the challenge of billiards geometry, the applications of mathematical principles—specifically the law of reflection and circle/triangle intersections—in attempting to pocket balls while controlling the cue ball’s path to set up the next shot. The wrestling with visualization of alignments.

This activity somehow evokes for me the image of a robber baron in a dinner jacket, smoking a cigar and sipping port—a man wealthy via unethical means—immersing himself in a frivolous dalliance while real laborers are out there building railroads and skyscrapers, growing the crops and collecting the garbage.

The pool-hall aesthetic of “The Music Man” is of local youth “fritterin’ away their noontime, suppertime, chore-time to get the ball in the pocket, never mind gettin’ dandelions pulled or the screen door patched or the beef steak pounded; never mind pumpin’ any water, ’til your parents are caught with the cistern empty on a Saturday night. And that’s trouble.”

That’s pool as the gateway drug to a dishonorable lifestyle.

Mr. Google tells me that the exact origins of the game are illusive, but that pool was played in 15th Century European royal courts and is referenced in French nobles’ journals as well as Shakespear’s Antony and Cleopatra. And that Abraham Lincoln called the game “health-inspiring.”

It’s just that by the early 1900s—“The Music Man” was set in 1912—the pool hall came to be seen as a den of alcoholic-fueled gambling, an allure to send innocent children down the path of wickedness.

“One fine night,” the show tune declares, “they leave the pool hall, heading for the dance at the Arm’ry. Libertine men and scarlet women, and ragtime, shameless music.”

And, of course, there have been movies—“The Color of Money,” “The Hustler”—depicting dodgy pool-hall ethics for financial gain, as well as high-profile wagering feuds that made Willie Mosconi and Minnesota Fats famous. (Here’s a pool tip I stumbled upon: Never gamble with a man named after a City or a State.) And might it tell us something that the word “snooker,” which identifies a specific version of billiards, also is a verb meaning “to fool” or “dupe”?

All that aside, to play the game in fact can feel like an innocent—and safe—form of target practice, no need for guns or a bow-and-arrow, not so time-consuming as golf and requiring less space than shooting hoops. The rare occasion of a perfectly executed pool shot, with just the right touch and spin, can feel like an heroic transaction.

What’s the trouble? What’s the downside? With a capital “D” that rhymes with “P” and that stands for “pool.”

But who won?

Separated by an ocean, a five-hour time difference and a scarcity of English sporting lore, I nevertheless committed to watching Sunday’s consequential Arsenal-West Ham soccer—sorry, “football”—match. Recorded it for viewing later in the day.

If this were the kind of report I typically filed for Newsday in a half-century of sportswriting, I’d get right to the dramatic finish: Final score, controversies, key developments and so forth. But that wouldn’t address the fluky root of the duel’s appeal.

So, start here. My 6-year-old grandson is an Arsenal fan. Proud owner of an Arsenal shirt. It’s my understanding that his attachment to the team started the first couple of years of his life when he and his parents lived in Islington, North London, not far from Arsenal’s home stadium, and maybe because my daughter has friends who attend Arsenal games.

When Alden was 3, his family relocated a short distance away in the London borough of Bow, just down the road from Stratford, where West Ham plays its home games. Not that Alden switched allegiance, but I meanwhile was introduced to a delightful novel assigned by my wife for her regular library book discussion group. In author Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, the fictional group of pensioners in a retirement village who go about investigating cold cases included Ron Ritchie, a fiery former union boss regularly attired in a West Ham shirt.

So.

I should explain that, though I grew up typically American in the ‘50s and ‘60s—baseball, basketball, football—I subsequently covered all manner of sporting competition, including two soccer World Cups, and our regular visits to the United Kingdom have helped fill in some background of what legitimately has been called the “world’s game.”

The English Premier League is generally accepted to be the most popular and commercially successful soccer operation on the planet, and of the 20 Premier League teams, seven are based in London: Arsenal, West Ham, Brentford, Chelsea, Crystal Palace, Fulham, Tottenham Hotspur.

Anyway, what made this week’s Arsenal-West Ham match really compelling was that Arsenal, with four games to go in the season, sat at the top of the EPL standings—sorry, “table”—on the verge of wrapping up its first title in 22 years. While West Ham was battling to avoid relegation, the practice typical in European leagues whereby the three bottom-feeders at the end of each season are demoted to a lower league and replaced for the next year by the lesser league’s top three finishers.

Also, there was some fun London history involved. Arsenal had commenced operations in 1886, founded by the munitions workers at the Royal Arsenal establishment, which dealt with ammunition and explosive research for the British armed forces. West Ham’s team debuted in 1895 as the Thames Ironworks Football Club, the company team of the largest and last surviving shipbuilder on the River Thames.

But about Sunday’s big match. West Ham wore its home claret (maroon) shirts, with the name of its major sponsor—the Irish gambling company Boyle Sports—prominently displayed across the chest. Arsenal’s white shirts similarly announced airline patron Emirates, with the slogan “Fly Better,” and the promotion “Visit Rawanda” on the left sleeve. American spectators, with keen vision and careful examination, might have been able to spot the team names on small logos on the upper left chest.

There were the usual soccer lulls throughout a scoreless first half and deep into the match, but with occasional lightning-strike near misses and athletic saves and, as one British TV commentator rejoiced, some “glorious chaos!” in goal-mouth scrambles.

In the 78th minute of the regulation 90-minute affair, West Ham’s Portuguese midfielder Mateus Fernandes suddenly materialized alone with the ball six yards from the Arsenal goal, but Arsenal’s Spanish keeper David Raya smothered the attempt. Finally, in the 83rd minute, Arsenal’s pesky Belgian forward Leandro Trossard at last struck the apparent winner—his first goal in 25 matches. Except the afternoon’s most gripping theatre was yet to come, at a point when Trossard might reasonably have been doing a curtain call.

An additional six minutes—what in soccer is termed “stoppage time,” had been appended to the competition to compensate for those moments during the match while players lay on the turf to emphasize fouls, or to recover from actual pain inflicted, with the clock always running.

Mere seconds before those six minutes expired, on a West Ham corner kick that brought a pell-mell scramble during which Raya leaped to deflect, but could not catch, the ball, West Ham’s English forward Callum Wilson left-footed the rebound through the crowd and across the goalline.

Except! Replays appeared to show West Ham’s Brazilian forward Pablo guilty of one of the dark arts practiced during grappling set pieces, impeding Raya. Pablo’s left arm was thrown back across Raya’s throat—and referee Chris Kavanagh called for a video review to determine whether Arsenal indeed had won, 1-0, or would be saddled with an histrionic, impossibly late 1-1 tie. Leaving 64,000 fans on site and television viewers waiting, and waiting….

And that’s when my TV’s recording of the match expired.

No need to colorize

(My former employers at Newsday chose not to use this obituary, prepared when I still worked there fulltime. But it already was written and just sitting in my file cabinet, so…..)

Ted Turner, the firebrand media mogul who founded CNN, colorized movie classics, pioneered cable television’s superstation concept with the Atlanta Braves as its centerpiece, captained an America’s Cup sailing winner and credited himself with ending the Cold War by creating the Olympic-style Goodwill Games in the mid-1980s, died Wednesday. He was 87.

[He had been diagnosed eight years ago with Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder.]

By turns charming and irreverent, witty and rude, Turner went through life in a manner that was not so much brusque as antsy, always itching to move to another topic, another passion.

He gained (and occasionally lost) enormous wealth, delighting in throwing money at his favorite causes, including an unprecedented $1 billion gift to support the United Nations. A 1996 partnership with Time Warner and subsequent acquisition by AOL led to Turner’s net worth tumbling $7 billion over two years when AOL shares collapsed. But in his many adventures, Turner argued that “you don’t evaluate everything on whether it makes a profit. Mother Teresa didn’t make a profit, you know.”

Behind a twinkly smile and booming drawl, Turner unabashedly offered his opinions on matters from world peace to tabloid journalism, from religion to politics. It was not unusual for him to lecture complete strangers passing on the street—“Smoking’s bad for you!”—or to inveigh against what he considered wrongheaded behavior, especially when it came to his great media rival Rupert Murdoch.

A lifelong Republican and capitalist to the core, Turner nevertheless could not be categorized, espousing investments in environmental concerns over armaments, going duck hunting with U.S. arch-enemy Fidel Castro of Cuba and even marrying actress Jane Fonda, who was pilloried by conservatives as Hanoi Jane, the sweetheart of the left during the Vietnam War days.

Fonda was the third of Turner’s marriages—after Judy Nye and Jane Shirley Smith—all of which ended in divorce. In a 2012 television interview, Turner said he had four girlfriends and described his dating situation as complicated but easier than being married.

His ownership of the Atlanta Braves began when he acquired the rights, in 1973, to carry their games on his Atlanta-based cable station—channel 17—which he beamed throughout the country, promoting the Braves as “America’s Team.” To plug his station, he suggested that star pitcher Andy Messersmith, who wore No. 17, change his name to “Channel” to be stitched on his uniform about his number. (League president Chub Feeney nixed the idea.)

In 1977, during a 16-game Braves losing streak, Turner sent manager Dave Bristol out of town on a “scouting trip” and made himself interim manager. After one game, a Braves loss to Pittsburgh, Feeney ordered Turner out of the dugout.

Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Stadium, built to host the 1996 Games, was retrofitted for baseball the next year, renamed Turner Field and remained the Braves home until 2017.

Robert Edward Turner III was born Nov. 19, 1938 in Cincinnati, the son of Robert Edward II, a billboard magnate, and Florence Rooney. When Ted was 9, the family moved to Savannah, Ga. He attended an exclusive private boys school in Chattanooga, Tenn., and studied the classics and economics at Brown University, but never graduated, expelled for having a female student in his dorm room. (Brown gave him an honorary bachelor’s degree in 1989.) When his father committed suicide in 1963, Turner—then 24—inherited the family business and began building his own media empire.

A skilled sailor, Turner failed in four attempts to make the U.S. Olympic team. But he captained the 1977 America’s Cup winner, appearing for the post-race news conference with a bottle of booze and a cigar, proclaiming, “I love everybody in this room tonight,” and proceeding to fall off his chair.

It was his love of the Olympics, and President Jimmy Carter’s boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games—which was followed by the Soviet Union’s boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic in retaliation—that moved Turner to create the Goodwill Games to “break this string of boycotts and end the Cold War.”

U.S.-Soviet athletic duels were a focus of the Olympic-style Goodwill Games, staged in Moscow in 1986, and Olympic boycotts by major nations indeed were ended for the 1988 Seoul Games. The Goodwill Games went to Seattle in 1990, to St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1994, to New York in 1998 and to Brisbane, Australia in 2001 before disappearing.

But Turner had moved on to bigger things, including becoming the largest private landowner in the United States, and nothing ever dented his self-confidence. “If I only had a little humility,” he once said, “I’d be perfect.”

No Aesop’s Fable

“It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”—Old cliché

OK, then; how exactly to characterize what Kenya’s Sebastian Sawe did in London last week? Sawe (it’s pronounced SAH-way) is a 31-year-old professional distance runner who officially navigated a 26-mile, 385-yard footrace in fewer than two hours—one hour, 59 minutes, 30 seconds. That’s pretty close to a mad dash, a velocity that the running community long had speculated might or might not be humanly possible.

Sawe’s absurdly hasty completion of the London Marathon—all foot traffic; no Ubers or E-bikes, no trains or buses—could not possibly be described as “pedestrian.” He was averaging four minutes and 33 seconds per mile. For 26-plus miles! He was moving at roughly 13 miles per hour.

Furthermore, right on his heels, Ethiopian Yomif Kejelcha became the second person to cover that distance in under two hours—1:59:41. So another banality wouldn’t work in describing Sawe’s feat: “Slow and steady wins the race.”

Go back to 1986. Then, my friend Jay Weiner published an advance to the Twin Cities Marathon in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune quoting experts, scientists and coaches mostly dismissing the chances of somehow lowering the world marathon record—it was 2:07:12 at the time—under the two-hour mark for years to come. If ever.

The best result that any of them could envision was Oxford University physiologist B.B. Lloyd’s prediction that 2:02 was the absolute limit—and estimating that even that shouldn’t be expected until the year 2000. In fact, after Ethiopia’s Haile Gebrselassie ran 2:03:59 in Berlin in 2008, he had said he didn’t expect to see a sub-two-hour marathon for still another 25 years. It wasn’t until September 2014, 28 years after Lloyd’s educated guess, that Kenyan Dennis Kimmeto, at the Berlin Marathon, got down to 2:02:57.

On the eve of the 2014 New York City Marathon, visions of slipping under two hours—fantasies, really—were raised again. But barely.

George Hirsch, co-founder of the NYC Marathon who was chairman of the sponsoring New York Road Runners Club, related the story then of how Fred Lebow, the sport’s imaginative impresario, had told him “ages ago” that Lebow was going to put up a million-dollar bonus for anyone who was able to run under two hours in that event.

Hirsch, himself a veteran marathoner who once ran 2:38, responded, “that’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. No one is ever going to break two hours in New York. Too many hills and tight turns. It’s just not possible.”

“Fred said, ‘You know that and I know that, but let’s see what happens with the story.’ The next day, there was his offer of a million-dollar prize. Not everyone knew the sport. A million dollars is what they knew. And Fred got some ink out of that.”

The generic term “marathon” was becoming more widely familiar. But an overwhelming percentage of the public still thought of it simply as a long race, unaware that an official distance of 26 miles, 385 yards had been settled upon after the 1908 Olympics in London, when organizers calculated the distance from the start at Windsor Castle to a finishing point in front of Queen Alexandra’s royal box at the Olympic stadium in West London.

It wasn’t until the early ‘70s that the so-called running boom, with ordinary folks beginning to join the challenge of a 26-mile run, was set off in part by American Frank Shorter winning the 1972 Olympic Marathon in Munich under the watchful eye of ABC television. (He ran 2:12.98.)

Until then, the only race at that distance outside the Olympics that was getting any public attention was the annual Boston Marathon. Studies of oxygen intake capacity and training methods designed to build tolerance to cramps and muscle tightness came into play, better equipment (lighter shoes, especially), as well as organizers’ efforts to provide ideal race conditions—40- to 50-degree weather, low humidity, cloud cover, consistent running surfaces of asphalt, mostly flat. Increasingly, there were deeper race fields, fueled by big money in the major marathons; Sawe earned 740,000 British pounds for his London victory, roughly $1 million U.S.

But it still was a marathon, demanding long-term endurance, persistence, pacing as opposed to a short-term burst of energy. Still more of a Tortoise thing than a Hare endeavor. At least until Sawe ran London with such alacrity.

And maybe Sawe shouldn’t look over his shoulder. Women have been officially accepted in marathons only since 1967 yet, in London, Ethiopia’s Tigst Assefa brought the women’s world-record time down to 2:15:41.

To the typical human, that’s a sprint.

Beautiful music

Want a sports quote for the ages? Consider this from 1987, by Marcel Souza, regarding his and—especially—teammate Oscar Schmidt’s starring roles when Brazil knocked the heavily favored U.S. national basketball team off its hoops high horse to win that summer’s Pan American Games gold medal:

“There is a saying in Brazil. We are the piano players. And the others are the piano carriers.”

“One of us shoots,” Schmidt clarified, “and the others go for the rebound.” Artists collaborating with manual laborers.

Never heard of Oscar Schmidt (who just died at 68)? Basketball, after all, long has been a United States-centric endeavor—specifically, an NBA showcase—and Schmidt chose instead to play out his 29-year career with club teams in his homeland, in Italy and in Spain. When the then-New Jersey Nets drafted him in 1984, NBA rules still banned its employees from Olympic competition, so Schmidt prioritized remaining the headliner for his national team.

“I would rather play with my friends and play 40 minutes,” he said then, and went about scoring 49,973 career points (with a per-game average of 30.7), more than anyone in history until LeBron James passed him two years ago. In five Olympics, a record, Schmidt totaled 1,094 points, also a record, averaging 28.8 per game and including an otherworldly 42.3 average at the 1988 Seoul Games.

He was the maestro of point production, a 6-8 ½ virtuoso of the long-range jump shot, scoring from binocular range before anyone had seen the likes of Stephen Curry’s dead-eye three-pointers. Schmidt years later told NBC Sports that “there was not a shot I didn’t like. I like them all because I practiced them all….So give me the ball. If you don’t want me to shoot, don’t give me the ball.”

In that ’87 Pan Am final, Schmidt scored 46 points, 35 in the second half of the 120-115 upset in which Brazil overcame a 20-point first-half deficit that seemed to reinforce the sport’s assumed pecking order. Fellow piano player Souza had 30 that game. Quite a recital, pretty much eliminating the need for the Brazilian piano carriers.

“Any shot,” Schmidt said many times, “is a good shot. Any time.” To perfect his three-point wizardry, he said, “My wife goes with me in practice and passes me the ball 500 to 1,000 times. That’s why I married her.”

There were 16,408 spectators at that Pan Am final in Indianapolis, smack in the middle of Hoosier Hysteria, when Schmidt introduced himself to the mostly jingoistic American hoops fans. In Brazil, he was Mao Santa (Holy Hand); to the international basketball community, simply “Oscar.”

The Yanks, at the time, had lost only two of 67 games in 36 years of Pan Am basketball, and featured a roster including two All-Americans, David Robinson and Danny Manning; two NCAA championship Final Four MVPs, Pervis Ellison and Keith Smart; plus future NBA players Rex Chapman, Pooh Richardson, Willie Anderson.

More than four decades of my covering international sports offered few treats to compare with Oscar’s Pan Am show, which he later called the highlight of his rollicking athletic career. He wound up on four separate basketball Halls of Fame, praised by such NBA greats at Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. At the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, he was honored as one of six who marched the Olympic flag into Maracana Stadium for Opening Ceremonies.

Possibly a candidate, when he showed up in Indy in ’87, for American sports viewers’ “Who’s That?” list, Oscar left town as one of the Pan Am Games’ three most endearing characters, along with Souza and Hortencia, the flashy, emotional Brazilian women’s basketball star who would pound the press table in exultation over every point and gesture wildly in animated discussions with her teammates.

Theirs were universal displays of competitive joy with which anyone, anywhere, could identify. But most of all, at that event, there was Oscar, who wound up on the “Who’s Who” catalog of athletic heroes and goodwill ambassadors. He wasn’t just Brazil’s best piano player; he was a basketball Franz Liszt, a hoops Vladimir Horowitz.

Farewell to a friend

My friend Ron died a couple of weeks ago. College roommate my senior year, a pal long before and long, long after. I was a sports journalist. He was a real journalist, a 30-year veteran of Voice of America, reporting on people and issues that really mattered.

While I was busy chronicling self-important jocks scoring touchdowns and muscling slam dunks, Ron was covering the likes of Madeleine Albright, the first woman to be U.S. Secretary of State. He reported on doings in Eastern Europe and with NATO, his bylines on such events as the trial of Libyan suspects in the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am flight over Scotland and the bloody dissolution of the former Yugoslavia.

Back in college, I could name Heisman Trophy candidates and various sporting heroes. Ron knew all that, too—we both worked in the sports department for The Maneater, our student newspaper at the University of Missouri—but he also could recite the names of every single member of Congress. During his sophomore year, he was a member of the four-person Missouri team that twice appeared on the televised College Bowl quiz show. A big deal; the victory over New Jersey State College and loss to the University of Pittsburgh were covered by the New York Times.

He hailed from Falls Church, Va., just outside Washington, D.C., and paid attention to what was going on in the real world. I recall his description of Richard Nixon—“nefarious prevaricator”—a characterization that certainly could apply to the Current Occupant.

Ron possessed a terrific chuckle and an appreciation of the little foibles in this big old goofy world. Given that the third person in our college apartment was a bit unkempt and appeared to have many girlfriends, Ron referred to him as “the family dog.” Also, he clearly understood my status as anything but a ladies’ man in college. I had a date—sort of a date—with a lass who was another member of the student newspaper, to attend an informal concert on campus. Things were wrapping up when she approached and announced, “I’ll get a ride with the drummer.”

After which there were various occasions—when he and I were together at some event or other—that concluded with Ron deadpanning, “I’ll get a ride with the drummer.”

The man always was on the mark, his superpower a keen observation of situations. So it was a treat, over the years, when we could get together—sometimes with his wife Ann (another Maneater alum) and sometimes at the most unlikely locales. I was lining up a trip to Eastern Europe in 1990, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, partly to cover a pair of the U.S. national soccer team’s pre-World Cup matches in East Germany and Hungary and to report on the dramatic political changes affecting international sports.

Ron was based at the time in Vienna, so we arranged to meet for a couple of days in Budapest and, one evening, with Hungary just days away from its first free election in 45 years, Ron invited me to join him at a “meet the candidate night.” He schooled me on the fact that Hungary had been edging for two decades toward a Western economy through so-called Goulash Communism, which the locals considered “cheating the Russians.”

I was told the joke that the reason for an old Communist law banning alcohol sales 24 hours before an election was to “guarantee that no Hungarians were seeing double—and therefore thinking there were two political parties from which to choose.” That there suddenly were 52 parties—52!—when I attended that candidates’ night was surreal enough, especially when a woman in the back of the room stood to address the potential politicos. “The Communists,” she informed them, “gave me a job showing French tourists around Budapest; the last thing I want to do is show French tourists around Budapest. What are you going to do about that?”

And I think it was the next afternoon that Ron and I were walking along the banks of the Danube and came across a Budapest spring festival that included a man in a straw boater singing, “Just a Gigolo” (with two mini-skirted background singers echoing “Gigolo! Gigolo!”). Could have been in New York City or Lincoln, Nebraska, rather than on that side of what had been the Iron Curtain.

I’d love to know what Ron would think now of the latest developments in Hungary, where—from a distance—it feels like reverse whiplash from 1990. Right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a close ally of fellow autocrats Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, has just been voted out of office after 16 years during which he eliminated checks and balances and stacked his nation’s judicial system and nominally independent agencies with his loyalists. (Which sounds a little too close to home.)

Of course, earlier this year, Trump moved to dismantle the Voice of America. And now Ron Pemstein, among VOA’s most knowledgeable veteran reporters before his retirement, is gone. Just when we’re in need of hearing some good news.

I keep thinking of how Ron often answered the telephone: “Is this somebody with good news or money?”