“Oak” and the nutty Knicks

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The first time the New York Knicks exiled Charles Oakley from Madison Square Garden, it was done with a large measure of regret. That was after the 1997-98 NBA season, when the wildly popular and ruggedly efficient Oakley was traded to Toronto for a younger, more athletic Marcus Camby. The situation was nothing like this week’s banishment, ordered by autocratic owner James Dolan after Oakley’s altercation with some Garden security personnel and Dolan’s unsubstantiated allegation that Oakley “may have a problem with alcohol; we don’t know.”

Then again, in both cases, Oakley lingers as something of a specter, a haunting image of haywire happenings weighing on Gotham’s basketball franchise. To see Oakley, at 53, escorted from his courtside seat in handcuffs provided the metaphor of shackled competence, while the Knicks bumble toward their fourth consecutive non-playoff season. During Oakley’s 10-year stay in New York, the Knicks never failed to reach the post season.

And that’s why, a couple of decades ago, the Oakley apparition was hanging over the Knicks’ preparation for their first season without him. It already was a bizarre time, with the league emerging from a three-and-a-half-month labor dispute. The 1998-99 season didn’t commence until February of ’99, shrunk from 82 to 50 regular-season games.

It so happened that 1999 was my one turn as an NBA beat writer (because Newsday was desperate after failing to replace Judy Battista, who had gone on to bigger things at the New York Times). So I stepped into the roiling Knicks narrative, in which general manager Ernie Grunfeld already was catching grief for trading fan favorites John Starks and Oakley.

That Starks was exchanged for Golden State’s Latrell Sprewell, who had been suspended most of the previous season for having put his coach, P.J. Carlesimo, in a chokehold, was unsettling enough on the behavioral level. But it was the loss of Oakley for the unproven Camby that created the greater angst in pure basketball terms.

Throughout the abbreviated two-week pre-season training camp, and right into the season, Knicks players spoke of “the ghost of Charles Oakley.” Sprewell was among those who acknowledged that head coach Jeff Van Gundy “mentions Oak’s name at times. We all know what Oak brought to the table.”

Van Gundy wasn’t about to deny that. “When the ball’s driven into the paint,” he said, “when there’s a loose ball on the court, we have to make up for what was lost. So that’s the reason we bring up [Oakley’s] name. Charles would take charges. Charles would take loose balls, get the offensive rebound.

“As a coach, you start right away [to get over such a loss]. But, as a person, a little bit of me left when Charles left, just as a little bit of me left with John Starks.  Personally, it is very difficult for me to say goodbye to those two guys because of what they did for me and my career for all the time there were here.”

Camby, whom Van Gundy said “needed to be pushed and prodded” to approximate Oakley’s work rate, defended himself by praising Oakley while arguing that “I bring something else, moving up and down the court.” Van Gundy was moved to predict that center Patrick Ewing would have to compensate for Oakley’s bullying, hulking spirit by having “a career rebounding year.”

As it turned out, and this somehow magnifies the greater dysfunction surrounding the Knicks’ recent expulsion of Oakley, the ’99 Knicks persevered to the championship finals in that microwaved season. They were 21-21 with eight games to play, whereupon Grunfeld was fired, but somehow found last-minute magic in spite of crucial injuries. Sprewell became a model teammate, Camby developed into something of a star and Van Gundy combined a touch for exploiting matchups with an ability to convince all the players to buy into his system.

During the rousing playoff run—the Knicks’ last trip to the finals—there was what could now be interpreted as a spooky glimpse of things to come. Then-Garden president David Checketts denied rumors, then admitted, that he was angling to replace Van Gundy with a marquee name. Phil Jackson.

Eighteen years later: Jackson is in his third year as James Dolan’s personal choice to be team president. The Knicks are in the midst of another lost season. And Charles Oakley’s ghost has come back to torment the Knicks’ house.

 

Closing the door on an L.A. Olympics

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This is just a guess, but I’d say that any prospect Los Angeles had of staging the 2024 Olympics already has been stopped at the border by Donald Trump’s blindly intolerant (and thoroughly un-American) attempt at a Muslim travel ban. I base this, to some extent, on New York City’s failed bid for the 2012 Games, rolled out during the Bush administration’s war in Iraq when at least some International Olympic Committee voters couldn’t get past the idea of “giving the festival of peace to a nation of pre-emptive strikes.”

Post 9/11 and leading up to the 2005 vote to award the 2012 Olympics, President Bush—unlike Trump now—had declared that he was imposing no religious test with his foreign policy. But there already was an anti-diversity elephant in the room. And this time, it is much worse.

So, while there is no divining some IOC members’ allegiances and prejudices, others’ downright partisan governmental considerations and even others’ well-meaning conviction that they are the United Nations in Sneakers, it’s a safe bet that smuggling this grand embodiment of international respect and goodwill past Trump’s wall of xenophobic scorn simply does not compute.

On Feb. 3, L.A. officials met the International Olympic Committee’s formal bid deadline, throwing their hat into the ring with Paris and Budapest. The vote to determine the 2024 host city won’t come until the IOC’s September meeting in Lima, Peru. But already, in response to Trump targeting of seven Muslim-majority countries, Iran has uninvited American athletes to a world wrestling competition it is hosting this month. That is a dramatic reversal in U.S.-Iran relations in that sport, which have been exceptionally warm for years in spite of the lack of diplomatic ties between the countries. The U.S. Olympic Committee, furthermore, is bracing for disruptions in other international competitions as a result of Trump’s executive order.

Naturally, LA2024 bid chairman Casey Wasserman is trotting out the old argument that sports and politics don’t mix, that the “power of the [Olympic] movement…[is]…to unite the world through sport, not politics,” and that his group will be “judged on the merits of our bid, not on politics” by the IOC.

The L.A. proposal makes a point of highlighting that it is “a city full of creative energy and extraordinarily united—not separated—by its breathtaking cultural diversity.” But neither that, nor Trump’s recent radio appearance claiming he “would love to see the Olympics go to Los Angeles,” plays nearly as well as French prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve’s words, during a Paris bid press conference shortly after a man was caught wielding machetes at the Louvre, that his country prefers to “build bridges, not walls.”

L.A. mayor Eric Garcetti had warned last summer that if Trump were elected president, it could have a disastrous effect on his city’s Olympic chances. And, in a statement issued after Trump’s Jan. 27 announcement of his travel ban, Garcetti said such an action “only fans the flames of hatred that those who wish us harm seek to spread.”

Having covered the Games 11 times, I consider myself an Olympic patriot, with a belief in the possibilities of fellowship through global sport. The Games really do (at least temporarily) put small dents into nationalistic and cultural differences, even though so much about the event is thoroughly political, with all the flags and medal counts.

So I side with Olympic poohbahs who balk at rewarding the politics of exclusion. In the 2005 IOC vote for the 2012 Games, when New York City was one in a murderer’s row of seductive candidates alongside London, Paris, Madrid and Moscow, one of the boosts for eventual winner London was the support it had gotten from the Muslim Council of Britain, representing 400 Muslim organizations.

When that vote was taken in Singapore, British prime minister Tony Blair, French president Jacques Chirac and Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero all attended to schmooze with the IOC, but George W. Bush stayed away. Wisely, I’d say.

Now, the USOC is attempting to dance around the Trump us-against-everybody mindset by proclaiming that, “Like the United States, the Olympic Movement was founded based upon principles of diversity and inclusion, on opportunity and overcoming adversity. As the steward of the Olympic Movement in the United States, we embrace those values. We also acknowledge the difficult task of providing for safety and security of a nation. It is our sincere hope that the executive order as implemented will appropriately recognize the values on which our nation, as well as the Olympic Movement, were founded.”

Fat chance.

Or….

?

R.I.P. New York City Marathon’s Truman

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Might a person be more inclined to read the obituaries as he ages? If memory serves, comedian George Burns, not so long before he died at 100, said that when he got up every morning, he would check the newspaper’s obit page—and if his name wasn’t there, he’d have a cup of coffee and go about his day.

I’m not quite at that stage. But, more and more, I find the perusal of obituaries to be somehow uplifting—not because they report a death but because they celebrate a life.

That said, the exception to finding pleasure in reading such biographical material on the recently departed is when the obit is about someone I have known—especially if that someone was an admirable contemporary.

Allan Steinfeld died last week. Only 70, he was the victim of multiple systems atrophy, a neurological disease. His was not a bold-face name, which surely is why my former editors at Newsday took a pass on marking his death at all. But, in more than 30 years as the technical whiz behind staging the annual New York City Marathon, Steinfeld was heroic in directly serving more than a million of the event’s participants.

And good for the New York Times for recognizing Steinfeld with a 700-word eulogy in Wednesday’s paper.

Originally the right-hand man to flamboyant road-racing carnival barker Fred Lebow, who made marathoning irresistible street theater and sold running as a legitimate lifestyle, Steinfeld inherited Lebow’s title of race director when the latter died of brain cancer in 1994.

According to George Hirsch, chairman of the New York City Road Runners Club, which operates the marathon, the official transition to Steinfeld’s leadership was blessed by a dramatic scene shortly before Lebow’s death in which Lebow symbolically cast himself as marathoning’s FDR. “I was in Fred’s apartment,” Hirsch said. “By then, his voice was just a whisper. He was talking about Allan, and there were a lot of questions as to whether Allan was the right guy. I remember Fred pulled me close to him and said….. ‘Truman.’”

(fred lebow statue)

I last saw the event’s Truman in October of 2014, eight years after he retired and handed the race director’s job to Mary Wittenberg. Steinfeld was being inducted into the marathon’s hall of fame, without much fuss but with heartfelt praise from those who worked with him. “Allan was just the classic unsung hero,” Wittenberg told me. “He’s a behind-the-scenes person who likes it that way.”

He had been a high school math and physics teacher and already had been finding all the right pieces in the massive marathon jigsaw puzzle before Lebow gave him a fulltime assistant’s job in 1978 for $12,500. That was half of Steinfeld’s teaching salary, but he decided that operating road races was more fun, with the added bonus of not being required to wear a tie to work every day.

His mastery of timing, scoring, course management, finish-line design and tying together loose ends with computers brought countless, wild Lebow ideas to fruition. And calmly. “I tell the staff,” Steinfeld said, “that the marathon is enough to scare the hell out of you, so handle each detail as it comes, and don’t think about the big picture.”

He called the New York Marathon, which went from 2,000 entrants in 1976 to just under 40,000 by the time he left his post in 2006, the equivalent “a herd of elephants moving along. They’re not stampeding. But you can’t stop or turn them. You can only nudge them.”

He insisted that he was “the farthest thing from a jock. I was fast but I couldn’t catch. In baseball, as a kid, I was the last one chosen, if chosen at all. ‘Who wants Steinfeld?’ I couldn’t play stickball because I couldn’t catch.”

In fact, he was a varsity sprinter for New York’s City College and finished one of the two marathons he attempted in the 1970s. Born and raised in the Bronx, he claimed to have been “kicked out of two colleges”—Hunter College and Bronx Community College—“because I failed French, then failed Spanish.”

But he wound up with an electrical engineering degree from City and a master’s in radio astronomy from Cornell of the prestigious Ivy League. He was working on a doctorate at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, where he went to study the Northern Lights, when he was blinded in his left eye.

He had been wrapping an antenna wire on an Alaskan rooftop when struck by the antenna and suffered a detached retina. A series of operations failed to save the vision in that eye and, shortly after he succeeded Lebow as NYC Marathon director, Steinfeld was encouraged by a major race sponsor to wear an eye patch—“like the Hathaway Man”—as a way to give himself an identity apart from the colorful Lebow.

That didn’t last long. It wasn’t his style, either in terms of fashion or drawing attention to himself. But he deserved his due, even if his obituary came much too soon.

Tennis’ continuum of future, past, present

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(2017 Australian Open)

From here, it’s almost always tomorrow in Australia, 16 hours in the future. But through to the magic of the DVR, it was possible to repeatedly retrieve yesterdays throughout the two weeks of the Australian Open tennis championships, during which events seemed to pass along a continuum, back and forth, from the day after through the past to the present.

Both the men’s and women’s title matches offered a glimpse of ancient history recycled and updated—the Williams sisters crossing swords for the 28th time in their careers, the 15th time in a Grand Slam tournament and the eighth time in a major final, followed by a 35th revival of Roger Federer vs. Rafael Nadal, further creating the sensation of being unstuck in time.

These are the acts you’ve known for all these years, especially the Serena Williams-Venus Williams show. The first time they dueled in a Slam final, at the 2001 U.S. Open, Federer was still two years away from the first of his 18 major titles, with Nadal’s first of 14 Slam trophies four years in the future.

In 2001, the Williamses already were the biggest news in tennis, Venus at 21 and Serena about to turn 20, their Open showdown timed perfectly with the first scheduled prime-time television coverage of a major tennis championship final.

The packed house of 23,023 in Arthur Ashe Stadium included a raft of entertainment and sports celebrities, among them Spike Lee, Robert Redford, New York Yankees manager Joe Torre and Diana Ross, who sang “God Bless America,” then offered a pre-match handshake and hug to both sisters. Also in attendance that night was Mary Tyler Moore; how’s that for a then-and-now reflection?

(2001 U.S. Open)

It was three days before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, so the Big Town had no trouble throwing massive attention into a tennis match, which proved to demonstrate that a sibling rivalry is not necessarily a spectator sport. Not since 1884 had sisters played each other in a major tennis championship—19-year-old Maud Watson defeated older sister Lilian for the Wimbledon title back when the sport was contested by amateurs and both Watsons played in white corsets and petticoats.

The Williamses, once down to business, were caught in what Serena called a “weird atmosphere,” the crowd unsure about taking sides and the players bumbling around in a disorienting psychological study, at turns overaggressive and cautious.

“Sisters are rivals,” Serena said after losing in straight sets. “A lot of people in families fight, and I guess our fighting is done out on the court, because we never fight. Maybe older sisters and older brothers wanted to see Venus win, and younger sisters and younger brothers wanted to see me win. Right now, I have zero difficulty with that.”

That was Venus’ fourth major crown, but Serena quickly turned the tables in their next four Slam finals matches—at the 2002 French, Wimbledon and U.S. Open and 2003 Australian—at which time Belgium’s perennial contender, Justine Henin, declared that “people are getting bored” by Williams-vs.-Williams championship matches. “Fans don’t know who to root for.”

Maybe. But there was not a single tournament director on the pro women’s tour who didn’t relish having the Williamses’ star power over the past decade and a half.  Prior to this year’s Aussie final, the sisters had last played each other in a major at the 2015 U.S. quarterfinals, with Serena attempting a calendar sweep of the four Slams, and there was nothing subtle about the power and passion that both she and Venus brought to that battle.

That may have produced the most fascinating athletic narrative in their long rivalry, a three-set victory for Serena in a feisty, noisy combat. What the 2017 Australian Open reinforced is that Serena, at 35, remains the most dominant player in women’s tennis. And that Venus, at 36, still is capable of managing an autoimmune disorder well enough to occasionally compete at the highest level.

In 1997, when Venus, at 17, made her first Grand Slam splash by advancing to the U.S. final (a loss to then No. 1 Martina Hingis) while playing with 1,800 colored beads in her hair, she announced that she was “completely different. I’m tall, I’m black, everything’s different about me than what’s been around….Face the facts.”

The facts are that Althea Gibson was tall and black and completely different 40 years earlier, when she became the first black player to win the U.S. title in 1957. Between Gibson and Venus, there was a handful of other black women on the pro circuit—Renee Blount, Leslie Allen, Zina Garrison, Lori McNeil….

(The sisters in 1996)

But there is no getting around the uniqueness of the sister act that continues to play out on the sport’s largest stages. And there’s no guarantee it won’t stay around a bit longer. That—and more of what Federer and Nadal offered in Melbourne—hints at some inextricable connection between the present, future and past.

Locker room banter, hazing and respectful reactions

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Let’s think about the weekend’s massive protest marches in terms of physics. For every action, according to Newton’s third law, there is an opposite and equal reaction.

It just might take a while. So a presidential candidate was exposed for his vulgar bragging about sexual assault in an October revelation and, about three months later—after scores of more indignities, and after the serial aggressor has become president and sworn to reverse “American carnage”—demonstrations organized by women turned up in at least 500 U.S. cities with 3.7 million participants. That’s one of every 100 Americans (my wife among them).

The marchers, including men and children as well as women, voiced a variety of agendas and fears, but it might be safe to say that all were responding to the new executive’s repeated aversion to “political correctness.” Which is, after all, simply a commitment to showing respect to all individuals and groups.

I come from a mostly male-dominated world, having worked as a sports journalist for roughly a half century. In that environment, especially regarding team sports, there certainly is a history of boys’ club exclusion and assumed dominance. But the difference between that, and our president’s argument that his molestation of women was “just locker room banter,” is that we have arrived at 2017 with a gradual expectation of chivalrous conduct.

A case in point would be the long, long overdue new Major League Baseball prohibition, announced in December, targeting the practice of veteran players forcing rookie teammates to dress as women in annual end-of-the-season hazing rituals.

That, too, took a while. It has been 11 years since Long Island’s Adelphi University invited hundreds of coaches and school administrators to a five-hour conference on hazing. My Newsday editor, in fact, still considered it to be a cute thing the following year when he assigned me to chronicle that “time-honored tradition” as the Yankees required rookies to dress as Wizard of Oz characters, including Dorothy, the Wicked Witch and other females.

Sports psychologist Susan Lipkins, an expert on the dangers of hazing, noted that by compelling men to dress as women, it sent the message that to be a woman is less than to be a man, thereby denigrating both the male dressing as a woman and women in general.

Anyway, in October—about the time that Hollywood Access audio tape surfaced of our future leader’s crass (and, in fact, criminal) claims—the New York Mets’ veterans ordered rookie teammates to don wigs, dresses and fake breasts as characters from the movie “A League of Their Own.” And to publicly fetch coffee in that attire for the old pros.

Maybe it took the outrage expressed by a handful of female sportswriters to finally move baseball officials to assume the role of adults and put an end to such bad behavior, after more than 30 years of rookies being ordered to wear tutus, cheerleader costumes or the outfits of female superheroes during the team’s final road trip.

“Before the ‘lighten up, it’s just a joke’ crowd has the chance to chime in,” Julie DiCaro wrote on the CBS Chicago web site at the time, “think about this: What if the rookies were all dressed in blackface as a joke? What if they were all dressed like Negro League players? Is that OK? “

That prompted SUNY-Oswego professor Brian Moritz, on his Sportsmediaguy.com web site, to question the “The Casual Sexism of the NY Mets.” Although, he admitted, a little late.

Some players continued to rationalize it as a harmless fraternal initiation. As “team-bonding.” As “fun.” (Something like “locker room banter” to them, no doubt, not to be nixed by “political correctness.”)

But any expert on hazing will argue that it is fun at someone else’s expense, that it is a means of reinforcing a pecking order of power and status. One of those experts, Roger Rees, told me years ago that hazing “legitimizes anti-social behavior” when sports, ideally, is supposed to “teach self-respect and respect for others.” Mets general manager Sandy Alderson, a former Marine aware of similar practices in the military, was among those who strongly backed the MLB ruling to end what he call something “divisive [that] undercuts morale.”

Divisive and undercutting morale? Hmmm. Forward…march.

Bonds, Clemens, fame and notoriety

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This shouldn’t be complicated. According to the dictionary definition of “fame,” neither Barry Bonds nor Roger Clemens requires the blessing of self-important baseball scribes to qualify for inclusion among the sport’s most widely known players.

Still, the annual Hall of Fame voting this week raised the topic again. Should Bonds and Clemens eventually be inducted into Cooperstown? Are they getting closer each year?

Listen: Bonds and Clemens already have their fame. By doing what they did, as arguably their generation’s most dominant hitter and pitcher, they long ago achieved far-reaching acclaim. And they did so, according to overwhelming evidence, powered by banned substances, which only served to raise their public conspicuousness. (“Fame” also can mean recognition of an unfavorable kind; notoriety.)

So, a couple of modest proposals:

1. Take away the St. Peter-at-the-Pearly-Gates function of the Baseball Writers Association of America. The organization was founded in 1908 to improve the writing conditions of baseball reporters. To subsequently empower its members to canonize ballplayers—to make news, rather than reporting it—is a perversion of journalism.

Too much attention is paid to the BBWAA members’ arguments over what weight should be       given to players’ moral behavior, especially since the writers have demonstrated a sliding           scale of acceptance, as indicated by the yearly increase in the number of votes for Bonds and     Clemens. Baseball historian John Thorn has argued that the system “permits sportswriters…to   see themselves as guardians of a sacred portal, the last best hope for truth and justice. And       it’s all hogwash and baloney.”

2. Take away the “sacred portal.” In no way should Bonds or Clemens get a pass for having cheated their way to grand statistical accomplishments. (Just as Major League Baseball should not get off the hook for having turned a blind eye to steroid use for years after other sports organizations tested and penalized juicers.) So, by demystifying Cooperstown—by dispensing with the venerated status for really good athletes by hanging their plaques in a reverential hall, conferring on them the title of Great Men—there would be no need to confuse exceptional baseball skill with a place in Heaven. (Angels—from the Los Angeles team—could still qualify for acknowledgement.)

The museum aspect of Cooperstown’s Hall already is a fabulous depository of baseball history and artifacts, good and bad. Even persona non grata figures Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose have some personal items in the museum, so the records of Bonds and Clemens—the complete records, with statistics alongside reports of their misdeeds—would have their place.

Baseball is unquestionably a significant piece of our culture, something to celebrate. But hero worship is a risky thing, just as consigning reality—good or bad—to the dustbin solves nothing. Better to skip the BBWAA’s editorial judgments and accept that Bonds and Clemens already made their own fame.

Winning isn’t the only thing

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Among the paradoxes and absurdities routinely accepted as establishing a human being’s greatness are football won-lost records and coaching authoritarianism. Just think of two famous quotes related to the legendary Vince Lombardi (neither of which was necessarily accurate, but still):

Lombardi supposedly gave us the decree that “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” (In fact, Red Saunders, who coached Vanderbilt and UCLA in the 1940s and ‘50s, first espoused that narrow doctrine of existence.)

Lombardi’s winning secret was attributed by his Hall of Fame tackle Henry Jordan to be that he “treated us all the same. Like dogs.” (Except Jordan’s teammate, Jerry Kramer, wrote in a 1997 New York Times opinion piece that Jordan’s flippant remark was “wildly inaccurate. Lombardi’s genius was that he treated us all differently.”

Anyway, this faulty, straight-line connection between unyielding demand and grid sainthood came to mind with the references this week to two old coaches, Paul (Bear) Bryant and John McVay—one universally celebrated, the other completely under the radar except for a single moment of disaster-movie proportions in 1978.

Because the University of Alabama was playing for coach Nick Saban’s potential sixth national championship on Jan. 9, there were repeated media genuflections to the late Bryant, who had won six titles for the school between 1961 and 1979. Bryant, though he affected a humble shuffle and a slow Southern mumble, was known as a sometimes brutal taskmaster and, late in his career, acknowledged his regret at having driven away one of the best players during his stint at Texas A&M in the mid-1950s.

The other fellow recently mentioned—almost in passing—was McVay, on the occasion of his 30-year-old grandson, Sean McVay, being hired as head coach of the Los Angeles Rams. I covered John McVay’s 2 ½ years as coach of the New York Giants in mid ‘70s, and witnessed the ability of a decent, respectful man to squeeze some pretty good results out of a rag-tag bunch of players. More than that, McVay demonstrated grace (even humor), especially in the face of a monumentally botched play that eventually cost him the Giants’ job.

That was on Nov. 19, 1978. McVay, who had been hired before the ’76 season with vague scouting and assistant coaching duties before being handed an 0-7 team midway through ’76, was about to get the Giants’ record even at 6-6 in ’78. They were leading the Philadelphia Eagles by five points and had the ball with only 20 seconds to kill. Philadelphia was out of time outs, and all the Giants had to do was take a knee. But McVay’s assistant, Bob Gibson, whom McVay had entrusted with the play-calling, ordered a handoff.

The Giants, shockingly, fumbled. In a heartbeat, the ball bounced directly into the hands of Philadelphia defensive back Herman Edwards for an against-all-odds 26-yard romp to the winning score.

It was Moby Fumble—Thar the Giants Blow It! It was the Archduke’s Assassination. Management fired Gibson, a McVay friend, the next day. General manager Andy Robustelli quit at season’s end and McVay’s contract was not renewed. A wrecking ball was taken to the entire organization.

But what I remember most was McVay’s demeanor, fully aware of crushing disappointment and the dire consequences in a bottom-line business—and yet….

When he showed up for his post-game remarks after the fumble, facing a roomful of pencils and pads and microphones poised to demand the (impossible) explanation, McVay leaned back against the wall and thrust both arms to the side. As if to say, “Go ahead; crucify me.”

He faced a roiling fuss over his preference for eschewing a headset, for not second-guessing his assistant’s calls from high in the press box. So, for the next game, he reported (slyly), “The way we’ll do it is put all the ugly coaches upstairs and all the good-looking guys on the sideline.”

His was the sort of perspective, and consummate endurance, that English poet Rudyard Kipling envisioned in his poem “If—“, two lines of which are written on the wall of the players’ entrance to Wimbledon’s Centre Court, essentially declaring that winning is not the only thing…

    If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

   And treat those two imposters just the same…

This is not to say that Bryant was a bad person for his unbending coaching style. I crossed paths with him only twice during his career, and neither occasion was unpleasant, though both times there was an undeniable reverence afforded him. All those victories made him something of a deity.

In December of 1968, my senior year at the University of Missouri, I was football beat reporter for the Journalism School’s Columbia Missourian assigned to Mizzou’s Gator Bowl game against Alabama, when Missouri coach Dan Devine told his kidding-on-the-square Bryant joke at a pre-game banquet.

“One night in the winter,” Devine said, “Bear had just gotten into bed and Mary Harmon”—Bryant always called his wife by her full maiden name—“said to him, ‘God, your feet are cold.’ And Bear said to her, ‘You can call me Paul.’”

Fourteen years later, dispatched by Newsday to Memphis for the Liberty Bowl to chronicle Bryant’s last game, I was reminded of Bryant’s exalted state by such extravagant recollections as this: Once, in a post-game dressing room, a reporter sat eyeing Bryant’s trademark houndstooth hat on a chair. Not planning anything untoward, just thinking what a prize it could be. When the reporter raised his eyes, an Alabama state trooper was looming over him, ordering, “Freeze!”

Only a month after that Liberty Bowl game, Bryant died of a heart attack and flags were ordered at half-staff both in Alabama and in Arkansas, where he was born. A state legislator during Bryant’s last years, Alabama grad Finis St. John III, had sponsored a bill to waive the mandatory retirement age of 70 for Bryant because “it is right for him in the South, in Alabama. People down here take their football very, very seriously, and so did Bryant.”

And so does Nick Saban. On Nov. 10, two days after the Presidential election, the current Bama coach admitted to reporters that he “didn’t even know [the election] was happening. We’re focused on other things here.”

Juxtapose that to John McVay who, during his tenure as University of Dayton coach, made a point of taking his players to see Niagara Falls before a road game in Buffalo. “It was part of their education,” he told me. “Let them see things. Now, I don’t want to say we were having a bad year,” he added with a twinkle in his eye, “but damned if they didn’t turn off the falls that day.”

In fact, McVay had few bad years. His first head coaching job in the pros was with the Memphis Grizzles of the short-lived World Football League, winning 17 of 20 games their debut season and sitting 7-4 when the WFL collapsed the next year.

After his brief tour with the Giants, he left coaching for a front-office job with the San Francisco 49ers, where for 17 years he collaborated with head coach Bill Walsh in operating one of the most successful reigns in NFL history, including five Super Bowl titles and the NFL’s executive-of-the-year honor in 1989.

Not that many people noticed. The Sports on Earth web site last year called McVay the “silent architect of the 49ers dynasty.”

So he doesn’t have a statue like Bear Bryant. McVay believed that “football can be fun.” He was known for shaking every player’s hand after every game, win or lose. He saw the wisdom of his one-time boss at Michigan State, Duffy Daugherty, that a team always can use a little luck. “And Duffy used to say, ‘It’s bad luck to be behind at the end of a game.’”

But not the only thing.

The (hackneyed) Gatorade bath

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Football bowl season again has saturated us with sport’s most absurd cliché, the Gatorade bath for victorious coaches. In the past three weeks, players ceremoniously have dumped tubs of icy liquid on the heads of virtually every winning mentor at the conclusion of the 42 post-season bowls—New Mexico’s Bob Davie, Old Dominion’s Bobby Wilder, Wake Forest’s Dave Clawson, Oklahoma State’s Mike Gundy, South Florida’s Charlie Strong, Air Force’s Troy Calhoun, and on and on—in this stale choreography that is well past its expiration date.

It really is a trite ritual, with not an ounce of imagination or originality. It is the ultimate copy-cat routine, whose practitioners surely don’t realize that it had its roots in avenging the demanding coach, rather than honoring him.

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, the seventh week of the 1985 NFL season:

The New York Giants, after consecutive losses, were 3-3 and preparing to play division rival Washington. Third-year Giants coach Bill Parcells, known for his sarcastic motivational tactics, was “trying all week to light a fire under [nose tackle] Jim Burt,” according to his Giants teammate then, linebacker Harry Carson, “by hinting that Washington center Jeff Bostic might be too quick and too strong for Burt.

“So Burt does a great job all game long and we win [17-3],” Carson recalled years later, “and Jim comes over to me and says, ‘Let’s get Parcells. Let’s get that [blankety-blank] with the Gatorade.’ When Parcells took his headphones off, we drenched him. It was Jim Burt’s concept.”

That appeared to be the end of such an impolite thing. Until the second game of the next season, when the Giants rose up to smite the San Diego Chargers after an opening-game loss to Dallas. Carson considered how Parcells was “very superstitious; if you do something one week and you win, you continue to do that.”

So he revived the Gatorade bath and continued it through the 1986 season. By the time the Giants had won the Super Bowl, TV’s most visible football commentator, John Madden, had begun to draw diagrams of the Gatorade stunt as if it were a key third-down play. At one point, Carson borrowed a security guard’s overcoat to allow him to sneak up on Parcells with the bucket—as if, by then, Parcells didn’t know what was coming.

In his 1987 “autobiography”—one of those quick-turnaround, as-told-to tomes by a sudden celebrity—Parcells related his conclusion that “those showers turned out to be symbolic” of players demonstrating that the coach was “one of them” in their triumphs.

Of course, the whole business—still prominent in televised coverage and game highlights—was a windfall for Gatorade, even if the dunking regularly was done with plain water. A Gatorade spokesman once told me that “you really couldn’t plan to market something as well as the dunk has for us, because it highlights our presence on the sidelines, that we stand for fueling athletic performance in the pursuit of victory.”

He also admitted that, “while we loved the fact that it’s affiliated with victory celebrations, Gatorade is about drinking it, not throwing it. We want to promote its consumption.”

Anyway, here we are, more than 30 years since Jim Burt imposed angry retribution on his coach’s disagreeable tactics, being repeatedly subjected to a custom that not only is juvenile but possibly dangerous.

In December, 1990, veteran coach George Allen told The Associated Press that he had not being feeling well in the six weeks after his Long Beach State players gave him a Gatorade bath at the end of their football season. Days after that public comment, Allen, 72, died.

A subsequent autopsy established Allen’s cause of death as cardiac arrest, though both his attorney and his son said Allen’s death was totally unrelated to a bout with pneumonia which had had him feeling poorly those last few weeks. But a doctor I knew confirmed that there could be “some potential of risk in shocking the body” with an icy shower, because “extreme cold is a significant cardiac stressor.”

Maybe that’s why Kansas State’s players, after defeating Texas A&M in the Dec. 28 Texas Bowl, doused coach Bill Snyder with a bucket of confetti.

Snyder is 77. May he—and all of us—outlive the banality of the Gatorade bath.

NFL: Stealth and surveillance

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Once again, the NFL has evoked Mad Magazine’s goofy Cold War-inspired cartoon “Spy vs. Spy.” How else to consider the recent heavy-handed punishment of New York Giants head coach Ben McAdoo? When his league-approved encrypted communication device, which pipes his voice covertly into his quarterback’s helmet, malfunctioned, the dastardly McAdoo resorted to the use of a walkie-talkie.

McAdoo was hit with a $50,000 fine and the Giants assessed an additional $150,000 penalty, as well as a degradation in their 2017 draft order. All because the walkie-talkie, unlike the NFL’s authorized CoachComm system, did not have a cut-off switch to discontinue the coach’s play-calling instructions with 15 seconds remaining on the play clock.

That theoretically unfair advantage over the Dallas Cowboys, who still were operating with the cut-off switch, nevertheless led to a drive-ending interception against the Giants. Still, the league must be forever vigilant in assuring a level playing field! Paranoia reigns among coaches, whose inherent tendency toward micromanagement—as a function of self-preservation—pairs with advancing technology to emphasize stealth and surveillance.

For a sport that sees itself as a simulation of war, with its blitzes and bombs and field generals, clandestine strategizing is of great consequence. Thus the strict rules against the use of, say, Navajo code talkers or Enigma machines.

(Enigma machine)

It’s all secrecy vs. chicanery—with teams, for decades, bivouacking in huddles to guard again pilfered campaign intelligence, and more recently deploying sideline pantomimes and the helmet implant.

Football wasn’t far beyond its rugby roots when Washington D.C.’s Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, devised the first huddle in 1892 to shield Gallaudet’s hand signals from opponents, themselves often hearing impaired and therefore conversant in signing.

For a century afterwards, huddles worked wonderfully for all players because quarterbacks—without the coaches’ direct involvement—called plays out of earshot of the opposition. Then, in the 1950s, Cleveland Browns coach Paul Brown, not satisfied to leave strategy to his soldiers on the field, began using “messenger guards” to shuttle play calls into his quarterback.

There were tales that wise-guy Browns quarterback George Ratterman once told rookie guard Joe Skibinski to “go back and get another play” when he didn’t like the one delivered from the sideline. So Brown took the next step, recruiting two Ohio inventors to build the first radio receiver into Ratterman’s helmet. That was in 1956.

“My helmet acted as an antenna,” Ratterman told me in a telephone conversation a few years before his death in 2007. “And I had to turn a certain way to hear, so I’d be standing outside the huddle, revolving around, trying to tune in the signal.”

Worse, Ratterman said, in a game against Detroit, the Lions got wind of the experiment, “so the Lions kept saying to each other, ‘Kick the helmet. Kick the helmet.’ And I kept trying to explain to them that my head was inside the helmet,” Ratterman said.

(George Ratterman’s wired helmet–without his head)

“Then, in Chicago,” he recalled, “we played a benefit game at Soldier Field against the Bears and they were planning all kinds of sets and displays for a halftime show. All during the first half, I was picking up walkie-talkies of these workers, setting up the displays. I couldn’t hear Brown at all, but I kept hearing stuff like, ‘Hey, Joe, set that up over there.’”

Brown’s messengers soon were employed by other coaches and, in the 1970s, Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry began shuffling quarterbacks after every play, something neither Roger Staubach nor Craig Morton much appreciated. As play-calling came to be wrested almost completely away from players by coaches, the NFL moved to provide direct communication that could cut through stadium noise via CoachComm, which became standard equipment in 1994. (Quarterbacks wired to receive transmissions from the coach’s headset wear small green dots on their helmets, and a fan of secret agents might make an immediate connection to the CIA. In a 1998 novel, veteran journalist Jim Lehrer wrote that CIA snoops had purple dots affixed to their license plates as a special privilege to warn off police and tow trucks.)

There are, meanwhile, many instances of coaches relaying signals by using coded placards, and coaches’ crafty hand-over-the-mouth delivery of commands. Because spies are everywhere.

In his 2007 book, “The GM,” celebrated sportswriter Tom Callahan recounted a classic undercover scheme in a 1977 game between the Colts (then in Baltimore) and New England Patriots. With Baltimore trailing late in the game and stuck with a third-and-18 on its own 12-yard line, the Colts had Bobby Colbert—then head coach at hearing-impaired Gallaudet—read the lips of New England’s defensive coordinator as he called for “Double safety delayed blitz.”

Colbert relayed the message to the Baltimore bench, which passed it on to Colts quarterback Bert Jones, who changed the play and threw an 88-yard touchdown pass for the winning score.

And that is why the always wary NFL, with Ben McAdoo’s walkie-talkie misbehavior, ruled that up with this it would not put.

Streaking

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According to the U.S. Running Streak Association, I have just become an “experienced” runner. That is how the organization—to which I have not paid the annual $20 dues and therefore am not a member—classifies people who have run “at least one continuous mile within each calendar day under one’s own body power” for at least 10 years.

If I were a USRSA member, I would be ranked 156th in the country. Which isn’t bad as long as one doesn’t consider that the longest unbroken streak—as of Dec. 13, 2016—is 17,369 days, or 47.55 years. That belongs to a fellow named Jon Sutherland, listed on the USRSA Web site as 66 years old, a writer from West Hills, Calif., whose circadian habit was the subject of a 2015 CBS Evening News report.

I have crunched the numbers. For me to rise to No. 1 on the list (which is available at runeveryday.com), the 155 folks ahead of me would have to take a day off—not bloody likely—and I would have to persist in pounding the pavement every day until I am 107 years old. (Plus, I’d have to start paying that yearly $20 fee.)

But that’s not the goal, any more than brushing my teeth every morning for the next 37-plus years is. It’s just custom now.

It wasn’t until my mid-20s that I was moved to attempt occasional jogs, mostly after a colleague greeted me one day with, “Welcome to Fat City,” and partly because my newspaper assignments included coverage of elite track and field meets. I often was surrounded by people giddy about physical activity, just as the running boom began to spread beyond accomplished athletes to everyday citizens.

So I joined the program already in progress.

By the time I had lined up a series of interviews with 1972 Olympic marathon champion Frank Shorter at his Boulder, Colo., home in early ’76, I was fit enough—barely—to join Shorter on the first three miles of his 10-mile afternoon run, which had followed his 10-mile morning run. He generously (and drastically) slowed his pace, until I went into oxygen debt and watched him disappear over the horizon.

But the thing about running is that you trundle around for a while, begin to feel the mental and physical benefits and, before you know it, you’re hooked.

“It is an addiction,” 2004 Olympic marathon silver medalist Meb Keflezighi told me recently. “If you miss a day or get injured—elite athletes get it, others get it—you don’t feel good.” Mary Wittenberg, who was race director of the New York City Marathon for 10 years, argued that running “is not a sport you dabble in. The more you do it, the easier it gets.”

(Finishing the 1978 Long Island Marathon, with Pete Alfano)

My two marathons are now decades in the past, and I no longer am interested in knowing how fast I’m going. (More accurately, how slow.) But, somehow, the two or four days off per month, through some 30 years of loping and rambling and trotting, disappeared as well. I went for a leisurely 5-mile run on Dec. 13, 2006 and haven’t missed a day since, putting me in the company of those listed by the USRSA. There are dietitians, teachers, attorneys, salespeople, bankers, coaches, landscapers, pastors, photographers, journalists, nurses, engineers, accountants, concert pianists…all manner of humans.

And all, apparently, are carriers of what Shorter has called “the disease of running,” which he once described as a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

“Oh, yeh, you’re OCD,” Shorter confirmed to me during a chat in 2012. “You’re just channeling it. I think some people are born with a need to move and a need to exercise. And it doesn’t go away. So why fight it? You’re lucky.”

One of the New York City Marathon’s marketing pitches was its Run for Life “manifesto,” calling on all citizens to “run for the rush, run to be strong, run off dessert, run to like yourself better in the morning, run to keep your thighs from rubbing together, run because endorphins are better than Botox, run to sweat away your sins, run so bullies can never catch you, run with your thoughts, run your troubles the hell out of town…”

A morning ramble gets the show on the road. It guarantees that something has been accomplished that day. It makes the breakfast Cheerios taste better. Even if, at 3,654 consecutive days, I still am 196 days short of my wife’s daily streak of brisk walks (which are fast approaching my running pace), I feel as if I’m getting somewhere.