Gentrification and the Islanders’ identity

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For 43 years, the Islanders-Rangers story has been a hockey version of the old country mouse-city mouse fable. A practical dwelling of simple tastes and no frills (Nassau Coliseum) for one, big-city opulence and celebrity treatment (Madison Square Garden) for the other. But each eventually content with its own lot and the realization that tastes can differ.

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Let’s think about this, on the occasion of what may have been the last Islanders-Rangers game—the 126th, lively as ever, going back to 1972—at the country-mouse residence this week. (The rivals could reconvene there in the playoffs, though they haven’t done so in the post-season since 1994.) Next season, when the Islanders relocate to Brooklyn, within the New York City limits, do they—and perhaps more specifically, their fans—lose their very identity? Do the Islanders merely become Rangers Lite?

Much of any sports team’s connection to its home base is perception. Not a single player on the Islanders’ current roster—made up of Americans, Canadians, Slovaks, a Czech, Austrian, Dane, Russian and Belarussian—hails from Long Island. Nor do any of the Rangers—a collection of lads from the U.S., Canada, Sweden and Norway—come from New York City. For their original meeting lo those many years ago, every Islander and every Ranger had come from north of the border: It was our Canadians against your Canadians.

Another geographical paradox is they are called the “New York Islanders”—rather than the Long Island (Somethings)—because original owner Roy Boe believed the “New York” label was more spectacular. More big league. Also, there was a general feeling in the Islanders’ early days that much of their potential audience would be Rangers’ fans unable to obtain tickets to games at the sold-out Garden.

Soon enough, though, the Islanders were champions. And, with the bandwagon effect, something more emotional and tribe-like than general product loyalty, the Islanders were seen as representatives of the Island—a photo negative of Manhattan—to their large and passionate fan base. Born and raised there; not New York City ex-pats. Working class; not fancy-schmancy Big Town sophisticates.

It was the Islanders’ comparatively rustic setting which convinced Al Arbour (whose very surname suggested leafy, shady surroundings) to sign on as coach and led to a four-year reign as Stanley Cup champions. Arbour had made it clear that he didn’t want to live among skyscrapers and concrete, which had been his idea of a “New York” team.

And it was the Islanders’ 1975 elimination of the Rangers from the Stanley Cup playoffs, only two seasons after they materialized as an expansion team, that provided the Island—a suburban sprawl forever in the entertainment and psychological shadow of Gotham—its first Carnegie Hall, Broadway show parity.

At the time, the “bumpkin” Islanders—as then-general manager Bill Torrey sarcastically described them to Newsday’s Mark Herrmann recently—jealously resented how Madison Avenue and the city media fawned over the Rangers, even as the Islanders were quickly developing into a powerhouse team.

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But when the Islanders began their run of championships in 1980 and it was suggested that it was “New York’s” first Stanley Cup since the Rangers’ 1940 title, feisty Islanders goalie Billy Smith declared, “The Stanley Cup is not in New York. It’s on Long Island.” That was a country mouse who came to appreciate his circumstance.

What, then, is the parable of gentrification? With the Islanders running away to Brooklyn, team ownership is saying that it is too good for the humble old Coliseum? (Might it be that fans stayed away from home games the past few years not because of an inferior building but rather an inferior team? They have come back to regularly fill, and dramatically energize, the place this season now that the Islanders at last are contenders again.)

A further insult to Island hockey fans are published reports that the Islanders’ Bridgeport farm team will settle in at the Coliseum. (Subliminal message: The minor leagues are good enough for you rubes.) That news circulates even as the parent club is trying to convince season ticket holders to follow it to the Barclays Center, an arena designed for basketball that can’t match the Coliseum for having no bad seat in the house.

The players—like all professional athletes, their primary association and commitment is to teammates, coaches and staff—acknowledge the “breaking-in period,” as Islanders captain John Tavares put it, regarding the Brooklyn move. It is not his place to question such management decisions, but in his six seasons, Tavares has come to believe that “what makes the [Islanders-Rangers] rivalry so great is that you have two such passionate fan bases. I think people from Long Island are very proud. I’m sure people from the city are the same….”

At this week’s (possibly) final Coliseum match between the country and city teams, message boards repeatedly vowed to Islanders fans, “We Play for You!”

For a few more weeks, anyway. (Will they at least leave the championship banners and plaques behind?)

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And then, it sounds like: So long, suckers.

 

Fantasy and reality in college sports

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The thing about NYU’s 2015 baseball team—the school’s first in that intercollegiate sport since 1974, as the New York Times reported this week—is that it is real. I make this distinction because, 15 years ago, I found myself following (through the school’s student newspaper) an NYU football juggernaut that turned out to be the athletic version of a unicorn.

The Violet gridders of 2000, according to regular dispatches by sports reporter Ryse Dwillin in the Washington Square News, were romping (allegedly) past opponents from Brandeis, the University of Chicago, Vassar, Washington U. of St. Louis and Whitman College of Walla Walla, Wash.

Not that many people would have been expected to notice. NYU’s athletic operation—with the exception of a powerhouse fencing team—had dropped off the Division I sports radar a quarter-century before. And New Yorkers’ sporting passions long ago turned almost exclusively toward professional teams. Especially that fall, a Yankees-Mets World Series and the Giants’ run to the Super Bowl were taking up virtually all of fans’ oxygen.

At the time, though, I had a significant connection to NYU, in the form of tuition payments for my daughter, herself a Washington Square News staffer. So, late that autumn, as NYU appeared positioned for the Division III national playoffs, I could have generated some rooting fervor for the lads in purple and white.

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Then, on Dec. 7, the Washington Square News published a short note from the editor, beginning,

“We’d like to come clean: There is no football team at NYU.”

A shocking Brian Williams moment? A reckless squandering of journalistic credibility? Or just a good college giggle, in the honored tradition of sly sarcasm?

One WSN account of the rampaging mythological team had roguishly quoted made-up quarterback Joel Luber’s complaint—a cliché in the real world of successful athletes who somehow feel unappreciated—that “none of the critics thought we were for real.”

Of course, they weren’t. Neither was the team’s beat writer. (Ryse Dwillin was an anagram, with an extra “i,” of actual reporter Will Snyder). Nor did coach Jack Wizzenhunt nor star tailback Ahmed El Kahloul exist, nor a play called “the Rooster,” wherein El Kahloul would hide the ball between his legs.

Eventually, what most surprised the playful Frankensteins who created that football monster was that a few readers didn’t get what they considered an obvious joke. There were some calls asking where to buy football tickets and how to try out for the team.

The whole thing was meant to lampoon the decidedly low visibility of NYU sports, even among its student body. Then, as now, most of the school’s intercollegiate teams played their “home” games nowhere near the bustling Greenwich Village campus, at such distant venues as Bloomfield, N.J., up-state Suffern, Upper Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens. (The revived baseball team’s home field is on Brooklyn’s Coney Island.)

There certainly is some irony in the fact that NYU currently fields 21 intercollegiate sports teams—11 for men, 10 for women—and legitimately can argue that its athletic emphasis is on serving students interested in competition. As opposed to, say, the University of Alabama, which has seven men’s teams and 10 women’s. In such an environment as Alabama’s, where King Football rules, a multi-million dollar entertainment business—based as it is on the labor of quasi-students—serves first to please alumni, television executives, sponsors, fabulously paid coaches and gamblers.

So, in the end, which is the lie? The grand spoofs, or the thing that inspires them—thoroughly professional big-time college sports programs hiding behind a claim of student-athlete amateurism?

Long before the fictional NYU gridders, there was the 1941 Plainfield Teachers College football team, and the Maguire University basketball team of the 1960s.

Annoyed by the attention paid to major-college football at the expense of smaller institutions, a Wall Street broker named Morris Newburger fabricated Plainfield (and an entire 10-team conference) with a simple telephone call reporting a final score to a major New York City newspaper. When the paper’s staff at last realized that it has been hoodwinked, Newburger issued a press release saying 15 Plainfield players had been declared academically ineligible  and that the coach chose to cancel the remainder of the season.

Maguire materialized from regular gatherings of high school coaches and college scouts at a Chicago bar—Maguire’s—who tweaked the NCAA’s policing naivete. As a prank, those fellows simply submitted information about their “school” nickname (the Jollymen), colors (green and white), and college president (Dr. Mel Connolly, actually a truck driver—his real name, minus the “doctor” title—who regularly could be found in his “office” at Maguire’s). Maguire’s subsequently received tickets to two Final Four tournaments until a Chicago columnist spilled the beans.

What we seem to have with these hoaxes is not so much nefarious prevarications but something on the order of Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness”—characterizing a “truth” as something that, while not exactly based on fact, points to the absurdity of real events.

My former Newsday colleague Stan Isaacs—a man with a twinkle in his eye who was a giant among sports journalists—years ago became so convinced that only bettors scoured the college basketball scores that he added his own invented schools to the newspaper’s list of results.

His favorite was Chelm University, which he named for a town in Yiddish folklore inhabited by people who were good-natured but stupid. There is no record that Chelm ever lost a game.

 

 

 

 

 

The non-Cuban Cubans who made black baseball history

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It’s Spring-like somewhere. And, really, this is an ideal time to conflate the passing of Black History Month with the approaching baseball season—even here in cold, cold Babylon Village, on the South Shore of Long Island, N.Y.

Especially here. This is where—more than a century ago—a staff of waiters, bellhops and porters at a fading resort, the Argyle Hotel, formed America’s first black professional baseball team. That was the summer of 1885—62 years before Jackie Robinson’s Major League debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The Aug. 22, 1885 edition of Babylon’s South Side Signal reported that a game on the Argyle grounds, between the National Club of Farmingdale and the Athletics of Babylon, was won by “the employees at the Argyle Hotel,” 29-1.

Formed by Argyle headwaiter Frank Thompson, they became known as the Cuban Giants, so named by a white New Jersey promoter who soon bankrolled them for Harlem Globetrotter-style tours. The name may have been based on the racial realities of the day—that white crowds would sooner pay to see Latinos than blacks play ball. Or maybe the result of the sporting press, known at the time to euphemistically refer to blacks as Cuban, Spanish or Arabian. Or perhaps became the team’s manager, Stanislaus Kostka Govern, was a native of the Caribbean.

In his 1995 book, “Complete History of the Negro Leagues,” Mark Ribowsky wrote that, in spite of “reams of attention in the press….it takes a leap of the imagination to believe that anyone who came to see them perform was really conned” by the Cuban ploy.

Less clear is whether the players originally were paid (top salary: $18 a week) to provide entertainment for hotel guests or, in fact, had baseball as their primary jobs.

A 2005 book, “Out of the Shadows: African-American Baseball from the Cuban Giants to Jackie Robinson,” edited by Bill Kirwin, said Thompson recruited players from as far away as Washington and Philadelphia. And Jules Tygiel, the late historian of black baseball, wrote that the team toured the East in a private railroad car and consistently drew sellout crowds—and was such a success that there was a handful of imitators. The Cuban X Giants in New York, Page Fence Giants from Michigan, Lincoln Giants from Nebraska.

At the time, base ball (two words in the American vocabulary then) was becoming the nation’s No. 1 spectator sport, and the Cuban Giants were a powerhouse, winning all 10 games against white competition in 1885 and proclaimed the “world colored champions” of 1887 and 1888.

(Babylon Historical and Preservation Society)

A story in the black Indianapolis Freeman newspaper soon reported that the Cuban Giants had beaten “the New Yorks” two straight games and that “the St. Louis Browns, Detroits and Chicagos, afflicted with Negro phobia,” declined challenges to play the Cuban Giants—“unable to bear the odium of being beaten by colored men,” the paper said.

By the 1890s, the Cuban Giants periodically counted on their roster such widely acclaimed players as Frank Grant, considered by baseball historian Robert Peterson to be the best black player of his era; Sol White, called by black sports historian Art Rust, Jr. the best long-ball hitter of his time; and Bud Fowler, memorialized in Cooperstown as the first black man to be paid by a white baseball team (and there were several for the barnstorming Fowler).

At the time, Babylon was past its peak as a booming resort destination triggered by the arrival of the Long Island Rail Road in 1867, when New York city’s summer crowds and other tourists made their way to nearby Fire Island. The Argyle, funded by a syndicate headed by LIRR president Austin Corbin and built on the former estate of railroad magnate Electus B. Litchfield, was the last of a dozen hotels in the village. Among the Argyle’s investors was the son of the Duke of Argyll; thus its name.

(Babylon Historical and Preservation Society)

(Babylon Historical and Preservation Society)

But it never was more than one-third occupied, fell into disrepair by the 1890s—even as its employees began to rule the base ball world—and was razed in 1904. Some of its wood lives on in homes situated on the hotel’s old grounds, on the West bank of Argyle Lake—which had been a large mill pond during the resort’s existence.

In 2010, a plaque—remembering the Cuban Giants—was erected on the approximate site of the team’s playing field. There is a home plate next to the marker. That is covered by snow for now. But it’s Spring-like somewhere, just as sure as there is baseball history right here.

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1980 U.S. Olympic hockey “miracle:” Skip the moral implications

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Sports always is an Us-against-Them exercise, and you choose your side. Identify with your tribe. So, when the underdog U.S. ice hockey team shocked the mighty Soviets on the way to winning a thoroughly unlikely Olympic gold medal in 1980, it was natural enough for American spectators to go a little haywire.

At the time, the Soviets were the established international hockey heavyweights and, on an implied level, were the athletic extension of a government considered the world’s most dangerous nuclear-age bully. Plus, we Yanks were hungry for some form of self-assurance, in a funk of insecurity over the Iran hostage crisis and were outraged morally by the USSR invasion of Afghanistan two months earlier.

(Twenty-one years later, U.S. policy makers invaded Afghanistan, but that’s another story.)

The Cold War still was raging, and the Olympics—theoretically above politics but so often a proxy conflict without bullets—was handy for some sabre rattling and nationalistic bluster.

So the meaning of that big game in Lake Placid was immediately inflated—perverted, really—as an expression of our homeland’s superiority. Herb Brooks, the U.S. coach, called his team’s 4-3 victory evidence that our way of life was better than the Soviets’. U.S. editorials declared that the hockey triumph “lifted the spirits of Americans everywhere.” The whole thing was schmaltzified—splendid hockey gone to hokey—and eventually Disneyfied in the 2004 movie “Miracle.”

Now, 35 years on, the so-called U.S. “Miracle on Ice” again is being celebrated—as it should be, though in a purely hockey sense. It was fabulous theatre on the big stage, intense competition at its finest. But, better than that is the release this week of a long-overdue documentary, “Red Army,” that gives an in-depth look at the other side, humanizing the Soviet players who were so long seen as merely malevolent Communist robots.

A New York Times review of “Red Army” cited its treatment of the “complicated nature of patriotism and the absurdity of treating sports as a chest-thumping global battle of wills.” Thoughtful people right after the 1980 game lamented the war mentality attached to that hockey summit, and how flimsy it was to hang one’s hat on the result of a sporting event.

ABC-TV’s Jim McKay, widely respected for his work amid the Olympics’ brotherhood-of-man idealism, nevertheless veered into jingoism when he signed off at the close of those Games, sounding near tears over the U.S. hockey victory. “What an Olympics!” McKay gushed. “What a country! Let’s say it here: We are a great people!”

Except: What if our hockey lads hadn’t won the Big Door Prize? And what about the fact that, overall, the East Germans (23) and Soviets (22) both accumulated more medals in those Games than the Americans (12)? Were we therefore a lesser form of humans?

Olympic success, by and large, is a function of a nation’s population, the size of its talent pool in specific sports, its financial wherewithal.

Plus, there was this: Because of the USSR military incursion into Afghanistan shortly before the Lake Placid Opening Ceremonies, President Jimmy Carter—who twice telephoned Herb Brooks with congratulations and called the hockey players “American heroes”—had ordered a U.S. boycott of the Summer Olympics in Moscow, scheduled that summer.

A U.S. Summer Olympian, volleyball player Debbie Green, was among those outraged by the political hypocrisy. “The athletes in the Winter Games,” she said, “get all the praise for their work, and now just because our Games are in Moscow, we’re accused of being un-American” for wanting to compete.

Let’s say it here: That 1980 U.S. hockey upset was a delightful surprise, a tribute to Brooks’ coaching skills and the grit of his collection of amateur players—outperforming what basically was a masterly professional team. But it was no test of national strength, no proof that God is on our side. And it hardly convinced the Kremlin to pull troops out of Afghanistan. (That took nine more years.)

OK, then. The game was Us-against-Them. But the result was not a manifestation of Good-vs.-Evil.

 

To Alex Rodriguez: Sorry, that’s been done

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Surely this latest Alex Rodriguez mea culpa is a variant of the old Pete and Repeat joke. Rodriguez apologized and what was left?

Not belief.

His hand-written letter “To the Fans” is a virtual echo of his Feb. 9, 2009 press conference, when Rodriguez belatedly denied his own denials of steroid use six years earlier. Properly contrite, he assured then of a road-to-Damascus conversion, welcoming the world’s judgment of his righteous actions going forward.

Repeat.

In his missive this week, Rodriguez segued quickly from taking “full responsibility for my mistakes” to declaring himself “ready to put this chapter behind me.”

If that doesn’t remind everyone of Yogi Berra’s redundant old line about revisiting déjà vu, it certainly conjures Oscar Wilde’s “Importance of Being Earnest.” You know, the play about protagonists maintaining fictitious personae to escape burdensome social obligations. About pretending to be a person other than oneself.

Repeat.

In 2009, Rodriguez buttressed his apology by insisting he had sworn off doping before joining the Yankees in 2004. And here (in my Newsday report below) was steroid expert Terry Todd’s immediate and, it turns out, thoroughly reasonable reaction:

“Anytime anyone says something like that to me, I’m always very skeptical.”

A former Olympic weightlifter who founded the center for physical culture and sports at the University of Texas and whose research includes hundreds of interviews of steroid users over several decades, Todd said then that Rodriguez “damn sure could have been taking testosterone” right up to his pubic 2009 confession.

In fact, we learned soon enough, Rodriguez damn sure was still doping at least up to 2013, when the Biogenesis scandal further slimed him. Too, there was the question, Todd said, of whether a former user of performance-enhancing drugs continues to be “advantaged over someone of equal ability and talents who never has taken any drugs at all. Most of the people I’ve discussed this with, who have wide experiences with steroids, seem to believe that you do have an advantage that never goes away.”

The theory is that, since ability in any sport is to some degree psychological, when a new level of performance is reached while doping, that new standard is “no longer a bridge too far in your mind,” Todd said. “And the fact these drugs took you to that place you couldn’t have gotten to on your own, just the fact that your muscles handled this new speed or weight means, in a physiological way, you have created perhaps subtle changes in your muscle structure, in the tendons and ligaments, that did not completely dissipate.”

To Todd, not only is that argument logical but, more to the point, “there definitely are personality types who, once they’ve experienced improvements in strength or muscle size that is greater than they felt they could have gotten [without steroids], they feel this [stronger, larger person] is them. And they are loathe to give that up.”

Sounds like our boy.

Adding to that toxic mix is whether fans can abandon their own addiction—to embracing a winner, no matter his methods. For all the talk-radio bluster now skewing toward making Yankee Stadium a No-A-Rod Zone—a reminder that Rodriguez is a truly exasperating presence for reasons beyond doping—it is worth remembering the 2013 season, when Rodriguez, playing through his pending suspension, was lustily cheered whenever he produced with his bat.

I was there, too, in early 1999, when the Knicks made a controversial trade for the disgraced Latrell Sprewell, who had been forced to sit out the previous season for attempting to choke P.J. Carlesimo, his coach with the Golden State Warriors. The very week of that Knicks’ transaction, then-Madison Square Garden president Dave Checketts called Sprewell “the poster boy for bad behavior in the NBA,” and there was plenty of sentiment among Knicks’ followers that they wanted nothing to do with a bad actor such as Sprewell.

Then, in his first game as a Knick—an exhibition against the Nets—Sprewell scored 27 points. Garden fans showered him with two raucous standing ovations and, during a practice session open to the public the next day, Sprewell was the most sought-after player for autographs and adoring chit-chat.

No wonder the border between admirable athletic feats and personal goodness appears so fuzzy to a fellow like Rodriguez, the object of praise all his life for his on-the-field skills. While he certainly takes his baseball performances seriously, his continuing doping regimen—even as he was serving as a spokesman for the Taylor Hooton Foundation’s campaign against steroid use, cautioning young players against demon drugs—established his conviction that his only obligation to the public is to hit the ball over the wall. Using whatever means available.

So he has again declared himself clean and enlightened. An ongoing joke, right? A gotcha riddle. Pete and Repeat…..

 

 

 

 

 

Play calls have gone terribly awry before Super Bowl 49

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So, here was my story for Newsday in the Nov. 20, 1978 edition (which came to mind after some commentator or another called Seattle’s final pass attempt in Sunday’s Super Bowl “the dumbest call in the history of the National Football League…”)

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East Rutherford, N.J.—To the Giants’ coaching staff—specifically, offensive coordinator Bob Gibson—went the George Custer Medal for Incredibly Faulty Calculations. Oh, the Giants and their fans were ready to hang that one around his neck, all right.

Let’s go to the videotape, just the last 20 seconds of yesterday’s Giants vs. Philadelphia Eagles game: Giants lead, 17-12. Third-and-two at their 29-yard line. Clock running. Philadelphia has neither the ball nor any timeouts remaining. Many of the 70,318 fans had begun filing out of the stadium a minute before, when Giants safety Odis McKinney intercepted a pass, deflected through Mike Hogan’s hands, at the Giants’ 10.

Apparently the Giants have won their sixth game—the first time since 1972 they have won more than five. The sensible wisdom of the moment is quite obvious: Be conservative. As one would turn out the lights when leaving a room, one would likewise have his quarterback assume the fetal position—football embraced close to the stomach—and lie there until the last few seconds of the game go away.

But Gibson, in a hurried phone conversation from the press box with the other coaches, orders quarterback Joe Pisarcik to hand off to fullback Larry Csonka off tackle. Further, the play dictates that Pisarcik do a dance step, a reverse spin before the handoff.

And Pisarcik—oh, my…he FUMBLES. Philadelphia cornerback Herman Edwards has the ball…on the RUN…and…and…

Dramatic, no? Philadelphia wins, 19-17. After it surely had lost.

To the Eagles—specifically, Edwards—went the Little Engine That Could Ribbon for hanging in there. His run with the Pisarcik fumble covered 26 yards and was as easy as it was totally unreasonable. “Things like that,” Edwards said, “well, that’s why you keep playing every play, right to the end. I don’t know why it happened or what happened. The ball just fell out. There was no hit on the play….”

Back to the videotape: Pisarcik, as he turns, has the ball begin to slip off his fingers. Anyway, as he looks to find Csonka, Csonka already has passed. The ball appears to float from Pisarcik like a soap bubble; on closer inspection, it apparently brushes Csonka’s hip.

Gibson avoided the post-game elevator when he noticed reporters already aboard. Outside the press box, angry fans called for almost five minutes, “We want Gibson! Send that bum out here!”

To head coach John McVay, facing a large room full of pencils and pads and microphones after the game, went the Patience Citation for repeating—many times—the coaching staff’s reasoning for not having Pisarcik fall on the ball.

“You run that play 500 times and you don’t fumble,” McVay said, reduced to a shrug and a sigh. “There was an Eagles’ kid lying around on the ground for a while there. Maybe they were faking an injury, and we didn’t want to get the clock stopped on that, so we decided we’d go for the first down. We figure that’s a pretty secure play, guys. A hand-off to the fullback has got to be a secure play.”

Hardly anybody agreed. Once again, the videotape; a closeup of the Giants huddle: “In that situation,” Giants center Jim Clack said, “you fall on it. When Joe came into the huddle and called the play, everybody in the huddle—EVERYBODY in the huddle—said, ‘Let’s fall on it. Let’s don’t take a chance.’ But Joe, well, he can’t just change a call like that.”

Pisarcik said, “Sure, the thought went through my mind to just fall on it, But….”

But earlier this year Pisarcik was “yelled at pretty good” (Clack’s words) for changing a play call sent down from the press box by Gibson. Pisarcik admitted that, saying, “Hey, sure. I’ve been yelled at. More than once.”

To Pisarcik, then, went the Ulysses Plaque for Carrying On Despite Various and Frustrating Rough Journeys. Pisarcik’s teammates and, in fact, even director of operations Andy Robustelli, made it clear that blame for the play should not be placed on the quarterback. “My main concern,” Robustelli said, “is Joe. That the players stand behind him. We have to make sure the players don’t lose confidence in what we’re doing. I didn’t agree with the call.”

The more the play was replayed, the more outrageous it seemed to the Giants. To the Eagles, too. “I wish that wouldn’t happen against the Giants,” Philadelphia linebacker Bill Bergey said. “Dallas or Washington, yes. The Giants, no.”

So unacceptable was the manner of defeat that a Giants’ helmet came flying onto the field as Edwards bounced up and down in the end zone with his teammates. Towels and other handy items were hurled among the Giants. “I was ducking helmets,” said reserve quarterback Randy Dean. Linebacker Harry Carson remained seated alone on the Giants’ bench for five full minutes after the game. Approached later in the lockerroom, he said, “Don’t ask,” and walked out. Pisarcik, when first approached by reporters, bellowed, “Get out of here!”

Probably tackle Brad Benson was best able to reason it out. “If the uncertain things didn’t happen in football,” he said, “then why would people come out and watch us play? But the bad part for me is that I really enjoyed it until the end.”

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[I came to think of that play as Moby Fumble (Thar the Giants Blow It!), as the Archduke’s Assassination—similar to the incident that triggered World War I, that fumble led immediately to the firing of Bob Gibson and, at the end of the season, the firing of John McVay and the resignation of Andy Robustelli. That play left the Giants in ruins. And the New York Times reported today that Gibson, who had been a close friend to McVay for years and that season had carpooled daily from their New Jersey homes to Giants’ practices with McVay, never coached again, never spoke publicly—and almost never privately—about the fumble. And recently was diagnosed with cancer.]

Bruce Jenner’s “young gladiator” days of long ago

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Bruce Jenner happens to be among the countless souls with whom I crossed paths in almost a half-century as a sports journalist. It was just a glancing blow, and I can’t say I kept up with his various transformations, professionally or personally, following his star turn as decathlon champion in the 1976 Montreal Olympics. But the current supermarket-tabloid squawk about Jenner “transitioning” into becoming a woman certainly is far removed from his original act as a public figure.

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Or not. During a long conversation at the ’76 U.S. Olympic track and field trials in Eugene, Ore., Jenner already was envisioning his moment in the Olympic Klieg lights as an audition for a career in the alternate universe of acting. He had just rewritten his own world record in the 10-event decathlon, and called the experience “everything I’ve ever wanted in athletics, all right there. So challenging, so much involved.” Yet, a month later, as soon as he had sewed up his gold-medal victory, he walked out of the stadium in Montreal without even taking his pole-vault poles with him, because he never intended to compete again.

He was moving on. He had been a phys ed major at tiny Graceland College in Lamoni, Iowa—“The way I went through college was to just be a jock,” he said. “That’s all I cared about.” Yet he added that, if offered a college do-over, he would have studied business.

He said he originally thought of himself as a football player—“a young gladiator, you know”—able to turn a debut blunder as the Graceland quarterback into a heroic play. “The first pass I threw was intercepted,” he said, “and when I tackled the guy who caught it and knocked him about three rows into the stands, they made me a defensive back.”

That lasted only three weeks, when his attempt to block a punt resulted in a knee operation. No worries; Jenner recounted how he could do anything in sports that he put his mind to. “I was Eastern U.S. water-skiing champion three times [in high school], high school state champion in the pole vault and high jump. Played basketball, too.”

His athletic prowess was such that the NBA’s Kings—then based in Kansas City—used a late-round pick on Jenner in the 1977 draft. (He never took up the sport professionally, though he did make a basket in a YMCA skit during the 1980 film, “Can’t Stop the Music,” a pseudo biography of disco’s Village People.)

The son of a tree surgeon in Sandy Hook, Conn., Jenner was unknown beyond the track community when he squeaked onto the 1972 Olympic team as a college junior, and even when he first set the world decathlon record in 1975. To train for the ’76 Olympics, when he was 26, he took a six-month leave from his job as an insurance salesman, during which time he was supported by his wife of three years, an airline flight attendant.

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“My wife and I are in this together,” he said then. “We decided a couple of years ago that we both wanted that gold medal.” Within five years, they were divorced, and Jenner married the second of three times.

It is something of a paradox that the decathlon—an endeavor typically devoid of spectators and often lightly attended even during the maximum-visibility Olympics—could serve as a springboard to celebrity. But there was, long before Jenner, a U.S. Olympic-star-to-Hollywood-headliner precedent: Swimming champs Johnny Weissmuller (1924 and ’28) and Buster Crabbe (1932) and decathlete Glenn Morris (1936) all wound up playing Tarzan on the silver screen—in an era when Tarzan movies were a big deal. Two-time Olympic decathlon champion Bob Mathias (1948 and ’52) also took a turn as an actor—once playing his decathlete self—before becoming a Congressman.

Plus, of course, there was the Jim Thorpe history, which has caused holders of the Olympic decathlon title to assume the shopworn label of “World’s Greatest Athlete.” (The story was that Thorpe, upon winning at the 1912 Stockholm Games, was complimented by King Gustav V of Sweden thusly: “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.” Thorpe is said to have answered, “Thanks, King,” and days later was honored with a ticker-tape parade in New York City.)

Decathlon champs, in truth, are closer to being the world’s most obsessed—rather than world’s greatest—athletes, given the need to train for a competition over two days consisting of the 100-meter dash, long jump, shot put, high jump, 400-meter run, 110-meter high hurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin and 1500-meter run. During his run-up to the ’76 Olympics, Jenner kept various implements for competition—shot puts, discuses, javelins, vaulting poles—scatted around his California home, and admitted to sometimes going through the motions of discus or javelin tosses while standing in crowded stores.

All the while, too, he was working hard at putting his name out there, with public appearances and motivational speeches. Reality TV didn’t exist then. But now, for somebody who keeps moving on…..

Football and underinflated heads

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In the run-up to the Super Bowl, amid too much attention to shrunken footballs, let us consider deflated heads. This week’s report of another deceased player found to have suffered from head-trauma disease related to the sport, and a medical study revealing increased risk of memory problems for kids who play tackle football prior to age 12, are what ought to scare the stuffing out of the NFL.

This is the kind of real news—as opposed to the vacuous Super Bowl media angst over players who won’t answer questions, Tom Brady’s sniffles and the chain-of-custody for game balls—that speaks to the future health of a $10-billion-a-year business. That so many former players, and potentially so many children entering the sport, will be losing their marbles prematurely would appear to dull the Big Game’s usual fireworks-and-marching-bands atmosphere.

And it could gradually siphon off future talent and fans, which is why the NFL, as reported by the New York Times, has been taking evasive action by backing nationwide Mom Clinics, meant to convince parents about the safety of having their tykes—as young as 5 years old—cracking heads in youth leagues.

It has become fairly standard for the NFL, and many of its players, to reference increased study of concussions and improved protocol in treating head injuries as their assurance against having a screw loose in later life. True enough that we all have learned plenty about the dangers over the years.

Long ago and far away, during my high school days on the football team in Hobbs, N.M., we dismissed “getting our bell rung” as an insignificant test of toughness. My friend Ronnie Foster, in fact, perfected a ball-carrying style in which he would lower his head to meet a would-be tackler, spinning away from the helmet-to-helmet blow to keep on going. I tried this in practice, with some success, but was fortunate to spend most of my time on the bench, so that I never got enough game-time action to render myself any goofier than I am.

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That was 1964. In 2002, Dr. Bennet Omalu, a forensic neuropathlogist, diagnosed so-called “punch-drunk” syndrome—specifically, CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy—during his autopsy of former Pittsburgh Steelers lineman Mike Webster. But it wasn’t until 2010 that the NFL announced it was hanging posters in all of its teams’ lockerrooms to warn players about the long-term dangers of head trauma.

“Why this took so long, I don’t know,” Omalu told me in a telephone conversation at the time. “I’m no genius; this is something I read about in medical school more than 20 years ago.” Since Omalu’s discovery about Webster, CTE repeatedly has been found in deceased old players. Former New England Patriots running back Mosi Tatupu, who died at 54 in 2010, was the latest cited in a Wednesday Boston Globe article.

Of course, there have been rule changes to prevent “targeting the head area,” restrictions on contact in practice and scientific work on finding the perfect helmet. But Omalu has argued that brain damage results not just from specifically diagnosed concussions but also from repeated blows to the head, and that helmets “do not prevent concussions or 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,” he said.

As a cerebral exercise, discovering a way to do that—and still have football as we know it—is a far bigger challenge than keeping all the pigskins inflated properly. Especially when fellows such as Jim Tressel, when he coached at Ohio State last decade, instituted the “Jack Tatum Hit of the Week Award,” glamorizing the viciously aggressive defensive play of a man known as the “Assassin,” and whose savage 1978 hit on New England’s Darryl Stingley left Stingley paralyzed the last 29 years of his life.

Maybe not everyone in football has a screw loose, though. A year ago, the school board in Marshall, Tex.—which fields a perennial state gridiron powerhouse and where Hall of Fame quarterback Y.A. Tittle played high school ball—approved plans to replace the district’s entry-level, tackle-football teams for seventh graders with a flag-football program. At least until they are a little older, those Marshall kids won’t have deflated heads.

Deflating footballs, pumping up the Super Bowl

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In the investigation of shrunken footballs, we are reassured that one thing that will not be underinflated is the Super Bowl itself. The whole idea of the NFL’s traditional two-week gap between its conference championships and the Big Game is to pump an otherwise empty information vacuum full of hot air. And this fits the bill perfectly.

From the earliest of its XLIX—sorry, 49—editions, the Super Bowl has succeeded at being America’s most puffed-up happening, an over-the-top exercise in nothing of real consequence. To now have a morsel of scandal for conspiracy theorists to chew on, and for thousands in the sporting press to comb over, feeds the ballyhoo beast.

This is all about hue and cry. And a reminder that annual media protestations of the NFL bamboozling the public with Super Bowl hype—even as said media gleefully traffic in such overkill—miss the point. That is: The Super Bowl defines hyperbole. It oozes hyperbole. It seethes with hyperbole. It strives for (and achieves) wretched excess—a self-important, overdone confluence of all that is modern America: Cut-throat competition, commercialism, conspicuous consumption, televised violence, with a clear hankering back to a male-dominated society.

The hand wringing by some pundits, that the deflated-ball caper will degrade this year’s Super Bowl, from an elite game to a spectacle, reveals a decided ignorance of the fact that the NFL purposely evolved the thing into a spectacle decades ago. The express purpose of Super Bowl exaggeration is to draw in the non-football fan, and now the curiosity about whether New England coach Bill Belichick or quarterback Tom Brady might try something sneaky guarantees more eyeballs.

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The Super Bowl already is the most watched TV show every year, and proof-positive that we have become a spectator society. The Super Bowl Party, once a village, has morphed into an entire nation, with less and less to do with the game and more an experience in overindulgence, to the delight of businesses dealing in nachos, adult beverage and gambling.

Running with such an overdose concept, a North Carolina man created a Web site in 2007 seeking 50,000 signatures to propose, to his local Congresswoman, a day-after-the-game national holiday. That effort, in the grand American tradition of a three-day weekend and in recognition of the debilitating Super Sunday immoderation, failed. But the idea was revived last year by a fantasy football group that submitted a petition to the Obama administration’s “We the People” site, which invites citizens’ voices in governing. (Among current “We the People” petitions—alongside those on issues of same-sex marriage, the Michael Brown case and mandatory vaccinations—are three railing about NFL officiating—which may be further proof that we are not a profound people.)

Consider that a 2011 essay by Robert Lipsyte, the unusually perceptive practitioner of sports journalism, argued that the annual National Football Lollapalooza might be the “only super thing we have left” in this land. “Super power, super economy, super you-name-it….gone,” Lipsyte wrote. Leaving us with a national holiday that rivals Christmas and Thanksgiving while serving as a proxy for military and economic superiority.

What we seem to be stuck with is the Super Bowl dichotomy of triviality and significance, which certainly was on full display as far back as the first of seven Super Bowls I covered for Newsday, in 1974.

That year, Miami’s future Hall of Fame linebacker Nick Buoniconti confided to a couple of us ink-stained wretches that his coach, Don Shula, had overruled team doctors who planned surgery on Buoniconti’s elbow just before the game. Five Miami players, in fact, acknowledged having to play with various pins in their bodies to hold together broken bones. (One of those five, safety Jake Scott, kidded darkly that the team’s biggest fear was a “lightning storm.”) The game clearly was a big deal.

Meanwhile, though, I spent an afternoon during that year’s Super Bowl media day with the self-proclaimed “gonzo journalist” Hunter S. Thompson, who had covered two presidential elections and gained fame with his surreal, drug-infused novel “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Thompson had been assigned to chronicle the week’s theoretically crucial doings for Rolling Stone magazine, and found, instead, that “I feel like calling my editor and telling him there’s no story here. There really isn’t anything happening.”

If Thompson were still around—he committed suicide in 2007—I doubt he’d be shocked about allegations that New England fudged the rules by shriveling some footballs. Nor should we be, given how athletes so regularly are praised for their “competitiveness” and lauded for attempts to get any edge possible. The euphemism for bending rules is the honored skill of “gamesmanship.” Another bit of news at the 1974 Super Bowl was then-commissioner Pete Rozelle’s admission that seven teams had hidden players beyond their roster limits during the season as a hedge against injuries.

Dishonesty aside, the current  mischief, rather than a buzz-killer, has been a godsend to sports talk radio and an attention-grabbing bonanza for the NFL. The already bloated Super Bowl continues to expand in our consciousness.

About keeping ALL of Joe Paterno’s history

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It is not as if Joe Paterno coached 111 college football victories posthumously. That restored portion of his record at Penn State wasn’t so much a give-back by the NCAA on Friday as it was an acknowledgment that things cannot un-happen.

Paterno’s teams in fact won those 111 games—from 1998, when the first complaint of possible child molestation by Paterno assistant Jerry Sandusky reached police, until 2011, when the Sandusky scandal became public and Paterno was fired for not having acted on an abuse charge against Sandusky.

So Paterno, three years after his death, once again is in the record books for winning more games (409) than any other coach at the highest level of college football. Fine. There are ramifications to rewriting history.

Just as necessary as maintaining an accurate record of wins and losses, though, is acknowledging what got Paterno in trouble in the first place—his elevation to sainted status that surely came into play when the Penn State brand was threatened by the Sandusky revelations. And Paterno, the most powerful man in State College, Pa. (and likely all of Pennsylvania) failed to do more about the awful transgressions on his watch.

Let’s not erase that part of the story, either.

Paterno literally had been put on a pedestal, his seven-foot statue outside the school’s palatial football stadium serving as a pilgrimage site for Penn State fans. An inscription with the statue glowingly proclaimed Paterno an “Educator, Coach, Humanitarian.” He was canonized for his “success with honor” motto that, after the Sandusky mess, sounded ironic at best.

Maybe the trouble was immortalizing Paterno in bronze while he still was alive, which not only fed his self-importance (subconsciously or otherwise) but also prophesied a purity of virtue impossible for any human being to live up to.

Better for universities to sculpt likenesses of some figure of history who is no longer around to take himself too seriously. Or, even less dangerous, a fictional personage. (I therefore submit that my alma mater, the University of Missouri, had a better idea with the two statues on campus: One of Thomas Jefferson, because Mizzou was the first university west of the Mississippi River built in Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase territory; the other of Beetle Bailey, a comic strip character. Beetle and his pals were based on fraternity brothers of his creator, Mort Walker, when Walker was a Missouri student. You may recognize the two honored characters below, during my recent visits.)

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Eight months after Paterno was fired—and six months after his death—Penn State officials removed his statue, declaring that it had become a “source of division and an obstacle to healing.” It is hard to know whether Paterno could have been aware of that, or if he somehow is monitoring efforts afoot now to bring back his sculpted likeness. Does he worry, in the afterlife, about the rehabilitation of his legacy?

Some say once gone you’re gone forever

And some say you’re gonna come back

Iris DeMent considered in song,

But no one knows for certain so it’s all the same to me

I think I’ll just let the mystery be.

In this matter of Paterno’s (figurative?) resurrection, it does seem downright cynical that some Penn State boosters want to go beyond his football-record comeback, with fund-raising already in progress to erect a second statue in downtown State College, depicting Paterno seated while reading Virgil’s “Aeneid.”

That Latin epic poem was Paterno’s favorite, an ode that is all legend and exaltation of moral values, chronicling Aeneas’ devotion and loyalty to his country and its prominence—rather than personal gain. It all sounds like Penn Staters again poised on the slippery slope of hero-worship. So many of them were so enamored of football success that Paterno took on the fatherly title of “JoePa;” turned up on life-sized cardboard cutouts (“Stand-Up Joes”) sold in State College; gave the campus creamery reason to market “Peachy Paterno” ice cream. The Sandusky scandal, and the fact his crimes went on so quietly for so long, hinted strongly that Paterno and his football operation had become too powerful to rein in, too locked into the tunnel-vision of producing football success to pay attention to the Sandusky menace right under their noses.

Paterno did leave behind some substantial worth in his 46 years at the school. More than $4 million personally donated to university projects. Hundreds of millions of dollars raised for Penn State through the football operation, including admission into the lucrative Big Ten Conference.

The visibility that Paterno and his teams brought to Happy Valley factored into growing Penn State as a prominent academic institution, and he was further applauded for his insistence that he would not allow athletic preference over education. He called it his “Grand Experiment.”

In the end, though, Sandusky’s depravity knocked Paterno off that pedestal. So, let the old coach keep his football victories. But the complete picture is not a work of art.