Before Caitlin Clark

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Kudos to The Athletic for its detailed origin story relative to the Caitlin Clark must-see entertainment frenzy: “Iowa’s sizzling popularity in women’s basketball was born in the state’s 6-on-6 tradition.”

As Scott Dochterman reported in the piece, “six-player basketball was more than just a sport in Iowa. It was the game of the winter, and its legacy flourishes through this Hawkeyes women’s basketball team” that features Clark’s binocular-range shooting, nifty passing and the enthralled sellout crowds celebrating her.

For long before Clark’s assault on virtually every college scoring record—by both women and men—long before Clark, 22, was born, high school girls in Iowa were starring in their unique brand of the sport that dates to the early 1920s and which, by the 1950s, was front-page news throughout Iowa. Their championship tournament was carried by radio and television stations in up to nine Midwestern states. There can be a strong argument that, for decades, nowhere else was the high school girl accepted as an athlete as she was in Iowa.

Susan Edge was a University of Missouri Journalism School colleague in the late 1960s who clued me in to the phenomenon. She had been a scoring machine for her Iowa high school’s six-on-six team, and her tales of community involvement were so compelling that I eventually convinced my editors at Newsday, 10 years later, to cover the season-ending event.

The whole business was a revelation. The six-on-six format—each team required to keep three defenders on one half of the court while three offensive teammates worked the other half—was a relic of Paleolithic times when females were thought incapable of extensive running. Yet it fit nicely into Iowa’s rural aesthetic: maximum possibilities for the few.

Six-on-six rules—a two-dribble limit before passing or shooting—rendered a crisp, fast-paced game of passing, moving without the ball, back-door cuts. That produced astounding offensive numbers, shooting percentages by the best players in the 60s and 70s, point totals such as Denise Long’s 70.5 average in the 1968 tournament. Long, whose small community high school north of Des Moines had just 120 students and a senior class of 34, once scored 111 points in a 32-minute game. She was such a headliner that she appeared on the Johnny Carson show and was drafted by the NBA’s Golden State Warriors—though the commissioner at the time, Walter Kennedy, considered that a publicity stunt and negated the pick.

That was in 1969, three years before Title IX of the Education Amendments Act decreed that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

But when Title IX administrators attempted to outlaw Iowa’s six-on-six play, arguing in the early 1980s that those girls restricted to defense-only were at a disadvantage for scholarship opportunities, Iowa officials and the Iowa public rebelled. Still the only state with separate bodies governing boys’ and girls’ sports, Iowa cited the popularity of the girls’ game—consistently outdrawing the boys’ state tournament and, even 45 years ago, generating rights fees for its own tournament in excess of six figures.

Not until 1993 did Iowa reluctantly abandon six-on-six for the standard five-per-team arrangement. And not without widespread regret among those who had reveled in the celebrity of being a six-on-six high school player. When 2019 state legislation to force the merger of Iowa boys’ and girls’ high school athletic associations failed, Iowa governor Kim Reynolds, who had played six-on-six high school basketball in the mid-1970s, told the Des Moines Register, “I’m still trying to get over the fact that we left six-on-six and went to five.”

There is a 2004 book, “The Only Dance in Iowa: A History of Six-Player Girls’ Basketball.” There was a 2008 Iowa Public Television special, “More Than a Game: Six-on-Six Basketball in Iowa.” There even was a 2009 stage show in Des Moines, “Six-on-Six: The Musical.” It had 18 original songs and a cast of 30. Iowa has a Granny Basketball League, formed in 2005, for women 50 and older who play by the 1920s rules and wear 1920s-style uniforms.

So the fuse was lit long ago for the current University of Iowa success and attendant spectator passion, with women from several generations drawn to the Caitlin Clark magic show—including Iowa head coach Lisa Bluder—fondly reminded of their six-on-six playing days.

Clark, for all her unprecedented feats, undeniably is being carried by the tides. “I’ve had so many people come up to me, like, ‘I played six-on-six basketball, and I just can’t believe the crowd you draw and how much fun you guys have playing,’” Clark told The Athletic. “These women who played 30, 40 years ago are just so mesmerized by our team and what we’re doing for women’s basketball. That never gets old. That’s super cool. A lot of those people are some of our biggest fans.”

Does the Mark Twain line from “The Gilded Age” fit here? “History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”

Becoming book-ish

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Don’t tell anyone, but I still haven’t finished Faulkner’s famous short story, “The Bear,” which was assigned during English lit class my first semester of college. Just the kind of negligence that happens when a person who delights in reading nevertheless limits himself to sports pages and magazines for far too long.

It was not the ideal approach to wider knowledge, especially for someone aspiring to be a journalist—a wordsmith of sorts. But I am here to report that there can be redemption. Over time, surrounded by Renaissance women and men—wife, friends, daughter, colleagues—becoming more well-read has rubbed off.

So while there remain literally scores of tomes on the multiple bookshelves around the house that have not yet been cracked by this reader, the perusal of literary works—joining a program already in progress among the cognoscenti—now continues apace. And boosted by this interesting new stimulus: Joining a monthly book discussion group at the local library.

It’s a bit like being back in school, in the sense of realizing there is no faking one’s way through the session just by reading the inside dust cover. The difference, though, is that the too-prevalent expectation among so many students—a good grade rather than more knowledge—is not the point in this gathering of committed bookworms.

On my own, I tend to marvel at authors’ skills to produce word pictures for scene-setting or to create realistic dialogue—how do they do that?—but the exchanges in a book discussion assemblage bring out musings on character development, relationships, plot twists and takes on the past beyond the dull recitation of historical dates and names. To hear the impressions of the others, prompting a hadn’t-thought-of-that insight, is like reading a good book review.

How did the setting figure into the story? Was there a significance to the protagonist’s name? What about some of the subtle literary references? Was the tale dramatic? Realistic? Humorous? Schmaltzy?

During my half-century as what we in the world of newspaper print called an ink-stained wretch, it regularly was made clear that reading—reading anything—is what leads to writing well. It’s a conviction that was embraced by no less an expert than the late novelist Larry McMurtry, who also was a rare-book scout and book store owner. In “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen,” one of three memoirs penned by McMurtry, he offered the delightful metaphor that the ranch life of his Texas youth, cowboys tending cattle, resembled the mission of a writer.

“What is [writing],” he asked, “but a way of herding words? First I try to herd a few desirable words into a sentence, and then I corral them into small pastures called paragraphs, before spreading them across the spacious ranges of a novel.”

A member of our discussion group had tipped “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen” to me. Probably would have missed it, otherwise. And my wife, leader of the library’s book discussion gatherings, zeroes in on volumes beyond my usual lighthearted fare and sticking with favorite authors.

We were assigned a book—a series of books, actually—about septuagenarians in a retirement complex who solved murders; another about siblings, their broken family, nostalgia and…a house; another with residents of an English Channel island relating their days under Nazi occupation during World War II—with their book club in a starring role; and one that is a collection of short stories loosely linked to travel situations.

In bygone days, when I traveled a lot for work, I occasionally would stop into out-of-town bookstores and check out the first page or two of the latest best sellers on display. Not taking time to get especially involved in the story; just another stab at examining the writing craft—what seemed to work and what didn’t. Maybe I could learn something.

There is a difference, as we journalists regularly and snarkily would remind each other, between writing and just typing. So, for anyone interested in the art of composition, to keep studying how the pros do prose—to get a glimpse into their bag of tricks—can never hurt. And the more minds to help sift through some notable scrivener’s yarn, the better.

Here’s the play….

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There was a recent headline on the website Yahoo!Sports asking if college football is “ready to get out of the stone age” by implementing in-game coach-to-player communication via tiny speakers inside players’ helmets. By copying that NFL system in effect since 1994, college coaches could further remove judgement calls from quarterbacks—who just happen to be the fellows in the cockpit of action—and endorse coaches’ control-freak impulses. There even have been reports that, unlike the NFL shut-off deadline of ending communication with 15 seconds left on the play clock, college coaches might be allowed to continue giving directions as a play unfolds.

“Joe’s open at the 10-yard line. Throw to him!”

My first thought, as a card-carrying member of the stone age, was of appalling micromanagement. Autocracy. Something between a general discouragement of athletes using their heads and complete player subservience. Isn’t decision-making an important role in individual performance, a demonstration of competitive awareness that abets physical skill?

“Interfering with the quarterback destroys his confidence,” Col. Red Blaik, who won three national championships during his 18-year career coaching Army, once argued. “He loses his faith in the coach….If the coach has worked properly with his quarterback [in training, the quarterback] knows more about running the works than does the coach.”

OK, Blaik coached in the 1940s and ‘50s. Ancient history. By the time Cleveland Browns coach Paul Brown began shuttling “messenger guards” into games with play calls in the mid-50s, the evolution toward robotic quarterbacking had begun in earnest. Brown, in fact, was the first to attempt the use of in-helmet walkie-talkies to decree a specific play, though those primitive gadgets sometimes picked up local radio stations and air-traffic controllers and soon were discarded.

That obviously didn’t stop the march toward dictating real-time orders from the sideline, leaving only the implementation of actions to the on-field cast. By the 1970s, Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry was shuttling his quarterbacks into the huddle on successful plays, a system that neither Roger Staubach nor Craig Morton appreciated.

But typically, critics—fans and commentators—so often ascribe blame for failure to the workers, not the boss. So the modern coach figuratively calls for a forward pass of the buck. (Once, when coach John McKay was asked what he thought of the on-field “execution” of his forever bumbling Tampa Bay Bucs, a first-year expansion team in 1978, he said, “I’m in favor of it.”)

It is difficult to imagine that, for decades, college football had a rule banning any instructions relayed from the bench—subject to a 10-yard penalty. The NFL, too, had such a prohibition until 1944. The first college coach to use baseball-like signals to telegraph plays from the sideline, in 1967, reportedly was Ohio State’s Woody Hayes. (Not that Hayes’ schemes appeared especially creative with a team known for its predictable “three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust” attack.)

Understandably, coaches seek as much control over developments as possible, given that retaining their jobs depends on winning. A belt-and-suspenders approach therefore has come to predominate. Coaches are electronically attached via headsets to assistants who are doing reconnaissance of the enemy from the press box. Signals are sent from the sidelines on “picture boards”—the photo of a bald-headed celebrity (no hair=no running backs) indicates the formation to the players; a drawing of an elephant might signify as so-called “heavy package” of extra tight-ends for short yardage; pictures of books could telegraph that players “read” the defensive alignment. Coaches wave arms, point fingers, pat their heads to relay instructions.

Plus, of course, there is the ubiquitous sight of the coach peering intently at a large laminated card on which he has various options. (A silly social media post, from some Brits self-styled as the Exploding Heads, just surfaced after the Super Bowl, wherein a English bloke accustomed to soccer wonders at many American football oddities, including, “Why is the coach holding a take-away menu?”)

All this military-like maneuvering, and especially the need for secrecy, of course has intensified after the University of Michigan was accused this past season of stealing opponents’ signs. Prominent NCAA coaches have contended that electronically transmitting commands—coach’s lips-to-player’s-ears—would solve the problem and, after some testing at a few bowl games, ought to be implemented forthwith.

From a stone-age perspective, that sounds like giving the coach a joystick and closing in on Esports.

Then and now

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What are the chances, when Notre Dame and Army renew their long-standing college football quarrel in New York City this coming Fall, that some sports journalist—steeped in history of the sport and of the profession—begins his or her game recap with some twist on “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky….”?

That’s how Grantland Rice commenced his report from the Polo Grounds a hundred years ago, a lede that has been called the most memorable in sportswriting history.

Of course, everything has changed since then—the evolution of sports coverage, mostly away from the “Gee-Whiz” tenor of Rice’s time; the rules and strategies and downright danger of football. This time, the two old rivals will meet at Yankee Stadium, long since Army (6-6 last season) has been a football power. In 1924, Army had lost only twice the previous two seasons and Notre Dame was on its way to a perfect 10-0 record.

They essentially were the two “national” college teams at the time, as Indiana University professor Murray Sperber documented in “Shake Down the Thunder,” his 2002 book that traces the history of Notre Dame football. Furthermore, as Allen Barra wrote in a 1999 New York Times recollection of that ballyhooed match, the 1920s “were the golden age of myth-making sports journalism.” And Grantland Rice was “king of the Gee-Whizzers,” the new breed of sportswriter that trafficked in “the most florid and exciting prose.” (And seen as opposing a more circumspect “Aw Nuts” school of scribes.)

Anyway, the story is that a Notre Dame press assistant happened to liken the 1924 Notre Dame backfield to a recent film, “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” and Rice ran with that ball:

Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army football team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds yesterday afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down on the bewildering panorama spread on the green plain below.

Rice rhapsodized (and maybe embellished) Notre Dame’s dominance—the final score, after all, was a thoroughly competitive 13-7—“through the driving power of one of the greatest backfields that ever churned up the turf of any gridiron in any football age.” Those Notre Dame backs “seemed to carry the mixed blood of the tiger and the antelope,” and when Layden scored the first Notre Dame touchdown, Rice described the 10-yard run “as if he had just been fired from the black mouth of a howitzer.”

Another factor at work that day was what Sperber cited as Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne’s media savvy, an understanding that playing in New York City—which had 11 daily newspapers at the time—was a marketing gold mine (and birthed the school’s so-called Subway Alumni). And Rice, columnist for the New York Herald Tribune whose work was syndicated widely, was “by far the most famous sportswriter of his era,” according to “King Football,” the 2004 book by Oregon State University liberal arts professor Michael Oriard—a former player, by the way, for both Notre Dame and the Kansas City Chiefs.

Rice’s Four Horsemen narrative, for all its poetic use of imagery and spectacle, left wide gaps of information that would not meet current editing standards. He did not use first names of players. He did not provide cumulative statistics such as team or individual yardage gained. His report was vague about when the scoring transpired. There is not a single quote in the piece, from coach or player or official.

That was the fashion then. Just as the exploits of the Horsemen—fullback Jim Crowley, halfbacks Elmer Layden and Don Miller and quarterback Harry Stuhldreher—were decidedly feeble compared to numbers common in today’s wide-open offenses. Stuhldreher threw only 33 passes all season (completing 25), hardly in the same ballpark as 2023 Notre Dame quarterback Sam Hartman’s average of 25 passes and 16 completions per game. Miller was Notre Dame’s leading rusher during the 1924 season with 763 yards, followed by Crowley’s 739, according to Sports-Reference.com. (There are no game statistics available for the Blue-Gray October Sky game.)

Still, as Barra wrote, the rise of college football in the 1920s, to a status in the American sports pantheon just behind Major League Baseball, “coincided with the rise of the sports pages” and “combined to make each other. And both helped to create Grantland Rice.” Even now, that first paragraph in Rice’s Oct. 18, 1924 Herald Tribune tale of the Four Horsemen riding to victory against Army endures in anthologies of sportswriting.

It could be argued that the opening lines are as memorable in the sports journalism universe as some of the great ledes in literature: “Call me Ishmael.” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” “It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

Or this one, from Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five,” which, come to think of it, recalls a certain extravagance in Rice’s account: “All this happened, more or less.”

The NFL bet

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Fifty years ago, the idea of putting the Super Bowl in Las Vegas, coupling the two primary examples of American excess, was as surreal as those two prodigious entities. Mostly because the National Football League—its Super Bowl showcase already out of control in 1974 and proclaimed by a commentator in that year’s host city of Houston to be “the championship of the solar system”—was adamant in its holier-than-thou stance against gambling.

“I would go anywhere,” then-NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle declared during Super Bowl Week of ‘74, “to testify against any proposals favoring legalized betting in pro sports. There is no doubt about the suspicions involved with betting, and we must be above suspicion.”

But here we are. The NFL now gleefully partners with multiple sportsbook operations—MGM, Caesars, FanDuel, DraftKings—has bookmaking establishments inside NFL stadiums that are open on game days, and debuted official NFL slot machines in Vegas days before this year’s big game. Where there is money to be made by the league…

It was right to the point, then, for the New York Times last week to note that the first Super Bowl played in Sin City “feels like a moment manufactured for” Hunter S. Thompson “as Las Vegas furthers the polishing of its image with the imprimatur of the NFL, which has made a seminal turn of its own with a public embrace of the gambling industry.” Thompson, creator of the subjective, first-person narrative he called “gonzo journalism,” attended that 1974 Super Bowl and produced a Rolling Stones magazine article headlined “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl.”

That was a take-off on Thompson’s best-selling 1971 book, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.” And the idea of the Rolling Stones piece was to subject the NFL to Thompson’s critical eye; though he considered himself a football fan, he cast himself as apart from what he saw as the NFL’s self-serving model of integrity.

For Rolling Stone, Thompson wrote that the Super Bowl headquarters hotel in Houston was “jammed with drunken sportswriters, hard-eyed hookers, wandering geeks and hustlers (of almost every persuasion) and a legion of big and small gamblers from all over the country who roamed through the drunken, randy crowd….”

That Super Bowl Week, I spent the better part of one day with Thompson, assigned by my Newsday editor to study the then-36-year-old, slightly bald, bespectacled, casually dressed celebrity author who smoked Benson & Hedges through a cigarette holder. (Not the only thing he smoked.) And the irony was that he appeared to be searching in vain for the Las Vegas cliché of rampant immorality.

During lunch in the lobby of the aforementioned hotel, he muttered about the absolute normality surrounding him. Where were the players and high rollers propositioning prostitutes? He drove me without warning to a dilapidated roadside bar—which appeared to be a topless joint, though not in use for that activity mid-day—but quickly left, with nothing to report.

We spent some time at a Super Bowl practice session for one of the teams—Miami eventually clobbered Minnesota in the dull title game to come—and Thompson decided that “the players almost all strike me as being the same person. I’ve never seen so many boring people.”

Then, as now, the hordes of reporters had no real news to unearth; everything about Super Bowl opponents already has been widely disseminated by the time they gather at the championship site. “I feel like calling my editor and telling him there’s no story here,” Thompson said. “There really isn’t anything happening.”

He subsequently wrote for Rolling Stone, “For eight long and degrading days, I had skulked around Houston with all the other professionals, doing our jobs—which was actually to do nothing at all except drink all the free booze we could pour into our bodies, courtesy of the National Football League, and listen to an endless barrage of some of the lamest and silliest swill ever uttered by man or beast…”

It must be noted that “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was straightforward in Thompson’s depictions of his own drug-induced haze—pill-popping, pot-smoking, tequila-swilling, acid-dropping. And that, in “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl,” he described his “crazed and futile effort to somehow explain the extremely twisted nature of my relationship with God, Nixon and the National Football League…”

The Super Bowl—I covered seven of the extravaganzas—never appeared to reach the level of disreputable behavior perceived by Thompson, though his radar likely was more sensitive to such grotesqueries. The event most definitely is over-the-top—a massive royal ball for the elite, scripted as a morality play of American values and competitiveness, sold as entertainment for the masses—thanks to the reach of television. In short, a voracious money magnet for the league and its partners.

Hunter S. Thompson died in 2005, of suicide. But he appeared to sense, a half-century ago, this just-consummated no-guilt relationship, which nicely fits Sin City’s marketed dispensation that “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” There already are hints that the Super Bowl could return there annually.

If so, they’re made for each other.

Football. And football.

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Pondering big football doings on the horizon…

First, an aside: A long-ago Dallas Cowboys star running back, Duane Thomas, when informed that having starred in the Super Bowl must have been “like going to the moon,” marveled in response, “You been to the moon, man?” Thomas’ reply to assertions that the Super Bowl was the “ultimate game” was similarly restrained. “If it’s the ultimate game,” he said, “how come they’re playing it again next year?”

So, with all due respect to the upcoming Super Bowl, America’s most-watched television event and cultural benchmark, the topic here is the football competition paramount in the eyes of most Earthlings: Soccer’s quadrennial World Cup tournament. And, interestingly, how that event’s return in 2026 to these shores is an example of retrofitting international expectations—physically as well as enthusiastically—into American mores.

Word has just come down that the World Cup championship final will be played on July 19, 2026 at the home stadium of American football’s two New York teams, the Giants and the Jets, in the New Jersey Meadowlands. This is a big deal, and more evidence that football—sorry, soccer—continues to be melded into the U.S. entertainment fabric.

We are well past the time when most of us in The Colonies reflected the great sportswriter Frank Deford’s perception that “USA” stood for “Uninterested in Soccer A-tall.” The 2026 World Cup essentially is guaranteed to set records for attendance and profit, in part because the tournament will be expanded to 48 participating teams, up from 32 in the last seven iterations. For the first time, three nations—the United States, Canada and Mexico—will share hosting duties, with the U.S. getting 78 of the tournament’s 104 matches.

And this time, 32 years since the U.S. staged the 1994 World Cup, the 11 U.S. stadiums in use will feel far less like mongrel soccer facilities, now better equipped to convert their gridirons to pitches to meet global requirements with widened playing surfaces and grass floors.

American football fields, Yank officials had to be reminded back in ’94, are 120 yards long and 53.3 yards wide, while soccer matches are played out on a 115- by- 75-yard layout. On grass; not artificial turf. Back then, before MetLife Stadium replaced Giants Stadium as New York metro’s primary football theatre, officials proposed what sounded like growing hair on a bald man’s head.

The idea was to construct a grass playing field on an elevated platform suspended by a scaffolding almost 12 feet above the permanent floor and extending six or seven rows into the Giants Stadium stands.

By the time World Cup sites officially were awarded then, the goofy platform idea had been ditched and great pallets of sod were trucked in from a North Carolina farm and placed over the fake turf. Likewise, grass was brought from a farm in California to temporarily cover the artificial stuff in the Pontiac Silverdome outside Detroit. (There was a lot of slipping and sliding on that grass inside the roofed Silverdome during the opening game there.)

These days, stadiums routinely cover their plastic grass with the real stuff to hold major soccer events. A Rhode Island outfit—Kingston Turf Farms—advertises having installed sod over the artificial surface for years at MetLife Stadium: “We bring in a crew to truck the specialty sod in, transport the sod to the field and install the sod over specialized turf protection layer…to transform an artificial playing surface to a natural grass surface in a 24-hour period,” Kingston Turf Farms broadcasts on its website.

And to make their field wider to meet soccer standards, MetLife officials plan to remove 1,740 seats, estimating a decrease in capacity from the 83,367 attendees at an October Giants-Jets Game to 74,895.

Of the other 2026 World Cup stadiums in the United States, those in Arlington, Tex.; Atlanta, Foxborough, Mass.; Houston, Inglewood, Calif.; Seattle and Vancouver also will cover their artificial turf with grass. (“Natural grass,” as the often-used redundancy has it.) And several stadiums are expected to figure out some way to widen their playing surfaces.

When international soccer officials granted the United States its first World Cup in 1994, it came with the stipulation that this country would establish an elite professional soccer league and, beginning in 1996, Major League Soccer materialized. And one consequence of that creation was the new league’s rejection of hybrid football/soccer venues. By 1999, the first “soccer-specific” stadium—with a wider field of grass—was opened in Columbus, Ohio and, of the 26 MLS teams now based in the United States, 22 of them compete in such arenas.

Such stadiums, by the way, were the brainchild of Lamar Hunt, an original founding investor in MLS. And a real football guy, however you define “football.” Hunt was a principal founder of the American Football League and of the charter member Dallas Texans. Who became the Kansas City Chiefs, beneficiaries of the 1966 AFL/NFL merger avidly pursued by Hunt.

The same Chiefs, of course, now attempting to win a big game that Lamar Hunt was first to call the “Super Bowl.”

A big loss

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My heroes have mostly been sports journalists, many of whom lived in a magical land called Sports Illustrated. The spiritual home of literary excellence, compelling narratives and revelatory insight, SI was Frank Deford, Roy Blount Jr., Dan Jenkins, Kenny Moore, Gary Smith and plenty more—and I was among the millions who wanted to participate, on some level, in the fun those people were getting away with.

But goodbye to all that. SI’s slow death in the internet age last year was hastened by the equivalent to committing suicide, when the magazine was accused of using artificial-intelligence-generated stories, complete with fake bylines. That sullied SI’s reputation far more than the cheap grab for attention with its annual swimsuit edition, which never had any more to do with sports and sportswriting than old claims by Playboy faithful that they treasured that publication “for the articles.”

Anyway, with SI’s massive layoffs this month, Valhalla is being boarded up. The money-changers who now own the brand are shutting down a primary nurturing place for future knights of the keyboard—as baseball’s sardonic superstar Ted Williams called reporters so adept at covering the business of competitive duels.

I am reminded of Deford’s observation in his 2012 memoir, “Over Time,” in which he predicted that in a not-too-distance life “no one will appreciate what sportswriting was really like at its apogee. I fear all you’d know would be blogs and/or statistics—the pole dancing of sports journalism.”

For followers of athletic entertainment—which certainly will continue to proliferate—the current ruling beast, ESPN, surely will carry on, along with countless podcasts and squawk-radio outlets. But those don’t give you elaborate storytelling, the kind of crafted writing that made you feel you were at the game and had insight into the participants. As Deford wrote of sites like ESPN, “there’s no poetry in its soul”—none of the kind of enticing prose that moved Sports Illustrated editors to corral such literary giants as John Updike, Jack Kerouac and George Plimpton for the occasional freelance article.

It was another noted SI alum, Pulitzer Prize winner and “Friday Night Lights” author Buzz Bissinger, who recently zeroed in on the great contribution of Sports Illustrated’s murderers’ row of stylish scribes. They showed all of us aspiring wordsmiths, Bissinger wrote, “the difference between sportswriting, a mindless layering of cliché upon cliché, and writing about sports.”

Deford once said that “when people hear you’re a sportswriter, they assume you’re more interested in the first half of the word than the second.” For proof of how the emphasis in fact ought to be on the “writer” part, there was—there used to be—Sports Illustrated.

An early exposure to that point came during my time in the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. Late in my senior year, when I was writing a sports column for the Columbia, Mo., city paper run by our J-School, I was summoned one spring day to fetch a widely-known author from the local airport for his appearance on campus.

That was George Plimpton who, at the time, was considered the most successful novelist to deal with the subject of sports. His “participatory journalism”—he wrote of acting in a Western movie, performing a comedy act at Caesars Palace, playing with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra—got the most attention when he wrote of pitching in a Big League exhibition game, sparring with a couple of boxing champions and, especially, training with the NFL’s Detroit Lions in pre-season camp. He first recounted that experience in a 1964 Sports Illustrated series that became his best-selling book (and later a movie), “Paper Lion.”

During our short drive to campus that day in 1969—Plimpton managed, uncomplaining, to fold his lanky 6-foot-4 body into my subcompact MGB—he said that he “would like to get across the idea that I wouldn’t have tried any of these things if I didn’t have a pencil with me at the time. I’m a writer, and I played on these teams to get closer to the people involved.”

Like the crowds of Sports Illustrated heroes I hoped to model, Plimpton perfected that difference between sportswriting and writing about sports. Sports was merely the backdrop for his intriguing yarns. It was typical Sports Illustrated fare. It was the journalism ideal—producing work that was deeply researched and well told.

Stop the presses!

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Guaranteed: There will be some new revelatory tidbit about Travis Kelce unearthed today. And tomorrow and the next day. People Magazine, BuzzFeed, Page Six, social media were made for that. In a culture mesmerized by celebrity, Kelce has become a primary Person of Interest, and therefore fully exempt from too-much-information grumbling.

His even more prominent girlfriend, his brother of equally elite status in pro football, his star turns on television and pod-casting, his fashion sense and philanthropy—all grist for the rumor and gossip mills.

And still there remain some factoids, consequential or not, to be dug up, even after the exhaustive piece in The Athletic that quoted former college teammates, coaches and roommates to describe what Kelce is really like, chronicling the animal-house existence of him and his brother Jason during their time together at the University of Cincinnati. (“So much beer,” it reported.)

So, in the spirit of flogging a hot topic to death, and with the understanding that there always is more that could be known, herewith some tangential nuggets not yet widely disseminated.

There is, on the Cincinnati campus, a 98-year-old building named Swift Hall. (No relation.) Among the university’s notable graduates are President and Supreme Court Justice William Howard Taft, baseball’s first commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, and trumpeter/bandleader Al Hirt. Not to mention Marge Schott, who once owned the major league Cincinnati Reds and once had her name on the school’s baseball stadium until her racist public remarks and comments supporting policies of the Nazi Party surfaced.

Basketball superstar Oscar Robertson and baseball Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax competed for the university. The first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, taught there late in his life.

In the belief that inquiring minds might not want to know—but ought to—there also is this about the Kelce boys’ college: The athletic nickname is Bearcats, and the burning question is: What is a bearcat?

There is such a thing as a Binturong, which is neither a bear nor a cat—at home in the rainforests of Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Palawan Island—that loosely qualifies in appearance to what could be part bear, part cat. And the word “bearcat” is said to be a simple translation of the Chinese word for panda—xiongmao.

Closer to a University of Cincinnati sports connection is the 1914 tale of the school’s football game against the Kentucky Wildcats, in which a Cincinnati gridder named Leonard (Teddy) Baehr—who was either a linebacker, fullback or lineman, depending on the source—excelled. A Cincinnati cheerleader named Norman Lyon supposedly raised an in-game chant, “Come on, Baehr-cat!” and the crowd joined in.

Or the nickname might be traced to a newspaper cartoon, which appeared after that game, depicting a bedraggled Kentucky Wildcat trying to escape a frightening creature labeled “Cincinnati Bear Cat.” (Might the cartoon have been inspired by the Baehr-cat chant?)

Or another, older origin story credits Cincinnati sports editor Jack Ryder declaring the team “played like bearcats” after a 1910 football loss. Which sounds like Ryder meant the moniker as an insult.

None of this has anything to do with Taylor Swift, who did not attend college but is known to be a cat lover—regular cats—and, during a University of Cincinnati game this fall, the school’s bearcat mascot donned a flowing blonde wig in a poor imitation of Swift (while wearing Kelce’s old No. 18 U. of Cincinnati jersey).

No need to keep your eyes peeled regarding more of this sort of thing popping up, though you can rest assured there will be much, much more to surface, whether Kelce’s Kansas City Chiefs continue to progress through the playoffs or not.

A bit much, maybe. But par for the course in these boldface-name-soaked times. And bearable.

 

Attractive trial balloon

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So Minnesota will run it up the flagpole this spring: a new state banner discarding its previous official seal that many Native Americans found offensive. An added plus to the change is the ditching of a flag cliché employed by more than 20 other states, all centering their insignia on an uninspired solid blue background.

Here’s a salute, then, to the new design. There are reports that it has been greeted by much of the public with a sort of golf applause (polite but hardly raucous), a reminder that widespread opposition to any change is rampant in modern culture. Still, something is afoot here, with a handful of states either having recently re-worked their flags or commissioned a study to do so.

This has my attention as someone who might argue having been a vexillologist before that term for flag aficionado existed. I was in fifth grade in the late 1950s when I mimicked a version of the California state flag by drawing that cool brown bear on an old white bedsheet; it was at least a year later when an American scholar named Whitney Smith was credited with coining vexillology—combining the Latin vexillum (that referred to flags carried by Roman cavalry) with logia for “study.”

Let’s study Minnesota’s search for a redesign. A call for submissions in the fall brought more than 2,600 suggestions—from children’s drawings to professional mockups. They featured stars and loons (the state bird), water (“Land of 10,000 Lakes”) and trees. Plus, there were some not-really-serious (they weren’t serious, were they?) portrayals of the unofficial state bird, the mosquito, and of hot dish, Minnesota’s popular take of the casserole.

Given the sly rejoinder typical among Minnesotans regarding their embrace of the state’s wintry reputation—“It keeps the riff-raff out”—my smart-aleck proposal was to emblazon the new flag with the universal prohibition sign (red circle/backslash symbol) superimposed over a cartoon member of the riff-raff, possibly wearing sunglasses and shorts, surrounded by snowflakes.

My friend Jay, a St. Paul resident, thought we could add an ice fisherman catching a curler through a hole in a lake. Give the guy one of those Elmer Fudd hats with ear flaps and it sounded like a winner.

Listen: New York, my home for a half-century, could stand an upgrade from its flag’s busy combination of sun symbol, two regal-like “supporters,” an eagle and “excelsior” banner, all on a humdrum blue field. How about, instead, an illustration of author Henry Miller’s characterization of New York as “a gigantic infant playing with explosives”?

But, no, this is not some gag. Sarcasm and scorn have no place here. Rhode Islanders, just because their state is 488 times smaller than Alaska and 251 times smaller than Texas, shouldn’t be saddled with a dishrag-sized flag to emphasize that inconsequential fact. You can’t give Idaho a potato logo and leave it at that.

Flag design ought to deal seriously with a state’s self-image and history, while tiptoeing around the dangers of poor design, forgettable images or—as with the former Minnesota gonfalon, offensive scenes of disenfranchised people. (There are 11 federally recognized tribes in the state.)

While Illinois, Michigan and Maine (which has a recent, striking plan for a single pine tree on a yellow field) are contemplating redesigns, Utah has come up with a simplified and eye-catching banner displaying a beehive, symbolizing the industriousness of its Mormon pioneers, backed by snow-capped mountain peaks. It’s simple and unique, like Texas’ lone-star ensign and the flag of New Mexico (a personal favorite), a plain yellow field with red Zia sun, referencing the state’s Indigenous nation.

There are memorable flags for Arizona (red star and sunburst), Alaska (big dipper), Colorado (big red ‘C’ on blue-and-white stripes), Tennessee (red with three white stars in a blue circle), Maryland (a jumble of red-and-white colliding with black and gold). Not great, but OK. Certainly different. Plus, of course, there is California’s distinct look.

Most state flags, though, are dull, barely recognizable from a distance or too similar to their neighbors’ (Florida and Alabama, both white with red X patterns).

Minnesota has the right idea. Working with a base design contributed by a 24-year-old man on the state’s southwestern border with Iowa and South Dakota, the State Emblem Redesign Commission, which spent $35,000 on the flag facelift project, came up with a final version that evokes the state motto—the North Star, positioned on a stylized depiction of the state’s shape and a nod to Minnesota’s waterworks, its 10,000 lakes and its source of the great Mississippi River.

Ted Kaye, a real vexillologist (secretary of the North American Vexillological Association), has given the new Minnesota flag an A+ for its simplicity, uniqueness and inclusion of meaningful symbols.

Thrown against the wall and sticking?

War (and) Games

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Let’s say you’re an optimist. In late November, United Nations members overwhelmingly passed an International Olympic Committee resolution calling for the worldwide cessation of violence during the two weeks of next summer’s Paris Olympic Games. Uplifting, no?

It’s called the Olympic Truce, a tradition first invoked 1,247 years ago—776 B.C.—when Greece’s warring rival city-states agreed to suspend all fighting to stage the first of the ancient Olympics’ elaborate sporting festivals. Merely a time out from butchery, but a ray of hope.

Let’s say you’re a pessimist. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has now been raging for almost two years, an aggression that in fact began with the annexation of Crimea in 2014. The recent Israeli-Hamas truce fell apart just days after it was implemented and fears of an expanded and brutal Middle East war persist. Can a collection of international sports poohbahs really expect to somehow put the brakes on these things?

Or, to cut that baby in half, what if the best you can expect is pragmatism?

In 2000, the Olympic Truce Centre was formally established in Athens and veteran diplomat and human rights activist Stavros Lambrinidis was named director. “We are not claiming to have a magic wand, where governments and religious organizations have failed,” Lambrinidis, now European Union ambassador to the United States, said when the Games returned to their ancient birthplace in 2004. “We hope to communicate to the world during the biggest peaceful celebration of humanity, where 12 more countries are members [of the IOC] than the United Nations, that with every representative in the stadium, of every religion, every color, every political point of view, you cannot fight and play at the same time. You can’t.

“You shouldn’t send some of your youth to play and some of your youth to die.”

Before the Truce Centre debuted, Olympic officials regularly had pitched the old call to give peace a chance—at least during the couple of weeks of their global athletic competition—with the slight possibility that all the world’s leaders and policy makers might like the idea.

In 1992 for the Barcelona Summer Games, the IOC cited its Truce tradition to grant Olympic status to Bosnia-Herzegovina, the breakaway Yugoslavia republic that was then taking a beating from the Serbs in their bloody civil war. Two years later, during Opening Ceremonies at the Lillehammer Winter Games, the IOC got a one-day pause in the ongoing Yugoslav war to allow 10,000 children from both sides of the conflict to be inoculated.

Then-IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch, in an unusual plea at the Lillehammer Opening Ceremonies, asked on-site spectators “and even those watching from your homes” to stand for a moment of silence for former Yugoslav city of Sarajevo, which had hosted the 1984 Winter Games, “whose people for over two years have suffered too much.

“Please,” Samaranch begged, “stop fighting. Please, stop killing. Drop your guns, please.”

No such thing happened for another year. In 1998, the Clinton administration was pressured to delay bombing raids in Iraq during the 1998 Nagano Winter Games. The Bush administration likewise was convinced to temporarily cease attacks on Afghanistan during the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. Neither of those military halts was permanent. And among the contradictory Olympic messages is how its Opening Ceremonies typically feature both a symbolic release of the “doves of peace”—and a military flyover. Not to mention the Games’ rampant nationalism even as they offer a brief alternative of play.

“I understand the cynicism,” Truce Centre director Lambrinidis said at the 2004 Athens Olympics. “This is a hard world. If it were a loving, peaceful world, you wouldn’t need an Olympic Truce. I’m willing to talk to any cynic—who, usually, by the way, are closet romantics. Is this a partly romantic appeal? Absolutely. Is it unrealistic? Absolutely not. The question is whether you can be a hard-headed realist and do some good. The question is: Do world leaders want to take this and run with it?”

He called himself “a convert” to the Olympic Truce tradition, a belief that beyond providing merely a diversion from bad news in the real world, it is an attempt to confront what is behind the discouraging front-page headlines. “The fact that the war doesn’t stop is not proof the Olympics Truce doesn’t work,” he said. “Whether it will stop wars for 16 days is not a legitimate yardstick.

“The power of this is that it’s not just a call for one more truce; it’s tied to an event in which every county in the world wishes to participate. You must create not just a police shield, but a moral shield around the Games that exercises public-relations pressure, even on non-state actors. Why treat terrorists as differently?

“It is not our job to decide what is a legitimate conflict and what isn’t, or whether a war is for self-defense or not. And these are Games for the youth of the world. You cannot punish the youth of the world for the sins of their leaders. We cannot use the stick approach, but we can use the carrot.”