Hockey playoffs: Hairy

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Among playoff hockey’s manly charms is its barbarism. And, more than that, barber-ism. Herewith, a consideration of the traditional “playoff beard.”

It long ago became ritual that, as the Stanley Cup tournament stretched into May, the rugged souls still playing look increasingly like a bunch of lumberjacks in the wild. That’s competitive success displayed on the players’ faces.

Beard scholars—there is such a thing; they are called pogonologists—theorize several roots for the playoff beard, which has spread (though patchily) to other sports: The solidarity component of teammates—one for all and all for one—going into battle together with a unified look. The notion that players’ full attention is on games and practices, with no time for such trivialities as grooming. The Samson thing, that being hirsute equals supernatural strength. The idea that, as employees doing the indispensable work for their companies, players have the unique privilege of disregarding dress codes.

Also, there is the sports version of an old wives’ tale. New York Islanders Hall of Famer Clark Gillies, sometimes credited with being the Father of the Playoff Beard, figured there is nothing more mysterious about it than being “like every other superstition. You win, you don’t change anything.”

Just as a bonus, he noted, the playoff beard means that “a lot less cuts and bruises show.”

The anecdotal evidence is that Gillies and his Islanders mates of the late 1970s—on the verge of winning four consecutive Stanley Cup titles—initiated the custom of not shaving until either being eliminated from post-season action or hoisting the Cup in triumph.

At the time, a scruffy five- or six-day razor avoidance was not yet in fashion. Men were either clean-shaven or, less often, committed to a Grizzly Adams look. So, while there is a danger in beard overanalysis—revolutionaries and iconoclasts like Trotsky and Che Guevara had beards, but so did Freud, Abe Lincoln and Hemingway—hockey players subscribe to the exhibition of facial hair as a pride in competitive prosperity.

That explains such lampoons as the “Maple Leafs Playoff Beard” meme, a depiction of a player without a hint of whiskers, just to make it clear that the Toronto Maple Leafs were absent from 10 of the past 12 playoff seasons and were dispatched in the first round this year.

Not to split hairs, but there are cases of wildly accomplished hockey stars who have succeeded in winning championships without a corresponding abundance in the beard department.

For reasons of youth or, with such fellows as Pittsburgh’s two-time Cup champion Sidney Crosby, there are examples of what 12-year NHL veteran Brad Boyes once described this way:

“A couple of guys, for whatever reason—well, you know when your uncle says, ‘You eat this and it’ll put hair on your chest.’ I guess they didn’t eat those things.” Boyes, by the way, acknowledged that his playoff beards were “just OK,” and barely cultivated in three brief trips to the post season.

Anyway, a personal P.S.: When I had a beard, which was entirely unrelated to the hockey playoffs, I nevertheless razored it away minutes after the Islanders won the 1980 Stanley Cup. Because, while watching the Cup’s final game on television, I was feeding my infant daughter her bottle of milk, and she somehow developed a reflex of reaching up and grasping my whiskers. And pulling. When her meal was finished, so was my beard.

Rhyme time?

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Poetry Month is circling the drain, almost gone, so I figured I ought to get busy. My stock in trade is sportswriting—pretty low-brow stuff compared to most composition, especially poetry—but who doesn’t aspire to something loftier, to be more than just one of those who only knows prose?

A motivation was the recent essay by Garrison Keillor, the grand humorist who created radio’s delightful Prairie Home Companion. Though “we all suffered under English teachers who forced us to pretend to be sensitive and sigh with appreciation” over poetic metaphors and similes, Keillor wrote, and though “many police departments now use Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’ instead of pepper spray,” he offered encouragement.

“You can do it,” he coaxed. Write poetry.

So I Googled “how to write a poem” and came across some tips (have a goal, avoid sentimentality, use images, rhyme with extreme caution) and stumbled onto some examples from the only poet I recall ever really understanding, sly Ogden Nash, whose piece entitled “Fleas” goes:

    Adam

    Had’m.

I can’t do that. But I was heartened by the knowledge that Nash was a baseball fan. In 1949, he published a poem in Sport Magazine that paid tribute to the sport’s great players in alphabetical order, from A to Z, including these nifty lines:

    C is for Cobb, Who grew spikes and not corn. And made all the basemen Wish they weren’t born.

    D is for Dean, The grammatical Diz. When they asked, Who’s the tops? Said correctly, I is.

    E is for Evers, His jaw in advance; Never afraid To Tinker with Chance.

    F is for Fordham. And Frankie and Frisch; I wish he were back With the Giants, I wish.

The Garrison Keillor piece suggested attempting a poem “for someone you dearly love,” but that seems risky for an amateur. I wouldn’t want to scare her off after all these years. Better, too, I decided, to avoid puppies, grandparents, young lovers and other clichés. Rather, just start by attempting verse mixed with familiar sport. Maybe with a nod to Joe Hardy on an old theme:

    There once was a team from the Bronx

    Known for its homers, big bonks.

    Its demise a temptation

    That was shared ‘round the nation,

    But a Faustian bargain? No thonx.

Or perhaps something fit for playoff time in winter sports leagues:

    A little haiku

    To describe hockey action.

    Skate, shove, punch, punch, punch.

Or an observation about an old basketball star’s new job:

    Patrick Ewing

    For years was stewing

    Yearning to be a coach.

    His old school has hired him

    (Eventually to fire him)

    That’s generally the sports approach.

Call this one “ESPN:”

    Turned on the TV,

    Sat in the lounger,

    Heard all the quacking, pre-game.

    What about real insight?

    Beyond the sound bites,

    Why’s commentary sound so lame?

     —

    The heads are talking,

    Loud’n caffeinated.

    Time to grab the ol’ remote.

    Only a din glutton

    Eschews the mute button.

    It’s for the players to showboat.

Well, I tried. Good enough for pepper spray, at least?

    I’ve showed so little poetic muscle

    The highest compliment I could get

    Would be backhanded.

    “Way to hustle.”

Next April, maybe.

 

Tim Tebow: Fake news?

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There are two kinds of people in the world. Those immune to Tebow Fatigue. And the rest of us weary souls.

It is now going on five years that Tim Tebow, his glory days as a Heisman Trophy winner and a brief flash of pro football success well behind him, has been vainly chasing a second act of athletic prominence. Rejected by four NFL teams, Tebow has turned to baseball, laboring on the sport’s lowest-rung, at 29, amid aspirants a decade younger than he is.

And, while his Sisyphean toil may not be fake news, it long ago began to feel like a transposed version of crying-wolf headlines. Over and over, there have been urgent prophecies, never fulfilled, of Tebow as savior or—at least—change agent.

Just months after his NFL apotheosis in a 2011 playoff victory, Tebow was traded by the Denver Broncos to the New York Jets, who spent all of the next season threatening to match the public relations hullaballoo by unleashing him in place of struggling quarterback Mark Sanchez, or as a runner-passer in the Wildcat formation, or as a receiver, or possibly as a running back.

Nothing ever came of any of that. Tebow, the erstwhile miracle man, mostly sat on the bench, was released after the season, spent one training camp with Philadelphia and another with New England but never played another NFL game. Always with much fanfare. Now, in what must be considered his athletic second language, Tebow is attempting to learn professional baseball with the Mets’ Class A farm team, the delightfully named Columbia (S.C.) Fireflies.

Jay Busbee of Yahoo! Sports wrote this week that Tebow “is playing baseball and nobody knows why.” His .143 batting average through April 19, against bush-league pitching, hardly forecasts big-time potential. So there are only his credentials as a celebrity—these days, mostly famous for being famous—that keep him in the public eye and make him the biggest attraction at the Columbia ballpark.

Come see the old Florida Gator star quarterback tackle another sport! (And don’t forget to stop in the gift shop on the way out for your Tebow Fireflies’ replica jersey.)

Surely, part of the narrative is Tebow’s recognition factor beyond sports, through his conspicuous displays of Christian faith. And even if his prayerful kneeling after football touchdowns—“Tebowing,” which he trademarked in 2012—wasn’t necessarily embraced for religious implications, it provided a fad to be widely mimicked.

The pose also was compared sarcastically to Rodin’s famous sculpture, “The Thinker.” So, segueing from that, let us ponder the puzzlement of the ongoing publicity glut.

Really: Why? Tebow hardly is the first jock to attempt a football-baseball transition. Apart from Deion Sanders—who is the only man to play in both the World Series and Super Bowl—Bo Jackson, D.J. Dozier, Drew Henson, Chad Hutchinson, Brian Jordan and Matt Kinzer are just some recent names on a long list of men who reached the top level in both sports. Plenty others—including two former Heisman winners, Chris Weinke and Ricky Williams—worked both the NFL and baseball’s minors.

One of those was John Elway. In 1982, the summer before the Stanford quarterback was made the NFL’s No. 1 draft choice, Elway dabbled in the minors with the Yankees’ Class A team in Oneonta, N.Y., while Yankee boss George Steinbrenner was convinced Elway would be his Major League right fielder within three years. Yet there wasn’t nearly the fuss made over him that the more limited Tebow is experiencing.

Elway, furthermore, was a can’t-miss NFL star, who followed his 16-year Hall of Fame career with the Denver Broncos by becoming the team’s general manager–and is the man, skeptical of the quarterback skills of one Tim Tebow, who sent Tebow packing in that 2012 trade to the Jets.

Here’s another argument—flimsy, I admit—why the Tebow story feels overdone. If one will accept a spelling quirk, there already has been a Tebow—Tebeau—in the Major Leagues. Three, in fact, in the late 1800s. George Tebeau (.269 average over six years), his brother Patsy (.279 in 13 years) and Pussy—so called, apparently, because his initials were C.A.T.; Charles Alston Tebeau—who was no relation to the other two. Pussy played only two games and hit .500, for the old Cleveland Spiders of the National League.

Anyway, now we have Tim Tebow, a Firefly. Yes, he’s generating plenty of light. But hardly delivering a shock. There is a big difference between a lightning bug and lightning. End of story.

NHL’s Olympic disappearing act

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By banning their players from next year’s Winter Olympics in South Korea, NHL owners basically are going to spite their noses right off of their faces. They will not participate on international sport’s biggest stage, bypassing the added bonus of furthering the league’s desire to spread the NHL gospel to Asia, because—commissioner Gary Bettman somehow reasoned—the Olympics will cause the NHL to “disappear” for more than two weeks.

In fact, the Olympics has been a boon to NHL visibility since the league first signed onto the Winter Games 19 years ago, even in the face of shameful conduct by U.S. players at the 1998 Nagano Olympics. (More on that in a minute.)

The 2010 Olympic gold-medal final was the most-watched hockey game in North American television history—the NHL’s primary turf—seen by 27.6 million Americans and 22 million Canadians. Compare that to the measly 7.9 million who tuned in for Game Seven of the previous season’s Stanley Cup final on U.S. TV, or even the all-time largest Stanley Cup single-game TV audience of 13-plus million in 1972.

Prior to the 2010 Games, the highest rated hockey game featuring NHL players also was at the Olympics, in the 2002 gold-medal final. Donnie Kwak, writing for The Ringer web site, sensibly argued last week that “even the worst Olympic hockey game is more compelling than a regular-season NHL matchup in February.”

Especially, I contend, because the skating and puck-handling skills of he NHL’s best are magnified by Olympic rules that do not tolerate the NHL’s counterproductive acceptance of fighting. No other major professional sport puts up with—in fact, markets—such side-shows.

Yet Bettman brings an odd logic to that as well, accepting fighting as a pre-existing condition in his league. “It’s been there from the start,” he has said, “and what is done at other levels isn’t necessarily what’s appropriate at the professional level.”

Bettman has concluded that fighting “is part of the game” because NHL hockey is “intense and emotional.” A similarly timid reluctance to enforce good behavior is what gave the NHL a figurative black eye in its 1998 Olympic debut, when some (still unidentified) members of the U.S. team destroyed $3,000 worth of property in their rooms at the Nagano Games athletes’ village, then made matters worse by dismissing the incident as “blown out of proportion.”

Supposedly there were only three troublemakers who caused that damage, spitting in the face of overwhelming Japanese courtesy to the world’s visiting athletes, yet all 23 members of the team banded together to steadfastly refuse cooperation in the U.S. Olympic Committee’s subsequent investigation. The excuse was “team solidarity”—not ratting on the perpetrators of embarrassment to them and the entire U.S. Olympic delegation.

Not until a month later, under pressure from the U.S. Hockey Federation and the NHL Players Association, did the 1988 U.S. team captain, Chris Chelios, at last write a letter of apology to the Japanese people and the Olympic organizers, with a check of $3,000 included.

Somehow, Chelios and 13 of the disgraced Nagano veterans were allowed to represent the United States again at the 2002 Winter Games, possibly because a repeat of the Yanks’ roguish actions wouldn’t cause a similar international incident for Salt Lake City’s hosts. “We kept [the 1998 culprits] to ourselves for a reason,” Chelios claimed, without giving a reason. “People who needed to know what happened, they knew what happened.” He included Bettman among those people.

So the NHL establishment simply moved on with a boys-will-be-boys shrug, just as Bettman and league owners justify occasional, though persistent, goonery on the ice. But if a tradition of fisticuffs is OK in NHL games, what’s the common-sense argument by Bettman and the league owners that player injury is a major reason for skipping the 2018 Olympics?

With NHL rosters becoming more and more geographically diversified—more than one quarter of active NHL players come from outside North America—there is overwhelming sentiment among players to participate in the South Korea Games. Russians, Finns, Swedes, Czechs not only like the idea of wearing their national colors but also understand that their past presence in the Olympics has cultivated new fans for the NHL.

Even the American players, unlike those few ingrates in Nagano, have come to appreciate that the global exposure and competitive buzz of the Olympics far outpace the mucking in the corners of NHL rinks in mid-February. Without them in South Korea, the TV-ratings winners will be figure skating and snowboarding. And the NHL indeed will disappear for a couple of weeks.

 

Another Raiders’ road trip

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Time to trot out the old Gertrude Stein quote that in Oakland, “there’s no there there.” With news that the NFL Raiders will be running off to Las Vegas comes the sense of a lost place. And, just to further disorient football fans and civic leaders, the team crassly intends to squat at the Oakland Coliseum for at least two more seasons while its palatial new playground is being built in Sin City.

“Home” games are looking like there might be no “here” there. Plenty of Raiders’ fans, often described as among the league’s most passionate and loyal, essentially are reacting to the Raiders’ good-bye by offering to make them sandwiches. You know: Here’s your hat; what’s your hurry?

That includes Scott McKibben, the man who heads the authority that controls the Oakland Coliseum. McKibben told USA Today that it is “actually financially to our benefit” if the Raiders don’t exercise their option to honor their lease through 2018—a clear suggestion that the Raiders pack up and leave immediately. The Coliseum generates $7 million a year from the team but spends $8 million.

There doesn’t appear to be a real danger that the Raiders will wind up like the imaginary Port Ruppert Mundys in Philip Roth’s “Great American Novel”—a baseball team in the World War II era forced to play its entire schedule on the road because its stadium was used as a soldier’s embarkation point.

But this promises to be a mighty awkward divorce. And not so different from the last time the Raiders said “See you, suckers” to Oakland citizens. That was in 1982, when the Raiders’ founder and original owner, Al Davis—father to current majority owner Mark, who inherited Al’s tendency toward itchy feet—went looking for greener grass in Los Angeles.

The weird logistics that year included having the Raiders continue to live and train in Oakland—practicing all week within view of the Oakland Coliseum—then flying the 365 miles to L.A. for Sunday “home” games. It was a bit like having the New York Jets play home games in Pittsburgh, or the New England Patriots play home games in Buffalo.

Players reported sometimes crossing paths with Oakland residents who marveled, “I didn’t know y’all were still around here.” The local newspaper, which had recorded the Raiders’ every move for the previous 22 seasons, quit covering the team. The Raiders’ fan club disbanded, though some members went on insisting, according to that season’s Raiders’ running back Kenny King, “You’re not the L.A. Raiders. You’re the Oakland Raiders.”

King’s response: “If they want to call us that, fine. I’m a Raider. A Whatever Raider.”

So, here we are again. The Whatever Raiders, expecting to play at least one more season 500 miles from their future digs, are somehow expecting Oakland folks to go on supporting them. Mark Davis, having lived up to his father’s allegiance to the team’s pirate logo by attempting to plunder taxpayers for a better stadium deal, nevertheless went on local radio and claimed, “I still have a feeling for the fans in the Bay Area. And I’ve met with a number of them. And anything I say to them isn’t going to soothe them, and it makes this whole thing bittersweet.”

Not that such emotions stopped him from merrily abandoning those fans, the same way the original Raiders left Oakland for Los Angeles in 1982, then walked out 13 years later on the spectator following they had built in L.A. to return to Oakland.

And now Davis has insisted that the Raiders will carry the “Oakland” name until settling in Vegas in 2019 or 2020.

But why should Bay Area citizens still contribute to Davis’ bank account with the Oakland Coliseum again becoming the Park of the Lost Raiders? With speculation that the team might seek a temporary home at the San Francisco 49ers’ stadium in Santa Clara—or even in San Antonio, Tex.—before its Vegas stadium is available, why should any fans buy into a one-way, short-term relationship?

Davis insisted that he really wanted to stay in Oakland, but had no choice.

Whatever, Raiders.

Far worse than Darwinism

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We have known for some time that elite women’s gymnastics—really, little girl gymnastics—somehow is even more Darwinian than other sports. It truly is survival of the fittest. No room for fear. No time for procrastination, no place to stand still. Puberty is coming. Weight gain is coming. Younger tumbling, flying daredevils are coming.

Those children train so hard in pursuit of Olympic glory that it is impossible for them to gain enough weight to reach puberty. The competition is so fierce that they dare not surrender to pain.

In 1995, San Francisco Chronicle sportswriter Joan Ryan published a book, “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes,” that touched on the frightening extremes to which so many gymnasts (and figure skaters) went to succeed. Based on interviews with more than 100 former athletes—as well as trainers, sports psychologists, physiologists and other experts—Ryan documented the physical and emotional hardships endured, the eating disorders, weakened bones, stunted growth, debilitating injuries and psychological problems. In 1996, the New England Journal of Medicine issued a report describing emotional and physical harm suffered by elite female gymnasts.

And the question now is whether that harsh, no-questions-asked environment facilitated far more disturbing damage to those kids. Over the past year, reports have surfaced of 360 cases of female gymnasts accusing coaches of sexual transgressions since the mid-1990s, and more than 80 gymnasts have alleged sexual abuse during that time by former Michigan State University and national team physician Larry Nassar, who in November was arrested on child pornography charges.

Were those ghastly crimes enabled by the gymnasts’ insecurity about their Olympic possibilities? About their athletic survival? Nassar’s abuse reportedly was perpetrated under the guise of medical treatment for injuries, and young gymnasts learn as mere toddlers that injuries are to be expected and must be dealt with.

Leading up to the 2004 Athens Olympics, I asked candidates for the women’s U.S. gymnastics team for a listing of their afflictions and found them to be a sawbones’ workshop. One 16-year-old had been through two fractures and a damaged ligament in her elbow. A 17-year-old, just off major Achilles surgery, remembered a stress fracture in her back at 5, a broken arm, a fractured wrist. Another teenager was coming off knee surgery and another returning from elbow reconstruction. Taken as a whole, elite gymnasts are either injured, were injured or about to be injured.

Was the celebrated husband/wife coaching team of Bela and Martha Karolyi, whose Texas ranch has served as the national team’s training center for decades, somehow complicit in creating an unreasonable cut-throat atmosphere? And could that have provided cover for Nassar, whom the Michigan attorney general branded a “monster” in announcing the most recent sexual assault charges against Nassar.

Bela Karolyi, who coached Olympic superstars Nadia Comaneci (in his native Romania) and Mary Lou Retton (after he set up shop in the United States), seemed to me a caring if demanding taskmaster, but he did always openly endorse the Darwinian model.

“They cannot slow down,” he insisted, “or the little ones coming behind them will swallow them up like they’ve never been there.” After two mothers of former Karolyi gymnasts told the Baltimore Sun in 1992 that his system was physically and mentally abusive—one blaming him for her daughter’s bulimia—Karolyi insisted, “I never interfere with their diet. I’m teaching gymnastics. The other things are for people around them—parents, teachers in school.”

I covered Olympic-level gymnastics for 25 years and found that, while the compelling performances and athletes’ dedication to excellence were to be much appreciated, I would not have wanted my daughter to be faced with that sort of survival test. And that was when I thought the worst thing for those kids was to avoid being swallowed up by the little ones coming behind them.

Another good Johann Koss deed

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Once again, Johann Olav Koss has reassured me that a career in sports journalism is not an entirely trivial exercise. Once again, Koss’ commitment to the ideal of a level playing field, of respect for rules and opponents, of the universality of games has affirmed the worth of having toiled in what hard-news reporters often dismiss as the “toy department.”

At 48, Koss, the former Olympic speedskating champion, has created Fair Sport, a nonprofit foundation offering financial and legal assistance to whistle-blowers with information about cheating in international competition. As the New York Times reported, Fair Sport will draw on private donations and commitments from global law firms to provide housing, criminal defense, immigration applications and psychological counseling to whistle-blowers.

This is just the latest good deed of a sportsman whose path I happily crossed a few times, beginning at the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympics. He was 25 then, when he won three gold medals and set three world records in his native Norway and immediately donated his $100,000 bonus check to Olympic Aid, which had been formed the previous year to raise funds for children in war-torn nations.

Koss signed on as an Olympic Aid ambassador and recruited fellow athletes to donate 12 tons of sports equipment—which he personally delivered to children amid civil strife in Eastern Africa. Over lunch in New York City shortly after the Lillehammer Games, he told me about seeing “with my own eyes” how “the martyrs of their wars are the ideal of children in places like that. I don’t think that’s good for children to have people who die in wars as their ideals. If they could have sport, to be healthy, to have a social connection, that would be good.”

So, yes, it’s just sports. But to Koss, it not only was a vehicle of self-fulfillment but also something valuable enough to be shared with those disadvantaged kids, something to be protected from the skullduggery of doping. In 2000, he reshaped Olympic Aid into Right to Play, zeroing in on sports as a tool for the development of children in more than 20 countries. He joined the International Olympic Committee’s athletes advisory commission and worked against the use of performance-enhancing substances.

Over and over, Koss demonstrated that just because sports events themselves don’t mean a lot in the greater scheme of things, that hardly disqualifies them from deserving our attention on several levels. He was proud of his speedskating accomplishments and insistent, as he told a couple of us ink-stained wretches while working for Olympic Aid at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, that athletes “are very good role models. When you’ve dedicated yourself to play fair—that is very important—then it’s totally enough to be a hero in sport.”

President Obama struck a similar tone during his White House reception for the World Series champion Chicago Cubs last year, declaring it to be “worth remembering—because sometimes people wonder, ‘Well, why are you spending time on sports? There’s other stuff going on’—that throughout our history, sports has had this power to bring us together….Sports has changed attitudes and cultures in ways that seem subtle but that ultimately make us think differently about ourselves and who we were.

“Sports has a way, sometimes, of changing hearts in a way that politics or business doesn’t. And sometimes it’s just a matter of us being able to escape and relax from the difficulties of our days, but sometimes it also speaks to something better in us.”

This latest Koss project, Fair Sport, is the result of a recently exposed Russian doping scandal so pervasive that some of us sports patriots could feel ourselves sliding into cynicism. But, once again, Koss’ focus on our right to play, and play fairly, has spoken to something better in us. Sports, he said during a chat at the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics, “is for peace. It’s for education. It’s for health. It’s to reach absolutely everybody in the world, to understand how to win, but also how to lose, and how to respect everyone.”

He has convinced me, again, that it is totally enough to be here in the toy department, where I write this missive while wearing my 1994 Lillehammer Olympics sweater.

Jim Boeheim’s values and college sport’s big bucks

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Syracuse basketball coach Jim Boeheim’s recent putdown of Greensboro, N.C., for having “no value” as a conference tournament site really was just the latest episode in college sports hypocrisy. Boeheim was reminding that his sport, on the Division I level, has nothing to do with proximity to campus life. Nothing to do with education. Nothing to do with the NCAA’s claim to be an amateur operation.

His typically prickly demeanor aside, Boeheim merely was verbalizing the state of affairs in his chosen racket. Just as conference realignments have severed schools’ geographical connections to chase bigger and better paydays, so do post-season tournaments increasingly gravitate toward the largest cities.

Because, as Willie Sutton supposedly said when asked why he robbed banks, “that’s where the money is.”

So the Atlantic Coast Conference, founded as a Carolina-centric league in the early 1950s, abandoned its traditional home in the burg that calls itself “Tournament Town” to play in New York’s Brooklyn borough this year. With Jim Boeheim’s hardy approval.

“Why do you think the Big Ten is coming to New York City?” Boeheim said of next year’s deal to bring that conference tournament from its Midwestern roots to Madison Square Garden. “It’s a good business decision. Everyone says this is all about business. The media centers, the recruiting centers, are Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and New York. How many players do their have in Greensboro?”

Boeheim, of course, is the crotchety fellow being paid roughly $2 million a year who has dismissed as “idiotic” any thought of sharing the wealth with college athletes. He is the guy who was suspended for nine games a year ago for failing to promote compliance of NCAA rules within his team for nearly a decade. He—and Syracuse basketball—are the embodiment of a gold-digging approach.

He noted that “Madison Square Garden made the Big East Conference” in the early 1980s, when Syracuse was a charter member of the league formed primarily to tap into the largest East Coast TV markets—$$$$: New York (St. John’s), D.C. (Georgetown), Boston (Boston College), Philadelphia (Villanova). The conference, in fact, mandated that its teams play the majority of their games in large public arenas, away from their campuses, to maximize ticket sales.

Long ago and in a galaxy far, far away, it was the ACC which concocted a post-season tournament to determine its league champion—and sole NCAA tournament participant. That was 1954, when only 22 teams made up the NCAA field. Between 1978 and 1980, the Big Dance grew from 32 to 48 teams, just when the Big East embraced the idea of a post-season tournament as a significant revenue stream. With as many as four of its original seven teams already guaranteed NCAA berths, its tournament essentially amounted to a series of exhibition games. But with large crowds paying top dollar at the self-proclaimed “World’s Most Famous Arena.”

As long ago as 1985, St. John’s Hall of Fame coach Lou Carnesecca admitted that the Big East tournament “means nothing. It’s nice for the league, to put a little money in the sack, to get the alumni together to discuss who’s better. It’s good because it makes a lot of noise…”

So isn’t it a bit ironic that none other than Jim Boeheim was grumbling back then that “any coach who feels he’s [already] qualified for the NCAA would rather not play a postseason tournament”?

Soon enough, he came around to the comforts of greed, until the Big East’s pursuit of further riches through a disorienting expansion of adding schools with a football emphasis led to its virtual demise. The conference eventually was forced to retreat to its old basketball model and Syracuse, meanwhile, ran away to the ACC’s greenbacks.

In Greensboro, many see justice in the fact that Boeheim and his Syracuse lads were immediately ousted by Miami from the ACC’s new Brooklyn stage in the first round, ending any hope of an NCAA bid. And that Syracuse subsequently was matched, in the consolation NIT’s first round, against the team from the University of North Carolina’s campus in Greensboro.

Surely there’s some value in that.

A fellow (and lesson) to remember

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A recent Facebook posting was linked to a North Texas State University student newspaper’s article about the school’s associate head basketball coach, Rob Evans. And that set off my free-association memory of a scales-falling-from the-eyes-moment.

He was Robert Evans to us Hobbs (N.M.) High School classmates in the mid 1960s. Quiet, with a 100-watt smile. A stylish fellow, he always seemed to be wearing a pressed white shirt. He was a starting forward on the 1964 basketball varsity that lost only once—in the state championship game, by one measly point, to a team (hated Roswell) that Hobbs had beaten three times earlier in the season. Robert had silken offensive moves and played suffocating defense in Hobbs’ relentless all-game full-court press.

He was a grade ahead of me, so our acquaintance didn’t go much beyond friendly hallway greetings and the fact that, as sports editor/photographer for the school newspaper, I witnessed—and recorded—much of Robert’s significant contribution to the basketball team’s heroics. I also took pictures for the school yearbook, and I’m pretty sure that’s my staged photo, among the collection of individual players’ shots, of Robert throwing a behind-the-back pass. (I was slow on the trigger: The ball already is out of the frame.)

Anyway, in my sheltered, privileged existence, I unconsciously assumed that Robert, along with all my fellow teenagers, lived essentially the same life I did. Nice house, leafy neighborhood, no real cares beyond typical 16-year-old angst over matters of popularity and acne. A guy like Robert, furthermore, was something of a celebrity; I certainly didn’t have the jump shot he put on display for the varsity crowds in excess of 3,000 people.

So here came the moment of revelation. During my first two weeks each summer, before I commenced three months of relatively lucrative (for a high school kid) work as an oil-field roustabout, I was the vacation replacement for a man who delivered Western Union telegrams around town. As if my own means of daily transportation—a hand-me-down, putt-putt Cushman scooter from my brother—weren’t dorky enough, the Western Union job required I wear a little yellow helmet in public. But it was my first paying job and, unlike the oil-field gig, which was purposed to earn college tuition, I had my parents’ permission to spend my Western Union earnings right away.

I bought a better camera.

Anyway, it quickly became apparent that in those days in Hobbs, an oil-patch town hard against the West Texas border, telegrams went either to local businesses or to residences without the benefit of a telephone. And the latter locations were in a part of town I previously was unaware existed. Unpaved streets. Sad wooden shacks. The folks who answered the doors there always were black.

Robert Evans is black. Yet I somehow was stunned to see him walking down one of those dusty roads one day, exchanging a smile and a wave, as I went about my Western Union rounds. My first thought—a dumb, naïve reaction—was something along the lines of, “What is he doing here?”

Or maybe: What is this run-down district doing in my seemingly comfortable little town? The one substantial brick house in that neighborhood, I later learned, belonged to the mother of Bill Bridges, a former Hobbs High basketball star who was playing for the NBA’s St. Louis Hawks at the time.

This was an overdue bit of education. All my interactions with other students had been on the sprawling, well-appointed high school campus. I had arrived in Hobbs from southern California for my sophomore year in 1962, and was surprised to hear, one morning from Mrs. Hill in our American History class, how relieved she had been over the Hobbs schools’ trouble-free response to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling eight years earlier. Another numbskull reaction from me: Hadn’t everybody just gotten on with integration?

Because my parents died shortly after my high school graduation, I was taken permanently away from Hobbs by college and work and fell out of touch with virtually everyone from those days. My loss. But I did bump into Robert after my freshman year of college at the big pond north of town—we called it Lake Inferior—where a friend of my brother’s had invited us to visit and partake in some water skiing. And I later read of Robert’s basketball career at New Mexico State, in particular his role in New Mexico State’s close loss to eventual NCAA champion UCLA and its superstar Lew Alcindor (soon to be Kareem Adbul Jabbar and a Los Angeles Lakers Hall of Famer).

The pages flew off the calendar until, in 1998, another Robert Evans update came to me via the national sports story of a dramatic, last-second NCAA tournament upset by Valparaiso over Ole Miss. Robert was then head coach at Ole Miss, the first black head coach in that deep-South school’s history and the architect of that team’s hoops revival. And, in 1999, when I was on a brief assignment in Phoenix, I heard that Robert had just taken the head coaching job at Arizona State. I asked an acquaintance at the school to pass on my good wishes, though I’m not sure he ever did.

Anyway, now it’s good to read the headline in that North Texas State student paper: “Half a century in the making, Rob Evans continues touching lives….”

Touched mine, way back when.

UConn basketball and credit where it’s due

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Allow yourself a rubbernecking moment. It’s a rare thing for any team to go 100 games without losing, so this is a good time to tap the brakes and eyeball various aspects at play in the extraordinary UConn women’s basketball streak.

There is, of course, the victory total itself, something no other college or professional team—men or women—has compiled. The numbers nuts out there recognize how forcefully UConn’s record—up to 101 games by Feb. 18—blows away the 88 straight won by UCLA’s men from 1970 to ’74, the 33 in-a-row by the NBA’s Lakers in 1972, the 47 consecutive college football victories by Oklahoma from 1953 to ’57; the 35-game unbeaten run (with 10 ties) by the NHL’s 1979-’80 Philadelphia Flyers.

Still, there somehow have been so-what reactions. Even, in the case of a Boston sportscaster named Tony Massarotti, a sneering, total dismissal of UConn’s feat, based—counterintuitively—on the argument that too many of the UConn victories were too lopsided. “It doesn’t count,” Massarotti blustered. “Please. What a crock.”

Wait. Might such a take have anything to do with gender?

In 1994, I was dispatched by Newsday to Chapel Hill, N.C., to seek metaphysical and cultural explanations for a situation similar to the current UConn basketball reign. The University of North Carolina women’s soccer team had just lost for the first time in 102 games (with one tie). And lost for only the second time in 204 games over eight years (with another seven ties mixed in).

My clear impression was that Carolina’s players approached their sport in the same way that Hall of Famer Bill Russell tackled his in a 13-year pro career during which he played for 11 NBA champions. Because there is a scoreboard, Russell once said, every athlete obviously plays to win.

The star of that ’94 Carolina soccer team was Tisha Venturini, and what she noticed about her teammates’ reactions, when their 102-game unbeaten streak was ended, didn’t reflect the individuals’ competitive will so much as their distinct personalities. “The ones who usually are emotional were crying hysterically,” Venturini said, “and the ones who never get emotional were just stone-faced.”

The team’s coach then—and now, going into his 39th season—was Anson Dorrance, and it was he who wondered at both the meaning of victory and what he called “the guy thing.”

“In our society,” Dorrance said, “we put too much stock in athletic success and failure. That’s men. Men lose sight of what’s critically important, your reason in life and the quality of your relationships. I think men measure their lives in these kinds of successes and failures. Numbers. Streaks. I think that’s why you see movies of the old high school quarterback pumping gas somewhere, to say: He just had a great arm; it didn’t make him a great man.”

That’s like the Bruce Springsteen lyric about ephemeral eminence…

    I had a friend was a big baseball player back in high school.

    He could throw that speedball by you

    Make you look like a fool, boy.

    Saw him the other night at this roadside bar

    I was walking in, he was walking out.

    We went back inside sat down had a few drinks

    But all he kept talking about was

    Glory days, well they’ll pass you by

    Glory days, in the wink of a young girl’s eye…

Dorrance believed that he was “not a bad loser. One of the things I’ve never been able to accept about sports is that one team has to lose. And yet, I’m best at arranging for other teams to lose. I mean, there’s something wrong with that, philosophically, don’t you think?”

He admitted to being “teed off” by the losses, as astoundingly infrequent as they were, “yet, why does this irritate me that’s I’m teed off? And if it irritates me that I’m teed off, why don’t I sever that part of my personality? Because I don’t want to? Is it just winning that I’m after?”

And is that really just a male trait?

Dorrance claimed that his female players “have taught me their ability to relate…they’ve taught me to be more human.” Yet that didn’t stop them from maintaining an athletic dominance. Since the team materialized in 1979, Carolina has won 22 national championships. “It’s not world peace or cancer research,” Dorrance readily conceded. But there was no getting around the fact that his players’ accomplishments were “impressive. Heck, I’m impressed,” he said.

Just as Carolina occasionally lost in soccer, UConn, at some point, will lose a basketball game. Because there are scoreboards and two teams trying to win. But when a team—any team—wins more than 100 consecutive games, it counts.