NFL draft: Razzle dazzle and “95 percent chance”

(si.com)

Those partners in prime time, the NFL and ESPN, are about to elbow their way into the sports spotlight with a sports event that isn’t really a sports event—the NFL draft.

There is no actual competition involved in this big orchestrated fuss. No winner or loser. No consequence of any sort for months—perhaps years—down the road. Yet the NFL draft is the most scrutinized, monetized, oversized affair on the sports calendar this side of the Super Bowl.

Newspapers, magazines and Web sites—not to the mention the self-promoters on ESPN’s many platforms—already are flooded with mock drafts, endless speculation and overwrought analyses by battalions of experts considering the possibilities of the first few dozen picks.

It’s all just educated guessing, infused with an air of sophistication, though certainly far removed from the league’s first draft in 1936. Then, no team had a scouting department and Wellington Mara, son of New York Giants’ original owner Tim Mara, took on the aura of a drafting genius simply by subscribing to magazines and out-of-town papers to build dossiers of college players across the country.

The first NFL scout wasn’t hired until the Los Angeles Rams paid a fellow named Eddie Kotal in 1946. And, until ESPN president Chet Simmons, in 1980, convinced a wary Pete Rozelle, then the NFL commissioner, that fans actually would watch a televised draft, team representatives simply gathered in a hotel ballroom—usually in Chicago, Philadelphia or New York—and relayed their picks via telephone. Mostly to be reported in the small print of the following day’s papers.

(cleveland.com)

I first covered the draft in 1977. Neither the Giants head coach, John McVay, nor their No. 1 pick, USC defensive lineman Gary Jeter, were anywhere near the New York hotel draft headquarters. Both—McVay from the Giants’ New Jersey base and Jeter from his home in Los Angeles—spoke briefly by phone to a handful of reporters.

There was no “No. 1” jersey unfurled in front of Jeter for the cameras, no smiling commissioner high-fiving and hugging Jeter, no perfectly coiffed Mel Kiper breathlessly updating which team was “on the clock” and which college players still were “on the board.”

Now, teams undeniably put an enormous amount of time and money into the effort. But what the draft show ultimately pedals to the public is the process of general managers being hoisted on their own petard of having Too Much Information.

Last year, a 538.com analysis found GMs to be “victims of their own obsessive pre-draft preparations—their skill level has increased so much that only the effects of chance remain….[and] much of what each team gets from its draft picks….is determined by pure chance.”

Since 2008, academics Cade Massey, now a Wharton economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago’s Richard Thalen have been updating “The Loser’s Curse” study, which paints NFL general managers as regular victims of their own overconfidence.

Massey and Thalen have documented that the best value in the draft comes somewhere between a late first-round and early- to mid-second-round choice, because teams—-so convinced they know more than the next guy—-routinely pay too much money for the highest picks. In reality, there is virtually equal knowledge of player talent throughout the league, Massey and Thalen found, with “no observable differences in [draft] skills across teams” and therefore outcomes that are “95-plus percent chance.”

So the aggregate effect of the whole exercise is fairly trivial, just another version of a televised Survivor or The Voice. Decidedly not a sports event. No matter; the most significant impact of the draft is to assure there is no off-season in pro football, that aggressively marketing another aspect of the NFL operation is a way to steal the thunder from the NBA and NHL playoffs and push ever-present baseball into the shadows at will.

According to sports economist Roger Noll, NFL teams in fact use the draft to collectively “eliminate competition for the best rookies, thereby reducing salaries” to the highest picks. My friend Jay Weiner, for years a chronicler of sports business, called the draft “as much a sporting event as the slave trade was a job fair.”

Give the NFL this, though: Its draft is very 21^st Century. It is audience empowerment. Interactive. Real fantasy football. Like the Super Bowl, it is profoundly exaggerated, all razzle dazzle and hyperbole.

But, at least with the Super Bowl, there is a final score.

Jackie Robinson, the only real No. 42

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To have every Major League player wearing No. 42 for games on April 15 these past eight years, as they did again Wednesday, is poignantly contrary to Brooklyn Dodger outfielder Gene Hermanski’s dark humor on a 1947 evening in Atlanta.

The Dodgers were about to play an exhibition game that night with Jackie Robinson in uniform No. 42. As the first black man on a big-league roster, in the days of Jim Crow, Robinson couldn’t be missed among his all-white teammates, no matter his raiment, and there had been a telephone call promising that if Robinson stepped onto the field, he would be shot. In the pre-game clubhouse, Hermanski offered, “Why don’t we all wear No. 42? They won’t know who to hit.”

So we have continuity with an encouraging twist. From Robinson’s solitary mission to personally integrate baseball, which was legitimately the “national pastime” when the populace was barely aware of the NFL or the brand-new NBA, we now have solidarity. Everyone, for one night, dresses up like Jackie Robinson on the anniversary of his first big-league game.

It is a nice gesture to an historic figure. Although, by and large, it doesn’t go much beyond a passing reference to a man—and a time—that current players and citizens born after 1947 can barely fathom. “Babe Ruth changed baseball,” Long Island University history professor Joe Dorinson said. “Jackie Robinson changed America, which in the long run is more important.”

When we spoke briefly by phone on Thursday, Dorinson was on his way to teaching his “History of Sports: A search for heroes” class. “I am wearing,” he said, “my Brooklyn Dodgers No. 42 uniform shirt.” Dorinson happens to be among the prominent Jackie Robinson scholars and in 1997, the 50^th anniversary of Robinson breaking baseball’s color line, Dorinson was co-coordinator of a massive Jackie Robinson symposium at LIU.

Dorinson preaches that sports “is not only a mirror on society but also a catalyst to produce social change,” and that three-day 1997 LIU academic conference demonstrated by gathering historians, baseball experts, old ballplayers, psychologists and just plain fans to sort out Robinson and his consequential legacy.

Recent events beyond athletic fields continue to confirm that a post-racial America hardly is a settled issue. But Dorinson has quoted the late historian Jules Tygiel (who had participated in the Robinson symposium) that “Jackie Robinson’s story, like the story of Passover, has to be retold each year. As the Jews were once slaves in Egypt, blacks were slaves in America, and the Jackie Robinson story brings renewal and hope.”

So, while there is consternation in some circles that the percentage of American blacks in Major League baseball actually has fallen in recent years—from a high of 17 percent in 1997 to 8.2 percent now—the Robinson inheritance lives on as one of diversity, of increased opportunity in American sports for Latinos, women, Asians. From being 100-percent white in 1946, the Majors’ current rosters are roughly 60 percent white. A real meritocracy.

George Vecsey, a giant in sports journalism, recently shared a poem on his Web site from Charles Barasch’s 2008 book, “Dreams of the Presidents,” in which Barasch imagined William Taft’s reverie of pitching in relief of Taft-era Hall of Famer Walter Johnson. Taft, the first President to throw out a ceremonial first pitch at a major league game (in 1910), fancies himself—in the Barasch verse—being beckoned from the stands, removing his tie and cuff links, rolling up his sleeves and striking out Ty Cobb.

And then retiring both Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. Black men. In the big leagues.

In reality, in those decades before Jackie Robinson, what seems normal now—to have a prominent sports league’s workforce mostly reflecting the population in general—didn’t exist. Only with the appearance of Robinson, essayist Roger Rosenblatt told the 1997 LIU symposium attendees, was there “a victory over absurdity. Victory over the ludicrous….When Robinson played, he turned an upside-down nation right-side up. Life created by white America for black America is nuts. Enter Jackie Robinson, to show us the nonsense in his bright, aristocratic way.”

Robinson, of course, was a baseball superstar. A .311 hitter over 10 seasons, the leader on six league championship teams, Rookie of the Year in 1947 and league MVP two seasons later, holder of the ungodly statistic of stealing home 20 times, inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1972.

Much more than all that, he was a poke in the eye of an unjust world, an elbow in the ribs on an unfair society not living up to its ideal of all men being created equal. Yet a fellow who tempered his on-field aggressiveness with years of turning the other cheek to outrageous insults. Yeshiva University English professor Manfred Weidhorn called Robinson “a rare case of applied Christianity.”

Another April 15 is a reminder: Even if we all don No. 42, there’s no mistaking which of us is Jackie Robinson.

(Illustration by Bob Newman)

Golf, the Masters and rule of law. Amen.

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(NOT the Masters–but there is a par)

Golf is a fine sport. But the uninitiated should be forewarned this week about much of the media’s worshipful, sappy treatment of the annual Masters tournament. Paeans to golf as “a game of honor and honesty” and the reverential homage to golf’s sacrosanct rules—said to guarantee more fairness than other athletic endeavors—tend to skip over the fact that golf long turned a blind eye to diversity and, at times, to common sense.

Not until 1975 was a black man, Lee Elder, allowed to play the Masters, and only 15 years later did the Masters’ home, the Augusta National, admit a black member. Still another 22 years passed before Augusta accepted women.

Rules, rules. At the 1968 Masters, an overzealous letter-of-the-law decree prevented Argentina’s Roberto De Vicenzo from advancing to a playoff after De Vicenzo’s playing partner, Tommy Aaron, entered a 4 on De Vicenzo’s scorecard—instead of the 3 De Vicenzo earned, fair and square—on the 71^st of the tournament’s 72 holes. It was Aaron’s mistake, yet it was De Vicenzo who was held responsible for the error, thereby losing the tournament by one stroke because he signed the inaccurate card.

Such imperfections bring to mind celebrated golf writer Herbert Warren Wind’s famous description, “Amen Corner,” which Wind used to label the Masters’ difficult section at holes 11, 12 and 13. Wind, who died in 2005 at 88, wrote that he lifted the phrase from a 1930s jazz tune, without religious implications.

(USAToday)

In fact, though, that old recording—“Shouting in the Amen Corner”—directly referred to a church environment. And, just for additional irony, given the Masters’—and golf’s—decades of segregation, the term specifically cited a tradition with Black Protestant congregations, in which church members continually exclaim “amen” during the sermon in response to the pastor’s words.

Furthermore, it could be that lyrics from “Shouting in the Amen Corner” apply to the Masters’ stuffy old exclusionary policies:

Brothers and sisters, we got hypocrites in this crowd

Brothers and sisters, some of you are shoutin’ too loud.

You’ll find out on judgment day, you can’t fool the Lord that way.

Brothers and sisters, hear all I’ve got to say.

And…

You can shout with all your might, but if you ain’t livin’ right

There’s no use shoutin’ in that amen corner….

In 1954, there was a James Baldwin play, “Amen Corner,” with the protagonist’s conclusion that she should not have used religion as an escape from the struggles of life and love. Four years after that production’s brief run, Wind, in his report on the 1958 Masters for Sports Illustrated, first conjured his “Amen Corner” term to dramatize Arnold Palmer’s final-round eagle on No. 13, which secured the first of Palmer’s four Masters’ titles.

My one encounter with the erudite Mr. Wind was during the 1986 U.S. Open at Long Island’s Shinnecock Hills course, when a first round played in a downpour and shifting winds rendered the world’s best golfers helpless to approach the par of 70.

Many of the pros that day declared a more accurate par would have been as high as 77. So I approached Wind, the most experienced golf observer on the premises, with the proposal that par be adjusted, as warranted, in response to conditions beyond just the length of the hole.

Wind regarded my two heads and dismissed the idea out of hand, after he had filled me in on some of the history. That is, that the British invented an imaginary Colonel Bogey, against whom their scores were measured, and Americans later devised par as a more specific, rigid norm. My clearly wacky theory of some par-ometer, that could slide up and down to reflect whether a hole was playing long or short, whether greens were slick or slow, whether a monsoon or hurricane figured in the mix, was in no way acceptable to Wind.

Because the rules are the rules in golf, that most ethical and moral of sports. And, as a skeptical journalist, I qualified as a target of this line in the song….

If your name ain’t on that roll, all that noise won’t save your soul

So stop your shoutin’ in that amen corner.

Baseball, hot dogs and American culture

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It would seem downright un-American not to note the opening of baseball season. Even in the face of evidence that the NFL has overtaken baseball as the nation’s favorite athletic theater; that the NBA and March Madness have (literally) soared to new heights; that soccer has shouldered its way solidly into our sports culture; that doping stars have revealed a contemptible underbelly in all competitive sports….baseball hangs in there.

It can be argued that baseball has become over-romanticized and soaked in nostalgia even as the modern game is burdened with maddening statistical over-analysis and Major League ballparks regularly bludgeon fans with artificial noise incompatible with the game’s pastoral roots.

As a barometer of where The American Pastime stands in the 21^st Century, roughly half of the students in my Hofstra sportswriting class each semester typically confess to preferring other spectator sports.

And yet, baseball is unquestionably in our DNA. A strong magnet to some, possibly just white noise to most, but always there through the long season from late March into November. Throughout our lifetimes, really.

When I was 6, I pleaded with my reluctant older brother to attempt hitting my not-so fast ball, and when his subsequent line drive struck me flush in the mouth—requiring the early extraction of a couple of baby teeth—it was a harbinger of my inauspicious baseball career, essentially concluded after Little League days. But it was not the end of my attraction to the sport, somewhere between fandom and appreciation.

Maybe it’s the eloquence of professional observers such as recently retired Los Angeles Dodgers announcer Vince Scully, with gems of narrative detail such as his call of the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax’s 1965 perfect game, that demonstrate baseball’s hold on us. (Google “Vin Scully Sandy Koufax perfect game” and enjoy 11 minutes of vivid drama.)

Or maybe it’s recognizing the truth in New Yorker Magazine veteran Roger Angell’s description, upon accepting the Hall of Fame writers’ award in 2014, that baseball “has turned out to be so familiar and so startling, so spacious and so exacting, and so easy looking and so heartbreakingly difficult that if filled my notebooks in a rush.”

Consider that American slang is loaded with baseball language. A ballpark figure. Batting 1.000. Grand slam. Out of left field. Step up to the plate. Ruthian. And that American popular culture is littered with baseball references. When Philip Roth tweaked the ongoing search for the “great American novel,” that theoretically perfect crystallization of the country’s spirit and identity, by calling his 1973 book “The Great American Novel,” he made it about baseball.

In a 2012 essay in the New York Times, “What baseball does to the soul,” Irish-born writer Colum McCann related the experience of a Yankee home run in a pivotal playoff-game as “a moment unlike any other, when you sit with your son in the ballpark, and the ball is high in the air, you feel yourself aware of everything, the night, the neon, the very American-ness of the moment.”

Afghan-American writer Mir Tamim Ansary, born in Kabul but raised from his high school days in the U.S., wrote that it wasn’t until he was in his 60s that he finally came to understand baseball by seeing it in terms of “the classic American Western….waiting for something to happen” and realizing that “if you care” about the result of each pitch, “it’s the purest possible definition of suspense.”

Quite naturally, baseball was the backdrop for the 1950s Broadway hit, “Damn Yankees,” for a retelling of the Faustian bargain. In the 1968 song, “Mrs. Robinson,” Simon and Garfunkel ask, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.”

It was baseball’s prominence in society that amplified one of the great advances in civil rights: Jackie Robinson. Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?”—sometimes called the best comic routine of all time—of course is baseball shtick. And, through his creator Charles Schulz, the inimitable Charlie Brown once said, “A hot dog is better with a baseball game in front of it.”

So, play ball.

Chris Mullin, 30 years later

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(Newsday/Paul Bereswill)

Obituaries always come too late for their subject to enjoy, and that could be said of the college basketball eulogy given Chris Mullin after his final game at St. John’s University. Rival Georgetown buried Mullin in the 1985 NCAA tournament semifinal before the Hoyas unconditionally praised him.

Not that Mullin, a legitimate hoops luminary, was ever the least bit unappreciated for his basketball acumen and craft throughout his four St. John’s seasons and 13 subsequent years in the NBA. But the way Georgetown coach John Thompson—and specifically Georgetown defender David Wingate—demonstrated their ultimate respect was with a singular assault on Mullin’s considerable talents.

That March 30 night in Lexington, Ky., exactly 30 years before Mullin was hired this week as St. John’s new head coach, Thompson essentially ordered Wingate to pay no mind to anything or anyone in the building except Mullin. While the other four Hoyas played a help-each-other zone defense, Wingate played Mullin. And the direct result, besides wearing out both Mullin and Wingate, was a 77-59 Georgetown victory.

Mullin had averaged 19.8 points that season, and he made half his shots that night. But Wingate allowed him only eight attempts, and thus a measly eight points.

“Never looking at the ball,” Wingate said in his team’s victorious lockerroom, “created a little problem for me. But when you’re covering Chris Mullin, you can’t take your eyes off Chris to look for the ball or Chris will be gone. He’ll be open with the ball.”

From the very outset, Wingate chased Mullin. He chased him outside. He chased him down low. He chased him through screens and a few walls. He seemed to chase him down the interstate, off the cloveleafs, down dirt roads and back alleys.

Mullin didn’t touch the ball for the first 3 ½ minutes while Georgetown built an immediate eight-point lead. With six minutes left in the half, Mullin’s basket tied the game, whereupon Wingate wouldn’t let him near the ball again for almost nine minutes while Georgetown went ahead by 14.

“There are lots of kids who can shoot like Chris,” Thompson said after the game. “But what makes him great is his ability to get open, and when he’s open, it’s not just his shooting that hurts you. It’s his passing, too. David is very quick, but Chris is very shrewd.”

That night in Kentucky, Quick put Shrewd in jail and threw away the key. But it was just one game, and there may be no larger compliment than the post-game fear of Mullin that Georgetown acknowledged.

Now, shrewd is clearly a Mullin quality St. John’s officials are counting on, given that Mullin never has coached on any level, and there is widespread agreement that the old star’s cleverness will serve him well in this new role. What he really will need, though, is a player like the one who demanded every second of Georgetown’s attention 30 years ago.

Singapore: A civilized place to visit

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There is a guess-you-had-to-be-there tone to the dialogue considering the legacy of Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore who died this week at 91. From this side of the globe, reports generally cast Lee’s transformation of the tiny city-state into one of the wealthiest Asian nations as having been accomplished through a semi-authoritarian, one-party rule that muzzles political dissent.

Along with the acknowledged success of Lee’s “Singapore model”—rendering one of the world’s highest per-capita incomes, spotless public spaces, clean tap water, non-corrupt government officials—there also has been attention to harsh penalties for such crimes as failing to flush public toilets and buying or selling chewing gum, and questions of whether free speech is fully tolerated.

As a person who spent a single week in Singapore for a 2005 assignment to cover a major International Olympic Committee meeting, I can only say there was nothing not to like about the place. On the surface, at least, Singapore appeared to follow the Walt Disney school of theme-park efficiency—a Tomorrow Land, Fantasy Land ideal. (You can chew gum, just don’t dare spit it out on the street.)

I even ran into the Statue of Liberty while I was there. (She was promoting the unsuccessful New York City bid for the 2012 Olympics.)

Picture gleaming, modern skyscrapers side-by-side with classic, historic buildings in the British colonial style, such as the Raffles Hotel (partly famous as home to the Singapore Sling drink). Think of impeccably neat surroundings and a mix of normally distinct cultures, a place somehow simultaneously Asian and Western, which was a manifestation of Lee’s ability to get along both with China and the United States.

Of course, I had read about the high-profile case of American teenager Michael Fay, whose conviction for vandalism and subsequent sentence to be caned in Singapore triggered a minor diplomatic crisis in 1994. It certainly made Singapore sound like a menacing place.

But travel can do enlightening things for one’s worldview. Almost a half-century in the newspaper business afforded me just enough global rambling, mostly via of assignments to cover international sports, not only to deepen an appreciation for all the good stuff and openness we have in the United States—but also to come to the conclusion that we too often paint other lands with a brush of generalization.

So it is not so hard to understand some of the Singaporean annoyance over disapproving representations of Lee and his approach to social order. A column in the United Kingdom’s Independent, written by Singapore native Calvin Cheng, appeared under the headline, “The West Has It Totally Wrong on Lee Kuan Yew.”

“Much as I understand the West’s fundamental DNA to assert certain unalienable freedoms,” Cheng wrote, “as a Singaporean, I strenuously object that there has been any…trade-off” between Lee’s enormously successful economic template and fundamental civil liberties.

“In short,” Cheng wrote, “are you a civilized person who wants to live in a civilized society? Because the things you cannot do in Singapore are precisely the sort that civilized people should not do anyway. If you are, you have nothing to fear.”

Indian-born Washington Post reporter Sahana Singh, who lived in Singapore for 12 years, wrote that she “never felt more free” than when she was stationed in that city-state. “Westerners,” she wrote, “ridicule Singapore for restrictions on personal expression and protest, but overlook how the nation provides more freedom than some of the most-lauded democracies.

“The national government,” she said, “is highly transparent and virtually incorruptible, functioning better than some chaotic, so-called democracies. And yet the world asks why the average Singaporean, who had good schooling, a job, affordable housing, healthcare, child-care and elder-care, doesn’t protest from roof-tops.”

It turns out, by the way, that when Michael Fay—upon returning to the United States—also got in trouble with the American legal system. And that Bill Clinton, who as President during Fay’s Singaporean troubles called that nation’s punishment of the lad extreme and mistaken, is attending Lee’s funeral.

A very civilized thing to do.

Sports, recreation and dancing grannies

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Public dancing in China seems an improbable pursuit to come under the heading of “sport.” But that popular routine, having stirred up controversy among some of the populace, suddenly is targeted for regulation through the Chinese government’s General Administration of Sport, according to a Wednesday report in the New York Times.

To an uninformed Westerner who observed such frolic during a 2011 trip to Shanghai, this is surprising on a couple of levels. First of all, the activity is more diversion or recreation than some competitive physical enterprise. And, beyond that, virtually all of the participants—just having an honest good time—appear more in line for some sort of senior discount than administrative sanction.

In fact, they are widely known as “dancing grannies.” Only a small percentage of the shuffling hoofers I witnessed were male and an even smaller percentage were not-yet-eligible for retirement. At serene Fuxing Park in the pleasant section of Shanghai known as the French Concession, there was a daily gathering of small crowds—seemingly impromptu, but always in the same section of the park—grouping themselves around boom boxes that played an eclectic blend of tunes.

Sometimes the dancers’ styles even matched the music though, just as likely, some would be tangoing to soft rock, or waltzing to disco. There were passer-by dancers, who would join the group only briefly and then move on, and committed terpsichoreans, who continued to strut their stuff—finding different partners or not—as long as there was music.

Other pastimes were scattered through the park’s various stations, each apparently reserved on a regular basis for a specific hobby preferred by greying residents. Men playing cards here, a group of folks singing opera there, not far from a knot of people engaged in tai chi (that slow-motion exercise that involves deep breathing and flowing, martial-arts poses) and, just down a path, others huddled around a speaker to engage in a little karaoke. There also was a regular outpost for a sort of banner-waving choreography, similar to those flag corps that lead marching bands.

In short, the park was alive with energy. And on walks around the city in the evening, it was impossible not to pass other knots of dancing grannies on lots and side streets.

The story from China now is that some residents object to the amplified music central to public dancing. (It was never clear, by the way, whether the music was supplied by a designated person, or a duty somehow rotated, or provided purely by chance.)

So the General Administration of Sport, through its mass-fitness department and in conjunction with the Ministry of Culture, is poised to do something—though it isn’t clear what. Reports that standards would be issued on what type of public dancing would be allowed appear to miss the point of the noise complaints.

In the end, shouldn’t the government be a sport about this? Those dancing grannies seemed a lot livelier, and smiley-er, than sedentary sorts all too common in so many societies (including ours). The English poet Lord Byron said, “On with the dance! Let joy be unconfined.”

Revolutionary, I know.

Curtain of gamesmanship

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(azcentral.com)

There is something to be said for college students’ uninhibited ingenuity. A primary purpose of higher education, after all, is to stimulate the innovative gene, and college hijinks have a certain place of honor at sporting events, few of which can match the passionate, occasionally goofy scene at big-time basketball games.

But I’m not sure I’m impressed with the Arizona State students’ Curtain of Distraction. Its fevered, bizarre mini-productions—staged for the express purpose of impairing the free-throw proficiency of opposing teams—somehow has brought overwhelmingly positive publicity for its buffonish inspiration.

The perpetrators—essentially a small band of students but fully backed by the university, including associate athletic director Bill Kennedy—are proud of having devised an efficient “free-throw defense” behind the opponents’ basket, and the NCAA itself—that bastion of fair play—has given its blessing.

The NCAA.com Web site has posted a glowing video about the creation and operation of the curtain, and further approved the device’s continued use in the women’s championship tournament for Arizona State’s first-round home games. That, in spite of a New York Times analysis that cited a one- to two-point advantage per game for Arizona State resulting from the curtain’s deployment.

In case you don’t know: With the Curtain of Distraction, Arizona State pranksters, stepping away from the role of spectating just as an opposing player readies to take a free throw, whip open a black curtain behind the basket to reveal some weird, frenzied skit. A student rowing a blow-up kayak. A mostly naked fellow playing a guitar. An Elvis impersonator. A fat guy in an undershirt and tutu. A clown jumping rope.

The choreographed lunacy has been called “brilliant” and “the funniest weapon” against free-throw efficiency. The intent itself hardly is new. In the 1950s, when guide wires stabilized baskets at NBA games, there were tales of Syracuse Nationals fans grasping those wires and shaking the backboard during opponents’ tries.

Still, compared to the typical modern tricks, of fans waving their arms behind the basket or holding up silly posters—also not exactly respectful—the Curtain of Distraction is fan disruption on steroids. It is a show-stealing invasion of the athletic competition. And at what point is that tantamount to poor sportsmanship?

Ka’Nesheia Cobbins, a senior guard for the Arkansas-Little Rock team, preparing to face Arizona State’s women in the second round of NCAA play, was aware that “every time they open [the curtain], it’s a different character, and we’re, like, ‘How did they do that?’ The commentators were saying that they think that’s something good. It’s cool, I guess, but we’re just going to have to block it out….”

Why is it something good?

The man who wrote the Times piece on the Curtain of Distraction’s effect, University of Michigan economics professor and public policy scholar Justin Wolfers, is the same fellow who applied “forensic economics” to a 2007 study concluding there was point shaving in roughly one percent of Division I basketball games. Wolfers drew no conclusions that the Curtain of Distraction is a different form of cheating. But I will.

Isn’t the Curtain of Distraction also gaming the system? Shouldn’t players be players, officials be officials, coaches be coaches and fans just be fans? Arizona State has a drama department for the Curtain’s aspiring thespians, where there is no danger of visiting basketball players showing up and trying to mess with their focus.

(Arizona State University)

Donald Trump for president? Ask the old USFL folks

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For anyone out there who thinks Donald Trump should not run for president, the good news is that Trump has announced he is forming an exploratory committee to consider running for president. Because, by now, the world surely understands that The Donald regularly deals in bunkum, far quicker to offer a bluff than produce a [small-T] trump.

“Americans,” Trump said in a statement threatening his White House campaign, “deserve better than what they get from their politicians—who are all talk and no action.”

Ho, boy. You could say it takes one to know one, and Trump has been road-testing his bluster for more than 30 years. Let me take you back to his most significant involvement in the sports world, when Trump, then 37, spent $9 million to buy the New York Generals in the short-lived United States Football League.

That was in 1984. The USFL, not quite bold enough to take on the established NFL, was organized as a springtime league. At the time Trump, son of a multimillionaire New York builder, already had the reputation as an attention hog. (His chief competitor in the high-powered real-estate world then, Sam Lefrak, said of him, “Kid only knows how to talk, not to build.”)

Still Trump, as the new owner of the Generals, whom he had purchased from Oklahoma oil tycoon J. Walter Duncan, commenced talking about all the things he would build in the USFL–which, it should be said, at least didn’t mind the free publicity.

Trump said he would hire Don Shula, who had just coached the fifth of his six Super Bowl teams in 1983, away from the Miami Dolphins. He said he was negotiating to bring all-NFL lineman Randy White from the Dallas Cowboys. He said he was close to a deal to spirit away all-pro linebacker Lawrence Taylor from the Giants.

None of that happened. When Shula announced his decision to withdraw from Generals consideration, Trump quickly claimed that he—Trump—had pulled back his offer rather than include a Shula apartment in the showy Trump Tower. Shula wryly countered, “I had my press conference first.”

Trump also maintained that, at a meeting of USFL owners shortly after joining their club, “the subject of moving our season to the fall didn’t come up until I brought it up. I brought it up and spoke for a half hour, and when I was finished, if a vote had been taken, I believe it would have been 12-6 or 13-5 in favor of switching to the fall.”

Fellow USFL officials strongly denied that. “I would suggest,” said Vince Lombardi Jr., then president and general manager of the Michigan franchise, “that Don is out there on his own on this. More than any other issue.”

Trump, who said his Manhattan tower had 68 stories when there really were only 59, said the Generals’ season-ticket sales in 1984 were at 40,000, when they actually were at 32,000. (The Generals played in the old Giants Stadium, with a capacity of 77,000.)

Trump had been among the original candidates for USFL ownership in 1983, “but it didn’t work out,” Tampa franchise owner John Bassett told me after Trump came aboard. “Why? That depends on who you talk to. If you talk to me, I tell everybody that he didn’t put up the $5,000 assessment, so we kicked him out. Which is true. If you talk to him, he tells everybody that he was busy with his real estate matters and wanted to play in the fall. Which is also true.”

So there are different angles of truth. But here is what actually happened in the USFL-Trump adventure. As the league dwindled to eight teams, there indeed was a decision to move USFL games to the fall, in direct competition with the NFL, for the 1986 season. Instead, the USFL folded.

And, just this past year, after Trump lost a bidding war to buy the NFL’s Buffalo Bills for $1.4 billion, Trump insisted via Twitter, “Even though I refused to pay a ridiculous price for the Buffalo Bills, I would have produced a winner. Now that won’t happen.”

For anyone out there who is a Bills fan, what did happen may be good news.

Academics and sports: Circular logic?

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Here’s a puzzler for Pi Day:

Since one of the earliest written approximations of pi was found in Babylon (on a clay tablet dated 1900-1600 B.C.), and I (a practitioner of sports journalism) live in Babylon (OK, not that Babylon); and since ancient Greek mathematician and physicist Archimedes, credited with devising the first recorded algorithm for calculating the value of pi, was from Syracuse (OK, not the Division I college sports power Syracuse); and since Pi Day (March 14) also is the birthday of genius poster boy Albert Einstein, who is said to have hated sports as a young man but befriended Paul Robeson, the pioneer black singer and actor who had been an all-American football player at Rutgers….might there be some empirical link between eggheads and jocks?

Is there some theory of relativity here?

The convergence of academia and athletics this time of year—that is, teams representing institutions of higher learning in the annual NCAA basketball tournament—in fact has increasingly taken the form of ships passing in the night. According to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics, 13 of the 68 teams involved in March Madness a couple of years ago would not have qualified if the new threshold being phased in by the NCAA had been applied—that teams must have 50 percent of their players on target for graduation.

More and more, the most serious forms of academic and athletic pursuits appear to exist in a transitory, incidental relationship without lasting significance. Like pi, the separation seems forever. Especially since the entertainment value of sports—dramatic, unscripted—increasingly generates a never-ending perception that, while games are fun, scholarship is a solitary, punishing grind unworthy of television coverage.

The beauty to Pi Day—recognized by Congress in 2009 because the 3/14 date reflects the first three significant numbers in pi—is the way it stirs up a bit of geek goofiness, worth a good giggle. Grey Matter for Dummies. Pi Day even can serve as a reminder that sports and education are capable of co-existing quite well.

In 2008, a new sport called Pi Ball was invented in South Africa—supposedly on Pi Day—played on a circular court around a central circular ball strike area. Comparable to beach volleyball, with two players on a team separated by a net, it hasn’t caught on internationally. And certainly not here in the United States.

But here’s a better answer to what we may see as the sound mind, sound body conundrum: At MIT, where they really do do rocket science, boasting some of the world’s elite brainiacs among the student body, the football team has posted winning records in five of the last seven seasons.

(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Not only that, but MIT has a really fun/intelligent cheer. (With pi included.)

E to the U, D-U, D-X

E to the X, D-X.

Cosine, secant, tangent, sine, 3-point-14159…..

Integral, radical, U, D-V,

Slipstick, slide rule, M-I-T.

There. Problem solved.

John Jeansonne

Newsday sportswriter emeritus/Hofstra University journalism adjunct

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Academics and sports: Circular logic?