A brush with a basketball master

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(Ralph Tasker)

Another six-degrees-of-separation moment: The celebrated Maryland high school basketball coach Morgan Wootten has died at 88. Never met the man. But there is a decided connection here, in a “he knew a guy who knew a guy” kind of way, because Wootten for years could be found in the same laudatory sentence as Ralph Tasker.

Tasker coached at my high school in Hobbs, N.M. and, by the end of his career, had won more games than any other prep coach in America besides Wootten. (Three others have since passed him.) At one point before Tasker retired in 1997, at 79, he briefly led Wootten in total victories on the way to 1,122 over 51 seasons. Wootten coached four years beyond that and wound up with 1,274.

Legendary stuff. The two hoops masters once coached against each other in a special mini-tournament (covered by Sports Illustrated). The national basketball Hall of Fame’s Lifetime Achievement Award, named for Wootten, was presented posthumously to Tasker a decade ago. And there was this singular occasion when Coach Tasker, in a moment of kindness not to be confused with objective existence, informed me that I appeared to be material for his forever-dominant varsity.

Tasker’s teams were like nothing I’d ever seen before my family arrived for my sophomore year in Hobbs, an oil patch town minutes from the Texas border. Tasker had his lads operate in a constant frenzy—all-court press and fast-break offense at all times. They regularly scored 100 points per 32-minute game; in the 1969-70 season, they averaged a still-record 114.6 points—in the days before there was a three-point shot. Their trapping, suffocating defenses were a human version of swarming locusts. And every bit as destructive.

After facing Tasker’s Hobbs boys while still a high-school coach in El Paso, Hall of Famer Nolan Richardson was inspired to implement what he called the “Forty Minutes of Hell” defense he used to win the 1994 NCAA championship at Arkansas.

I was properly introduced to the Tasker approach months before ever meeting the man or enrolling in my new school. I had played freshman ball in suburban Los Angeles the previous season and figured I was fully capable of handling myself in Hobbs’ vigorous all-comers summer league. (Tasker, I learned years later, had taken the coaching job in 1949 on the condition that he have his own key to the gym—so it always was open.)

Seconds into my first pick-up game, I came face-to-face with Hobbs’ elevated basketball metabolism that rendered opponents as helpless as a leaf in a gale. Every kid in town seemed to surround me the instant I touched the ball. Stripped, embarrassed, left to watch an instant basket scored at the other end of the floor.

I subsequently played a year of B-team ball, mostly as a third-stringer, and never caught up. But my high school years afforded me a front-row seat to the Tasker phenomenon. Our 3,200-seat gym—always packed for a home game—had not yet been renamed Ralph Tasker Arena. But the man already was so central to the basketball operation that the school’s pep band, an essential piece to a night of hoops, was named Taskervitch. Still is.

The story regarding his commitment to up-tempo play was that, a half-dozen years into Tasker’s coaching run, a player named Kim Nash suggested expanding the occasional use of a full-court press—why not go from opening tap to final buzzer?—and Tasker responded that no team was in good enough shape to do that. “So,” Nash reportedly said, “get us in shape.”

That led to a week of the team practicing in the heavy, steel-toed boots worn by the region’s oil-field workers. (Six degrees again: I worked my high school summers in the oil fields. In those boots.) From then on, Tasker’s always pressing, always fast-breaking heat put rivals in the microwave.

Tasker himself was the antithesis of that wild and woolly playing style. He wore these thick coke-bottle lenses, spoke softly and seldom, seemed far older (at least to us teenagers) than he was then—mid ‘40s. His demeanor fit his other job, teaching government and economics, rather than a hard-charging coach. While the other fellows with whistles and clipboards barked instructions and oozed passion, Tasker quietly offered bits of praise.

Personal example: As an assistant coach of our JV football team, he once made a point of publicly commending my blocking success in front of the entire squad. I was a scrub and everybody knew it, but Tasker made a point of encouraging the least of us.

Okay: About that one-time evaluation of my hoop skills.

That came following a summer-league game shortly after my graduation. I had been recruited to join a rag-tag team of friends, some of us who were working days in the oil fields and seeking a little evening fun at the gym. I may have been averaging two points a game until, one night, against a collection of guys who would make up the next year’s varsity, I went for 22 points.

Highlight of my limited athletic life. By far. It included sinking one 20-footer after faking out Larnell Lipscomb, one of the members of the following season’s state championship team. Tasker, who always was around to watch those surprisingly formal informal tilts, sauntered up after the game and offered something like, “You could have made a good Hobbs Eagle.”

Doubt it. But what would Morgan Wootten have thought about that?

LSU champions. My people (sort of).

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This might be an ideal time to acknowledge my ethnicity (however borderline): Cajun. Same as the head coach of the newly crowned national collegiate football champion. Same as all those citizens of rural Louisiana who don’t mind interpreting LSU’s gridiron triumph as helping to mitigate longstanding portrayals of their tribe—my tribe?—as backward and ignorant.

We’re going to need a bigger bandwagon now, a rolling sort of Mardi Gras float overflowing with celebrants of Cajun revenge.

It’s just football. Since all the fuss is based on the transitory, illusory aspect of athletic success, it may not be wise to tie self-esteem too closely to the jock exploits of this—or any—team. After all, LSU’s star quarterback (a transfer from Ohio State) and so many of its players are decidedly not Cajun.

But somehow LSU’s perfect season argues for Cajun aptitude beyond a distinct cuisine, music and hospitality. The title victory is a psychological boost to the largely self-contained rural communities in the Louisiana bayous with a passionate generational allegiance to LSU football. And the coach, bayou-raised Ed Orgeron, is quintessentially Cajun, the face (and voice) of the whole operation.

So I’m going to take the occasion to mull some marginal roots.

My ancestors, ‘way back, came from Acadia, the colony of New France in the 17th and 18th Centuries that included parts of eastern Quebec, the Maritime provinces and about half of modern-day Maine. Run out of town by the British during what was called the Great Expulsion in the Seven Years War of the mid-1700s, most of those French Catholic settlers of Acadia—“Acadiens,” then “Cadiens,” then “Cajuns”—wound up in Louisiana, where my parents were raised and I was born. In Crowley, La., the heart of Cajun territory.

Full disclosure: I lived only the first two weeks of my life in Crowley, my mother’s hometown, and can’t say I knew what a Cajun was. Because my father was a mid-level oil field executive, regularly transferred every two or three years, I grew up in West Texas, southern California and New Mexico—geographically and culturally distant from a Cajun identity or lifestyle.

Only every other year did we spend vacation time in Louisiana—boy, I hated the humidity—visiting relatives and being exposed to the French-inflected, mysterious accents of cousins, aunts and uncles. Cajun accents. Like nothing to be heard anywhere else.

I remember being with my father when he bumped into old acquaintances in tiny Hessmer, La., decades after he had left his hometown and was seriously out of practice with the dialect of his youth, having great difficulty keeping up with their archaic form of French/English patois.

It wasn’t until around my 11th birthday, as a studious follower of college football and therefore cognizant of top-ranked LSU’s run toward its first national title in 1958, that I became aware that my father was an LSU grad. Reason enough for me to adopt the Bayou Bengals.

My connection to “LOOZ-ee-an” (Cajun pronunciation of the state) beyond that? A line from Mary Chapin Carpenter’s lively Cajun tune, “Down at the Twist and Shout,” applied well into my teen-aged years:

Never have wandered down to New Orleans

Never have drifted down a bayou stream….

Until one summer, later on, my cousins Bill and Paul took me in a canoe—a “pirogue,” as referenced in the old Hank Williams song “Jambalaya”—down one of those streams, spooking me by noting that cottonmouth snakes could be dangling from the canopy of live oak trees. (It was only Spanish moss. And that also was my last bayou experience.)

So I’ve never had alligator stew or participated in a “crawfish boil.” Don’t play the fiddle or accordion. Didn’t make a living farming or fishing. But I do have this decidedly Cajun surname, common in the southern regions of Louisiana but foreign everywhere else.

And I have my dad’s 1936 LSU yearbook, “The Gumbo.” On its cover is a line from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, “Evangeline,” set during the Great Expulsion and the Cajuns’ flight to the Gulf of Mexico: “They who dwell there have named it the Eden of Louisiana.”

I’m thinking now of an uncle who introduced me to the work of Justin Wilson, an old Cajun chef, humorist, author and all-around ambassador for Louisiana who died at 87 in 2001. Wilson was said to be half-Cajun, on his mother’s side, to which he responded, “If I’d been full-blood, I couldn’t have stood it.”

Whatever my purebred status, I can stand it. And to all my Cajun relatives, dressed in style, going hog wild, me oh my oh; I hope the LSU thing means you’re having good fun on the bayou.

R.I.P.: New York City’s Olympian

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In a half century as a sports journalist, I came across countless practitioners of performance dexterity. Jocks who could roll with the punches, professionals capable of conjuring last-minute heroics, coaches and trainers who could mold champions. Jay Kriegel was their equal, a bespectacled gent with an impressive gray mane who was the epitome of a shaker and mover.

When I got to know him a bit, Kriegel was in his mid-60s. I was reporting on New York City’s bid to stage the 2012 Olympic Games and Kriegel was executive director of the group pursuing that event as part of what he called his “love affair” with the city of his birth.

It didn’t work out. For reasons forever obscure—political or financial or even pragmatic—those Games were awarded to London by the International Olympic Committee poohbahs. But not because Kriegel, who died in December at 79, had not been on top of his game.

The appropriate sports cliché for him would be The Go-To Guy. He seemed to know every person—and every building—in Big Town. His resume was all benign power in the worlds of politics, real estate, broadcasting. He had been a wunderkind assistant to John Lindsay, both during Lindsay’s time as a Congressman and later as mayor.

Under Lindsay, Kriegel helped draft sections of what became the voting rights act of 1965. He co-founded the American Lawyer magazine, was a CBS-TV vice president.

So when Dan Doctoroff, then an equity investment manager, got the notion in the late ‘90s that New York City embodied everything about the Olympics—skyscraper dreams, subway-sharpened elbows, United Nations diversity—he sought out Kriegel to head his NYC2012 team.

“I wanted somebody who was passionate about New York,” Doctoroff said then, “who knew more people in New York than I did, with government and media experience, and was indefatigable.”

One of Kriegel’s previous roles was as part of CBS’ proposal to air the 1992 Albertville and 1994 Lillehammer Winter Games, so he knew that territory as well. Still, when Doctoroff contacted him about the Olympic vision, Kriegel’s first reaction was, “Crazy idea. Strange idea.”

“But I liked Dan,” Kriegel later related. “He was intelligent, thoughtful. The thing is, I had never thought of the city in that way. For a New Yorker, this got you to think about the city differently.”

Specifically, he considered “how the city had come through this astonishing renaissance in the ‘80s and ‘90s. You wouldn’t have thought the same way in the ‘80s. But there was this incredible vitality, the conviction that the city runs well and can run well. People have come to appreciate this as a great stage.

“And looking at the plan, there was this appreciation of what’s here that we all take for granted every day. This incredible infrastructure and capacity to absorb large events.”

Shortly after announcing his intention to seek the Olympics, Doctoroff was named deputy to mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2001, so he had government backing. He sought out former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke for his diplomatic connections; former U.S. Olympic Committee fund-raiser John Krimsky for his corporate relationships; former gymnast Wendy Hilliard for her deep ties to Olympic sports bodies; and urban planner Alex Garvin to design a Games blueprint.

It was Kriegel who employed the gears and levers of power to facilitate multiple development initiatives not only meant to execute the Olympics but also to improve the city. Sure enough, a study by New York University’s transportation policy center—completed six years after New York lost the vote to host the Games—concluded that “contrary to popular belief, the New York City Olympic Plan has largely been implemented even though the Games [were] held in London.”

The study cited the bid group’s initiative to re-zone the West Side Hudson Yards, extension of the No. 7 subway line, transformation of the High Line and Brooklyn Waterfront and realization of an expansive ferry service. Even the last-minute rejection of NYC2012’s proposed West Side Stadium, the NYU report said, had pushed the city toward quick agreements to construct new stadiums by both the Yankees and Mets.

“Right down that list, pretty damn good,” Kriegel said just days before the 2012 Olympics opened. In London. “The principle we stated was to have a bid to benefit the city, win or lose.”

Now, the only loss is Kriegel.

To the Giants, the Opposite of Miraculous

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Apparently it is not possible to have a televised New York Giants-Philadelphia Eagles game without a brief reference to the Giants’ Great Stumblebum Play of 1978. There it was again during this regular-season’s finale between the old rivals.

TV continues to call it “the Miracle of the Meadowlands”—an event contrary to all laws of nature that unfolded 41 years ago at the Giants home in the Jersey wetlands.

I call it Moby Fumble (Thar the Giants Blow it!). And the Big Oops. From the Giants’ standpoint—and I was then the team’s beat writer for Newsday—it was the manifestation of the imperfect human condition. On steroids. Not merely because of the turnover itself—that happens, no?—but the fact that the blunder was facilitated by a thoroughly illogical plan at the most inopportune time.

The Giants were leading, 17-12, and had the ball, third-down-and-two at their 29-yard line. The clock was running; 20 seconds to go. The Eagles were out of timeouts. All the Giants had to do was have quarterback Joe Pisarcik take the center snap and fall on the ball. And the game would be over.

To almost all of the 78,000 spectators already headed for the parking lot—and to all but of few of us reporters who refrained from joining our colleagues’ rush to the lockerrooms—the game was over.

Except Pisarcik was ordered to run “Pro 65 Up,” a play requiring the execution of a little spin move and a hand-off to running back Larry Csonka. They muffed the exchange, then watched helplessly as the ball hopped into the arms of Eagles defensive back Herman Edwards—a passer-by, really—who was free to run 29 yards the other way, untouched, for the winning score.

It was The Most Incredible Play Call (and Fumble). The offensive coordinator who called the play, Bob Gibson, was fired the next day. The following week, leading in the final seconds of the first half against Buffalo, the Giants introduced what has become known around football as “the Victory Formation”—wherein a team positions three players tightly around the quarterback, circling the wagons for a static hike-and-kneel-down motion.

“That’s out Philly play,” Pisarcik snorted after the Buffalo game, exasperated that Gibson hadn’t thought of such an obvious precaution against the Eagles. “Ha. It wasn’t put in last week. We call the play ‘a day late and a dollar….’”

That the Giants proceeded to be blown out in the second half by Buffalo was just more evidence of how that The Play Call (and Fumble) Seen ‘Round the NFL was metastasizing. The team’s GM, former All-Pro Andy Robustelli, resigned at season’s end. Head coach John McVay was not retained.

What may have been seen as a miracle for the Eagles was, to me, the Archduke’s Assassination (ask a World War I historian), the trigger to a toxic domino effect that re-ordered the entire Giants organization from top to bottom.

Whatever the perspective, it is good for the TV executives to continue recalling such a consequential instance. And for a sort of replay: On Dec. 29, the Giants were within three points of the Eagles early in the fourth quarter when, on second down from his 27, Giants quarterback Daniel Jones botched a low shotgun snap, recovered, then lost the handle again.

It was something of a minor miracle (yes, in the Meadowlands) that the Eagles’ Fletcher Cox found himself in the right place to cover the ball at the Giants’ 2. Arguably the game’s turning point, that set up a quick Philly touchdown and the Giants’ 12th loss in 16 games.

The Giants fired their coach the next day. A lot like 41 years ago. So again, the team is straying from the road to success, seeking some sense of control. Call it fishtail.

 

Occupy Halftime

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Surely it is a tribute to the Harvard-Yale game’s enduring status that climate-change activists chose it for their disruptive (but thoroughly peaceful) protest Saturday. A public demonstration requires an observant public. So, while those two egghead institutions long ago ceased to prioritize football; while the NCAA’s sports-industrial complex essentially drew a chalk outline around the Ivy League’s major-league status more than 40 years ago, Harvard-vs.-Yale still attracts a crowd.

It is a bit arrogant, of course, too snobbishly exclusive, the way the Harvards and Yales continue to call it “The Game,” as if there were no other of such importance. But there were 44,898 witnesses at the Yale Bowl for the 136th renewal of their annual duel. That was eight times the average attendance at Yale’s previous five home games this season.

That was enough for a quorum. Enough to affect the message from 200 protesters who stormed the field at halftime calling on the two elite institutions to divest their massive investments in fossil fuels. “Nobody wins,” some banners carried onto the field warned. “Yale & Harvard are complicit in climate injustice.”

Of course there were cries of condemnation for the “inappropriate” setting. Officials at the two elite schools, as well as the Ivy League office, harrumphed that while they were passionate believers in free speech, they found it “regrettable”—according to an Ivy League email—“that the orchestrated protest came during a time when fellow students were participating in a collegiate career-defining contest and an annual tradition when thousands gather around the world to enjoy and celebrate the storied traditions of both football programs and universities.”

Not the venue, in other words. Which is the same kind of inverted reasoning that granted Colin Kaepernick the right to protest police brutality and racial inequality—but not during the National Anthem before high-profile NFL games. Too many people might see him and be forced to think about the issue.

College theoretically is about promoting critical thinking, and both Harvard and Yale brand themselves as leading bastions of learning and justice. All nine members of the current Supreme Court attended either Harvard or Yale. Six U.S. Presidents went to Harvard; five to Yale. (Once, at The Game, Harvard’s band spoofed 350-pound President William Howard Taft—a Yale man—for getting stuck in the White House bathtub.)

So here was something of a teaching moment Saturday, a chance for concerned students to stoke awareness of what they believe is their schools’ misguided contribution to the carbon emissions problem. Their occupy-halftime movement resulted in a few dozen arrests and plenty of social media commentary and a delay of almost an hour in re-starting the game. (Sorry: The Game.)

Because the Yale Bowl is the rare college stadium which didn’t join the 1980s business model of installing lights to satisfy television, the teams played into virtual darkness, a quarter-hour after sundown. But that only enhanced the football drama, their scuffle finishing in the gloaming after a second overtime period. Yale won, 50-43, and one of its giddy players dismissed the inconvenience of the protest by declaring that his mates were prepared to play “until tomorrow.”

Part of the irony is that Yale was America’s Original Football Factory—the Alabama of the early 1900s—a perennial national champion prior to World War I, fielding All-Americans (possibly semi-professionals rather than ordinary students) and producing a lineage of influential coaches. The Yale Bowl, when it opened in 1914—the biggest and best of its kind—was called a “handsome and remarkable monument to the cult of the pigskin.”

It’s just that not since 1968 has Yale, Harvard or The Game gotten any attention to speak of. That was the year that Harvard scored 16 points in the final 42 seconds to salvage an improbable tie and led to the Harvard Crimson’s memorable headline, “Harvard beats Yale, 29-29.”

Hmmm. Nobody won? Developments during The Game in 2019 might have presented an opportunity to think about a final score.

Political football

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Is this how Donald Trump ended up at the LSU-Alabama game on Nov. 9?—after a memo from a White House staffer that went….

“If at any time during the remainder of this term the President wants to see and be seen by a tremendous crowd of enthusiastic Southerners, I suggest we consider sending him to one of the big football rivalry games.

“….football is a religio-social pastime in the South, particularly when you get teams like Alabama and Mississippi playing. That would be a good way to get him into a key Southern state and get to see many people from the two states, without doing anything political.”

Sure enough, there was Trump in Tuscaloosa, Ala., among the 101,821 pigskin faithful.

Wait. The above communication was for Richard Nixon in the fall of 1969. It’s just that these days, with headlines of Trump “Out-Nixoning Nixon” on other matters, the thought occurred that the current occupant of the Oval Office might endeavor to implement a similar Southern Strategy.

LSU was ranked No. 2 in the nation and Alabama No. 3 going into this month’s showdown of unbeaten powers. In 1969, No. 1 Texas was about to play No. 2 Arkansas in early December when Nixon announced he not only would attend the game but would be bringing with him a Presidential plaque to personally declare the winner to be national champion. The Commander-in-Chief as gridiron kingmaker.

In both cases, such a non-political appearance was clearly political. With the Republican Party’s 1960s electoral tactic of picking off Southern white voters reluctant to accept civil rights initiatives, Nixon brought further attention to a game that came to be known as “Dixie’s Last Stand”—the final major American sporting event played between all-white teams.

Trump, after he had been roundly booed at a Washington Nationals World Series game and a mixed martial arts event in New York City, could assume the citizens of the red states of Louisiana (where he got 58 percent of the 2016 vote) and Alabama (62 percent) promised a more comfortable reception.

At the 1969 game in Fayetteville, Ark., Houston Post sports columnist Mickey Herskowitz reported that the capacity crowd “did not include a few dozen [Vietnam] antiwar demonstrators who stood, quiet and reproachful, on a grassy hill overlooking the stadium, holding signs addressed to the President. The largest read: ‘Give peace a chance.'”

Fifty years on, in Tuscaloosa, dissent was likewise minimal—seven students in the stands wearing T-shirts spelling out “impeach” and small groups of protesters outside the stadium. The South’s religio-social pastime again ruled the day.

Anyway, Trump left the game with still eight minutes to play. Not only did he miss three more touchdowns in LSU’s rollicking 46-41 victory, but—unlike the stir caused by Nixon a half-century earlier—Trump’s only post-game comments came in a generic tweet, offering thanks for “a great game.” Nixon wound up wading into a partisan and regional fuss by appearing in the Texas lockerroom minutes after the team’s come-from-behind 15-14 victory, wearing makeup for the television cameras and clapping victorious coach Darrell Royal on the back. With the promised “championship” plaque in hand.

The problem then was that there still were bowl games to be played and Penn State, like Texas, also finished its season unbeaten. (This was 29 years before the NCAA officially designated a single bowl to be the national championship game; prior to that, sportwriters’ and coaches’ polls christened a No. 1 team, and sometimes more than one.) Ninety thousand letters and telegrams came pouring into the White House from outraged Penn State backers. A few of the school’s alums picketed 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The White House lamely offered to produce a second plaque to acknowledge Penn State’s active 29-game winning streak, longest among the nation’s major colleges. To which Penn State coach Joe Paterno (a Republican), replied, “You tell the President to take that trophy and shove it.”

Four years later, at Penn State’s commencement ceremonies, Paterno told the gathered graduates and dignitaries, “I’d like to know how could the President know so little about Watergate in 1973 and so much about college football in 1969.”

Tricky stuff. And P.S.: Texas officials said that the Nixon plaque, which he had taken back to D.C. to be engraved immediately after the ’69 game, never was seen again. Only this year did the school’s athletic department produce a replica. Out-Nixoning Nixon?

Cain seemed so able, until…..

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At 16, Mary Cain was pulverizing decades-old school and age-group track records. She was, as this week’s headline on her New York Times video op-ed put it, “the Fastest Girl in America.”

The rest of that headline: “Until I joined Nike.”

Now 23 and long absent from the elite running scene, Cain has cited Nike’s Oregon Project, the training system of recently banned coach Alberto Salazar, as emotionally and physically abusive. His emphasis on weight loss, she said, led to low bone density that caused five broken bones. She didn’t get her period for three years and battled suicidal thoughts.

Should we have seen this coming? On Feb. 18, 2013, Cain, then a high school junior in the New York City suburban of Westchester, set high school and under-age-20 records in a single race, the women’s mile at New York’s Millrose Games. That came just three weeks after she shattered a high school mile mark that had existed for 41 years, and three weeks after she crushed a 35-year-old high school two-mile record by a disorienting 17 seconds.

There were 44 events that night in the world’s oldest and most prestigious indoor meet, mostly featuring professionals and experienced collegians, but it was the spindly 5-foot-6 Cain—including her long ponytail, she was barely more than 100 pounds—who stole the show.

She was bound for Olympic glory, already appearing fearsome on the sport’s horizon. She was still 18 months from taking her driving test, already a running prodigy. And yet, in covering that event, I was compelled to include this paragraph:

Some veteran observers and coaches worry that Cain might be experiencing a case of too-much-too-soon, as if she were trying to play the One Minute Waltz in 30 seconds. There are too many tales of promising young careers knocked out of orbit by injury, over-training, eating disorders and the complications of maturing bodies.

And here we are. In the Times op-ed, Cain said Salazar, three times New York City Marathon champion in the early 1980s and mentor of 2012 Olympic gold (Britain’s Mo Farah) and silver (American Galen Rupp) medalists at 5,000 meters, was “constantly trying to get me to lose weight.”

Known for pushing limits with his own training, Salazar last month was handed a four-year ban by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency for “multiple anti-doping rule violations” he had pressed on his athletes (though none of his charges were named or penalized). His skeleton key for opening the door to success was turning Cain into a skeleton, demanding she become “thinner and thinner and thinner,” she said. She found herself “just trying to survive.”

In 2015, two years after joining the Oregon Project, she returned home to New York and enrolled at Fordham University.

When she had burst onto the track scene as a high school junior, Cain appeared thoroughly self-assured. She recounted how, at 10, she had been a competitive swimmer who wanted to follow Michael Phelps’ watery path to the Olympics. Her event was the butterfly until a sixth-grade after-school track program hooked her and, the first time she was timed in the mile, ran a startling 5:47, an age-group performance that would leave any of track’s stopwatch-loving crowd misty-eyed and weak-kneed.

She met Salazar at the 2012 Olympic track and field trials at the University of Oregon—Salazar’s alma mater and near his Portland home—when she advanced to the 800-meter quarterfinals. She had Just turned 16. Salazar immediately arranged to coach her long-distance, from her home’s opposite coast, and quickly fashioned training specifics for her final two high school years.

One tactic was an attention to her “core strength,” recognizing the torso is the body’s center of power. Another was to have her train wearing a contraption called “ShoulderBack,” a harness to promote ideal posture.

When Cain chose to turn professional rather than run collegiately upon high school graduation, it was a decision many of the running community questioned. She enrolled at the University of Portland to be near Salazar’s training base, but insisted that “to be completely consumed by track might be a little bit out of my comfort zone.” She said she wanted to have college friends “who are less track-y.” But she also said she “totally won’t have a roommate, because I sleep in an altitude tent,” one of those newly-fashionable athletic accessories to enhance the body’s production of more red blood cells, boosting endurance.

She also said then, in the midst of posting times she never again achieved with the Oregon Project, “At this point, I just kind of roll with it. I don’t really know what to expect these next few years. And I kind of like that. I kind of like it being a little bit of a mystery. For me and for everybody.”

“The most famous marathoner of all time….”

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Rosie Ruiz died last month, but it’s possible she never will go away. Her one audacious public act more than 39 years ago—briefly hoodwinking officials and spectators into believing she had won the Boston Marathon despite having run only the last 1/26th of the race—established that her name would live in infamy.

Proof was in the prominent obituaries by all the major news outlets. All afforded Ruiz what P.T. Barnum, another celebrated hoaxer also persisting past his expiration date, declared was more important than bad publicity: They spelled her name right.

“Rosie Ruiz, the Boston Marathon winner who wasn’t,”… (Washington Post)

“Rosie Ruiz, the Boston Marathon course-cutter who was stripped of her victory….” (Associated Press)

“Rosie Ruiz, famous for cheating in the 1980 Boston Marathon…” (Sports Illustrated).

“Rosie Ruiz, whose name became synonymous with cheating…” (New York Times)

In her 66 years, she never ran a marathon. Yet Bill Rodgers, the 1980 men’s Boston champion who reigned as the world’s best practitioner of that event in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, once called Ruiz “the most famous marathoner of all time.”

Unheard of until she crossed the Boston finish line on April 21, 1980, Ruiz instantly became a household name. A punch line. In the chaos of a 4,900-runner field—448 of them women—the question wasn’t necessarily “how?”—how was a non-competitive 26-year-old able to pull off such a scam?—but “why?”

“I just don’t understand,” Rodgers said then.

These days, the male and female Boston champions each are paid $150,000 in prize money. But in 1980, all the winner got was a laurel wreath and a bowl of beef stew—a decades-old tradition in its final year before Boston’s cuisine evolved toward post-run treats such as yogurt. Not until 1986 did Boston offer prize money.

Boston being the oldest and most celebrated race of its kind, Rodgers was the rare soul who parlayed consistent dominance into a financial benefit with eponymous running gear and a Boston running store. But Ruiz, even had her surprise breakthrough been legitimate, hardly was in line for any windfall.

So why would she have risked the thoroughly predictable scorn that surfaced immediately with her vague, evasive and essentially clueless post-race comments? Fellow runners and officials were astonished—in fact, offended—by her complete lack of knowledge about training or the Boston course and an inability to summon any details about her participation.

Eyebrows were raised higher by her failure to have been spotted at any checkpoints along the way, and just how she had produced a Boston women’s record time that required averaging five-minute, 30-second miles for 26 consecutive miles when she previously had claimed her best time for a single mile was 5:30.

But she showed up at a New York press conference four days later wearing her winner’s medal and insisting she deserved it, even as a Delaware newspaper published a story by an author named Marty Craven that he had met Ruiz jogging in Central Park the previous month, and “she told me she knew this girl who cheated in the New York Marathon by taking the subway, and I started to tell her how easy it would be to cheat in Boston….I think the friend she was talking about was really her.”

In fact, it was.

Ruiz never gave up that medal. She never acknowledged her dastardly deed, and never responded to any of several invitations to run subsequent marathons. Still, with the news of Ruiz’ death, Canadian Jacqueline Gareau—the real Boston winner in 1980, her victory officially acknowledged a week after the race—told Canada’s National Post that she “forgave [Ruiz] completely. It’s not a big thing for me.”

“Why she never apologized—that belongs to her,” Gareau said. “Maybe she was not completely right in her mind. I’m just hoping she’s forgiven herself. Hoping that, on some kind of way, that she was okay.

“You know, she was part of my life.”

And, in a way, immortal.

Play now, heal (and pay) later.

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In many ways, Nick Buoniconti was a parable of the football culture. He punched above his weight—a low draft choice, theoretically too small to be a pro linebacker, but whose doggedness and toughness landed him in the Hall of Fame. He played hurt, a point of highest praise in his sport, and won two Super Bowl rings. Yet he spent the last four years of his life, before his death at 78 this week, “paying the price,” in his own words—suffering from dementia he believed resulted from more than 500,000 hits to the head during his 14-year professional career.

Yet, to the end, and even having endured the trauma of his son’s paralysis, the result of a college football injury in 1985, Buoniconti insisted that he “always loved” football. “I still do.”

During my six years of covering the NFL, the longest conversation I ever had with Buoniconti was during Super Bowl Week in 1974, when he made clear his realization—and acceptance—of the “athlete’s dilemma,” what author John Weston Parry described in his 2017 book as “sacrificing health for wealth and fame.”

It was five days before the Big Game in Houston, during a post-workout media opportunity on the Dolphins’ practice field as Buoniconti’s Miami Dolphins were preparing to face the Minnesota Vikings. Almost off-handedly, Buoniconti described the pain from three floating chips in his right elbow and how his coach, Don Shula, had just nixed surgery to fix the problem.

“It’s my elbow,” Buoniconti said. “But what can I say? Shula decided that if I had the operation before the Super Bowl, there may have been complications and I wouldn’t be ready to play this week. I’ve learned that it’s a player’s obligation to play.”

His wasn’t the only example that day of football’s split-screen image, a requirement of yeoman strength in juxtaposition to physical disarray. Among Buoniconti’s teammates, safety Jake Scott had five metal screws holding together a broken hand (but joked that the team’s biggest fear was “a lightning storm.”) Guard Bob Kuechenberg had a pin in his right shoulder, cornerback Tim Foley had a pin in his left shoulder and tight end Jim Mandich had a pin in his left hand.

None of them missed the game (won by the Dolphins for a second consecutive Super Bowl title).

Buoniconti had injured his elbow three weeks earlier and aggravated it in the conference title game the following weekend. Because he was having “trouble moving my fingers and there was radiating pain down my arm,” he said, Dolphins’ physician Herbert Virgin agreed to operate immediately.

Except: “Well, after the [conference championship] game that night,” Buoniconti said, “I dropped into King Arthur’s Place [a Miami bar/restaurant] and saw Shula there and he offered to buy me a beer. I said I couldn’t, that I had to be going. Shula asked, ‘Where?’ I said, ‘I’m going over to the hospital to get the bone chips taken out of my elbow.’ Shula said, ‘What?!’”

Shula summoned Virgin, two other physicians and Buoniconti for a consultation that, according to Buoniconti, went like this: “There were five people there and one man, Shula, decided I shouldn’t have the operation. You know, we decided. But we really didn’t. Shula will probably give me hell for saying this stuff.”

Likely, Buoniconti—a two-time all-pro—was protected from discipline over that loose-lips moment for the same reason Shula blocked his medical care: Shula needed Buoniconti in the Super Bowl.

My phone call to Virgin later that day brought the doctor’s refusal to discuss the situation. “I am under strictest orders from the coach not to discuss this unless [Shula] gives permission,” he said. Shula denied any interference. “Did Virgin say he couldn’t discuss this?” Shula said. “Well, anything that’s of a confidential nature within our team, we prefer to keep it that way.”

Virgin later called back to say he in fact had permission to explain that “it’s no big deal. Nick can’t injure himself further. If it bothers him during the game, we’ll just give him some Darvon, and that’s only glorified aspirin.” (Darvon was banned by the FDA in 2010 because of heart risks.)

There are endless examples similar to Shula’s stiff-arm response to prioritizing health over football, and Buoniconti acknowledged as much that day.

“We all know this stuff about having arthritis 20 years from now,” he said then. “But, heck, I understand that football players don’t live past 50, anyway, because of their injuries and because they tend to be overweight as soon as they finish competing. But I’m not thinking of 20 years from now. I’m thinking of Sunday.”

He was 33 at the time and he lived past 50. By 28 years. But there was a football price.

 

A long moon shadow

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I thought of Ralph Kramdem (“To the moon, Alice!”)

I thought of black and white television amid the first lunar landing’s 50th anniversary celebrations. Almost as astonishing as the technological marvel of having sent humans 238,900 miles through space to walk on Earth’s natural satellite was the realization that a half-century has elapsed since the big event.

Listen, kiddies: In 1969, there were no cell phones, laptops, digital camera, DVDs, hybrid cars. There was no email, Google, GPS, global warming. (There was no #MeToo movement, either, which helps explain how the fictional Brooklyn bus driver, Kramden, got away with regularly threatening to send his wife into orbit.)

Anyway, I was there, vicariously taking in another startling happening during that remarkable year when the Amazin’ Mets won the World Series and almost a half-million of my generation went to Woodstock, even as relentless bad news wouldn’t go away. The Vietnam War. Student protests. Chappaquiddick. The Manson family murders. Civil rights unrest.

I was 22, a couple months out of college. The operative counsel among my age group was not to trust anyone over 30. We grew our hair and wore terribly gaudy clothes. (Bellbottoms!) There was reason to wonder if the country was coming completely apart along generational and racial lines. (Hmmm.)

Still, I don’t recall being especially pessimistic about the future, and possibly the Apollo 11 story had something to do with that—an awesome development long before the word “awesome” came to be such a threadbare adjective. At the time, the equivalent hyperbolic expression—likewise so overused that it was rendered devoid of real impact—was “far out.” Except the moon landing really was far out.

I was working at the New York City offices of the United Press International wire service, mostly taking Major League baseball results by phone and re-writing game summaries. It was a Sunday. Shortly after 4:15 p.m. on July 20, the bank of teletype machines that brought in UPI dispatches began emitting alarm bells to signal major news, attracting a stampede of folks from around the building. The lunar module had landed.

At the time, though I obviously didn’t know it then, my future wife was at Newsday’s Long Island headquarters, transcribing moon musings from the newspaper’ columnists—putting her far closer than I to what several of my journalism colleagues have called the biggest story of our lifetime.

It certainly was beyond me—still is—how rocket scientists, audacious visionaries and hundreds of thousands of worker bees could fashion such a project. All the more mystifying, as I drove home from work that evening, was how the astronauts’ voices could be beamed from the moon’s surface to my car radio—but were lost as I drove from Manhattan through the Queens Midtown Tunnel. As if I suddenly were on the dark side of the moon.

I got to my rented room in time to see Neil Armstrong’s first steps around 11 p.m. On a black-and-white TV. He, and minutes later, Buzz Aldrin were alone. No Alice.