It’s all speculation now

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(My alma mater. Now. Not then.)

 

What if something like this coronavirus thing had happened 50 years ago? I was graduating college then, just as several of the students in my Hofstra University sportswriting class hope to do—virtually, no doubt—next month. What if, during my senior year, shelter-in-place orders and social distancing had gone into effect?

I would have been cornered in my off-campus apartment with two other lads. We had no television and no reason to be there beyond getting a night’s sleep. We never cooked; there never was any food in the place. What if all on-campus dining had been shuttered as well as the townie restaurants. How often could I have stomached the old Ku-Ku Burger drive-through? (15-cent burgers.)

The Journalism School building—my real home at the time, where I spent most of my waking hours on the Columbia Missourian staff—would have been off limits. My daily routine of reporting and writing about local and regional sports would have been kaput because, as we now know, all sports are suspended during a pandemic. Besides, with the Internet and digital journalism still decades in the future, how likely was it that the Missourian could have pivoted to being produced remotely? We had typewriters and telephones (dial; not smart) but none of the fall-back technology so crucial to 21st Century communication.

Restrictions on travel and on the gathering of crowds would have cancelled the University’s annual Journalism Week conference, which would have meant that prominent guests such as the vice president of United Press International, who flew in from New York City, would not have participated in what resembled a jobs fair. Which meant he would not have stumbled onto some of my work in the Missourian. Which meant he would not have offered me immediate gainful employment in the real world. Which meant….

I’m of the belief that alternative history belongs in novels, unsettling what-ifs such as Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” and Stephen King’s “11/22/63.” Or poems—Frost’s “Road Not Taken.” In real time, our lives play out in a series of developments that, in retrospect, feel like simple twists of fate. And we carry on.

There was no communicable disease raging a half-century ago. The only minor interruptions in my senior year were a split lip sustained in an intramural softball game and a brief bout with mono. The UPI offer came through. I set off for the Big Town the day after graduation. Moved to Long Island’s Newsday a year later and stayed for 44 years. Met my wife at Newsday. Had a daughter. Traveled widely on assignments. Met fascinating people. Learned stuff. Had a lot of yukks.

Some people have all the luck. But suppose such a discombobulating event as COVID-19 had hit in 1969 or ’70, when I was looking no farther down the road than another day of newspapering, experiencing just what I had wanted to be when I grew up.

Now, part of my duty is to offer those Hofstra students some insight into the journalism business, but the world is shifting under all our feet. Maybe the best advice is the John Lennon lyric—“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” I have no answer to “What if?”

A sickly little rhyme

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If it’s possible that there is something worse than a communicable disease, that something very well could be bad poetry.

Nevertheless, I persist…

There now is a virus, corona

It’s spread by anonymous donors

So shelter in place

And don’t touch your face

It’s the Whale and you could be Jonah

…

Perchance, create a soliloquy

As long as you stay six feet from me

With everything closed

No folks juxtaposed

Lock your door and throw out the key

…

In this pinch at least we have Zoom

To virtually fight off the gloom

But the raging pandemic

Is downright systemic

Optimism is key, I’d assume

…

We miss shopping and concerts and sports

As well as group things of all sorts

But listen to Fauci

It’s not just about ye

In this storm all need a safe port

Stay healthy…..

 

Another April Fools’ Day

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(Stan Isaacs)

It’s April Fools’ Day, but this is not exactly a prank. This is an earnest attempt to honor my late Newsday colleague and mentor Stan Isaacs, who died in 2013 at 83. It is inspired by the fact that, each April Fools’ Day during Stan’s long and distinguished career there, Newsday published his whimsical rankings of decidedly inconspicuous topics, calling them IRED—the Isaacs Ratings of Esoteric Distinction. The purpose, he said, was to offer “an appraisal in areas that are generally ignored by raters,” and he declared that “no category is too arcane” to grade.

IRED, he said, was “a loving spoof of the Ring Magazine boxing ratings….a rush to respond to the unrecognized need for evaluations of qualities like the Bridges Across the River Seine.” For each April 1 edition, he began with his personal classification of chocolate ice creams and, from there, quantified such universal matters as Fred Astaire’s dancing partners; TV remote buttons; “Things that Aren’t As Good as They Used to Be;” bowling pins. “The IRED never glittered more,” he once noted, “than when it evaluated People Who Were Neither On the Way Up or Down.”

Grantland’s Bryan Curtis, in an appreciation shortly after Stan’s death, insightfully recognized him as “a fierce opponent of whatever he was ‘supposed’ to be writing, an insurrectionist with a smile.” That was the key to making Stan a journalism hero. Worldly and creative, and admirably goofy. A keen observer with a twinkle in his eye. A man, certainly, who understood the need for an April Fools’ Day giggle.

As a pale tribute, then—and even in these strange times—here is my 2020 rip-off of his delightful parody:

Historical figures for the Age of Coronavirus: 1, Lady MacBeth (wash your hands). 2, Ignaz Semmelweis (19th Century pioneer of antiseptic procedures). 3, Edvard Munch (don’t touch your face like that).

Now part of the daily language: 1, In an abundance of caution. 2, Social distancing. 3, Flatten the curve. 4, Shelter in place. 5, Postponed. 6, Zoom.

Possible 2020 Opening Days in baseball: 1, May 1st. 2, June 1st. 3, July 1st. 4, August 1st. 5, April 1st, 2021.

Telephone functions (circa 1970): 1, Telephone.

Telephone functions (circa 2020): 1, Mail. 2, Camera. 3, Newspaper. 4, Clock. 5, Calendar. 6, Map. 7, Encyclopedia. 8, Book. 9, Stopwatch. 10, Record player. 11, Calculator. 12, Notebook. 13, Compass. 14, Alarm. 15, Radio. 16, Television. 17, Diary. 18, Tape recorder. 19. Technological wizardry I have not yet deciphered. 20, Telephone.

Familiar structures personally visited: 1, New York City’s Chrysler Building. 2, Shanghai’s “Bottle opener” (World Financial Center). 3, Sydney’s Opera House. 4, St. Louis’ Gateway Arch. 5, Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia cathedral. 6, Athens’ Parthenon. 7. The Leaning Tower of Pisa. 8, London’s Westminster Abbey. 9, Starbucks.

Minor league baseball team nicknames (then and now): 1, Montgomery Biscuits. 2, Reading Coal Heavers. 3, Lancing Lugnuts. 4, Chattanooga Lookouts. 5, Akron Rubber Ducks. 6, Allentown Peanuts. 7, Albuquerque Isotopes. 8, 2019 Miami Marlins.

Music genres: 1, Classical. 2, Blues. 3, Country. 4, Folk. 5, Ska. 6, Rock. 7. Roll.

Famous quarterbacks: 1, Tom Brady. 2, Joe Namath. 3, Joe Montana. 4 (tie) Archie, Payton and Eli Manning. 5, Doug Williams. 6, Monday morning. 7, Armchair.

Social distancing

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There was a time when running spread like a communicable disease. In the 1970s, the bug was caught by hundreds, then thousands, of ordinary folks. Citizen road races and marathons sprang up, drawing increasing crowds, giving lie to the expression associated with a 1959 short story, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.”

In short order, runners weren’t lonely at all. The first few infected by Frank Shorter’s televised 1972 Olympic marathon victory began to pass on what Shorter has benignly called a “disease.” Underlying causes included the headline feats of high school mile phenom Jim Ryun, the dawning of cross country and track opportunities for women opened by the passage of Title IX, and a contagion of fitness. Over the next five decades, those contributed to such developments as the New York City Marathon’s more than 400-fold increase in participation.

So the new irony, now that we’re on Coronavirus Standard Time, is that running suddenly can represent a form of social distancing. It is, by nature, a solitary pursuit. Once described by Shorter as “selfish,” running in fact can be altogether altruistic, a handy way to stay away from other people and thus to avoid contributing to the problem. It is “the perfect sport,” according to a recent New York Times item, “for a pandemic.”

With New York City banning all contact sports in local parks and shuttering playgrounds as part of restrictions on gatherings of more than five people, running need not violate such decrees. It requires nothing more than a pair of shoes and open space, with the simple proviso of staying at least six feet from fellow runners. Runners World magazine is advising that “the best plan for running right now is to go out for a solo run and enjoy the outdoors, in non-crowded areas.”

Further, running serves as an antidote for cabin fever in these shelter-in-place times and has been touted—like all exercise—as a boost to the immune system and to mental health.

But, yes, there are more incongruities. Because running has become so mainstream—a reported 60 million Americans participate in running and jogging each year—vastly populated Spring races, including the 30,000-strong Boston Marathon, are among the rash of postponed events triggered by the current health crisis.

In “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” English author Alan Sillitoe used running as a metaphor for his protagonist, an impoverished teenager guilty of petty crime, to run away from society. But Texas-based historian James McWilliams, in a 2016 essay on the Boston Marathon for the Paris Review that referenced Sillitoe’s tale, nevertheless conflated contemporary society and running, community and individuality.

“When the Boston Marathon ends,” McWilliams wrote, “there will be tens of thousands of runners marked by a shared experience, even if each runner will ultimately be alone, a novella unto himself.”

There is no getting around the reality of having to share this coronavirus situation. Still, might a leisurely daily run—alone—be doing one’s part in slowing the galloping chain reaction?

Keep your hands to yourself

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The New York Times headline asked, “Is this the end of the high five?” Another timely question in the age of coronavirus.

With hand-to-hand contact identified as a primary culprit in spreading the contagion, the familiar palm-slap above the head is being seriously frowned upon. For more than 40 years, it has been a hallmark ritual of jockdom celebration, commiseration and congratulation. Yet—“out of an abundance of caution,” as the operative phrase goes—the high five act already had segued into fist bumps and elbow knocks in the days before the sports industry shut down completely. Who’s to say that, even upon a return to normal existence, it won’t be gone forever?

On the one hand (and keep washing it), old habits don’t die easily. The basic handshake, for instance, is said to have originated thousands of years ago, possibly to demonstrate that the offered shake indicated the lack of a weapon. Or was merely to suggest friendship, seal a deal or show respect.

One of the great civil traditions in sports is the hockey handshake at the conclusion of playoff series, when members of opposing teams—after having gone at each other, hammer and tongs—line up for polite individual greetings and let bygones be bygones. “That’s the kind of thing,” former Islanders goaltender Glenn Resch told me years ago, “that raises sport to being a sport. It raises us above being just animals.”

Sports being sports, though, there is plenty over-the-top exuberance, and elaborate variations of saluting colleagues’ accomplishments evolved. Pairing the ubiquitous presence of televised games with human nature’s bent toward mimicry, we arrived at the high five as everyday fashion.

The custom long ago spread far beyond the playing fields and has become something of a cliché. In 1981, “high five” was added to the Oxford Dictionary. In 2002, a group of University of Virginia students invented National High Five Day, to be celebrated on the third Thursday of April with a 24-hour period for giving as many high fives as possible to friends and strangers alike. (Might that annual rite also be in jeopardy now?)

So, if this is the end of the high five, what exactly was the beginning? Most accounts cite a 1977 baseball game in which Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Glenn Burke, greeting teammate Dusty Baker after the latter’s home run, spontaneously stretched an arm overhead and giddily whacked hands with Baker.

Others cite the 1978-79 University of Louisville’s basketball players as high five authors, and there also is a tale that late 1970s Murray State basketball player Lamont Sleets practiced the maneuver and attributed the name to his father’s Vietnam unit, “The Fives.”

Some claim that women’s volleyball players created the move in the 1960s, and in my half-century of working as a sports journalist, the first time I witnessed anything resembling the modern high five was at a grass-roots Olympic volleyball event sometime in the ‘70s. That routine was closer to a “high 10,” in which teammates simultaneously smacked both hands, shoulder high, patty-cake style.

Anyway, before that, high school basketball players had been executing an early form of the fist bump—one fellow’s balled-up hand tapping the top of another’s. And, before that, there was the display in which a lad offered an open palm, about waist high, and his colleague gave him a downward strike.

Before that was the widespread practice of patting a teammate on the rump. And, eventually, we arrived at such yahoo toasts as the flying chest bump and football’s counterintuitive bashing of teammates’ helmets. As if a little more skull-rattling were in order during a grid contest.

Given the concussion epidemic in modern sports, who’s to say that attaboy! gesture shouldn’t go the way of the coronavirus high five?

A silent killer in sports

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Upon his retirement after 67 seasons as baseball play-by-play man for the Dodgers, preeminent sportscaster Vin Scully said the thing he would miss was “the roar of the crowd.”

Think about that in this suddenly-gone-quiet time throughout the sports world. With the dramatic but thoroughly reasonable strategy of limiting large gatherings to mitigate the spread of coronavirus, one consequence is no March Madness to cheer. Or NBA or NHL games. Not even Spring Training baseball.

So, for a while at least, we will not be seeing buzzer-beating baskets or majestic home runs or overtime goals. But what is really passing strange will be the eerily silent arenas and stadiums across the land.

It’s just sports—an alternate universe, an escape from serious issues such as pandemics. But sports’ everyday presence has come to be something we take for granted. And in considering the effects of quarantining the fun-and-games industry, Jack Holmes asked in an Esquire essay, “How about the roar of the crowd?”

How about, he noted, the fact that “our human experience is borne up in gathering together for events and festivities….which remind us we are not alone in a vast and lonely world…”

Amid the lightning-fast developments of the spreading coronavirus, NBA, NHL and NCAA officials briefly considered carrying on without spectators—sort of a hazmat solution in the face of the contagion. A weird version of what we know as spectator sports, to say the least.

“We play games without the fans?” was LeBron James’ initial reaction. “Nah, that’s impossible. I ain’t playing if I ain’t got the fans in the crowd. That’s who I play for.”

On the extremely rare occasions when a big-time sports event was played “behind closed doors”—without an audience—it proved to be an empty experience for all involved. In 2015, civil unrest in Baltimore following the death of a black man named Freddie Gray while in police custody led to the Orioles barring fans for a single game against the Chicago White Sox—the only time that happened in Major League history.

Jeff Samardzija, the White Sox pitcher that day, said at the time that he “wouldn’t recommend” such a move again. “This is a game to be played in front of fans,” he said. “I understand a lot of people watch on TV nowadays, but it’s definitely a spectator sport.”

Broadway shows have shut down because of new limitations on large gatherings—that is, an audience—and you can’t have a Broadway show without an audience. Same for sports, really; without fans, sports merely become a pantomime.

“It’s astonishing,” Esquire’s Holmes wrote, “how much of a sporting product’s value is generated by the roar of the crowd….All of these tournaments and championships we have designed and built for our own entertainment—their value is rooted solely in the fact that large numbers of us have decided to agree they are valuable….A lot of people care, so you should care, and share it with other people who care. People pay money—lots of money—to be in the crowd and create some of that value.”

Eric Nusbaum put it this way on Slate: “There are a million bad things about sports, but there is one good thing that transcends all of them: community. [Sports] only matter because we collectively decide they do.”

When this coronavirus thing is over, which will deserve a good roar from the crowd, we are not going to miss social distancing.

The Astros’ purloined signals

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Country music has a weakness for cheating songs and Houston is smack dab in Honky Tonk territory. How long until someone comes up with a little ditty about the two-timing, double-dealing, mean mistreating ballclub there?

Maybe something like this…

The team that once wore rainbow clothes

Was named for a gun but changed to Astros;

Finally won the title as best of the pros

Until a guy blew a whistle on the con.

..

Old gamesmanship, a brand-new plan

Using video, a bat and a garbage can

To count the fingers on a catcher’s hand

And that ball, folks, is goin’, goin’, gone!

..

So now everybody is sighin’ and cryin’

All of a sudden, there’s purists not buyin’

“If you ain’t cheatin then you ain’t tryin’”;

What once got praise now gets a loud moan.

It’s safe to say that we’re all in agreement that the Astros were involved in hornswogglery on their way to the 2017 World Series title, and that they deserve condemnation. But I have a confession: I’m not sure I’m as shocked by the revelations of the Astros’ dastardly, elaborate scheme to steal signs as I am by how shocked the baseball world claims to be—from opposing players and league officials to Major League beat reporters.

As Brian Phillips noted in an essay for The Ringer, “Sports isolates competitive, driven, and obsessive human beings….attracts the people with the strongest desire to dominate…[and] tells them that their desire to dominate is a good, even a heroic, quality.

“It then places these phenomenally competitive and ambitious people inside an environment that’s largely free of true negative consequences while promising them immense rewards—money, fame, status—for defeating each other.”

Robert Prentice, writing for the University of Texas business school website Ethics Unwrapped, cited six plausible explanations for the Astros’ misbehavior—among them the “slippery slope” of baseball’s full acceptance of sign stealing as long it is accomplished without the aid of technology; and the rationalization that “stealing signs might have seemed mild when compared to the steroid scandal of a few years ago.”

The interesting P.S. to that sort of whataboutism was the recent advice—if that’s the right word—offered by former Yankee Alex Rodriguez, that the Astros should have expressed “remorse” for their digressions. Fans, he said, “want a real, authentic apology. And they have not received that thus far.”

Interesting guidance from a man not only guilty of his own bad manners, repeatedly violating doping rules, but also of putting forward public apologies for his steroid use that proved to be insincere. Twice. Not only did Rodriguez go back on his 2009 mea culpa but was continuing to juice even as he served as a spokesman for the Taylor Hooton Foundation’s campaign that cautioned young players against demon drugs.

In journalism—my profession—we are cautioned to stay this side of the sometimes-thin line between skepticism and cynicism, so I’ll resist the temptation to assume any of the Astros’ outraged opponents might also have engaged in some form of illicit corner-cutting at some point. Decades of covering Olympic sports confronted me with a widespread belief—though not the proof—that “everybody uses performance enhancers.”

As if that makes some instances of cheating acceptable.

Thomas Fox, a Houston attorney and self-proclaimed “compliance evangelist,” asked in an online post, “Why do we have ethics in sports?” and considered reasons both noble and self-serving.

“Is it to teach youngsters the importance of fair play as a social construct?” he wondered. “Is it to create a level playing field so those who compete do so based on hard work, ability and skills alone and not some nefarious ‘edge’? Is it to protect the billions made by baseball and will be made in the future? Or is it because it simply is the right thing to do? Do you play fairly so you will not be called ‘cheater’ the rest of your life?”

Forbes columnist Henry DeVries, in as essay related to the Astros case, suggested that one can “take a virtue (right or wrong) approach, a duty-based approach, or a utilitarian (consequence) approach,” and that, “if you are more worried about winning and making money than you are of being a benefit to society as a whole, that is utilitarian ethics at play.” To have chosen the last of those, stealing signs as a path to the World Series title, DeVries wrote, was to somehow justify that it “will benefit the Houston fans.”

Can’t say I’m astounded. But cheatin’ songs always are sad songs.

Olympic fever?

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Danger always is lurking at the Olympic door. Mexico’s government troops gunning down protesters days before the Opening Ceremonies in 1968. The Palestinian attack on the Israeli team compound in 1972. Massive debt for Montreal in 1976. Politically engineered boycotts in both 1980 and ’84. A deadly bomb during the Atlanta Games in 1996. Salt Lake City’s post-9/11 jitters in 2002. Fears of oppressive Chinese Communist censorship in 2008. Brazil’s mosquito-borne Zika virus in 2016.

The sky forever seems to be falling. With buttoned-up security, the Olympics go on—and with a remarkable ability to create a festive, peaceful island in an increasingly chaotic world. Not since 1940 and 1944, during World War II, have the Games been cancelled.

But what about this summer’s Tokyo Olympics as the coronavirus radiates from its outbreak in China, across Asia and now into Western nations? The Olympics not only is a hothouse for public dissent (because it is such a visible stage) but also for germs (because so many people, from everywhere, are packed together for three weeks with not enough rest and too much contact). Personal experience: Head colds and viral infections marched through the press facilities at all of the 11 Olympics I covered.

So far, Tokyo officials, who estimate welcoming 11,000 athletes and 600,000 overseas visitors, are insisting there is no Plan B—no thought of calling off, postponing or moving the Games. That, despite news that pre-Olympic qualifying events already have been moved out of China and other Asian venues, affecting athletes from several countries. Quarantines of potential Chinese Olympians have forced disruption of those athletes’ training or cancelled their pre-Olympic competitions. Schooling planned in Japan for 80,000 unpaid Olympic volunteers, hailing from around the world, has been delayed.

Japan already has the highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases outside of China, and the March 1 Tokyo Marathon, which normally has more than 30,000 mostly-amateur runners from home and abroad, will restrict its field to roughly 200 elite professionals. Possibly all wearing surgical masks.

The coronavirus reportedly is related to SARS, the deadly severe acute respiratory syndrome which broke out in China in late 2002. That contagion forced the relocation of the 2003 women’s soccer World Cup, a high-profile 16-nation tournament that had been scheduled for four sites in China, to six cities in the United States.

The move worked, in part because of the Americans’ experience in hosting the previous World Cup four years earlier. So now Shaun Bailey, a London mayoral candidate, has suggested the 2020 Olympics likewise be transferred to his city, which staged the 2012 Games.

Except there is a marked difference between transporting a one-sport championship tournament and the massive Olympic show, with its 33 sports and 30 times the number of participants. Organizing the Olympics, a 1996 Atlanta official said at the time, amounted to “putting on a Super Bowl every day for 17 consecutive days.”

In fact, it is bigger than that. And getting bigger all the time. For Tokyo, 7.8 million tickets have been sold. More than $3 billion in local sponsorship deals have been finalized. NBC has paid $1.4 billion just for U.S. broadcasting rights (with the significant expectation that the Games will fit into its summer programming window before American football and baseball playoffs take over). More than 80,000 hotel rooms are in the mix. Organizers have spent about $25 billion on their Olympic operation.

For obvious reasons, Tokyo wants—and needs—to stick to its schedule. And the history of Olympic perseverance, in the face of multiple challenges, is exceptional. But the 2020 prognosis is iffy.

Better shoes? Technology doping?

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Flubber!

Let us acknowledge the obvious. If an elite runner thought it would make him faster, he would compete wearing a beanie outfitted with a propeller. On his derriere.

More conventionally, if a shoe company were to design footwear which would guarantee its wearer would be 4% quicker….well, what part of evident don’t you understand?

But being guilty of seeking every tiny performance edge is not the tricky part. Rather, in this age of rapid scientific advances, there is the concern regarding potentially artificial assistance.

Ethicists and sports officials have been worried about this kind of thing for a while. And now wearers of the space-age Vaporfly running shoe, fashioned by the sportswear giant Nike, have produced history’s five fastest men’s marathon times and four of the 10 fastest women’s marathons in the last two years.

Is such equipment merely maximizing human capacity? Just helping fulfill the logically aspirational Olympic motto—citius, altius, fortius (“faster, higher, stronger” in Latin)? Or is it crossing the fuzzy line into technology doping, adding a furtivus (loosely translated, “sneakier,”) to the motto?

With the Vaporfly, an extra-thick mid-sole with a carbon fiber plate acts like a spring, compressing when the runner lands, storing energy from the foot strike and expanding again to return that stored energy into the ground to push the runner forward. Independent studies have confirmed a 4% efficiency boost.

Is this situation anything like when swimming officials were wrestling with the acceptability of full bodysuits 20 years ago, after those suits were found to provide buoyancy and muscle constriction that worked to reduce fatigue? (Eventually those suits were banned in international competition.)

Is it similar to the NBA’s prohibition in 2009 of Athletic Propulsion Labs sneakers, which featured a ballyhooed “Load ‘N Launch” technology to increase vertical leap and thus were judged to be supplying an undue advantage?

In the slapstick 1961 movie “The Absent-minded Professor,” the application of “flubber” (flying rubber) to the shoes of the school’s basketball players—allowing them to soar above the opposition like kangaroos against elephants—clearly was as unjust as it was comical.

But science in fact lurks as a possible threat to an even playing field. Golf (club technology), baseball (bat materials) and football (Stickum) all have implemented restrictions on paraphernalia. Thirteen years ago, track and field’s governing body barred such aids as springs and wheels in athletic shoes, though its basic rule is vague: Shoes may not confer “any unfair assistance or advantage” and must be “reasonably available” to all competitors.

Vaporfly is available for $250 a pair, though a runner under contract with Nike surely can get a break there. For now, the shoe remains an acceptable accoutrement, though track’s international federation has formed a working group of athletes, scientists and legal experts to review the Vaporfly and is expected to announce a “temporary suspension of any fresh shoe technology” until after this summer’s Tokyo Olympics.

Epilogue: In 1960, Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikila ran the 26-mile, 385-yard Olympic marathon barefoot. And won. In 1964, he won the Olympic marathon again. Wearing shoes. Technology? Or just time marching on?

 

A Super Bowl survey

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(not really)

And here’s another geographical fact about Kansas City. Not only is it decidedly in Missouri—apparently news to a New Yorker named Donald Trump—but there also is not really a corner to stand on at 12th Street and Vine (“with my Kansas City baby and a bottle of Kansas City wine”).

That specific intersection, referenced in Wilbert Harrison’s 1959 chart-topping hit, hasn’t existed since an urban renewal project wiped out a section of 12th Street 60 years ago. Also, though officially adopted in 2005 by Kansas City, the song was written by two California teenagers who never had been to Kansas City.

Which, again, is in Missouri.

Granted, though, it is a state that can seem to be all over the map.

There is, for instance, a California, Mo. A Washington, Mo. A Louisiana, Mo. An Oregon, Mo. A Nevada, Mo. (Named by a fellow who immigrated from Nevada City. Which, any cartographer worth his salt knows, is in California.)

There even, for the internationally aware, is a Cuba, Mo. A Mexico, Mo. A Lebanon, Mo.

And no surprise: There is a Missouri City, Mo. (Though it’s hardly a city; population 279). There most certainly is not a Missouri City, Kan.

But, anyway. As a former resident of Missouri (during my college years), I can report that the state has a lot of moving targets. The climate is one: “If you don’t like the Missouri weather,” the saying goes, “wait 10 minutes.” Dreadful humid heat, sleet, tornadoes, snow, rain. Sometimes all on Thursday.

Just as evasive is a set way to pronounce the state’s name. About half the natives—generally speaking, those is the urban centers and along the northeast side of a sort of diagonal Mason-Dixon line—say “Mizz-ur-ee.” To the west and southwest, and in more sparsely populated areas, it’s “Mizz-ur-uh.”

I had just graduated from the University of Missouri—hailing from out of state, I’ve always said Mizz-ur-ee—and had left the region when then-governor Warren Hearnes announced with some fanfare in 1970 that both pronunciations were correct. Still, Missouri politicians continue to get flack from the locals for switching to an “ee” or “uh” ending depending on where they are giving a speech.

Okay. There is a Kansas City, Kan, directly across the Missouri River and roughly a third the size of Kansas City, Mo. But it is not the home of the Super Bowl champion Chiefs. In the wake of Trump’s embarrassing faux pas, in which he Tweeted how the big game’s winners had “represented the Great State of Kansas,” some clarification is in order.

The Kansas Kansas City is the come-lately Kansas City, incorporated in 1872—two decades after the Missouri Kansas City officially materialized. And the story is that the Kansas Kansas City took its name to fool New York financiers—maybe they would think it was the booming, established Missouri Kansas City—into sending a monetary boost to their town.

Over time, the two states have become friendly enough neighbors, but they do have a tense history going back to open violence involving anti-slavery (Kansas) and pro-slavery (Missouri) factions leading up to and during the Civil War. And sports, mostly through a long-standing rivalry between the two state universities, indelicately played on that history for the next hundred years.

The schools’ football rivalry was called the Border War—taken literally from the bloody Civil War era skirmishes—for decades before it finally downgraded to the Border Showdown at the beginning of this Century. Less menacingly, Norm Stewart, who for 32 years coached Missouri basketball, delighted in getting under the skin of Kansas fans—partly by his claim that, for Missouri road games in Lawrence, Kan., he avoided spending a single dime in the state of Kansas by booking his team into hotels and restaurants (and gassing up the team bus) 40 miles away in Kansas City.

Stewart recently admitted that story was just a myth. But it demonstrated that he knew the lay of the land. And that Kansas City is in Missouri.