Respect for Tiffeny Milbrett

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In the summer of 2001, it was possible to argue that the most accomplished player on any New York professional sports team was 5-foot-2, 130 pounds and female. That was Tiffeny Milbrett, who has just been inducted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame.

Milbrett was playing for the Long Island-based New York Power in 2001, the inaugural season of the short-lived Women’s United Soccer Association. A feisty attacker, hiccup-quick, she seemed to persistently materialize at the goalmouth, poised to strike. She constantly called for the ball, not in any discernible language but with what her coach and teammates described as a series of squeaks and shrieks and shouts. “The higher the pitch,” Power teammate Christie Pearce said then, “the more she wants the ball.”

Milbrett was the WUSA’s first MVP, its first author of a hat trick and the first season’s scoring leader, yet spent her career—16 years on the U.S. National team; still sixth on the all-time goal scoring list—yearning for the kind of recognition mostly withheld from her while being lavished on so many of her peers. The Mia Hamms. Julie Foudys. Brandy Chastains.

Which didn’t sit especially well with Milbrett, who had picked up the nickname “No Tact Tiff” during her time at the University of Portland, when her 103 goals equaled Hamm’s then-college record. “I earned that,” she said of the handle. “Because of many, many times having foot in mouth. But a lot of times tact is B.S. The truth hurts.”

With Milbrett, there was no beating around the bush, no sugar-coating, just look-you-in-the-eye talk. “Here I was,” she said, “coming onto the national team and going above and beyond those guys and not getting the respect from my coaches and teammates. It took me way too long to get that respect.”

That was the era when the American women shouldered their way into the public sports consciousness with Olympic and World Cup titles. They stirred the passion of countless young girls—the Ponytail Hooligans—and demanded the attention of Nike’s marketing might.

It was Milbrett who produced the gold-medal winning goal at the ’96 Olympics and who led the team in scoring in the 1999 U.S.-based World Cup—the one more widely remembered for Chastain’s off-with-her-shirt penalty-kick celebration. Milbrett still shares the national team record for most goals in a match—five.

There was a 2000 Olympics first-round match in Melbourne, Australia—a 2-0 victory over Norway—that illustrated the relentless threat of a Milbrett score, even as she went about what amounted to a negative hat trick. Dead-eye shooter that she was, it didn’t seem possible she could hit the goal’s woodwork three times in a game if she tried. But she wasn’t trying, and she did.

After giving the U.S. an early 1-0 lead, Milbrett rattled one shot off the right post, one off the crossbar and one off the left post, then rifled another just wide and nearly knocked over the Norwegian keeper with yet another heavy blow. She had come within inches of a six-goal game.

Still, she noticed back then, “the endorsement world looks for this one spitting image, this person next door, this All-American image. This one. This type.”

Not her. But endorsements come and go. The Hall of Fame is a little piece of immortality. There’s no hurt in that truth.

The Gagliardi Doctrine: Football sanity

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John Gagliardi began his letter—neatly produced by playing the Olivetti or the Underwood, one of those manual pre-laptop writing machines—“See. I can type.”

I had interviewed him a couple of weeks earlier at St. John’s Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minn., where Gagliardi was in the 34th of his eventual 60 seasons coaching the school’s football team. He already was wildly successful at collecting championships in the NCAA’s non-scholarship Division III, but that wasn’t the news. The real story was how Gagliardi had an approach to his sport that was so foreign as to be a football non sequitur.

That was 1987, and it simply did not follow then—any more than there might seem a logical progression now—that Gagliardi’s rejection of tackling in practice, of playbooks and agility drills, of calisthenics and war terminology, of clipboards and whistles and blocking dummies, could set such an enviable example of gridiron might.

Anyway, Gagliardi was recalling back then how his coaching career began as a 16-year-old high school junior. And how, “meanwhile, there was a junior college in town”—Trinidad, Col.—“and I was also playing basketball in high school and the coach at the junior college asked me if I’d like to play for him after the high school season was over.

“He told me,” Gagliardi said, “to go to night school and take typing” to be eligible for the college team. “I wound up lettering four years in junior college in basketball—two years while I was still in high school. I got to be a hell of a typist.”

When Gagliardi died this week at 91, six years after retirement, he took with him a humanity and a wonderfully sly sense of humor. More than his 489-138-11 coaching record—by far the most accomplished mark in college football history—was his outrageously sane approach.

A football team that didn’t practice tackling? “That came to me,” he said, “as a young guy who was getting killed in practice” during his high school playing days at Trinidad Catholic.

No calisthenics? No drills? No laps? “When I was in high school,” he said, “we had a coach I learned a lot from. All negative. He was a fanatic on calisthenics and drills. Torturous stuff. And laps, laps, laps. We were worn out before we started. My memory of it was that Hell must be like this. Those damn duck walks. I hated them. Years later, everybody was told how bad those duck walks are for your knees. Anyway, then we’d scrimmage. We’d kill each other in practice. I came within a hair of not hanging in there.”

What saved his playing career, and launched his coaching vocation, was when that negative coach was called to military service during Gagliardi’s junior year. The school principal intended to disband the football team but Gaglilardi, the team captain, saved the day by volunteering to coach.

“We just wanted to play,” he said. “First thing I did was throw out all the calisthenics. See, I had noticed all the kids who would go play intramurals never did all the drills and that stuff, and I never saw any ambulances going over to their fields. The ambulances always were coming over to us.”

And another thing: “Our coach used to say, ‘Hit somebody! Kill somebody!’ But I noticed that I was the guy getting killed,” Gagliardi said. “The only tragic flaw in his system was that, when we lined up, we didn’t know what the hell we were doing. I was the tailback—you know, the old single-wing, Notre Dame Box and all that—and I noticed that when I’d call a play, there would be panic in the linemen’s eyes. ‘Who do I block?’ I thought the first thing we ought to do is figure out who to block.”

When Trinidad Catholic proceeded to win the state championship that year, Gagliardi had found his calling—and the conviction that a football coach need not stand on ceremony. At St. John’s, he did without staff meetings, grading of game film, the existence of a training table. No player was considered too small. No player ever was cut from the team, with in excess of 150 on the roster some years and as many as 120 sometimes used in the same game.

His players employed The Beautiful Day Drill, in which they would lie on their backs, gazing up at the foliage and Minnesota sky, observing to one another, “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” The team had an informal Canadian Award, no more than a verbal prize, given to players who made it through the chilly Midwestern autumns practicing only in shorts. There was an inordinate amount of fun.

To those incoming freshmen, intent on proving they were worthy footballers, who asked Gagliardi, “Who do I hit or kill?” Gagliardi’s answer was, “That’s not the way to make a tackle. First, you’ve got to line up in the right spot. You’ve got to go to the right spot. You’ve got to figure out where the ball is. You’ve got to not get blocked. You’ve got to pressure the ball.

“You do all that, eventually you’ll make the tackle. Besides, if you’re in the hospital, you won’t make the tackle. And I hate visiting hospitals. If we tackle in practice, who do we hurt? Our own quarterback and running back. They’re human. They’ve got knees and mothers.”

In 2010, when the National Football League at last acknowledged the risk of brain damage inherent in the sport, I called Gagliardi, who often noted that “we haven’t made a tackle on the practice field since 1958.” Might such a system save the pros from further head trauma and long-range health and legal issues?

Gagliardi, who once declined to take an assistant coaching position with Bud Grant’s Minnesota Vikings, insisted that NFL coaches “certainly don’t need my advice. I’m not looking for converts. Certain things—religion, politics—you’ll never change.

“But I think we led the world in fewest injuries. It isn’t rocket science to me. I’ll never forget the first time we won the national championship and, at a clinic afterwards, a fellow says to me, ‘Don’t you think, if you’d have hit more in practice, you’d have done better?’

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t know. We played 12 games and won them all. I don’t know how we could’ve won 13.’”

My type of coach.

Jay Horwitz: A PR man who measured up

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News to me: There is a Museum of Public Relations in New York City, which boasts hundreds of rare artifacts, oral histories, letters, photos and film to “bring PR history to life.”

It happens that, in a half-century as a sports journalist, I have dealt with countless PR practitioners, what we used to call—not unkindly—tub-thumpers. And it happens that one of the best of them, Jay Horwitz, has lately been the topic of heartfelt appreciations after 39 years as PR chief for the New York Mets.

Horwitz has been assigned a new position as “team historian” and tasked with gathering alumni and tidbits for next year’s 50th anniversary of the Mets’ first World Series championship. But as he moves on, I propose including a symbol of quintessentially quirky Horwitz salesmanship in that carnival-barker hall-of-fame: Specifically, what I would call a 1978 “game-used” tape measure from Horwitz’ pre-Mets days.

The relic in question was employed 40 years ago at Mama Leone’s Midtown Manhattan restaurant, where a small group of New York track and field writers had gathered for their weekly luncheon to hear college and club coaches pitch potential news about their athletes’ latest running, jumping and throwing feats. To some extent, those were exercises in being numbed by numbers—mostly dry statistics like split times, personal bests and local meet records.

At the time, Horwitz was the sports information director for New Jersey’s Fairleigh Dickinson University. And his chore was to somehow sell the local media, already inundated by the Big Town’s myriad sports happenings, on some reason to pay attention to FDU’s decidedly humble athletic operation. Which he did brilliantly with an ear for the novel, dispensing odd morsels—beyond the cold stats—that were both revealing and entertaining.

FDU had a sprinter then named Ephraim Serrette who kept a list of the various misspellings of his name, 13 in all, from meet results—Abraham Seit, Eram Sert, Earl Serrette, Ephrimim Sirreti and so on—so Horwitz playfully passed that along. FDU had a baseball player whose summer job at a munitions factory was putting pins in hand grenades. Horwitz let the news hounds know. FDU had a hurdler who asked to leave practice early to go to his ballet class and “before he knew it,” Horwitz giggled in retelling the tale years ago, “I was at the ballet class with a guy from the wire service.”

FDU had another hurdler whose hobby was collecting snakes and Horwitz, naturally, requested the athlete bring the aforementioned reptiles in cages to a track workout, where a local photographer was waiting to document another deliciously idiosyncratic sports moment.

The story got even better because, as Horwitz later reported, “the damn snakes got loose. Four boa constrictors running around the damn track, slinking along. They bolted, and guys were running every which way, and this hurdler running after his snakes, grabbing them….”

Only a crack PR person could orchestrate that kind of breaking news.

Anyway, for that luncheon at Mama Leone’s (which then was a theatre-district landmark but has been closed since 1994), Horwitz brought along FDU’s star high jumper, Franklin Jacobs. Jacobs already was plenty newsworthy, having recently defeated the world’s top-ranked jumper, Dwight Stones, by clearing 7-feet-6 inches, lifting Jacobs to No. 1 in the United States and No. 3 in the world in his event.

Horwitz raised the bar by pushing an additional nugget, precipitated by his earlier telephone query to the Amateur Athletic Union. “I’ve got a kid here who’s 5-foot-8 and he’s jumping over 7 feet,” he informed the AAU. “Is that unusual?”

He was told that the average high jumper stood 6-1 ¾, almost half a foot taller than Jacobs. He went to the Guinness Book of World Records and learned that, at the time, a 5-foot-9 San Jose State jumper named Ron Livers had cleared 7-4 ¼ for the existing record—19 ¼ inches—of jumping above one’s own head.

By the time Jacobs arrived at that luncheon, he already had gone 22 inches above his height. Horwitz had a major scoop to advance.

“I’ll never forget the track luncheon when we measured him,” Horwitz recalled soon after the event. “Franklin kept saying to let me measure him to see if he grew taller. And I kept saying, ‘Franklin, don’t do that. You don’t want to be taller. You want to be 5-8.'”

Jacobs was beckoned to stand as a flexible retractable tape was produced and unfurled from the floor to the top of his noggin, the way track officials check the high jump crossbar for accuracy after a significant leap. “I was sitting in my seat saying, ‘Please, God, let him be 5-8,’” Horwitz said. “I mean, I knew he was 5-8, but….”

Four days later, in the Millrose Games at Madison Square Garden, Jacobs upped his best to 7-7 ¼, which remained his career optimum and, at 23 ¼ inches over his head, still stands as the record these four decades later. (It was equaled in 2005 by the 2004 Olympic champion Stefan Holm of Sweden, who was 5-11 ¼ and jumped 7-10 ½.)

The Museum of Public Relations should find that tape measure, put it on display and have Jay Horwitz sign it, a manifestation of the man’s golden (and fun) promotional touch.

 

Professor of The Big Picture

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Take it from an old sportswriter who knows the score (though not much else). For the guru-on-the-mountaintop illumination of What It All Means, for how otherwise superficial endeavors fit into real life, there are folks like Hofstra University history professor Michael D’Innocenzo.

I was reminded of this last week in attending the school’s dedication of D’Innocenzo’s eponymous seminar room on campus. It was just the most recent in a fairly endless stream of awards, fellowships, recognitions and widespread praise earned by D’Innocenzo for his teaching, researching and writing about major events and consequential human affairs over six decades. And counting,

The man is a walking, talking historical landmark. An activist for non-violent social change. An expert on immigration and civil rights. (He was an instrumental figure in bringing Martin Luther King Jr. to Hofstra for a 1963 speech.) A big-picture guy who, for me, has been a vital source for understanding that sports—recess; fun and games—in fact are of significant consequence.

We met when my wife was taking D’Innocenzo’s “Sports and the American Character” class at Hofstra in 1974, and among the suggestions he posed to his students then was a doctoral dissertation on the effect of sports on the aspirations of people, particularly minority groups. Or sports’ effect on the male-female relationship. Or the effect of college athletic recruiting. On winning. On losing.

He spoke of how, for so long, “scholars, sad to say, looked at sports as frivolous,” never bothering to go beyond “mythology.” He saw the connection between sports’ “No. 1 mentality” and Teddy Roosevelt’s Big Stick Policy and how Americans “have always thought of themselves as models for the rest of the world. Sports has been an enormous factor in this country since the 1920s.”

Babe Ruth, he said, “was a sign of early America—up from the bottom with his broken home,” and ultimately a symbol of America’s post-World War I power.

D’Innocenzo noted the “robber-baron mentality” of sports, that “succeeding is the thing, no matter how you do it. Offensive holding is accepted as a part of football. Think of Ty Cobb in the ‘20s sharpening his spikes; anything to steal that base.”

So now I teach a sportswriting course at Hofstra, as an osmotic beneficiary of D’Innocenzo’s learned observations, and one of my objectives is to reinforce the fact that covering sports is more than balls and strikes. That it requires something of a sports anthropologist, willing to consider issues of race, gender equity, performance-enhancing drugs, the almighty dollar.

During the New York Yankees’ run of nine consecutive first-place finishes in the early 2000s, when they were operating with the league’s highest payroll, D’Innocenzo compared their ability to “go and buy some established player” to the United States “using its leverage with NATO to project our influence elsewhere in the world. Historians call that dollar diplomacy.”

In the relatively early days of the Super Bowl, as the National Football League began to wallow in self-importance, the league offered a $10,000 college grant to the teenager who submitted the best essay on “The NFL’s Role in American History.” D’Innocenzo found it interesting that the winner was a female “because she is not part of it, except from the outside. She is reinforcing the old status-quo that men participate and women appreciate.”

That is changing. And none of this is to say that D’Innocenzo is anti-sports. He’s a Mets fan, for goodness sakes, and for decades has been an eager practitioner of tennis and softball. He believes in “so many affirmative values in sports,” he said. “Discipline, though it can be perverted. The camaraderie. The sense of getting beyond one’s self.” He said he would love to see more of those qualifies in the classroom setting.

But surely it is a healthy thing to be shaken out of our passive spectating stupor by considering things beyond the final score. Long ago, I wrote down this quote from D’Innocenzo: “Anytime you study something closely you will find yourself being critical of parts on it. Even in the competitive world of sports I have come to know and love.”

I should get to work on one of those doctoral dissertations….

Serena Williams, rules and fairness

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It’s complicated, of course. The Serena Williams incident in this year’s U.S Open championship final has taken us far beyond a discussion of tennis rules and proper sporting behavior. Almost immediately, the debate veered toward male privilege, identity politics, racism and crowd dynamics.

Was Williams the victim of a power imbalance in which a chair umpire is not to be challenged? Was that exacerbated by the fact that the umpire, Carlos Ramos, is a man and the player, Williams, a woman—and a woman of color at that?

Did Williams, without question the superstar of women’s tennis, deserve special consideration regarding the application of the sport’s arcane regulations at such a crucial time in such a big match? Did Williams’ past fits of pique, profanely threatening a lineswoman at the 2009 Open and fuming, “I truly despise you,” to a female chair umpire at the 2011 Open, factor into the Ramos-Williams dispute?

And what about the Arthur Ashe Stadium crowd, which poured fuel on Williams’ fiery protests with sustained booing that ultimately diminished 20-year-old Naomi Osaka’s eventual victory?

That last aspect recalled the chaos of a 1979 second-round Open match between John McEnroe and Ilie Nastase who, by the way, embodied what Williams cited as past behavior by men that she rightly said was worse than her on-court actions. That night, opponents widely disparaged as “Nasty” and “Super Brat” baited each other with whining and childish delays until chair umpire Frank Hammond—unable to control the non-action or the booing spectators—defaulted the match early in the fourth set.

Hammond had struggled to enforce the rules, as well as an order by tournament referee Mike Blanchard to “put Nastase on the clock—or else.” Yet when an exasperated Hammond finally (and correctly) proclaimed a premature end to the match, he was taken out of the chair and replaced by Blanchard to appease the unruly crowd. The craziness resumed toward a McEnroe victory.

Then even Hammond admitted afterwards that the players’ star power had superseded tennis law, calling Nastase, the more guilty of the two parties that night, “very colorful. He’s great for tennis.”

Last Saturday, Carlos Ramos chose not to apply a similar immunity to Serena Williams, in spite of her unprecedented accomplishments and vast popularity. After what amounted to a formal warning when Ramos cited Patrick Mouratoglou‘s illegal coaching hand-signals to Williams—a violation Williams denied but Mouratoglou acknowledged—Ramos docked Williams a point for smashing her racket, then a game when she called him a “liar” and “a thief,” leaving her on the brink of defeat.

Ramos’ series of verdicts were cast by Williams, and many observers, as evidence of a double standard applied to women—not only in tennis but in all of society’s venues.

Rebecca Traister, in The Cut column for New York Magazine, wrote that “a male umpire prodded Serena Williams to anger and then punished her for expressing it….She was punished for showing emotion, for defiance, for being the player she has always been—driven, passionate, proud and fully human.”

Furthermore, Traister wrote, Williams’ rage was an understandable means to “defy those rules designed and enforced by, yet so rarely forcefully applied to, white men.”

It is beyond dispute that McEnroe, Nastase, Jimmy Connors and—early in his career, Andre Agassi—were among male players repeatedly guilty of crass and offensive displays. And that, because large crowds paid to see them, they often got away with such boorish behavior. But Martina Navratilova, whose 18 major-tournament singles titles compare nicely with Williams’ 23, argued in a New York Times opinion piece, “I don’t believe it’s a good idea to apply a standard of ‘If the men get away with it, women should be able to, too.’ Rather, I think the question we have to ask ourselves is this: What is the right way to behave to honor our sport and to respect our opponents?”

A core ideal in sports—theoretically the one true meritocracy, no matter the participants’ ethnicity, appearance, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, economic status—is fairness. The “level playing field” and all that. In protesting Ramos’ application of code violations against her, by complaining, “It’s not fair,” Williams was reminding that sports can be as imperfect as the real world, populated as it is by flawed humanity; that the same rules in fact are not always applied to everyone.

So. In the end, was it fair—to both her and Naomi Osaka—to apply the rules to Williams?

 

 

Touchdown Elvis

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I was thinking that night about Elvis

Day that he died. Day that he died.

—“Elvis Presley Blues,” sung by Jimmy Buffett

 

Approximately nobody missed the news flash on Aug. 16, 1977, that Elvis had died. Think of this week’s response to Aretha Franklin’s death, but with a heavier blow because Elvis was only 42, almost half Franklin’s age. So on that day, exactly 41 years earlier, the main topic of conversation in the New York Giants’ lockerroom at their Pleasantville, N.Y., summer training camp wasn’t the least bit unusual.

It’s just that it was slightly more personal than might have been expected. A thousand miles from Graceland, the connection went beyond the fact that Elvis had claimed football to be his second most passionate interest, after music. Specifically, he had been a very public fan of the short-lived World Football League franchise in his Memphis hometown. And no fewer than 11 members of the 1977 Giants—eight players and three coaches, including head coach John McVay—were refugees from the recently defunct Memphis Southmen.

If I had been a more alert journalist, I would have offered the bosses at Newsday an instant sidebar on the Giants’ thoughts about their close encounters with the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Instead, I filed a not-so-earthshattering piece on how the Giants coaches were switching fourth-year pro Ray Rhodes from wide receiver to defensive back. (“Yeh, I’m a cornerback,” Rhodes said, “but I’m giving no interviews. I got nothing to say.”)

Certainly Rhodes, who wound up playing four more years and coaching another 30 in the NFL, was all shook up that day. But the real story was Elvis and, by extension, the former Memphis players who shared some thoughts about the man.

They were aware that Elvis had been in the building, Memphis’ Liberty Bowl, with 30,121 other spectators for the Southmen’s debut on July 10, 1974. It was reported that Elvis sat with country singer Charlie Rich, and that when Rich returned to his seat after singing the national anthem, Elvis observed, “That’s a tough song to sing, ain’t it?”

Memphis was a good team, winning 17 of 21 games in 1974 and had a 7-4 record the next year when the league folded mid-season. Which led to the migration North, from Memphis to the Giants, by running backs Larry Csonka and Willie Spencer, receivers Ed Marshall and Gary Shirk, center Ralph Hill, linebacker Frank Marion, guard Ron Mikolajczyk and defensive back Larry Mallory—along with McVay and his assistants Jay Fry and Bob Gibson.

Pro football never returned to Memphis despite an effort by Elvis’ foundation in the early 1990s, long after his death, for a franchise to be named the Hound Dogs. What was left behind was “an Elvis-owned and –used WFL football” given to him by Southmen owner John Bassett and offered at auction at Graceland during the annual Elvis Week in 2017.

According to a letter of authenticity from Elvis’ bodyguard Sonny West, who died months before that auction, “Elvis used this football on the grounds of Graceland in the ’70s….

“Elvis and some of us guys went to some of the [Southmen] home games as a guest of the owner and sat in his box. Elvis and John became friends quickly. John got the ball and gave it to Elvis. I’m sure it was a game ball at one time but had passed the newness of that stage and became a practice ball for the team. Elvis and I passed the ball a few times in the backyard of Graceland.”

Likely, then, the future Giants Csonka, Marshall, Shirk, Spencer and the others had handled that ball at some point in practice. The Elvis ball. I wish I’d asked a few more questions in 1977 about such small degrees of separation.

But, now, full circle, thinking about the day that Aretha Franklin—born in Memphis, by the way—died. Among the countless tributes of respect for her influence and eclectic musical gifts was a recollection of her rendition of the Star Spangled Banner before a 2016 Thanksgiving Day game between the Detroit Lions and Minnesota Vikings. Passionate, four-and-a-half minutes long, with gospel phrasing and ad-libs—“It is the land of the free,” she threw in—it surely would have moved Elvis to marvel, “That’s a tough song to sing that way, ain’t it?”

Real person. Real sport.

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Frank Carroll is retiring at 80. He coached figure skating for 58 years, most widely known as the mentor of five-time world champion Michelle Kwan and five other Olympic medalists, including 2010 Olympic winner Evan Lysacek.

In a half-century of covering sports, I can’t say I crossed paths with too many characters more memorable than Carroll. All those heroes and villains in what my sportswriting brethren typically considered real sports—football, baseball, basketball—all those physically gifted protagonists, psychologically vulnerable troupers, philosophically aware artistes and occasionally fanatical wingnuts, yet one of the really fascinating humans was encountered in…skating. Go figure.

(I must acknowledge that in reporting on five Winter Olympics, I long ago was disabused of any notion that, a) figure skating lacked arresting personalities and b) that it was not a sport. An early lesson came from 1992 U.S. pairs skater Calla Urbanski, a 31-year-old once-divorced, remarried former waitress who partnered on the ice with Rocky Marval, the 26-year-old owner of a small trucking company. The Waitress and the Truck Driver. “To say this isn’t a sport, just because we wear fancy outfits,” Urbanski lectured, “I’d like to challenge the guys who say that to get their butts into the air and turn three times and land on an eight-inch blade. And then tell me it’s not a sport.”)

Not that there isn’t a theatrical aspect to the endeavor. And Carroll—who spun humorous, involved tales that he illustrated with hand gestures and dramatic expressions—was an ideal example. For a brief time in his youth, after all, he had been an actor. Sort of.

“There were these bad beach party movies that I was in, in the mid-‘60s,” he said. “I was a body. I’m Irish. I’m like Casper the Ghost with this skin, but I had blond hair then and I was the perfect beach bum/surfer. They would spray me tan!”

He is the only son of a teacher who grew up in Worcester, Mass., with a pond near his home that lured him into skating. Take a breath, and listen….

“I used to go to the movies and see those old Movietone newsreels that had pictures of [1948 Olympic gold medalist] Barbara Ann Scott and Dick Button [the 1952 and ’56 Olympic champ]. Then they built an indoor rink in Worcester, across the street from my house.

“I was 12. I was the second person on the ice when it opened. [The owner] was the first. He gave me a key and said, ‘Frankie, if this rink isn’t being used for hockey or lessons, it’s yours.’ I was a very good skater very early because I’d practice at home on the floor. I’d put a dishrag down on the linoleum floor and skate around on that.”

He enrolled at Holy Cross and, based on his regional skating title, was given a partial athletic scholarship and awarded a varsity letter for skating, “even though they didn’t have a skating team,” he said.

“I’d practice early in the morning before the Holy Cross hockey team got on the ice, and they’d line up along the boards, waiting with their hockey sticks. If I missed one thing in my routine, they’d take their sticks and bang on the boards and boo me.

“But if I skated well, they’d all cheer.

“When I finished school, well, you know, you go on with your life. My father thought skating was frivolous or stupid, but I was 21 years old and I signed for more money in a week with the Ice Follies than my dad ever made in a year in his entire life: $250 a week.”

He wound up going to Hollywood at the invitation of friends and found his way, temporarily, into bit parts of those beach movies. “I didn’t know I wanted to coach at all. I’d go to the beach, go to the gym to work out. But there was this little rink in Van Nuys where I gave skating lessons to beginners, and these kids began to improve and I got in demand. So I eventually gave up the cattle call at the studio.”

Just as elaborately—with asides and not-especially pertinent detail—Carroll told of how his accidental discovery of music for a Kwan skating program resembled finding a winning lottery ticket in the street; of how his coaching theory lacked talk of winning because that was “destructive language; it doesn’t make any sense to be promising and building hopes up in the sky”); yet how, before Kwan’s 1998 Olympic final in Nagano, Japan, he “prayed a lot. I went to the Catholic church here because that’s my church, and then I went to the [Buddhist] temple, just to cover my bases.”

Kwan, though the favorite, was beaten by Tara Lipinski that year, and retired with a silver and bronze in two Games. But Carroll—voted into a handful of skating halls of fame—long ago was safely inside the velvet ropes, and got his Olympic coaching gold with Lysacek eight years ago.

He covered his bases. He left his mark. He made things interesting. In a real sport.

Vanishing News

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On my early morning runs these days, I can spot a newspaper in the driveway of maybe one house in 20. As an ink-stained wretch who has been attempting to commit journalism for a half-century, that feels like a personal affront.

And now the New York Daily News, which once sold more than two million papers a day, up and fired half its staff.

Hitting even closer to home, those News “layoffs” included 25 of the 34-person sports department. I consider myself a patriot of sports journalism, having practiced the craft since high school and, beginning in 1970, at Long Island’s Newsday.

Furthermore, I have been clinging to the notion that, no matter what, there always will be a demand for newspapers. Radio didn’t kill them. Television didn’t kill them. So, for the past decade, I’ve been teaching a sportswriting course at Hofstra University, on the theory that 21st-Century students can find the same enjoyment I experienced in chronicling the unscripted drama of grand athletic events, which are so often tangled up in community identification. (And politics and big business and considerations of fair play.)

But of course, the Internet happened. Smart phones and iPads and blogs. The Bermuda Triangle of newspapering. Belatedly, I’ve come to fear that old friend Tom Callahan, who has written sports about as beautifully and knowledgably as anyone, had a point when he slyly wondered, “Why not teach something useful—like trolley car driving?”

The world is changing, no?

My first job out of college was at United Press International’s New York City wire service office. We were based in the Daily News building, the Art Deco skyscraper, built during the Depression, with its fabulous lobby dominated by an enormous globe that lent the place—and the business—an almost sacred formality. It somehow reinforced my belief in journalism’s noble status.

Gotham, furthermore, was then a metropolis awash in newspapers. Straphangers devoured the tabloid Daily News and Post on packed subway cars, where standing-room-only necessitated special skills to read the broadsheet New York Times. (Bob Stewart, a senior presence at UPI, schooled me on how to fold the Times, vertically, into quarter pages.)

Soon enough, New York’s Big Three papers became direct competition when I signed on with Newsday, and the Daily News, especially, was a menacing presence because of its vast readership. Any ill-advised show of pride in producing a scoop during my six years of covering the New York Giants was parlayed by a favorite News character, Norm Miller, who would demand sarcastically: “What’s your circulation?” (To which Vinny DiTrani of New Jersey’s Bergen Record would retort, “120 over 80.” But Norm had a point.)

The Daily News was a behemoth, and its sportswriters were minor celebrities, widely known, and so often with a wiseguy whimsy that fit New York so well. Miller, plenty aware of the ephemeral condition of newspaper stories, often referred to the News as “the Daily Fishwapper.” Quickly out with the trash.

Apparently—sadly—the current News owners feel the same way about all the journalistic talent they have tossed aside. Colleagues and former comrades are rightly lamenting how the gutted News has been severely hobbled in its role as political watchdog and voice of the people. Just as devastating, to my mind, is the loss of all those folks who brilliantly dealt with fun-and-games, the crucial diversions from a Real World spinning out of control.

Bob Klapisch, veteran baseball writer now based with the Bergen Record, posted this on Twitter:

“Daily News Customer Service, can I help you?”

“I want to cancel my subscription.”

“May I ask why?”

“You just fired several of my friends.”

“Can I ask what section you read most?”

“Sports.”

“Well, we’re still going to have a great sports section.”

“No you’re not.”

That’s one less newspaper in a driveway.

 

Meeting Mandela

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This was in 1992, on the morning of the Opening Ceremonies of the Barcelona Olympics. Apartheid officially had ended in South Africa, allowing that nation’s athletes to be welcomed back into the Olympic family after 32 years of isolation, so a colleague and I took the crosstown subway ride to the seaside Olympic Village to seek South African athletes’ thoughts on the tangle of sports and politics.

As we were leaving, Nelson Mandela suddenly appeared, trailed by no more than a half-dozen reporters and a TV camera. We had stumbled into an ad hoc news briefing and, given the accidental opportunity, tossed a couple of questions Mandela’s way.

It is not every day that one blunders into meeting and addressing a person who truly was changing the world. Mandela, who would have turned 100 today, July 18—he died in 2013—was then two years past his 27 years of imprisonment for having agitated for blacks’ rights, still two years from being voted in as South Africa’s first democratically elected president.

A month earlier, with riots in the black townships threatening to slow the process of integration, he had suggested that South African athletes stay away from the Barcelona Games. There were only eight blacks in South Africa’s 95-person Olympic delegation. But as he would do in embracing the mostly white national rugby team during the 1995 World Cup as a unifying force in South Africa’s transition away from racist minority rule, Mandela reversed field, choosing a “one-team, one-nation” strategy, another of his many signals for harmony.

“Let’s let bygones be bygones,” he said that morning in 1992. “Let’s concern ourselves with our presence here. I urge you to come along with me, to forget the past and get on with the future.”

He posed for cameras in the village with a handful of green-and-yellow-clad athletes—black and white—and expressed the often-empty Olympic hope that united sport somehow can lead a splintered world in the right direction.

“It’s important for our young people to participate,” said Mandela, who lit up to recall his youthful days as a boxer and track athlete when asked about his own sporting inclinations.

“There is no doubt in my mind,” he said, “that this is the correct decision, and I am quite satisfied in the racial breakdown of the team. I would have liked it to be a reflection of our population”—at that point, 26 million of the 32 million South Africans were black—“but there has to be a starting point.”

In South Africa, newspaper editorials had been encouraging Olympic participation as a spur in negotiations between Mandela’s black African National Congress and white South African president F.W. de Klerk, and as an emotional way to appeal to the most radical constituents on both sides.

A white South African equestrian in the Mandela group that day, Peter Gotz, reported that “Olympic fever has been raging in South Africa . . . . It’s been a very nice gesture to have Mr. Mandela here. He told us, as a team, that he was proud of us, and that the whole country is proud of us. I guess I don’t feel so much a part of history as I feel a part of the present and the future.”

That dumb-luck crossing of paths 26 years ago with such a historic figure was exhilarating, and a comfort to be reminded that a long career of covering sports events doesn’t limit one to meaningless frivolity. Among Mandela’s beliefs of reconciliation and hope was the acceptance of how sports could grab headlines and wield surprising power, could even be used to narrow a brutal black-white divide in his country.

A person really can bump into heroes in the sports journalism business.

The World Cup escape

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Comparative happiness is immoral. I’m not about to take pleasure in the fact that England currently suffers with some dreadful politicians stoking fear of immigrants and other perceived grievances. Besides, that sort of thing is abundantly available right here at home.

On the contrary, I am a bit jealous of how the English were afforded a temporary, euphoric respite from anti-social turmoil by the World Cup and their national team’s delightful run in the tournament.

It was just soccer and, in the end, the English lads didn’t necessarily reverse a self-deprecating “narrative of decline” described by Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker, that it’s been “all downhill since the end of the Second World War, or the end of the Empire, or 1066…”

Or the Brexit chaos that reportedly has Prime Minister Theresa May facing the possible collapse of her government. But by changing the subject—“Don’t You Know There’s a Bloody Game On?” the Sun newspaper headlined amid bad bureaucratic developments—the soccer team unleashed a unifying giddiness in pushing to the Cup semifinals for the first time since 1990.

From my perch in New York, and with the United States having failed to qualify for the first time since 1986, I allowed myself multiple, shifting allegiances from the start of the tournament. Spain, for its buzzing, precise passing and teamwork. Portugal, just to watch Cristiano Renaldo’s out-of-the-blue strikes. Argentina, in anticipation of Lionel Messi’s magic. Mexico, because our neighbors to the South deserve a break. Brazil, because Brazilian soccer is true performance art. Panama, because a tiny country making its World Cup debut is a beautiful thing, however it fares. France, based on a family ancestry going back many generations, and with the discovery of France’s wondrous teenager Kylian Mbappe.

The whole thing, even without a home team to follow, was a welcome escape from the daily—hourly—assault of depressing national and international news, an uplifting antidote to spreading xenophobia.

By the end of group play, I was all aboard the English bandwagon. Marveling at goalie Jordan Pickford’s lightning reactions. Raheem Sterling’s downfield sprints. Harry Maguire’s precise headers. Manager Gareth Southgate’s formal attire (a vest?). Harry Kane’s relentlessly unmussed hair in spite of his diving, lurching, rumbling charges toward goal—not to mention his role as the target of repeated fouls. (“A friend,” reported my daughter, who now lives in London, “called him ‘the most English person possible.’”)

Even England’s excruciating extra-time loss to Croatia in the semifinals couldn’t break the celebratory fever. The soccer anthem “Three Lions,” with its bullish chorus originally written when England hosted the 1996 European Championships, was revived with a vengeance:

It’s coming home/It’s coming home/It’s coming/Football’s coming home.

Because England invented soccer, the natives nurture an assumed superiority regarding the sport—but offset by the contained melancholy of knowing their side has won the World Cup only once, in 1966. And, since then, repeatedly has endured the cruelest of losses in major international tournaments, six times beaten in penalty shootouts, beginning with the 1990 World Cup semis.

A sidebar: I covered that shootout loss for Newsday, in Turin, Italy. The English manager then was Bobby Robson, who gamely declared that he and his team had “to put on a bright smile and accept it. There’s nothing you can do about it.” The English had played the Germans to a 1-1 tie through 90 exhausting minutes of regulation, plus 30 of extra time, only to lose the sport’s version of a game of H-O-R-S-E. Or something akin to taking turns throwing a football through a tire.

Of course it was noted then that the Germans had been England’s victims in the ’66 final, and that called to mind the English sportswriter who is said to have written, on the eve of the ’66 title match, a wickedly clever reference to matters beyond soccer:

“Fret not, boys, if on the morrow we should lose to the Germans at our national game, for twice this century we have defeated them at theirs.”

But, as I say, comparative happiness is immoral. And this World Cup did a good job of sidelining political stuff and cultural differences. While the English jauntily sang their “Three Lions” song (the title referencing the team’s official shield with national roots dating to the 12th Century):

Three lions on a shirt/Jules Rimet still gleaming/Thirty years of hurt/never stopped me dreaming. (Jules Rimet was the longtime soccer official after whom the World Cup trophy is named.)

It’s coming home/It’s coming home/It’s coming/Football’s coming home.

After England eliminated Sweden in the quarterfinals, my daughter texted that “People are driving around honking horns and singing out of windows….I just saw a young white kid on a bike yell, ‘It’s coming home’ and high-five two old black guys sitting on a bench as they yelled it back to him….Everyone here is talking about weather (in a good way) and the World Cup. It’s a lovely change in atmosphere.”

We could use some of that here in the Colonies.