The chess crowd went wild!

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Action photos of last week’s World Chess Championship final were about what one would expect. Images of the two adversaries, deathly still, bent over the playing surface, frowning slightly, a hand to the face, hair a bit unkempt. Staring at little castles and horses and thimbles with crowns.

To all of us unschooled in the “combative nature” of the Sicilian Defence (as it has been branded by English chess grandmaster John Nunn), not to mention the wily possibilities of the Noah’s Ark Trap or the Morphy Defence’s ability to “put the question to the white bishop,” it is easy to miss the presence of tension and danger.

Maybe if there were BrainCams, affording a glimpse of the players’ cognitive wheels turning, lightbulbs suddenly flashing, adrenaline coursing. That could help educate the unintentionally apathetic among us.

To those in the know, there were gushing reports of the two-week combat, which so excited The Guardian’s Stephen Moss that he fantasized about a future of Norwegian champion Magnus Carlsen and Russian runner-up Sergey Karjakin “playing in stadiums filled to overflowing, while [English soccer superstar Wayne] Rooney and Co. play in local parks in front of a handful of aging spectators clutching plastic bags.”

Moss called Carlsen’s winning move “akin to the holy grail in chess—a queen sacrifice…bold, brave, brilliant….Something,” he wrote, “that makes you continue to believe in the sport even in the bad times.”

There are folks who contend that chess isn’t a sport in the first place and, based on my half-century of experience as a sports journalist, I hold that belief to be reasonable—and no insult to chess players or chess fans. If a sport requires physical exertion—as well as skill, competition, defense and strategy—chess appears to fall into the category of games.

More to the point, possibly, is a discussion of whether the sound minds of chess stars ever can vie for the kind of widespread spectator passion stirred by the sound bodies in football, baseball, basketball, soccer and so on. (This may parallel Masterpiece Theater’s inability to match the ratings of shows with exploding aliens and heavy artillery and, furthermore, could be evidence that we are not a profound people.)

It is a fact that the closest chess came to water cooler discussion and barstool arguments was in 1972, when impetuous, egocentric American Bobby Fischer tangled with the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland. The Cold War implications of that duel weren’t nearly as arresting as the weird circus Fischer created by demanding a larger prize pool, walking away from a second game rather than continue with the presence of TV cameras and finally, that forfeit loss behind him, conjuring his first victory in a small backstage room and forcing organizers to ditch cameras in the main stage for the rest of the tournament.

The cloak-and-dagger maneuvers fueled surprising attention to coverage on public television, first aired in New York but soon spread to national outlets. Because there were no pictures from Iceland, the TV show consisted of updates by a chess amateur, Shelby Lyman, mostly filibustering from a bare-bones studio in Albany, N.Y.

Lyman, a Harvard-educated sociology teacher, went about occupying the mostly dead time—long stretches of absolute inaction while Fischer and Spassky pondered their next moves—by interviewing chess experts. Eventually, a little bell would ring, stirring Lyman to announce, “We have a move!” and to hustle to a huge chess board behind him to illustrate the latest play.

Against all odds, Lyman—who kept various chess pieces in his pockets to be ready to demonstrate the match progress—became an instant sensation, proclaimed the Julia Child of Chess, even compared to flamboyant football and boxing commentator Howard Cosell. As Fischer set about his comeback from an 0-2 game deficit to win Games 3, 5, 6, 8 and 10, there were reports of bartenders being asked to switch their TVs from Mets games to the chess, as an aid to the clientele’s friendly wagering; of the flagship station pressured into pre-empting “Sesame Street” to expand its chess show; of public preference for Lyman’s play-by-play over coverage of the Democratic National Convention.

Still, it was chess. My friend Dave D’Alessandro, for years a crack sports journalist before going on to bigger things as a member of the Newark Star-Ledger editorial board, parodied those oddball Fischer-Spassky dispatches by emailing me this sendup of the Shelby Lyman narration:

“We’re talking with grandmaster Max Euwe, live on the phone from Reykjavik. Doctor, what do you think of the match so far?”

“Eh, I think they oughta move the horses and ashtrays more.”

The thing is, Dave happens to know what a Nimzo Indian Defence is. And probably a fianchetto, too. And I can’t tell a knight from a rook, wallowing in ignorance while the New York Times quoted chess experts who declared the Carlsen-Karjakin confrontation of wits “one of the most exciting championship matches in history,” with Carlsen “applying unrelenting pressure” on Karjakin and Karjakin, in turn, showing a “remarkable ability to eke out draws [and] defending brilliantly….

“The energy of the crowd [at the Manhattan competition site] at moments was unmistakable,” the Times reported, “if never exactly at the level of Alabama versus Clemson.”

Magnus Carlsen was referred to as “The Mozart of Chess.” Slate’s headline on its match coverage judged Carlsen’s title-clinching play “one of the most beautiful, stunning moves in the history of the World Chess Championship….a beautiful coda” after Karjakin had “slipped from his opponent’s grasp repeatedly….”

Gladiatorial stuff, no? While Carlsen stroked his chin, And Karjakin rubbed his forehead.

Hooray for brain surgeons

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This December 3^rd is my 13^th anniversary of still being here. I can explain with the essay below, which I wrote for the American Academy of Neurology trade magazine Neurology Today in 2005 (when a former Newsday colleague was an editor there) about my Dec. 3, 2003 brain surgery.

Old but good advice: Listen to your body. And should you become aware that you are beginning to hear, in only one ear, whatever messages are available, pay attention. It could be telling you that an acoustic neuroma has come into your life and that a translabyrinthine craniotomy is in your future.

Personal experience: I was going deaf in one ear. I had a brain tumor. It was benign. Didn’t feel a thing during eight hours of surgery. Everything is fine.

But here’s the cautionary tale: An earlier diagnosis, or a bit more urgency when occasional vertigo cropped up five years earlier and when hearing started to dim in the left ear, might have meant dealing with a smaller tumor. Which might have meant allowing surgeons to yank the thing out of my head without having stretched the No. 7 nerve so badly that it never bounced back.

Because the tumor turned out to be larger than suspected, the procedure—I love the medical term, “translabyrinthine craniotomy”—knocked out the use of the No. 7 nerve, which controls the left side of the face. That partial facial paralysis necessitated two more operations—a quick-hit 45-minute job a month later to insert a tiny gold weight in my left eyelid, allowing me to close the eye and then, a year later, a five-hour nerve-replacement deal restoring muscle tone to the left side of my face and now permitting me the hint of a grin. The nerve-replacement operation was coupled with minimal plastic surgery (just pulling up the skin a dab on that side, which I describe as a half-assed facelift) and has pretty much straightened the line of my mouth.

Bottom line: Life is good. I quickly returned to work as a newspaper reporter and, almost as quickly, got back into a normal daily routine which includes driving, mowing the lawn, taking out the garbage, and morning runs at a modest speed. I sometimes am aware of a low-grade dizziness. No big deal. I can’t hear out of my left ear. No big deal.

I was out of work for three months following the craniotomy, but I never was in any pain whatsoever. And if someone wanted to see the scar from my brain surgery, I could show the 2½-inch mark near my bellybutton where surgeons harvested blubber to plug my head closed and keep my brain from leaking. This recalls the old George Burns-Gracie Allen joke about her brother’s appendectomy, in which George noticed a scar near the brother’s neck and Gracie explained that he was “ticklish down there so they had to go in” near his tonsils. Why show people the 2-inch crescent-shaped cut behind my ear, which I can’t see anyway, when instead I could reveal my “brain surgery scar” on my abdomen?

Anyway, here is some 20/20 hindsight: Though I did check out original symptoms of dizziness in the spring of 1999, a series of doctors couldn’t find anything untoward and, for some reason, never did an MRI. I soon noticed diminished hearing in my left ear but, again, standard hearing tests—no MRI—led to the wishy-washy diagnosis that I merely was getting older (mid-50s then).

It wasn’t until late 2003, after complaints that my tin ear was becoming more annoying, that my wife insisted I see another primary care physician, who cited asymmetrical hearing loss as a red flag and immediately put me onto a better ear specialist, who immediately ordered an MRI, which immediately spied the tumor.

Two specialists’ opinions and three weeks later, a team of five surgeons at New York-Presbyterian Hospital were doing their rocket science inside my head. It turned out that the tumor, which doctors said could have been 10 to 15 years old, was starting to press on my brainstem. In retrospect, that was the scary part, because when the brainstem goes, so does the patient.

I thought of an old country-music lyric: “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” But listen: If something about your body doesn’t sound right, make sure the medics keep looking for the cause. I’d rather have a translabyrinthine craniotomy than a neuroma coma.

Fidel was everywhere

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I remember Fidel as something of a shopping mall Santa Claus, showing up everywhere that our small band of American reporters went while covering the 1991 Pan American Games in Cuba. It was as if there was more than one Fidel, like Mickey Mouse at Disney World, materializing at the basketball arena, the track stadium, the water polo pool, the softball field. Often on the same day.

At a Cuba vs. U.S. women’s basketball game, Fidel joined the crowd in doing the wave. He posed for pictures with medal winners of multiple sports. He so insinuated himself into the operation, personally hanging medals around winners’ necks—especially Cuban winners, but others, too—that U.S. sports officials began to grumble that he was violating Olympic and Pan Am protocol.

Technically, as head of state of the Pan Am host nation, his only involvement was to officially open the games with a brief, scripted declaration, then become a mere spectator. But he played all the parts in the production.

At one point during the Games, there were rumors that he had suffered a heart attack, gossip immediately put to rest when he showed up at the Pan Am bowling lanes. We Yanks constantly were on the lookout at public gatherings for the familiar bearded presence, so easy to spot in his green fatigues (the emperor’s old clothes), an exercise we likened to a weird game of “Where’s Waldo?”

We were just sports journalists, but what was eminently clear then, as in the reports in the days since Fidel’s death at 90, was how omnipresent he was in all Cubans’ lives. In the wake of his 1959 revolution, he had engendered fierce loyalty among the public for bringing education and health care to the lowest classes, yet he eventually became widely feared for restrictions—often brutal—on speech and assembly, and hated by Cuban exiles for his strong-arm nationalization of private enterprise.

At the time of the ’91 Pan Am Games, Cuba had just lost its most dependable sugar daddy with the 1989 collapse of the Soviet Union, and Fidel’s economic policies were failing most citizens. Yet he toured the Games in a caravan of Mercedes limousines, while most of the populace lived in ramshackle buildings and had to stand in line for a daily ration of two loaves of bread, no bigger than baseballs, as well as each family’s once-in-every-nine-days schedule to obtain a chicken. So much for Fidel’s defiant maxim of “Socialism or Death.”

Ironies were everywhere. Cuban athletes delivered to us the party line that representing their country, and by extension Fidel’s revolution, in amateur competition was far preferable to lucrative professional careers abroad. Yet they acknowledged that sports champions received well above the average Cuban’s income, were afforded free cars and free apartments and never had to wait in bread lines. (This, even as there were persistent reports of Cuban jocks defecting in search of U.S. contracts.)

Too, there was obvious tourist apartheid. A colleague and I visited Veradero Beach, two hours east of Havana, a playground for rich capitalists on holiday from Europe and Canada (no regular Cubans allowed), a sort of Hilton Head resort smack in the middle of epidemic poverty. We drove there in a rented new Nissan, available to foreign visitors while Cubans were stuck with decaying pre-revolution American cars or rickety little Russian Ladas.

Then there was the incongruity of the Pan Am shooting competition in Cotorro, an isolated piece of land just east of Havana, where a small band of U.S. military personnel were in full evidence. They had guns. And they didn’t miss.

It was a thoroughly apolitical situation, of course—members of the Marines or U.S. police forces who competed on the American team as amateur target-practice elites. No counter revolution or anything like that was going on. But it was such an unlikely scene, given Fidel’s rigid rejection of U.S. imperialists. The Yank sharpshooters were roundly cheered by Cuban spectators as they blazed away at flying clay pigeons and stationary targets.

A 33-year-old Air Force captain named Bill Roy set a world record for accuracy, then took pains to argue that it was “an opportunity to be anything but an Ugly American.” He said his real job was as an English professor at the Air Force Academy, “teaching Beowulf and his search for fame” to academy freshman. Still, You Know Who was in everybody’s thoughts.

“Why isn’t Fidel here?” American shooting team member Roxanne Thompson wanted to know. “He’s a military guy.”

Back at our hotel in downtown Havana, the Habana Libre, I had been getting calls from an apparent government functionary, inviting me to share a drink. (His name was Dmitry or Sergei or Yuri, some Russian name that was not unusual for a Cuban after all those years of USSR relationships.) I kept putting him off with the excuse—based on fact—that I had a busy, unpredictable schedule.

Finally, he corralled me in the hotel lobby. He said he just wanted to talk about what I thought of Cuba and Cubans and the Games, though fellow U.S. reporters said they suspected he wanted to monitor—or somehow already was monitoring—whether I was reporting on issues beyond mere sport.

I was, of course. A few details about how Cubans could be fined, and possibly arrested, for fraternizing with foreigners. About the ghost-town aspects of Havana shops that were available to citizens, in contrast to the stylish restaurants and bars frequented by visitors. About a day trip to the Bay of Pigs, site of the ill-conceived 1961 U.S. attempt to overthrow Fidel with a brigade of Cuban exiles, and Fidel’s emergence from that victory as a charismatic leader. About a brief pass through Santiago de Cuba, where Fidel’s first attempt at a revolution in 1953, against president Fulgencio Batista—believed by many Cubans to be a tool of the U.S.-based mafia—had failed, leaving bullet holes in the walls of the Moncada Barracks that still were visible.

Nothing came of Dmitry’s (or Yuri’s) interest in my work, though our brief chat was one more reminder of the ubiquitous Fidel.

During that 1991 assignment, some of us wondered if, without Fidel, Cuba would evolve away from the dictator’s half-century of sulfurous anti-U.S. rule and an intolerance of homegrown dissent. Or would Cuba return to the Batista days, with a small upper echelon of super-wealthy landowners and affluent tourists, again consigning the majority of Cubans to be an underpaid and under-educated servant class.

Back then, it was hard to see that he ever would be out of the picture.

How firing the coach represents U.S. soccer progress

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(Jurgen Klinsmann)

America fired its national soccer coach this week, which qualifies as a relatively new fashion. A mere generation ago, the U.S. team could have lost of couple of World Cup qualifying games, as Jurgen Klinsmann’s lads just did, and almost no one would have noticed.

This is a reminder that a coach’s job security is directly proportional to the sport’s cultural significance—that is, the degree of interest, and therefore the expectations, among the populace. More than that, it is a reminder of how dramatically (and how quickly) soccer has progressed on these shores.

Twenty-six years ago, the best the U.S. soccer federation could scrape together for a national team was a jury-rigged collection of recent college players. There was no U.S. professional league because there was no demand for one. The rag-tag team that qualified for the Italy-based 1990 World Cup did so, in large part, because the region’s perennial power, Mexico, had been banned for using ineligible players.

Even so, the Yanks barely squeezed into the championship tournament, their first such appearance in 40 years, and were promptly destroyed by Czechoslovakia, 5-1. The most skilled player on that U.S. team was Tab Ramos, who went on to a successful career as a player and coach and now, at 50, briefly was mentioned as an outside favorite to replace Klinsmann—before U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati settled on a more obvious choice, Bruce Arena.

After that 5-1 thrashing in Florence, Italy, in 1990, Ramos was one of only a few U.S. players brave enough to face reporters’ post-game interrogations. So I asked him, if he somehow could have known beforehand how disappointing his World Cup debut would be, might he have preferred to take a pass?

“This,” he said, “is the greatest experience of my life. If I had to go through it again, just the same way, I would.”

(Tab Ramos, 1990)

“It’s a reality,” he said. “It’s not something to be ashamed of. If we lived in another country and lost, 5-1, we couldn’t go home. But we’ll go home and walk through Kennedy Airport and no one will recognize us, anyway.”

Ramos was born in Uruguay, where his father had played professionally, but had moved with his family to New Jersey when he was 7. He knew very well the pecking order of American sports at the time.

“Soccer’s a way of life everywhere but in the U.S.,” he said. “Everywhere else, your team loses, you cry and stay home from work the next day because you’re so upset. Your team wins, you don’t go to work because you’re so happy.”

He wasn’t feeling sorry for himself to be an “American soccer player” (an oxymoron, in those days, like “living dead” or “definite maybe.”) He was appreciating his great (and unlikely, in those days) opportunity on the sport’s biggest stage.

One of Ramos’ teammates then—and another fellow whose name momentarily was tossed around as a possible Klinsmann successor—was Peter Vermes, who had spent two years playing in the lesser European pro leagues in Hungary and The Netherlands. Vermes recalled reading the Dutch newspapers shortly after he was hired by Holland’s F.C. Volendam club and seeing quotes from his new teammates, who wondered, “Why did we sign him? What do we need an American for?”

Now, the reality is markedly different. Major League Soccer, the U.S. professional league, is in its 21^st season. American players regularly find jobs with European teams. Soccer, as a spectator sport in the States, now is on the order of ice hockey, just behind the big three of football, baseball and basketball. The United States, in fact, is one of only seven nations to have qualified for the past seven World Cups, a streak equaled only by global powers Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Italy and Spain, plus Far East regional force South Korea.

Enough people, from soccer fans to soccer officials, care enough about the national team’s recent struggles that Klinsmann’s ouster was inevitable. His record over six years was 55-28-15, a winning percentage (.638) second only to Arena’s (71-30-29, .658) for any of the 35 coaches who were around for more than two games in the national team’s 100-year history.

(Bruce Arena)

But it matters more than ever that Klinsmann lost those first two Cup qualifying games. And it was Arena, from 1998 to 2006, who managed the Yanks’ highest World Cup finish in 2002—a 1-0 quarterfinal loss to eventual runner-up Germany. Arena did so with the same clear-eyed awareness of America’s relative come-lately soccer status acknowledged by Ramos and Vermes in the horse-and-buggy days of 1990.

“I mean, if I said my philosophy was to play like [five-time World Cup champion] Brazil,” Arena said early in his first tour as national coach, “I’d look pretty stupid, wouldn’t I?” But, too: “You can only put 11 on the field,” he said. “If you could put 500 Brazilians on the field, or 500 Italians [winners of four World Cups], against 500 Americans, we’d have a problem.”

His only problem now is qualifying for the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Because a lot of people will notice if he doesn’t.

Identity politics: Mizzou and Tim Kaine

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So we almost had a fellow Mizzou grad as vice president of the United States—a fellow former Mizzou journalism student at that.

That Tim Kaine is now going back to being a senator from Virginia hardly is the worst news about Tuesday’s election. At least I can distract myself from the frightening American vision whipped up by the President-elect’s racist, misogynistic and mendacious campaign rhetoric to know that Kaine’s documented decency reflects well on the old alma mater.

At this point, I’ll just cling to my personal identity politics. I’ll hang on to the idea that a man who was so close to being one heartbeat away from the Oval Office spent his college days much the way I did.

Except, of course, that Kaine graduated summa cum laude in three years. And was a senator in the Missouri Students Association. And was so far ahead of his fellow students that he worked as a teaching assistant in an economics course.

I got a C in economics. I confess to have spent much more time—much more—in the offices of the student newspaper, The Maneater, than in the library during my University of Missouri days. While Kaine, in his concession remarks on Wednesday, could retrieve a quote from William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! that applied to the situation—“They kilt us but they ain’t whupped us yit”—I concede that I never finished Faulkner’s The Bear for a freshman English assignment. I was too busy reading the sports section.

Kaine came to Columbia, Mo., almost a decade after I left, and went on to far bigger things, opting out of journalism studies to earn his degree in economics, and then to law school at Harvard, to mayor of Richmond, governor of Virginia, U.S. Senator. I remained an ink-stained wretch for a half century.

But a sociology professor once discussed with me the concept of tribalism, how we all need—all like—to identify with some group that reflects our values or, at least, reflects how we prefer to think of ourselves. The college link is part of that. Wherever we go to school, we are connected to that place and—by extension, its people—for the rest of our lives. And when we hear of a successful, principled fellow alum, it’s tempting to lay claim to being part of that.

Look at what my school turned out: A man whose life experiences allowed him to empathize with people from other cultures and circumstances. At 22, Kaine worked with the deeply poor in Honduras for nine months. In Richmond, he worshiped at a black church for decades. When The Maneater recently published a profile of Kaine—“How MU shaped vice-presidential nominee and graduate Tim Kaine”—it was just good journalism. But, too, there rightly was pride in recalling Kaine as one of Mizzou’s own.

Of course there have been knuckleheads among our alums. Kenneth Lay, the Enron CEO found guilty for the securities fraud that destroyed the company and cost 20,000 employees their jobs, was a Mizzou grad. But, then, so were some highly regarded folks. George C. Scott (originally a journalism major!), long-time PBS News Hour anchor Jim Lehrer, Missouri senator Claire McCaskill, Missouri governor Jay Nixon, singer/songwriter Sheryl Crow, and so many respected journalism colleagues over the years that I couldn’t name them all.

It’s a stretch that Mizzou’s tiger mascot is named “Truman” in honor of the 33^rd President of the United States, a form of tribalism which ignores the fact that Harry S Truman, while he indeed was a Missouri native, never attended the university and, in fact, is the most recent President who didn’t have a college degree.

But at a time when there is so much enmity swirling around the election results, I am ready to flaunt an association—however tenuous—with Mizzou grad Tim Kaine. In that Maneater piece, there was a college buddy’s recollection of how he and Kaine formed a club called SIMA (the French word for “friends”—amis—backwards) that consisted of selling friend-o-grams for 25 cents. Those simply were a means of expressing friendship to other students, which Kaine and his pal hand-delivered around campus.

What a lovely gesture. Sounds something like wanting to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. In the end, my preference for Kaine’s presence in the next administration really had nothing to do with the fact we went to the same school. But I certainly don’t mind the coincidence.

The Cubs, the curse and daytime baseball

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Could it be that the final curse the star-crossed Cubs had to reverse was Major League Baseball’s building revolt against the last guardians of daytime baseball?

Let’s, for the moment, put aside the Billy Goat thing in 1945, Steve Bartman’s (quite reasonable) reach for a foul ball in 2003, the black cat moment in 1969, Babe Ruth’s called shot in 1932, Leon Durham’s fielding flub in 1984. When the Cubs, after 112 years of only afternoon home games, attempted their first night contest at Wrigley Field on Aug. 8, 1988, a fourth-inning downpour wiped out the proceedings.

“Someone up there seems to take day baseball seriously,” the Chicago Tribune editorialized the next day, throwing in the quote from a fan convinced that the heavens’ negative retort to artificial illumination “proves the Cubs are cursed.”

Another 28 years on, the Cubs at last have broken that evil spell on the sport’s biggest stage.

To review: In 1982, then-Cubs general manager Dallas Green first proposed lights for the Friendly Confines. Television, he said, was dictating that the team play at night, and he said that if the Cubs were to make the playoffs, they would be forced to move post-season home games to the rival White Sox’ crosstown Comiskey Park. Or possibly St. Louis.

He hinted—darkly—that, without the installation of permanent lights at Wrigley, the club would have no choice but to move, mentioning a tract of undeveloped land in the Schaumburg suburb, Northwest of the city. About that time, Major League Baseball decreed that, should the Cubs ever return to the World Series for the first time since 1945, their home games would be shifted to an alternate, lighted site.

Sure enough, in 1984, in the midst of Green’s campaign to light up Wrigley, the last outdoor World Series day game was played. San Diego (which had benefited mightily from the Leon Durham error in the league championship series) at Detroit.

(Wrigley before lights)

Now, think of Ernie Banks, Mr. Cub. Not, specifically, the “Let’s play two” Banks, always eager to go extra innings; more generally, the perpetually sunny-disposition Banks.

Think of C.U.B.S.—Citizens United for Baseball in Sunshine—a 1980s neighborhood group on Chicago’s North Side that fought against the establishment of night baseball for the Cubs.

Think of a widely held notion at the time that putting lights at Wrigley was akin to drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa. Think of Bill Veeck, the brilliant baseball executive who had been a Wrigley Field popcorn vendor as a boy and later was responsible for creating the distinctive touch of covering Wrigley’s outfield walls with ivy. To Veeck, Wrigley’s special charm was its commitment to day games, to “make people discover how lovely it is to come and sit in the sun and enjoy a game.”

When C.U.B.S. mobilized protests, its members said they would accept temporary lighting as long as the vast majority of games remained in the afternoon. But Dallas Green called them “inflexible.” In 1985, Green declared that the Cubs would be gone from Wrigley “in five years” unless permanent lights were installed. “We’re dead to this neighborhood,” he said then.

(Cincinnati’s Crosley Field, May 24, 1935)

The first Major League regular-season game played at night was on May 24, 1935, in Cincinnati. By 1939, every team except the Cubs had installed permanent lighting, though it wasn’t until 1971 that a World Series game started after sundown—Baltimore at Pittsburgh.

So maybe MLB won out with the entire 2016 Cubs-Cleveland Indians World Series played under the lights. Did you notice, though, that when the Cubs finally threw off the hex of championship disappointment after 108 years, it was morning? 12:57 a.m.

The Cubs fan litmus test. And Hillary Clinton.

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Are you with the Cubs in this partisan fight? If so, should you be required to show your papers? Does it matter whether you were born a Cubs fan—as opposed to being a previously undecided outsider just become drawn to trickle-down excitement?

It’s just baseball. And yet it is abundantly clear that some people out there believe there should be a litmus test. That being a member of the Cubs party now should be restricted to those who can provide indisputable proof. (Photo IDs, maybe?) That they be required to have experienced the Cubs’ overwrought mythology, to know how it feels to be Tantalus or Sisyphus, to have gone through at least a significant part of the team’s 108 years of solitude.

Here’s an example: Hillary Clinton. According to GOP.com, she is “Bandwagon Hillary.” She is “jumping on Chicago’s bandwagon [and] like with every other matter….switches allegiance with sports teams like positions on issues.” GOP.com reminded that, when she was running for the Senate in New York in 2000, she claimed she had “always been a Yankees fan.”

We probably shouldn’t be allowing World Series loyalties to be leaching into the contentious White House campaign. But it is a given that sports-team passions can get a bit manic around championship time. (If you don’t believe it, listen to sports talk radio.) And just as true is the time-honored tradition of politicians using sports identity to demonstrate their regular-folks bona fides.

Still, I’m going to defend Clinton’s right to declare herself a Cubs fan. First of all, isn’t everybody drawn to the long-suffering Cubs now? Outside of Cleveland Indians territory, anyway? Check out this map, a World Series sendup of the ubiquitous red state/blue state presidential election forecasts, that is circulating on the Internet.

Beyond the fairly universal appeal of the Cubs’ Halley’s Comet-like star turn, there is data to support Clinton’s logical and lengthy connection to the team. She was born in Chicago (two years into the Cubs’ 71-year absence from the World Series) and raised in the city’s Park Ridge suburb, less than 10 miles from the Cubs’ historic Wrigley Field home. Her father was a Cubs fan. Her brothers, with whom she watched plenty of Cubs’ games on television, were Cubs fans.

In 1993, when she was First Lady, Clinton was offered membership in the Emil Verban Memorial Society, an exclusive club of Washington-based Cubs fans named for a Cubs infielder from the late 1940s and early 50s who was said to epitomize the team by being “competent but obscure and typifying the team’s work ethic.”

That a player such as Verban, who hit .095 in 1950, should be fervently embraced in that forgiving way is yet another indication of Cub allegiance, especially since society members were among the nation’s most successful folks—Ronald Reagan, retired Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, TV personalities Bryant Gumbel and Bruce Morton, golfer Ray Floyd, actor Tom Bosley and conservative columnist George Will among them.

What some commentators and Republican Party operatives object to, regarding Clinton’s fandom, is that she indeed admitted to rooting for the Yankees in general—and Mickey Mantle in particular—as a child, in part because she admitted that a Cubs fan so often needs the fallback of having a team that wins once in a while.

Among those who have questioned Clinton on the matter is Chicago Sun-Times Washington bureau chief Lynn Sweet in a recent column, and political commentator Chris Matthews, who had asked when she donned a Yankee cap during her Senate campaign, “Doesn’t she know she looks like a fraud?”

This protestation of multi-team fandom, unreasonable to my mind, recalls the late Bill Searby, one of my first bosses at Newsday in the early 1970s. The way his colleagues told it, Searby had taken advantage of the G.I. Bill to complete his education after his service days, and wound up attending several colleges. As the scores came over the wire on football Saturdays, more than one winner would prompt Searby to exult: “That’s my team!”

“Which one?” his co-workers would snicker. I think they were jealous.

Going ‘way back in (black) baseball history from Cubs’ Fowler

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(Dexter Fowler)

Baseball coincidence is a fascinating thing. Consider just one in the many notable tidbits related to the end of the woebegone Chicago Cubs’ 71-year World Series drought—a fellow named Fowler becoming the team’s first black man to play in the Fall Classic.

That’s Dexter Fowler, a 30-year-old outfielder who, rather symbolically, was the lead-off batter in Game 1 against the Cleveland Indians. The significance of Fowler’s presence, though, isn’t related to some new civil rights breakthrough. Rather, it is another reminder of how long ago the Cubbies last appeared on the sport’s biggest stage. So long ago, in 1945, that the Big Leagues still were two years from getting around to the initial step of desegregation, in the person of Jackie Robinson.

(Jackie Robinson)

But here is the really curious statistic that does connect Fowler to racial inclusion in our national pastime. According to Baseball Hall of Fame records, the first black man on a white professional baseball team—roughly 70 years before Robinson and twice that long before Dexter Fowler—was a gent known as Bud Fowler.

(Bud Fowler)

Bud Fowler lived from 1854 to 1913 and, beginning in 1878, claimed to have played for predominantly white teams in 22 states and Canada. He was primarily a second baseman. Yellowed newspaper clippings in the Hall of Fame archives describe him as a “versatile, fast, slick fielder.” A Cincinnati Inquirer article published in the early 1900s reported that “Bud has played games for trappers’ furs. He has been rung in to help out a team for the championship of a mining camp and bags of gold dust. He has played with cowboys and Indians. He has cross-roaded it from one town to another all over the Far West, playing for what he could get and taking a hand to help out a team.”

It turns out that Bud Fowler was born John W. Jackson, son of a barber in Cooperstown, N.Y., home to the baseball Hall. There is no information on why or how he changed his name from Jackson, though he was said to be called “Bud” because of his inclination to address most people by that name. He never married, died broke and is buried in a pauper’s field just outside Cooperstown’s city limits, where a tombstone was placed on his grave in 1987 to note his place in baseball history.

He was 5-7, 155 pounds (compared to Dexter Fowler’s 21^st-Century dimensions of 6-5, 195.) Bud batted and threw righthanded. (Dexter is a switch-hitter who throws righthanded.) Like Bud, Dexter has had a number of baseball homes, playing for 10 teams at various minor-league levels—the Modesto Nuts, Waikiki Beach Boys and Tulsa Drillers among them—on his way to a nine-year Major League career with Colorado, Houston and now Chicago. And, while Dexter already has earned more than $32 million playing the game, he has a long way to go to equal Bud’s longevity.

According to that century-old Inquirer story, Bud Fowler “has been playing baseball for the past 26 years and he is yet as spry and as fast in his actions as any man on his team. He has no Charley horses or stiff joints, but can bend over and get up a grounder like a young blood….he is 48 years old, but to look at him, you would set him down to be not more than 25.” The Inquirer piece ended with the invitation to “go out and see him play second base this afternoon.”

In 1997, on the 50^th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s entry into the Majors, an Eastern Michigan University history professor, Sidney Gendin, published a paper calling Fowler “first of at least 40 blacks who played on teams in organized white baseball leagues before the turn of the century. But in the mid-1880s, with deteriorating social mores pushing blacks out of the minors, Fowler spent more time barnstorming, during which he would help support himself by working as a barber. He started his own all-black team based in Adrian, Mich., sponsored by a wire fence company, the Page Fence Giants, who toured the Midwest in the team’s own railroad car.”

Also in ’97, the Hall of Fame opened an exhibit, “Pride and Passion: The African-American Baseball Experience,” which prominently featured Bud Fowler’s role as grand marshal in the parade of long-ago baseball integration. That was before segregationists established the infamous “color line” that lasted until Robinson.

(Larry Doby)

At the opening of that exhibit, by the way, among the invited participants was Larry Doby—the first black player in the American League, who debuted months after Robinson had done so with the National League Brooklyn Dodgers. Doby’s team was the Cleveland Indians, Dexter Fowler’s current World Series opponents. And Doby, along with teammate Satchel Paige, became the first black men to win a World Series title, in 1948—the Indians’ last championship season.

Hmmm.

Smith-Carlos and Kaepernick: Compare and contrast.

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Long before Colin Kaepernick, there was the Tommie Smith-John Carlos incident. Complete with the same horrified amazement—or amazed horror—over the appropriateness of the gesture. The same rotten-tomato treatment of the medium that mostly blotted out the message.

“We didn’t carry guns,” Smith reminded during a rare reunion with Carlos in 2004, 36 years after the fact. “We didn’t beat anybody up. It was a prayer of solidarity, a cry of freedom. But it was an agonizing hurt for America, because everybody saw it. The whole world saw it.”

What Smith and Carlos did in 1968 was use the stage of the Mexico City Olympics—specifically, the victory podium during the playing of the “Star Spangled Banner” after Smith won the 200-meter gold medal and Carlos the bronze—as a call for social awareness and plea for the disenfranchised. Head down, each silently raised a black-gloved fist.

“It was basically an act of love,” Carlos said at the same low-key 2004 appearance with Smith during the U.S. Olympic track and field trials in Sacramento. “Tough love, but love.” He compared it to disciplining a child to keep him from “putting his hand in a socket. We spanked America on the fanny and said, ‘Don’t put your hand in that socket.’”

In ’68, some American cities literally were in flames over civil rights unrest, the Vietnam war was raging months after both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. At San Jose State University, where Smith and Carlos were among the stars on the so-called “Speed City” team, sociology professor Harry Edwards had attempted (but failed) to organize a black boycott of the Mexico City Games.

At the last minute, after setting a world record in the 200, Smith decided to raise a his gloved right hand during the playing of the anthem. He gave his left-hand glove to Carlos with an invitation to follow his lead.

As with this year’s Kaepernick protest, in which the San Francisco 49ers quarterback has been joined by other athletes kneeling during the pre-game anthem to focus attention on police treatment of minorities, the immediate reaction to Smith and Carlos was one of wide condemnation for shattering protocol, for showing disrespect.

The veteran sportscaster Brent Musburger, then a Chicago newspaper columnist who represented the clubby establishment thinking, railed that Smith and Carlos were “black-skinned storm troopers.” International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage, an American, and U.S. Olympic Committee officials were outraged, ordering Smith and Carlos out of the athletes’ village and suspending them from further competition.

Hate mail and death threats followed. Smith never ran another competitive race, and it was decades before more thoughtful and nuanced perceptions of the Smith-Carlos action began to take hold.

In his 1993 memoire “Days of Grace,” tennis champion and activist Arthur Ashe wrote that Smith and Carlos had turned the Mexico City victory stand “into a sacrificial altar as they surrendered their victory to the greater good of downtrodden black people.”

In 1999, HBO aired a documentary, “Fists of Freedom,” in which Smith recounted how he was “scared. I was scared. My father said to me when I got home, ‘Boy’—he’s the only one allowed to call me ‘boy’—‘I don’t know what all this hooprah’—as he called it—‘comes from. But you’re my son, and it must be good because I raised you to do the right thing.’”

In 2005, a 23-foot sculpture of that Smith-Carlos Olympic moment was erected at the heart of the San Jose State campus. (The statue left empty the place on the victory podium that had been occupied by white Australian Peter Norman—who subtly joined the two Americans’ protest by wearing the same Olympic Project for Human Rights button as Smith and Carlos—so that visitors can pose with a raised fist on the silver-medal step.)

In August, Smith, now 72, and Carlos, 71, were among the old “Speed City” athletes invited to the school’s announcement that it was reviving the storied track and field program they had brought to worldwide prominence. (San Jose State had discontinued track in 1988 for what it said was financial reasons, though it kept vastly more expensive football.)

Three weeks ago, when members of this summer’s U.S. Olympic and Paralympic teams were honored at the White House, Smith and Carlos were invited to serve as the teams’ “ambassadors”—finally and officially welcomed back into the USOC family after 48 years as outcasts. “Their powerful silent protest in the 1968 Games was controversial,” President Obama said, “but it woke folks up and created greater opportunity for those that followed.”

That same week, the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African-American History & Culture opened just yards from the White House—with a bronze statue of the Smith-Carlos victory-stand demonstration at its entry to the sports gallery.

It was at a New York screening of the 2004 HBO documentary, days before the film aired, that Smith offered me an ironic update on the fallout from their 1968 public display. He said his son, 11 years old at the time, had just seen a promo of “Fists of Freedom” and “called me at work. He called on my beeper, actually. I called him back and he said, ‘Dad! You’re on TV!’ He said, “You’re famous!’”

Famous. A little like Colin Kaepernick is famous—for choosing a protest setting that even historically progressive Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has called “dumb,” “disrespectful,” and “ridiculous;” a circumstance that so many people can’t comprehend.

That day at the HBO screening, Smith said, “I’m still trying to explain it. I’ll be trying to explain it till the day I die.”

Vin Scully and me (sort of)

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It was awfully nice of Vin Scully, in his farewell Dodger Stadium broadcast wrapping up 59 seasons in Los Angeles, to mention me. Well, sort of. “Since ’58,” he said of the team’s first year on the West Coast, “you and I have really grown up together….the transistor radio was what bound us together.

“Were you among the crowd that groaned at one of my puns?” he asked. “Did you kindly laugh at one of my little jokes? Did I put you to sleep with the transistor radio tucked under your pillow?”

How did he know? In 1958, I was 11 years old. The Dodgers, with Scully in tow, had just relocated to L.A. from Brooklyn. My family had just moved to the L.A. suburb of Sepulveda in The Valley. My parents had just gifted me with a transistor radio, the modern marvel of that time, pocket-sized, which made it possible to listen to the Everly Brothers, Sheb Wooley (“It was a one-eyed, one-horned, flyin’ purple-people eater”) and Kingston Trio (“Hang down your head, Tom Dooley”) while riding a bike to the local deli or the high school gym for some pick-up basketball.

Better than the music, though, that transistor delivered Scully’s soundtrack of summertime, Dodgers play-by-play and storytelling that regularly meandered beyond baseball. His pitch-perfect combination of keen observation and verbal picture-painting, his silver-tongued accounts that somehow were simultaneously simple yet sophisticated, were a daily necessity.

So, yes, the transistor was a bedtime accessory. It was a traveling companion, and we Angelenos even toted our transistors to the games, to “see” Dodger baseball better through Scully’s descriptions than with one’s own eyes.

That was partly because, from 1958 through ’61, the Dodgers’ first L.A. home was the cavernous Coliseum, designed for Olympic track and football, which afforded lousy views of baseball action from roughly 75 percent of the seats. But with Scully’s voice emanating from all those transistors, reverberating in the vast stadium, nothing was missed.

My family left L.A. in 1962, but my half-century of travels as a sports journalist occasionally brought me within the sound of Scully’s voice, and that was a little like going home. In 1969, during my senior year at the University of Missouri’s journalism school, I was assigned to cover a game between the Dodgers and Cardinals in St. Louis, and I recall my classmate Ernie Williamson—who hailed from L.A.—being more awe-struck to be standing near Vin Scully during batting practice than any of the ballplayers. (Me, too, actually.)

That spring, in my off-campus apartment, I somehow picked up a broadcast of the Dodgers’ first game in Montreal against the new expansion team there. Scully was mulling mellifluously about that bilingual city, and how the word “gauche” was French for “left,” but with the English translation of “awkward” or “tactless.” Being left-handed, he playfully wondered if he should take offense.

I laughed at his little joke.

In 1972, I was back in Los Angeles as a raw Newsday reporter, covering a Mets game at Dodger Stadium. I procured a transistor radio to listen to Scully’s call, and of course his observations and asides found their way into my game story. Made it far better, in fact.

He passed along news of Mets’ infielder Rusty Staub’s broken hand. (“For Le Grand Orange, this year has turned to a lemon.”) He noted how Mets’ call-up Dave Schneck, though off to a blistering Big League start with his bat, was guaranteed nothing in the future. (“It’s like dirt at inspection time. If you have a weakness, boy, they’ll find it, and they’ll do the best they can to get you back in the minors.”)

Schneck soon was back in the minors and finished his Major League career with a .199 batting average after barely 100 games.

In 1980, I was casting around for historical tidbits for a feature on sports lingo, and among the puzzlements was an old baseball expression I had heard for years, identifying an easily catchable fly ball as a “can of corn.” My sources for the piece included several books, a few long-retired ballplayers—and Vin Scully.

Typically, he offered a pertinent tale, delivered by phone with the same familiar elocution and institutional knowledge that always flavored his broadcasts. “The first fellow I ever heard use that expression,” he said, “was Arch McDonald, who was a pretty famous Washington broadcaster who came to New York and did the Giants games for a couple of years. Arch was a cross between W.C. Fields and Ned Sparks, and it came out, ‘CAN o’ corrrrrn!’ But we’re still debating the origin of that one.”

I recall that my mother—no sports fan—sometimes would listen over my pre-teen shoulder when the transistor was tuned to Dodger games, drawn to Scully’s often humorous yarns or personalized background notes that he slipped into the play-by-play. His was not a style limited to balls and strikes.

Which surely is why, in a farewell column for the Los Angeles Times last week, Bill Plaschke suspected, “Now that Vin Scully is leaving, we’ll never again cheer so hard for foul balls.”

Over the years, it wasn’t Scully’s great calls of special baseball moments that separated him from the pack, though those were routinely terrific. It was the endless flow of fascinating digressions and parentheses, shared as if with a nudge of the elbow to a pal. At his final Dodgers home game, that included his recollection of Gil Hodges’ steel-like grip that could shape a ball for a pitcher, and brief reminiscence of meeting Babe Ruth as a young boy. Scully described the Dodger pitchers facing the meat of the Colorado Rockies lineup with, “There are some big mountains to climb in the range of the Rockies.”

I did not groan at the pun. To the contrary.

Every semester, I play for my Hofstra University sportswriting students Scully’s ninth-inning radio account of Dodger pitcher Sandy Koufax’s 1965 perfect game, a gem of narrative detail. It not only portrays in vivid words each pitch but also the drama and tension, that there were “twenty-nine thousand people in the ballpark and a million butterflies;” that Dodger teammates in the bullpen were “straining to get a better look through the wire fence in left field;” that, for Koufax, “the mound must be the loneliest place in the world right now;” that, when fans booed a called ball, “a lot of people in the ballpark now are starting to see the pitches with their hearts.”

It was the kind of riveting recitation that would keep a kid with a transistor under his pillow awake well past lights out.

Anyway, now Vin Scully is retiring, just short of his 89^th birthday. That must mean I’m not 11 anymore.

John Jeansonne

Newsday sportswriter emeritus/Hofstra University journalism adjunct

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