The U.S., Cuba and baseball diplomacy

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(N.Y. Daily News photo)

(N.Y. Daily News photo)

Anyone lucky enough to visit La Esquina Caliente in Havana’s El Parque Central immediately learns the exalted status of baseball in Cuba. There, at The Hot Corner of the island capital’s Central Park, men have been gathering for decades to passionately argue the value of players and teams.

It is the Cuban version of discourse that we Yanquis typically experience on barstools and sports talk radio, evidence of an unbroken spiritual link between Americans and Cubans in spite of a half-century of political polarization.

Baseball is their national pastime, too.

So, now that the Obama administration at last has moved to normalize relations with Cuba, what could be a more logical cultural exchange than sending the Tampa Bay Rays to the Caribbean island for an exhibition game next spring?

If all the details can be ironed out, that will be the first such tour by a Major League Baseball team since the Baltimore Orioles played a home-and-home exhibition against the Cuban national team in 1999. But it hardly would represent a new relationship, despite the decades of ideological hardball between the two nations.

As early as 1937, the New York Giants made Havana their spring training site, followed by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1941, ’42 and ’47 and the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1953. When Jackie Robinson broke the majors’ color barrier in 1947, one benefit to training in Cuba was that country’s long history of racial integration.

In his acclaimed 1952 novel, “Old Man and the Sea,” Hemingway—a Cuban resident for most of the 1940s and 1950s—had the fictitious Cuban fisherman Santiago talk baseball with his young companion, rhapsodizing about the Yankees and “the great DiMaggio.”

The 1959 Cuban revolution severed the island’s formal ties with Organized Baseball. But big-league teams, technically prevented from doing business in Cuba, found ways to get Latin American scouts into the country to evaluate the plentiful homegrown talent, and a fairly steady stream of Cuban defectors continued to find their way to the majors—Yoenis Cespedes, Yasiel Puig and Aroldis Chapman being some resent examples.

It might be worth remembering that a young Castro was once considered a pitching prospect by the Giants; that Havana was home to the Cincinnati Reds’ Triple-A affiliate Sugar Kings of the International League from 1954 to ’59; and that just months after Castro’s rebels ousted the U.S.-backed authoritarian government of president Fulgencio Batista, the Junior World Series was contested between the American Association champion Minneapolis Millers and the I.L. pennant-winning Sugar Kings.

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That series concluded with a seventh-game, ninth-inning Havana victory, with future Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski playing second base for the Millers, who were managed by perennial hard-luck baseball man Gene Mauch. Castro was omnipresent—in the stands, in the Sugar Kings dugout, addressing the home fans: “I came here to see our team beat Minneapolis, not as premier, but as just a baseball fan. I want to see our club win the Little World Series. After the triumph of the revolution, we should also win the Little World Series.”

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The next year, Castro nationalized all U.S.-owned enterprises in Cuba and then-baseball commissioner Ford Frick decreed the Sugar Kings be moved to Jersey City, the first of several stops for that franchise before reaching its current iteration as the Norfolk Tides. (An Orioles affiliate; small world.)

U.S. national teams have made a couple of Cuban appearances since then, including the 1991 Pan American Games, which were attended by both Castro and (separately) Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, a U.S. Olympic Committee vice president at the time.

Steinbrenner contended then that Castro had wanted the Yankees to “come down here for an exhibition in 1977, ’78, but [baseball commissioner] Bowie Kuhn, in his infinite wisdom, wanted it to be an All-Star team instead. And it never happened.”

Now, what a visitor to Havana from Estados Unidos might be surprised to find, along with the baseball knowledge of those fanaticos at La Esquina Caliente, is a lovingly maintained 45,000-seat national stadium, Estadio Latinoamericano, smack in the middle of the city’s many paint-starved, deteriorating buildings. And, on the scoreboard, the retention of English-language baseball parlance—“ball,” “strike,” “out.” Topps baseball cards have been known to find their way around Cuba.

The island is a thoroughly natural locale to host a team from what Cubans know as the Gran Ligas. If the Rays indeed venture to Havana a few months hence, it will be—for baseball fans here and there—a touch of paradise lost and found.

 

Mizzou: Bursting the bubble on race-relations naivete

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At Mizzou’s 1968 post-season football banquet, a virtually anonymous black linebacker named Ed Taylor—a member of the scout team who never got into a game—was briefly the center of attention. He sang songs, teased several teammates and delivered a personal judgement on the state of civil rights in the school’s athletic department.

This was amid an especially tense time in the national struggle for federal protection against institutional segregation, on an overwhelmingly white campus in what had been a slave state. That season, some white students still were waving Confederate flags while the marching band played “Dixie” during games, resulting in a protest that formed the Legion of Black Collegians to afford students of color a campus voice.

Taylor, during that 1968 football soiree, said, “There isn’t a problem here.” He called head coach Dan Devine “a genius in things like hiring Prentice Gautt” to be the first black football assistant in the Big Eight Conference.

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I was a senior in Journalism School, football beat reporter for J-School’s Columbia Missourian. Taylor’s brief public remarks, and his thoughtful answers in a later interview, made a nice story. I barely knew the fellow, just as I barely knew Gautt, though he lived in my off-campus apartment complex and we always exchanged pleasantries as we came and went.

Taylor was a biology major who wanted to be a teacher “because I want to do something about the Negro problem,” he said. “I want to get through to as many people as I can before their parents ruin them.”

Gautt, after breaking the color barrier on the University of Oklahoma’s football team and playing seven years in the NFL, in ’68 was studying for his doctorate in psychology, even as he worked on the football staff.

At the time, might Mizzou’s football team, far more diverse than the rest of the university, have existed in a protective bubble against the kind of racial tension that Taylor said he experienced at his Cahokia, ill., high school? Might white students such as myself have been functioning in a bubble of naivete, mostly oblivious to how marginalized the minority students felt?

I recall going with friends to catch a Dick Gregory appearance on campus, expecting a first-rate comedian’s act and instead getting a taste of Gregory’s other vocation—civil-rights activism. Some fairly heavy things to think about.

I was aware of Journalism School colleague Sylvia Carter’s expose, published in our independent student newspaper, The Maneater, of racism in the Columbia community. She had showed up at city real estate agencies about rental inquiries with a black friend, to whom she pretended to be engaged, whereupon she was informed, posthaste, that there no longer were any vacancies. Anywhere.

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But now, it somehow is more depressing to be confronted almost a half-century later with news of ongoing racial incidents at Mizzou; of tone-deaf university leadership; of how it took a boycott threat by the football team—its leverage based on the kind of money the school stood to lose without more games—to generate the kind of attention that forced administrative action.

As a graduate of the Journalism School that proclaims itself the world’s oldest and consistently is rated among the best in the country, I find it almost as dispiriting to learn of a communications professor who called for “some muscle” to eject journalists covering last week’s public protests. Students taking up a chant of “Hey, hey, ho, ho! Journalists have got to go!” just needed an education regarding free speech and the First Amendment. But the last person who should require a journalism lesson was someone supposedly providing such an education: Melissa Click, described as holding a “courtesy appointment” in J-School, which is separate from the communications department.

In marked contrast to Click, there has been some real journalism going on at Mizzou for months, long before the football team’s involvement triggered national coverage. Both the student-staffed Missourian and all-student Maneater have been well ahead of the curve in chronicling complaints about the university’s top management that went beyond racial issues and included significant disgruntlement among the faculty.

Click since has apologized and resigned the J-School appointment. And the Missouri Board of Curators, in the wake of resignations-under-pressure of both the university’s four-campus president and the chancellor of Mizzou’s flagship Columbia campus, has appointed as interim president a black man, Michael Middleton, former law professor, civil rights attorney and deputy chancellor of the school. At least that move sounds like a far better Missouri Compromise than the original.

It turns out that Middleton was an undergraduate at Mizzou when I was. Too bad I didn’t know him. I might have learned some things sooner.

Miami’s discredited touchdown: Remember Cornell?

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To anyone interested in historical context and the nobility of sportsmanship, it is exquisite timing that Cornell was playing Dartmouth just days after Miami’s controversial eight-lateral, no-time-left kickoff return that was allowed to stand in a Halloween night upset of Duke—visual evidence and official admission of error notwithstanding.

Miami’s scoring play, the Atlantic Coast Conference later acknowledged, should have been over before it was over. Which would have left Duke a 27-24 winner instead of a 30-27 loser.

The result will stand, based on the NCAA rule that states, “When the referee declares that the game is ended, the score in final.” But there is the Cornell-Dartmouth exception.

In 1940 Cornell, ranked No. 2 in the nation, gave back a 7-3 victory over Dartmouth after Cornell confirmed that it had scored the winning touchdown when it accidentally and innocently was permitted a fifth down at the end of the game.

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That game, too, should have been over before it was over. So, while the ACC, NCAA, Miami authorities and Miami advocates insisted that further action was completely out of their hands, Cornell long ago demonstrated the opposite.

A review of the Cornell-Dartmouth film had prompted a heartfelt mea culpa telegram from referee Red Friesell, lamenting his critical error in permitting an extra down, and Cornell’s president subsequently visited his team’s practice field to announce he would forfeit.

“We have done the right thing, and this will live with us,” president Edmund Ezra Day told the Cornell players. “We shall not have to spend the rest of our lives apologizing for a tarnished victory.”

What, then, is different about the Miami-Duke situation, when matters also took a turn for the weird as the clock ran out?

Neither Miami’s players, in 2015, nor Cornell’s, in 1940, had engaged in any nefarious act. Miami reasonably kept playing through its zany kickoff return after Mark Walton barely failed to complete his lateral—the third of an eventual eight legal, backward passes—before his knee was down on his own 26-yard-line.

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Likewise, Cornell quarterback Pop Scholl did nothing more criminal than throw a six-yard scoring pass to William Murphy 75 years earlier. It was the ref, Friesell, who had lost count of the downs in the confusion after a delay penalty that was followed by an incomplete Scholl pass on what in fact was fourth down. And it was the crew of on-field officials, as well as the replay official, who botched the handling of Miami’s last-ditch scramble. It’s just that Cornell’s authorities chose to override the rules.

Might Miami have exercised a similar gesture?

In the post-game spin room, a Miami forfeit was interpreted as either the ethical, magnanimous thing to do (Tom Jones of the Tampa Times: “It’s never too late to right a wrong”) or was seen as simply “stupid” (Yahoo Sports’ Dan Wetzel: “There would be litigation. There would be court-ordered stays. There would be endless howling. There would be chaos….”)

Mostly on display in this latest episode of human imperfection on the part of referees, as it relates to the passionate enterprise of big-time college football, is that too much is at stake to put a primary emphasis on grace. That final, wild and clearly exciting Miami kick return—though it should not have counted—impacted Miami’s chances of qualifying for a lucrative bowl game; meant plenty to a legion of investors (OK, “gamblers”) in the sport; affected career paths of coaches and marketing types.

In justifying its decision not to consider forgoing the stained victory, Miami athletic director Blake James sent a letter to season-ticket holders and donors reporting that the ACC had admitted “multiple incorrect calls” against Miami throughout the game, including an erroneous pass-interference flag on Duke’s go-ahead touchdown drive. (That essentially cast Miami as as much a victim of the refs’ incompetence as Duke.)

In the end, while that eight-lateral return may have been a feverish dream to the unfortunate Dukies, to Miami, channeling Cornell’s 1940 benevolence was a downright nightmare.

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A song of long-suffering, and the Cubs

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Enough about the Mets for a moment. What Chicago needs now, with the Cubs having added to their historic run of baseball failure, is someone whose allegiance to the team—and whose sense of humor—is not diminished by grinding, recurrent baseball disappointment.

Steve Goodman died in 1984 of leukemia, only 36 years old. But, before he went, among the splendid songs he wrote was “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request.” It is a roguishly heartfelt ditty, not so much crying-in-his-beer hopelessness as an expression of lasting affection.

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Do they still play the blues in Chicago when baseball season rolls around? Goodman sang. When the snow melts away, do the Cubbies still play, in their Ivy-covered burial ground?

It was Chicago native Nelson Algren, a prominent literary figure of the 1940s and 50s, who said, “Before you earn the right to rap any sort of joint, you have to love it a little bit.” Of his beloved Cubs, Goodman had license to sing, from a rooftop overlooking Wrigley Field, of “the home of the brave, the land of the free, and the doormat of the National League.”

For outsiders, celebrating Mets fans among them, it is entirely too easy to mock the Cubs who, for five score and seven years, have gone without a championship—squirming in public in what could be spelled “wriggley” field. Carl Sandburg’s description of his hometown, “the city of the big shoulders,” calls to mind a symbolic Cub-at-the-bat, appropriately proportioned with a broad, ample resting place for his Louisville Slugger while watching another imminently hittable pitch go by.

One is tempted to think of Cubs hitters as somehow lacking courage. Chicken in the car and the car won’t go, that’s how you spell….

Their last National League pennant was in 1945–and only then while most of Major League Baseball’s best players were off fighting in World War II. Their past is freighted with curses and omens, and such meatheaded experiments as the College of Coaches, an eight-man committee mandated by owner P.K. Wrigley that functioned (sort of) in place of a manager from 1961 into the 1965 season, a span when the Cubs never finished higher than seventh in the league.

The only lesson there, a form of double-play combination for Old Man Wrigley: He who Tinkers with a franchise for Ever hasn’t a Chance.

So here was singer/songwriter Goodman, a man with whom Mets fans—who have endured their own lengthy diamond travails—should be able to identify. Author of “City of New Orleans,” a 1970s hit covered by Arlo Guthrie, Goodman grew up a Cub devotee in suburban Park Ridge, Ill., where he was a Maine East High School classmate of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Clinton, it happens, is among the members of the Emil Verban Memorial Society, which is nothing more than a collection of roughly 200 loyal Cubs fans, their organization named for a plodding Cubs player who hit (if “hit” is the right word) .095 in 1950.

President Ronald Reagan, an Illinois native who briefly did radio play-by-play for Cubs games in his salad days, was part of the Verban Society, along with TV personalities Bryant Gumbel and Bruce Morton, golfer Ray Floyd, actor Tom Bosley and conservative columnist George Will.

Plus, of course, the club included Goodman, who also wrote a strangely optimistic anthem, “Go, Cubs, Go,” with the refrain, “The Cubs are gonna win today.” It has been reported that Goodman only created that song out of spite, after the team’s general manager in the early 1980s, Dallas Green, proclaimed “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request” too depressing.

It is only depressing to know that Goodman died so young, sad to know he won’t be giving us more sly lyrics like these, in which he lamented how the Cubs…

made me a criminal, that’s what they did; they stole my youth from me. I’d forsake my teachers to sit in the bleachers in flagrant truancy. One thing led to another, and soon I discovered alcohol, gambling, dope. Football. Hockey. And lacrosse.

But what do you expect when you raise a young boy’s hopes and just crush ‘em like so many paper beer cups? Year after year after year. After year after year after year after year after year…..

Before we are surrounded by the noisy passion of Mets fans during the upcoming World Series, then, listen to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xBxZGQ1dJk

Football: Columbia U’s Achilles heel

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With apologies to Homer…..

Sing, O goddess, the anger of Columbia footballers, like the Wrath of Achilles, that brought ills upon Wagner in fulfillment of the will of the gridiron gods.

Or something heavy like that, as a way to begin the tale of a team that had lost 24 consecutive games before last weekend; the epic struggle for a school that hasn’t experienced a winning record in the sport since 1996—and has enjoyed only two seasons above .500 in the past 42 years. The siege of Columbia football sounds like something out of the Iliad—a book, by the way, that is required reading for all Columbia freshman.

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In fact, it was before long-suffering Columbia’s 26-3 victory over Wagner that Columbia’s senior defensive lineman Hunter Little mused to WNYC radio’s Ilya Marritz, “There is something to be said for glory. I don’t know if I can speak so much for Homer as someone like Achilles, or any of the heroes that followed him….

“There’s something to be said,” Little judged, “for being out on a Saturday, and playing a game, and being in the moment, and making a great play.”

Marritz has been narrating a weekly podcast called “The Season,” detailing Columbia’s latest attempt to rise from the gridiron ashes. It is an engaging series, and Marritz declares himself “bizarrely interested” in Columbia football, an enterprise that historically has demonstrated it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the Lions to enter into some grid paradise.

In the last 80 years, since Columbia’s 1934 Rose Bowl victory over Stanford, it has won one league title (in 1961). From 1983 to 1988, Columbia lost a major-college record 44 consecutive games. Its futility was so beyond human understanding that, after it turned a 17-0 lead into a 49-17 loss to Harvard in the first game of the 1985 season, its first-year coach, Jim Garrett, publicly dismissed his players as “drug-addicted losers.”

Garrett had just arrived at Columbia after 20 years working as assistant and head coach in the pros, but immediately demonstrated how overmatched he was in the Columbia job.

“One adversity comes and—bang!—they’re right back in the sewer,” Garrett fumed after a single game. He somehow was allowed to stay the rest of that 0-10 season before being sent on his way. (When he went, he made sure that his three sons on the Columbia team transferred to Princeton. One of them, Jason, is these days coach of the Dallas Cowboys.)

Nineteen additional lost games after Garrett—two full seasons—Columbia was leading Brown, 16-12, with one minute to play. Brown, after advancing to the Columbia 9-yard line, fumbled and Columbia appeared to recover, which would have ended that gruesome losing streak at 40. It was a brutally cold late November afternoon, with a wind chill of 8 degrees in Providence, R.I., the kind of weather legendary sportswriter Red Smith once described as “a perfect day for football—too cold for the fans and too cold for the players.”

Yet Columbia at last was poised to triumph. Over the elements. Over a favored team. Over daunting odds.

Until the officials ruled that Brown had retained possession.

On the next play, a fourth down-and-two, the second-string Brown quarterback squirted through a small hole in the Columbia defense and scored. And Columbia lost yet again: The story of the school’s football Trojan War. Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield as prey to dogs and vultures….

Jordan Sprechman was a Columbia student at that time, and threatened to write a book he said he would call, “At Least Soccer Won.” Now a lawyer for J.P. Morgan Chase in Manhattan who moonlights as an official scorer at Major League Baseball games and as statistician with the New York Jets and, of course, Columbia football, Sprechman explained this week that, “My experience as an undergrad and in law school at Columbia was that the football team won five games in seven years. The soccer team won the Ivy League title all seven years.”

Naturally, during last weekend’s surreal turn of events, that rare Columbia victory over Wagner, Sprechman was crunching numbers in the press box. “You can look at it two ways,” he said. “We’ve won one in a row. Or we’ve lost 24 of the last 25.” Against Penn this week, he puts Columbia’s changes as “less than 25 percent.”

It’s not war, or course. Just football. There is every chance that Columbia’s lads, soon to be sent forth with Ivy League degrees, will find fulfilling, financially rewarding work to even the score in another phase of life. But there’s something to be said for a little football glory.

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Separating the players from the fans

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In the verisimilitude of NFL stadiums these days, almost all fans are suited up and ready to go, only a set of shoulder pads and a helmet shy of offering to trade places with the players. Faux Tom Bradys are decked out in their No. 12 Patriots jerseys. Mock Dez Bryants in their No. 88 Cowboys jerseys. Artificial No. 13 Odell Beckham Juniors in Giants blue and No. 12 Aaron Rodgerses in Packers green.

This appearance or semblance of truth—this blurring of spectator and performer—has been a multiplying phenomenon for roughly a quarter century, ever since merchandizers hit on the financial bonanza of mining sports loyalists’ dress-up fantasies. Where once it was enough just to ride the bandwagon, attired in mufti, it has become standard procedure to walk around with another person’s name and number on one’s back.

And it isn’t just young men, whose age and gender at least roughly coincide with the athletes they are pretending to be. Older folks, little kids, women and girls assume player identities as well.

Whether this is motivated by a visceral belief that fans, by increasing the number of Eli Mannings or Andrew Lucks on site each Sunday, can affect the game’s outcome is difficult to pinpoint. But wearing a player’s shirt has become so routine that the NFL, as well as other professional leagues, publicizes lists of top-selling jerseys. (Brady currently is No. 1.)

In this strange circumstance of visual cloning, then, it is refreshing to note the Seattle Seahawks’ variant on the theme. In Seattle, football fans indeed wear blue or white team shirts, often with the name and number of quarterback Russell Wilson (No. 3) or running back Marshawn Lynch (No. 24), whose replica jerseys are the ninth and 15th among top sellers.

The difference in Seattle, though, is the ubiquitous presence of jersey No. 12, a number that hasn’t been worn by a Seahawk player since 1981 and never will be again. (Only one man ever wore No. 12 for the Seahawks since they joined the NFL as an expansion franchise in 1976. And he, essentially was just another spectator: Sam Adkins played—briefly—in all of 11 games over a four-year career from 1977 to 1981 and threw a total of 39 passes (17 completions, two touchdowns, four interceptions), before he—not his jersey—was retired.

But in 1984, Seahawks head coach Chuck Knox began to refer to the support of Seattle’s home crowd as an extra player—a 12th man—and that December, team owner Mike McCormack officially retired that “player’s” number as a tribute to the fans.

 

So now, a visitor such as myself doesn’t walk the Seattle streets without passing countless citizens wearing No. 12, with “FAN” above the number where a surname normally goes. There are “12” banners in shop windows, “12” scarves and hats for sale, a giant “12” flag flying on game days atop the tower of the global Starbucks headquarters. (The Seahawks No. 12 shirt, by the way, is the 19th most popular NFL jersey sold.)

 

In November of 2005, that “extra player”—famously loud in a stadium constructed to amplify crowd noise to record-level decibles—conspired to rattle the New York Giants into committing 11 false-start penalties and missing three field goals, which led to an overtime Seahawks victory. The next day, Seattle coach Mike Holmgren awarded the game ball to old No. 12.

That fed the fans’ conceit that they in fact can influence the game’s result, not unlike the apparent belief of the fellow who pulls on a Ben Roethlisberger No. 7 shirt with the conviction that he is prepared to further steel the Pittsburgh Steelers against their opponents. (“Put me in, coach; I’m ready to play.”)

As if. But in Seattle, at least, the we-are-the-team make-believe mostly stops short of ticketholders envisioning themselves to actually be Russell Wilson. The No. 12 shirt says, “FAN.” Truth in advertising.

Not exactly winning behavior

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What’s the word I want here? Inane? Asinine? Puerile? When the Mets clinched a berth in baseball’s post season last week, they celebrated by pouring champagne  on each other. Vacuous? Same thing when the Yankees secured a spot in the playoffs. Moronic?

Oh, it’s an old baseball ritual, as predictable as the changing leaves of autumn. A team qualifies for the so-called “second season”—the World Series or league divisional series, even the one-game wild card competition—and its players engage in a liquid food fight. As delirious as if they had cured cancer or ended war.

They should be happy, of course. They have achieved a worthy-enough goal in their decidedly competitive profession. Woo hoo. But their tiresome, annual champagne-bath rite—wasteful, childish and ultimately far out of proportion to the accomplishment—spirals into embarrassment.

When Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first men to reach Mount Everest’s summit, they did not pour adult beverage over each other’s head. Nor did Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin when they set foot on the moon. There was a poet named Ted Koosner who, after 35 years of plugging away, in 2006 won the Pulitzer Prize, the World Series ring of his chosen field. He marked the occasion by going to a local café and having a hot beef sandwich.

Then there is baseball, with its over-the-top, frat-house custom of pouring bubbly onto goofy teammates, coaches, other team employees and reporters. The whole exercise is choreographed—team attendants prepare for the event by hanging protective plastic sheets in the clubhouse and provide safety goggles for the players.

It’s an expensive mess, once reported to cost from $20,000 to $40,000 and requiring day-after steam-cleaning of carpets and replacing ceiling tiles ruined by the spraying booze. Former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent once called the bedlam “silly” and tried to curtail it, but got no support from players or owners.

In 2009, the Los Angeles Angels took the idiocy down another notch, to insensitive crassness, when they doused beer on the jersey of Nick Adenhart, their teammate who had been killed during the season by a drunken driver.

There has been some effort by baseball to limit the champagne and, in some cases, replace it with Ginger ale. (Which also is dispensed incoherently.) But the tradition no doubt is fostered by witless media treatment: The wallowing player jubilation is quite visual, after all, just the thing for SportsCenter and sports-page photos.

Yet it may be worth noting that the most exaggerated sports championship of them all, the Super Bowl, is observed without such behavior. In the 1960s, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle decreed that no alcohol be permitted in locker rooms at any time—a rule that still stands—because it conveyed a poor image of the players, particularly to young fans.

Here’s the suggestion I have for giddy baseball celebrants—which comes from the late football Hall of Famer Andy Robustelli, who used to cringe when players punctuated their own terrific performances with wild look-at-me dances: “Act like you’ve been there before.”

A tennis player knows: Sun gets in your eyes.

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(The professional men’s tennis tour is stopping in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia this week, just miles from the Equator, another summer stop in the sport’s traveling circus. Below is a story produced for Newsday during the recent U.S. Open that never saw the light of day. No pun intended. Perhaps it applies….)

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For tennis players, the sun is an occupational hazard. Especially when executing a service toss around high noon.

“It’s like an outfielder trying to catch a fly ball,” top-ranked American John Isner said. “You see it all the time that they lose the ball in the sun. We lose balls in the sun all the time as well.”

The process of keeping an eye on the ball, after lifting it overhead and directly in line with Sol, is just one more potential peril in the game. It is not unusual to see a player repeatedly look up to gauge the sun’s angle before serving, sometimes adding a practice toss.

Tennis, after all, is a sport that literally follows the sun, with the majority of the pro tour contested outdoors and often in warmer climes, beginning the calendar year Down Under in Australia’s summertime. Yet the challenge of having to regularly spy a yellow tennis ball in a sky with a big white ball of light is ongoing.

“I actually asked John [Isner] the same question [about the service toss],” said No. 4 women’s player Caroline Wozniacki. “Because, sometimes—in Australia, especially—the sun in right in your face and it’s really hard.

“You can kind of throw the ball a little bit to the left or a little bit to the right and kind of work with it. But you just know it’s the same for the opponent, so you just have to go with it.

“I don’t {change the] position of my stance, just my aim. You need to make sure you get up to the ball with perfect timing, because you have less of a margin when you move the ball around.”

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Marin Cilic of Croatia, the 2014 U.S. champ, called it “always tricky” to adjust a toss to keep the sun out of his eyes, “looking more to one side so the sun doesn’t bother me so much. And that’s always going to play around with your effectiveness on your serve.”

More difficult, even, “is the first shot after the serve,” he said, “still having the [effects of looking into the] sun in your eyes.”

So why, one might ask, don’t more tennis pros play in sunglasses?

A few do. Serb Janko Tipsarevic and his countryman Viktor Troicki. Australia’s Samantha Stoser. First-year pro Jamie Loeb, North Carolina’s NCAA champ.

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Loeb said she began playing in shades when she was 7 or 8 because her eyes “are really sensitive and I can’t play with a hat. I know a lot of girls say they just can’t play with sunglasses but, for me, it’s something I’m comfortable with.”

Yet it has nothing to do, Loeb said, with fighting the sun on her service toss, which is “just something I’ve gotten use to over the years.”

Stoser’s rationale for sunglasses has even less to do with playing conditions. “I started wearing them when I was about 14,” she said, “just because I thought I’d look cool and different. And now I can’t play without them” except at night or in full shade.

Even with the eyewear, she said, “if I’m serving right into the sun, I still probably squint a little bit.”

There are on-line tennis discussion boards in which recreational players have declared that their eye doctors recommend playing in sunglasses, yet others insist that dark lenses impair reaction time. Some even suggest a tactical advantage similar to that used by poker players indoors, where there is no sun: With dark glasses, your opponent can’t detect, from your eyes the direction of the upcoming shot.

But pure reasoning and science don’t appear to affect players’ choice in the matter any more than 1968 Olympic gold medal relay sprinter Charlie Greene’s explanation for competing in sunglasses. “These,” Greene said of his shades, “are my re-entry shields.”

In the end, the lack of sunglasses-wearing tennis pros appears to be a matter of merely doing things the way they’re always been done. Cilic is among those who said he simply would feel “uncomfortable” playing in sunglasses.

“When I was younger,” Wozniacki said, “when I was, like, 9, I think my coach said it was unprofessional [to play in sunglasses]. You know, Why not play with sunglasses that actually make it easier to see? I don’t see a reason why not. But when you’re not used to it and you didn’t do it growing up, it’s a hard transition.”

Even the old song—“My future’s so bright I gotta wear shades”—doesn’t appear to apply here.

Stumbling into some dark American history

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Sometimes a carefree getaway to some charming locale can stumble a person onto a bit of dark, sad American history. We were in Seattle recently and took a ferry ride to Bainbridge Island, a trendy little place on Puget Sound that proclaims itself “35 minutes by ferry, miles from ordinary.”

On the island, there is a walkabout guide directing tourists to wine-tasting boutiques, bake and ice cream shops, art galleries, coffee houses and a farmer’s market. And a small historical museum, wherein there are detailed accounts of what Presidential historian Michael Beschloss has called Franklin Roosevelt’s “now-notorious Executive Order 9066.”

That decree, issued shortly after the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, was based on the unreasonable fear that all people of Japanese descent were security risks. (American Muslims since 9/11 may identify with this.) It mandated the forcible removal, without due process, of more than 110,000 people—about two-thirds of them American citizens—to 10 distant, primitive camps patrolled by armed guards.

And the first unseemly roundup of anyone with Japanese roots, something of a test case to see if the U.S. government could get away with such a scheme, was on Bainbridge Island, where Japanese immigrants first landed in 1883 to farm and work the sawmills.

In early 1942, there were 277 people packed off from Bainbridge to the Manzanar camp in the California desert and retained until the end of World War II, cooped up in crude barracks. In the Bainbridge museum are videos detailing the operation, and pictures by renowned photographer Ansel Adams of those incarcerated in Manzanar.

The whole xenophobic undertaking—U.S. soldiers brandishing rifles with fixed bayonets as they herded the Japanese-Americans from their homes—is disorienting to consider in the land of the free, where all men supposedly are considered equal, “endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The old films in the Bainbridge museum—of Japanese-Americans allowed to bring only possessions they could carry, marched onto ferries and trains and ultimately fenced into camps with barbed wire, watch towers and searchlights—are eerily similar to scenes of Nazi trains loading up Jews.

It wasn’t until 1988 that President Ronald Reagan at last acknowledged the injustice, issued a formal apology for the nation and pledged a measly $20,000 for each survivor of the camps.

But here’s the astonishing part. Some of those in relocation camps signed up for service in the U.S. Army’s almost all-Japanese-American unit and fought for the government that essentially had jailed them.

Beschloss recently wrote of how baseball teams, organized by those trapped within the so-called “war relocation camps,” flourished, because many inmates considered baseball a “weapon with which, amid their hourly humiliations, they could assert their Americanism.”

Manzanar (Ansel Adams photo)

My only brush with formerly incarcerated Japanese-Americans was just as startling for the apparent lack of resentment. When the U.S. flag was raised, and the Star Spangled Banner played, to celebrate Kristi Yamaguchi’s gold-medal victory in figure skating at the 1992 Winter Olympics, it certainly seemed ironic—given that Yamaguchi’s father, Jim, was a California-raised, third-generation American who had been banished to an internment camp for people of Japanese ancestry. And her mother, Carole, had been born in such a camp.

Jim Yamaguchi was 7 when he was sent to a camp in Arizona. Carole Yamaguchi’s parents, George and Katherine, had been exiled to Amache, Colo., even though George was serving in the Army in Germany at the time.

Yet Carole Yamaguchi told me during those Olympics, “Our parents never said much to us children about it until we were much older, and then they just explained what happened. My dad wasn’t bitter. He was such an American he didn’t even give us Japanese names.”

Jim Yamaguchi’s only trip to Japan, Carole said, was years after the war. He was a dentist in the U.S. Air Force. “He had a great time,” Carole said. “He was just fixing teeth and playing golf.”

 

 

The Islanders are gone, and so is Al Arbour

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coach

The Islanders’ long good-bye to the only home they knew for 43 years, the sprawling New York suburbs that inspired their nickname, feels complete now. Al Arbour is dead.

The team has left for Brooklyn and Arbour, whose adept coaching turned them from expansion ragamuffins to four-time Stanley Cup champions in the early 1980s, is gone at 82, after suffering recently with dementia.

Somehow, the timing seems appropriate. Arbour’s style and the team’s Nassau Coliseum digs were analogous: Humble efficiency. Without showmanship or ego, Arbour molded the Islanders into the best franchise in major-league sports, with five consecutive trips to the Cup finals and 15 playoff appearances in his 19 years behind the bench. News of his death comes as the old Coliseum, never approaching pretentiousness but without a bad seat in the house and with plenty of passion, has been stripped of all banners claiming its tie to the Islanders, awaiting a downsizing to minor-league status.

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Arbour, it has been told many times, came to the Coliseum job hesitantly. In 1973, he had his pick to coach either the Vancouver Canucks or the one-year-old Islanders, who had won only 12 games in their expansion season. He was leaning toward Vancouver until Islanders general manager Bill Torrey convinced him that Long Island did not fit Arbour’s perception of a teeming, dirty New York City with tall buildings, a place where he was reluctant to raise his four children.

By the time he retired from coaching in 1994, Arbour had come to embrace the Island as home, far from his birthplace of Sudbury, Ontario, a town founded on the discovery of nickel, across Lake Huron from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He recalled playing hockey on the frozen creeks of Sudbury as young as 7, often with friends against their fathers, and worked for a time in the underground nickel mines.

His dream was to play either professional hockey or baseball—he was a pitcher—and, at 21, got his first NHL experience with Detroit, though he wasn’t on the roster when the Red Wings won the 1954 Stanley Cup. Arbour’s Cup victories as a player came with the Chicago Blackhawks in 1961 and Toronto Maple Leafs in 1962 and 1964.

With the NHL’s first expansion beyond its Original Six teams, Arbour went to the St. Louis Blues in 1967, served as their first captain, and played in three more Cup finals—all losses—during his four years in St. Louis.

It was during the 1970-71 season that Blues coach Scotty Bowman, on the day of a game, called Arbour—still an active player—into his office and appointed him coach. (Bowman said he had to go on a scouting trip and Arbour, later claiming he “didn’t know what the hell was going on,” watched the Blues come from behind to tie Toronto.) By the time he retired, Arbour’s total of coaching victories—782—was second only to Bowman’s in league history.

Never a star player—a defenseman, Arbour scored 12 goals in 626 games over 14 seasons and made repeated trips to the minor leagues—he was known for his savvy and what he called his “claim to fame,” playing while wearing glasses.

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That quirk caused Arbour to be christened “Radar” during his rookie season with Detroit by the team’s general manager, Jack Adams. And the handle came to take on added significance because of Arbour’s obvious hockey vision—an ability, his players attested, to see “everything.”

Convinced that new tactics forever were in demand, he once used three left wingers on a forward line; once put a forward in goal in the final seconds to save time sending off the goalie for an extra skater; once yanked a goalie during a first-period power play for a six-on-four skater advantage (which resulted in a goal).

Beyond mere strategy, Arbour was adept at pushing the right psychological buttons, most famously in the 1975 playoff series against Pittsburgh by inviting any Islander lacking belief they could rebound from an 0-3 deficit to leave practice. The Islanders wound up winning four straight and the series.

He was, of course, provided exceptional young talent by Torrey, six of whom became fellow Hall of Famers with Arbour—Mike Bossy, Clark Gillies, Pat LaFontaine, Denis Potvin, Billy Smith and Bryan Trottier. But Arbour clearly knew how to motivate them, and all their teammates.

“My philosophy,” he said upon coming to the Island, “is that some guys need a pat on the back and some guys need a kick in the pants.”

For Long Island sports fans, forever in the shadow of Big Town before the Islanders came, he was a shot in the arm.