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Love for the underdog

Americans are a fortunate lot, born to moon landings and miracles on ice on other unprecedented successes. We assume a degree of superiority in comparison to other peoples, an over-the-top arrogance based on a history of industrial and technological advances. We invented the airplane, chemotherapy, chocolate chip cookies. Baseball.

But we ain’t perfect, and the start of another World Cup tournament is a reminder to have some humility. As Will Leitch noted in a New York magazine essay, “In no other context outside international soccer are Brazil, Argentina, Belgium and Denmark global powers and the U.S. a plucky upstart.”

So, no, there is no expectation that the Yanks will bring home the Cup from the month-long event being staged out of season and out of the sport’s normal zone of influence—in the tiny oil-rich, culturally restrictive Persian Gulf nation of Qatar. Of the Cup’s 32 participating countries, the United States is ranked roughly in the middle, with—according to FiveThirtyEight website predictions—a 1 percent chance of going all the way. FiveThirtyEight gives the U.S. only a 53 percent hope of surviving the three-game opening round.

The Leitch article accurately headlines the World Cup “the only real American underdog story,” even as Leitch posits that this situation “makes the team considerably more fun to cheer for.” The lovable underdog. And, while there is plenty of evidence that the 2022 Yank team has a number of handicaps—the second-youngest roster in the tournament, a disappointing run-up to the tournament in terms of victories, perfect health and firepower—it ought not to be forgotten how far American soccer (and American soccer fandom) has come in the last 40 years.

1983. Caracas, Venezuela. Pan American Games. There was a first-round U.S. soccer match against Guatemala, a country with roughly 1/20^th the population of the United States, in which the Yanks had their rather large heads handed to them. 3-0, I think it was.

The Latino fans in attendance were kind, not averse to showing appreciation for the Americans’ efforts but fully aware of the chasm of competence and how foreign the sport was to the 1980s American scene. One could imagine a thought bubble over the fans’ heads, with the words: Gringos, this is a football. It is round. Are we going too fast?

It was another seven years before a collection of U.S. college lads, lining up against hardened pros from around the globe, barely sneaked into their first World Cup in 40 years only to remind that “American soccer player” was widely regarded as an oxymoron. Like “jumbo shrimp.”

Then again, how much adventure is there in rooting for a team always assured of victory? How real is that? When the Yanks trampolined into the second round of the 2002 World Cup with shocking wins over Portugal, then fifth in the world, and longtime rival Mexico, U.S. soccer spokesman Bryan Chenault summed up the giddy reaction—and sudden interest from the opinion-shaping media—saying, “Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. And they’re all welcome. There’s plenty of room.”

Something clearly was afoot. That year, as the Americans came within a referee’s failure to penalize a German’s illegal touch of surviving a 1-0 quarterfinal loss, talk-radio and sports-column pundits began to unreasonably fret over the possibility that soccer somehow could shoulder aside the place of football, baseball and basketball in the pantheon of U.S. sports. As if that were the point.

The truth is that a large portion of the American citizenry has come to acquire a taste for soccer, and their national team—not a world-beater but clearly competitive—has added to the appeal of the World Cup’s top-notch sporting theatre.

Old friend George Vecsey, among my sports journalism heroes, who has written a book about the eight World Cups he covered for the New York Times, has just posted thoughts on the Yanks’ present football situation, including this (to me, surprising) observation: “The accumulation of injuries and benchings and transfers lead to my conclusion that the best days of American soccer just might be—I hate to say this—in the past.”

Whoa. But we still have chocolate chip cookies.

April 1st

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(Stan Isaacs)

In memory of the late Stan Isaacs, who enjoyed a long and distinguished career as Newsday’s star columnist before his death in 2013 at 83, herewith is another (pale) revival of his annual April Fool’s Day spoof, a whimsical ranking of decidedly inconspicuous topics. Each April 1, Stan published what he described as “an appraisal in areas that are generally ignored by raters”—such as bowling pins, Fred Astaire’s dancing partners, TV remote buttons, “Things that Aren’t as Good as They Used to Be.”

He called his polls IRED, the Isaacs Ratings of Esoteric Distinction, what he said was a “loving spoof of the Ring Magazine boxing ratings….a rush to respond to the unrecognized need for evaluation of quantities like the Bridges Across the River Seine.”

His delightful lampoon can’t reasonably be duplicated. But I keep trying the past few years. As he put it, “no category is too arcane to grade,” so here goes the 2022 J-Faux lists, on similarly (and seriously) judged objects that normally might seem trivial, and beginning with London-related categories, since I have spent a fair amount of time there visiting daughter, son-in-law and grandboy the last couple of years….

London Underground stops: 1, Elephant & Castle; 2, Barking; 3, Tooting Broadway; 4, Cockfosters; 5, Shepherd’s Bush; 6, Shoreditch High Street; 7, Hammersmith.

London Pub Names: 1, Laughing Gravy; 2, Boot and Flogger; 3, The Widow’s Son; 4, George and Vulture; 5, Mad Bishop and Bear; 6, The Fat Walrus.

London parks for morning runs: 1, London Fields; 2, Victoria; 3, Hampstead Heath; 4, Battersea; 5, Kensington Gardens; 6. Hyde Park.

Serena Williams, rules and fairness

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It’s complicated, of course. The Serena Williams incident in this year’s U.S Open championship final has taken us far beyond a discussion of tennis rules and proper sporting behavior. Almost immediately, the debate veered toward male privilege, identity politics, racism and crowd dynamics.

Was Williams the victim of a power imbalance in which a chair umpire is not to be challenged? Was that exacerbated by the fact that the umpire, Carlos Ramos, is a man and the player, Williams, a woman—and a woman of color at that?

Did Williams, without question the superstar of women’s tennis, deserve special consideration regarding the application of the sport’s arcane regulations at such a crucial time in such a big match? Did Williams’ past fits of pique, profanely threatening a lineswoman at the 2009 Open and fuming, “I truly despise you,” to a female chair umpire at the 2011 Open, factor into the Ramos-Williams dispute?

And what about the Arthur Ashe Stadium crowd, which poured fuel on Williams’ fiery protests with sustained booing that ultimately diminished 20-year-old Naomi Osaka’s eventual victory?

That last aspect recalled the chaos of a 1979 second-round Open match between John McEnroe and Ilie Nastase who, by the way, embodied what Williams cited as past behavior by men that she rightly said was worse than her on-court actions. That night, opponents widely disparaged as “Nasty” and “Super Brat” baited each other with whining and childish delays until chair umpire Frank Hammond—unable to control the non-action or the booing spectators—defaulted the match early in the fourth set.

Hammond had struggled to enforce the rules, as well as an order by tournament referee Mike Blanchard to “put Nastase on the clock—or else.” Yet when an exasperated Hammond finally (and correctly) proclaimed a premature end to the match, he was taken out of the chair and replaced by Blanchard to appease the unruly crowd. The craziness resumed toward a McEnroe victory.

Then even Hammond admitted afterwards that the players’ star power had superseded tennis law, calling Nastase, the more guilty of the two parties that night, “very colorful. He’s great for tennis.”

Last Saturday, Carlos Ramos chose not to apply a similar immunity to Serena Williams, in spite of her unprecedented accomplishments and vast popularity. After what amounted to a formal warning when Ramos cited Patrick Mouratoglou‘s illegal coaching hand-signals to Williams—a violation Williams denied but Mouratoglou acknowledged—Ramos docked Williams a point for smashing her racket, then a game when she called him a “liar” and “a thief,” leaving her on the brink of defeat.

Ramos’ series of verdicts were cast by Williams, and many observers, as evidence of a double standard applied to women—not only in tennis but in all of society’s venues.

Rebecca Traister, in The Cut column for New York Magazine, wrote that “a male umpire prodded Serena Williams to anger and then punished her for expressing it….She was punished for showing emotion, for defiance, for being the player she has always been—driven, passionate, proud and fully human.”

Furthermore, Traister wrote, Williams’ rage was an understandable means to “defy those rules designed and enforced by, yet so rarely forcefully applied to, white men.”

It is beyond dispute that McEnroe, Nastase, Jimmy Connors and—early in his career, Andre Agassi—were among male players repeatedly guilty of crass and offensive displays. And that, because large crowds paid to see them, they often got away with such boorish behavior. But Martina Navratilova, whose 18 major-tournament singles titles compare nicely with Williams’ 23, argued in a New York Times opinion piece, “I don’t believe it’s a good idea to apply a standard of ‘If the men get away with it, women should be able to, too.’ Rather, I think the question we have to ask ourselves is this: What is the right way to behave to honor our sport and to respect our opponents?”

A core ideal in sports—theoretically the one true meritocracy, no matter the participants’ ethnicity, appearance, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, economic status—is fairness. The “level playing field” and all that. In protesting Ramos’ application of code violations against her, by complaining, “It’s not fair,” Williams was reminding that sports can be as imperfect as the real world, populated as it is by flawed humanity; that the same rules in fact are not always applied to everyone.

So. In the end, was it fair—to both her and Naomi Osaka—to apply the rules to Williams?

The World Cup escape

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Comparative happiness is immoral. I’m not about to take pleasure in the fact that England currently suffers with some dreadful politicians stoking fear of immigrants and other perceived grievances. Besides, that sort of thing is abundantly available right here at home.

On the contrary, I am a bit jealous of how the English were afforded a temporary, euphoric respite from anti-social turmoil by the World Cup and their national team’s delightful run in the tournament.

It was just soccer and, in the end, the English lads didn’t necessarily reverse a self-deprecating “narrative of decline” described by Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker, that it’s been “all downhill since the end of the Second World War, or the end of the Empire, or 1066…”

Or the Brexit chaos that reportedly has Prime Minister Theresa May facing the possible collapse of her government. But by changing the subject—“Don’t You Know There’s a Bloody Game On?” the Sun newspaper headlined amid bad bureaucratic developments—the soccer team unleashed a unifying giddiness in pushing to the Cup semifinals for the first time since 1990.

From my perch in New York, and with the United States having failed to qualify for the first time since 1986, I allowed myself multiple, shifting allegiances from the start of the tournament. Spain, for its buzzing, precise passing and teamwork. Portugal, just to watch Cristiano Renaldo’s out-of-the-blue strikes. Argentina, in anticipation of Lionel Messi’s magic. Mexico, because our neighbors to the South deserve a break. Brazil, because Brazilian soccer is true performance art. Panama, because a tiny country making its World Cup debut is a beautiful thing, however it fares. France, based on a family ancestry going back many generations, and with the discovery of France’s wondrous teenager Kylian Mbappe.

The whole thing, even without a home team to follow, was a welcome escape from the daily—hourly—assault of depressing national and international news, an uplifting antidote to spreading xenophobia.

By the end of group play, I was all aboard the English bandwagon. Marveling at goalie Jordan Pickford’s lightning reactions. Raheem Sterling’s downfield sprints. Harry Maguire’s precise headers. Manager Gareth Southgate’s formal attire (a vest?). Harry Kane’s relentlessly unmussed hair in spite of his diving, lurching, rumbling charges toward goal—not to mention his role as the target of repeated fouls. (“A friend,” reported my daughter, who now lives in London, “called him ‘the most English person possible.’”)

Even England’s excruciating extra-time loss to Croatia in the semifinals couldn’t break the celebratory fever. The soccer anthem “Three Lions,” with its bullish chorus originally written when England hosted the 1996 European Championships, was revived with a vengeance:

It’s coming home/It’s coming home/It’s coming/Football’s coming home.

Because England invented soccer, the natives nurture an assumed superiority regarding the sport—but offset by the contained melancholy of knowing their side has won the World Cup only once, in 1966. And, since then, repeatedly has endured the cruelest of losses in major international tournaments, six times beaten in penalty shootouts, beginning with the 1990 World Cup semis.

A sidebar: I covered that shootout loss for Newsday, in Turin, Italy. The English manager then was Bobby Robson, who gamely declared that he and his team had “to put on a bright smile and accept it. There’s nothing you can do about it.” The English had played the Germans to a 1-1 tie through 90 exhausting minutes of regulation, plus 30 of extra time, only to lose the sport’s version of a game of H-O-R-S-E. Or something akin to taking turns throwing a football through a tire.

Of course it was noted then that the Germans had been England’s victims in the ’66 final, and that called to mind the English sportswriter who is said to have written, on the eve of the ’66 title match, a wickedly clever reference to matters beyond soccer:

“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.”

But, as I say, comparative happiness is immoral. And this World Cup did a good job of sidelining political stuff and cultural differences. While the English jauntily sang their “Three Lions” song (the title referencing the team’s official shield with national roots dating to the 12th Century):

Three lions on a shirt/Jules Rimet still gleaming/Thirty years of hurt/never stopped me dreaming. (Jules Rimet was the longtime soccer official after whom the World Cup trophy is named.)

It’s coming home/It’s coming home/It’s coming/Football’s coming home.

After England eliminated Sweden in the quarterfinals, my daughter texted that “People are driving around honking horns and singing out of windows….I just saw a young white kid on a bike yell, ‘It’s coming home’ and high-five two old black guys sitting on a bench as they yelled it back to him….Everyone here is talking about weather (in a good way) and the World Cup. It’s a lovely change in atmosphere.”

We could use some of that here in the Colonies.

Helmut Kohl, soccer and the Berlin Wall

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Helmut Kohl was at the game. March 26, 1990 in Dresden, East Germany. That was not quite five months since the fall of the Berlin Wall and six months prior to the official reunification of the two Germanys following 45 years of Cold War antagonism.

So the event, an old-timers’ soccer match featuring a Unified Germany team for the first time since the 1964 Olympics, was far more about symbolism than competition. And it was much more about Kohl, who was in the process of deftly engineering Germany’s new coexistence, than about the former international stars who were scurrying around on the field.

The Unified Germany side was stocked with retired fellows from East and West Germany’s separate 1974 World Cup teams, and pitted against a Rest Of The World outfit that featured such former international stars as England’s Bobby Charlton and Brazil’s Jairzinho. Yet the hardiest pre-game cheers from an overflow crowd of 38,000 were for Kohl, the West German chancellor.

Aside from his physical heft—he was 6-foot-4 and at least 300 pounds—Kohl brought a social and cultural weight to the process. He walked with spectators into the stadium. He performed the ceremonial pre-game kick-off. He mingled with players from both sides after the game. For purposes of sports? Or politics? “Probably both,” German soccer luminary Franz Beckenbauer said then.

News of Kohl’s death last week, at 87, brought all this to mind. A handful of us American sports journalists, who had been in East Berlin to cover a World Cup tune-up match that week between the United States and East Germany’s national team, commandeered rental cars and drove to Dresden to spend another day on the front porch of history.

We had been staying at a hotel on the East side of the Berlin Wall, short blocks from the Brandenburg Gate, cite of President Ronald Reagan’s 1987 “tear down this wall” speech. Steps away in the other direction was the Allied Checkpoint Charlie, where sidewalk vendors recently had set up a flea market peddling concrete chips of the wall and virtually entire military uniforms of Soviet and East German border guards, as well as various military pins that had been worn by those guards. It was like some gift shop on the way out of a museum dedicated to the Iron Curtain era.

We could walk through ragged new holes in the wall, no problem.

But for Germans, particularly in the East, there was a state of confusion with the sudden arrival of democratization and reunification. For one thing, East German money had become essentially worthless.

“Mr. Kohl told all the people, ‘Vote for my party and you will get [West German] deutschmarks,’” Sigfried Koenig, an East German sports official, told me. “Well, I voted for Mr. Kohl”—actually for Kohl’s sister party in the East. “I voted for deutschmarks. That was March 18. What is it now? March 28 already. Where are my deutschmarks?”

In fact, Kohl fulfilled his promise with remarkable speed. By that summer, he allowed the 17 million East German citizens to adopt the mighty West German mark at a rate of 1-to-1, an extraordinary economic stroke that further solidified his popularity and likely stanched a destabilizing flow of refugees from East to West.

Meanwhile, though, there was our Dresden adventure.

Forty-five years before, Dresden had been hit by the Allies’ worst firebombing of World War II. (Kurt Vonnegut’s brilliant 1969 novel, “Slaughterhouse Five,” was based on that horrific incident.) When we were there in March of 1990, the wartime ruins of the Frauenkirche church still were untouched. (Starting in 1994, the church was rebuilt as part of reunification.) The firebombing’s rubble from the city’s 16^th Century castle, the Schloss, likewise was visible. (Some of the proceeds from that Unified Germany soccer exhibition were earmarked to restore the Schloss, finally completed in 2013).

(Frauenkirche ruins)

Tickets had gone on sale two months before and were snapped up—at prices equivalent to $1.20 to $2.40, U.S.—in a half-hour. On the night of the game, scalpers were getting up to $40, U.S. We U.S. reporters were able to convince officials we belonged in the stadium by using the only word we could conjure in our rudimentary German: Zeitung. (Newspaper.)

Of no significance whatsoever was the soccer result—Rest Of The World, 3; Unified Germany, 1. But even that had its echoes of the hostile past that Kohl was working to mend. Charlton, the great English player who was then 52 years old, was mostly kidding when he said, “I suppose it would have been diplomatic to let the Germans win. But we’ve never been very diplomatic that way.”

That was reminiscent of one British sportswriter’s snarky advance story of the 1966 World Cup final, when Charlton and his English mates were about to take on Germany: “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.”

The beauty to March 26, 1990 in Dresden was that it was about neither soccer nor war, and that sports sometimes can be more than just sports. Political? Yes. And having seen Helmut Kohl score was a memorable occasion.

(My little piece of the Berlin Wall)

NHL’s Olympic disappearing act

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By banning their players from next year’s Winter Olympics in South Korea, NHL owners basically are going to spite their noses right off of their faces. They will not participate on international sport’s biggest stage, bypassing the added bonus of furthering the league’s desire to spread the NHL gospel to Asia, because—commissioner Gary Bettman somehow reasoned—the Olympics will cause the NHL to “disappear” for more than two weeks.

In fact, the Olympics has been a boon to NHL visibility since the league first signed onto the Winter Games 19 years ago, even in the face of shameful conduct by U.S. players at the 1998 Nagano Olympics. (More on that in a minute.)

The 2010 Olympic gold-medal final was the most-watched hockey game in North American television history—the NHL’s primary turf—seen by 27.6 million Americans and 22 million Canadians. Compare that to the measly 7.9 million who tuned in for Game Seven of the previous season’s Stanley Cup final on U.S. TV, or even the all-time largest Stanley Cup single-game TV audience of 13-plus million in 1972.

Prior to the 2010 Games, the highest rated hockey game featuring NHL players also was at the Olympics, in the 2002 gold-medal final. Donnie Kwak, writing for The Ringer web site, sensibly argued last week that “even the worst Olympic hockey game is more compelling than a regular-season NHL matchup in February.”

Especially, I contend, because the skating and puck-handling skills of he NHL’s best are magnified by Olympic rules that do not tolerate the NHL’s counterproductive acceptance of fighting. No other major professional sport puts up with—in fact, markets—such side-shows.

Yet Bettman brings an odd logic to that as well, accepting fighting as a pre-existing condition in his league. “It’s been there from the start,” he has said, “and what is done at other levels isn’t necessarily what’s appropriate at the professional level.”

Bettman has concluded that fighting “is part of the game” because NHL hockey is “intense and emotional.” A similarly timid reluctance to enforce good behavior is what gave the NHL a figurative black eye in its 1998 Olympic debut, when some (still unidentified) members of the U.S. team destroyed $3,000 worth of property in their rooms at the Nagano Games athletes’ village, then made matters worse by dismissing the incident as “blown out of proportion.”

Supposedly there were only three troublemakers who caused that damage, spitting in the face of overwhelming Japanese courtesy to the world’s visiting athletes, yet all 23 members of the team banded together to steadfastly refuse cooperation in the U.S. Olympic Committee’s subsequent investigation. The excuse was “team solidarity”—not ratting on the perpetrators of embarrassment to them and the entire U.S. Olympic delegation.

Not until a month later, under pressure from the U.S. Hockey Federation and the NHL Players Association, did the 1988 U.S. team captain, Chris Chelios, at last write a letter of apology to the Japanese people and the Olympic organizers, with a check of $3,000 included.

Somehow, Chelios and 13 of the disgraced Nagano veterans were allowed to represent the United States again at the 2002 Winter Games, possibly because a repeat of the Yanks’ roguish actions wouldn’t cause a similar international incident for Salt Lake City’s hosts. “We kept [the 1998 culprits] to ourselves for a reason,” Chelios claimed, without giving a reason. “People who needed to know what happened, they knew what happened.” He included Bettman among those people.

So the NHL establishment simply moved on with a boys-will-be-boys shrug, just as Bettman and league owners justify occasional, though persistent, goonery on the ice. But if a tradition of fisticuffs is OK in NHL games, what’s the common-sense argument by Bettman and the league owners that player injury is a major reason for skipping the 2018 Olympics?

With NHL rosters becoming more and more geographically diversified—more than one quarter of active NHL players come from outside North America—there is overwhelming sentiment among players to participate in the South Korea Games. Russians, Finns, Swedes, Czechs not only like the idea of wearing their national colors but also understand that their past presence in the Olympics has cultivated new fans for the NHL.

Even the American players, unlike those few ingrates in Nagano, have come to appreciate that the global exposure and competitive buzz of the Olympics far outpace the mucking in the corners of NHL rinks in mid-February. Without them in South Korea, the TV-ratings winners will be figure skating and snowboarding. And the NHL indeed will disappear for a couple of weeks.

The Cubs, the curse and daytime baseball

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Could it be that the final curse the star-crossed Cubs had to reverse was Major League Baseball’s building revolt against the last guardians of daytime baseball?

Let’s, for the moment, put aside the Billy Goat thing in 1945, Steve Bartman’s (quite reasonable) reach for a foul ball in 2003, the black cat moment in 1969, Babe Ruth’s called shot in 1932, Leon Durham’s fielding flub in 1984. When the Cubs, after 112 years of only afternoon home games, attempted their first night contest at Wrigley Field on Aug. 8, 1988, a fourth-inning downpour wiped out the proceedings.

“Someone up there seems to take day baseball seriously,” the Chicago Tribune editorialized the next day, throwing in the quote from a fan convinced that the heavens’ negative retort to artificial illumination “proves the Cubs are cursed.”

Another 28 years on, the Cubs at last have broken that evil spell on the sport’s biggest stage.

To review: In 1982, then-Cubs general manager Dallas Green first proposed lights for the Friendly Confines. Television, he said, was dictating that the team play at night, and he said that if the Cubs were to make the playoffs, they would be forced to move post-season home games to the rival White Sox’ crosstown Comiskey Park. Or possibly St. Louis.

He hinted—darkly—that, without the installation of permanent lights at Wrigley, the club would have no choice but to move, mentioning a tract of undeveloped land in the Schaumburg suburb, Northwest of the city. About that time, Major League Baseball decreed that, should the Cubs ever return to the World Series for the first time since 1945, their home games would be shifted to an alternate, lighted site.

Sure enough, in 1984, in the midst of Green’s campaign to light up Wrigley, the last outdoor World Series day game was played. San Diego (which had benefited mightily from the Leon Durham error in the league championship series) at Detroit.

(Wrigley before lights)

Now, think of Ernie Banks, Mr. Cub. Not, specifically, the “Let’s play two” Banks, always eager to go extra innings; more generally, the perpetually sunny-disposition Banks.

Think of C.U.B.S.—Citizens United for Baseball in Sunshine—a 1980s neighborhood group on Chicago’s North Side that fought against the establishment of night baseball for the Cubs.

Think of a widely held notion at the time that putting lights at Wrigley was akin to drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa. Think of Bill Veeck, the brilliant baseball executive who had been a Wrigley Field popcorn vendor as a boy and later was responsible for creating the distinctive touch of covering Wrigley’s outfield walls with ivy. To Veeck, Wrigley’s special charm was its commitment to day games, to “make people discover how lovely it is to come and sit in the sun and enjoy a game.”

When C.U.B.S. mobilized protests, its members said they would accept temporary lighting as long as the vast majority of games remained in the afternoon. But Dallas Green called them “inflexible.” In 1985, Green declared that the Cubs would be gone from Wrigley “in five years” unless permanent lights were installed. “We’re dead to this neighborhood,” he said then.

(Cincinnati’s Crosley Field, May 24, 1935)

The first Major League regular-season game played at night was on May 24, 1935, in Cincinnati. By 1939, every team except the Cubs had installed permanent lighting, though it wasn’t until 1971 that a World Series game started after sundown—Baltimore at Pittsburgh.

So maybe MLB won out with the entire 2016 Cubs-Cleveland Indians World Series played under the lights. Did you notice, though, that when the Cubs finally threw off the hex of championship disappointment after 108 years, it was morning? 12:57 a.m.

The Cubs fan litmus test. And Hillary Clinton.

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Are you with the Cubs in this partisan fight? If so, should you be required to show your papers? Does it matter whether you were born a Cubs fan—as opposed to being a previously undecided outsider just become drawn to trickle-down excitement?

It’s just baseball. And yet it is abundantly clear that some people out there believe there should be a litmus test. That being a member of the Cubs party now should be restricted to those who can provide indisputable proof. (Photo IDs, maybe?) That they be required to have experienced the Cubs’ overwrought mythology, to know how it feels to be Tantalus or Sisyphus, to have gone through at least a significant part of the team’s 108 years of solitude.

Here’s an example: Hillary Clinton. According to GOP.com, she is “Bandwagon Hillary.” She is “jumping on Chicago’s bandwagon [and] like with every other matter….switches allegiance with sports teams like positions on issues.” GOP.com reminded that, when she was running for the Senate in New York in 2000, she claimed she had “always been a Yankees fan.”

We probably shouldn’t be allowing World Series loyalties to be leaching into the contentious White House campaign. But it is a given that sports-team passions can get a bit manic around championship time. (If you don’t believe it, listen to sports talk radio.) And just as true is the time-honored tradition of politicians using sports identity to demonstrate their regular-folks bona fides.

Still, I’m going to defend Clinton’s right to declare herself a Cubs fan. First of all, isn’t everybody drawn to the long-suffering Cubs now? Outside of Cleveland Indians territory, anyway? Check out this map, a World Series sendup of the ubiquitous red state/blue state presidential election forecasts, that is circulating on the Internet.

Beyond the fairly universal appeal of the Cubs’ Halley’s Comet-like star turn, there is data to support Clinton’s logical and lengthy connection to the team. She was born in Chicago (two years into the Cubs’ 71-year absence from the World Series) and raised in the city’s Park Ridge suburb, less than 10 miles from the Cubs’ historic Wrigley Field home. Her father was a Cubs fan. Her brothers, with whom she watched plenty of Cubs’ games on television, were Cubs fans.

In 1993, when she was First Lady, Clinton was offered membership in the Emil Verban Memorial Society, an exclusive club of Washington-based Cubs fans named for a Cubs infielder from the late 1940s and early 50s who was said to epitomize the team by being “competent but obscure and typifying the team’s work ethic.”

That a player such as Verban, who hit .095 in 1950, should be fervently embraced in that forgiving way is yet another indication of Cub allegiance, especially since society members were among the nation’s most successful folks—Ronald Reagan, retired Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, TV personalities Bryant Gumbel and Bruce Morton, golfer Ray Floyd, actor Tom Bosley and conservative columnist George Will among them.

What some commentators and Republican Party operatives object to, regarding Clinton’s fandom, is that she indeed admitted to rooting for the Yankees in general—and Mickey Mantle in particular—as a child, in part because she admitted that a Cubs fan so often needs the fallback of having a team that wins once in a while.

Among those who have questioned Clinton on the matter is Chicago Sun-Times Washington bureau chief Lynn Sweet in a recent column, and political commentator Chris Matthews, who had asked when she donned a Yankee cap during her Senate campaign, “Doesn’t she know she looks like a fraud?”

This protestation of multi-team fandom, unreasonable to my mind, recalls the late Bill Searby, one of my first bosses at Newsday in the early 1970s. The way his colleagues told it, Searby had taken advantage of the G.I. Bill to complete his education after his service days, and wound up attending several colleges. As the scores came over the wire on football Saturdays, more than one winner would prompt Searby to exult: “That’s my team!”

“Which one?” his co-workers would snicker. I think they were jealous.

Going ‘way back in (black) baseball history from Cubs’ Fowler

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(Dexter Fowler)

Baseball coincidence is a fascinating thing. Consider just one in the many notable tidbits related to the end of the woebegone Chicago Cubs’ 71-year World Series drought—a fellow named Fowler becoming the team’s first black man to play in the Fall Classic.

That’s Dexter Fowler, a 30-year-old outfielder who, rather symbolically, was the lead-off batter in Game 1 against the Cleveland Indians. The significance of Fowler’s presence, though, isn’t related to some new civil rights breakthrough. Rather, it is another reminder of how long ago the Cubbies last appeared on the sport’s biggest stage. So long ago, in 1945, that the Big Leagues still were two years from getting around to the initial step of desegregation, in the person of Jackie Robinson.

(Jackie Robinson)

But here is the really curious statistic that does connect Fowler to racial inclusion in our national pastime. According to Baseball Hall of Fame records, the first black man on a white professional baseball team—roughly 70 years before Robinson and twice that long before Dexter Fowler—was a gent known as Bud Fowler.

(Bud Fowler)

Bud Fowler lived from 1854 to 1913 and, beginning in 1878, claimed to have played for predominantly white teams in 22 states and Canada. He was primarily a second baseman. Yellowed newspaper clippings in the Hall of Fame archives describe him as a “versatile, fast, slick fielder.” A Cincinnati Inquirer article published in the early 1900s reported that “Bud has played games for trappers’ furs. He has been rung in to help out a team for the championship of a mining camp and bags of gold dust. He has played with cowboys and Indians. He has cross-roaded it from one town to another all over the Far West, playing for what he could get and taking a hand to help out a team.”

It turns out that Bud Fowler was born John W. Jackson, son of a barber in Cooperstown, N.Y., home to the baseball Hall. There is no information on why or how he changed his name from Jackson, though he was said to be called “Bud” because of his inclination to address most people by that name. He never married, died broke and is buried in a pauper’s field just outside Cooperstown’s city limits, where a tombstone was placed on his grave in 1987 to note his place in baseball history.

He was 5-7, 155 pounds (compared to Dexter Fowler’s 21^st-Century dimensions of 6-5, 195.) Bud batted and threw righthanded. (Dexter is a switch-hitter who throws righthanded.) Like Bud, Dexter has had a number of baseball homes, playing for 10 teams at various minor-league levels—the Modesto Nuts, Waikiki Beach Boys and Tulsa Drillers among them—on his way to a nine-year Major League career with Colorado, Houston and now Chicago. And, while Dexter already has earned more than $32 million playing the game, he has a long way to go to equal Bud’s longevity.

According to that century-old Inquirer story, Bud Fowler “has been playing baseball for the past 26 years and he is yet as spry and as fast in his actions as any man on his team. He has no Charley horses or stiff joints, but can bend over and get up a grounder like a young blood….he is 48 years old, but to look at him, you would set him down to be not more than 25.” The Inquirer piece ended with the invitation to “go out and see him play second base this afternoon.”

In 1997, on the 50^th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s entry into the Majors, an Eastern Michigan University history professor, Sidney Gendin, published a paper calling Fowler “first of at least 40 blacks who played on teams in organized white baseball leagues before the turn of the century. But in the mid-1880s, with deteriorating social mores pushing blacks out of the minors, Fowler spent more time barnstorming, during which he would help support himself by working as a barber. He started his own all-black team based in Adrian, Mich., sponsored by a wire fence company, the Page Fence Giants, who toured the Midwest in the team’s own railroad car.”

Also in ’97, the Hall of Fame opened an exhibit, “Pride and Passion: The African-American Baseball Experience,” which prominently featured Bud Fowler’s role as grand marshal in the parade of long-ago baseball integration. That was before segregationists established the infamous “color line” that lasted until Robinson.

(Larry Doby)

At the opening of that exhibit, by the way, among the invited participants was Larry Doby—the first black player in the American League, who debuted months after Robinson had done so with the National League Brooklyn Dodgers. Doby’s team was the Cleveland Indians, Dexter Fowler’s current World Series opponents. And Doby, along with teammate Satchel Paige, became the first black men to win a World Series title, in 1948—the Indians’ last championship season.

Hmmm.

Centrowitz, reclycled

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“Are you kidding me?”

It was a good question, one that Matthew Centrowitz said he put to “everyone I know” in the moments after he won the Olympic 1500-meter final, having shocked three-time world champion and 2008 Olympic gold medalist Asbel Kiprop of Kenya as well as the rest of the field. “Everyone” included Matthew’s father, Matt Centrowitz Sr., who was celebrating wildly in the stands of Rio de Janeiro’s Maracana Stadium as his son took a victory lap.

“Are you —– kidding me?” Matt Sr. shouted back. Whereupon the two commenced volleying the phrase back and forth.

Kiprop aside, it has been Olympic doctrine that Americans just don’t come through in the so-called “metric mile,” 120 yards shy of a mile, which vies with the 100-meter dash as the most appealing of track and field’s events. The last Yank to prevail at that captivating Olympic distance, in 1908, was Mel Sheppard, a man whose application to become a New York City policeman somehow was rejected on the basis of a “weak heart.”

So it could be said that, in Rio, Centrowitz’s karma ran over Olympic prognosticator’s dogma. A real dent in accepted belief. In 1912 (Abel Kiviat), 1936 (Glenn Cunningham), 1968 and 1972 (Jim Ryun), Americans were pre-race favorites based on the fact that they held the world record in either the mile or 1500—or both—entering the Games, yet repeatedly failed to win gold, until it became normal procedure. Other legitimate U.S. threats at the distance, Marty Liquori in the 1970s and Alan Webb in 2004, also succumbed short of Olympic glory to injury or strategic muddles.

Anyway, for those of us who began reporting on track and field happenings in prehistoric times, there were lots of echoes to young Centrowitz’ breakthrough, beyond repeated Are-you-kidding-me astonishment. It was four decades ago that I covered a handful of Matt Centrowitz Sr.’s elite races, including his runner-up finish in the 1976 U.S. Olympic trials at 1500 meters and his victory in the 1980 trials at 5,000 meters.

(I also interviewed Abel Kiviat, by the way. Not during his 1912 Games in Stockholm. Rather, in 1982, when Kiviat was then the oldest living U.S. Olympian at 90, we chatted about his disappointment in losing the 1912 Olympic 1500 by a tenth of a second, and about his Olympic roommate, a fellow named Jim Thorpe, whom Kiviat remembered fondly.)

EUGENE, OR - JUNE 29: Matt Centrowitz (white jersey) and Dick Buerkle #51 (red jersey) compete in the final of the Men's 5000 meter event of the 1980 USA Track and Field Olympic Trials held on June 29, 1980 at Hayward Field on the campus of the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon. (Photo by David Madison/Getty Images

(Matt Sr., 1980)

The senior Centrowitz is a native of The Bronx who had come to prominence at Power Memorial High School in Manhattan—basketball hall-of-famer Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s school, since closed—and for one year at Manhattan College before transferring to the University of Oregon, then and now a track powerhouse. He was a genuine mile star in his time, having broken the school record of the late Oregon legend Steve Prefontaine, though Centrowitz’ 1976 Olympic experience ended abruptly. He was eliminated in the first round, finishing sixth in his 1500 heat. And, in 1980, President Jimmy Carter’s boycott of the Moscow Games left Centrowitz home with the rest of the U.S. team.

But maybe what’s past is prologue. When the storied old Millrose Games downsized from a half-century of annual Madison Square Garden productions to Upper Manhattan’s chaotic Armory building in 2012, a skinny lad named Matthew Centrowitz—recently turned pro after a career at the University of Oregon—brought down the house by winning the featured mile in a hot 3:53.92.

He didn’t look that much like the Matt Centrowitz I remembered. A better tan. No mustache. Shorter hair. Finer features. But the kid could motor and, sure enough, it was—as the tattoo on young Centrowitz’ chest proclaims—“Like father, like son.”

It is unbecoming for a sports journalist to root for a team or individual athlete and, anyway, I didn’t have time for cheering while cranking out a story on deadline that night. But in the Rio final, to watch Matthew Centrowitz’ execution of an apparently risky, yet ultimately brilliant game plan—his dawdling early pace, his insistence on controlling matters from the front of the pack throughout the race, his blistering final lap—was good stuff. And to see his dad, a guy who has been in the arena, come essentially unglued with the result, was—I don’t know—Olympic.

Are you kidding me?

(Statue of the mythological Echo in Seattle, next to a running path)

John Jeansonne

Newsday sportswriter emeritus/Hofstra University journalism adjunct

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Centrowitz, reclycled