Not a 2020 candidate

4 Replies

(As close as I and my potential First Lady will get to entering the White House)

Today I am announcing that I have decided not to run for President in 2020. I am doing this, in part, to stand out from the crowd. But there are many other reasons, beginning with the fact that the country really doesn’t need an old white guy in the Oval Office who has not previously been elected to anything.

In coming to this conclusion, I weighed the fact that I have no interest in conducting a listening tour through Iowa or New Hampshire. It’s really cold in those places this time of year. Also, I have determined that I don’t have a single political adviser. Or a speechwriter. And my donor base is nonexistent.

Name recognition, too, would be a problem on the stump. I acknowledge that I’m not well known by voters outside my state. Let alone in my immediate neighborhood. And though I have traveled widely, I confess that I never have set foot in either Hawaii or South Dakota. That’s seven electoral votes I probably couldn’t count on.

Then there is the matter of the relentless media scrutiny that is inevitable in a national campaign. The failure to receive my college diploma until I paid a $5 parking ticket in 1969 was an oversight, a thoroughly innocent memory lapse. But some aggressive snoop from the Washington Post or New York Times, bent on winning a Pulitzer, no doubt would make a big deal of that.

My international agenda might be another drawback. I took a Russian history class in college. But it was ancient Russian history and I didn’t exactly ace the course. Same with a “Power Politics” class. That was mostly about the 1930s and 40s. In 1991, I was in Cuba and saw Fidel Castro several times, but we never spoke. Besides, he’s gone now. So I’d have to get up to speed on a lot of things.

Economic policy: I read the Ron Chernow biography of Hamilton, founder of the nation’s financial system, before it had inspired the smash Broadway musical, but I can’t say I possess much fiscal savvy. What’s a bitcoin, anyway?

I do believe I’m on the same page as many of my fellow Americans regarding several pressing matters. I think the NFL has to figure out a way to substantiate pass-interference calls when the Super Bowl is at stake. I advocate the Oscars’ no-host format. I ascribe to no specific political ideology, though I do empathize with the semi-Libertarian tenet that you can do anything but don’t step on my blue suede shoes.

Bottom line, though: A campaign is just too daunting. Too exhausting. All those babies to kiss and selfies to pose for. All those “spontaneous” drop-ins at diners, interrupting folks just trying to eat their pancakes in peace. All those debates, mixing it up with a fair number of blowhards trying to one-up each other with tales of humble upbringings, pulling up bootstraps and walking miles to school in the snow.

And the good campaign slogans already have been used. Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too. He’s the One. Happy Days are Here Again. A Chicken in Every Pot and a Car in Every Garage. The People’s Choice. Where’s the Beef? I considered “He Means Well” but it sounds a bit wishy-washy.

It would be cool to go on Meet the Press, though. It would be fun to have, you know, a lawn sign with my name. But, no. I’ll leave it to others.

Vice president? I’m not seeking it, I’m not requesting it. I don’t expect it to happen.

Now hear this

Leave a reply

(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

This was in the fall of 2013 at an Arlo Guthrie concert, where there was an abundance of gray and thinning hair in the room. Arlo was digressing, as he often does midway through a song, about an upcoming show with his mentor Pete Seeger, the folk-singing social activist who was then 94 years old (and just months short of his death).

“Pete said, ‘Arlo,’ I don’t like that I don’t sing as well as I used to,’” Guthrie related. “I said, ‘Pete. Look at our audience. They don’t hear as well as they used to.’”

It took more than five years, but I got the hint. And went for hearing aids.

It’s just part of finally acting my age, really. According to the Center for Hearing and Communication, one in every three people over 65 has some degree of hearing loss. Two in three over 75—a number I’m closing in on—are losing their decibels.

I should note that, the marching of time aside, I have been functioning in mono for a while now. More than a decade ago, via a translabyrinthine craniotomy—a wonderfully named procedure—a benign tumor was yanked out of my head with the minimally negative result of deafness in one ear.

But the other one seemed in mint condition. So I worked at maneuvering speakers to my good-ear side, which typically was done by executing a slide-step and half-turn (as subtly as possible). Also, I got accustomed to holding a phone in my opposite hand. No problem.

Alas, the fact that people increasingly seemed to be mumbling under their breath, and the recent occasional need for TV’s closed captioning, moved me to schedule a visit with an audiologist.

It would be an overstatement to describe the minutes locked inside a sound-proof booth, straining to react to little beeps and hums in headphones, as akin to taking a polygraph. But the surprisingly stressful process does get to the truth. And the truth, that the good ear isn’t as good as it used to be, was right there in the downward trend of lines on the audiogram graph.

And what sealed the deal for me was the discovery of a veritable miracle of advancing technology: The crossover hearing contraption.

The way it works is that the gizmo plugged into the previously deaf ear transmits audio instantly to the better-ear aid, restoring a version of stereophonic sound.

This is the kind of thing that could lead a progressively mature person into Six Million Dollar Man territory—thinking in terms of bionic implants for various failing parts and a forever-young pretense.

Especially since there is a certain amount of stealth involved in wearing these new gadgets. Long out of style are those massive ear trumpets, the human equivalent of television rabbit ears—blatantly obvious and not particularly efficient—as well as several generations of appliances that brought to mind the 1964 song “Beans in My Ears.”

Here in the 21st Century, the “assistive listening device” consists of an inch-long apparatus that fits behind the ear—the flappier the ear, the better for disguise, lucky for me—and a virtually invisible wire leading into the ear canal. It’s the same look you get of your Congresswoman during a remote televised interview from the Capital.

Not that I should be the least bit self-conscious about signaling codger-hood by sporting hearing paraphernalia. Seriously, is it possible to cross paths with a member of Generation X or Z who doesn’t have something plugged into his or her ears?

And, listen: These little doodads resonate. Eerie? No. Ear-y.

R.I.P.: Track’s Fred Thompson

Leave a reply

Too late now. I wish I had asked Fred Thompson what originally drew him to track and field as a youngster; whether his participation in the sport—he competed for Brooklyn’s Boys High and City College—enhanced his feeling of personal worth; whether running track not only gave him something to do, growing up in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant community, but also dared him to push limits, stay in school, think in terms of being a productive member of a group.

All those things were transmitted by Thompson to the thousands of girls and young women he mentored through the Atoms, the track club he founded in 1963, and enhanced with the female-only Colgate Games he organized in 1974. Thompson died last week at 85, and I never even asked him the source of his transformational club’s name.

I could guess. The atom is the smallest unit of a chemical element, and Thompson’s club was for the little ones, kids as young as 8 and 9 and teenagers, often from broken homes and lives of poverty. (Thompson originally was a chemical engineering major at City College before switching to history and later earning his law degree at St. John’s University, so he knew his atoms.)

He himself had grown up in Bed-Stuy, which rivaled Harlem as a prominent black enclave, raised by an aunt after his parents split. And whatever it was he got out of running track he soon realized was available only to boys in those pre-Title IX days. So, barely into a career of law practice, he created the Atoms, based on the belief that more investment in grade-school sports would counter “the many problems in high school” and the lure of the mean streets. The atom, of course, is a primary source of energy.

He promoted competition—not winning-as-the-only-thing but as a means to demand maximum effort in a challenging world—and a responsibility to teammates. He preached a “yes, you can; yes, you can” attitude that one of his runners called “stubbornness” to be “positive instead of negative.”

In strict coaching terms, Thompson was among the best. His Atoms’ stars included Cheryl Toussaint and Diane Dixon, Olympic gold medalists in 1972 and 1984, and two-time Olympian Lorna Forde. (In 1988, Thompson was named the women’s sprint coach for the U.S. Olympic team.) But the Atoms were started as a social project; no previous track experience was required but school attendance was. And what the club really stood for, he said, was “excellence in education, trying to better yourself.” In the club’s first 15 years of existence, the unlikely total of 50 former Atoms earned college degrees and went on to varied careers that included teaching, the law, nursing, psychology.

A long-ago NBC-TV series, Real People, once aired a segment on Thompson in which Toussaint called the Atoms “my second family…the encouragement I got. If anyone wants to call Fred a saint, it’s fair enough.”

One of my first beat assignments for Newsday in the early 1970s was the New York track and field scene, including the annual winter series of meets at Madison Square Garden. One of my first expert sources was Thompson—almost always in a suit and tie, always dripping with passion for the sport and his Atoms, which often had as many of 50 team members.

For a while, they trained in locked Brooklyn schoolyards by scaling fences in the early evening before he arranged workouts at Pratt Institute and before the most accomplished Atoms performed at the Garden, the self-proclaimed “world’s most famous arena.” Thompson brought his kids, and then the Colgate Games, to that premier athletic stage. (Since Thompson’s 2014 retirement as Colgate meet director, his replacement has been Touissant.)

He never married, he said, because no woman would have put up with him and the Atoms. He didn’t like to be called “Coach” by club members, preferring “Fred” or “Freddie.” “I’m their friend,” he said.

In that old Real People report, Lorna Forde said, “Freddie’s crazy. He takes his whole income and just spends it on us and, ‘Well, maybe I’ll get it back when I get some funds and stuff.’ And nobody would do that. Nobody.

“They don’t make people like that anymore.”

Tennis’ working-class hero

Leave a reply

If winning Grand Slam tennis tournaments was easy, anybody could do it. Andy Murray has contributed mightily to the public’s understanding of just how much work play can be at the elite level.

Murray won three major titles during a career, apparently ended now because of a chronic hip injury, that has been enormously successful by any standard. More to the point: His hardly was a primrose path.

He spent the first eight years of his professional career, and his first 27 major-tournament appearances, gnawing at the chains of great expectations. After immediately establishing himself as a member of the sport’s Fab Four—consistently ranked alongside Federer, Nadal and Djokovic—Murray repeatedly faced the insistent question (especially from the clamorous British press) of “When?”

When would he at last win the Big One? His early promise—the 2004 U.S. Open junior title at 17—had raised the likelihood that he would be the first British man to win a major since 1936, and his repeated close-but-no-cigar finishes somehow were seen as a dereliction of duty.

He had arrived on the scene not long after a cartoon in the London press highlighted the irony of Great Britain’s distinction as the sport’s birthplace and host of the game’s oldest and most famous tournament, even as it continually failed to produce championship contenders. Wimbledon, the lampoon went, had become “a fortnight of glorious self-delusion about Britain’s status as a serious tennis nation.”

Britons’ mixed feelings about the Scottish-born Murray were summed up in a ditty by a fellow named Matt Harvey in 2010, when Harvey was hired as Wimbledon’s official poet laureate:

If he’s ever brattish/Or brutish or skittish

He’s Scottish.

But when he looks fittish/And his form is hottish

He’s British. 

Later that summer, Murray entered the U.S. Open as the fittest, hottest player on tour, only to be upset in the third round. Under the usual post-match interrogation of how soon and how he intended to fulfill his enormous potential, he might have responded with a thoroughly reasonable snarl. Something along the lines of: “This isn’t easy, you know.”

But instead of telling the media vultures to go jump in a lake, Murray clarified what should have been obvious. “I have no idea whether I’ll win a Grand Slam or not,” he said. “You know, I want to. But if I never win one, then what? If I give a hundred percent, try my best, physically work as hard as I can, practice as much as I can, then that’s all I can do.

“It’s something I would love to do. I’ll give it my best shot.”

In such settings, Murray speaks in a flat monotone, almost mumbling, sounding a bit detached even when he is anything but. It’s a startling contrast to his on-court voice, fiery shouts of self-deprecation and a body language at maximum volume of annoyance in times of frustration.

Two years after that soul-baring, after four runner-up finishes in majors, he at last had a Slam trophy at the Open and was just as straightforward about his feelings. He admitted that mid-match of his four-hour, five-set victory over Djokovic, “You’re still questioning yourself and doubting yourself.”

He eventually won Wimbledon twice and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, but last week’s description of Murray by the U.K.’s Independent as “a human in the land of gods” was a fitting recognition that his successes were hardly pre-ordained. That, to get paid, he had punched the clock. And that he indeed is not immortal.

At 31—young in the population at large but pushing the expiration date for his physically demanding enterprise—Murray now is “meeting the little death,” as novelist John Updike once wrote, “that awaits all athletes.”

But how about this for a nice legacy? The occasional “love” in tennis need not mean one’s labors are lost.

The other skating crimes in Detroit that week

Leave a reply

Early January 1994—25 years ago this week—brought big, big news in figure skating. Nancy Kerrigan, widely considered a gold-medal candidate for that winter’s Olympic Games, was physically assaulted the day before she was to compete during the U.S. National Championships, which were serving as the Olympic trials, in Detroit.

It turned out, as anyone paying any attention has known for the last quarter century, that associates of Tonya Harding, Kerrigan’s skating rival, were responsible for the attack. The fiendish episode, and its shadow over the ’94 Lillehammer Olympics, was so bizarre that it refuses to grow smaller in the rearview mirror.

And now that the skating nationals are returning to the Motor City for the first time since ’94, veteran Olympic reporter Phil Hersh has marked the Nancy-Tonya anniversary with a terrific in-depth retrospective for nbcsports.com.

That same week in Detroit, by the way, another highly unusual skating event transpired: The first—and, as far as I know, last—National Media Figure Skating Championships. Not so memorable that Hersh should have mentioned it. But, still.

It was organized by Michelle Kaufman, the Olympic beat writer for the Detroit Free Press at the time. She arranged for use of a skating rink, for rental skates, even for music to accompany our…ahem…routines. (We were on our own for skating outfits, which I recall ran toward sweatshirts and jeans.)

Kaufman invited a handful of figure skating officials to the morning gathering, and that informal mingling with the likes of U.S. Figure Skating Association president Claire Ferguson paid enormous dividends at the Olympics. Unlike the hordes of journalists who parachuted into the Games at the last minute, in anticipation of more Tonya-Nancy mayhem, those of us from the small knot of…er…competitors in the Media Figure Skating Championships were immediately recognizable to Ferguson.

About those championships, though. There were a couple of folks who actually knew what they were doing. I recall a woman who wrote for a skating magazine who was doing spins and jumps, some real dipsy-doodling. But, as Randy Harvey of the Los Angeles Times noted, “We can see that at a figure skating event anytime.” He preferred the Larry-Curley-Moe bits, such as the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s Jay Weiner shuffling around as half of a pairs team—the other half being a chair. I suspect it was not so much a prop as a device to prop him up. And the New York Times’ Jere Longman finishing his slow-motion bit by pretending to drink from a champagne bottle.

My favorite—and I believe it resulted in the winning scores—was the vision of the Boston Globe’s John Powers, a bear of a man, building steam as he powered across the ice with what appeared to be dead aim at the judges’ table. I contend there was real fear in the arbiters’ faces, a dread that he may not be able to stop or turn in time.

Could it be that Powers was awarded good marks for having spared the judges injury?

As for my own performance: Having grown up in warm-weather locales, with scant experience on blades, I decided to play it safe. Since the judges were at one end of the rink, I chose to glide—shamble? totter? lumber?—to the opposite end, whereupon I did a few back-and-forth repeats before making a quiet exit.

Unlike Tonya Harding, I did not attempt a triple axel. Also unlike Harding, I did not fall. And I was abundantly rewarded. One of the appointed judges, Linda Leaver, who coached 1988 gold medalist Brian Boitano and therefore was eminently knowledgeable of all things figure skating, presented me with a perfect 6.0—the highest possible score in the sport at the time.

“I don’t know what you did,” she said. “You were too far away. I just figured it must have been okay.”

Anyway, then we all adjourned to cover the real skating. And actual crimes.

Sports betting: Feel-bad entertainment

Leave a reply

Nostradamus I am not. For this, and many other reasons, I am not rubbing my hands together in anticipation of nationwide legal sports betting.

That puts me somewhere in fuddy-duddy territory. A recent poll found that the majority of Americans—55 percent—now support such activity, a reversal of attitudes from just 25 years ago. And that shift in mood coincides with the Supreme Court ruling in May that struck down a 1992 federal law prohibiting most states from authorizing gambling on sports.

Teams and leagues, so opposed for so long to betting as a risk to “the integrity of competition,” suddenly are rushing to arrange partnerships with casinos. Calvin Ayre, a Canadian-Antiguan entrepreneur and founder of an online gambling company, has cited an analysis that sports betting can be “the cure to declining TV sports viewership.”

Having money on the line, the reasoning goes, will draw gamblers to tune in and monitor the progress of their investments. Those self-proclaimed oracles and clairvoyants out there, convinced they can see around the corner, will want to track their potential windfalls.

But I tend to subscribe to the argument that gambling is a sure way to get nothing for something. I confess to an aversion to barrel apparel. At this writing, my one annual attempt at sports prognostication—joining 35 others in a $1 college football bowl pool—reminds again of the financial ruin I would face as a serious gambler.

Of the 21 games played so far, I have correctly foreseen the winner of nine. (A losing percentage of .428.) Over the pool’s 20-year existence, I never have finished in first place, while my friend’s daughter won the whole thing when she was 3 years old! She did so by prophesying results based on which opposing teams’ mascots would be natural predators of the opponent’s mascot. As reliable as any betting system available, I suspect.

Furthermore, I cling to the outdated belief that the unscripted theater of sports—the sheer unpredictability—provides quite enough action. And to apply such an outlook precludes involvement with the soul of the betting industry—point spreads. Since the purpose of sporting contests is to determine a winner and loser, the exercise of divining—guessing?—by how much a team will win or lose strikes me as (sorry) pointless.

And don’t get me started on fantasy sports, in which wagering on the statistics of individual players takes precedence over team performance—a clear devaluation of the very idea of sports competition.

One final thought, after struggling to compose these thoughts on the vacuous—and fiscally perilous—racket that is sports betting: The English author and critic M. John Harrison has judged that “writing is like gambling. Unpredictable and sporadic successes make you more addicted. Not less.”

Hmmm. But I haven’t lost my shirt.

 

Brexit and soccer: A political football

Leave a reply

The best thing about Brexit is that it offers an occasion to summon the delightful noun “portmanteau,” a word that blends the sounds and combines the meanings of two other words.

Mostly, though, “Brexit”—for “British exit,” the United Kingdom’s pending withdrawal from the European Union—feels thoroughly unpleasant. It has been characterized by some experts as the worst step backward for Europe and Western civilization since the end of World War II. Economically. Socially. Ethnically. Even—and this caught my attention as a veteran of sports journalism—athletically.

A major aspect to Brexit is its proponents’ expectations of British control over immigration. And that translates to the likely loss of foreign superstars who have been so essential to the English Premier League’s status as the world’s best in soccer. The subsequent retreat in the game’s quality, and the resulting dent in its commercial appeal, are why all 20 Premier League clubs were against the Brexit referendum passed in 2016.

In a Forbes listing of the Premier League’s best 10 players last season, only two were Englishmen. According to the BBC, a Brexit-imposed work permit requirement for non-UK workers would eliminate almost 60 percent of the league’s current roster players.

That could take English soccer back more than two decades, to when a quota system limited UK teams to three foreign players. Back then, many of the sport’s cognoscenti were becoming convinced that the increasingly insular nature of the English game made it boring. It was mostly hopeful long balls launched downfield—“pigeon racing,” it was dismissively labeled—and not much else.

Such an approach, by-passing the midfield as defenders send balls over the top toward a clinical, physically imposing striker, still is particularly associated with the English. It does have its adherents, though they are in danger of being accused of being old school. I recall this argument from Jack Charlton, a member of England’s last World Cup champion in 1966, when he used the strategy to coach the first Irish team to qualify for the World Cup in 1990.

“Play in [the opponents’] half of the field,” Charlton said. “Endeavor every time to get the ball behind people. Get the buggers turning, turning, turning on defense. It drives them crazy. All the fanciest, classiest, ‘possession football’ in the world is no substitute for getting the ball behind the defense and playing merry hell with them when they’re facing the wrong way.”

But, since that ’66 English world title, Germany has won the Cup three times with a relentless efficiency emphasizing shifting player roles; Italy has won twice with its defensively oriented, counter-attacking catenaccio; Brazil three times with its creative, fast-flowing brand sometimes equated to dance; Argentina twice with individual skills and speed; Spain once with grounded, quick-touch passing—the fancy, classy, possession football Charlton believed to be no substitute for long ball.

These “national styles” are generalizations, of course, and generalizations are dangerously unreliable. What is difficult to argue against is that a broader talent pool will make a sport, and every team, better. Though there were grumbles from the xenophobic French fringe last summer that the country’s 2018 World Cup team was more African than European, stocked with sons of immigrants from the Congo, Senegal, Morocco, Mali and Cameroon, the bottom line was that France won the title. Viva la difference, n’est-ce pas?

Soccer teams, posited a 2014 Washington Post series, “may accrue additional benefits when their players differ in the way they interpret problems and use their skills to solve them,” and that “this variation likely stems from their exposure to different training methods and styles of play” that undeniably differ from country to country.

An opinion piece in the New York Times by a political journalist based in London argued that Brexit is “the most boring important story in the world” right now. Sticking strictly to the less significant aspect of soccer, I am rooting for unrestricted travel of players that assures a continued diversity in the game—an antidote to boredom. Some fancy, classy, possession football mixed in with the pigeon racing. Describing such a soccer style would necessitate a portmanteau: Spanglish.

Pardon these Presidential moments

Leave a reply

A prominent person dies and all manner of folks come out of the woodwork to lay claim to personal interactions with the recently departed, however tenuous. So, not to be left too far behind in this matter….

I did not actually know George H.W. Bush, or any United States President. But I was in near proximity to him once, and to some other Commanders in Chief as well. Some First Ladies, too.

(I also was once in the same room as Fidel Castro. But that’s another story, another country and another system of government. So, never mind.)

About the Bush memory. It was in the mid-‘80s. He was still Vice President, filling in for Ronald Reagan at a U.S. Olympic Committee function meant to honor American athletes. The event was supposed to have been at the White House but was moved to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street. A disappointment—because of the lesser venue, not because I necessarily yearned to see Reagan in person.

I was among a small group of Olympic reporters underwhelmed by Bush’s brief rote speech from a prepared statement. Still, there was this quintessential Washington, D.C. moment, when Chris Wallace—then the chief White House correspondent for NBC News—shouted a question, thoroughly unrelated to the proceedings, at Bush as he left. Just like you’d see on the evening news. A query about the Iran-Contra scandal, I think. Bush ignored him. Just like you’d see on the evening news.

Presidents are celebrities, of course, and like celebrities they tend to appear at major happenings. That meant it was almost inevitable that, as I went about a half century of sports journalism, a President and I would occupy the same relative space at some point.

With some ruffles and flourishes, then, I will proceed.

At a U.S.Open tennis match in the mid-1990s, Jimmy Carter and First Lady Rosalynn were in the crowd, about three rows in front of the seats reserved for us reporters. Very inconspicuous except for the fellow accompanying them in a suit and dark glasses, with the little gizmo in his ear. The secret service profile giveaway.

Reagan attended the Opening Ceremonies of the 1984 L.A. Olympics, though I won’t count that as a close encounter because he stayed completely out of sight—behind bullet-proof glass high above the field—as he officially declared the start of those Games. By contrast, Bill Clinton brazenly marched onto the floor of the Atlanta Olympic stadium for the 1996 Ceremonies, only two days after the fatal crash of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island had put everyone of high alert for possible terrorism. More on Clinton in a minute.

Richard Nixon was at a Mets game not long after his 1974 resignation, but I won’t count that, either, except to say that the police security presence inconvenienced all of us in attendance. Donald Trump, still just a boastful real estate guy who liked to get his name and picture in the paper, regularly made himself obvious in his personal suite at U.S. Open tennis matches through the 1980s and into the 21st Century. (I noticed that his suite was empty at this year’s tournament.)

I did speak with Trump at length by phone in 1984, because he had just purchased the New York/New Jersey franchise in the short-lived U.S. Football League. (What I learned was that almost none of his assertions that day proved to be accurate.)

First Ladies? Aside from that Rosalynn Carter cameo at the tennis championships, Laura Bush literally brushed shoulders with me and fellow Olympic reporter Jay Weiner in a scrum of spectators during the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics Opening Ceremonies. Jay said hello.

Hillary Clinton, between her roles of First Ladyship and Secretary of State, spoke to a handful of us ink-stained wretches in Singapore in July 2005. We were there to cover the International Olympic Committee meeting to name the 2012 Olympic host city and Clinton, then a New York senator, was there to pitch New York City’s bid. (New York lost to London.)

Not surprisingly, it was Clinton’s husband who most often appeared on my—and countless others’—personal radar. Aside from that Atlanta Olympic sighting, he showed up in Chicago for the first match of the 1994 World Cup soccer tournament hosted by the U.S. He was the principal dignitary at the Mets game on April 15,1997 to celebrate 50 years since Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier. (More secret service headaches, but a memorable event.)

At the 1996 Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia, I was meandering around the press box at halftime when Clinton popped in, gabbing—hoarsely—with folks from the two academies and anyone else in his path. He could barely be heard because of a case of laryngitis. Standing five feet from him, I was tempted to ask if his doctor was aware that, in his condition, he nevertheless was spending the day in the freezing cold.

Didn’t happen. Wouldn’t have been polite. Plus, I hardly knew the guy.

Proper attire in college football

2 Replies

yes

no

There are far more worrisome matters these days than the mutiny by sports apparel companies over traditional college football colors. But, really: Dressing Notre Dame’s gridders in pinstriped Yankee baseball pants and navy blue helmets?! This may be another potentially touchy topic that probably should he avoided on Thanksgiving weekend. But won’t be here.

I quote Paul Lukas, who runs the web site Uni-Watch (“The obsessive study of athletic aesthetics”), in judging that Notre Dame fashion statement “about as silly as you’d expect.” More idiotic is how such unnatural apparel trends have become so common.

I acknowledge a curmudgeonly mien regarding this subject. And a personal one. To see the lads representing my alma mater, the University of Missouri, tromping around this season in white helmets one week, yellow the next, is an abomination. The school colors are black and gold and, for something like 50 years, the conventional garb was black helmet (with three distinctive stripes), black shirt (white on the road), gold pants.

Not only stylish, but appropriate. An immutable look that was instantly identifiable to the Mizzou tribe of alumni and fans—and to college football observers in general. Then Nike got its grubby capitalistic hands on the operation and replaced historical hues with shades of mediocrity. Once Nike co-founder Phil Knight initiated a garish rotation of togs for players at his school, the University of Oregon, a few seasons ago, we have been doomed to counterintuitive attire that, in effect, creates mystery teams. Not to mention candidates for those old Mr. Blackwell worst-dressed lists.

This cross-pollination of pigments is gripping all sports, and Nike isn’t the only perpetrator among the outfitters. There is a frenzy over “alternate uniforms” in which teams change clothes from week-to-week, game-to-game, resulting in moving targets of sartorial insignificance.

One major trend is that, while black is being erased from teams that traditionally have worn black, there simultaneously is a preoccupation of dressing those whose school colors are not black in black—at least part of the time: Northwestern (purple and white) in black. Florida State (garnet and gold) in black. Nebraska (scarlet and cream) in black. Iowa State (cardinal and gold) in black. Tulane (green and blue) in black. Temple (cherry and white) in black. North Carolina State (red and white) in black. Baylor (green and gold) in black. And on and on.

The nonsensical reasoning for this misapplication of colors—the excuse, constructed out of whole cloth by Missouri, among others—is a “branding” supposedly meant to establish a team’s widespread identity among spectators and potential recruits. When, in fact, it does the opposite.

My Missouri guys—Who are those fellows and where are they from?—have worn a different uniform in each of their 12 games this season, such a dizzying search for a hallmark that the Columbia Missourian, the city newspaper operated by the university’s elite Journalism School, sought out a professor from New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology for insight.

Tim Scott, the FIT academic and consultant to such high-tone clothing giants as Ralph Lauren, found some of the uniforms “well-coordinated,” some “a bit ordinary,” some “not so traditional,” and the black pants used in one combination to “look almost like women’s workout pants…”

That’s branding? Since college rosters turn over quickly—with no player around for more than four years—the uniform is what customarily served as the constant for spectators. Ever since we moved past the ancient Olympians competing in their birthday suits, there has been a real visual aspect to sports duds, as evidenced by the many listings—however subjective—of the most attractive and ugliest. Notice: Among the regularly cited favorites are those essentially unchanged over the decades: Alabama’s threads. Michigan’s. Penn State’s. USC’s. UCLA’s.

Just last week, Uni-Watch’s Lukas referenced the annual USC-UCLA game, “which once again found the Bruins and Trojans going color vs. color, to spectacular effect,” UCLA in its powder blue and gold and USC in cardinal and gold, an eye-catching (and familiar) corrective to the weird Notre Dame/Yankee laundry.

Spare us the chromophobia of gaudy, illogical raiment. (They wear their welcome thin. Instantly.) Stick with the hand-me-down styles and official colors of past generations. Custom over costume.

 

Applauding the story: David Price

Leave a reply

It is a cardinal rule of sports journalism: No cheering in the press box. Don’t take sides. Check your partiality at the door. Let the fans be fans and just report.

It’s not that hard, really. We Knights of the Keyboard, as Hall of Fame Red Sox slugger Ted Williams sarcastically called the sporting press, most often are too busy juggling game developments, deadlines, statistics and the English language to have time or energy for rooting. Plus, it doesn’t take long in the business to understand there is no direct line between a jock’s admirable athletic skill and moral virtue. That tends to dull favoritism.

What we cheer for is the story. So now, from a distance—officially retired, and only catching glimpses of the World Series on television—I might have given in to my pre-teen fandom for the Dodgers against the Red Sox. I certainly retain a clear bias regarding the Dodgers’ classic uniforms. (Love the red numbers.)

But the way the narrative played out, with an especially nice ending for Red Sox pitcher David Price, I found it easy to muster a quiet hoorah for a fellow who years ago made a good impression in what, for him, was a decidedly uncomfortable situation.

That was July 9, 2011. I was one of a handful of Newsday scribes assigned to Yankee Stadium in anticipation of Yankee favorite Derek Jeter’s pursuit of a 3,000th career base hit. A big deal. My job, specifically—if Jeter were to produce that hit—was to talk to Jeter’s victim, whichever Tampa Bay Rays pitcher surrendered the hit.

That turned out to be Price.

“I’d rather not be the answer to this trivia question,” he said hours after the fact. “But I am. It’s tough, but he’s one of the best hitters who ever played baseball, so he was going to do it to somebody, and it just happened to be me.”

All the fuss that day was about Jeter, of course, but there always is another side to the tale. In covering sports, I often am reminded of an old Peanuts cartoon, in which Linus excitedly reports to Charlie Brown about watching a televised football game in which the home team conjures an improbable last-second victory.

Linus details how the home team is behind, 6-0, stuck on its own one-yard line with three seconds to play, when the quarterback throws a perfect pass and the receiver avoids four tacklers and somehow scores.

With the decisive extra point, “The fans went wild,” Linus reports. “You should’ve seen them. Thousands of people ran onto the field, laughing and screaming. The players and the fans were so happy they were rolling on the ground and hugging each other and dancing and everything. It was fantastic!”

Charlie Brown says, “How did the other team feel?”

So I was one in a small clutch of reporters who approached David Price that July day to ask how he felt to be the defeated antagonist in a stadium full of laughing, hugging, dancing Yankees and their fans.

Price noted how unavoidable the Jeter commotion was. “It was everywhere,” he said. “I mean, walking out of the tunnel and looking at all the signs saying, ‘Congratulations, Jeter.’”

Jeter had singled off Price in the first inning for his 2,999th hit, and when he stepped to the plate in the third inning, “You’ve got 50,000 people screaming for Jeter to get a hit,” Price said. On top of that, Price was supplied a baseball marked with a “J-3” in the event Jeter would strike his 3,000th hit in that at-bat.

Sure enough, Jeter made a 3-and-2 Price curveball disappear over the leftfield fence to lift the Yanks into a 1-1 tie. “I really didn’t care,” Price said, “if the guy got [No. 3,000] off me, as long as he didn’t drive in a run or score a run. And he did all those things.”

His response was to “tip his cap” to Jeter. He reminded that, in his major league debut three years earlier, he had given up a home run to Jeter, who hardly was known for hitting homers. The thing was, Price certainly didn’t ask for sympathy; rather, he described pitching before a full house in what he called “the grandest stage in baseball” was what “any player could ask for.”

In his 11 big-league seasons, Price twice led the league in earned run average and once in strikeouts and has complied an envious won-lost record of 143-75. But because, in sports, coming up short in the highest-visibility occasions is too casually equated with deficient character, he has had to endure years of public scorn for a 2-10 post-season record prior to this fall.

Now, he’s the answer to another trivia question: Who twice beat the Dodgers in the 2018 World Series, including in the title-clinching game? That’s worthy of a good cheer from a long-ago Dodgers fan.