Home runs weren’t all that happened

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Let’s say you are the target of senseless hate and that, having survived, you are advised to simply forget about it. Let it go. Move on.

Think of Henry Aaron, the baseball Hall of Famer who died this week at 86. In 1974, when Aaron—a Black man—was about to surpass baseball folk hero Babe Ruth as the sport’s home run king, insults and death threats rained down on Aaron and his family. Racism, pure and simple.

And, once the whole troubled affair was over—once Aaron had his record 715th homer and reasonable people gave him the acclaim he deserved—there was a widely held expectation that he simply should get over what he described as “a living hell” during his pursuit of the revered Ruth standard.

Except there was the reality of the situation, months of what essentially amounted to arguments for Ruth’s white privilege.

“All those letters I received,” Aaron said during a telephone conversation 20 years after the fact. “People have said to me. ‘Why don’t you destroy them? Get rid of them?’

“I said, ‘Why should I? This is for real.’ People need to realize it could happen again. I keep those letters so that my children, my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren, will know what I went through.”

And now it’s 2021 and some arguments persist that an emphasis on healing pre-empts accountability.

During that 1994 phone interview, arranged to mark the 20th anniversary of No. 715, Aaron reminded of what was painfully obvious, that he merely had been “out there playing baseball in 1974.” Just going about his business. Not leading some insurrection, not attempting to cancel hallowed sports history. Yet he routinely was subjected to bigoted outrage.

“I need to keep those letters,” he said, “to let people know: This happened.”

Five years later, Aaron at last was feeling more appreciated and a bit immortal when his old team, the Atlanta Braves, staged a small pre-game celebration on the 25th anniversary of No. 715. I happened to be in Atlanta that April 8, assigned to cover a New York Knicks basketball game the next night, and was able to finagle a press credential to the event.

A quarter century before, Aaron had felt slighted when then-baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn skipped Aaron’s momentous game in favor of addressing some booster group in Ohio. But for the 1999 remembrance, commissioner Bud Selig was there. He had known Aaron since both were 20 years old, Aaron as a rookie for the then-Milwaukee Braves at a time when Selig’s father provided cars for Braves’ players.

Selig unveiled a new “Hank Aaron Award” to be annually presented to the best hitter in each league and Aaron declared, “This tops it all.”

Aaron was 65 then. “My grandchildren, my great-grandchildren, will forever be able to say their father had an award named in his honor,” he said. He told the large Atlanta crowd that night, “I know some of you weren’t born when I hit that home run, but I thank you all from the bottom of my heart.”

Still, he kept those letters from the early ‘70s. “Was baseball ready to accept what I did 25 years ago?” he asked during a brief chat before that ceremony. “I don’t know, but I did it. All those things were happening so quickly then. I don’t think America was ready to accept what was happening in baseball.”

His wife, Billye, compared the “overwhelming” 1999 tribute to the unsettling atmosphere around his ’74 homer. “This is joyous,” she said. “We were a little out of sorts 25 years ago. We didn’t know what would happen. It was an odd kind of feeling: What will be? This makes up for it. Yes.”

Aaron was such a dangerous hitter during his 23 Major League seasons that opposing pitchers, respecting his ability to cause them trouble, called him “Bad Henry.” (Aaron preferred being called “Henry” to “Hank,” but once admitted late in life that it was quicker to sign autographs with the shorter version.) One rival pitcher, Curt Simmons, famously said that “trying to throw a fastball past Henry Aaron is like trying to sneak the sunrise past a rooster.”

In the end, he was more Ruthian than Ruth. But…

“If I were white,” Aaron once said of setting the home run record, “all America would be proud of me. But I’m Black.”

Now, at his death, the tributes are rolling in. But don’t forget any of the history. As he said, this happened.

Still here

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(This just appeared in Newsday’s Act2, the Geezer section.)

A former colleague telephoned recently—first time we’d spoken in years—to ask if I was dead.

I was not. But it was mighty thoughtful of him.

The fact is that both he and I are what some people would consider “elderly:” Closing in on the life-expectancy-for-males-in-the-U.S. statistic, which now is just beyond 76 years. In the high-risk group for Covid-19. Plenty of water under the bridge. We’re almost to that point when Casey Stengel, late in a career as an enduring baseball character, had noticed, “Most of the people my age are dead at the present time.”

So it was a legitimate question, even though the caller and I both remain in the workforce. He’s in television; I attempt to teach college students about what was my primary profession, journalism, for 50-odd years.

But the truth is a lot of folks in our demographic indeed have shuffled off this mortal coil. You lose touch with somebody and, before you know it, he or she shows up in an obituary. Especially these days, not just because of the coronavirus pestilence but because our contemporaries tend to be, well, old.

The result is that to still be going strong when near or beyond the three-quarter century mark can be something of a surprise. Willie Nelson—he’s 87—recently released a song to that effect:

I woke up still not dead again today/The internet said I had passed away/But if I died I wasn’t dead to stay/And I woke up still not dead again today.

Roger Angell—he’s 100 now but was only 93 when he wrote his “This Old Man” essay for the New Yorker—acknowledged then how extended human longevity can be as shocking as the news of someone’s demise.

“It must be this hovering knowledge, that two-ton safe swaying on a frayed rope just over my head,” he wrote, “that makes everyone so glad to see me again. ‘How great you’re looking! Wow, tell me your secret!’ they kindly cry when they happen upon me crossing the street or exiting a dinghy or departing an X-ray room, while the little balloon over their heads reads, ‘Holy —! He’s still vertical!’”

It happens. Some of us have all the luck. A few surgical procedures along the way, a drastically slowing pace on morning runs, expanding pill regimen, dimmed hearing, increased visual assistance—at this stage, the major function of ears evolves into holding spectacles in place—yet feeling spry. Relatively.

A friend, even more ancient than I, once mentioned that he first felt old when a younger man than him was elected U.S. president. In my case, that didn’t happen until 2008 with Barack Obama—though I barely had missed that milestone, by mere months—with Clinton, W., and the recent White House occupant. Now that Joe Biden is taking office, I’m back to being a comparative pup.

Anyway. When I got the call, inquiring whether I might no longer be extant, it wasn’t as if my life flashed before my eyes, though it did seem appropriate for the caller and I to reminisce briefly about some earlier good times. Both of us marveled at having spent decades getting paid for what never has felt like hard labor. I had wanted, as a child, to be in the newspapers as creator of a comic strip but wound up a sportswriter instead.

Nice work if you can get it, and I did. Traveled the world. Met fascinating people. Learned stuff. Couldn’t have married a better, smarter, more multitalented person. Lovely daughter and, as of this year, a grandboy. A few nice pets.

And I’m still entertaining the hope that I amount to something when I grow up.

That’s the thing. Even in what technically could be described as geezerhood, it seems thoroughly normal to continue seeking what’s around the next corner. As opposed to, say, propped in a rocking chair, drooling. Upon my official retirement as a full-time reporter, a neighbor suggested the importance of accomplishing “one thing” each day. The other day I wrote and mailed Christmas cards.

That was my one thing. And it sent forth the word to distant friends and relatives that I am not dead.

And it’s not a waltz, either….

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If the question should arise on a test or in a friendly game of trivia, could you name Australia’s national anthem? Sorry, it’s not “Waltzing Matilda.” At least not officially. Tricky follow-up: What does a dancing woman have to do with the “unofficial” Australian anthem?

First the news: On New Year’s Day, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the sanctioned alteration of one word in his nation’s actual anthem, “Advance Australia Fair.” In a long overdue move to recognize the country’s Indigenous history, the song now begins “Australians all let us rejoice, for we are one and free.” Previously, that sentence ended “young and free,” which suggested a narrative dating only to arrival of European settlers and the establishment of a British convict colony in the late 18th Century, thereby ignoring some 65,000 years that First Nations people inhabited the continent.

This is the kind of thing that encourages a little rummaging around in the historical attic. And tucked in there with the significant matter of how the new one-word anthem tweak signals an acknowledgment of inclusiveness—though not specifically addressing Australia’s shameful “stolen generations” policy through the first half of the 1900s, when Aboriginal children were relocated to white families to be “civilized”—there is the decidedly lesser matter of music minutiae.

It was not until 1984 that Australia discarded “God Save the Queen,” an incessant reminder of British imperialism, as its formal anthem. Based on a national plebiscite seven years earlier to choose a “national song,” the globally familiar and locally embraced “Waltzing Matilda” had been defeated—28% to 43%—by “Advance Australia Fair.”

But among the truths I learned while covering the 2000 Sydney Olympics was how “Waltzing Matilda” remained what Australians consider “fair dinkum”—unquestionably good and genuine. Furthermore, according to an information technology expert named Roger Clark, who has operated a Waltzing Matilda home page for 25 years, “Advance Australia Fair” is “a dreadful dirge with archaic expressions….”

During those Games, informal chats with the natives reinforced a widespread feeling that it was “sad to say” that Aussie gold-medal performances were celebrated with the playing of “Advance Australia Fair.” Because, I was informed, “Waltzing Matilda” was more quintessentially Australian.

The latter is sung rousingly at national team rugby matches and other public events. It routinely is introduced, along with bush dancing (heel, toe, heel, toe, slide, slide, slide) to all small children (“ankle-biters” in the local vernacular). It is such a part of Australia’s identity that many of the nation’s passports include the words to “Waltzing Matilda” hidden microscopically in the background pattern on the visa pages.

Ah, yes, the words.

Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong/Under the shade of a coolabah tree/And he sang as he watched and waited ‘til his billy boiled/“You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.”

Gibberish to us blow-ins (foreign visitors), the lyrics spin a yarn about a drifter or tramp (swagman) who steals a sheep because he is starving and, when the authorities come to arrest him, chooses suicide, throwing himself into a waterhole (billabong) to drown. The swagman had been lounging under a coolabah (eucalyptus) tree, waiting for his billy (tin cup for coffee or tea) to boil…

Written in 1895 by Banjo Paterson, the Bard of Australia, the song is considered evocative of virtually everything Australian—the bush country, traditional resistance to authority and elitism, and sprinkled with descriptions inherited from the Aborigines.

Down came a jumbuck [sheep] to drink at the billabong/Up jumped the swagman and grabbed him with glee/And he sang as he stowed that jumbuck in his tucker [food] bag/“You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.”

There is no woman in the tale. The slang “waltzing Matilda” may have dated to a German presence during the Australian gold rush of the mid-1800s, since “aud die Walz gehen” translates to taking to the road, and “Matilda” was a bedroll, the “girl” a traveling man slept with.

Paterson’s ballad proceeds to describe the arrival of a wealthy landowner—referenced as a “squatter” in that era’s newly upper-class “squattocracy’ in pastoral Australia, those who simply settled on land until they came to be seen as rightful owners—who summons the cops.

Up rode the squatter, mounted on his thoroughbred/Up rode the troopers, one, two, three/“Where’s that jolly jumbuck you’ve got in your tucker bag?/You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.”

Up jumped the swagman and sprang into the billabong/“You’ll never take me alive,” said he/And his ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabong/“You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.”

Paterson apparently based his Everyman hobo on a sheep shearer named Hoffmeister who had shot himself while mounted troops pursued him and fellow shearers for having set a woodshed full of sheep ablaze during unionization struggles for better wages and conditions.

One fellow I polled on the topic in 2000, a college lad, argued that “Waltzing Matilda” was “a story of the underdog, and Australians love the underdog, because Australia traditionally has been the underdog. It’s about democracy, in a sense. Democracy and the little guy going against the system.”

And set to a catchy tune.

Anyway, if this anthem matter should come up in casual conversation now that “Advance Australia Fair” has been updated, don’t forget the history of Aussie drifters and their distinctly christened sleeping bags.

Native American mascots: No offense?

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Guilty.

Not, if it please the court, for intentionally disparaging Native Americans by playing on high school teams nicknamed “Indians.” (Or working on the school newspaper called “The Pow Wow.”) I plead youth. I was 15—and white—and didn’t give a second thought to how that mascot landed with Indigenous People.

Sixty years on, the knuckleheads who are moaning about Cleveland’s baseball team announcing it will ditch the “Indians” moniker—and Washington’s footballers no longer branding themselves with an out-and-out slur—have no such excuse. We all have had plenty of time, and exposure to protests regarding racial awareness, to acquire an education in the matter.

Still, Atlanta clings to the name “Braves,” Kansas City to “Chiefs,” Chicago to “Blackhawks.” A recent fivethirtyeight.com analysis of MascotDB by Hope Alchin found that, while the numbers are decreasing, 1,232 high school teams continue to use Native American names, including 411 Indians, 107 Chiefs or Chieftains and 45 holding onto Washington’s recently discarded name.

“Why are teams so reluctant to let go of their Native mascots?” Alchin wanted to know. “Research has repeatedly shown the mental harm that these icons inflict on Indigenous people, and tribal leaders continue to speak out against teams’ disrespect and appropriation. Finally, in 2020, it seems that broader public opinion might be catching up. Football fandom, perhaps, has not.”

Four states—California, Maine, Oregon and Wisconsin—have laws or department of education policies prohibiting Native American mascots in public schools. Washington, Illinois, Massachusetts and Nebraska have proposed embargos and, in 2005, the NCAA implemented a de facto ban focused on colleges whose mascots were deemed “hostile or abusive.”

That year, Ronald Levant, a former president of the American Psychological Association, declared that the “use of American Indian mascots as symbols in schools and university athletic programs is particularly troubling because schools are places of learning. These mascots are teaching stereotypical, misleading and too often insulting images of American Indians. These negative lessons are not just affecting American Indian students; they are sending the wrong message to all students.”

I finally had begun to learn a few things way back in 1972, when I was assigned by Newsday to report on Dartmouth College’s decision, in the face of building Native American complaints, to change its athletic nickname from “Indians” to the school color, Big Green.

Dartmouth’s founder in 1770, Eleazar Wheelock, had claimed his school was for “the education and instruction of Youth of the Indian Tribes in this Land…and also of English Young and any others.” By 1972, though, Dartmouth was struggling to recruit Native American students—aiming for an increase of just 15 for each class of 800 students—while confronted with its few Indigenous students’ anger over the school mascot, who wore war paint and did sideline dances for first downs.

A Dartmouth professor at the time, Jeffrey Hart, claimed he was mystified by the fuss, since “I never regarded the Indian symbol as a racial slur, and I only marvel at those who do so, or at least say they do.”

Among non-Native Americans, a tone-deaf pretzel logic persists that such mascots, rather than an insult, are an “honor” to Indigenous People. As historian Jennifer Guiliano, author of the 2015 book “Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America,” put it, “It’s really hard for Native communities to look past that this…is a celebration of the dying of their ancestors….It is celebrating extermination and colonization.”

My freshman-year teams, when I was an “Indian,” were at Alemany High, opened five years earlier in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. (My family moved the next year and I became a far less-offensive “Eagle.”)

Why the administrative muck-and-mucks came up with that mascot is beyond me. The school was named for a Spanish-born missionary who became Bishop of California a century earlier; nothing to do with Native American history in the area, unless one considers the unpleasant narrative detailed by the Native American Heritage Commission:

“Despite romantic portraits of California missions, they were essentially coercive religious labor camps organized primarily to benefit the colonizers….to first militarily intimidate the local Indians with armed Spanish soldiers who always accompanied the Franciscans in their missionary efforts.”

It turns out that, at some point over the past half-century, Alemany changed its school colors and its mascot. From garnet and grey to cardinal and gold (questionable upgrade, but OK) and from Indians to….Warriors?! That really is just another term to caricature Native Americans as crazed, wild aggressors.

And doesn’t sound so innocent.

Statistics and other truths

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Recognizing the “major league” status of the old Negro Leagues seems like a fat pitch down the middle of the plate, but for 100 years Major League Baseball whiffed. So now, the attempt to retroactively integrate roughly 3,000 players into the MLB narrative is, if nothing else, statistically tricky. A real cold case for the sport’s esteemed Lords of Quantification.

Baseball, more than any other sport, reveres numbers, both for day-to-day evaluation and as a device to compare players from different eras. But the detailed scrutiny of numbers requires a complete accounting, and even the most competent of box-score archaeologists likely won’t be able to unearth all the Negro League totals known to be woefully lacking.

So the result, ESPN’s Howard Bryant said in a recent interview on PBS, is that an attempt to “retrofit” available stats into the record books likely could diminish—rather than enhance—the accomplishments of Negro League stars. In a thoughtful analysis for Slate, Owen Poindexter cited the yawning disparity between the oral history and the documented record of Negro League superstar Josh Gibson’s career home run total—800 in folklore, a mere 238 “officially.”

To go by the latter figure would reduce Gibson from being the all-time home run leader, Poindexter noted, to a middling rank of 264th. “Baseball history enthusiasts—even many casual ones—know that Gibson sustained a Paul Bunyan-like legend,” Poindexter wrote. “But statistics can outlast stories, and one wonders how a curious fan might view one of the 20th Century’s greatest sluggers upon seeing him buried in a sea of good-not-great players on the home run list.”

Similarly, the Negro League great Cool Papa Bell potentially would have his stolen base story dramatically downsized. While the standard tale is that Bell once stole a startling 175 bases in one season, the respected database Baseball-Reference.com records that Bell never surpassed a season-high of 21 stolen bases (three times) and amassed only 167 in 21 years. (Other sources put Bell’s stolen base total at 345 and say he was not thrown out a single time.)

Baseball-Reference does specify clearly that its totals for Gibson and Bell, among other Negro League players, are necessarily “incomplete,” and there is widespread agreement that those confirmed, patchwork numbers are no more marginally accurate than Negro League folklore.

Bryant’s primary point, in an ESPN column, was that MLB is “taking the easy way out” by “rewriting the history books” rather than admit that its longtime commitment to segregation was what necessitated the existence of the Negro Leagues in the first place, an arrangement that clearly was separate but not equal.

MLB casts its current decision as “correcting an oversight,” but Bryant argued that the Negro Leagues “were not the result of an ‘oversight,’ and to frame their exclusion as such is stunningly offensive. It was a deliberate system. The major leagues destroyed a half-century of Black baseball history, and baseball history in general, with one unrelenting purpose in mind: to do their part in reinforcing Black inferiority to the rest of the country.”

Negro League players “didn’t need baseball’s validation to be special,” Bryant wrote. “The legend that Josh Gibson perhaps hit 800 home runs carries more power than what is left of the shredded, surviving statistical record because it gave these Black men their poetry. It gave them their dignity. The legend was more important than being anointed legitimate 100 years later by the very industry that excluded them.”

The former Negro League star Buck O’Neil, 83 at the time and still scouting in the Majors, alluded to such poetry during a 1995 academic symposium considering the impact of Babe Ruth. “Before I ever saw Babe Ruth, I heard him,” O’Neil said, describing the sound of bat-on-ball that he never had heard before, and said he didn’t hear again until the first time he heard Josh Gibson smite a ball. “I’m still in baseball,” he said, “because I want to hear that sound again.”

Notice: No mention of statistics. Poindexter wrote, “The newly authenticated stats [to be accepted by MLB’s belated “major league” declaration] provide a minimum baseline of truth, but not the whole truth.”

World’s Greatest……

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Rafer Johnson was turning 65, long since a boldface name whose resume was bursting with athletic, humanitarian and barrier-breaking fireworks, by the time I met him. Olympic champion. Co-founder of the Special Olympics for the disabled. Member of Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign entourage. UCLA’s first Black student-body president. Lifelong civic booster in southern California.

But what he talked about that day was his kids. This was in July 2000. We were in Sacramento for the U.S. Olympic track and field trials. I was covering the event; Johnson was there as a father. His son, Josh, was a contender in the trials’ javelin competition.

“It’s the same for all parents,” Johnson said. “What you want is the best for your child. You want what they want, and anything short of reaching that goal is disappointing. But not disappointing, in that you showed you could compete at that level. That’s the bottom line. If you can walk away having given your best effort, you can’t ask for more. You might wish for more, but you can’t ask for more.”

When Johnson died last week at 86, I thought of “discovering” him in 1958—though he already was the world decathlon record-holder, with a 1956 Olympic silver medal. I was a grade schooler in suburban L.A.; he was a forward on the UCLA basketball team, whose games regularly were televised locally. His coach was John Wooden, who subsequently won a record 10 national titles and reportedly once lamented not adjusting the team’s style to better accommodate Johnson, who that season was UCLA’s most accurate shooter—over 50 percent.

I thought of newspaper coverage two years later detailing Johnson’s dramatic decathlon victory in the Rome Olympics, an intriguing story of competitive rivalry and international fellowship. Johnson had barely prevailed against C.K. Yang, who was from Taiwan but also was Johnson’s UCLA teammate, training partner and friend. (Decades later, I bumped into Yang at the 1988 Seoul Olympics and got his feelings on the long-running political tug-of-war between mainland China and Taiwan over the island’s identity, and Yang’s belief that, despite competing under the compromised name of Chinese Taipei while denied a display of its national flag or anthem, “it’s still better to be here. We’ve come to the conclusion that we can close our eyes and show the world some sports we can do.”)

And of course I thought of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics’ opening ceremonies, an elaborate Disneyfied production highlighted by Johnson lighting the Olympic cauldron, a central act in the Games’ quasi-religious pomp.

He was 49 then, tasked with circling the Coliseum track, then climbing 99 wickedly inclined steps, torch held high in his right hand, to the stadium’s peristyle end. He was 24 years past his last competition; he had turned down an invitation to play for the Harlem Globetrotters and didn’t act on being drafted by the Los Angeles Rams, who didn’t care that he hadn’t played football since high school.

But that taxing ascension toward the heavens, witnessed by a full stadium and global television audience, reinforced the title—earned by Johnson at the ’60 Games—that traditionally is bestowed on Olympic decathlon gold medalists: World’s Greatest Athlete.

“I had my turn,” Johnson said during the Sacramento meet. “I worked hard at it, like all Olympians do, like all athletes. That was my time. When [he and wife Betsy] had children, it was their time, from youth soccer right up to what they’re doing today. We tried to make the house theirs. I didn’t have any of my medals or awards around because the house was a place for their trophies and medals.”

He had dabbled briefly in acting. Worked as a sportscaster. Immersed himself in the turbulent politics of the ‘60s. Found himself regularly in the midst of defining historical moments, a real-life Forest Gump. Johnson was the guy who wrestled the gun away from Bobby Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, in June of ’68 at L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel.

Watching his son at the 2000 trials, Johnson said he had “a feeling much different from when I was competing. If I got nervous then, I could go work out. With your kids competing, you just sit and watch and pray and hope. But I don’t get just into winning and losing. It’s thrilling to see them have the opportunity to compete on that level. It’s an opportunity I wish every kid could have.”

Josh placed seventh, four spots short of making the Sydney Games. Johnson’s daughter, Jenny, meanwhile was in the process of qualifying for the same Olympics in beach volleyball and wound up finishing fifth at those Games.

Shortly before those track trials, I had chatted with Jenny Johnson. Her father, she said, “coached a lot of my teams and more of my brother’s teams. My mom coached my teams. In sixth grade, he brought his medal to school; we were studying ancient Greek culture and he talked to our class about the ancient Olympics. He never talked about his accomplishments.”

She said that on the morning of the ’84 Olympic ceremonies, “he said to me, ‘Guess who’s lighting the torch?’ I said, ‘Michael Jackson.’ He said, ‘No, I am.’ I didn’t know what it was. But everybody was cheering, our whole family was crying, and he said it was so powerful a feeling, when he turned around [at the top of the steps ascending to the cauldron] and saw the crowd, that he had to hold on.”

Michael Jackson? “It’s the answer most kids would’ve given,” Johnson said. “Anybody but their dad.”

Bronx cheers

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In the spirit of seasonal grinches out there, and fully in line with the pernicious year of 2020, here are some aspects to the otherwise cheerful world of sports that deserve a humbug! response:

—Coaches and managers, apparently convinced that opponents not only are spying on them but also are masters of lip-reading, continuing to cover their mouths to discuss strategy. Even though their coronavirus masks—and good for them for adhering to that protocol—clearly guard against code-breaking.

—Overly dramatic pre-game videos, screened both for television intros and on event-venue jumbotrons, that cast ball games as something akin to world war battles or the discovery of penicillin. Apparently those schmaltzy overboard productions, with voice-of-God narration and ostentatious imagery, are the work of out-of-work documentary directors keen on chronicling the likes of D-Day Normandy landings.

—The appalling lack of adverbs in the vocabularies of sports announcers, declaring how teams “play aggressive” and “get ahead quick.” These often are the same people who feel it necessary to specify that golfers hit a good golf shot and football players run the football and throw the football to help their football team win the football game.

—Pajama-style, full-length baseball pants. Bring back the old knickers and stirrup socks of the Frank Robinson days. (Ask your grandfather.)

I present these grumbles with the acknowledgement that they cast me as a sports curmudgeon, though that hardly makes me the Sports Curmudgeon. As far as I’m concerned, that title forever belongs to the late Frank Deford, the widely celebrated sports journalist most associated with his writing at Sports Illustrated and commentary on National Public Radio.

There is a 1993 book, The Sports Curmudgeon, that purports to be the “first sourcebook for spoilsports” with “biting comments and malevolent mouthfuls from some of the biggest hotdogs in the history of professional athletics.” Hadn’t heard of it until Google just took me there. Likewise with the website sportscurmudgeon.com, posted by a fellow named Jack Finarelli; each blog post begins “Don’t get me wrong, I love sports…” and commences to mostly summarize recent jock developments.

But it was Deford who gave sports curmudgeonry a good name, slyly noting the foibles and annoyances at play—among them the “victorious football teams who pour Gatorade on their coaches….The Sports Curmudgeon says, okay, maybe it was funny the first time years ago. Maybe. Once. Maybe. Besides, how stupid are the coaches now not to expect being doused?”

Another from Deford: “Announcers in any sport who say that the—choose one: shooter, quarterback, hitter—had ‘a good look.’ Fine women have good looks. The Sports Curmudgeon says: Keep good looks out of sports.”

And another: “Hockey goalies who leave their little water bottles on top of their nets. The Sports Curmudgeon says: We do not need littering on the field of play. What’s next? Picnic lunches for the right fielder? A bad precedent.”

The Deford curmudgeon mischievously railed against tennis players no longer holding a second service ball in hand—male players sticking the second ball in their pockets (“’Where has style in sports gone to?’ cries the Sports Curmudgeon, bemoaning lumpiness”) and female players “who stick the second service ball in their panties….Would Katharine Hepburn stick a tennis ball in her panties? Would Emily Post?”

All right, here are a couple more from this pale copy of a sports crank:

—College football teams fielding players with duplicate jersey numbers. Yes, I know that the second No. 12 or No. 65 must be on the opposite side of the ball from his numerical doppelganger, but only about 30 players—on rosters of more than 100 lads—have any chance of getting playing time. Let the benchwarmers sport shirts with used numbers—or triple digits if necessary; they’re just going to be standing on the sidelines.

—Soccer players’ theatrical collapses, intended to draw fouls, which suggest the wounded fellow’s dismemberment or—at the very least, paralysis. A razzberry for these cartoonish near-death moments which pass almost instantly, the way Wile E. Coyote is fully, immediately and repeatedly restored to full health after some terrible (often self-inflicted) mishap.

Sometimes booing is appropriate.

(Sort of) close encounters

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Willie Smith

The trouble with obituaries is that they sometimes come too soon, when the protagonist in the tale ought to have had more years. But, paradoxically, also too late. Roger Maris, the old baseball player, once likened obituaries to overdue credit offered after his playing career. “When you die,” he said, “they finally give you good reviews.”

Willie Smith died this month. Too soon; he was 64. I covered his track and field adventures for Newsday from high school—Uniondale on Long Island, N.Y.—and through three Olympic cycles, until he at last won the gold medal that his earlier records foretold.

Maradona died this week. Too soon; he was 60. His career as soccer’s troubled wizard already was fading when I witnessed some of his on-field magic at the 1990 World Cup in Italy, and then his embarrassing dismissal from the 1994 U.S.-based World Cup for illegal drug use.

Former New York City mayor David Dinkins was another pre-Thanksgiving death. He was 93, at least getting good reviews for a full and accomplished life. I used to bump into Dinkins during U.S. Open tennis tournaments, where he remained a suave presence for years, willing to answer a couple of nebulous questions about his favorite sport.

Hanging around the sports journalism profession for a half-century inevitably affords such glancing contacts. So reports of these deaths, while celebrating their lives, were nevertheless more sobering than, say, the recent obituary of the 79-year-old British party planner for royals and rock stars who perfected the use of a special table to seat all the boring guests.

I had never heard of that woman. But I admit a regular perusal of the newspapers’ obituaries because, done well, they are microwaved biographies, rich personal profiles boiled down to a few hundred words. They trace the just-departed’s roots and passions, influences of home and school and vocation, coincidences and relationships, twists of fate along the way to making some dent in the world.

Obituaries confer a bit of immortality on the deceased—the well-loved teacher, selfless public servant, widely-known entertainer, robber baron. Prominent athlete. They perpetuate those souls’ impact, achievements and just plain humanity.

Of the three cited above, Willie Smith was really the only one I can claim to have known a bit. He was an ebullient fellow willing to communicate what made him tick, how he went from finishing last in his first race in junior high school (“I thought, ‘Quit track. Give it up.’”) to setting national high school records at three sprint distances, which made him briefly feel “a little cocky” before he reminded himself there were plenty of fast runners out there.

Through the homestretch of big races, he said, who would have an urgent conversation with himself: “Beat him. Beat him. Beat him.”

He missed making the 1976 Olympic team by two places in the 100-meter dash and nevertheless decided, “I feel good. Of course, I could feel better, but I feel pretty good.” He technically qualified for the 1980 Olympics at 400 meters, but only after President Jimmy Carter had ordered a U.S. boycott of the Moscow Games—another close-but-no-cigar for Smith. He said he wasn’t sure if he would be more upset if he subsequently learned the eventual Moscow champion had run faster than he had—or slower.

By then, Smith had his college degree from Auburn and was mulling whether he should “get a steady job” or keep running. He kept running, a career in television work and training youth runners delayed, and at the 1984 Olympics, he at last got the gold as part of the Americans’ 4×400-meter relay team.

With Maradona, an international superstar not given to tete-a-tetes with us ink-stained wretches, the handful of crowded post-game press briefings was as close as we got to him. And even then, he hardly was interested—and possibly not able—to articulate either his soccer genius or the increasingly ruinous behavior that cut short his career.

He made no apologies for his excesses with drugs and food and women, and certainly not for a creativity that occasionally bent the soccer rules. Like the famous fisted score against England in the 1986 World Cup, what he called the “Hand of God,” Maradona’s illegal arm deflection prevented an apparent Soviet Union goal in the ’90 Cup. But if the referee missed the call that should have given the Soviets a penalty kick, Maradona said, then there simply was no infraction. And “you can’t blame the ref. The referee can make a mistake, just like we can make a mistake.” To the suggestion that his skill and stardom might have brought him special privilege, Maradona said, “No, no. Absolutely, no.”

He was such a dominate global entity, soccer’s version of folk hero/miracle worker, that L’Equipe, the French sports daily, used the farewell headline, “Dieu est Mort”—“God is dead.”

David Dinkins

Mayor Dinkins, meanwhile, radiated this humble, quiet air. He was a fairly constant figure at U.S. Open tennis tournaments. He was a friend to many of the elite players and tireless booster of diversity in the sport. He had been instrumental in the city’s negotiations to expand the National Tennis Center, which probably prevented the lucrative annual event from leaving town in the early 1990s. He had worked to arrange a change in the jet takeoff patterns at neighboring LaGuardia Airport after years of ear-splitting annoyance to fans and players.

Most recently, Dinkins could be found in the tennis center’s President’s Suite where, during the 2013 mayoral race, my wife suggested to him that he again would make an ideal candidate. That was 20 years after he left office. “I’m done with that,” he said politely. But I’m pretty sure he appreciated the thought.

Early in my decades of newspapering, I thought of the staff obituary writer as some maudlin soul, seeming to physically take on the cast of a cadaver himself while spending his days profiling dead people. But really, the good obit writer is a skilled storyteller, crafting a complete narrative that provides more than typical news articles.

And these guys deserved a good sendoff.

Common denominator?

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Numerology is not my thing. But a photo in the New York Times last week, of Joe Biden in his No. 30 high school football jersey, did prompt some ruminations regarding coincidence. The picture was from 1960, when Biden was a senior and, according to the accompanying article, an exceptional pass catcher for Archmere Academy, a Catholic school in Claymont, Delaware.

It so happens that, the following fall, I wore No. 30 on the freshman team at Alemany High, a Catholic school in the Los Angeles suburb of San Fernando. (I was an offensive lineman—at least until everyone surpassed me in height and weight the next year and I wound up playing quarterback. Not exceptionally.)

But there’s more. Biden’s team was undefeated in eight games the year of that snapshot. Mine, in the season when I was dressed in No. 30, also was 8-0.

No student of karma, I nevertheless should point out that Biden, on his way to becoming President-elect this month, had risen to the status of United States Senator by the minimum required age: 30. I meanwhile embarked on a half-century career in journalism, whose practitioners traditionally indicate the end of a story submitted for editing with the number 30 (separated by two hyphens).

Yes, and back in my high school days, my favorite member of the Los Angeles Dodgers was shortstop Maury Wills. No. 30. That was about the time the student/youth protest movement—and young people in general—were espousing the warning, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” I also could note parenthetically that, in that era, we whippersnappers were spending more than a little time listening to the terrific Beatles collection known as The White Album. Which consisted of 30 tracks. And not too long after came that delightful movie, Back to the Future, in which Marty McFly traveled 30 years back in time.

According to affinitynumerology.com, the number 30 “resonates with optimism….resonates with and supports creative expression and encourages it in others.”

That’s a welcome outlook for us citizens right about now, though I wouldn’t want to go overboard in declaring some divine or mystical connection at work.

What all this means is purely subjective and most likely inconsequential. Just as incongruous as reporting that the earliest written records of numerology—the study of numbers in one’s life—are said to have come from Babylon. I live in Babylon. But the one on Long Island, New York; not ancient Mesopotamia (now modern Iraq).

I’d have to count myself among the skeptics who argue that numbers have no occult significance and do not influence our lives; that numerology feels more like a superstition, a pseudo-science using numbers to supply the veneer of scientific authority.

But I do consider The Count a superstar among the Muppets. And one more happenstance related to this discussion: Joe Biden will be U.S. President No. 46. I was born in ’46.                                                                                      -30-

Early predictions of a Second Guy

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Could it be that Roy Blount Jr. is a visionary? In 1990 the humorist, author and one-time sports-journalism brother published “First Hubby/A Novel About a Man Who Happens to be Married to the President of the United States.”

It’s an occasionally absurd tale. The narrator, a good ole boy named Guy Fox, is a writer of modest accomplishment whose spouse, Clementine, has risen through the political ranks to the vice presidency on a third-party ticket. Then, when President DaSilva—his first name never is revealed in the book’s 285 pages—dies when struck by a fish (yes, absurd), Fox suddenly finds himself being “the first male First Lady of the Land.”

There are plenty of puns, silly song lyrics and signature Blount wisecracks. Guy Fox expounds on the Secret Service, social issues, sex, race, the media, politics and about feeling self-conscious to be chewing tobacco in the First Lady’s office. (He relates that the long tradition of tobacco-chewing in the White House included Warren Harding popping whole cigarettes in his mouth and Andrew Johnson once mistaking a senator’s hat for a spittoon.)

There are quirky historical tidbits about several former First Ladies, Fox’s thoughts about raising kids and his observations on the overwhelmingly (and, he insists, unnecessarily) large staff assigned to him. Plus, of course, there is the deliberation on how he ought to be addressed.

“People don’t actually call you Mr. First Spouse, do they?”

“People call me Guy,” he says.

When Blount penned this novel, the closest anyone had come to the fictional Guy Fox’s situation was John Zacarro in 1984, after his wife, Geraldine Ferraro, was chosen by Walter Mondale to be the first female vice-presidential candidate representing a major American political party. That, of course, was before Sarah Palin ran on the losing ticket with John McCain in 2008.

(Mondale didn’t come close to stopping Ronald Reagan’s re-election, and it didn’t help Ferraro that Zacarro, like a certain 2016 Presidential candidate, was a Queens, N.Y., real estate developer who inherited his father’s business and was caught in some bank-financing skulduggery.)

Four years ago, of course, one William Jefferson Clinton seemed about to wind up being the first real First Hubby. (During his wife’s original presidential campaign, former President Clinton told Oprah Winfrey in 2007 that his Scottish friends suggested he call himself First Laddie. During Hillary’s 2016 campaign, possible titles of First Matie, First Gentleman and First Dude were thrown around.)

But, about Roy Blount as a political prophet:

Included in “Now, Where Were We?”—a 1989 compilation of his essays from publications such as The Atlantic, Esquire, New York Magazine and Gentleman’s Quarterly—is the piece, “Why It Looks Like I Will Be the Next President of the United States, I Reckon.” In that, Blount envisioned a “brokered” convention, “somebody waiting in the wings” at the end of a chaotic Democratic Party primary that sounded a lot like the Republican’s (un)civil strife in the 2016 primaries. Blount wrote how, unlikely as it may have appeared, political bigwigs had to settle on him, someone “perceived as too abstract and austere. A writer, not a politician.”

Which could be overcome, he wrote, by

  1. Lying
  2. Easing folks’ minds.
  3. Setting an example of the feasibility of getting away with things.

In “First Hubby,” slipped in with Guy Fox’s account of romancing Clementine, his thoughts about The Muppets and how he has no interest in autographing pictures for schoolchildren who write in at their teachers’ behest—“Tell them to go climb a tree. That’s what I did when I was their age”—are some fascinating situations and dialogue that could have come from current politicians and pundits.

From Blount’s imaginary President DaSilva:

“People ask me whether I’m not put off by some of the panhandling tactics of the urban homeless. Well, you know it’s not only homelessness that’s up, it’s also shamelessness. If Donald Trump can behave the way he does, then why shouldn’t people go up to strangers in the street, get right up in their face and ask for money?”

A disapproving Donald Trump reference! Right there on Page 170 of a 30-year-old book. The DaSilva character also sounded a bit like Bernie Sanders at times:

“We need a middle-class revolt, which forces the rich to pay for programs that help the poor aspire to that old-fashioned goal, a decent living….”

And what about this Blount song lyric in “First Hubby”?

You got big old hair and a little bitty heart.

I should’ve known about you from the start.

Your pompadour is a work of aaaaaaart—

You got big old hair and a little bitty heart.

So: Here’s Kamala Harris positioned as Blount’s heroine Clementine was at the beginning of the “First Hubby” narrative—first female Vice President. Which makes Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, a heartbeat away from becoming a Second Guy.