Rams’ move follows the money

Word that the Rams will return to Los Angeles has me temporarily unstuck in time and briefly suspended from cynicism.

November 2, 1958. My 12^th birthday. The substantial gift from my father was to accompany him, no sports fan but a steadfast parent, to the Los Angeles Coliseum to attend my first NFL game, between the Rams and Chicago Bears.

To a sixth-grader, this was a magnificent thing, and the occasion began to take on enormous heft when my father and I found ourselves stranded, moments before kickoff, on the 110 Freeway as we approached the stadium exit. There were 100,470 souls about to squeeze into the substantially roomy Coliseum, one of the grand American sporting venues. The Rams were 2-3 at the time, the Bears 4-1, yet that crowd remains the second-largest in the history of the franchise—founded in 1936 in Cleveland before spending 49 seasons in L.A. and the last 21 in St. Louis.

What ensued that afternoon was a wild 41-35 Rams’ victory and an audacious one-man performance by the Rams’ 5-foot-11 running back Jon Arnett, whose weaving, breathtaking journeys across the floor of the Coliseum—repeatedly leaving Bears defenders grasping at air—accounted for 298 yards. Arnett ran 72 yards with a screen pass; returned a punt 36 yards through traffic; brought back another punt 24 yards and another 58 yards; launched runs from scrimmage of 52 and 38 yards.

Back then, before there was video, the Los Angeles Times regularly published a series of birds-eye photos of consequential plays, employing little dots to illustrate the progression of a ball carrier’s trek downfield. It’s possible that those day-after newspaper recreations of Arnett’s forays were a factor in propelling me toward an interest in sports journalism.

Anyway. My family left L.A. in 1962—not for a bigger stadium, corporate suites or naming rights—so my geographical distance accelerated the natural process of outgrowing a young lad’s starry-eyed fandom. But as a sports reporter for almost a half-century, I crossed paths with the Rams several times before they left California in 1995; in fact, I interviewed their relentlessly hands-on owner, Carroll Rosenbloom, just months before he died in 1979.

And what I learned then has echoed through the years: Fabulously wealthy team owners regularly threaten to move as a ploy to wangle political support for more palatial stadiums, better financial breaks from the local authorities and the helpless taxpayers.

Rosenbloom had owned the Colts in 1971 when they won the Super Bowl, but he became unhappy with the stadium deal in Baltimore and made a franchise-for-franchise trade with then-Rams owner Robert Irsay the next year. By 1979, the season the Rams at last qualified for the Super Bowl in their sixth consecutive trip to the playoffs, Rosenbloom had arranged for the team to play in nearby Anaheim the next season, complaining about the 77-year-old L.A. Coliseum’s amenities—“Even in the press box, I can’t get to a toilet without walking for seven minutes. I take an empty tennis ball can with me so I can take a leak without missing seven minutes of the game.”

What prompted Rosenbloom’s widow, Georgia, to pack the Rams off to St. Louis in 1995 was her failure to get a new stadium arrangement in L.A. (NFL owners attempted to block the move but Georgia Frontiere, by then married for a sixth time, prevailed by threatening to sue.)

She died in 2008 and Stan Kroenke, the Missouri native who had helped her manipulate the transfer to St. Louis, went from minority to majority ownership. And now it is Kroenke, who married into the massive wealth of the Walmart Waltons, who has burned a bridge with the St. Louis community in search of greater riches in L.A.

In his application to the league requesting the move, he declared a new St. Louis stadium proposal would put him “on the road to financial ruin.” And on the road to Southern California, because “home,” to these people, is where the money is.

Fans, the folks so emotionally (as well as monetarily) involved in all this, naturally have no power in such decisions, as a recent New Yorker magazine spoof by satirist Andy Borowitz reminded:

Two days after their team completed a losing season for the 15^th time in 17 years, a consortium of Cleveland Browns fans has formally applied to relocate the NFL franchise to Los Angeles. Unlike other teams vying to move to L.A….the Browns’ application is believed to be the only one submitted entirely by fans.

According to Butch Rydzewski, the Browns fan who is masterminding the relocation effort, Los Angeles is the ideal destination for the team “because it is two thousand miles away and someplace most of us have no intention of ever visiting.”

Meanwhile, awaiting the construction of the gold-digging Kroenke’s luxurious new stadium in Inglewood (which is a “suburb” essentially surrounded by the sprawling Los Angeles city limits), the Rams will play next season in the venerable Coliseum.

That, to my 12-year-old self—oblivious to the robber-baron bent of professional sports fat cats—is where they belong.

Why the Al Jazeera report on doping is not shocking

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This is not meant to cast aspersions on Peyton Manning or any of the other prominent athletes implicated for obtaining banned performance-enhancing substances in the recent Al Jazeera report. (Those named all denied the allegations, and two have filed defamation suits.) And this certainly isn’t intended to condone doping in sports.

But a matter-of-fact reaction to the Al Jazeera piece is to recall a 40-year-old declaration by two-time Olympic weightlifter Mark Cameron. It was around 1976 when Cameron suggested that if his fellow competitors were told that eating scouring pads would make them stronger, there would not be a clean pot within miles of the gym.

About that time, on an assignment to cover the U.S. Olympic track and field trials, I was so bombarded with heavy hints of widespread doping that I began to wonder if it was possible for anyone to qualify for the Olympics without a prescription. In the weight events, particularly, American athletes were claiming that virtually all of the top international competitors were engaging in prohibited chemical activity. And so they must as well. Discus thrower Jay Silvester, who had won a silver medal in the previous Games, estimated that “99 to 100 percent of the world-class weightmen use steroids.”

When asked directly if he was in that category, Silvester said, “No comment.” The discus winner at those trials, Mac Wilkins, responded to the same question with this wink-and-nod quote: “Aren’t steroids supposedly illegal?”

Some things are a mystery, but some things are abundantly clear. Irrefutable evidence of doping violations is difficult to pin down, but elite athletes have been seeking an edge—by almost any means—forever. And it has only been during the current century, when the high-profile sports of baseball and football finally began to take serious anti-doping measures, that real penalties—and therefore a stigma—were attached to juicing.

Long before Major League Baseball or the NFL paid attention to this stuff, the U.S. Olympic Committee hired its first drug-control chief, Dr. Robert Voy, recognizing in the early 1980s a need for aggressive testing. The first major drug busts in sports were at the Pan American Games of 1983, in Caracas, and 1987, in Indianapolis, and it was then that Voy said significant anti-doping progress only would commence “if the NFL would go back to fielding 235-pound linemen, instead of 285-pounders; if the NFL would face the steroid problem; if Division I college football would wipe out steroid use, which they could do for the same money they spend on tape.”

Now, 30 years later, New York Times columnist Michael Powell has made the same point in his sober reaction to the Al Jazeera undercover documentary naming Manning (among others)—that the “shock would be to discover that more than a few men in this morally compromised sport are completely clean. In the last two decades, the weight of NFL linemen has jumped by 50, 60, 70 pounds, and men the size of linebackers play wide receiver.”

Powell quoted University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke’s observation that “football and doping kind of go hand-in-hand.”

This is not the kind of information the typical sports fan—or the typical sports journalist—much cares to think about, and that has enabled sports authorities to mostly look the other way, especially since theirs is an endeavor in which “doing anything to win” is a maxim.

These days, at least, we have tentatively accepted that the first step in resolving the doping issue is to acknowledge the extent of the problem. So that stars fingered by Al Jazeera, as in the the BALCO and Biogenesis scandals, are inclined toward passionate repudiation—instead of instructive parables about scouring pads and clean pots.

The Olympics: My window on the world

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If I were writing a book on my experiences covering 11 Olympic Games (which I so far only have threatened to do), here is where I would start…..

Tonya and Nancy already had hijacked the Lillehammer Olympics by the time citizens of the world arrived in Norway in February 1994. There already had been weeks of legal scrimmages and news-conference scrums leading up to the Games, feeding the public’s compulsive appetite for sordid, sensational theatre.

Every day was a headline: The bodyguard squealed. The hit man confessed. Tonya Harding denied everything. OK, Harding knew—but only after the fact—of the Olympic Trials plot against figure-skating rival Nancy Kerrigan. Harding’s ex-husband ratted on her.

It was a paperback novel. A game of Clue. (It was the bodybuilder. With a telescoping baton. In the practice rink.) The story had operatic heft, daytime TV melodrama, something to offer to crime sleuths and voyeurs alike as it veered from serious to silly. It was an episode that simultaneously brought unprecedented attention to the Olympics even as it revealed the underbelly of ferocious competition—and didn’t necessarily show media coverage at its best.

So, we should talk about that.

Meanwhile, though: Consider the Olympic big picture, this wonderful mess of contrasts, this incongruous pageant of crass commercialism, uplifting personal triumph, clashing politics, inspirational brotherhood, divergent cultures and international confusion—all balled up into this wacky theme park consisting of mostly odd sports.

And just plain adventure.

Two days before the Lillehammer Opening Ceremonies, I and a couple of fellow ink-stained wretches visited an army-green tepee positioned on the edge of frozen Lake Mjosa—down the hill from the center of Lillehammer—to sit cross-legged on reindeer rugs around a cozy fire for a chat with four Sami women.

The Sami—don’t call them “Lapps,” the politically incorrect term Norwegians often used that translates to “outcasts”—had created a campsite to position themselves in the Olympic spotlight and depict the traditional life of their people, nomadic reindeer herders from the northern-most edges of Norway, Sweden and Finland.

Gunhild Sara Buljo, marveling a bit at temperatures (8 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit) far warmer than at her home near the North Pole, was wearing a multicolored, hood-like gohpin on her head and a ruffled, pleated knee-length gakti dress of blacks and reds. She resembled a square dancer from somewhere in the American Midwest. Ellen Eira Rasoal sat next to her, stirring the contents of three large black pots. “Reindeer meat, coffee and”—Rasoal smiled—“toddy.”

Another Real Olympic Experience. Through the intensity and drama of grand sporting competitions and global ambiance, the Olympics never fails to provide what Times of London columnist Simon Barnes once described as “an unfailing source of fabulousness” with “an incandescent vividness….”

So true. Beyond the competitive landscape are the lessons. Geographical, historical, cultural, political, lingual. Culinary.

In Seoul (1988), I learned that eating kimchi can clear your sinuses, whether you want them cleared or not. In Barcelona (1992), I discovered a daily timetable that takes some getting used to—the locals take their afternoon siestas, don’t eat dinner until around 10 p.m., regularly lounge at outdoor shops drinking coffee or stronger beverages until 2 or 3 a.m. In Nagano (1998), a handful of us found the small tunnel near the Olympic complex where government, military leaders and Emperor Hirohito were to have been sheltered late in World War II in the event of the ground war which never came.

In Sydney (2000), I was repeatedly informed by laid-back native Aussies that there are “no worries.” In Athens (2004), I was constantly reminded that a walk along Aristotle Street or Socrates Street did not cause one to be philosophical so much as practical: Red lights did not necessarily apply along the buzzing, narrow roadways. And motor scooters were known to pull onto sidewalks among the pedestrians.

In Lillehammer—while editors were terrorized into insisting that “we must keep this Tonya and Nancy story alive,” dispatching four times the manpower necessary to detail every sniffle and frown on display in figure-skating practice sessions—I learned about the Sami’s indigenous tonal chant, the Yoik; about how most modern Sami lived in log cabins rather than tepees; about how each Sami family in the far North kept its own flock of reindeer. For food, for entertainment (they raced them), for clothing and rugs.

I also learned about trolls.

Everywhere were statues of trolls, some only four inches tall, others as high as a grown human’s chest. It was possible to buy a Troll Certificate, which proclaimed: “This is to Certify That (insert your name here) has visited Norway, the Kingdom of the Trolls, and today became a member of the Friends of the Trolls.” It had a very official Friends-of-the-Trolls seal in the lower right-hand corner.

There were troll restaurants, a Troll Garden Hotel, an entire Troll Park in Lillehammer’s Gudbrandsdalen Valley, a “world’s largest troll sculpture”—45 feet high, weighing 70 tons and looking like a furry takeoff on Rodin’s “The Thinker”—in nearby Hunderfossen. And whole sections of troll literature in Norwegian bookstores.

I was told by Kjerstin Hansen, who worked for the Ministry of Family and Children in Oslo, that trolls “are quite dumb. Most of the stories about trolls have something to do with a princess being taken away by a troll, then someone rescues the princess, and the troll doesn’t even understand what happened.”

Trolls, the natives related, can be fooled into benign dancing to the music of famous Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, and often can be talked out of potential trouble by little children. Yet my search for a real, live troll did not go well.

“Maybe you are looking in the wrong places,” one Lillehammer resident said.

“You should look up there, in those mountains above the Olympic ski jump,” an Olympic volunteer suggested. “But you must go at night. And you must not bring a flashlight or torch. Trolls don’t like light.”

At the Olympic information desk, it was recommended that “you need to have a lot of fantasy” to find a troll. “And aquavit,” which is a strong alcoholic drink made from potato and caraway. “The homemade stuff is the best,” I was assured.

But then, in the end—without benefit of flashlight or liquor—I became convinced that I had found this American troll, set loose in Norway to bring a cloud of confusion to everyone and everything. Tonya Harding.

The conclusion of that eerie Tonya and Nancy tale came in Hamar, the satellite Olympic city an hour’s drive south of Lillehammer where the figure skating competition played out in a smallish arena that seated 6,000 people and was crawling with media. Even though most Norwegians preferred to follow the biathlon—a combination of cross-country skiing and shooting.

The women’s long-program skating final was on February 25, 1994—50 days after the bizarre attack on Harding’s rival, Kerrigan, during a practice session at the U.S. Olympic skating trials in Detroit. (I should have known something unpleasant was afoot in the Motor City that week; there was no hot water in my Detroit hotel shower.)

The Harding-Kerrigan dirty-tricks story brought an invasion of high-profile television celebrities such as Connie Chung and big-name columnists, dispatched to Norway in anticipation of possible mayhem—parachuting into what they believed would be a gold-medal showdown between the two U.S. rivals. Teams of reporters were ordered to synchronize their watches to Tonya Standard Time and pay her full attention—even during the first week of the Olympics, before Harding had arrived in Norway.

What added to the whole Twilight Zone tension, of course, were the backgrounds of Harding and Kerrigan. One, Harding, a hardscrabble Oregon lass, a smoker (though Harding lied about that) proud of her blue-collar skills as drag-racer and mechanic, street-wise and tough. The other, Kerrigan, a more traditionally elegant practitioner of the event and highly sought for endorsements—a sort of Cinderella, whose father was a welder on disability, her mother legally blind.

Of course, when Harding arrived in Norway, out of shape and moody, the weirdness factor only multiplied. My newspaper, Long Island’s Newsday, became so caught up in the anticipation of physical danger that it photo-shopped a front-page picture of Harding and Kerrigan virtually side-by-side in practice to suggest an on-ice confrontation.

So, OK, the what-bleeds-leads tabloid types got part of what they wanted. During practice between the skating short and long programs, there was a bizarre training-session crash: Another Tonya—Tanja Szewczenko of Germany—collided with Oksana Baiul, the 16-year-old orphan from Ukraine and eventual gold medalist, who suffered a cut on her leg, requiring stitches, and a strained back.

And that wasn’t all. The next morning’s warmup session for the gold-medal final featured a double-dare incident, wherein two-time champion Katarina Witt shouted down France’s Surya Bonaly after a slight fender-bender resulting from Bonaly’s intimidating drive-bys while the top competitors shared the rink.

Throughout this melodrama, what most news organizations missed was how the singular Tonya-Nancy story was thoroughly tangled in the stereotype of women in sports. No other Olympic sport—no other sport, period—is as committed to presenting women in the “traditional” sense of beauty and effortless grace as figure skating is.

Furthermore, “traditional” values of commoner (Harding) and princess (Kerrigan)—though only partially based in fact—fueled a theater aspect that served to keep women’s figure skating on the fringe of “real” sports, thereby furthering a marginalization of women athletes.

There was a goodly amount of irony to that. The Lillehammer Olympics were staged in a nation theoretically ideal for promoting women’s sports, in that Norway is a country of the vigorous outdoors and Norwegians of both sexes, from the time they are 3 or 4 years old, are introduced to cross-country skiing and camping in the frozen woods.

At the time of those Olympics, both Norway’s prime minister (Gro Harlem Brundtland) and president of its parliament (Kristi Kolle Grondahl) were women, as is Norway’s current prime minister (Erna Solberg). Plus, of course, Norway’s queen, Sonja.

Yet in Norway’s push to win medals during those ’94 Olympics, almost all of the 230 million Norwegian kroner (about $33 million U.S. at the time) poured into its sports federations was going into men’s sports. And, after all, when that male chauvinist French Baron Pierre de Coubertin founded the Modern Olympics in 1896, he declared the Games to be “the solemn periodic manifestation of male sport based on internationalism, on loyalty as a means, on arts as a background and the applause of women as a recompense.” He fought against the inclusion of female athletes in his Games.

So there we were in that winter wonderland, most of us ordered by editors to take the daily bus ride from our housing in small accommodations near Lillehammer, down to Hamar, to witness another dull skating workout and the fairly embarrassing effort of hundreds of reporters to get Harding or Kerrigan, or anyone else, to say something interesting or informative about the upcoming competition. (I did borrow a colleague’s rental car one day for the short trip, and was treated, as I drove, to live play-by-play of the men’s downhill on the radio. In Norwegian. There was great excitement in the broadcaster’s call, though I was helpless, with my uneducated American ear, to understand any of the description. It just sounded like, “Babada babada babada babada Tommy Moe! Babada babada babada Tommy Moe! Tommy Moe! Tommy Moe!” At least I was not surprised to learn, a bit later, that American Tommy Moe had turned in a terrific run. And won.)

Understand that editors who wouldn’t know an Axel from an 18-wheeler expected a buildup to a sort of Ali vs. Frazier fight of the century. There were legitimate aspects to the nutty episode, of course, with Harding threatening to sue the U.S. Olympic Committee if she were prevented from competing, and the USOC lawyering up to insure against future embarrassment of this kind. But veteran Olympic observers long before came to the conclusion that Harding was completely off her game. Kerrigan’s physical recovery from the attack by Harding’s henchmen was a story. Harding’s competitive possibilities were nonexistent.

She had been runner-up in the 1991 world championships, part of the American sweep with winner Kristi Yamaguchi and third-place Kerrigan, but by the time she got to Norway, she was no threat to medal, really nothing more than a sideshow. She eventually finished a badly beaten eighth.

It was Kerrigan who took the lead in the skating short program and who performed the competitive routine of her life in the decisive long program, only to lose a narrow 5-4 judges’ vote—strictly along Eastern bloc-Western partisan lines—to Baiul.

Not quite three years later Baiul, having relocated to Connecticut to further a professional skating career, was arrested for driving drunk at 97 miles per hour in a 45-mph zone in suburban Hartford. Not Harding’s fault. But during and after the Lillehammer Olympics, an over-the-top chaos seemed to emanate from the Harding stakeout.

In the end, it was as if Typhoid Tonya had cast her evil spell on the entire proceedings. And the whole life-imitating-art-imitating-life extremes became—and remain—deeply ingrained in the popular culture.

Louden Wainwright III wrote a song, “Tonya Twirls:”

You knew she was in trouble/ When you saw her bodyguard.

When you saw those two together/ You knew it wasn’t hard

To see that she was different,/ Not just one of the girls;

With their gliding and their sliding/ And their piroutees and twirls.

There have been versions of Harding trotted out on Seinfeld, on the Simpsons. Weird Al Yankovic included the Tonya and Nancy account in his music video “Headline News,” with a scene of “Tonya” and “Nancy” literally wrestling on the ice. “Tonya, The Musical” was a short-run, low-budget, very-far-off-Broadway show in which “Tonya” sang, “I want the cash” and rhymed it with “I’m tired of bein’ white trash,” and “Nancy” simpered through “It’s Not My Fault I’m Good.”

In 2008, “Tonya & Nancy, The Rock Opera,” was staged in Portland, Ore. (with the real Tonya in the audience one night).

“My mom is legally blind,” sang the Kerrigan character in the introductory number.

“My mom is legally nuts,” responded the Harding actress.

On the 15^th anniversary of the Lillehammer Games, I spoke to the original creative source behind that production, novelist Elizabeth Searle, who called the Tonya and Nancy drama “a primal story that taps into the themes of American life. It’s a microcosm of our celebrity-crazed, super-competitive, violent, glitzy society. There’s just a theme of obsessive competitiveness of American life; almost anyone can relate to that. The jealousy. The wanting to do anything to win. Also, the characters: You couldn’t imagine these people.”

The rock opera’s songs were ripped directly from headlines and from actual quotes, with titles such as “Whip Her Butt” (sung by “Tonya”), “Estacada” (a lament by Harding’s ex-husband, Jeff Gilloly: “When you wake up sleeping in your car in Estacada, ‘cause your house is surrounded by reporters and FBI…”)

Other titles were “The Laces Broke”—a reference to Harding requesting a do-over during her Olympic final because of skate problems—“You’re the One” and “It’s Our Whole Life” (a Tonya-Nancy duet).

Searle called the strangely true Tonya and Nancy drama an “absurd, only-in-America dark comedy. And, unlike O.J., it didn’t end tragically. Some people can still laugh about it.”

So, one Olympic cycle after the Harding-Kerrigan caper, when Tara Lipinski and Michelle Kwan were gearing up for a far more benign duel for Olympic gold in Nagano, battling each other at the national championships in the country music capital of Nashville, I couldn’t pass on attempting a lyric that melded the local genre with the competition.

I envisioned words set to music featuring a slide guitar and fiddle accompaniment—quintessentially middle American. The thing would have been published, if two crack Olympic writers—Jay Weiner of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and Brian Cazeneuve of Sports Illustrated—and I had been able to sell our proposal for a thoughtful yet fun-loving book we were going to call “Numb and Numb-er, The Winter Olympics Guide for Flakes.”

It went something like this….

I can’t figure skatin’/ And I can’t figure her

Slippin’ around with guys in sequins/ Fallin’ on their wallets with a certain frequen

Cy.

‘Course I’ve heard of Tonya/ Heard of Nancy, too.

But this ain’t exactly stock-car racin’/ Ain’t football and ain’t quail-chasin’ –I

Guarantee.

… (Chorus)…

No knee-cappin’, no fist-fightin’/ No bad-mouthin’ in a bind.

She’ll smile right onto that gold-medal stand/ If she can just stay off her behind.

Is Tara in the short program?/ Is Michelle in the long?

Does size have somethin’ to do with things?/ How come there’s music but nobody sings

The songs?

…

Some costumes’ll make you cry,/ Some’ll make you laugh.

Judges just settin’ there with poker faces/ Givin’ life sentences on the basis

Of a four ‘n’ a half.

…(repeat chorus)…

About the four-and-a-half reference: This was before they changed skating’s scoring system, from a perfect 6.0. But, then, there are lots of old country songs out there that allude to nickels in jukeboxes and dimes in pay phones.

And, by the way, during that visit with the Sami women? We asked if those folks, visiting from up there above the Arctic Circle, had ever heard of someone named Tonya Harding. One of the women solemnly removed a stick that was stirring the pot of reindeer meat. And gently whacked herself on the knee.

A gun discussion by the N(B)A

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(Stephen Curry on NBA’s PSA)

Whoa. Stop the presses.

“NBA Lends Its Name and Its Stars to Campaign Against Gun Violence.” Front page of the New York Times just before Christmas. Now, that’s news. Far more staggering than ongoing accounts of Donald Trump’s xenophobia and bellicosity; the bloody conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Turkey; the latest report of America’s top one percent exploiting tax loopholes to further enhance their filthy-richness.

For a sports league to wade into the contentious national debate surrounding firearms is truly astonishing. By definition, sports is escapist entertainment, primarily concerned with expanding its clientele and therefore averse to ruffling feathers. As Nathaniel Friedman pointed out on Salon, “The NBA has put itself in a position that major sports leagues—multibillion-dollar operations dependent on broadcast revenue—should in theory try to avoid. They’re in the business of attracting new fans, not alienating them. Using the league as a platform for unpopular ideas is deeply counterintuitive…”

New Jersey’s Record newspaper noted how “professional sports leagues usually promote causes that won’t cause a backlash, such as fighting breast cancer or supporting Habitat for Humanity.” Traditionally, the standard for big-time athletes to avoid damaging their marketability is Michael Jordan’s reported explanation for declining to support black Democrat Harvey Gantt’s senatorial campaign against race-baiting GOP incumbent Jesse Helms in 1990: “Republicans buy sneakers, too.”

So this is a big deal, what a Washington Post editorial called “a brave decision…charting a new course in civic responsibility.” Partnered with former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety project, the NBA-endorsed TV spots do not mention the phrase “gun control” or call for specific policy or legal action. Instead, they lament the loss of innocent lives, at a time when—according to polls—the need for more reasonable access to weapons is something that the majority of Americans favor.

The NBA appeal, then, hardly casts it as a cultural infidel, and Everytown for Gun Safety’s Jason Rzepka stressed to SBNation that the project is “neither pro-gun nor anti-gun,” but “about gun violence.”

Predictably, though, the NBA/Everytown effort is being interpreted by some trigger-happy Second Amendment vigilantes as an assault on their constitutional rights. Fox News correspondent Ed Henry expressed dismay that the public service announcements spoiled some citizens’ Christmas joy. (“Shouldn’t people have a chance to celebrate with their families and not what is seen clearly as a political message?” he asked.) The online site northwestfirearms.com used its message board to ask, “Are you ready to boycott the NBA?”

And Larry Pratt, founder of Gun Owners of America, somehow perceived racial and religious implications, telling Henry, “Privately-owned guns have become the last line of defense of true white Christian Americans. And now they’re going on about how ‘we can stop gun violence together?’ What does that have to do with white people when black Americans are twice as likely to die from gun violence in this country? And gun violence is committed by predominantly black people, not white people.”

Whoa.

Clearly, the NBA’s resolve to get involved in such a touchy topic is a revelation. Big news because of the passionate—and anticipated—pushback, the inclination to choose up sides and apply a full-court press to the NBA’s business model. Still, in terms of shaping attitudes about illegal firearm trafficking, it has been pointed out that young people watch sports and hear what their favorite players say. And NPR commentator Frank Deford said he was willing to bet “there are more sports fans in Congress than there are gun fans.”

Hey, don’t shoot. I’m just the messenger.

Odell Beckham might be really sorry.

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So we went from a sorry situation, Odell Beckham Jr.’s reckless and vicious comportment during the Giants-Carolina Panthers game, to Beckham’s issued apology—which isn’t the same as saying he regretted trying to take off an opponent’s head.

In fact Beckham, glorified for the neither moral nor immoral ability to catch footballs with one hand, didn’t come out with his apology until his one-game suspension (which he had appealed) was upheld. And even then, his expression of remorse was offered to his teammates, the Giants organization and fans. With no mention of either the Panthers or defensive back Josh Norman, whom Beckham very well could have rendered a paraplegic by launching himself—helmet-first and full-speed—at Norman’s head.

Perhaps Beckham’s “apology” fit the rarely employed definition: A justification of his actions rather than an expression of penitence—the old Plato Apology of Socrates defending himself in 399 B.C. against charges of “corrupting the young.” The 23-year-old Beckham did go on about how “a lot of kids look up to me as a role model” and how that “is a responsibility I accept and take seriously.”

Certainly, Giants coach Tom Coughlin and some Beckham teammates did the Platonic thing in countenancing Beckham’s relentlessly nasty play by maintaining that the Panthers had heaped contumely upon him. “He was provoked,” Coughlin said.

The coach cited reports that a member of the Panthers, during pre-game warmups, had threatened Beckham while holding a baseball bat, and painted Beckham as something of a victim because Norman also violated the no-roughing rules. (Norman was fined but not suspended.)

But the NFL dismissed, for lack of evidence, suggestions that Beckham was the target of opponents’ homophobic slurs. (As if that were license to attempt inflicting serious physical harm.) Just as easy to disregard was Beckham’s post-game excuse that his actions merely were a function of manly competitiveness—the last resort of cheap-shot scoundrels.

So, unable to talk his way out of the suspension, Beckham released his written apology in which his (or his consultant’s) eloquent wording acknowledged that he had “dropped the ball on sportsmanship.” More than one commentator called that a “perfect apology.” But people who study these things have noted how they too often are “part of the ritual,” as author Paul Slansky put it, allowing offenders to “just move on.”

Slansky, who co-authored the 2006 book, “My Bad: 26 Years of Public Apologies and the Appalling Behavior That Inspired Them,” once told me he considered the public mea culpa “rarely sincere because it’s obligatory. It’s meaningless. [A person] apologized; how easy is that? You have to prove you mean it. Otherwise, it’s just all p.r.”

It is to Beckham’s benefit that there is a willingness in the sport’s culture to quickly leave unpleasantries behind. “Football fans—and the football media—have zero long-term memory,” DJ Gallo wrote in The Guardian. “Our brains function like we’ve taken years of spearings from Odell Beckham.” Outrage over some player’s misdeeds regularly is replaced by hearty cheers as soon as he resumes excelling for the home team.

At this point, Beckham must be given the benefit of the doubt. University of Massachusetts psychiatry professor Aaron Lazare, who spent 12 years researching his book, “On Apology,” has allowed that “people do apologize for genuinely humanist reasons.” But other times, he said, “they do it to get off the hook.”

Maybe this is a case of a real apology, with the ability to remove a desire for revenge, to encourage forgiveness, to relieve guilt. Coughlin insisted that Beckham “felt bad” about the whole thing. Or maybe it’s just Beckham bunkum. We’ll see.

Merry Christmas

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(In a previous century, Newsday would publish an annual Christmas essay, each penned by a staff member, and somewhere along the way I was invited to participate. Here, slightly updated, is the old yarn….)

“Write about snow,” my daughter said.

That would be a Christmas topic. It also would expose me as an Outsider. I grew up in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, California, New Mexico. My first recollection of snow was in the Dick Tracy strip of the Sunday comics one mid-December, big white flakes wafting down onto Tracy’s stylish yellow fedora. People didn’t wear fedoras in the South and West. Until I went off to college in the Midwest, I don’t recall owning a sweater, either.

Now, frankly, I can get fairly passionate about snow’s rightful place in the whole Christmas mood. Currier & Ives prints. Snowball fights. Ice-skating on the local lake. One year we drove up to Connecticut to chop down our own tree in a postcard snow-covered field, equipping ourselves with boots and hats and scarves and a saw. What we should have brought was one of those surveyor tripods, because if an otherwise perfect tree is growing on a hillside, it will lean alarmingly when snugly nestled into its stand in the den. It will then necessitate small guide wires tied to the sliding-glass door handle and to a nail next to the fireplace, just to hold it upright. But I was unaware of this; not only did we not have snow in west Texas and eastern New Mexico, we also did not have hills.

Anyway, a white Christmas is a symbolically familiar thing only because it has been filtered through a lot of Anglo-Saxon and European wintertime tradition, layering English gift-giving of Boxing Day over the Dutch legend of St. Nicholas and various other Old World customs. There’s no snow in Bethlehem.

“Write about the time you tried to eat Christmas dinner at McDonald’s,” my wife said.

That would get into the traditionally poignant holiday theme of how a singular soul sometimes can become disconnected from the big human family, a most fundamental element of Christmas, the old no-room-at-the-inn experience. I was single, I was roughly 2,000 miles from my nearest sibling, my parents no longer were living, and my roommate had gone home to Pennsylvania for the holidays. I was wandering a bit ghostlike through the noisy Yuletide bustle.

(Bob Newman artwork)

I don’t recall feeling sad about it. I was ticked off and, mostly, hungry because McDonald’s—my very last choice, whatever the occasion—was closed. I don’t remember quite what I did about it, though I doubt seriously that I cooked anything. Maybe a can of soup.

To be in such a situation now, at 69, really would be awful. But when one is 24, gainfully employed, with a football game to watch on TV, what’s the problem with being alone to face a shuttered fast-food emporium? That was roughly the time of life when I was so confident where my next meal was coming from that I didn’t own a credit card and often forgot to carry cash. I wrote checks—some for amounts of 57 cents or $1.23—at the grocery store and must have assumed that emotional nourishment always would be in plentiful supply as well. Probably because it always had been.

When I was growing up, Christmas itself seemed cozy enough and, being snowless, certainly warm enough. Grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins lived too far away for any of those rollickingly festive, chaotic gatherings so often depicted in movies and books. But there were four of us kids, and the posed snapshots of the family each Christmas included the cat and the dog and at least one battery-powered contraption or an electric train, so there was no lack of excitement.

My father, one of the quietest, most peaceful people I ever met, always answered our query of what he wanted for Christmas with, “Just a little peace and quiet.” So we gave him socks or a tie.

“Write about the first Christmas present you remember,” my daughter said. “I remember my tricycle. And my red Christmas robe.”

Now, that’s interesting. I remember I once admired a tiny notebook that my brother had. It had maps of the United States and the world in it, and I always loved maps, an affection for geography that may have had something to do with subconsciously feeling the movement of my father, an oil company executive who was transferred every three years, like clockwork, causing the family repeatedly to fold up our tent and move along. To me, a primary question in life is: How do you get there from here? What roads do you take?

My brother’s notebook, then, was to be coveted, beyond the automatic extra value carried by all of his belongings (based on the fact that he was older), which he sparingly and warily loaned to the Charlie Brown of the family for the very good reason that I forever was breaking his stuff. His model airplanes, his homemade go-carts powered by old lawn mower engines, whatever; they fell apart in my innocent hands. Even years later, I borrowed his motorcycle and was not yet a mile away when the clutch cable broke. I captained his new ride-on mower and had gone 20 or 30 feet when some essential gizmo gave out.

So it was no small thing, that long-ago Christmas, to unwrap an apparently humble package from my brother to find the notebook-with-maps.

I could write about the red necktie and black blazer I got from my parents way back when. Worn with a white shirt, The Look accurately replicated Dick Tracy’s daily garb (indoors, where he courteously would remove the yellow fedora)—a reminder that Christmas gift-giving is an ideal time to humor otherwise ridiculous requests.

I could write about the Christmas-card routine. “Dear Aunt (Somebody): Hope your year has gone well. We are fine and busy here. Well, guess I better go now so this gets in the mail in time for the Christmas rush. Love to all….” I always mean to do a better job of it, but I am hesitant to bore an aunt in Effie, La., or an old family friend in Hobbs, N.M., with the fairly exciting news that my car passed 100,000 miles in October, and it would sound too much like putting on the dog to gush about my business trip to London in June. Plus, there’s a built-in difficulty in picking up a dialogue with someone you last told, “Hope your year has gone well. We are all fine and busy here….”

I could write about the maturation of my own appreciation of Christmas as an occasion, except that may not be giving credit where credit is due. From the time I met my wife, I have been thoroughly marinated in the sounds, smells, tastes and rituals of Christmas. The tree is settled upon only after standing in the cold until toes and fingers are numb. Homemade wreaths go up everywhere. Advent calendars and Christmas placemats materialize. Outdoor lights are painstakingly strung on bushes. Ornaments—we must have at least 200 now—must be placed for maximum visibility on the tree, with the most breakable ones strategically away from the cat’s reach. No two gifts are wrapped alike; creativity and tactics of disguise (such as several boxes of ascending size, each inside the other) are held in high esteem.

But I digress.

Our daughter was born at Christmastime. How’s that for a spectacular gift? We stuck her under the tree in her modern-day swaddling clothes and took her picture, and to look at that photo now—all these years later—gives a sort of Normal Rockwell texture to my life, far removed from the time outside that darkened fast-food joint long ago.

Now that’s something to write about.

Bowl games and grid inflation

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It’s a zeitgeisty thing to have the holiday season filled—stuffed, crammed, clogged, jampacked—with college football bowl games. But we are up to 40 major-college bowls this season, and even some of the sport’s insiders have begun to wonder about a form of grid inflation.

Because, while there is no danger of running out such events, we are running out of blue-ribbon teams to play them.

Three of this winter’s 80 bowl teams—that’s almost two-thirds of the 128 schools that field maximum-scholarship teams—have losing records (Minnesota, Nebraska and San Jose State). Another 12 also are not above .500 after scratching out 6-6 seasons.

Only 18 teams are either conference or conference-division champions (though two independents, 10-2 Notre Dame and 9-3 BYU, could be added to that level of accomplishment). One bowl, the first-year Arizona Bowl, was so desperate for participants that it had to settle for two middling teams in the same conference, fellow Mountain West members Colorado State and Nevada. (One of 7-5 Colorado State’s losses was to that below-par Minnesota outfit, and Nevada is among the crowd of 6-6 teams.)

“Clearly,” Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson said, “the system is broken.”

Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby is on record acknowledging that “we do have too many bowl games and have more bowl games waiting in the wings.” According to Atlantic Coast Conference commissioner John Swofford, his league’s athletic directors would prefer teams be at least 7-5 to be bowl eligible.

Even NCAA president Mark Emmert, the primary-care official for college football, last week cautioned that his organization members “are going to have to figure out what’s the purpose of bowl games? Is it a reward for a successful season, or is it just another game that we’re going to provide an opportunity for?”

Behind that curtain of concern, though, are some financial and competitive realities that don’t appear likely to change:

ESPN, which will televise 34 of the 40 bowls—plus the national championship game—wants the programming and the advertising riches that brings. (ESPN, in fact, owns 13 of the bowls through its ESPN Events subsidiary.)
Athletic departments and conferences want the payouts for bowl participation, which last year ranged from $325,000 per team in Boise’s Famous Idaho Potato Bowl to $18 million each for contestants in long-established bowls such as the Rose, Orange, Sugar and Cotton.
Coaches want the added game experience for players with remaining eligibility, plus the recruiting-tool visibility. Not to mention the automatic bonuses that schools routinely spread throughout their staffs. (The Seattle Times recently detailed how Washington State has guaranteed head coach Mike Leach an additional $75,000 for getting his team to the Sun Bowl, while Leach’s assistant coaches will receive from $15,000 to $35,000 each, and athletic director Bill Moos $50,000.)

No surprise: Money was the motivation when all this started with the 1902 Rose Bowl, which leaned on college football’s growing popularity as a way to finance the annual Tournament of Roses Parade, then 12 years old. The final score was so lopsided—Michigan 49, Stanford 0—that the Rose Tournament’s game was held in abeyance until 1916. But, by 1935, the Orange and Sugar Bowls had appeared, and the Cotton in ’37.

Only Major League Baseball was more popular and more widespread than college football then, though perennial superpower Notre Dame had stopped accepting bowl invitations after winning the 1925 Rose and didn’t lift its self-imposed ban on the post-season until 1970.

There was some assertion that Notre Dame chose not to extend its seasons with bowl appearances because the additional games didn’t jive with the primary purpose of education. But that quaint notion was quickly discarded as big money increasingly came with bowl appearances and the Associated Press decided, in 1968, to discontinue crowning its national champion prior to the bowl season.

With that, bowl games (of which there were only 10 in 1969) suddenly evolved from holiday exhibitions to match-ups with we’re-No. 1-implications. And continued to multiply, sending all on this Road to Excess. Civic leaders want the prestige and the free publicity of staging bowl games. Conferences want pre-arranged tie-ins with bowls for a slice of the lucre. Corporations want bowls as billboards. The Quick Lane Bowl. The GoDaddy Bowl. The Zaxbys Heart of Dallas Bowl. The AdvoCare V100 Texas Bowl. The Foster Farms Bowl. The TaxSlayer Bowl….

An irony is that the year-old, four-team national championship tournament has clearly diluted the significance of all but the two bowls serving as championship semifinal sites. (This season, those are the Orange and Cotton). And that is just as predicted in 2007 by UCLA administrator John Sandbrook, who first studied a possible playoff for an NCAA committee in 1994 and provided an update on the subject for the NCAA-watchdog Knight Commission in 2004. A formalized playoff for No. 1, Sandbrook said then, would “overtake” the traditional bowl format.

Then again, it hasn’t slowed a more-of-less-accomplished-teams trend. And what are the odds that some player on one of those under-.500 teams, giddy to win a bowl and finish a humdrum 6-7, will then run around proclaiming, “We’re No. 1”?

Jets-Giants: Nobody wins (until OT). So familiar.

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Did this happen Sunday? Or in 1974?

………..

The Jets were playing the Giants in a rare regular-season NFL clash between New York teams, though the game wasn’t in New York. The Giants led, 20-13, early in the fourth period. The date was Dec. 6, 2015. Also, Nov. 10, 1974.

The Jets, their bacon saved on an implausible keeper by their quarterback, summoned the tying touchdown in the dying moments and sent the game into overtime at 20-20. Whereupon their sudden-death victory was finalized when the Giants’ placekicker missed a field goal. Wide left.

Same plot. Same details. Same ending.

In ’74, 31-year-old Joe Namath, whose multiple knee surgeries rendered him the least likely person in the entire stadium—spectators included—to run with the ball, shocked the outfoxed Giants by literally limping in real-time slow motion on three-yard bootleg for the tying score. (Namath completed the hobble with a lame straight-arm more evocative of a “please don’t hit me now that I’m across the goal-line” appeal.)

In ’15, an even older—but far healthier, at 33—Ryan Fitzpatrick, scrambled 15 yards on a desperation fourth-and-six to keep the Jets moving toward their late equalizer. Echoes that seem to qualify under the definition of déjà vu, the illusion of having previously experienced something actually being encountered for the first time.

There’s more. In ’74, when NFL sudden-death rules were new to the regular season and allowed a team to win on any first-possession score, the Giants needed only seven plays in the extra period to move to the Jets’ 25-yard line. There, on fourth-and-one, they opted for a decisive field goal try, but Pete Gogolak knocked the 42-yard attempt just left of the upright. (And the Jets soon answered with a Namath touchdown pass to Emerson Boozer.)

In ’15, it was Giants’ kicker Josh Brown who missed a 48-yarder that could have kept the overtime going and avoided defeat. He, too, missed to the left. A not-so-instant replay of Giants doom.

New York, New York? By 1974, the Giants had become Big Town ex-pats, leaving Yankee Stadium to play most of the ’73 season and all of ’74 in New Haven, Conn., at the Yale Bowl, their temporary home field while a new Giants Stadium was under construction in the New Jersey Meadowlands. So Connecticut was where they dueled the Jets that November.

In 2015, of course, the teams jousted in their five-year-old shared East Rutherford, N.J., home that replaced Giants Stadium. They’ve all been Jersey boys for a long time.

In ’74, Giants fans questioned why coach Bill Arnsparger hadn’t gone for a first down on that overtime fourth-and-one. In ’15, they are grumbling about coach Tom Coughlin’s choice to try converting a fourth-and-two on the Jets’ four yard-line, instead of taking an apparent clinching field goal when already leading by 10 points.

It could be argued that, 41 years later, there was a new back story to the Jets-Giants meeting, because in ’74, neither team was going anywhere, though the Jets—1-7 entering the Giants game—didn’t lose again in the old 14-game schedule and finished 7-7. The Giants, who had been 2-6, didn’t win again on their way to 2-12. In ’15, at least, both sides entered the local fray with some hope for the post-season, however frayed those hopes. Maybe the Jets can put the modest boost to a 7-5 record to good use. And even the 5-7 Giants, in dire straits, aren’t mathematically eliminated from the post-season.

But there is so much about this that hints at some cosmic burlesque. One beauty of sports is the unscripted drama, the surprise ending. And yet, as the Latin motto goes, nihil sub sole novum. Nothing new under the sun. Everything that is happening now has happened before.

I covered that 1974 game. I could have filled in the blanks.

Gray matter: Is watching a brain-addling sport ethical?

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Just who among us needs our heads examined?

Football players? Last week’s revelations of the late Giants star Frank Gifford’s positive test for the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, came days after St. Louis Rams quarterback Case Keenum, attempting to rise after a tackle, was all rubbery and disoriented, while little imaginary birds twirled around his helmet.

Football fans? There certainly are some who have begun to wonder about the ethics of supporting a sport faced with increasing evidence of its participants’ cognitive impairment. Gifford was the 88th of 92 deceased former NFL players examined who was found to have had CTE.

Parents of potential football players? At the Boston University center that studies CTE, the percentage of positive tests on former players from all levels is a whopping 90-plus percent, and pre-collegiate players have been sustaining some 90,000 concussions per year. Among the public figures who have said that, if they had sons, they would not allow them to play football, is Football-Fan-In-Chief Barack Obama.

How about anyone who thinks these headache-inducing reports signal the imminent demise of our most popular sport? It has been almost 14 years since the first case of CTE was diagnosed in a deceased football player, yet Harris Polls continue to find football to be the nation’s overwhelmingly favorite spectator sport—37 percent of the population lists the NFL as No. 1 and another 11 percent prefer college football. (Only 16 percent of the citizenry list Major League Baseball as top choice and no other sport breaks into double figures.)

In 2009, in a New Yorker magazine piece, Malcolm Gladwell considered football’s future extinction, and a stream of thoughtful reports since then have considered how the ramifications of head injuries might play out: Liability suits that could subject coaches, team doctors and referees to financial exposure. Parental concerns. Skyrocketing Insurance costs. The drying up of advertising and television commitments. Congressional action.

Last year, a self-described NFL fan wrote to New York Times ethics columnist Chuck Klosterman pondering the morality of supporting a league apparently aware that its sport is detrimental to the health of its participants. Klosterman concluded that, as long as everyone is enlightened about the peril that could visit football players, he “can live with” the public loving something that is dangerous.

Me, too. And, after all, football isn’t boxing or—worse—mixed martial arts, in which the primary purpose is to separate an opponent from his or her senses. But we should persist in furthering our education about the potential hazards, and hope that football authorities do the same. Early-onset dementia among players is real gray matter, something to consider in all its shades and consequences.

A crack neurologist once explained to me the brain’s vulnerabilities, and it goes something like this:

The brain isn’t much more than a blob of Jello, about three pounds net weight, floating in a fluid, held in place by a scaffolding of fibers. It is as well-housed as any other internal human gadget—the skull, after all, doesn’t crack easily. But with a blow to the head, whether encased in a helmet or not, the brain easily can rattle off the inside walls of the skull or, worse, twist violently, causing a tear.

A simple concussion brings temporary alteration of consciousness, often so brief as to go unnoticed, yet short-circuits the part of the brain controlling awareness, alertness and focus of attention. A stronger bop on the head can create a contusion, a bruise caused by the brain ricocheting off the opposite wall of the skull and then back again. Even more damage results if the torque force wrenches the Jello mass.

Later this month, the movie Concussion will be released, and director Peter Landesman has said the film can’t help being “a shot between the eyes of the NFL,” because it portrays how forensic neuropathologist Bennet Omalu (played by Will Smith) had to battle NFL efforts to suppress his research on players’ brain damage.

Omalu was the man who, in a 2002 autopsy of former Pittsburgh Steelers lineman Mike Webster, first recognized CTE in a football player. Each of the first nine deceased NFL players’ brains Omalu examined, in fact, had CTE, and he told me during a telephone interview in 2010 that the root cause was not “just concussions. It’s repeated blows to the head. Helmets do not prevent concussions or [undiagnosed] sub-concussions, because they don’t stop the brain from bumping around in the skull.

“We have to take the head out of the game.”

And good luck with that. Though the NFL and other football authorities belatedly are implementing rules and protocols to limit head trauma, there is this Gordian knot: With both Frank Gifford’s conspicuous 1960 concussion, suffered on what often has been described as a “brutal, blindside” tackle by Philadelphia’s Chuck Bednarik, and Case Keenum’s recent injury, the damage in fact was not a result of an opponent’s contact with the head.

The Gifford injury, which precipitated his one-year sabbatical from football, was sustained when the back of Gifford’s head struck the ground as he went down. He had attempted to sidestep the charging Bednarick and the two essentially were facing each other at the instant of the tackle. On impact, Bednarick caught the off-balance Gifford with an arm and shoulder across Gifford’s chest, rocking Gifford backward.

Keenum was tackled waist-high but, like Gifford 55 years earlier, bounced his noggin off the turf as he fell backward. Jello surprise. So how to safeguard against that?

I don’t have a son. So that’s settled. And I will continue to be a football spectator. But I will make sure to check out Concussion as well.

Remember Alice? (A Thanksgiving tradition)

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There was a lot of gray hair at Carnegie Hall Saturday night. A full house of 2,800, all of us ready (when the chorus came around on the guitar) to sing a bar of Arlo Guthrie’s mischievous anti-war ‘60s ballad, “Alice’s Restaurant.” More than a celebration of the 50^th anniversary of the song’s inspiration, which was Arlo’s 1965 Thanksgiving Day arrest for littering, it was a movement, an identification with a bygone era that somehow doesn’t feel as troubled as it did then.

Everyone there knew exactly what Arlo was talking about when he noted that it is difficult to reminiscence when you can’t recall much from so long ago. But his bit of wisdom regarding a fading memory was that, in order to make room for something that may happen in the future, a person tends to discard stuff from the past.

Some stuff, though, is too good to throw out. That certainly includes the way “Alice’s Restaurant” typifies Arlo’s audience-friendly concerts. His genuine form of interactive entertainment, the sing-along format carried on from his mentor Pete Seeger, is a civilizing antidote to so much impersonal modern social media. When he plunges into the great anthem written by his father Woody, “This Land is Your Land,” the full-community vocalization is a veritable Kumbaya moment.

(A sidebar here: In the delightful compilation, “The Final Four of Everything,” using so-called bracketology to rate all that we love and hate, New York Times reporter Richard Sandomir imagined a competition of 32 songs vying to be the New National Anthem. Matching contenders from “God Bless America” to “We Shall Overcome;” from “You’re a Grand Ole Flag” to “Born in the USA,” Sandomir settled on “This Land is Your Land” as the ultimate champion in a final-round showdown with “America the Beautiful.” Because, Sandomir wrote, Woody Guthrie’s song “evokes America’s coast-to-coast natural beauties…” Without, one could add, bellicose imagery and excessive flag-waving.)

Anyway, beyond being a card-carrying member of Saturday’s Carnegie codger crowd, I can claim to have first attended an Arlo performance in the earliest days of “Alice’s Restaurant,” originally recorded in 1967. Arlo has said that the first gig he ever did outside New York City was at a joint called Café Harris in Columbia, Mo., in 1965, which was my freshman year there at the University of Missouri.

It was in 1967 that my college roommate, Dave Prigge, suggested we check out this touring young folk singer, son of the famous Woody Guthrie, at Café Harris on the edge of campus. And I was rewarded—in that smoky, intimate coffee house—with hours of humor and melodies from Arlo and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. It turns out that Arlo wrote a song about that now-defunct establishment, “Café Harris Rag,” which was included on the soundtrack when “Alice’s Restaurant” became a movie in 1969.

What I wish I had now, since it indeed is difficult to remember much about so long ago, is 27 eight-by-10 color photographs, with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, documenting that Café Harris experience, the inspiration for me learning to play the guitar. (Not well, okay, but it was a nice hobby for years.)

So, more than simply nostalgia, Arlo’s annual Thanksgiving weekend show at Carnegie Hall and the widespread playing of “Alice’s Restaurant” as a Thanksgiving standard feel like a connectivity to people and places and events. A movement. With full orchestration and four-part harmony.

John Jeansonne

Newsday sportswriter emeritus/Hofstra University journalism adjunct

Rams’ move follows the money

Why the Al Jazeera report on doping is not shocking

The Olympics: My window on the world

A gun discussion by the N(B)A

Odell Beckham might be really sorry.

Merry Christmas

Bowl games and grid inflation

Jets-Giants: Nobody wins (until OT). So familiar.

Gray matter: Is watching a brain-addling sport ethical?

Remember Alice? (A Thanksgiving tradition)