Tennis seeding: Fair warning?

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Today we’re going to discuss seeding in Grand Slam tennis tournaments. Is it fair to all concerned that Wimbledon officials have included Serena Williams, seven times the event’s champion but currently ranked 183rd in the world, among the 32 seeds? By contrast, had this year’s French Open visited an injustice upon Williams, who hadn’t competed in 16 months while on maternity leave, by refusing to seed her there?

In both cases, it should be noted, Williams was welcomed into the competition. (She withdrew from the French with an injury after winning three matches, two against seeded players.) An essay on the website The Undefeated by Michael Fletcher argued that failing to seed Williams again “would have punished sports fans, who want to see the biggest stars perform on the biggest stages.” Fletcher’s comparison was that Tiger Woods “is eligible to play the Masters and PGA Championships for life” in spite of a long absence from the golf tour because of a back injury, and that the same applies to former champs however far past their prime.

But withholding a seeding position is not the same as banning Williams from the biggest stages. The Women’s Tennis Association, in fact, allows women who miss time because of childbirth to enter events based on their pre-absence ranking—in Williams’ case, No. 1—just without a guarantee of seeding.

And while Williams complained at the French that she should have been afforded a spot among the seeds—that she should not be penalized for becoming pregnant—there hardly is full agreement among her peers. Mandy Minella, a 32-year-old pro from Luxembourg, told the New York Times that she expected to have to earn her seeding, which is based on world rankings, after giving birth last October.

And what exactly does seeding accomplish? Belgium’s Kim Clijsters was unseeded when she won the U.S. Open in 2009, 17 months after giving birth. She had been away from competition for almost three years, but was gladly accepted as a wild card based on her Open title four years earlier.

So, the point?

Theoretically, by seeding the top 32 players in a Grand Slam field of 128, tournament officials “protect” those with the highest ranking against having to face any other seeded player through the first two rounds. That not only is considered a reward for the best players but also a guarantee to spectators and TV executives that the big names will be around longer.

The flip side of that premise is that players good enough to be seeded 17 through 32 might prefer facing one of the top 16 early—when the pressure is on the more accomplished player—rather than in the third round or later, when the stars are rolling.

It was only in 2001 that the major tournaments doubled the number of seeds from 16 to 32. The late Bud Collins, who was the sport’s premier historian as a newspaper and television reporter, said he preferred the maximum of eight seeds in effect prior to 1971. “Why not have some first-round fun?” he reasoned, by putting the best players in immediate danger.

Collins furthermore was mystified by the primary source of women’s seeding, the WTA rankings computer, which he nicknamed “Medusa” after the female in Greek mythology with living venomous snakes in her hair.

But back to Serena Williams.

In 2006, when she was 24 years old and already had won seven of her open-era record 23 major tournament titles, Williams had been kept inactive by a chronic knee injury for so long that her ranking plummeted to No. 91 by the time she entered the U.S. Open. As a consequence, she was unseeded.

Her reaction then? “I don’t really feel like an unseeded player ‘cause I don’t think about it. Obviously, I am. But I just feel I am who I am and I’m out there to perform. I don’t know too many people that see ‘Serena Williams’ next to their name and they’re, like, ‘Yes!’”

No kidding. It’s not as if having an unseeded Williams disables opponents’ alarm systems. Surely that still applies.

So she’s seeded 25th and her Wimbledon draw is a kind one. After her first-round victory over the Netherlands’ Arantxa Rus, ranked 107th, she will face Bulgaria’s Viktoriya Tomova, No. 136. Then, either No. 57 Tatjana Maria of Germany or No. 62 Kritina Mladenovic of France.

Meanwhile, Slovakia’s Dominika Cibulkova, the 2014 Australian Open finalist who was bounced from No. 32 to unseeded when Williams got the 25th spot, must play No. 44 Alize Cornet of France, with the likelihood she next would have to deal with Johanna Konta, seeded 22nd and playing for her British home crowd, in the second round.

And Poland’s Agnieszka Radwanka, who inherited Cibulkova’s apparent No. 32 seed, has dispensed with No. 195 Elena-Gabriela Ruse of Romania and gets No. 66 Lucie Safarova of the Czech Republic next.

“I don’t think it’s the right thing to do,” Cibulkova told BBC before the tournament. “I think it’s just not fair.”

Discuss.

 

Celebrating Panama’s World Cup debut

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Maybe it takes an American of a certain age to understand that Panama should feel no shame in its World Cup results—three losses in three games, including that 6-1 pounding by England last Sunday. Someone who witnessed the United States’ showing in the 1990 Cup certainly can relate.

Back then, it was perfectly clear that the label “American soccer player” was an oxymoron, like “living dead” or “jumbo shrimp.” The Yanks had showed up at the Cup for the first time in 40 years with a collection of callow amateurs in a den of hardened professionals, in no way comparable to other Cup participants. And they immediately were humiliated by Czechoslovakia, 5-1, on the way to an 0-3 record.

It was a requiem for a lightweight and brought mocking headlines from the soccer-savvy Europeans. The newspapers in Italy, that year’s host nation, dismissed the Yanks as “poor kids, thrown to the massacre,” with a defense “made of butter.” (Only one other time in that tournament did a team allow 5 goals as the 1990 per-game average of 2.2 set the still-standing record for lowest in the 88-year history of the event.)

But here’s the thing: One of the U.S. players, Chris Sullivan, made the point right after being publicly humbled by Czechoslovakia that “we deserved this. But just remember: We’re the students here. Why not have the rest of the world read that 5-1 score and know that we’re the students of the game? We’re still learning.”

Yes, and now we have Panama’s burdensome trial in Russia, its first dance at sport’s biggest international party. Though not as soccer-challenged as that 1990 U.S. team, though boxing and baseball are more entrenched in its sports culture, Panama competes with a pool of talent severely limited by a population, 4.1 million, that is less than half that of New York City.

“When the coach [Hernan Dario Gomez] said we were coming here to learn, that is exactly what he meant,” said Panama’s 37-year-old captain Felipe Baloy, known as Pipe (Pee-pay). “We were coming up against world-class teams with great players.”

Baloy realized that, the final score aside, to have produced his country’s first World Cup goal late in that England match was “something big. We’re learning a lot. The result makes us sad, but the first goal is important.” It merely set off national merrymaking.

The newspaper Marca in Spain declared that “Panama found themselves in front of a cyclone, they came up against a deluge of goals and found themselves inundated.” Italy’s Gazzetta dello Sport called the game “not a match” but “an English stroll.”

In sports, of course, everyone is looking for a Rosy Scenario, something akin to the ideal romantic partner. But sometimes, you don’t have to win to win.

In 1990, a central character on the U.S. team, Tab Ramos, was 23 years old and devoid of professional experience. Immediately after he and his mates were taken apart by Czechoslovakia, Ramos’ thoroughly reasonable attitude was, “This is the greatest experience of my life. If I had to go through it again, just the same way, I would.”

Not signing any articles of surrender, that. Ramos recognized the expectations, that American soccer barely was crawling then. Sure enough, he wound up playing in two more World Cups as the Yanks grew into legitimate Cup actors—their failure to make this year’s tournament notwithstanding. Amid their run of six consecutive World Cups, they pushed to the quarterfinals in 2002.

So Panama lost three games and went home. What’s so bad about that? Its players, and its nation’s fans, got a front-row seat at the most watched sports event on earth. Of the 201 national teams worldwide, Los Canaleros—“the Canal Men”—were one of only 32 to make it to this summer’s big show.

“We qualified [for the World Cup],” Gomez said. “We have to celebrate that.”

Felipe Baloy got it. “The experience in Russia has been top-notch,” he said. “We hope that Panama can keep going. As a group, we’ve had a good coexistence in which we’ve spent time with younger players, who will stay with us.”

There is a verse in the Panamanian national anthem that, translated to English, goes like this:

Progress caresses your path.
To the rhythm of a sublime song,
You see both your seas roar at your feet
Giving you a path to your noble mission.

See you in 2022, Panama.

Embodiment of World Cup shockers

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(Bahr’s on the right, vs. England at the 1950 World Cup)

It seems appropriate that the World Cup would be in progress when Walter Bahr died. And that soccer blasphemy would be in the air—plucky little Iceland tying the Goliath Argentina, often-disappointing Switzerland drawing with five-time champion Brazil, long-suffering Mexico upsetting defending champ Germany. In each case, the humble being exalted, although Bahr had to wait decades for his acclaim.

Bahr, who was 91, was the last living member of the 1950 U.S. team—a collection, essentially, of weekend warriors who somehow defeated England, the sport’s original superpower. Bahr, in fact, directly facilitated the winning goal 68 years ago in what has been considered the most shocking result in Cup history.

What was so different about Bahr’s grand moment—compared to the televised, monetized, scrutinized 2018 Cup doings—was that approximately nobody in Bahr’s nation noticed his team’s heroics. It wasn’t until 1990, when the United States ended a 40-year World Cup drought and our soccer-illiterate country began to wonder about an activity that didn’t involve the legal use of hands, that Bahr became something of a star.

(40 years later…)

“We hadn’t even heard of the World Cup until we went and played in it,” Bahr, then 63, told me during a 1990 chat. “When we got to Brazil”—host of the ’50 Cup—“we realized it was going to be a pretty big deal. But at the time, no one knew we left and no one knew we came back.”

If Bahr had been given to telling fish stories when a trickle of U.S reporters began to show some soccer curiosity in 1990, he might have spun yarns of his prominent role against mighty England. He might have described nifty dribbling through the English defense, being an American version of Argentina’s Lionel Messi, Brazil’s Neymar or Portugal’s Cristiano Renaldo. He might have regaled us with recollections of ticket-tape parades and heroes’ welcomes.

On the contrary. He came clean.

“If we had one reporter at our games, that was a lot,” he said. “Dent McSkimming, who was with the St. Louis paper, was a soccer fan. So he paid his own way to Brazil and he’d go to the games and call his office with the score and maybe a paragraph or two. In those days, no one ever interviewed you, anyway.”

Too bad. Bahr was a delightful subject whose front-row seat to those pioneer days in America help orient us Yanks about how far behind the rest of the world we had been in the sport. So far behind that, with virtually no attention paid the ’50 World Cup in the U.S. media, the monumental triumph over England did not become a watershed moment. The founding of MLS, the States’ professional soccer league, was still 46 years in the future.

On that 1950 team, “the closest thing to a professional player we had,” Bahr said, was a Scottish-born defensemen named Ed McIlvenny, who lived in Philadelphia, where Bahr was working as a full-time schoolteacher. Joe Gaetjens, the Haitian-born striker whose diving header converted Bahr’s seemingly harmless 20-yard shot into the winning score against England, worked as a dishwasher in New York City. Defenseman Harry Keough and midfielder Frank Wallace were mailmen in St. Louis. Goalie Frank Borghi was an undertaker in St. Louis. Belgian-born defenseman Joe Maca was an interior decorator in New York. Midfielder Charlie Colombo was a carpenter in St. Louis. Midfielder Gino Paraiani was a cannery worker in St. Louis, with a paper route on the side. Forwards John Souza and Ed Souza—who weren’t related but both hailed from Fall River, Mass.—were a knitting plant foreman and part-time truck driver, respectively. One team member, Ben McGloughlin, didn’t make it to Brazil because his boss wouldn’t give him time off from his job managing flow meters.

“I played on every national team for 10 years,” Bahr said, “but I only had 18 international appearances. You could never get our whole team together for practice.”

Under the radar, Bahr enjoyed a Hall of Fame career as both a player and coach—his Penn State University teams regularly appeared in the national championship tournament—yet for years he was more widely known as the father of Chris and Matt, NFL placekickers who won two Super Bowls apiece. They and a third son, Casey, all played professional soccer.

When people suddenly wanted to hear about the ’50 World Cup, four decades later, Bahr said, “I don’t have any great single memory of the game,” except that “it was a big deal to the Brazilian fans. The crowd for the championship game, Brazil against Uruguay, is still listed as the largest attendance ever—199,000 and something. The crowd for our game with England was 20,000, 30,000. [Officially, in World Cup records, it was only 10,151.] But they seemed pro-American to me. See, England was favored to win the World Cup and Brazil wanted no part of the English. But I thought they were cheering for us.”

In telling these stories, Bahr cautioned, “Make sure that all this is listed under ‘Ancient history.’”

OK. But well worth the retelling at World Cup time.

Golf: Acting one’s age?

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Is it required that an older white man take up golf? I ask because I fit the demographic. And have for some time.

I’m retired (semi). Not unpleasantly. But I’m starting to worry that I’m not good at being, uh, elderly. Never have I taken a metal detector on a beach stroll. I do not own white shoes, and certainly not a white belt. Moving to Florida, replacing dinner with the midafternoon Early Bird Special, is out of the question.

Shuffleboard? Nah. Gardening? I mow; that’s enough. Crafts? Don’t think so.

Maybe golf could be part of acting my age. And — full disclosure — I did putter briefly with an easier version of the sport a few years ago, going a handful of rounds at the local Par 3 course, deploying three decidedly low-tech clubs. It hardly was torture. Fresh air. A little solitary time. The challenge of (relatively safe) target practice.

But it didn’t take. Maybe too many reminders of Mark Twain’s contention that golf “is a good walk spoiled.” Slices, hooks, balls lost in the water or woods.

It is entirely possible that I have tended to dismiss the activity based on clichés: That it is a rich person’s enterprise. That it so often has been associated with the exclusivity of country clubs — no blacks, no women and so on. There is an old story of how Groucho Marx, when he was advised that a club did not accept Jews and therefore could not allow his daughter into its swimming pool, responded, “She’s only half-Jewish. Can she wade in up to her knees?”

Just as unfair, probably, is my skepticism of the oft-voiced claim that golfers somehow are more morally upright than other sportsmen; that, whatever their failures on the links, they are absolutely faithful to the pickiest of rules, incapable of violating golf’s “honor code.”

But what to make of golf’s customary use of the Mulligan, that handy do-over that wipes a poor shot off the score card? What was it the late Paul Harvey, conservative radio commentator famous for his “rest of the story” postscripts, said? “You yell ‘fore,’ shoot ‘six’ and write down ‘five.’ ”

OK. Numbers. Statistics clearly insist that golf is a pastime for mature male folks such as me. Much is made of the fact that the sport provides exercise, but nothing too strenuous for us graybeards. (Especially when touring the course in an electric cart.) According to the golf demographics from Americangolf.com, of the 29 million golfers in the United States, 77.5 percent are male and 61 percent are more than 50 years old. I’m 100 percent both. Author Malcolm Gladwell seemed to have those figures in mind when he declared the game to be “crack cocaine for old white guys.”

There are, of course, good arguments for the benign addiction of mental relaxation. The way humorist Will Rogers put it, “There is nothing that will get your mind off everything like golf. I have never been depressed enough to take up the game, but they say you get so sore at yourself you forget to hate your enemies.”

An interesting concept, that. If a sport can precipitate better human relationships, if it can compel enhanced character traits such as personal humility and empathy for fellow duffers, what’s to disparage?

Still, I worry about metaphorical traps. In a 2010 book, “Golf, the Game of Lessening Failures,” Bob Glanville wrote, “An amateur golfer is one who plays golf for pleasure. A golf analyst is a psychiatric specialist who treats individuals suffering from the delusion that playing golf is a form of pleasure.”

Also, just when I was wondering if I ought to give the sport another try, I read comedian Joe Zimmerman’s recent lament that a certain (part-time) resident of Washington, D.C., is giving golf — and golfers — a bad name. Golf had been “so close,” Zimmerman wrote, to shaking off the “image of a rich, old, unathletic white guy making sexist jokes and trading real estate tips.” And then that fellow began dominating the news between incessant rounds on the links.

I know plenty of thoroughly decent citizens who are fervent devotees to golf. So that one poor example shouldn’t be the deciding factor here.

But maybe I’ll wait till I’m older.

 

Flush with hockey history

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Here’s what I remember most about the last time a National Hockey League expansion team advanced to the Stanley Cup finals in its debut season: Interviewing Montreal Canadiens goalie Gump Worsley while he sat on the commode.

The background: In 1968, a half-century before the Vegas Golden Knights rolled into this week’s Cup finals in their inaugural campaign, the first-year St. Louis Blues made it to the championship round against the Canadiens, seven times the Cup winners in the previous 12 years.

The 1967-68 Blues had a far less challenging path than 500-to-1 shot Vegas to get that far, because Vegas is the only first-year member of the league’s current 31 teams. In 1967, the NHL had doubled in size from its “Original Six” franchises to 12 and, by placing the six new teams in a separate division with a playoff format that kept the divisions apart until the finals, guaranteed an expansion team would play for the title.

The Blues had finished third among the six newbies during the regular season. But after loitering near last place for more than three months, they began to defy their melancholy nickname. And that’s when I came into the picture.

In 1968, I was a junior in the University of Missouri’s Journalism School, where the curriculum included working on the staff of the Columbia Missourian, the J-School-operated city newspaper. My editor, future ESPN luminary John A. Walsh, somehow began assigning me—or letting me—cover the occasional Blues home game as the team evolved into a major sports story in the state.

The drive from campus to St. Louis took two hours each way. But whatever terms and conditions were required to fit such a commitment into my schedule were readily accepted and, frankly, I have no recollection of prioritizing other activities. I don’t remember missing any classes, yet in exhuming old Missourian clippings from my personal archives, I find there was a surprising number of treks to the Gateway City that semester.

There were my dispatches of a late-January Blues victory over the Minnesota North Stars—only the second hockey game I had seen in my life; of an early February loss to reigning Cup champion Boston in which St. Louis fans delayed the game 20 minutes by throwing debris on the ice after a Blues’ goal was overruled; of a late February tie against Montreal.

In April, I covered four games through the first two rounds of the playoffs, a delightful glimpse at big-time sports journalism. The Blues featured a collection of interesting characters: Hall of Fame coach Scotty Bowman, his chin thrust defiantly forward at all times. The rough-and-tumble Plager brothers, Barclay and Bob, always ready for some fisticuffs. Defenseman Al Arbour, unique for playing while wearing glasses (and soon to coach the Islanders to four consecutive Stanley Cup titles). Balding 14th-year NHL goalie Glenn Hall who, like virtually all those manning his position in that antediluvian age, did so minus a protective facemask. And star forward Gordon (Red) Berenson.

At the time, a Florida-based pop group called the Royal Guardsmen had a novelty hit song, “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron,” inspired by the recurring storyline in Charles Schulz’ “Peanuts” comic strip of Snoopy the dog imagining himself as a World War I airman fighting Germany’s Red Baron ace. Of course Berenson, the 1967-68 expansion division’s Player of the Year, immediately was dubbed The Red Baron.

(Columbia Missourian, May 8, 1968)

Anyway, there I was at the St. Louis Arena on May 5, 1968, for the first game of the Cup finals—upstart Blues vs. the storied Canadiens—a 3-2 overtime victory for Montreal. And again on May 7 for Game 2: Canadiens 1, Blues 0. Naturally, the two grizzled old goalies—Hall was 36 then, Worsley days short of his 39th birthday—were to be sought for post-game remarks.

Hall had saved 35 of 36 Canadiens’ shots, beaten only by Serge Savard early in the third period. Worsley had turned back all 19 Blues attempts.

In the cramped Montreal lockerroom, steamy from showering players, a handful of us reporters were searching for Worsley when he called from a toilet stall, “In here, fellas,” and urged the brief questioning to begin. An interesting introduction to Sportswriting 101.

He assured that he and his mates would go back to Montreal and wrap up the series in the next two games. “What’s the use of winning two here and going home and lose two on our own ice?” he said.

Sure enough, two games later the Canadiens were again kings of their universe. Sitting on hockey’s figurative throne.

The royal treatment

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So Serena Williams was at the royal wedding—wearing sneakers to the reception—and, according to USA Today, has offered Meghan, the new Duchess of Sussex, advice on how to handle some of the more extreme aspects of fame, such as being chased by paparazzi.

This is proof, as Mark Twain supposedly said, that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

That’s because there is more to this than the old connection between tennis and the British royal family. The less-than-six-degrees-of-separation includes the morsel that, in 1926, the future King of England—then known as Prince Albert or “Bertie” before he became George VI 10 years later—competed in doubles at Wimbledon, the sport’s premier event. George VI, of course, was father to the current queen, Elizabeth II, whose daughter-in-law Diana came to regard elite tennis players with the same sort of awe that commoners had for her and other royals.

In the 1990s, Diana recruited Steffi Graf, whose record for most Grand Slam singles titles in the open era finally was surpassed by Williams last year, to give tennis lessons to Diana’s two sons. And now the younger son, Harry, has married Meghan Markel and made her a duchess.

It was Graf and other high-profile tennis champs, Monica Seles and Virginia Wade among them, who compared with Diana the difficulties of being so much in the limelight, how “the royalty had that sort of glare all the time,” Wade said.

When Diana was killed in the 1997 automobile accident precipitated by pursuing tabloid photographers, Seles recalled having been spooked by a similar incident seven years earlier: In Paris (where Diana died). With Seles’ chauffeured car struck by stalking paparazzi (just as happened to Diana).

Diana had met so many tennis stars by attending each summer’s Wimbledon tournament, where she regularly was seated in the royal box and, according to Wade, was “the life and light of the royal box…not just there because she had to be there, but really interested.” (I took the photo below in 1986, when the press seating was located just to the right and above the royal box.)

Diana reportedly played tennis at least twice a week and, months before her death, revived her occasional friendly competitions with Graf in a semi-public match to inaugurate a new women’s tennis headquarters in London. Local media had been invited to the event but, according to veteran English tennis writer John Parsons, the press’ vantage point allowed only a glimpse of the ball moving back and forth. Neither player could be seen, so Parsons’ estimation that Diana produced some impressively long rallies may very well have been aided by Graf.

When Diana died, during the 1997 U.S. Open in New York, Seles reported that television sets in the players’ lockerroom all were tuned to the latest news of the fatal accident, “instead of the usual tennis.” Current and former players stopped to recall their interactions with the princess.

Christ Evert said she had had tea with Diana more than once. John McEnroe remembered that she had spoken to him about a common hardship: Divorce. Wade reminisced about the time she bumped into Diana while Diana was trying on shoes on London’s fashionable Sloane Street. “She leaps out of her seat to say hello,” Wade marveled.

An example of how celebrity rhymes.

Now, whatever Duchess Meghan’s relationship to Serena Williams, it is logical that each can identify with the other’s place at the other end of prying cameras.

The Hokey Pokey for jocks

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We long ago passed the tipping point between sports and celebrity. So probably the looming all-athlete season of TV’s “Dancing With The Stars” was inevitable, the most recent nexus of a competitive dare and of jocks’ apparent addiction to applause.

What once might have seemed paradoxical—like having ventriloquists battling it out in a mime competition—now fits right into prime-time programming. You take folks who are famous for a specific skill and are convinced they can demonstrate a limitless diversity of corporeal talent, and market their not-my-job venture to a public drawn irresistibly to boldface names.

That’s entertainment. Allegedly.

It just doesn’t sound like a slam dunk: basketball Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—post-career activist, cultural ambassador, outspoken figure on race and religion—now 71 years old and paired with a partner more than a foot-and-a-half shorter than his 7-foot-2. Perhaps part of the anticipated viewer appeal is similar to race car crowds counting on a spectacular crash. One of the DWTS season headliners, after all, is Tonya Harding, a person of interest in one of sport’s memorable crackups.

On a limited basis, this arrangement has been attempted for more than a decade. Football’s Emmitt Smith and Jerry Rice, basketball’s Clyde Drexler and short-track speedskating’s Apolo Ohno were among the first jocks who waltzed—or tangoed or rumbaed—onto the DWTS set.

It should be noted that the artistry of professional athletes, basketball players in particular, has been compared favorably to ballet by some principals in that discipline. And there have been plenty of reports of football pros employing bits of dance in workouts, including the ballet bars installed at the Dallas Cowboys training center to facilitate creative stretching routines. So there certainly is the possibility of cross-over aptitude.

A consumer anthropology research executive, Robbie Blinkoff, called the acceptance of “jocks in a dance competition…an enlightenment, in a way. A few years ago, it would have seemed ironic. But the old rules don’t apply.”

Furthermore, traditional expectations of what qualifies as a sport—Must there be a defense? Is choreography allowed? What about subjective judging?—have been evolving for some time. In my three decades of covering the Olympics, one constant was the negotiation over which activities were worthy of inclusion under the Games’ big tent. Candidates included Frisbee, Lifesaving (rescue dolls are used, rather than real drowning victims), artistic roller skating, dog-sled racing, water skiing, tug-of-war, aerobics. Among stranger things.

And, yes, also knocking on the Olympic door have been variations of rug-cutting and foxes trotting. Especially ballroom dancing and, most recently, break dancing. Perhaps, then, it is a logical short sock-hop to the upcoming televised dance-offs featuring Kareem; figure skating’s Harding, Mirai Nagasu and Adam Rippon; baseball’s Johnny Damon; football’s Josh Norman; luge’s Chris Mazdzer; college basketball’s Arike Ogunbowale; snowboarding’s Jamie Anderson and softball’s Jennie Finch.

Still, and not to step on any toes here, the sports-centric DWTS format really is the blurring of performance types. Acting is not singing and tightrope walking is not playing the tuba. Maybe that’s the intended charm in this show, to mix physical metaphors and dispense with a black-and-white delineation of performance expectations.

But what about old radio comic Ed Gardner’s compartmentalizing of show biz—that “an opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, sings”?

Ranking sports journalists: 1, Stan. 2, Isaacs.

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(Stan Isaacs)

This is what Stan Isaacs gets for having been a terrific mentor—my lame attempt to revive his grand contributions to polling.

Isaacs, a premier Newsday sportswriter and columnist from 1954 to 1992 and among my more inspirational colleagues during his last 22 years there, died in 2013, at 83. He died on April 2, the day after his annual April Fool’s parody, the Isaacs Ratings of Esoteric Distinction, would have appeared. It’s high time those carefully judged rankings of apparent triviality be reinstated.

The IRED was pure Isaacs, goofy and worldly and creative. It was originally conceived, he explained to readers, “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.” He declared that “no category is too arcane” and that “the IRED never glittered more than when it evaluated People Who Were Neither On the Way Up or Down.”

He once ranked towns along the route of the Boston Marathon. And Bowling pins. And his Least Favorite States (he had Nevada No. 1). And Fred Astaire’s Dancing Partners. And Things That Aren’t As Good as They Used to Be.

He once ranked TV remote buttons: 1, Off. 2, Mute. 3, Return. 4, Exit. 5, Power. 6, Volume. 7, Channels. 8, Closed Caption. 9, Menu. 10, Pause.

He once ranked Lewis & Clark: 1, Clark. 2, Lewis.

On a couple of occasions, Isaacs gave me the extraordinary honor of serving as a guest contributor to the IRED, rating high school nicknames (The Polo Marcos of Illinois and Custer Indians of Milwaukee led my list) and United States Football League silver helmets (since nine of the 12 original teams in that short-lived league all wore silver helmets).

The idea of compiling such standings, Isaacs said, was to offer an “appraisal in areas that are generally ignored by raters.” A daunting task, given the high bar he set. But here goes:

Potatoes: 1, Mashed. 2, Baked. 3, French Fried. 4, Couch.

Obsolete golf clubs: 1, Niblick. 2, Spoon. 3, Brassie. 4, Cleek. 5, Mashie.

Most distinctive state flags: 1, New Mexico. 2, Louisiana. 3, Arizona. 4, California. 5, Colorado. 6, Texas.

English pairs: 1, Lennon and McCartney. 2, Fish and Chips. 3, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. 4, Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. 5, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. 6, Henry VIII and Jane Seymour. 7, Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves. 8, Henry VIII and Catherine Howard. 9, Henry VIII and Catherine Parr.

Mail: 1, e-. 2, Amazon. 3, Fed Ex. 4, UPS. 5. U.S. Postal Service.

Muppets: 1, Fozzie the Bear. 2, Statler & Waldorf. 3, Kermit. 4, Bert & Ernie. 5, Miss Piggy. 6, Beeker. 7, Animal. 8, Janice. 9, The Swedish Chef.

Twins: 1, Astronauts Mark and Scott Kelly. 2, NFL players Ronde and Tiki Barber. 3, BeeGees Robin and Maurice Gibb. 4, Advice columnist authors Dear Abby and Ann Landers. 5, Romulus and Remus. 6, Rod Carew.

Sports Scandals: 1. Chicago Black Sox throwing the 1919 World Series. 2 (tie) Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis Tour de France doping. 3, Rosie Ruiz Boston Marathon “victory” by running only the last half-mile. 4. Tonya and Nancy. 5, 1950s point-shaving in college basketball involving CCNY, NYU, LIU, Manhattan College, Bradley University, the University of Kentucky and the University of Toledo. 6, Ben Johnson’s steroid-powered 1988 Olympic sprint victory. 7, The 1983 George Brett Pine Tar Incident (ask a Yankee fan). 8, This month’s Australian cricket ball-scuffing incident.

Tigers: 1, Bengal. 2, Caspian. 3, Siberian. 4, Malayan. 5, University of Missouri.

Clouds: 1, Cirrus. 2, Stratus. 3, Cumulus. 4, Cumulonimbus.

Characters from TV’s Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle: 1, Moose. 2, Squirrel. 3, Boris. 4, Natasha. 5, Sherman. 6, Mr. Peabody. 7, Dudley Do-right. 8, Nell. 9, Snidely Whiplash.

Landscape implements: 1, Mower. 2, Trimmer. 3, Rake. 4, Hired Help.

Favorite currencies made obsolete by the adoption of the Euro: 1, Lira (Italy). 2, Forint (Hungary). 3, Peseta (Spain). 4, Deutsche Mark (Germany).

Favorite pollsters (in reverse order): 6, Nielsen. 5, Pew Research. 4, Gallup. 3, AP college football. 2, Quinnipiac. 1. Stan Isaacs.

Martin Luther King and sports in society

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Let’s imagine, in marking a half century since his assassination, that Martin Luther King Jr. were still alive today. He’d be 89 now, not impossibly old.

What he might say about 2018 issues has been the subject, in the past few days, of all sorts of public ruminations and speculations. My own curiosity, as a sports journalist, relates to how the business of fun-and-games has become so ingrained in society as to be inseparable from our politics, sexism, racism and culture wars.

How might King respond to the president suggesting that NFL players be fired for protesting against police treatment of minorities? What might he say about Fox News host Laura Ingraham rebuking basketball star Lebron James for “talking politics” by telling James to “shut up and dribble”? To what extent might King see sports as a primary arena in the fight for civil rights and justice?

Twenty-five years ago, for the 25th anniversary of King’s death, my editors at Newsday allowed me to ask some of those questions of former King associates and King scholars. There were no definitive answers, of course. But the basics of what they told me then ring a lot of bells now.

Harry Edwards, University of California sociology professor emeritus and longtime activist, noted then how society had “compartmentalized” blacks right out of the civil rights discussion. “By that, I mean the black athlete—who is on TV, day in and day out, making millions of dollars, driving a hundred-thousand-dollar automobile, with his pick of women and vacation sports, with his pick of the good rewards of society—becomes totally out of sync with the masses of black people. Those athletes are neutralized, made safe, neatly bounded off.

“And then it becomes very easy, once that process is established, to say: ‘Hey, you are an athlete. What are you doing talking about the lack of blacks in high-prestige occupations? You just play ball.’”

Which sounds like “Shut up and dribble.” Or claiming that Colin Kaepernick, as a $19-million-a-year backup quarterback, was in no position to speak for the oppressed in 2016.

At the time of King’s murder—April 4, 1968—sports had not yet pushed from the fringes to the center of social events. The Super Bowl was a two-year-old curiosity. The World Series was years from going to prime time. The NCAA basketball tournament was nowhere near its current March Madness.

Muhammed Ali had refused induction into the army two years earlier, which certainly caused a stir, but Ali lost that fight—banned from boxing for five years. King, meanwhile, was busy enough dealing with institutional segregation, with the Vietnam War, even a divided black community.

“To be frank about it, we had not gotten around to sports in 1968,” the Rev. Joseph Lowrey, a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with King, told me 25 years ago. But, by 1993, Lowrey argued that there was “hardly anything, except maybe Michael Jackson or Oprah Winfrey, that can match the Super Bowl for getting into American homes—not only as entertainment, but also a something with an educational value that helps form opinions.”

Months after King was slain, Tommie Smith and John Carlos used their platform as star athletes at the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics as a call for social awareness and a plea for the disenfranchised. By raising black-gloved fists during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner, they were a Kaepernick moment decades before Kaepernick.

But Harry Edwards had failed to engineer a black boycott of those Games. His argument was that “sports inevitably reflects, reproduces society and social environment. It’s the tip of the iceberg. I think Dr. King would look at that and understand that. Sports not only has greater importance because of the increasing number of blacks involved, as a direct consequence of the atmosphere brought about by Dr. King, but because it is so magnified by the media. And this is exactly the same conversation I had with Dr. King in 1968.”

King’s oldest son, Martin Luther III, told me during those 1993 interviews that he didn’t remember his father ever attending a sports event, though “I know he admired Jackie Robinson…” and, during SCLC retreats, “he’d always play softball. He could jump high, to be so short. Daddy was 5-7, maybe 5-8, but he could leap. And he was an excellent swimmer.”

In the spring of 2014, on one of my last assignments before official retirement from Newsday, I was sent to Memphis to cover a weekend of March Madness action. With a little time to spare, I took the ¾-mile walk from my hotel to the Lorraine Motel, site of King’s murder.

It was like time-traveling back to 1968, and surprisingly sad. As part of what now is the National Civil Rights Museum, the motel’s exterior has been preserved to look exactly as it appeared in newspaper photos the night King was shot 50 years ago. Two vintage cars, a 1959 Dodge Royal and 1968 Cadillac, are parked in the motel lot.

So we can only imagine. The consensus among those who knew King was that, while impossible to divine his exact reactions to 2018 doings in sports, he would be “vocal.” Whether through protest or negotiation, his voice would be heard.

 

 

 

God’s team, or just a good team?

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This is a wish that the Loyola-Chicago University basketball team charges right through the NCAA tournament’s Final Four weekend and wins the national title. It is a keep-the-fingers-crossed hope that the decided underdog has its day. A belief, in fact, that such an unlikely result might come to pass.

It is not, however, a prayer. It is not—and this is a bit tricky for someone who spent eight years in Catholic school—an endorsement of tournament superstar Sister Jean’s plea for divine intervention on behalf of Loyola. For all the charm in the country’s discovery of Sister Jean Dolores-Schmidt, the 98-year-old team chaplain and sometime scout, I confess to a discomfort in hearing her admission on one of many TV appearances that she prays for a win, and that “we have God on our side.”

My first participation in organized sports was as a sixth-grade Little Leaguer, and one of the first admonitions from our gangly, soft-spoken coach, Mr. Buck, was that there would be no supplications that the Almighty come to the aid of our team. (And, by extension, work against our opponent.)

Victory and personal stardom hardly are against my religion. But I am reminded of a CNN essay a few years ago which asked, “When did God become a sports fan?” It cited the increasing number of baseball players pointing to the heavens after hitting home runs, NFL players praying in the end zone after scoring, victorious jocks in various sports thanking The Lord for helping them make winning plays.

The article quoted William J. Baker, author of “Playing with God,” making the point that such gestures amounted to “an athlete using a moment to sell a product, like soap.” By publicly thanking God for victory it was, in effect, calling more attention to the athlete than to his faith. Such conflating of godliness with athletic success brought, at one point, a letter to the editor in a British newspaper with the headline, “Leave me out of your petty games.—Love, God.”

A couple of years ago, the Public Religion Research Institute did a study that found 53 percent of Americans and 56 of sports fans believed God rewards faithful athletes with “good health and success.” And that more than a quarter of Americans and sports fans say God determines the outcomes of specific games. Which seems to equate defeat with somehow already being on the road to hell.

The Sister Jean story, with all its sidebars and spinoffs flooding the televised, digital and print coverage of the tournament, is lovely for the way it has emphasized community—she’s hearing from former students, former players, nuns from her order. The fuss reminds of how we identify with our school or associates, and it reflects the fairly unavoidable presence of big sports events in our society. In a visit to the retirement home of Sister Jean’s order in Dubuque, Iowa, New York Times columnist Juliet Macur was told by one of the nuns how she was encouraged to think, “How many young people would usually be interacting with a 98-year-old like this?”

But, too, another nun noted the “irony in this [that] we often like to talk about peace and justice and living in the margins and helping other people. And, of course, Jean Dolores did all of that earlier in her career. But now the camera isn’t on peace and justice. It’s on Jean Dolores.”

It’s on winning basketball games, and a tournament that will bring the NCAA $8.8 billion in television-rights money over eight years. It’s on how Loyola is cashing in on Sister Jean’s sudden celebrity by marketing Sister Jean T-shirts, socks and bobblehead dolls.

“At the end of the game,” Sister Jean said, “we want to be sure that when the buzzer goes off that the numbers indicate that we get the big W.”

Perhaps that’s just a variation of hope—from her lips to God’s ears. But, as a prayer, it could be seen as trivializing faith and religion. It could be hinting that God will confer success on the more moral team, and that may not be staying in one’s lane when it comes to sports.

How about this: Root for Loyola if you prefer. I will. But if those lads don’t win, it’s a shame. Not a damn shame.