Here comes the judge in the bow tie

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There was an era when track and field officials, the guys with stopwatches—“These Are the Souls That Time Men’s Tries,” a Newsday headline once proclaimed in a delightful play on the famous Thomas Paine quote—were attired quite formally in tuxedos and bow ties.

And that comes to mind with the death of John Paul Stevens this week at 99. Stevens, of course, was widely recognized as “the Supreme Court justice in the bow tie,” and in 1992, he weighed in on the eligibility of 400-meter world record holder Butch Reynolds during the U.S. Olympic Trials.

In the greater scheme of calling balls and strikes in such weighty matters as Bush v. Gore and the Citizens United case, Stevens’ Reynolds decision likely is only recalled by my fellow sports journalists who dealt with the story at the time. But it was a significant application of individual due process as well as U.S. versus athletic jurisdiction.

At issue was whether Reynolds, who was fighting a two-year suspension for doping, not only was personally ineligible for the Trials, but whether he would violate a vague international track federation “contamination” rule. That is, by competing, he might render ineligible not only the other 31 entrants in the Trials’ 400 meters—and also the upcoming Barcelona Olympics, for which the Trials was a qualifier—but the entire 866-athlete field in all of the Trials’ events.

Reynolds arrived at the 10-day meet, which played out in New Orleans, brandishing an order from a U.S. district court that had cleared him to run, based on his ongoing argument that a positive urine sample for steroids from a 1990 meet in Monte Carlo had been mislabeled and in fact came from another athlete.

Later the same day, however—on the eve of the first of four rounds of the 400-meter competition—a circuit court granted the appeal by the U.S. track governing body, with three other 400 runners as co-defendants, barring Reynolds.

Reynolds’ representatives immediately petitioned the Supreme Court and, less than three hours before the competition was to begin the following day, Justice Stevens ordered Reynolds be allowed to run. All the other 400 competitors, excluding Reynolds’ younger brother Jeff, then voted to reject meet officials’ attempt to further delay the competition, with the possibility of formulating a Plan B—determining the 400-meter Olympic team apart from the Trials’ process.

The track federation was in a hopeless bind: As the U.S. arm of the international governing body, it was required to uphold the latter’s ban on Reynolds, even as it was bound by the Supreme Court order to let Reynolds run. (Stevens’ fellow justices had quickly concurred with his ruling, the first time the Supreme Court ever ruled on an Olympic matter involving competition.)

With the other 400-meter runners threatening to sit out the event if Reynolds (and his brother) ran, prominent U.S. track official Leroy Walker convinced Primo Nebiolo, the international federation president from Italy, to back off the “contamination” ultimatum.

In all the chaos, the five-ring Olympic logo seemed to have added a sixth—the vicious circle. Ultimately, everybody ran, with the top three finishers in the final guaranteed Olympic berths and the top six eligible for the 4×400 Olympic relay. Reynolds finished fifth.

“I guess I’m going to Barcelona,” Reynolds said. “If I’m not chosen to run on the relay, I guess I won’t run. But I’ve proved Butch Reynolds can take a blow and keep on going.”

Shortly before the Barcelona Games, his name was withdrawn from the U.S. roster. Five months later, he was awarded $27.3 million in damages by a Columbus court, citing the world-governing body for “ill will and a spirit of revenge.” But that was negated by an 1994 appeals court ruling declaring it had no jurisdiction over the Monte Carlo-based international federation. And the Supreme Court declined to intervene again.

But the justice in the bow tie had given Reynolds his shot.

Just sorta fixed my aorta

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It was as close as I’ll ever get to resembling Michael Phelps: Undergoing the complete removal of body hair, from the neck down, in preparation for a significant occurrence.

In the case of Phelps and other elite swimmers, shaving their arms, legs, backs, armpits and chests is a time-honored ritual in pursuit of the slightest edge in major international competition. The practice may be as much a psyche job as a physical benefit; former Olympic champion John Naber once explained it by recalling how comedian Steve Martin “used to say that he put a slice of baloney in his shoes before he performed to help him feel funny. Well, shaving helps you feel fast.”

Me? I was obliged to undergo a thorough depilation as an essential bit of readiness prior to open-heart surgery. The hospital orderly wielding electric clippers kept assuring me of the need to eliminate any bacteria that may cling to body hair. Anyway, since that pre-event pageantry—like a ribbon-cutting or breaking a bottle of champagne over a ship’s bow—occurred before the administration of anesthesia, it’s about all I remember about the whole process.

As my wife has noted, I emerged from the post-op fog repeatedly asking, “When are they going to do the surgery?”

By then, of course, I was hooked up to an IV drip, nasal oxygen prongs, blood-pressure cuff, bladder catheter and heart monitor, with a small plastic drainage tube protruding from my torso. And still there was some sense that the entire deal might have been a parlor trick, a sawing-the-woman-in-half illusion. I can’t say I ever was in any real pain. Some degree of post-operative discomfort and boredom, yes.

The team of surgeons—and let’s hear it for the best in modern medicine—had carved a four-inch opening in my sternum in order to fix a badly leaking aortic valve, then glued me back together, all in about three hours. For the next few days, I was fed pills of various shapes, colors and functions—some to get rid of extra fluids, some to counter dehydration, some to insure against an irregular heartbeat, some to regulate cholesterol, maybe a couple of placebos, for all I know.

I suppose that people in my age bracket, almost three-quarters of a century without having shuffled off this mortal coil, have an increasing likelihood of such adventures. Body parts start to wear out, and it had been a year-and-a-half since my primary-care doctor, during a routine physical, detected a heart murmur. That led to a visit with a cardiologist and occasional monitoring of the situation—without any lifestyle changes—until the most recent round of tests precipitated the human equivalent of a service recall.

I was informed by my surgeon that the necessary repair would be accomplished via a “minimally invasive” procedure and that there was only a one percent chance I wouldn’t make it through. Just in case, though, my wife lined up two Broadway plays and a ballet the week before surgery. The kind of things you can’t take with you.

It turned out there was no rush for such unrestricted leisure. Hours after surgery, I was walking the hospital halls. Four days after the valve job, I was sent home. Ten days on, my cardiologist said that four—maybe five—weeks hence, I could expect to resume my daily morning runs.

Meanwhile, there was a lot of paperwork involved. Too many afternoon naps. Some bad jokes about male chauvinism now that my replacement part is the valve of a pig. But, all in all, it was just another episode in the continuing saga of advanced maturity.

The hairs have grown back, by the way. But don’t worry; nobody is going to see me in a swimming pool, much less a Speedo.

Horse talk

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What if you could get a tip on this week’s Belmont Stakes straight from the horse’s mouth? Valuable inside dope of how the nags are feeling? How they think workouts have gone? Whether there might be an intimidation factor favoring an opponent?

This assumes, beyond the old saw, that horses can talk. Also, that they would want to share any personal information. A half-century of work as a sports journalist taught me that elite athletes don’t necessarily care to offer their thoughts about the big game. To inquiries regarding insight on one’s performance, a common jock’s retort often goes something like, “You saw it.”

In 2008, when Big Brown was a major sports story—winner of the Kentucky Derby and Preakness leading up to the final leg of the Triple Crown at Belmont—the satiric news source The Onion spoofed Big Brown’s “arrogant refusal to speak to reporters.”

No bon mots from him. The flip side of such silence was offered by Frank Vuono, whose 16w marketing company was handling Big Brown’s lucrative licensing deals at the time. “There is no question we attach human qualities” to fine thoroughbreds, Vuono told me—traits such as courage, intelligence, honesty and heart. And the fact the horses “don’t talk back,” he said, “makes them perfect clients” and, as an added bonus, keeps them from offending anyone.

My late Newsday colleague Bill Nack once described the “borderline mythic” treatment of 1973 Triple Crown winner Secretariat being due, in part, to the fact that he was “this gorgeous mute who came along who was totally honest; all you had to do was feed him and train him and he’d do what you asked.”

Just as humans often are granted the appellation of “hero,” based solely on the ability to hit a home run, dunk a basketball or make an unexpected game-saving play, so do four-legged winners of sporting contests tend to be somehow admired. They don’t go into burning buildings to save babies, yet they often are ascribed the qualities of goodness and determination. As if an inbred ability to run fast indicated a never-give-up valor.

One of my first racetrack assignments in the fun-and-games business resulted from my curiosity regarding the difference in training processes between human and equine racers. A horse, I was reminded then by the best thoroughbred coaches, doesn’t know a Triple Crown from an eighth pole. They can’t be coaxed to workouts based on the lure of world records or fame. They can’t be threatened with, as one trainer put it, “Look. I’m going to kick you off the team if you don’t shape up.”

Still, there’s the Mr. Ed thing, the anthropomorphization of critters, the urge to sort of put ourselves in the animals’ shoes. To suppose what they might be thinking.

A recent takeoff in the New Yorker presented this year’s Kentucky Derby in the purported words of the race’s participants. So Country House, eventually declared the winner of that controversial event, described his confusion in how “everyone was running like mad. On my back was a tiny man dressed like a bumblebee. He had a stick and he was hitting my ass. Which was weird.”

The piece obviously was done for laughs, with Long Range Toddy admitting, “I don’t love running. I think walking at a brisk pace can give you the same kind of cardio with much less stress on your body.” And War of Will making the point that “my name is Greg, not War or Will. I don’t know what that even means or why people call me that.”

Not to disparage horse sense, but the truth is that thoroughbreds—1,500 pounds of muscle and speed—have brains the size of a walnut. They run 35 miles per hour on ankles the size of human ankles, with men on their backs—not a recipe for relaxed sprinting—so it is pretty clear that what you see on the track is what you get. And don’t expect an interview process would produce any more enlightenment about the race’s turning point or strategy or horse expectations.

Maybe a neigh or a whinny. But anyone claiming more from the horse’s mouth is hearing voices. Anyway, when Maximum Security became the first Kentucky Derby winner to be disqualified for interference in the race’s 145-year history, I strongly suspect he would have had only one thing to say.

“No comment.”

Fast living. (Emphasis on “living”)

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Anyway, nobody died.

Reports of Sunday’s Indianapolis 500 stretch run, describing “a perilous blocking move” by eventual winner Simon Pagenaud swerving back and forth across the track ahead of runner-up Alexander Rossi in the final lap, recalled a similar—and frightening—drivers’ dare in 1989, the one time I covered the celebrated race.

That high-risk duel 30 years ago, between Emerson Fittipaldi and Al Unser, Jr., hardly resembled typical last-second sports drama—the decisive jump shot, walk-off home run or tackle-breaking touchdown dash. It was deadly serious, a game of chicken at speeds in excess of 200 miles per hour. And a reminder that an aversion to chronicling human fatalities was a major factor in making sports my chosen sphere of journalism.

Automotive competition has its attraction, certainly. In what feels like a previous lifetime, I in fact partook in a gymkhana event, maneuvering my old MGB through a parking-lot maze of cones and turns for time. I have no recollection how well I did, but it was great fun. And quite safe.

Compare that to my first racing assignment at the 1979 Formula One championship in Watkins Glen, N.Y., when it was required, in obtaining press credentials, to sign a form acknowledging the possibility of collateral damage (including death) to us non-combatants. A real attention-getter, that.

A subsequent mission in 1982 to report on the Indy 500 “speed week,” the series of training sessions leading up to the race, began with the news that Gordon Smiley, attempting to qualify for his third Indy, had just hit the wall at 190 miles per hour and died instantly. He was 36.

A sobering twist of the traditional Indy 500 opening command of “Gentlemen, start your engines” once was offered by Jim Murray, the often snarky sportswriting great, by beginning his column on the race with “Gentlemen, start your coffins.”

Department of irony: A first impression in 1989 of finally witnessing the self-proclaimed America’s Greatest Sporting Spectacle was mostly dullness. Cars whizzed past, over and over for hours, in a deafening, almost lulling routine, while the usual attrition of broken automotive parts thinned the field.

But when Fittipaldi and Unser began their treacherous jousting through the last half-dozen laps, the speeds and the drivers’ abandon became unsettlingly evident. With continuous turns rushing at them in a blur and no room to spare in the corners, Fittipaldi and Unser were dodging and weaving dangerously past lapped cars. Unser had barreled past Fittipaldi on the straightaway with just more than two laps to go, then wandered all over the track to keep Fittipaldi from latching onto his draft. There seemed every chance that if the wall didn’t get them, a car was bound to.

So, when it ended no worse than it did, it was fairly miraculous. Unser was literally bumped from the lead when Fittipaldi’s right front tire clipped Unser’s left real tire and sent Unser into a slow spin, sliding backwards into the outside restraining wall. Somehow, trailing racers avoided a multi-car pile-up as Unser slipped back across the track and onto the infield.

The baseball expression “suicide squeeze” came to mind. But in a literal sense. Yet Unser, having lived through it, insisted afterwards that it was “just racing.”

“Y’know,” he said, “in racing there’s just times when you don’t think about life, you don’t think about money, you think about winning. [Fittipaldi] wasn’t going to lift [his foot off the accelerator], and neither was I.”

According to the Indy 500 website, only 16 drivers have died during the race in its 103 years (and another 27 during qualifying and practice sessions.) Fittipaldi, now 72, and Unser, now 57, could be said to be too old to die young anymore.

Veteran Indy 500 driver Johnnie Parsons years ago argued that he and his colleagues “are not wild and wooly characters who do not care if they live or die, nor or they clowns or speed-happy maniacs. They are men with a special skill….envied by many who were not gifted with the daring spirit and the ability to live life to the fullest.”

Still. Kids, don’t try this stuff at home.

Sports justice and King Solomon

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Of the 156 golfers entered in last week’s PGA championship tournament, only one—53-year-old former champ John Daly, was permitted to ride an electric cart to traverse the hilly 7,459-yard (4.2-mile) course. Because, the PGA’s American with Disabilities Act committee ruled, Daly has an arthritic knee.

Was that fair?

“Well,” 15-time major tournament champion Tiger Woods said, “I walked on a broken leg, so….” Woods was referring to the 2008 U.S. Open, which he won while playing with a stress fracture in his leg and a torn knee ligament.

Given that a core principle of sports is the so-called level playing field—theoretically a pure meritocracy, all competitors held to the same standards—there are some tricky dilemmas that are not so easily dealt with. Try this one:

Because two-time Olympic women’s 800-meter champion Caster Semenya of South Africa has a rare disorder of sexual development that produces high naturally-occurring levels of testosterone, she has been ruled ineligible in women’s events from 400 meters to a mile.

The international Court of Arbitration for Sport determined that Semenya’s condition provides a significant advantage in speed and endurance. And its not-so-great compromise is that Semenya may compete against men or in intersex categories not obviously available. Or she—and the tiny number of women with her condition—must reduce her testosterone levels either with drugs or surgery. (She is allowed to compete against women in other distances and has entered a 3,000-meter race at Stanford University next month.)

Not fair, Semenya said.

“Discriminatory,” the court in fact admitted. But “necessary, reasonable and proportionate” as a means of being fair to her female competitors.

All right: Define “fair.” Sameness? (Must Semenya have the same XX chromosome makeup as the female majority to be included in that group?) Deservedness? (Was John Daly entitled to special consideration because of his bad wheel?)

How about need?

In 2007, Oscar Pistorius of South Africa argued he should not have been excluded from running 400-meter Olympic qualifying events just because he had no legs. A double-amputee, Pistorius was producing times just a tick slower than the best able-bodied athletes in the world by using carbon-fiber artificial legs. Before he eventually was cleared for Olympic competition, there actually was some concern that Pistorius’ spring-like prostheses gave him an edge over runners with real legs.

Was that a worry about sore-loser complaints? Or the reasonable anxiety of well-meaning fairness-doctrine guardians so often confronted with performance-enhancing drugs, doctored equipment and other dastardly fudging?

For the equity police, there are no easy answers. Even well-intentioned drug testing—which has been used in Olympic sports for a half-century but came much, much later to American football, baseball and basketball pros—can only monitor chemistry. Not morality. What about doping sabotage? Inadvertent ingestion of a banned substance? Imperfect science?

“It’s a deep philosophical question,” swimming official John Leonard told me years ago. “Maybe we should say, ‘The hell with it. Let them use what they want and let’s just compete.’ But that’s not sport. That’s war. When you use any means available to win, that’s war. When you have rules that you agree to, to make things as equitable as possible, that’s sport.”

Still, “as equitable as possible” might not cover all aspects of genetics. Given all the gray areas, the incalculable bits of individuality, can even sincere attempts at sports justice truly balance the scales?

Julian Savulescu, a biomedical ethics professor based in Australia, posted an online proposal suggesting that, since Caster Semenya’s testosterone levels were natural and not the result of attempted cheating, she should remain eligible and her competitors should be allowed to add synthetic testosterone to “reduce any advantage Semenya may have.”

Problem solved. Cut the baby in half. (And golf carts for all.)

This. Is. Jeopardy!

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What is…Not the Mueller Report?

(The category was Big News and the answer was: James Holzhauer’s $1.7-million Jeopardy! run, now the most anticipated ongoing story of the spring.)

Let’s get down to business. Pick up your signaling buttons.

Category: Analytics.

Answer: This web site, apparently beaten to the punch by James Holzhauer, posted a chart on the frequency of where the Jeopardy! Daily Doubles have been located over the past 18 years.

What is…Fivethirtyeight.com?

Category: Close But No Cigar.

Answer: Brandeis University sports information direction Adam Levin got within this much money—closer than anyone else—of beating James Holzhauer so far.

What is…$18?

Category: Sour grapes.

Answer: Former non-winning Jeopardy! contestant Charles Lane’s description of James Holzhauer in a Washington Post column.

What is…a “menace”?

Category: Curmudgeon at Large.

Answer: Vanity Fair’s Daniel D’Addario’s take on James Holzhauer’s Jeopardy! dominance.

What is…“boring” and “deadly dull television”?

Category: Believe It or Not.

Answer: James Holzhauer’s winning strategy, according to the satiric “news source” The Onion.

What is…Threatening other contestants with a nail-studded baseball bat during commercial breaks?

Category: Not Hair Brained.

Answer: Washington Post columnist Norman Chad wrote that James Holzhauer outranks Albert Einstein’s IQ because Holzhauer is this.

What is…a “buzzer genius”?

Category: Sports.

Answer: James Holzhauer’s stated dream job, according to an interview posted by The Athletic.

What is…Major League Baseball general manager?

Category: Homophones.

Answer: A Jeopardy! contestant closely related to James Holzhauer’s adventure.

What is…kin Jennings?

Category: Nostradamus. DAILY DOUBLE.

(I’ve always wanted to say this, Alex: Let’s make it a true Daily Double.)

Answer: The most likely person to finally beat James Holzhaeur.

Who is…Not me?

But not necessarily for everybody…

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As April wanes I wax poetic

Concern myself with things aesthetic

Like rhyming onomatopoeia

With maybe an encyclopedia?

—

But as this month for special language

Comes to a close I always anguish

Over beats, syllables, also grammar

And iambic pentameter.

—

I think that you shall never see

Good poetry composed by me

But that won’t stop me e’ry April

To see if I am sudd’ly capable

—

Because it would be really fun

To write as Ogden Nash had done

Except a diphthong for me to coin

Might pull a muscle in my groin

—

Suppose I try for assonance

And wind up being half a dunce?

Or strain to conjure up a dactyl?

It’s just not feasible, not practyl

—

So poetry is not my deal

It’s hard to write, somehow not real.

Let Kilmer match a poem and tree

That seems a stretch, I’ll stick to free

Verse.

Or worse.

Too few good women in basketball?

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Muffet McGraw

This month’s NCAA women’s basketball championship final had a decided past-is-prologue feel when Notre Dame head coach Muffet McGraw lamented her sport’s dearth of “women in power.” For only the eighth time in the last 20 years, both coaches in the title game—McGraw and her Baylor counterpart, Kim Mulkey—were female.

And the context for current gender-equity issues certainly includes the personal histories of McGraw and Mulkey.

In the late 1970s, when McGraw, upon graduation from St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, competed in the WBL, the first women’s pro league, 32 of the 42 people who held head coaching positions—several for as few as one game over the WBL’s brief and troubled three-year existence—were male.

A couple of years later, when Mulkey was an all-American guard at Louisiana Tech, the team’s preparation and in-game coaching were handled by a man, Leon Barmore, though his title was “assistant.” The titular head coach, Sonja Hogg, sat on the bench for games but stuck to the second banana’s job of recruiter and luncheon speaker.

In 1982, that Louisiana Tech team won the first women’s national tournament sponsored by the NCAA. The previous 10 women’s versions of the Big Dance had been run on a shoestring by the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, while then-NCAA executive director Walter Byers insisted that facilitating women’s teams would “destroy the NCAA and college sports as we know them.”

But as Title IX, the 1971 law banning sex discrimination in education, slowly took effect, Byers wound up in the stands for that initial NCAA-backed title game in Norfolk, Va. He was there to witness Louisiana Tech’s 14-point victory over Cheney State, and to see the shortest player on the court—5-foot-4 Kim Mulkey—seize control in the second half.

During Tech’s decisive 20-2 run, Mulkey drove the lane for a layup, drove again and dished to senior Pam Kelly for a layup, lobbed a pass to leading scorer Janice Lawrence for another gimmee, sank a 20-foot set shot and looped another assist to Lawrence.

“Hey, gang,” Hogg said then, “this is what it’s all about. The NCAA will give us credibility. Exposure.” Also money, with the women’s tournament teams receiving travel expenses for the first time.

But something else happened under NCAA control. The proportion of female head coaches in women’s college basketball programs, at more than 90 percent in the early 1970s, has steadily dropped to under 60 percent.

As one way to reverse that trend, McGraw declared during Final Four weekend that it is her intention to never again hire a man as assistant. Predictably, there was the rejoinder that the most successful college women’s basketball coach in history—a guy, UConn’s Geno Auriemma—has done plenty to advance females in the sport by showcasing a record 11 national championships and by employing all women on his staff.

Mulkey, furthermore, wouldn’t go beyond saying she “understands” McGraw’s position. “I want the best person for the job,” said Mulkey, whose top assistant at Baylor is male. In 2008, in fact, Mulkey hired Barmore, the former Louisiana Tech championship architect, who served as her Baylor assistant for three seasons.

It could be that Mulkey’s experience, in terms of female-male balance, always was closer to cosmic justice than McGraw’s. During Mulkey’s playing days at Tech, that school’s women’s athletic budget equaled the men’s, even though there were 12 men’s teams and only three women’s.

But McGraw’s promise of women-only on her staff, in the face of the sport’s big-picture numbers, forces the contemplation that the past isn’t entirely past.

The Knicks as contenders? (Ask your parents.)

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This is how long it’s been since the New York Knicks played for a championship: One early-season Knicks’ loss leading up to that most-recent NBA Final-round appearance was the result of a last-second three-point basket by a Milwaukee Bucks sharpshooter named Dell Curry.

Stephen Curry’s father.

Way back then, in 1999—20 years ago; a generation ago—I had volunteered to cover that season after Newsday’s designated Knicks beat reporter traded herself to the New York Times. I can report that the experience was akin to having a courtside seat at a Stephen King novel. Abundant horror. Relentless suspense. Imperfect, real-life ending.

Knicks fans, not as thoroughly despondent as during this—the worst season in the team’s 73-year existence—nevertheless were as restive as ever then, regularly in full grumbling mode during a disorienting season which had been downsized from the usual 82-game slog to a 50-game frenzy over 13 weeks.

Because of a protracted labor dispute, training camps weren’t opened until mid-January, almost four months later than originally planned, and immediately the sky seemed to be falling. Spectator favorites Charles Oakley and John Starks had been traded away and in their place were an (unfairly) perceived slacker, Marcus Camby, and the NBA’s Enemy No. 1, Latrell Sprewell, whose 68-game suspension for choking his Golden State coach a year earlier had just been lifted.

The first game wasn’t played until February 5 and on April 19, already down to the last eight games, the Knicks—their roster stocked with fabulously compensated but aging, injury-hobbled veterans—were adrift at 21-21. They likely were going to miss the playoffs for the first time in 12 years.

The condensed schedule, which cut significantly into practice time, exacerbated the Knicks’ health issues and the need to marshal a reconstituted roster. There was an ongoing sense of fitting square pegs into round holes, constant talk of seeking a “chemistry”—though backup point guard Chris Childs argued that “chemistry is between lovers. Not basketball players.”

Really, those Knicks were schizophrenic. And so were those Knicks. Beautiful music one night. Completely off-key the next.

Five days into the season, Sprewell suffered a stress fracture in his heel and missed 13 games. The theoretically indispensable Patrick Ewing, from the start, was nursing a bad knee, a deteriorating Achilles tendon—and, later, injured ribs. He was absent for 12 games and below par for many others. Larry Johnson, another past-his-prime former All-Star, was restricted by chronic knee tendinitis.

Holding on to late leads was a persistent problem, a recurrence noted one night in Phoenix by radio play-by-play man Gus Johnson as the clock—and the Knicks’ advantage—again were leaking away.

“Coach Jeff Van Gundy is pacing the sidelines,” Johnson reported to his listeners.

Van Gundy, three feet away, turned to Johnson. “Damn right,” he said.

As the Knicks’ new hired gun, Sprewell engaged in serious one-on-one practice duels with the team’s shooter-in-residence, Allan Houston, in attempts to establish a pecking order. Until, eventually—and just in time—the two came to the conclusion that there was room for both of them.

Sprewell bridled at being used as a sixth man most of the season and declared that he wouldn’t change his full-throttle style to fit Van Gundy’s half-court sets. Like Van Gundy, though, his intense persistence ultimately served the team well.

Somehow, despite their deficiencies, the Knicks never lost their fire, a trait embodied by Childs, all of 6-foot-3, who late in the season offered to rumble with Atlanta’s 7-2 Dikembe Mutombo after accusing Mutombo of an intentional elbow that knocked out Childs’ tooth.

“It’ll be a 12-round fight,” Childs promised. “I’m going to call Don King and get it set up. I may not be able to reach his mouth, but I’ll get him.”

As the Knicks continued to flail around the .500 mark, rumors persisted that general manager Ernie Grunfeld was about to fire Van Gundy, who hardly was surprised. (“What’s he supposed to be saying to me?” Van Gundy said, “‘Good job’? You know, like, ‘Keep it up’?”)

When the Knicks hit that 21-21 low point, three places out of a playoff spot, team president Dave Checketts instead fired Grunfeld. And word leaked that Checketts was talking to Phil Jackson, coach of the six-time NBA champion Chicago Bulls, about also replacing Van Gundy.

Then came the series of far-fetched happenings. Down 15 points with seven minutes to go in Miami against the first-place Heat, the Knicks wound up winning by two. The next night, they won in Charlotte in the process of taking six of their last eight and sneaking into the playoffs. Barely.

Whereupon Houston’s awkward, desperation last-second 14-foot jump shot, waffling on the rim and backboard before deciding to fall through, bushwhacked Miami in the last seconds of the decisive fifth game of the first round. That was the first—and still, only—time a No. 8 seed eliminated a No. 1.

A second-round sweep of Atlanta suddenly had Garden fans, those insatiable beasts, temporarily sated and chanting Van Gundy’s name—“I thought the next word would be ‘sucks,’” was Van Gundy’s sly reaction—and had Checketts admitting he had lied about denying contacts with Jackson.

Next, tied a game apiece against Indiana in the third round, the Knicks learned that Ewing’s Achilles tendon was torn. But while he watched from the bench in the third game, with 11.9 seconds to play and the Knicks down by three, another impossibility was conjured by Larry Johnson. He caught a deflected inbounds pass and drilled a three-point shot as he was fouled, and his subsequent free throw won the game. And the Knicks won the series in six.

That the Knicks, without Ewing and with Johnson’s bad knee acting up, then lost the Finals to a younger, healthier San Antonio team in five games was perfectly reasonable.

So, close but no cigar.

There is a tired old cliché in sports that “nobody remembers who came in second,” a contention that anything less than a championship is failure. Horsefeathers. Those Knicks were memorable. And they get better as the years pass.

An April Fools’ Day Tradition

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(Stan Isaacs)

It used to be an annual tradition on April Fools’ Day for my longtime employer, Newsday, to publish star columnist Stan Isaacs’ whimsical rankings of decidedly inconspicuous topics—such as bowling pins; Fred Astaire’s dancing partners; TV remote buttons; “Things That Aren’t As Good as The Used to Be.” Stan died in 2013 and I officially retired from the newspaper the next year. But in Stan’s memory, his delightful parody must not go away.

It was conceived, he said, “as a loving spoof of the Ring Magazine boxing ratings….a rush to respond to the unrecognized need for evaluations of quantities like the Bridges Across the River Seine.”

His waggish purpose was to offer “an appraisal in areas that are generally ignored by raters” and he declared that “no category is too arcane” to grade. He called his yearly polls IRED, the Isaacs Ratings of Esoteric Distinction.” What follows is my pale imitation—which I will call the J-Faux—of similarly (and seriously) judged objects that normally might seem trivial.

Eating utensils: 1 (tie), Knife. Fork. Spoon. 2, Chopsticks. 3, Fingers.

Times: 1, Daylight. 2, Standard. 3, New York (print edition).

Thoroughfares: 1, Route 66. 2, Abbey Road. 3, Bourbon Street. 4, Barcelona’s Las Ramblas. 5, Broadway. 6, Straight and Narrow.

Chess strategies: 1, Nimzo Indian Defence. 2, Noak’s Ark Trap. 3, Morphy Defence. 4, Fianchetto.

Prognosticators: 1, Nostradamus. 2, Punxsutawney Phil. 3, Jeane Dixon. 4, Jimmy the Greek. 5, Your daily horoscope. 6, Any meteorologist in Southern California, where “it never rains.”

Three Stooges: 1, Moe. 2, Larry. 3. Curley.

50-Year Anniversaries Being Observed in 2019: 1, First man on the moon. 2, Amazin’ Mets’ World Series victory. 3. Woodstock. 4, Joe Namath’s Super Bowl guarantee. 5, First post-college job for yours truly.

Famous Pairs: 1, Pinky and the Brain. 2, Bob and Ray. 3, Romeo and Juliet. 4, Simon and Garfunkel. 5, Bonnie and Clyde. 6, Macaroni and cheese. 7, Death and taxes.

Harry Potter characters: 1, Hedwig. 2, Professor Dumbledore. 3, Draco Malfoy. 4, The sorting hat. 5, Hermione Granger. 6, Voldemort. 7, Ron Weasley. 8, Various muggles. 9, Dudley Dursley.

Forms of precipitation: 1, Rain. 2, Snow. 3, Sleet. 4, Fog. 5, Graupel.

Books on my bookshelf that I really mean to read some day: 1, Finnegans Wake. 2, War and Peace. 3, One Hundred Years of Solitude. 4, The Satanic Verses. 5, The other 35 of Shakespeare’s 37 plays.

Dogs: 1, Snoopy. 2, Lassie. 3, Tramp. 4, Rover. 5, Balto. 6, Rin Tin Tin. 7, Pluto. 8, Old Yeller. 9, Fido. 10, Sprocket. 11, Jack Russell.

Puzzlers: 1, Pi. 2, Rubik’s Cube. 3, E=mc2. 4, More than a few New Yorker cartoons.

Dreadful sports clichés: 1, They control their own destiny. (Impossible; destiny is destiny.) 2, Step up to the plate. 3, It is what it is. 4, At the end of the day… 5, That team just wanted it more. 6, They dodged a bullet. 7, They were playing with a chip on their shoulders. 8, There’s no tomorrow. 9, They gave 110 percent.

New Year’s Days: 1, April 1 (Until the Gregorian calendar replaced the Julian in 1564). 2, Jan. 1. 3, Sometime between Jan. 20 and Feb. 20 (Chinese or Lunar New Year); 4, Sometime between Sept. 5 and Oct. 5 (Jewish New Year, or Rosh Hashanah). 5, Sept. 11 (Coptic New Year, or Nayrouz). 6, Baseball Opening Day (“This is going to be our year!”)