Who’s going to win it all?

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Should we believe the polls? Are they really a reliable predictor of who will come out on top in the end? Of who will do what to whom? Seriously: What are the chances that Clemson, currently leading in the oldest of polls—which has been conducted by the Associated Press since 1936—will be the 2020 college football champion?

Oh. Those polls. The ones relating to the Electoral College.

But we’re still talking about surveying, no? Canvassing? Inquiries into public opinion from a sample of people? We are considering margins of error and predictions that occasionally are wrong. (Think of the grief that fivethirtyeight.com creator Nate Silver has had to deal with the last four years).

The urge to question the rock-solid certainty of these reports brings to mind celebrated old New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel, whose teams dominated the 1950s but, at age 70 in 1960, was informed that an AP bulletin said he was about to be fired. “What,” Stengel wanted to know, “does the UP say?”

The UP was United Press, AP’s rival wire service (for which I worked in 1969-70 when it was called United Press International and still was a viable competitor to AP). Appropriate to this discussion, the AP and UPI were primary disseminators of the college football polls for decades until the UPI poll, its panel of judges made up of coaches at the highest level, handed its ratings list over USA Today.

It’s certainly worth noting that, during my time at UPI, there were confirmed cases of coaches outsourcing their votes. Some, not wanting to bother with having to measure colleagues’ teams, quietly turned the chore over to the sports publicists at their schools. Others, reasoning that a victory—even a loss—against a highly rated opponent was good for their own status, consistently ranked their upcoming opponent somewhere in the Top Five. No matter that team’s previous success.

So much for thorough analysis. Which would not have come as a major surprise to the founder of the AP poll, Alan Gould, who admitted outright that his purpose simply was “to develop interest and controversy between football Saturdays….to keep the pot boiling.” To Gould, sports was “living off controversy, opinion, whatever. This was just another exercise in hoopla.”

But the late Mickey Carroll, with whom I spoke years ago during Carroll’s long tenure as director of the highly regarded and widely cited Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, argued that the AP and UPI exercises weren’t “real polls,” because a real poll “takes some sort of group and, in a scientific way, sees how they feel.”

The college polls don’t do “a big enough sample,” Carroll said. “If they said, ‘Let’s poll football fans across the nation on how they feel,’ that’s a poll.” Quinnipiac’s methodology requires telephoning by some 300 interviewers, with computers randomly determining the numbers to be called. To obtain a typical total of 1,200 responses, Carroll said “at least double that number” had to be contacted over five to seven days.

The AP football poll, meanwhile, uses the same 65 sportswriters and broadcasters to determine their weekly ranking. In the USA Today poll, there are 62 coaches involved. In terms of prognostication, a recent review by The Bleacher Report website found that, of college teams ranked first in the AP and USA Today pre-season polls from 2004 to 2013, only three of 10 maintained top status through the season.

Mixing metaphors, that reduces the gridiron rankings to pretty much a jump ball. Marginally accurate in terms of forecasts. And while political polls aren’t perfect, either, the Electoral College—I’ve been unable to find a cheer or fight song for the institution—keeps finishing No. 1. So far, anyway.

Rhymes with sad

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The familiar smiting of foreheads continues with New York football fans. Ahead by 11 points with fewer than seven minutes to play last week, the Giants managed to lose to Philadelphia, 22-21.

Cue Mark Twain—“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”—and I’ll tell you about covering a striking preview to current gridiron developments in 1976 as Newsday’s Giants beat writer.

In ’76, the Giants had at last won a game—in their 10th try—at home against Washington, whereupon they immediately lost the next week. By one point. This year, their first victory—much earlier; sixth game—also came in the Jersey Meadowlands, also against Washington, also followed by this latest failure, also by a single point.

Furthermore, in each of the long overdue, skin-of-the-teeth first-of-the-season successes—in 1976 and 2020—the Giants barely had escaped yet another defeat in the final minute vs. Washington.

In ’76, with the Giants ahead by 3, Washington set up for a final offensive play at the Giants’ seven-yard line with 41 seconds remaining. An option pass, the potential winning score, was tipped by a rookie Giants linebacker named Harry Carson (who went on to a 13-year NFL career and a place in the Hall of Fame) and was intercepted in the end zone.

In 2020, ahead by 1 with 36 seconds left, the Giants were faced with a Washington two-point conversion attempt after the apparent tying touchdown. That went awry under defensive pressure from Giants defenders and, combined with Washington coach Ron Rivera’s risky decision not to play for the PAT and overtime, saved the Giants’ bacon.

Followed by the next week’s close-but-no-cigar let-down. Now as then. An echo from 44 years earlier.

The famous George Santayana quote—“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”—may not apply so much as novelist Kurt Vonnegut’s rejoinder: “I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana. We’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive.”

Not that re-runs are exact. In ’76, there was no sports talk radio for anguished boosters to let off steam. No social media, either. Of course, here in 2020, with fans homebound by the coronavirus, there isn’t instant in-stadium Monday-morning quarterbacking via the old raspberry. And one other minor, extraneous difference: The Washington Football Team no longer has an offensive nickname, as in 1976.

So the Giants are 1-6, a smidge ahead of their ’76 record of 0-7, then on their way to 3-11. Another non-playoff season apparently is assured, which would make four in a row and eight in the last nine years. While, by the way, their co-tenants at MetLife Stadium, the New York Jets, who were 1-6 at this point in ’76, also headed for a 3-11 record, now are 0-7. Sort of neighboring mirror images.

“History is a poisoned well, seeping into the ground-water,” Canadian poet/novelist Anne Michaels wrote. “It’s not the unknown past we’re doomed to repeat, but the past we know. Every recorded event is a brick of potential, or precedent, thrown into the future. Eventually the idea will hit someone in the back of the head. This is the duplicity of history; an idea recorded will become an idea resurrected. Out of fertile ground, the compost of history.”

Whoa. In 1976, after a seventh consecutive loss, the Giants fired head coach Bill Arnsparger, a brick of potential that appears about to hit winless Jets coach Adam Gase in the back of the head. And in ’76, the Jets had a first-year head coach, Lou Holtz, who resigned in hopelessness after the team’s next-to-last game. That idea wouldn’t be resurrected by this year’s first-year Giants coach, Joe Judge, would it? More rhyming history?

Please stop

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For a few minutes there, I thought Major League Baseball at last had wised up, its players eschewing the juvenile practice of celebrating playoff-series victories by dousing teammates—or anyone within range—with champagne. A New York Times report cited how the Tampa Bay Rays marked their American League crown with a player dance-off and the Los Angeles Dodgers quietly reminisced among themselves at their quarantine hotel after winning the National League series.

Alas, several players were quoted lamenting how 2020 pandemic guidelines mandated they eliminate such harebrained behavior. And a baseball official confirmed that the “traditional” champagne idiocy will be allowed for the World Series champions.

So I’m posting my annual disgust with the practice (which first appeared in 2015 but still applies):

What’s the word I want here? Inane? Asinine? Puerile? When the Mets clinched a berth in baseball’s post season last week, they celebrated by pouring champagne  on each other. Vacuous? Same thing when the Yankees secured a spot in the playoffs. Moronic?

Oh, it’s an old baseball ritual, as predictable as the changing leaves of autumn. A team qualifies for the so-called “second season”—the World Series or league divisional series, even the one-game wild card competition—and its players engage in a liquid food fight. As delirious as if they had cured cancer or ended war.

They should be happy, of course. They have achieved a worthy-enough goal in their decidedly competitive profession. Woo hoo. But their tiresome, annual champagne-bath rite—wasteful, childish and ultimately far out of proportion to the accomplishment—spirals into embarrassment.

When Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first men to reach Mount Everest’s summit, they did not pour adult beverage over each other’s head. Nor did Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin when they set foot on the moon. There was a poet named Ted Koosner who, after 35 years of plugging away, in 2006 won the Pulitzer Prize, the World Series ring of his chosen field. He marked the occasion by going to a local café and having a hot beef sandwich.

Then there is baseball, with its over-the-top, frat-house custom of pouring bubbly onto goofy teammates, coaches, other team employees and reporters. The whole exercise is choreographed—team attendants prepare for the event by hanging protective plastic sheets in the clubhouse and provide safety goggles for the players.

It’s an expensive mess, once reported to cost from $20,000 to $40,000 and requiring day-after steam-cleaning of carpets and replacing ceiling tiles ruined by the spraying booze. Former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent once called the bedlam “silly” and tried to curtail it, but got no support from players or owners.

In 2009, the Los Angeles Angels took the idiocy down another notch, to insensitive crassness, when they doused beer on the jersey of Nick Adenhart, their teammate who had been killed during the season by a drunken driver.

There has been some effort by baseball to limit the champagne and, in some cases, replace it with Ginger ale. (Which also is dispensed incoherently.) But the tradition no doubt is fostered by witless media treatment: The wallowing player jubilation is quite visual, after all, just the thing for SportsCenter and sports-page photos.

Yet it may be worth noting that the most exaggerated sports championship of them all, the Super Bowl, is observed without such behavior. In the 1960s, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle decreed that no alcohol be permitted in locker rooms at any time—a rule that still stands—because it conveyed a poor image of the players, particularly to young fans.

Here’s the suggestion I have for giddy baseball celebrants—which comes from the late football Hall of Famer Andy Robustelli, who used to cringe when players punctuated their own terrific performances with wild look-at-me dances: “Act like you’ve been there before.”

Keeping it real?

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For $50, I could be a cardboard fan in the football stadium at my alma mater, the University of Missouri, for the rest of this season. For just $25, I could appear as a heavy-duty paper-based spectator in the basketball arena at Hofstra University, where I attempt to teach journalism. I got emails offering these possibilities last week.

There are several considerations to contemplate here. The first is whether lending my likeness to a piece of cardboard would solidify any suspicions that I am two-dimensional. You know, having length and breadth but no depth. No substance. A superficial presence.

Another concern is that, as a career sports journalist, I believe in projecting a neutral mien. I have great enthusiasm for sports, but I long ago abandoned hard-core fandom, and that doesn’t fit so well with the expectation, in the case of the Missouri offer, to “put on your black and gold” and “use only Mizzou branded attire….”

My other school telegraphed a similar form of attire fascism, specifying that all cutouts “wear your favorite Hofstra gear.”

Just to be clear: I find the whole cardboard-fan trend, as a visual proxy for having real people in the seats during the ongoing pandemic, not only is epidemiologically astute but downright clever. The inspiration reportedly originated in March with a German filmmaker and soccer aficionado named Ingo Mueller, who was looking for a way to demonstrate continued support for his beloved Borussia Monchengladbach club during the coronavirus.

Mueller’s out-of-body alternative spread like (pardon the expression) a virus. Images of ordinary folks and celebrities materialized as backdrops at games in Taiwan, South Korea, throughout Europe and the United States. The smiling face of former NBA hoops star Shaquille O’Neal showed up at a soccer match in Northampton, England. The recognizable mug of Chipper Jones, who regularly tormented the New York Mets during his estimable career with the Atlanta Braves, popped up in the Mets’ CitiField stands. Pets—cats, dogs, even a horse—joined the faux crowds, including Mets player Jeff McNeil’s virtual pooch, who made the evening TV highlights after Atlanta’s Adam Duvall bounced a home-run ball off the doggie’s photo in the rightfield seats.

One positive aspect to these inanimate audiences is that they won’t stir up the trouble that in-the-flesh fans sometimes do, the latest example being the ruckus in Los Angeles by thousands of theoretically celebrating ruffians following the Lakers’ NBA title. At least 76 people were arrested and eight police injured in that chaos.

It’s the sort of thing that has happened too many times to recall. One killed and 80 injured following the Detroit Tigers’ 1984 World Series victory. Two shot and one stabbed amid widespread vandalizing in the wake of the San Francisco Giants’ 2014 Series title. Similar trouble when the Philadelphia Eagles won the 2018 Super Bowl. Just to mention a few.

The word “fan,” of course, is derived from “fanatic.” (In Italy, soccer partisans are called tifosi—literally, those “infected by typhus” and therefore prone to acting in a fevered manner. ) Things can get out of hand.

So say this for cardboard fans: They see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Among the “terms of use” for purchasing that University of Missouri cutout is that the submitted photo “cannot be offensive, lewd, derogatory, infringing, discriminatory or otherwise inappropriate.” Otherwise the school will reject it and “will not be obligated to provide the purchaser a refund….”

Absolutely reasonable. And an added bonus is how the cardboard-fan invitation comes with a basic lesson in quality photography. Face a light source. Avoid backlighting. Don’t stand in front of a window or other light source. Stand in front of a solid colored background. If you wear glasses, tilt or angle your face to avoid reflected glare. Don’t use a flash. Have someone take your photo vertically from the waist up, standing three to four feet away. No selfies.

I briefly weighed the prospect of being a face in the cardboard crowd. It has become quite fashionable (though I personally can’t claim to ever having been particularly stylish). But this whole production of staging athletic events in empty (or mostly empty) stadiums and arenas, with bogus spectator noise and imitation people, borders on theatre of the absurd.

Of course, this is 2020.

Looking back

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Perhaps you noticed that pop-country singer-songwriter Mac Davis died. His claims to fame were writing several hit tunes for Elvis Presley and a couple of other big-name artists, recording a handful of his own successful numbers and doing a bit of acting. My metaphysical connection is to his 1974 ditty “(Lubbock) Texas in My Rearview Mirror.”

Each summer of my college days, I had bivouacked in Lubbock, spending just enough time there to absorb some Hub City flavor beyond its wider recognition as hometown of Buddy Holly and site of Texas Tech University.

Residents are called Lubbockites, whose hair (the saying goes) is styled by the wind that howls across the West Texas High Plains. Often carrying a great abundance of sand. Lubbock is so flat it is said you can stand on a penny and see Dallas—350 miles to the East. The informal longitude/latitude coordinate for Lubbock is “smack in the middle of nowhere.”

Maybe that’s why I recall hearing, on occasion, the sort of stir-crazy declaration by some locals that “Happiness is Lubbock in my rearview mirror.” And that was before I’d heard the Mac Davis song.

But I hardly found existence there in my early 20s to be unbearable or oppressive. I ate (too) often at the Whataburger. Took a summer job working in the sports department at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal—a magnificent if unlikely name for a newspaper in a location that has no familiarity with either snow or mountains. Experienced the counterintuitive Lubbock status as a “dry” city—no alcohol sold in restaurants—but with a string of package beer stores along the “strip” just on the edge of the city limits. (And you could bring your beer in a paper bag into the restaurants!)

The citizenry was overwhelmingly friendly, always a “howdy” from acquaintances and strangers alike. For fun, there were fierce games of handball in 100-degree heat with my brother’s Tech fraternity brother, Chris Hernandez, before adjourning to the local Dairy Queen for an icy lemonade. (And occasionally a drive to the strip.)

Anyway, there was then in Lubbock—and surely still is, as in virtually every burg—an inclination among the young and restless to crave brighter lights and greener pastures. Think of the early scene in “Midnight Cowboy,” when Joe Buck was a dishwasher in a similarly dusty West Texas settlement, yearning to escape to New York City. “What I got to stay around here for? I got places to go.”

That theme, similar to the one in the Beatles’ “She’s Leaving Home,” is what the Mac Davis song is about….

I was just 15 and out of control/lost to James Dean and rock and roll/I knew down deep in my country soul/that I had to get away.

Later verse…

So I lit out one night in June/stoned on the glow of the Texas moon/Humming on old Buddy Holly tune called “Peggy Sue.”

With my favorite jeans and cheap guitar/I ran off chasing a distant star/if Buddy Holly could make it that far/I figured I could too.

With the sum-it-up chorus…

I thought happiness was Lubbock Texas in my rearview mirror/My mama kept calling me home but I just did not want to hear her.

During my brief encampments there, city boosters had issued a bumper sticker that proclaimed “Lucky me. I live in Lubbock.” Which, naturally, was altered by some of the town’s wiseacres to “Lucky me. I’m leaving Lubbock.”

Considering the source, the sentiment reminded of the truism that nobody but you is allowed to criticize your mother. Or, as 1950s novelist Nelson Algren (“Walk on the Wild Side;” “Man with the Golden Arm”) put it, “Before you earn the right to rap any sort of joint you have to love it a little while.”

Among municipalities of more than 100,000 citizens, Lubbock is said to be the second most conservative city in the United States, so it’s possible I never was destined to settle there. But Avalanche-Journal sports editor Burle Pettit was an invaluable mentor whose advice I still cite to my journalism students, the friends I made there were special, and sometimes I catch myself humming an old Buddy Holly tune.

I submit that Davis’ “Texas in My Rearview Mirror,” beyond reviving for me some nice memories, is a perspicacious piece of work, with the revelatory conclusion of appreciating home, with Lubbock growing “nearer and dearer….”

And when I die/you can bury men in Lubbock Texas/In my jeans.

Gambling Odyssey

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Gambling problem? That’s a conspicuously ironic question tacked onto those relentless ads that invite sports talk radio listeners to sample “risk-free” wagering.

According to the National Council on Gambling Problems, the rate of addiction among sports bettors is at least twice that of gamblers in general. So those ads essentially are Sirens’ songs to a potentially vulnerable audience not lashed to the mast to avoid sailing into the trap of compulsion.

Since May 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban prohibiting sports gambling in most states, 22 states and the District of Columbia have rushed to legalize the activity. Radio Matters, the Radio Advertising Bureau’s blog, reported a subsequent stampede, “especially on sports format stations,” to accept advertising from sportsbook operators.

Gambling problem? Experts on the issue see the ads as nothing less than greasing the skids for trouble, the kind of temptation that beer ads present to alcoholics or the enticing effect fast food marketing has on those with unhealthy eating habits. More than that: The ads are meant to bring a new generation into the game—because the more people hooked on betting, the more money to be made.

Professional sports leagues, long vociferously opposed to taking the Las Vegas model nationwide, suddenly see the financial wisdom in boarding the bandwagon. As Daniel Wallach, director of the University of New Hampshire School of Law’s Sports Wagering and Integrity Program, recently told The New York Times, “All sports gambling derives from the product the leagues put on, and there’s an upside [the leagues] don’t want to leave on the table. That would be bad for business.”

Legalized sports betting, a Nielsen Sports study found last year, “will increase fan engagement and expand interest in pro and college events….adults who bet on the NFL watch 19 more regular season games than those who don’t.” It follows, Nielsen reported, that advertisers “foresee greater market share by getting into the action.”

Everybody gets richer—including counselors in the gambling addiction business.

As a sports journalist—and, by definition, a sports enthusiast—my curmudgeonly reaction to these developments aligns with the Casino.org website prediction that “legalized gambling on sports will gradually change American sports. As with everything that involves money, the sports industry will become even more commercialized than it is now. In a slow but consistent process, the focus on American sports will become betting rather than the game itself. Anyone who has ever gambled on a sporting event knows that once you place a bet, the focus of the game suddenly becomes money, not the game. And that’s not what sports is about.”

It appears inevitable, furthermore, that there will be an increase in what National Council of Gambling Problems executive director Keith Whyte calls “in play”—urging gamblers to bet on developments during a game, whether a certain player will score a basket in the next five seconds, or who will convert the first three-pointer in a quarter. That keeps the wagerers’ adrenaline flowing and diminishes the importance of final scores, even point spreads.

Bet on this: The preponderance of betting adds “is going to be a big issue,” Whyte told the Associated Press recently. “There’s heightened concern for people struggling with gambling addiction and relapse.”

Lots of luck with that.

Connecting dots at Liberty U.

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Put these elements into a Venn diagram: The two Jerry Falwells, Liberty University, college sports, Black Lives Matter, the coronavirus, remote learning, Past and Present. There are numerous overlapping connections.

The scribes and the pharisees would fit in there, too. Last month’s reporting of Falwell Jr. slinking away from his perch as Liberty president centered on scandalous behavior diametrically opposed to what some consider the school’s holier-than-thou vision statement.

The school was founded by Falwell Sr. in 1971 as “a boot camp for young champions of Christ.” And central to propagating the Liberty gospel was getting widespread attention through athletic success, so there I was on the Lynchburg, Va. campus 34 years ago on a sports assignment for Newsday.

Part of what I witnessed turned out to be a decades-early glimpse of our current quarantine existence—students prohibited from attending a bar, nightclub, disco or movie theatre or visiting the residence of a member of the opposite sex.

Serious social distancing.

Liberty students were not wearing masks, but there were strict regulations (since loosened a bit) on, among many other things, attire: Ties required for all male students, skirts or dresses for all females, until 3 p.m. every day. There was no global plague afoot then, of course. But the limitations on partying resembled what colleges in 2020 are demanding for public health reasons.

Yet, as with so many universities now, there was permission to soldier on with sports.

At the time, Liberty had just moved up from Division III, two giant steps below the elite level, but Falwell Sr. was prophesying a sort of last-shall-be-first revelation, and he had a banner presented him that year by a student declaring, “Liberty vs. Notre Dame, 1995.” Already, Liberty was expanding its football stadium to 12,000 seats and had plans for a capacity of 42,000 (though it remains at 25,000 and last season averaged 18,272 fans per game, with not yet a game against Notre Dame).

“Evangelicals,” Falwell Sr. told me during that 1986 visit, “deserve a school every bit as good as BYU provides the Mormon child and Notre Dame provides the Catholic child.”

The next time I set foot on campus, in 1994, Liberty had just qualified to play in the NCAA Division I basketball tournament. The so-called Big Dance.

“Baptists don’t dance,” Falwell Sr. confirmed on that occasion. “But we’re going to dance this year. By special dispensation.”

Because, Christian boot camp aside, “There are two languages that young people understand,” he said. “Music and sports.” (Although, it should be noted that there remain restraints on the type of music allowed for Liberty students: Music that “honors the Savior and is in harmony with God’s word;” outlawed is all music with “lewd lyrics, anti-Christian messages, etc.”)

Sports, of course, is where Black lives came into the picture—the need at an overwhelmingly white institution for talent to compete. “We’re looking for seven footers who can read and write, bounce that ball and shoot, and are Christians,” Falwell Sr. said.

Morgan Hout, when he was coaching the football team in the 1980s, said that “the first question we ask [a potential recruit] is, ‘Are you Christian?’” But not current coach Hugh Freeze, who made other allowances while taking Liberty to its first bowl game last December. Freeze told The Ringer what he wants to know is: “Number One, does he fit with our program? Is he a gym rat? Does he love to compete? I don’t’ ask, ‘Well, is he an angel?’”

It turns out that neither Freeze nor athletic director Ian McCaw, both hired by Falwell Jr. in the last four years, appear to be angels, either. Freeze was sent packing by the University of Mississippi after allegations of NCAA violations as well as phone records detailing his calls to escort services. McCaw was forced out at Baylor in the wake of sexual and domestic assault charges in that school’s football program.

So not everything has been as advertised at Liberty, including the fact that Falwell Sr. regularly used the title “Dr. Falwell,” though the only doctorate degree he held was honorary. In the mid-‘70s, press releases claiming the young school’s accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools were found to be exaggerating the fact that Liberty merely had applied for accreditation.

In 2007, when Falwell Sr. died, bequeathing the university’s presidency to his son, the school was drowning in debt. Whereupon Falwell Jr. did a very 2020 pandemic thing, investing in remote classes. And now the place is doing swimmingly, with roughly 85 percent of its 100,000 students attending online. According to the Wall Street Journal, Liberty’s assets reached more than $2.8 billion in 2018.

Meanwhile, Falwell Jr. made it clear that his responsibility was not maintaining spiritual health at what his father called a “fundamentalist-slash-evangelical school;” rather, it was to prosper “academically, financially and in athletics.”

Except, at a time when sweeping awareness of racial injustice is so prominent, Falwell Jr.’s coziness with critics of the Black Livers Matter protests has prompted an exodus of Blacks—several of them crucial to the university’s athletic prominence. “Liberty University Poured Millions Into Sports. Now Its Black Athletes Are Leaving,” Slate Magazine headlined last month.

The article reported that Falwell Jr. spent $150 million in the last four years on sparkling athletic facilities to lure elite high school players, only to have Black athletes, uncomfortable with Falwell Jr.’s racially insensitive tweets and an unwelcome campus culture, announcing they are transferring out.

That’s how liberty—small “L”—gets into the graphic.

Time out!

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I’m thinking of Billy Pilgrim, the central character in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, who “came unstuck in time.” According to newspaper reports, the Indianapolis 500—previously contested on Memorial Day weekend since its inaugural race in 1911—just happened this past Sunday. On August 23.

The NBA and NHL playoffs are going on; shouldn’t that mean it’s the middle of May? The Kentucky Derby will be run a couple weeks hence, which sounds like May still is on the horizon. Baseball season is in its fifth week, so it must still be April!

Except, if it’s April, why aren’t golf commentators whispering worshipfully from Augusta, Ga., about the “timeless” Masters, its relationship to springtime amid the magnolias and azaleas? Instead of anticipating that the golf biggie isn’t due until mid-November.

Are we Rip Van Winkle-ing in reverse? And, calendars aside, where are we? Half of hockey’s playoff teams—from Pittsburgh and Tampa Bay and Boston and Washington—have been playing “home” games in Toronto. Road games, too, while the other half of the NHL has been in Edmonton. So everybody is neither here nor there.

For anyone watching the annual Western & Southern tennis tournament on television—and that’s the only way to watch it, since no spectators are allowed on site—the on-court signage says they are in “Cincinnati.” In fact, the matches are in the New York City borough of Queens. (Never mind that the event never is in Cincinnati; its permanent base is the Cincy suburb of Mason, Ohio. That’s another story, before the dawn of bubbles.)

The W&S is a traditional warm-up for the U.S. Open, coming to the same Queens location which, just to emphasize the dominant theme of these disorienting days and weeks and months, borders the neighborhood of Corona, home to the New York City ZIP code hardest hit by the coronavirus.

The Open will happen shortly before the French Open commences—even though the French Open should already be roughly four months in the rear-view mirror. And the pandemic time warp includes the fact that the Tokyo Olympics now are scheduled for the summer of 2021. But will be called “Tokyo 2020.”

This is what a plague will do to sports, let along life in general. Beyond all these high-profile competitions, of course, everything from high school field hockey to international cricket has been re-scheduled, relocated, redirected, reduced or re-imagined.

Synchronize your watches?

Whistling Dixie?

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The zombie idea that there must be college football in the South despite a global pandemic does not appear to be about just college football. Even as coronavirus risks cited by widespread medical advice have convinced a majority of schools across the nation to close their stadiums, caution apparently is gone with the wind in the South.

Because, as Florida State English professor Diane Roberts noted in the Washington Post, “In the South, college football has long been a sort of do-over for the Civil War.”

The three major conferences intent on soldiering on—the SEC, Big 12 and ACC—have 25 of their 37 institutions based in the states from the former Confederacy (plus another five from Civil War “border states”). And a rebel legacy clearly is asserting itself on the gridirons of Dixie.

“Football,” Southern historian James Cobb told me years ago, “is a place where the Lost Cause reasserts itself. It’s a component of the South’s need to industrialize and beat the North at its own game. A way to re-fight the Civil War.”

It was during an assignment at the University of Tennessee three decades ago that then-Tennessee coach Johnny Majors, who died in June at 85, reminisced about how “even when I was a kid, so many people I knew would talk about the Yankees, what they’d done to us.” He made it clear that one answer to the Yanks’ superiority complex was the South’s football success; Majors not only had been an All-American player at the school in 1956, but also coached three SEC championship teams there.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Southern author Rick Bragg, in a 2012 essay for ESPN, confirmed that college football in the South “has been an antidote to often dark history for as long as even our oldest people can recall. We are of long memory here. I gave a talk once in Mobile, Ala., and mentioned that the Southern aristocracy had been on the wrong and losing side in two great conflicts: The Civil War and the civil rights movement, prompting one older gentleman to rise from his seat, huffing that I did not know what I was talking about, and leave the room.

“Later, I said I was surprised that mentioning the turbulent 1960s would anger anyone so, after so much time. A nice gentleman told me, no, that wasn’t it. ‘He’s still mad,’ the nice man said, ‘about the war.’”

It’s now 155 years in the past.  Roughly five generations ago.

But forget, hell. From 1939 to 2001, there was an annual All-Star football bowl called the Blue-Gray Game—contested in the original Confederate capital of Montgomery, Ala.—between players who competed for colleges in the North against players from schools in the former Confederate states, and which outfitted the teams in the colors of the Union and Rebel armies. With, by the way, the added historical element that Black players were banned until 1965.

In his 2001 book, “King Football,” Oregon State University professor Michael Oriard, who had played collegiately and professionally, documented that the “three major Southern conferences remained entirely segregated until 1963” when Maryland, then in the ACC, first accepted a Black player. The Southwest Conference—its highest profile teams now are in the Big 12 (Texas and Oklahoma) or SEC (Texas A&M and Arkansas)—wasn’t fully integrated until 1970 and the SEC not until 1972.

Furthermore, Oriard wrote, “the most powerful force for integration was not high-minded principle but the need to win football games…”

The irony is that, in re-fighting the Civil War, Southern teams commenced doing so by recruiting Blacks (and Yankees), even as the majority of Southern college fans, student bodies, coaches and administrators has remained overwhelmingly white. In her Post essay, Roberts referenced a culture she called “retro-America” in which “racial roles are pretty stark….Older white men are in charge (85 percent of Power Five coaches are white) while young men of color—55 to 60 percent of the Power Five football teams—perform the labor.” Those numbers are even more dramatic in the three Southern leagues among the Power Five.

“Small wonder,” she added, “that civil rights historian Taylor Branch famously detected ‘a whiff of the plantation’ around college football.”

The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture declares that “more than any other sport, football seems to reflect characteristics of the South.” And Atlanta-based reporter/author Tony Barnhart has written, “Like all things in the South, the importance of college football can be traced back to the Civil War.”

To keep playing through a modern plague sounds like some argument for Southern states’ rights. And rites.

Black (school) power

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Among the aspects of racial awareness stirred by Black Lives Matter demonstrations following George Floyd’s murder in police custody, here’s one I hadn’t considered: Young African-American athletic prodigies choosing historically Black colleges over traditional high-profile powers such as UCLA, Kentucky and Kansas.

The New York Times last week reported several instances of top basketball and football hotshots either declining offers—or transferring—from predominately white institutions in favor of lower-profile operations at Howard University, Norfolk State, Arkansas-Pine Bluff and the like.

If that becomes a trend, it could precipitate a fundamental shift in control—from the rich schools and athletic departments which profit mightily off the exploits of uncompensated (mostly Black) athletes in the two revenue sports—to the labor force, the players. In basketball, especially, it takes only one star to carry a team and lure television’s visibility and big bucks.

With moves afoot to allow college athletes some compensation for use of their names and images, all jocks are beginning to acquire bargaining chips regarding their choices. For Black athletes, typically part of a tiny campus minority when they compete for predominately white schools, an added bonus would be that studies indicate they will experience more supportive professors and mentors at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

This comes more than a half-century after the good-news/bad-news of desegregation. While that nudge toward more equal opportunity belatedly opened some doors for Blacks, to polish their athletic skills and resumes at the professionally run white college factories, it meanwhile dried up the quality of sports talent at the HBCUs. And, as a consequence, lowered the already minimal public profiles of those schools.

As Clarence (Big House) Gaines put it to me a good 35 years ago, the last time the best Black players opted for HBCUs was “when it was the only place they could go.”

Gaines, who died at 83 in 2005, was the Hall of Fame basketball coach at Winston-Salem University for 48 years, averaging more than 18 victories per season. His proteges included Earl Monroe, 13 years an NBA star, and Cleo Hill, the first first-round NBA draft pick from an HBCU (in 1961). But with the lifting of Jim Crow restraints, Gaines soon was unable to compete for elite talent against the sport’s aristocracy.

Potential recruits would ask, “Are you Division I?”

“No,” Gaines would tell them.

“Will I be on TV?”

“Not hardly,” he would say.

Gaines described Winston-Salem as “a school with a Division II philosophy, a Division III budget and high ideals. We run this program on the money from student activity fees and gifts from alumni and friends. The gifts we get, I couldn’t support two kids. All our problems could be solved by one thing: Money.”

Among Gaines’ contemporaries was Davey Whitney at Alcorn State which, despite being the first HBCU to play in the NCAA Division I tournament (in 1980), hardly realized a recruiting bonanza.

“We used to get at least three of the best kids in the state of Mississippi [before Southern white schools began to gradually integrate in the 1970s],” Whitney said back then. “None of the major schools in the South cared about basketball. Now, we’ve got to recruit against the Alabamas and the Ole Misses as much as the DePauls.”

The chore was to “somehow show your kids that they’re just as good as anybody else,” he said. “They read about players from the white schools. They see them on TV, and they’re in awe.”

They wanted “to go where the action is,” Whitney’s athletic director, Marino Casem, said. “They wanted the bright lights”—something the underfunded HBCUs couldn’t offer.

If now, as some prominent young Black players have indicated, they can athletically prosper at an HBCU—even as they bring attention (and money) to schools in the Black community—it feels to them as if that piece of their lives will matter.