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Newsday sportswriter emeritus and adjunct professor in the Hofstra University school of communications.

Equal time?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An immigrant’s tale

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I am an immigrant. Came to New York at 22; didn’t speak the language or know the mores. Didn’t understand that CAW-fee came in different iterations, that “regular” meant cream and sugar added. Ordering a ham-and-cheese sandwich, I was flummoxed to be asked, “what kind of bread?” Where I came from, bread was bread. White. “Wonder.” In the hinterlands, I hadn’t been aware of a diversity of loaves.

Still here, though, after 55 years, a resident alien of sorts. Not based in Gotham itself—Manhattan—though I briefly shared a studio apartment long ago with a college acquaintance on the fashionable East Side before settling in a LAWN-Guyland suburb. Found a wife locally—a citizen spouse!—and assimilated. (No green card necessary.) Got a nice job. Paid taxes. Was never a danger to anyone but myself.

But, yes, an immigrant—a person generally defined as coming “from outside one’s community.” Immigrants are much in the news these days, prompting this consideration of my status as, technically, a furriner: born in Louisiana—raised in Texas, California and New Mexico and schooled in Missouri—before arriving in New York as what Australians call a “blow-in,” a non-native.

Can’t say I felt dismissed as “the other,” as some exotic invader to be shunned or disparaged. There was a time when some fellow college students—aware I had gone to high school in New Mexico and apparently oblivious to the “New” in that state’s name—seemed to find great humor in addressing me as “Gringo.” There are far worse maledictions.

Anyway. Though not actually from another nation (though I have been to Ellis Island among some huddled masses who also were visiting the Statue of Liberty), I would argue that New York is quite unlike the regions of America where I grew up, the way London isn’t the same as England and Shanghai is an entirely different version of China.

I certainly had never eaten a bagel nor ridden a subway before arriving. A person could live in the nation’s second-largest city, Los Angeles—as I did during part of my childhood—and have no comparison to what life was like in the Big Town or its environs. As Groucho Marx once observed on that matter, “When it’s 9:30 in New York, it’s 1937 in Los Angeles.”

Voluntarily uprooted, drawn to a job in New York and existing for a time as a stranger in a strange land, I never experienced any untoward discomfort. (Guilty of a few bumpkin faux pas, likely.) But as celebrated journalist Clive Barnes wrote in his introduction to a 1985 collection of essays on New York, it is “a city of born-again natives,” people from Out There Somewhere who came in quest of something and set down permanent roots. To live in New York is to be surrounded by ex-pats. Standard procedure. We’re all really in the same boat.

There is a song by Paul Simon—who was born in New Jersey, by the way; he immigrated with his family to the borough of Queens as a pre-schooler—that evokes the defining American story of immigrant millions bringing of hundreds of languages and customs to New York:

We come on the ship they call The Mayflower/We come on the ship that sailed the moon/We come in the age’s most uncertain hours/And sing an American tune.

Some of us came by way of Wink, Tex., Hobbs, N.M., and Columbia, Mo. Yet happy to say I haven’t been deported. And starting to feel acclimated.

A Paris medal ceremony

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Quadrennial Olympic recitals never cease to be fascinating on several levels. So, with that in mind, here is a final medal ceremony for the 2024 Paris Games:

GOLD. Sprinter Winzar Kakiouea from Nauru, the world’s smallest island nation (population 13,000) out there in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a touch north of the Equator. Kakiouea’s Olympics lasted 11.15 seconds, which is how long it took him to run the 100 meters in a first-round qualifying heat. Five runners in that heat ran faster, as did 34 of the 46 entered in the 100, which eventually was won by American Noah Lyles in 9.79 seconds in a smashing finish. All Kakiouea lacked were the top-notch training facilities enjoyed by large, rich nations; the coaching expertise, endorsement backing, regular competitions at the elite level and a deep pool of local rivals to regularly challenge him. (Those things had plenty to do with the United States and China winning the most gold medals in the Games, 40 apiece.)

SILVER. All the sports that NBC mostly kissed off—trampoline, canoeing, sport climbing, badminton, cycling, modern pentathlon, judo, sailing, skateboarding, surfing, taekwondo, weightlifting—so it could air endless hours of the U.S.-centric sports of basketball, swimming, gymnastics. Not to mention wall-to-wall beach volleyball. (The female players’ minimalist “uniforms” clearly had something to do with that.)

BRONZE. Doesn’t it seem odd that Olympic divers—marvelous, daring acrobats who train at their sport for hours on end—were so pale? Hardly bronze gods that an aquatic sport would appear to produce. (Must be from doing all their work indoors in natatoriums.)

TIN. Sorry; what is Snoop Dogg’s Olympic sport? From the Washington Post, there was this headline midway through NBC’s relentless attention to the so-yesterday rapper: “Are we watching the greatest sports event in the world, or a special episode of “The Voice”?

GOLD. The Clark Kent/pommel horse guy, Stephen Nedoroscik. We couldn’t see his viral fame coming any better than Nedoroscik apparently can see much of anything without his glasses. He reportedly can solve a Rubik’s Cube in 8.68 seconds and is a video-games champ—multi-talented even as he specializes in only one of the gymnastics disciplines.

SILVER. Table tennis. There were reports of U.S. basketball’s Anthony Edwards insisting that he could get at least a point in a match with any of the table tennis Olympians, who good-naturedly dismissed his claim. This is not ping-pong in your basement, with the family dog lurking to gobble up a wayward ball.

BRONZE. As a spectator sport, shooting hardly is riveting. Clearly there is a skill involved, but fans have to resort to a video screen image of the target showing each shot’s result. What was visual was 51-year-old Turkish air-pistol shooter Yusuf Dikec’s nonchalant stance as he prepared to fire—no protective glasses or headphones, his shooting arm outstretched, with his other hand in his pocket. Dikec won silver and several athletes mimicked his pose in post-competition celebrations, including Mondo Duplantis, the Swedish pole vaulter by way of Louisiana, after Duplantis set a world record in his event.

TIN. The inevitable Olympic downers: The IOC and boxing officials failing to agree—or to provide clear guidelines—on whether two female pugilists were in fact women. Doping accusations. Death threats targeting Opening Ceremonies director Thomas Jolly. Spying charges against Canadian soccer officials for flying a drone over New Zealand practice. These all are proof that, for all the unifying, escapist benefits of the Games, the Olympics reflect the imperfections of real life.

GOLD. Simone Biles in flight. The Netherlands’ Sifan Hassan winning medals in the 5,000 meters (bronze), 10,000 meters (bronze) and women’s marathon (gold). That’s almost 40 miles of racing (against the world’s best) in 10 days. Also: American Cole Hocker’s stretch-run finish to pass co-favorites (and committed rivals) Jakob Ingebrightsen of Norway, the defending Olympic champ, and Josh Kerr of Britain to win the men’s 1500.

SILVER. The variety of skills at the Games. Just how do those artistic swimmers pull off the flips and leaps from underwater during routines in which they hold their breath for up to 90 seconds? What sort of training, mentally and physically, prepares athletes for their various performances that feel a bit heroic? All pretty impressive.

BRONZE. How come the United States can’t settle on one uniform during the duration of the Games for all its track and field athletes? It would be far easier to follow them that way.

TIN. Biles’ brandishing of a G.O.A.T. necklace, a claim to being the Greatest of All Time. (There were plenty of “greatests” there—if in fact an operative definition of “greatest” is possible.) Biles won two golds in the five individual events she entered. Brilliant. But, then, American swimmer Katie Ledecky entered just two individual races, the women’s distance events, and won both, so she could claim dominance over her domain. However accomplished, many other Olympic athletes have only one discipline available to them—say, a shot putter or judoka, and therefore hope for only one potential medal. With a gold, might they be the greatest?

GOLD. French swimmer Leon Marchand. Always fun to see the host nation excited over its own stars, and Marchand got France off to a terrific start.

SILVER. Wonderful to see tiny countries winning Olympic gold for the first time against tremendous odds: Thea LaFond of Dominica in the women’s triple jump; Julien Alfred of Saint Lucia in the women’s 100 meters.

BRONZE. The non-flame Olympic flame cauldron. LED lights inside a 90-foot-tall, 20-foot-wide hot-air balloon was an inventive touch. Splendid, but felt like another step away from reality. Those LED lights were not lit from rays of the sun in Olympia, Greece, as has been the tradition.

TIN. A longstanding International Olympic Committee refusal to call Taiwan Taiwan, based on a political agreement with mainland China. So Taiwan has become Taipei at the Games, stuck with a generic Olympic flag.

GOLD. Swimming in the River Seine in the men’s and women’s triathlon. That’s bravery, there, even after $1.5 billion was spent to clean up the river.

SILVER. The big bell that track and field winners were invited to ring in celebration of victories. Made in Normandy, a gift from Olympic organizers to the city, the bell, assigned to hang in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame after the Games, was placed in Stade de France during the rugby competition and kept in the stadium when track events commenced.

BRONZE. Not enough was made of the presence of Ukrainian and Palestinian athletes at the Games and the escape from war they provided to their citizens.

TIN. Tom Cruise and Snoop Dogg in the Closing Ceremonies (in segments previously taped for NBC, yet!). There were 204 national teams represented at the Paris Games by more than 10,000 athletes in 32 sports, yet NBC’s Pavlovian instinct was to continually feature Boldface Names.

GOLD. The Marathon for All, opening the marathon route after Olympic competition to the hoi polloi for a citizen fun run.

SILVER. It’s probably not feasible for television to conjure the typical Olympic scene beyond the playing fields—a diverse picnic in countless languages, an amusement-park ride in which the riders really are half of the amusement. To witness the Olympics in person is culturally enlightening, competitively dramatic and generally great fun. Higher, faster and stronger than everyday stuff. But through the TV lens?

BRONZE. There were generally top reviews for the Closing Ceremonies, though the sense here was of an odd Cirque Soleil show—difficult to relate to the Games—and the only real highlight was of athletes from many nations joining in signing “We Are The Champions.” Of the World.

TIN. To the curmudgeonly knucklehead who awarded these medals.

Fee-fi-fo-fum

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English vs. Spanish (Armada)

Things that were worth paying attention to in this month’s 2024 European soccer tournament:

—There was plenty of highly entertaining sports theatre, concluding with Spain’s championship victory over England that was conjured with a bare four minutes remaining in the title match.

—The riveting final result came after England’s repeated narrow escapes from early elimination in the tournament had helped ratchet up the drama. (Especially for me, watching a couple of those tense matches at my daughter’s home in London.)

—More than the competitive sparks, though, the whole exercise, as England coach Gareth Southgate noted, was as much a national incident as a sporting contest.

There were, leading up to the final, references to longstanding hostilities between the contestants, starting with last year’s women’s World Cup, when Spain defeated England. And reaching back as far as the mid-16th Century attempt by the Spanish Armada to invade England. (Spain lost that one.) Such historical allusions seem unavoidable before these big games, as when one English sportswriter previewed England’s 1966 World Cup final with a reminder to “Fret not, boys, if on the morrow we should lose to the Germans at our national game, for twice this century we have defeated them at theirs.”

There is a root-root-root-for-the-home-team vigor on steroids, most of it in good fun. Flag-waving, chanting crowds flocked to stadiums in Germany, the tournament’s host nation, as well as to pubs and watch parties in their home countries. A Spanish newspaper reported that 87 percent of the populace took in the final. Powerful examples of national identity were manifested through soccer.

That England fans were marching through Germany singing “Football’s Coming Home”—a decades-old ditty referencing the country’s status as the sport’s birthplace and its only international championship at the ‘66 World Cup—was ripe for interpretation by non-English supporters as English arrogance and entitlement. Even, perhaps, a reminder that the English empire had once been the largest in history, ruling over more than a quarter of the globe.

“As English fortunes have risen,” University of Limerick psychology professor Orla Muldoon wrote on the eve of the championship final, “so too has the sense that there are many among us who really want the winners to be Anybody But England.” Muldoon, acknowledging “a strong sense of national identity” based on “passionate support for national teams,” further argued for what she called “disidentification.”

“It’s not indifference,” she wrote, “but rather an active process [that] allows us to actively express out dissimilarity and dissatisfaction from those who support English football.” The point is for Europeans who happen to share the English language to reject any connection to stereotypical “lager louts and violent hooligans” who have been associated with English soccer, and a “sense that the reputation of the English abroad is poor.”

Meanwhile, another zeitgeisty situation with national identity—immigration—was at work during the championships. Spain’s breakout star was Lamine Yamal, still 16 years old when he scored the goal to put his team into the title game. He had become the youngest player to appear in the European championships, the youngest to score a goal and the youngest to play in the final, turning 17 the day before that match, in which he assisted on the first of Spain’s scores in the 2-1 victory over England.

He emerged, according to one dispatch, as “the young prince of Spain.” But he was born to parents who immigrated from Equatorial Guinea and Morocco and hailed from the Catalan city of Mataro—near Barcelona—which right-wing politicians had branded as one of country’s “multicultural shitholes,” according to a report in The Guardian. So when Yamal celebrated his decisive semifinal goal by using his fingers to spell out the post code of his hometown, a former Spanish equality minister took the occasion to declare that “it’s very important we remind people who say that Spain isn’t big enough for everyone, or that there’s a problem with immigration that brings crime…that Spain is Lamine Yamal.”

In the moment, Yamal’s heroics seemed to cast him as thoroughly Spanish to national-team fans, the flip-side of what had happened to English forward Bukayo Saka, born in London to Nigerian immigrants. Four years ago, after Saka was one of three Black players who failed to convert penalty kicks in a shootout loss to Italy that left England as European runner-up, he and the other two players were targeted by relentless racial abuse on social media.

So it might be just soccer. But among the hoi polloi, national unity is best facilitated by success. Prior to this year’s Euro final, King Charles lightheartedly encouraged the English team to “secure victory before the need for any last-minute wonder-goals or another penalty drama” so that “the stresses on the nation’s collective heart rate and blood pressure would be greatly alleviated!”

Think of this, though: Charles reigns over a nation, the United Kingdom, that includes Scotland and Wales, two non-English lands whose ardent soccer supporters fit comfortably into Professor Muldoon’s theory of disidentification. And who likely welcomed that the championship trophy went to “Anybody But England.”

 

O Art! (Going for the gold)

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With the Olympics’ return to Paris this summer after precisely 100 years, Pierre de Coubertin lives. Well, not really. But his imprint on the Games endures. Mostly.

What hasn’t changed is the fact that de Coubertin—the French-born aristocrat, educator and historian—was responsible for the Olympic revival in 1896, some 1,500 years after the Ancient Games disappeared, and his idealistic concept of promoting international brotherhood, however imperfect, soldiers on.

But his brainstorm of melding strong body/strong mind competitions—by adding contests in painting, sculpture, architecture, music and literature alongside the physical activity—has not persisted. De Coubertin died in 1937 and his Olympic art competitions were gone after the 1948 Games.

He had wanted egghead tug-of-wars as a “pentathlon of the Muses.” His plan was to award medals to the best in creativity as well as to those ectomorphs, endomorphs and mesomorphs making a muscle in pursuit of the Olympic motto: “Citius, Altius, Fortius.” (Latin for “Higher, Faster, Stronger;” a motto suggested by de Coubertin, by the way.)

“Deprived of the aura of the Arts contests,” he reportedly declared in introducing efforts of imagination in 1912, “Olympic Games are only World Championships. From now on, [Art] will be part of each Olympiad, on a par with the athletic competitions.” It was his conviction that one doesn’t have to go into oxygen debt to produce something memorable.

So, for the 1912 Games in Stockholm, just to make sure there would be participants in the literature playoffs, de Coubertin entered his own poem, a flowery tome he called “Ode to Sport” (though he did so under two fictitious names, George Hohrod and Martin Eschbach).

It won!

O Sport (it went), pleasure of the Gods, essence of life, you appeared suddenly in the midst of the grey clearing which writhes with the drudgery of modern existence, like the radiant messenger of a past age, when mankind still smiled. And the glimmer of dawn lit up the mountain tops and flecks of light dotted the ground in the gloomy forests.

Second stanza:

O Sport, you are Beauty! You are the architect of that edifice which is the human body….

And so on through seven more grandiose sections…

O Sport, you are Justice!…And O Sport, you are Audacity!….O Sport, you are Honour!….O Sport, you are Joy!….O Sport, you are Fecundity!….O Sport, you are Progress!….O Sport, you are Peace!….

O Boy!

A Russian-born American named Walter Winans, who had won Olympic gold in the long-discontinued sporting test of “running deer shooting, double shot” in 1908 and silver in “team running deer shooting, single shot” four years later, then took aim at the new arts challenge in ’12 and came away with the first-ever gold in sculpture.

No animals were injured in “team running deer shooting,” which employed a moving deer-shaped target 110 yards from the shooter. Anyway, when Winans’ took the podium to receive the medal for “American Trotter,” his bronze casting of a 20-inch-tall horse pulling a small chariot, he “waved proudly to the crowd,” according to Smithsonian magazine. A champion again.

There is no record of de Coubertin’s reaction to winning the first composition competition (and, in fact, it apparently wasn’t common knowledge that he actually was George Hohrod and Martin Eschbach until years later). So, he was involved in nothing comparable to the medal ceremony at those Games in which King Gustav of Sweden publicly declared that American Jim Thorpe—winner of both the five-event pentathlon and 10-event decathlon—was “the greatest athlete in the world.” (That’s when Thorpe reportedly responded, “Thanks, King.”)

There were 151 artistic Olympic medals awarded from 1912 to 1948, and in ’48 the British artist John Copley, at 73, may or may not have become the oldest Olympic medalist in history with a silver for his engraving titled “Polo Players.” Alas, David Wallechinsky, the crack Games historian, in his regularly updated editions of The Complete Book of the Olympics, instead cites Oscar Swahn, who was 72 when he won gold in 1908 as part of Sweden’s running deer shooting, single-shot team.

The only person to win two Olympic gold medals in art, a recent New York Times article noted, was Luxembourg’s Jean Jacoby, the 1924 winner in “mixed painting” in 1924 and 1928 champ in “drawing and water colors.” Jacoby died in 1936 but, like de Coubertin, earned a piece of immortality when his design was used on Luxembourg postage stamps for the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki. And his own image was featured on a Luxembourg stamp in 2016.

The only woman to win an arts gold was Finland’s Aale Maria Tynni for “lyric works” in 1948. Her poem, “Laurel of Hellas,” referenced the laurel wreath, symbol of sporting victory dating to Ancient Games in Hellas (the Greek name for Greece).

When Avery Brundage, an ardent proponent of the Olympic poohbahs’ often hypocritical “pure amateurism” edict, became IOC president in 1952, he ended Olympic arts competitions and had all their results stricken from official records, arguing that the arts entrants typically were professionals in their fields.

But if Pierre de Coubertin and his arts concept were still around now….

Think of the 1981 movie “Chariots of Fire,” which focused on the dramatic journeys of British sprinters Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell toward victories in the 100 and 400 meters during the last Paris Olympics, in 1924. The film won four Academy Awards. One of those for Best Original Score by the Greek composer Vangelis.

Gold-medal Olympic art, that.

Sport’s uncertainty principle

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The thing about sports and athletes is that their performances remain entirely unscripted. Unpredictable. No guarantees. This thought occurred with reports that Jerry West, a veritable poster boy for basketball excellence, has died at 86.

In his 14 pro seasons, West was an NBA All-Star 14 times. His Los Angeles Lakers made the playoffs each of those years and West literally came to embody the entire league—for a long time, we’ve known that is his silhouette on the NBA’s official logo—reliably stupendous, especially at the most crucial moments. He was known as Mr. Clutch.

Yet he played on only one NBA championship team despite his exceptional resume. And I was there during an exceedingly rare moment—especially atypical because Newsday rarely sent me on a pro basketball assignment—when West briefly went from hoops superman to a Clark Kent disguise. A fallible human.

That was during the 1972 playoff semifinals. The Lakers, who that season had won a then-record 33 consecutive games, were struggling mightily against the Milwaukee Bucks. In the series-opening 21-point Lakers loss, West—a career 47-percent shooter; a jump-shot master—made only 4 of 19 field goals. All layups.

“Kids of any age,” he lamented after the game, “should be able to shoot better than we did”—27 percent attempts converted by the team; a mere 21 percent by West. The Lakers won the next two games, but in the fourth, West missed 14 of 23 shots (31 percent) during another loss. And with a post-game shrug, the flummoxed West, who somehow couldn’t find the hoop with a search warrant, muttered, “God heal my jump shot.”

An anomaly, that. Though quickly overcome. The Lakers wound up winning the series and the championship final against the New York Knicks. And West, by the way, had lent a vast contribution to his team’s offense with a team-leading 8.3 assists per game during the Bucks series. So it was impossible to judge him guilty of dereliction based on the unforeseen reality of his sickly jump shot.

Still, that series hardly fit the West narrative of consistent brilliance that he carried beyond his playing days to coaching and front-office work. More to the point, it was an example of what can—and occasionally does—happen in the quirky universe of sports.

When the Lakers moved to L.A. from Minneapolis, having just used their No. 1 pick in the 1960 draft on West, I was in eighth grade, living in The Valley, so that was my team. West already was a widely recognizable star, the best player on the University of West Virginia team that was 1959 NCAA tournament runner-up. (A close-but-no-cigar result that would become a recurring, frustrating experience for West.)

On our playgrounds then—and despite the fact that televised NBA games were uncommon and we were left to visualize the Lakers through the voice pictures of radio’s frenetic Chick Hearn—our models to mimic were Elgin Baylor and West.

Baylor could defy gravity, the NBA’s first aerial showman (Julius Erving before there was a Julius Erving; Michael Jordan before there was a Michael Jordan) with a hang-in-the-air jumper. Also on the Lakers then was West’s predecessor as West Virginia hero, a guy with a more picturesque name, Hot Rod Hundley. But it was West who was the model of perfection with his unerring line-drive jump shot, his knack for rebounding, passing and octopus-arm defense. We mostly wanted to be Jerry West.

For that 1972 playoff series years later, he was 33, in his 11th season, still at his best. During the ’71-‘72 regular season, he had averaged 25.8 points and a league-leading 9.7 assists per game. So it was a bit of a shock—bewildering, really—to witness West’s transitory descent into mediocrity.

Bottom line: His jump shot quickly was healed. He finally got his championship ring. But foregone conclusions are not the point in what was his world.

Bill Walton: The early days

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Back then, in the early ‘70s, Bill Walton was what you might call an enigmatic figure, a mum college hoops superstar—all action, no talk—a long-haired hippie in the stay-in-your-lane world of jocks.

This was during widespread student protests against the Vietnam War. And while Walton, who died last week at 71, hardly was a bomb-throwing revolutionary, he was culturally and politically at odds with his celebrated coach, John Wooden, known to lecture Walton about getting haircuts and curbing his use of obscenities. And when Walton was arrested for participating in the blockade of the UCLA administration building, Wooden had to provide bail.

So in December 1973, with Walton and his top-ranked UCLA mates, winners of 78 straight games over 2½ seasons, about to play No. 2 North Carolina State—itself unbeaten in 29 consecutive games—my Newsday editors judged that it was time to set up an interview with the mysterious Walton and report on What He Was Really Like. Go to Los Angeles, was the order, then to St. Louis for that highly anticipated UCLA-N.C. State game days later.

I did not speak to Walton on that assignment. I did not learn that Walton struggled so mightily with a stutter that he revealed, years later, he “could not say ‘hello.’ Could not say ‘thank you.’” I certainly got no insight into the loquacious basketball commentator of the future, whose hyperbolic, sometimes oddball, strikingly knowledgeable observations came to entertain sports fans.

All I saw then was a player of exceptionally diverse skills, who brought far more to the sport than his size (6-foot-11) implied. A sleight-of-hand passer uncommon for a big man, he led his team in assists as well as scoring and rebounding.

But in that short time, I did get a strong impression of how highly Walton’s teammates valued him beyond the basketball basics.

Tommy Curtis, UCLA’s a flashy senior guard, offered to arrange an unprecedented one-on-one with Walton. To do so Curtis, who had befriended the L.A. Lakers future Hall of Fame pro Wilt Chamberlain, proposed that I meet him at Chamberlain’s Bel-Air mansion in the Santa Monica foothills, where Curtis also would invite Walton.

It was then standard UCLA athletic department policy that its players be shielded from prying interrogations by the press. Before Walton, Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) had been similarly protected. Wooden, who at the time was in the midst of coaching a record 10 NCAA championship teams—in a 12-year-period, yet—typically would designate one player to be available to reporters after games. And a general rule was that players would speak publicly only when teammates were not watching.

Yet on separate occasions while I was hanging around, Curtis and freshman Rich Washington volunteered bits for a Walton portrait. “The main thing with Walton,” Curtis said during the Chamberlain-mansion visit—at which Walton never appeared—”is that Bill is tired of writers and fans saying this is a one-man team. He has a tremendous feeling for other people and he knows there are other guys on this team who have feelings, too. He doesn’t want it always said that Walton won the game.”

At the time, Walton already had been named college basketball player of the year twice—and was on his way to a third consecutive honor—though he was surrounded by the likes of Keith Wilkes, Dave Meyers and Curtis, all future NBA draft choices. (Only Curtis did not play professionally). Plus, there was Walton’s close friend Greg Lee, whom Curtis described as “the greatest passer you will see” and who also saw time in the pros.

Washington found Walton to be “very aware of things happening today. He’s very involved. He asked the coaches to sign his petition against Nixon [during the Watergate scandal]. They didn’t, but they didn’t give Bill a hard time, either. I guess they understand that he is trying to fight against always being associated with basketball, like he is struggling for a new identity other than all-American.’”

Curtis said that Walton “brought up transcendental meditation at our first practice session [for that 1973-74 season]. He said it was something that helped him cope with all the pressures of the world. Coach Wooden said, ‘Fine, and any of the players interested in this should talk to Bill about it.’” Several players followed through with daily 20-minute meditation sessions as well as Walton’s vegetarianism.

For that 1973 showdown vs. North Carolina State, which five months earlier had sold all of the 18,000-plus tickets and which was covered by 200 reporters, the UCLA player assigned to speak to the press after his team’s victory was Wilkes. UCLA’s team manager guarded the lockerroom door against trespassers, telling one ink-stained wretch that “I won’t throw you out. Just don’t go in.”

Walton waited in the room for a half hour, then flipped a blue hood over his head and slipped away, ignoring all questions.

It was during Walton’s early pro days with the Portland Trail Blazers that an intimate profile of the man began to surface, especially with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian David Halberstam’s 1981 book, “The Breaks of the Game.” There was some irony to the fact that Halberstam reportedly had chosen the Trail Blazers—whom Walton led to the 1977 NBA title— for a day-by-day account of a pro basketball season because of the Trail Blazers’ reputation for offering reporters full access.

Ironically, too, Walton—who missed all of the ’78-’79 season because of chronic foot injuries and eventually underwent 37 orthopedic surgeries—had just left the Trail Blazers for San Diego when Halberstam began his research.

It took a while for Walton to emerge as more than a basketball heavyweight, more than a kid attuned to his generation’s concerns and style—the lanky, publicly silent fellow wearing tie-dyed t-shirts and reveling in Grateful Dead concerts. And time to fully overcome his debilitating stutter, which he slyly described as “my greatest accomplishment….and your worst nightmare.”

Not really. A lot of people had wanted to hear what he had to say for a long time.

Graduates, faculty, parents, guests…..

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Been working on my commencement speech. You know; just in case. Not that any establishment of higher learning has asked, or that any have the position still open.

As for my qualifications: There is evidence that a person need not be a Nobel or Pulitzer Prize winner, a politician, activist, academic, actor, film producer, motivational speaker, or business leader to get the gig. A frog (Kermit) once spoke to the Southampton College grads here on Long Island.

Montana State University invited Flint Rasmussen, a former professional rodeo clown, to address its graduating class in early May. Michigan’s Hillsdale College presented television game-show host Pat Sajak to its students. Graduates at D’Youville University, a small private school in upstate New York, were addressed by an artificial intelligence robot named Sophia. Even a football placekicker with 1940s political and social values was enlisted by Kansas’ Benedictine College.

A lot of schools recruit an alum. I checked; my alma mater, the University of Missouri, already had a series of ceremonies for its various schools earlier this month. So I will have no role in bringing down the curtain for those departing scholars.

It’s just that Dartmouth is going to have former tennis star Roger Federer speak and, well, I covered tennis for more than 40 years during my sportswriting career at Newsday. I also chronicled a number of Mets games, and I noticed that Seton Hall had Gary Cohen, the Mets’ play-by-play man, deliver its commencement address. Maybe if tennis or baseball knowledge can be related to advice for the future leaders of the world….

Where to go with that, though? The thing about college commencement speeches is how ephemeral they tend to be, how easily forgotten they are. Only via some hand-me-down recollection from a former Mizzou colleague (who had to be reminded by another grad) was I recently informed that the acclaimed playwright Tennessee Williams had addressed our 1969 class. And for all I remember about what he said—which is not a word—it could have been Tennessee Ernie Ford who did the honors.

I wonder if Williams mentioned that day how, during his two years taking courses in my alma mater’s journalism school—the first in the world and still highly ranked—he was said to be so bored (and distracted by unrequited love for a girl) that his father brought him home.

I have polled several people about this, and the general sense—with no disrespect to the prominent folks who work so hard to produce their words of inspiration and instruction—is that commencement addresses essentially are boiler plate. Guidance that is no more revelatory than “Be Prepared.” “Take notes.” “Don’t count your chickens.” “Wear sunscreen.”

When I think about it, some of the best life wisdom can be found in the lyrics of the late John Prine. His tune “Safety Joe” counsels how it was “too bad” that the protagonist “never got too sad” but also “never got too happy,” wearing “a seat belt around his heart.” Prine sang

If you don’t loosen up the buckle

On your heart and start to chuckle

You’re gonna die of boredom, Safety Joe.

 In “That’s the Way That the World Goes ‘Round,” Prine cautioned

You’re up one day, the next, you’re down

It’s a half an inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown.

And he put in a good word for the benefits of education in “It’s a Big Old Goofy World.”

So I’m sitting in a hotel
Trying to write a song
My head is just as empty
As the day is long
Why it’s clear as a bell
I should have gone to school
I’d be wise as an owl
‘Stead of stubborn as a mule.

In one of those regular New York Times liberal vs. conservative editorial “conversations” between staffers Gail Collins and Bret Stephens, Collins noted that in past commencement addresses she had given, “I could tell that most of the audience was hoping I’d make them laugh. Just in a way that made them feel it was OK to celebrate their achievements by having a good time with their families and friends.”

Stephens took more of an ivory-tower approach, writing that he would urge grads to cultivate an inner life, memorize poetry, imitate writers and artists they admired. And—maybe a bit more down-to-earth—”please stop photographing your damn meals.”

All right. There it is. There’s the speech. Wear sunscreen.

 

 

 

 

Athletic DNA

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From the Department of Being Comfortable in One’s Genes:

Top-ranked women’s golfer Nelly Korda recently enjoyed a record-equaling run of five consecutive tournament titles; might her athletic ability be related to the fact that her father, Petr, was among the top tennis pros of the 1990s? Also in the sports news lately is the splendid work of New York Knicks guard Jalen Brunson; his father, Rick, was a member of the last Knicks team, in 1999, to play in the NBA Finals.

Taking this another step: Nelly Korda’s mother, the former Regina Rajchrtova, represented her native Czechoslovakia in the 1988 Olympics and once reached No. 26 in the international tennis rankings. And Nelly’s siblings also are world-class athletes—sister Jessica, once ranked as high as 13th in golf, and brother Sebastian, among the globe’s top 30 tennis players.

Both of Brunson’s parents were accomplished athletes as well. His mom Sandra was a volleyball player for Temple University when she met Rick.

Petr Korda, good enough to have won the Australian Open in 1998, used to punctuate a meaningful victory with his Pete Townshend celebratory hop, an exuberant scissors kick that mimicked the Who’s singer/songwriter. Now we’re talking about Nelly’s generation; when she teed off in her first senior championship in 2013, one of 19 amateurs in a 156-player field and a month shy of her 15th birthday, she toured the course with who she called her “caddy daddy.”

Nelly described her father’s contribution to staying within seven strokes of the lead that day as fairly typical caddy stuff: “He calms me down. When I start walking a little fast, he’s like, ‘Slow down a little.’ But when I make a birdie, he’s like, ‘Let’s go. Next hole.’”

So: How inevitable was it that Petr’s sporting dominance would be passed along? Is that an inheritable trait, like blue eyes, blood type or baldness?

In the case of the Brunsons, the son—Jalen—has emerged as a star this Spring, averaging more than 36 points a game in the playoffs, while the father—Rick—spent his nine NBA seasons as a rarely used sub, playing little for that 1999 Knicks team. Anything to be drawn from that?

Of course there are scholars in the field considering how far apples fall from the proverbial athletic tree. The Science In The News website reported that “athletic ability can be an inherited trait” by citing the EPOR gene—which “provides instructions for making protein called the erythropoietin receptor” and directs the production of red blood cells and the ACTN3 gene, which “produces powerful contractions in glycolytic type II skeletal muscle fibers…”

Got that?

Then there is the nature-vs.-nurture aspect: While genetics influence an individual’s physical and psychological characteristics, the environment (including relationships and experiences) also impacts development. So genes certainly can matter, but there also is the aspect that a child of a notable sports figure grows up in the sports culture.

There are plenty of examples of enormously successful jocks (men and women) whose children (boys and girls) have exhibited a similar level of talent, including some who thrived in a different sport than the parent. Football’s Archie Manning and his sons, Peyton and Eli. Baseball’s Bobby and Barry Bonds as well as Ken Griffey and Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball’s Pat Mahomes and his football son Patrick. Basketball’s Dennis Rodman and his soccer daughter Trinity. Hockey’s Bobby and Brett Hull. Tennis’ Yannick Noah and his basketball son Joakim. And currently  waiting in the wings for his anticipated NBA gig is Bronny James, son of superstar LeBron.

To further muddle this riddle is a need for attention to the fact that different sports require distinct physical attributes: Fast-twitch muscle fibers for powerful bursts of movement as opposed to slow-twitch muscle fibers that are best for endurance sports, for instance. And keen eyesight, hand-eye (or, in soccer, foot-eye) coordination. Just more DNA mysteries.

A study by Lisa M. Guth and Stephen M. Roth, available on the National Library of Medicine site, found “more than 200 genetic variants…associated with elite athletic status” and acknowledged that “a favorable genetic profile, when combined with an optimal training environment, is important for elite athletic performance.

“However,” they concluded, “few genes are consistently associated with elite athletic performance, and none are linked strongly enough to warrant their use in predicting athletic success.”

Maybe, then, athletic prowess—an art rather than a science?—is a particularly individual thing.

Bad racing form

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There is something very East German about thoroughbred racing’s state of affairs just as the Triple Crown season commences. Not, specifically, the past year of on-track equine deaths that have been attributed to various circumstances, including drug use. Rather, the fact that the sport’s athletes—the racehorses—have no say in practices meant to boost them toward the winner’s circle.

It’s bad enough when elite human athletes choose to ingest banned substances to get that extra little edge. (And then, busted, express shock that a performance-enhancing drug could possibly have found its way into their system.) But the nagging realization that homo sapiens purposely expose unsuspecting nags to risky, illicit medication goes to a new (lower) level.

That human capacity to manipulate unwitting subjects in dastardly experiments is what sports psychologist Steven Ungerleider detailed in his 2001 book “Faust’s Gold.” From the 1960s through the ‘80s, Ungerleider reported, the former East Germany put more than 10,000 uninformed youngsters on a steroid regimen in a state-mandated quest to dominate worldwide sports events. Which led both to championship performances and long-lasting health problems.

At work then, and now in racetrack cases, was the dishonest circumvention of basic communication. The dirty little secret is that coaches and officials have been known to subject their human charges to various “vitamin” supplements without the athletes’ knowledge. A horse, meanwhile, not only does not know a Triple Crown from an eighth pole, but can’t possibly know if its trainer is spiking the oats.

Responsibility for a failed drug test therefore clearly rests with the trainer, the principal caretaker of his horses and a primary beneficiary of his horses’ success. Thus the ongoing Kentucky Derby suspension of Bob Baffert, whose horses have won that historic race four times and is third in the career earnings list with more than $385 million in purses, but who has a lengthy record of doping violations. Baffert is shouldering the blame for his colt Medina Spirit who, after winning the 2021 Derby, tested positive for a potent corticosteroid used to reduce pain and inflammation.

Obviously Medina Spirit, who died five months later, hadn’t been aware of the betamethasone in his system.

“Does a horse even know he’s in a race?” asked James Ross in a horse-sense post unrelated to doping on theconversations.com. “The answer is likely ‘no.’

“From a horse’s perspective,” Ross wrote, “there are few intrinsic rewards for winning a race. Reaching the end might mean relief from the pressure to keep galloping at high speed and hits from the jockey’s whip, but the same is true for all the horses once they pass the finishing post….there is very little direct, intrinsic benefit to the horse that would motivate it to voluntarily gallop faster to achieve this outcome.”

Logically, then, what incentive would a thoroughbred have to use substances that could endanger its future well-being—even if it somehow understood the possible competitive benefit?

The late Phil Johnson, a Hall of Fame trainer who had been a middle-distance runner in high school, once explained to me that the crucial difference in coaching a human vis-à-vis a horse is the language barrier.

“If I’m training a man to run track,” he said, “I can sit down and talk with him about his career, what he hopes to accomplish and how he can go about it. With a horse, you can’t do that. You can’t sit him down and say, ‘Look, I’m gonna kick you off the team if you don’t shape up.’”

A human runner can be advised of the benefit of extensive training, maybe even offered the suggestion of an illicit chemical enhancement. An equine runner typically is asked to take a brisk but brief morning gallop and have a nice day in the stall. Horses “can get bored a lot quicker [than humans],” Johnson said. “They can’t be told what they’re training for….and what really sours a horse is the boredom of the track.”

So good trainers are careful not to upset their horses, which are at their best when they are happy and eager to run. Thoroughbreds are not driven by the ego-centric possibility of a world record or alluring publicity or defeating a particular rival.

For a stars-in-his-eyes trainer, grasping for more money and more fame, to slip his unassuming horse a mickey—in the fashion of those old East German taskmasters—truly is a definition of “dehumanizing.” The trainer, that is.