Ten-hut!

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Tempus may fugit but, in the sports world, there is increasing concern that time is dragging for younger audiences; they aren’t having enough fun and a tedium over the length of games is highlighting a preference for…highlights. Only highlights.

That’s a problem for leagues paying enormous television rights fees to broadcast live events.

At a recent two-day New York City conference for professional sports league CEOs, billionaire team owners and high-profile media moguls, NBA commissioner Adam Silver echoed some worried executives working with the National Football League by noting an estimated 70-percent drop in game viewership among the 18-to-34-year-old demographic.

“People,” Silver lamented, “are living on their phones.” And that leads to what Daniel Cohen, a vice president for the Octagon sports and entertainment agency, called the “double-edged sword” of leagues’ social-media deals.

“At what point,” Cohen asked at the conference, “does putting up all these highlights on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and your own websites cannibalize your audience? There has to be a shift back toward capping the abundance of highlights that are accessible there if you want to maintain exclusivity and a premium price on your rights.”

For years, sports leagues’ control-tower responsibilities have included struggling with spectators’ shorter attention spans. Baseball, especially, has brain-stormed rule changes in attempts to pick up the pace and generate excitement, to somehow present something closer to exploding car-chase scenes than Masterpiece Theatre. Given the trends, though, the prognosis is not particularly bright.

Consider a Penn State University course study that cited social medial and technology for reducing teenagers’ ability to stay focused on anything for more than eight seconds. A report by the National Center for Biotechnology Information came up with the same statistic, concluding that the average human’s attention span dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to those eight seconds in 2013. One second less than that of a goldfish!

That kind of wandering concentration has been exacerbated in sports by the onset of legalized betting and the whole fantasy landscape. The result is making outlets such as the NFL’s Red Zone cable channel, which flits around the league to zero in exclusively on scoring chances, ideal for goldfish.

But by sticking to just game highlights, the Red Zone and similar fare are unmoored from the big picture, lacking context. Highlights are Cliff Notes to novels, Twitter posts to robust storytelling. Is that a smart way to cultivate the next generation of fans?

As long ago as 2013, Forbes magazine reported that the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars had considered displaying the Red Zone on their stadium video board during games, and ultimately created a “Fan Cave”—a 7,000-square-foot lounge atop one end zone with WiFi and 18 flat-screen televisions providing Red Zone access. That assured that paying customers could turn their attention away from the game in front of them to seek more stimulating action around the league. (Cheaper to just stay home and turn on the tube, no?)

Highlights—though spectacular and climactic—exist in a vacuum, robbing viewers of plot development, a setting, themes, subplots, dilemmas and other details that flesh out the larger tale. As such, highlights can’t help contributing to the proliferation of restless, inattentive souls.

And possibly goldfish.

More than bad P.R.

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There is a guy out there who calls himself the Reputation Doctor and I can think of at least two prominent veterans of the football coaching trade who could use his services right now. A sort of surgeon specializing in character repair, his name is Mike Paul, who has been praised by BusinessWeek as “The Master of Disaster;” by Sports Illustrated as “Mr. Fixit;” by various political leaders as “The Crisis King.”

And if there ever were public figures in need of esteem convalescence, we could start with Jon Gruden and Urban Meyer, a couple of fellows who appear to consider themselves apart from polite society. Judging by recently revealed emails and videotapes, Gruden and Meyer seemed to assume the job bestowed unlimited access to power and privilege, a free pass to belittle and badger whomever they pleased.

I once spoke to the Reputation Doctor while reporting on an embarrassing transgression by some accomplished sports star or other. Of course he spoke only in general terms, since he was not working with that athlete, but a central tidbit he did offer was that “if they were my clients, I’d say, ‘You don’t want people to doubt your word.’”

Which gets right to the problem with Gruden and Meyer. Gruden, after detailed revelations of racist, sexist and homophobic emails he had authored over several years, insisted he had “not a blade of racism in me” and claimed he “never meant to hurt anyone.” He resigned as Las Vegas Raiders coach under pressure—amid the high probability that not a soul believed his weak mea culpa.

Meyer called evidence of him canoodling with a young woman in a suburban Columbus, Ohio bar, after he had skipped his Jacksonville team’s flight home from its loss in Cincinnati, proof only of “a bad decision…stupid.” Jacksonville owner Shad Kahn called Meyer’s behavior “inexcusable” but kept him around for the Jaguars’ fifth consecutive loss the next weekend. Meyer’s questionable conduct aside, losing five straight games in his first NFL job is not a good career look.

Meanwhile, character witnesses have not exactly rushed to either man’s defense and subsequent reporting not only reinforced unsavory qualities in both coaches, but raised the question of whether they represented a decidedly low standard among their peers.

Writing for Slate, Alex Kirshner called Gruden “a spitting image of the worst stereotype you had in your head of a meathead, authoritarian football coach” and concluded that Gruden’s attitude toward Blacks, women and gays “wasn’t an affront to the NFL as much as an embodiment of it.”

New York Magazine’s Will Leitch contended that it is “becoming increasingly clear” that the Gruden’s emails were “about the entire culture of the NFL….You want to know what the NFL is really like? The Gruden emails—again, sent by one of the most powerful figures in the league, without the slightest worry of reproach, to top-ranking NFL officials at their corporate email addresses—are the opening pages of the entire story…”

William Rhoden of The Undefeated argued that the “reality is that the NFL, for all its attempts to move forward, has been revealed as a regressive organization populated by white men who hold views about race and power that are antithetical to progress and enlightenment. Trust me, Gruden is not the only person who holds these beliefs. He’s the only one stupid enough, or emboldened enough, to express them via email.” At The Atlantic, Jemele Hill declared that “the NFL is full of Jon Grudens.”

Urban Meyer has not been similarly cast as reflecting league-wide boorishness—not yet, anyway. But shortly after he took the Jacksonville job, there was a published reminder that one of his first hires was strength coach Chris Doyle, who had been forced out at the University of Iowa over allegations he had made racist statements and had bullied players. (Doyle resigned months ago but denied any wrongdoing.)

Sounds like the NFL needs more than a public relations medic.

Water break

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

Anyone here old enough to remember the song “Cool Water”? The tale of a parched man traveling a wasteland with his mule, tormented by mirages, it was written in 1936, first recorded in 1941 (still before my time), but revived occasionally, including during my youth in the 1950s.

The yearning refrain — “cool … clear … water” — pops into mind with what seems to be increasingly hot, humid weather, when I’m lucky enough to have plentiful access to transparent, tasteless, odorless H2O. The best liquid refreshment there is, really.

I was chatting by phone with my brother recently as he went about one of his typically physical labors amid the suffocating heat near his Texas home, when I recalled how my favorite part of the day — back when he and I worked in the West Texas oil fields during our high-school summers — was the water break.

“I kinda preferred quitting time,” he said.

Well, yes. It is certainly possible to overdo long hours of digging ditches, stringing pipeline, wrenching together various structures that — mysteriously to me — would deliver petroleum products to the public. My thoroughly informal title in that process was roustabout, defined as “an unskilled or semiskilled laborer, especially in an oil field or refinery.” I recently came across a survey by CareerCast, rating jobs based on environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress, that judged roustabout to be the absolute worst.

Still, that time is a pleasant recollection, for several reasons. First of all, that was before a climate-change awareness that the use of fossil fuels is wrecking the planet, so to have been a cog in that destruction is not something I had to struggle with.

The work was demanding enough — ever try to dig a trench in the sedimentary rock called caliche? — and hours in temperatures regularly near 100 degrees were long enough (10 a day, six days a week). There was, however, the favorable cost-benefit analysis that the gig would last a mere three months before high school classes resumed and the banked money would get me through college — thereby assuring a permanent farewell to oil field drudgery by the age of 18.

That’s the lesson, kiddos. Heavy toil isn’t so bad at that age; in fact, it reinforces a man-over-mouse self-worth so long as it solidifies the conviction that there are more fun ways to earn a living. In my case, a half century in journalism.

My boss then, the gang-pusher, was a 40-something gentleman of admirable work ethic, kindness and a sense of humor named Walter H. Cox. (“What’s the ‘H’ for?” we’d ask. “Hurry,” he always said, more a command than an answer.) Walter once told me how he had dropped out of high school to take an oil field job because of the good (comparatively) money available. He never expressly acknowledged regretting the decision, but all those years later the money hadn’t gotten much better and the work was just as physically demanding.

One summer, there were two older fellows on the crew — they seemed ancient; probably in their late 40s or early 50s — who occasionally wouldn’t show up Sunday mornings (our day off was Saturday). Walter guessed they might have relaxed from a long, sweaty week by spending too much of their pay on drinks (not water).

So, short on manpower one Sunday, Walter stopped the truck on the way to the oil patch and ducked into the local bar — this was at 5:30 in the morning — and fetched a young fellow lured by the promise of a quick single-day check. The lad lasted until about 1 p.m., then literally walked off the job, slowly disappearing over the flat horizon of barren mesquite and dust. I suppose he was able, after a mile or so to the nearest highway, to hitch a ride. Maybe right back to the bar.

The rest of us had just resumed duties after our usual half-hour lunch hour — which for me always included a quick 10-minute nap under the truck, the only place to find a little shade, after a hearty repast of four sandwiches and ice cream, kept cold in a small thermos. (God bless my mother.)

A few more chores and it was time for a break. And — no mirage — some cool, clear water.

 

Mind games

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One danger in sports journalism, a profession I have enjoyed for a half-century, is engaging in amateur psychology. That may be because there are so many occasions for potential malpractice, such as addressing tennis champion Naomi Osaka’s recent public scuffle regarding her self-worth.

At 23, Osaka’s sporting achievements already have made her fabulously compensated, uncommonly marketable and widely admired. And, by her own account, thoroughly joyless. After the latest of her rare on-court disappointments, a third-round loss in this year’s U.S. Open—which she has won twice—she tearfully announced an indefinite sabbatical. Because, she said, “when I win, I don’t feel happy. I feel more like relief. And then when I lose, I feel very sad. And I don’t think that’s normal.”

An unqualified shrink, armed with only a press credential, might wonder about the irony of such dissatisfaction. Or the source. Might the expectations that haunt Osaka come from so much early success? Or from the relentless winning-is-the-only-thing culture that pervades the sports world, echoed by fans, Internet scolds, talk radio and the athletic community itself?

Shortly before the Open commenced, Osaka posted on social media that she was ready to leave her “extremely self-deprecating” habits behind, admitting she has felt “I’m never good enough….I’ve never told myself that I’ve done a good job, but I know I constantly tell myself that I suck or I could do better.”

It’s easy to marvel at how a life of elite athletic competition not only would have established that the existence of a scoreboard is evidence that the goal of playing is to win, but also that sport is a zero-sum thing: There always will be a loser as well as a winner.

“It sucks in tennis that there’s a winner and loser every single day,” top-ranked Ashleigh Barty said after she was beaten midway through the Open. “But you can’t win every single tennis match that you play….”

At Wimbledon, the oldest and most celebrated of the sport’s major tournaments, two lines from Englishman Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” are written on the wall of the players’ entrance to Centre Court:

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two imposters just the same…

There are other versions of that, countering the cliché that athletic victory is a defining moral trait (though they are not necessarily embraced by athletes or their followers). Grantland Rice—a sportswriter!—declared in the 1940s that “it’s not that you won or lost but how you played the game.” Modern Olympic founder Pierre de Coubertin said that “the most important thing…is not winning but taking part.”

The reality, of course, is that a faulty, straight-line connection between hoisting a championship trophy and one’s personal merit—between a sports loss and some character flaw—constantly is reinforced by so many who have the critic’s megaphone or an Instagram account.

After losing at the Open, another of the tournament’s former champions, Sloane Stephens, posted that more than 2,000 abusive messages were sent her way, though she had been beaten by a worthy opponent, three-time major-tournament winner Angelique Kerber. From total strangers, there were curses, threats of physical harm and suggestions that Stephens be jailed.

Sometimes the other player wins. And so what? Even an amateur should realize that the psychological danger is the all-too-common habit of seeking to assign blame for a loss.

 

What if….

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My idea of play changed after 9/11. But not quite as I expected. As a sports journalist, working in the world of fun-and-games—reporting from the “toy department” in the estimation of many newsside colleagues—my immediate reaction to that day included the realization, hardly atypical, of how insignificant ball games were.

Amid a national mood that ranged from insecurity to ethnic profiling to seeking revenge through American military might—with an entire country, Afghanistan, initially targeted over the deeds of the guilty terrorists—a sporting emphasis was difficult to rationalize.

Until I read an essay in Salon by Allen Barra shortly after the attacks. To Barra, a problem with Afghanistan, which had become a safe haven for the likes of al-Qaeda and the brutal Taliban, was that it was “badly in need of some national pastimes.

”Forget about cutting back on games here [in the United States],” he wrote. “Maybe we should look to getting them involved over there. Before we drop bombs on them, maybe we should try some basketballs.”

Basketballs? As an answer to the some 3,000 murdered and 25,000 injured in four coordinated attacks on the East Coast? Frivolous? Or, as Barra argued, a far better source of activity—not to mention a model for young people to emulate—than more violence?

Barra’s was the sort of reasoning that Johann Olav Koss, the great Olympic speedskating champion, cited for organizing the donation Of 12 tons of sports equipment that he personally delivered to children amid civil strife in Eastern Africa in the 1990s. He had seen how “the martyrs” during Eritrea’s war against Ethiopia had become the standard of admiration there.

“I don’t think that’s good for children to have people who die in wars as their ideals,” Koss said. ”If they could have sport, to be healthy, to have a social connection, that would be good.”

Shortly after the 9/11 destruction, when so many of us were trying to figure out why and who, I sought out some with first-hand experience in Afghanistan. It hadn’t been that long ago—before the Soviets invaded in the late 1970s and years of war set the stage for religious extremists there—that Afghanistan in fact had basketballs to occupy citizens.

Tom Gouttierre, recently retired after 40 years as director of the Center of Afghan Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, had spent 10 years of Peace Corps service in Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1970s.

With his Peace Corps buddies, Gouttierre created a set of basketball leagues there, finding “excellent athletes” among the natives, “these mountain people who can run like gazelles and run forever, with tremendous lung capacities. I used to love for other teams from sea level to come into Afghanistan and play us. We’d run ‘em to death.”

At one point, Gouttierre learned that a young American basketball pro and Rhodes Scholar was visiting and asked him to give his players tips on shooting jump shots. The player was the Knicks star Bill Bradley.

Gouttierre translated basketball lingo into Persian and gave names of historical figures in Afghan history to his formations, so Genghis Khan was a 1-3-1 defense and Iskandar (Alexander) was 1-2-2. At the time, he said, soccer was popular, and volleyball , field hockey and team handball, with a long history of Afghan wrestling and boxing. Girls and women played sports then, especially basketball and volleyball, before sports lost out to ongoing wars.

By the late 1990s, when the United Nations refused to recognize the Taliban government, Afghanistan became the only one of the International Olympic Committee’s 200 nations suspended by the IOC, which cited the fact that women had been banned from sport, a direct violation of IOC rules.

Gouttierre said the Taliban reminded him of H.L. Mencken’s description of a Puritan’s “living in mortal dread that somewhere someone is having fun.”

So, maybe if there had been some more fun to be had over there….

 

How to be a good teammate

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(A version of this appeared in Newsday’s Opinion pages)

Start with the obvious. Social distancing will not facilitate sacking the quarterback. Or just about any other jock endeavor. Competitive sports cannot happen from home via Zoom on a laptop. And masking, though helpful in some situations, clearly isn’t the answer for athletic duties that involve physical proximity, relentless travel and adhering to schedules that are not conducive to quarantine interruptions.

You can see where this is going. Incapable of operating remotely, sports leagues, more than most businesses, need their employees to be vaccinated to avoid Covid cooties and the attendant headaches.

Just as clear, in a land where the sports establishment is deeply embedded in our culture and its wars, is the fact that some high-profile athletes are protesting the inoculation push. So let’s consider how their arguments are not particularly sound.

The freedom-and-personal-choice claim, for instance. What are the chances that the National Football League will stand still for having unvaccinated players gumming up its massive financial commitments to provide televised entertainment? This, after all, is the so-called No Fun League, known for meting out punishment against such picayune violations as untucked jerseys and touchdown celebrations.

In an occupation that promises Darwinian competition for jobs and historically short careers, the NFL has further tightened the noose for survival: Unvaccinated players this season will face the loss of paychecks if they are the cause of Covid outbreaks resulting in forfeitures.

The National Hockey League reportedly is considering withholding per-game salaries for any player sidelined by the virus. Major League Baseball so far has opted for extending more personal privileges—more freedom!—to vaccinated players while stopping short of a vaccine mandate, aware that it must negotiate the matter with the players union and that their collective bargaining agreement expires in December.

Since athletes’ livelihoods are based on their physical well-being, there certainly are those who (irrationally) reject the vaccine in the belief that they possess greater knowledge of the human body than the medical community. (“I’m not a doctor but I’m playing one now…”) Or that they don’t yet have enough information regarding vaccine safety, though league officials, team doctors, union reps and government officials have been broadcasting the relevant data for months. Now that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has given its stamp of approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, that player defense has collapsed.

So here’s a quid pro quo that sounds overwhelmingly reasonable for both sides: If all players do their teams (and the general public) the kindness of submitting to vaccines, the players in exchange will be freed from enduring last year’s annoying protocols of competing in fan-less “bubbles” away from home and family, traveling in split parties, quarantining, undergoing constant testing and holding team meetings on Zoom.

And here might be a bonus, beyond providing the safe resumption of spectator fun and games for the masses: As semi-celebrities, accomplished athletes often are granted the status of role-modeling. They don’t necessarily have the expertise, nor the intellectual horsepower, to discourse on matters of science. But that doesn’t stop them from receiving disproportionate attention whenever they air wide-ranging pronouncements.

Given that reality, doesn’t it follow that professional athletes’ public acceptance of Covid vaccines would reinforce mandates similar to New York City’s requirement that all public high school athletes and coaches be inoculated to participate in the “high-risk” sports—defined as football, basketball, wresting, volleyball, lacrosse and rugby? (Nassau and Suffolk officials have not taken this step.)

As a sports journalist for half a century, I am a fan of athletic performance, drawn to the drama of games, the participants’ physical feats, the presence of quirky characters. But when it comes to a pandemic and the anti-vaccine blatherings from the likes of baseball’s Anthony Rizzo and football’s Cole Beasley, among other impressively skilled athletes, I’m convinced that our real freedom is having access to the educated judgement of all-star epidemiologists.

These players need to take one for the team.

A sporting chance?

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Herschel Walker was a 19-year-old college junior when bumper stickers around the University of Georgia campus implored, “Herschel for Governor.” The exhortation had nothing to do with young Walker’s political stances, executive experience, legislative ambitions or anything of the kind. It merely reflected the ga-ga adoration for a star athlete, the non sequitur leap from celebrity status to legislative bona fides.

Forty years later, it is Walker himself proposing “Herschel for Senator,” even though his resume remains essentially the same: Football player of legendary proportions. He has whopping name recognition but no government-related training or experience. And there are some skeletons in his closet that still have skin on them.

He has acknowledged dealing with a multiple-personality disorder and violent behavior, has been accused by his ex-wife of death threats, and his current wife is being investigated for voting illegally. He is running for a Senate seat representing his native Georgia but has lived in Texas for decades. He has been cited for greatly exaggerating business profits while dramatically undercounting the number of his employees to apply for a federal Paycheck Protection Program loan.

So the question is whether mere sportsworld fandom, with its low threshold of curiosity regarding administrative knowhow or personal flaws, might again lift a well-known athletic figure into office, as it did with former Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville. Caitlin (ne: Bruce) Jenner might be counting on a similar dynamic in California’s gubernatorial recall.

Walker did attain electoral victory in winning the 1981 Heisman Trophy, college football’s top honor—when all the voters were sportswriters, sportscasters and former Heisman winners.

That prompted him to skip his senior year at Georgia and commence an impressive 16-year professional playing career, first with the upstart—and short-lived—USFL’s New Jersey Generals before playing 13 years for four NFL teams. The Generals, originally owned by Oklahoma oil tycoon J. Walter Duncan, were sold in Walker’s second season to a New York real estate developer named Donald Trump, who now happens to be the loudest voice pushing Walker’s senate run.

Now 59, Walker long has considered himself a renaissance man—he has branded his food services business with that title—who never saw the need for traditional job preparation. He declined to participate in spring football practice at Georgia because he preferred running track and he eschewed weight lifting because he “reckoned” he was plenty strong without it.

“All my life,” he said, “people would say, ‘Herschel, you can’t do this. Herschel, you can’t do that.’ All my life I’ve done things I’m not supposed to be able to do….As long as you don’t tell your mind what you are, you can be anything you want.”

Admirable self-confidence. But his “anything” always was rooted in his football reputation, including being recruited to attempt Olympic bobsledding, a sport with a tiny talent pool in the United States. He met the basic requirements of having sprinter’s speed, to propel the sled’s start, and 212 pounds of ballast, to hurry it down the mountain. (He and his sled pilot finished seventh at the 1992 Winter Olympics, only Walker’s second and final competition in the sport.)

Upon Walker’s declaration last month to seek the senate, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported from his rural Georgia hometown of Wrightsville (population: 3,600) that the town’s favorite son—whose name graces his old high school football field and a road leading to the school—is widely loved by local residents and can’t help but win the election. Minus any policy discussion.

Just numbers

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

Looking in the mirror doesn’t shock me. I don’t appear a bit older than yesterday. But coming across the numbers in a check register from my college days, unearthed among a stack of old papers and photos, produced quite a jolt.

Look: A check for a month’s rent for an off-campus room, $36.56. For a pair of slacks, $5.13. Lunch at the local smorgasbord restaurant, $1.37. A year’s university tuition and fees, $445. Talk about old.

This is the kind of conclusive evidence — more specific than carbon dating; better than counting the rings in a tree trunk or checking a building’s cornerstone — that will zero right in on the age-old old-age question. That, and a related query: When was the last time anyone wrote checks for these items?

I read where it’s possible to calculate the age of cattle or horses by examining their teeth. And it can be concluded a dog is old by noting that it “lays around a lot.” Hmm. More precisely: When you hear a cicada rattling, you can be sure it just turned 17.

But regarding us humans, if you were one of those carnival workers who charge customers $5 to guess their age, just on sight, guided only by evaluating wrinkles, saggy skin, lack of hair color and so forth, I’d argue you are practicing art, not science. (Or something closer to a scam than a scheme.)

Let’s say the subject in question wouldn’t let you get close enough for the pinch test. (Pinch the skin on the back of his or her hand to see how long before the skin snaps back. One to two seconds, she’s under 30. Five to nine seconds, he’s between 45 and 50. Anywhere from 35 to 55 seconds, you’re looking at a septuagenarian.)

All right, then, first names could offer a hint. If I were a Noah or a Liam, I likely would have been born around 2010, not yet a teenager — just as a woman christened Madison would likely be near a 21st birthday. Michael of Mary? Hitting 70 years old. Christopher or Jessica? Thirty-something.

But those of us with a common handle like John could be from such recent vintage as the 1960s or from as far back 1920s (and going out of style long before our name has). A more specific age figure might be conjured via a culture quiz, determining one’s awareness that Drake isn’t necessarily a university in Des Moines, Iowa, and The Weeknd doesn’t refer to Saturdays and Sundays.

Still, there is a lot of guesswork involved in this matter. I’ve known people in their 90s who still had all their marbles and others well past 80 who hadn’t lost anything off their figurative fastball. Hard to pinpoint their time among us. I thought I had found a formula on the Internet (yes, I’ve heard of the Internet!) that would eliminate the gray area in assessing graybeards’ total trips around the sun, a method to identify the museum candidates.

Except the sixth of the seven steps (see below) is dependent on already knowing one’s birthdate, so what’s the challenge there?

1) Pick the number of times a week (more than zero, less than 10) you would like to go out to eat; 2) Multiply by two; 3) Add five; 4) Multiply by 50; 5) If you already have had your birthday this year, add 1,757. (If not, add 1,756.); 6) Subtract the four-digit year you were born; 7) Of the remaining three-digit number, the last two digits give your age.

Bogus, no? And after running through all that convoluted math, I was informed that I am 60, which I confess is off by more than a decade.

So, back to my old check register, unsettling as its information is, for the facts. There was a check for 11.1 gallons of gas for my car: $4. For tennis shoes: $10.05. For a winter coat: $25.75.

All sobering proof that time has marched on. (Which isn’t all bad.) And no pinch test necessary.

That’s rich

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This is an old man speaking, susceptible to How Things Used To Be. Feel free to opt for trendier fare. TikTok videos. Look-at-me Instagram posts. Instant messages composed entirely of acronyms.

Nevertheless, I shall rail against the latest realignment of college athletic conferences, which really has nothing to do with colleges and very little to do with athletics as a whole. These days, it’s all about football “programs;” nobody calls them “teams” anymore, because their function is to serve as cash cows for television, coaches and athletic directors.

My problem—and here I acknowledge a fusty nostalgia—is believing in the outdated sense that conferences should reflect regional ties, traditional rivalries and institutional similarities.

Alas, the universities of Texas and Oklahoma which, in the public mind, are not so much bastions of higher learning as football operations in pursuit of wealth, have announced they will leave the already diminished Big 12 to join the nation’s richest league, the Southeastern Conference. It feels like a modern version of the priority voiced 70 years ago by Oklahoma president George L. Cross: “We’re working to develop a university that our football team can be proud of.”

I admit to loving the college game in spite of its meaner aspects, including a long history of tenuous connections to academics. In the late 1800s, for goodness sakes, the original football factory was Yale University. But there was a fairly recent time when a reasonable percentage of the hired guns were actual students and conferences facilitated contests for nothing more consequential than neighborhood bragging rights.

Then the big bucks got a little too big and the social climbing commenced, in the 1990s destroying the Southwest Conference that was modeled on geography, a collection of Texas colleges plus Arkansas. Roughly 20 years on, the Big 12—a grouping of mid-America/breadbasket schools which had cherrypicked four former SWC teams—went into decline with the departure of Nebraska (to the Big 10), Colorado (to the Pac-12), Missouri and Texas A&M (both to the SEC.)

When that shameless gold-digging was afoot, NCAA president Mark Emmert washed his hands, telling the watchdog Knight Commission in 2011 that his organization “does not have a role in conference affiliations and should never be in the business of telling universities what affiliations they should have.”

At that same Knight confab, though, then-Knight co-chair Brit Kirwan, at the time president of the University of Maryland system, expressed “great concerns over the fragmented governing structure” in which football establishments, seeking the most affluent league connections, were “wreaking havoc on a number of institutions” and their non-football athletes.

Kirwan recognized “the dance going on” to be based on the urge for Bowl Championship Series eligibility; i.e., more TV payouts. The next year, sure enough, Maryland—a founding member of the ACC more than a half-century earlier—jumped to the higher income bracket available in the Big 10.

It was then-LSU chancellor Michael Martin who in 2011 guessed, presciently, that “we could end up with just two enormous conferences, one called ESPN and the one called Fox.” Which sounds far more likely than the argument put forward in a recent article by Michael Benson, president and professor of history at Coastal Carolina University.

Benson claimed that “the two biggest brokers in these conversations” are not football muscle and TV riches; rather, “the role of academics and a given school’s ‘institutional fit.’” He cited the Big 10’s insistence that it welcomes only members of the Association of American Universities, the most exclusive club of pre-eminent research-intensive schools that includes only 64 of the nation’s roughly 4,000 degree-granting institutions (1.6 precent).

But Nebraska, now firmly ensconced in the Big 10, recently was booted out of the AAU. And when my dear old alma mater, the University of Missouri, jumped to the SEC in 2012, it became only the fourth of the league’s 14 schools—along with Vanderbilt, Florida and Texas A&M—that is inside the AAU’s velvet ropes. Texas would be No. 5. Oklahoma does not belong to the AAU, though it is doubtful that the Oklahoma football team’s pride is hurt by that fact.

Consider: Of the 23 Division I national football championship games dating to 1998, 16 were won by non-AAU schools. So much for the role of academics in these matters. Just follow the money.

Which gets back to my earlier Yale reference. Only last week, Don Kagan, Yale’s former professor of history and the classics, died at 89. In 1987, when Kagan was serving as Yale’s interim athletic director, we had a chat about that school—and its fellow conference members in the Ivy League—having long-ago chosen scholarly might over football supremacy.

Kagan said then, “This desire to gain [football] glory is understandable, and to a certain extent, not contemptible. But you have to realize that you’d still be great if you never won another football game. You have to think: Is it glorious to hire a bunch of mercenaries and then, when you win, say ‘Our mercenaries can beat your mercenaries’? What’s the point?”

No comparison

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Now that all the Olympic gymnastics drama is over, maybe people will stop speaking for Kerri Strug. Whatever there is to consider regarding Simone Biles’ untimely onset of competitive insecurity—risk vs. reward, outside expectations vs. individual awareness, the so-called culture of “winning at all costs” vs. various interpretations of “courage”—to compare her situation to Strug’s 25 years ago at the Atlanta Games is a leap. With a high degree of difficulty.

Mostly, the juxtaposition of those two Olympic moments amounts to nothing more than Twitter conjecture mixed with sermonizing.

One ill-informed post declared that Strug “is rolling over in her grave now” because “she finished the Olympics (and brought home the gold) on a broken leg. [While] Simone Biles just quit on her team.”

Strug, it should be noted, is not rolling over in her grave because she is not—thank God—in her grave. She is a healthy 43-year-old mother of two, veteran of several marathons, author of a children’s book and autobiography, with a master’s degree and a resume that includes work in the Treasury and Justice departments.

She also did not, as the “grave” tweet claimed, execute that 1996 vault on a broken leg. She had damaged two ligaments in her ankle on her first of two vault attempts and went ahead with a second try, which at first was believed to be necessary for the Americans to sew up a team gold medal. (Later calculations revealed that her score wasn’t necessary for the victory, but Strug’s final jump was captivating sports theater.)

Anyway, to segue from that to concluding that Biles “quit on her team” in Tokyo not only is blatant Monday-morning quarterbacking but unrelated to Strug’s situation. Strug was carrying on in spite of physical pain; Biles was unsettled by a dangerous case of the “twisties,” a sudden sense that, in the air, she “couldn’t tell up from down.”

Just as speculative was a headline on Slate.com making the case that Biles’ no-mas resolution somehow proved that “Kerry Strug shouldn’t have been forced to do that vault” a quarter-century earlier. NBC’s website went the next step by claiming Strug “praises Simon Biles’ decision,” offering as evidence nothing more than a Strug tweet that simply said she was “sending love to you @Simon Biles.”

There was no direct contact with Strug to substantiate that, by “sending love,” she meant to “praise” Biles’ choice to withdraw.

A writer for something called Bustle.com claimed the personal recollection that Strug, in 1996, “rocketed down the vault runway….just 18 years old, only 4-9 and muscular, blonde….” But, in fact, Strug—though she in fact was 18 at the time—was 4-foot-7 and had close-cropped brown hair.

OK, that’s a quibble. But context matters, and it’s important to report that, immediately after Strug’s instantly famous vault, there was outrage with the assumption that Strug—a girl!—had been bullied into soldiering on by coach Bela Karolyi. The bearish, intimidating Karolyi indeed believed wholeheartedly in gymnastics’ Darwinian survival ethic. But more to the point was the fact that an 18-year-old boy, in a similar situation, could have counted on lavish praise for “playing hurt” and “taking one for the team.”

It also was clear that Strug typified a gymnastics truth that, at 18, she had not yet reached puberty and wouldn’t until she retired from the sport, which typically requires a training regimen so physically demanding that girls in their late teens often have not gained enough body weight to attain sexual maturity. Strug at the time looked and, with her canary voice, sounded like a 12-year-old.

Still. That day she said her final vault was her call. “I’m 18. I can make my own choices.”

Was it a smart move? Was it right? “The public wants to see us as dainty little girls,” Strug said during a lengthy phone interview in 2000, four years after the fact. “We are strong young individuals who have to make a lot of tough decisions. We’re away from home, on a strict diet, not going to regular schools, and if a child doesn’t want to do all of that, you can’t force them to.”

At the time, she found it a “little perplexing” that there still was a big fuss over her vault. “To me,” she said, “the injury thing was just another little sacrifice toward achieving my goals. And why should my goals be any different from a boy’s?”

In the end, could it be that Strug—like Biles 25 years later, and under entirely different circumstances not to be compared—had used the muscles in her head? In each case: Her call.