Happy 90th, Looie

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Some things are lost to antiquity, and it has been 23 years—a full generation—since Lou Carnesecca retired. But Carnesecca is still with us—a blessing, that—and his 90th birthday, on Jan. 5, should not pass without some reflection on Carneseccas’s exalted status as a New York sports institution and endearing personality.

Far more than his enormous success coaching basketball, with more wins (526) than anyone else in St. John’s University history (and many more coaching high school and, briefly, the professional Nets), was Carnesecca’s passion for the job and devotion to an even-expanding circle of associates.

He reveled in the sport’s exhilarating highs and occasionally burdensome lows. He personified the stereotypical New Yorker—overreacting with outrage one moment, shrugging or spreading his hands the next. He never hesitated to loudly berate officials during the intensity of competition, but just as likely would share a whispered confidence to an acquaintance he barely knew, accentuated by a sincere touch on the arm.

“The game,” he said with obvious feeling, “I think it’s a melody. A composition. It can flow. There is a beauty to it.” But, too, “It’s an agony. It’s a suffering. And it’s still a game! Why? Why do we torment ourselves?”

“I ask myself, ‘What the hell am I getting so worked up about?’”

He was something of a benign Mafia Don in the basketball community, widely sought out and paid respects by colleagues. He kept a ragged old telephone book, stuffed with names of all his coaching mentors, longtime colleagues and former players, going back decades. When one would die, he would put an “R.I.P” next to the name—but never erase it. He was famous for sending flowers whenever someone’s mother died, or sending congratulations to celebrate a birth.

He often made light of himself, only 5-foot-6 and never more than a junior varsity player when he was a St. John’s student (though he hit over .300 for the first St. John’s team to qualify for baseball’s College World Series). He laughed at his own cartoonish gyrations while coaching, how he left his sideline seat forever empty while he slid or walked on his knees, arms outstretched; spun on his feet; turned and racewalked in the direction of an errant pass.

He said he always wore brown pants for games so the dirt wouldn’t show. He recalled a game in the late 1960s—at Madison Square Garden, against Fordham—when he raced downcourt alongside his guard, Carmine Calzonetti, eventually standing under the basket when Calzonetti completed a fast-break layup.

“I’m like those guys in a Shakespeare play,” Carnesecca said, “and they’re so caught up in it that they go right off the stage, out the side door of the theater, onto Seventh Avenue. Still swordfighting in the street!”

For St. John’s to have renamed its arena for him is the least it could do.

(St. John's University)

(St. John’s University)

During an enlivening interview in his office during his final season, Carnesecca fretted about what life would be after retirement, scolded himself for taking the game so seriously—even as he acknowledged that it was an “extension of myself” and gloried in his good fortune to be healthy and still a part of the action.

He raved a bit about unappreciative fans—“the cruelty. The venom!” that sometimes spewed from the stands—even as he delighted in his answer to those catcalls in his mid-60s. “It helps that I’m a little deaf,” he said. “Look. I take out my hearing aid.” He spread the various little pieces, battery and so on, on his office couch, cackling.

He kept a feather-duster in his office because his predecessor, Joe Lapchick, had once described coaching as “Peacock today, feather-duster tomorrow.” He acknowledged the celebrity that came to him fairly late in his career, with the rise of the Big East Conference and St. John’s highly visible duels with Georgetown and Syracuse in the 1980s.

“It’s ego, a little,” he said. “It blows a little smoke. It’s nice to be recognized, to be put in the limelight.” But he wouldn’t be carried away. “It’s a veneer,” he said, and basketball was “just entertainment, not important” in the greater scheme of things.

In the end, his love for basketball mirrored his love for his native New York City, which he described as “a city that gets into you. You’re alive.”

He thought a moment. “You have to stay alive, too. You have to be on your toes.”

Happy 90th, Looie. Way to stay on your toes.

J.P. Parise’s goal: The Islanders’ bar mitvah, the Rangers’ “Big No.”

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J.P. Parise is gone too soon at 73, but his goal—11 seconds into overtime on April 11, 1975—lives on as one of the most operatic moments in the history of both the Islanders and Rangers. That night at Madison Square Garden, Parise’s quicksilver strike, ending the three-game, first-round playoff series, not only represented the Islanders’ coming of age—their NHL bar mitzvah after a pair of seasons that only could be described as the Terrible Twos—it also prolonged a Rangers narrative as the sport’s Tantalus. From 1940 on, never quite drinking from the Cup.

As Newsday’s back-up hockey reporter to the esteemed Tim Moriarity, my assignment that night was the losers’ lockerroom, where I found the Rangers—almost to a man—to be fairly eloquent in summing up their emotional crash.

That included the feisty Derek Sanderson’s declaration that “The Atlanta Flames are better than the Islanders. The Islanders won’t win another playoff game.” (Of course, the Islanders won seven more, through the next two series, and soon reeled off four straight championships before the Rangers, 19 years later, at last won their first Cup in 54 years.)

Here’s what Parise had the Rangers mulling that evening:

“It reminds me,” the dashing winger Rod Gilbert said, “of when I was a bachelor, and I would find the most beautiful girl and say, ‘Meet me somewhere,’ and then at the last second, she says, ‘No.’ It’s like that. It’s a big ‘No.’”

Future Hall of Fame defenseman Brad Park, who was a half-step slow in getting to Parise before Parise converted the goal-mouth pass from Jude Druin, called it “a humble feeling to be sitting there with the puck in your net and the other team jumping for joy.”

As the Rangers soaked in their disappointment, the scrappy forward Pete Stemkowski admitted, “I won’t adjust to the season being over until the Stanley Cup playoffs are over. But, maybe the 20 guys in this room can adjust better than the people who aren’t playing—family and friends. We’re under pressure and we just do our best. We can handle it. But the people who live and die with us, they’re the ones really hurt, I think.”

Rangers forward Steve Vickers, whose third-period goal capped a Ranger comeback from 0-3 to 3-3 and forced overtime, called it “the most embarrassing defeat I’ve ever suffered. Losing to the Islanders….it’s going to be a long summer having people asking about it.”

At the time, most of the Rangers lived in Long Beach, close enough to the Islanders’ Nassau Coliseum home to sense a rush to the Islanders’ bandwagon. “The most frustrating thing,” Rangers goalie Ed Giacomin acknowledged, “was when we went into the Coliseum [for the series’ previous game] and seeing all those ‘Choke’ signs the Islander fans had put up. And now, my fans on the Island, they might be Islander fans now.”

Just as pointed at the “Choke” signs were the “1940” chants, which would go on for almost two more decades. To such historic references of failure, Vickers said, “I don’t take the whole thing personally. The Destiny and Fate thing with the Rangers doesn’t faze me at all. I’ve only been here three years, not 40. I had a good year and, anyway, I don’t look back. It’s not my policy.”

Thoroughly reasonable for Vickers to say then. But now, with Parise gone, look back. That goal was a notable moment in New York’s hockey doings.

The National (College) Football League playoffs

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Unincumbered by the thought process, enthusiasts of the new college football playoffs already are contending that a four-team tournament is too limited. There is clamoring to expand to eight teams. Or 16. Fans want it, the narrative goes; “fairness” demands it (poor TCU got left out this year). Excitement and the boffo TV ratings for the New Year’s Day’s inaugural semifinal round foretell it.

This, remember, is an activity of the NCAA, which describes itself as a non-profit organization, in spite of the billions of dollars it is raking in, and is performed by what the NCAA insists are “student-athletes,” though a more accurate label would be—at best—athlete-students.

The sad fact is that nobody—including the university presidents who long argued that expanding the postseason was an infringement upon their educational mission—appears willing or able to stand up to the steamrolling power of ESPN’s money and visibility.

Here’s an unsettling thought: Might the playoff system, now stretching one game beyond the traditional bowl season, have been realized so quickly if not for the revolting Jerry Sandusky child molestation revelations at Penn State in 2011?

At the time, Penn State’s president, Graham Spanier, was chairman of the college president’s Oversight Committee for what was then called the BCS—Bowl Championship Series—that designated two top teams for a “championship” bowl. Spanier was on record declaring that a football playoff in college’s top division was “just not going to happen. The presidents of our universities are not going to go for it. We’re the ones who have the say.”

In a June 2010 interview with BlueWhite Illustrated, a Web site for Penn State sports, Spanier said, “Sports reporters and fans can talk about it all they want…. As if talking about it and debating it makes it more likely to change. Some people say, ‘Just go to four teams.’ Then four will go to eight and eight will go to 16. We’ll end up with an NFL-style playoff. Everyone knows where it will head if we go beyond two teams. I just don’t want to go in that direction.”

That oversight committee was formed in 2003 (Spanier was one of the founding members) and immediately began discussing the possibility of a major-college football playoff. In 2004, it hired UCLA administrator John Sandbrook to study the matter—and Sandbrook, in doing so again for the watchdog Knight Commission in 2007, became convinced that change would overtake the bowl system at some point.

That point was reached shortly after Spanier was dismissed by Penn State in November 2011 following public disclosure that Sandusky, assistant to Penn State head coach Joe Paterno, was a serial abuser of young boys. Both Spanier and Paterno were fired for failing to follow up on tips of Sandusky’s criminal behavior.

And Spanier barely was out of the BCS Oversight Committee scene when that group, in June 2012, voted unanimously to recommend a four-team playoff to begin in 2014-15.

So now, it is with cheerful indifference to the pitfalls of a thoroughly professional playoff, similar to ignoring the perils of coaches such as Paterno having virtually uncontested power over institutional and legal matters involving their teams, that a further expansion of the top-tier college season is inevitable.

Money talks. Loudly. Among Spanier’s comments, when he still was in his oversight position, was that he and fellow university presidents would not be swayed by the “potential” riches inherent in a playoff system. But the $7.3 billion that ESPN offered for 12 years of TV rights was enough to twist those presidents’ arms.

And the reality is that the big bucks hardly are earmarked for academic needs and professors’ salaries. In a discussion I had with Smith College economics professor Andrew Zimbalist a couple of years ago regarding big-time college sports, Zimbalist reminded that “the NCAA, in effect, is a trade association for coaches and athletic directors. I don’t think anybody in his right mind would say this does anything to fulfill the educational purpose.”

Alabama’s Nick Saban, the nation’s highest paid college coach ($7 million a year), reasoned before his team lost its playoff semifinal to Ohio State that, “If you create value for the university, and you look at it for that standpoint, then I think there’s a relative amount that someone’s worth is based on.” Saban, like many football coaches at top public universities, earns more than any other state employee, including the governor and university president.

So here we go. First, Monday night’s hyped-up Oregon-Ohio State lollapalooza. Soon, an eight-team playoff. Then, probably, 12 teams, with a bye week for the top four built in. Then 16 teams? The evolution of The National (College) Football League—professional sports at its finest.

Don’t give higher education a thought; this is what fans and ESPN want.

 

Sympathy for Shanghai

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Nothing makes news (good or bad) feel more immediate than having it emanate from a familiar locale. Shanghai is more than 7,400 miles from my digs on Long Island, but my daughter lives and works in Shanghai, so reports of the New Year’s Eve stampede that killed 36 people there hit too close to home.

The fatal chaos occurred on The Bund, Shanghai’s most scenic spot, a spectacular touristy waterfront. During a visit in 2011, we engaged in obligatory strolls along the mile-long Bund, had a drink in the restaurant atop the House of Roosevelt, one of a dozen historic buildings along the Bund’s walkway, overlooking the Huangpu River and the sparkling high-rises on the opposite bank. A more peaceful, carefree place is hard to imagine.

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Also, I couldn’t help posing for a snapshot in front of the bronze statue of Chen Yi, who looked important. (Indeed, he was the first Communist mayor of Shanghai—1949-1958).

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Initially settled by the British in the mid-1800s with Shanghai’s establishment as a trading post, the Bund experienced a construction boom at the turn of the 20th Century, with commercial buildings springing up in architectural styles described as Beaux Arts, Romanesque Revival, Gothic Revival, Renaissance Revival, Baroque Revival, Neo-Classical and Art Deco. Terrific structures, even to a visitor with little knowledge of architecture.

Those remain, and across the Huangpu River, in the Pudong district (Shanghai’s version of Wall Street) is a series of shining skyscrapers, including the distinct “Bottle Opener,” Shanghai’s World Financial Center building.

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All of the Bund’s atmosphere is a dramatic contrast to Shanghai’s old walled city, just a short walk–but feeling light years–away. Laundry hangs in its narrow lanes shared by pedestrians and bicycles riders.

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And all of it an unlikely setting for death.

Cricket explained: “Baseball in the round”

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If one is to accept French-born American historian Jacques Barzun’s long-ago observation (and I do), that “whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball,” then surely it behooves us Yanks to investigate cricket if we wish to acquire some understanding of our British friends.

Years ago, on a trip across the pond, I took an indifferent stab at this cultural mystery by purchasing a tea towel (“dish rag,” in American vernacular) emblazoned with brief instructions that promised “Cricket As Explained to a Foreign Visitor.” That souvenir clearly was aimed at the sort of knucklehead U.S. tourist most likely to buy a little plastic Big Ben tower or Beefeater figurine. The impish tutorial went like this:

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You have two sides, one out in the field and one in.

Each man that’s in the side that’s in, goes out, and when he’s out, he comes in, and the next man goes in until he’s out.

When they are all out, the side that’s out comes in, and the side that’s been in goes out, and tries to get those coming in, out.

Sometimes you get men still in and not out.

When both sides have been in and out, including the not outs,

That’s the end of the game.

Howzat?

Almost a half-century as a sportswriter has convinced me how international games are—sports without borders—and how easily competition translates from land to land. Not everything is familiar to everybody, though. And there may not be two sports—baseball to Americans and cricket to the English—more weighted with puzzling conventions and coded language to outsiders.

A few years ago, Tamim Ansary, an Afghan-born American author, wrote a lovely essay called “Understanding Baseball,” in which he acknowledged needing 46 years as a U.S. resident to be able to figure it out. Basically, Ansary concluded, there is only suspense in a sport if one cares about the outcome, so that deciphering strategy isn’t a primary necessity to appreciate the drama..

Still, cricket is a vexation to most Americans, made all the stranger when it is said to be “baseball in the round.” Which it is. Sort of. Or maybe baseball is cricket cubism.

Anyway, it happens that my daughter has connections in England. So, during a Christmas-time visit there, I attempted to solve the cricket riddle. Herewith some principles, as I interpreted them, often using baseball comparisons to aid a Yank’s comprehension:

  • The team batting is “in.” The team fielding is “out.”
  • The bowler—not quite like a pitcher—takes a long run, something like a long jumper’s approach to the takeoff board, before flinging the ball on one bounce to the batsman.
  • The batsman faces a maximum of six pitches from the bowler, though he could be put out on any of those pitches if the bowler sneaks the ball past him and hits the wicket—the three stumps behind the batsman—or if a fielder catches his batted ball on the fly.
  • After six pitches—called an “over”—whether they are delivered to one or multiple batsmen, the bowler is replaced. (He may return after another six-pitch “over.”)
  • The field is an oval, with its outer limits marked by a fence, rope or some other boundary. If the batsman strikes a ball past that boundary on the fly—the equivalent of a home run—it is called a “six,” because it results in six runs. If the batsman sends a ball past the boundary on the ground, before a fielder can get to it, it is a “four.”
  • If the fielders can keep a batted ball in play before it reaches the boundary, the batsman commences running the length of a 22-yard horizontal skinned “infield,” where a teammate—technically, a second batsman—has been standing, and who runs the opposite direction of his fellow batsman. One trip of 88 feet, roughly the same as the 90 feet between baseball bases, before the ball is retrieved results in a run. Two trips, two runs, and so on.
  • Because a ball batted in any direction is in play, fielders are scattered strategically around the grass oval, some quite close to the batsman. No foul balls.
  • There are 11 men per team, but it is after nine batsmen have been put out—what is called an “innings” (plural)—that the other team bats.
  • A batsman, meanwhile, can keep hitting—even after scoring whole batches of runs; a rare “century” consists of one man piling up 100 runs in a single at-bat—until he is put out. So an innings can last hours or even days. Typically, a game consists of two innings per team.
  • Some teams have been known to score 500 runs while “in,” and—feeling safely ahead and wanting to get on with shutting down the other side, have decided to “declare”—that is, stop batting before all of their batsmen have been put out. And daring the other side to catch up before its innings is completed.

Meanwhile, as with a cricket game itself, my recent lesson stretched well beyond tea time and into the next day as I attempted, not with any great success, to squint through the fog of terminology and determine what is acceptable within the rules. That is to say: What is kosher. What is cricket.

jiminy

Keeping up with the Alabamas?

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With the annual college football bowl season upon us, and the first-ever four-team national championship playoff weeks away, it may be time to declare then-LSU chancellor Michael Martin’s 2011 remark to be prophetic. “I think,” Martin said then to the watchdog Knight Commission, which was considering the mad scramble for alignment with the richest conferences, “we could end up with two enormous conferences—one called ESPN and the other called Fox.”

Martin understood that this is all about television programming and athletic departments selling to the highest bidder, virtually beyond university presidents’ control. And the self-proclaimed “Worldwide Leader in Sports”—ESPN—is the Pancho Villa in this revolution, with lots of pesos to spend. That network shelled out $12.3 billion over seven years for rights to the three-bowl championship series, which will drag into mid-January.

Plus, ESPN has plenty left over to be able to guarantee $100,000 apiece to Bowling Green (a humble 7-6 this season) and South Alabama (6-6) to fill three hours of air time in the new Montgomery, Ala., Camellia Bowl. As stalwart New York Times reporter Richard Sandomir informed us last week, the made-for-TV Camellia Bowl is the 11th of 39 bowl games owned by ESPN.

Meanwhile, for either Bowling Green or South Alabama to dream of ever playing in, say, the Rose Bowl—$23.9 million payout per team next month—is to buy into ancient Roman playwright Plautus’ line that one has to “spend money to make money.” That endless keeping-up-with-the-Alabamas game is what caused Alabama-Birmingham (wisely) to give up its football program last month, just as it has precipitated recent break-ups of old conference ties.

Because ESPN or Fox—or CBS, through its deal with the mighty SEC—continually offer more money and exposure to the likes of Nebraska over an Iowa State, they encourage the former in search of more generously compensated conference packages (Nebraska from the Big 12 to Big Ten). Eventually, though (if not true already): How can these upwardly mobile teams avoid the inherent risks of ratcheted-up professionalism?

In 2012, a Knight Commission survey found 56 athletic-department operating budgets to be above $20 million annually, and two to be $100 million or more. “Powerful interests that benefit financially from big-time sports, as well as fans and booster clubs with emotional investments,” the commission concluded, “can distort the clarity of mind required for effective governance.”

OK, a declaimer: I love college football and quite enjoyed that the gridiron representatives of my alma mater—the University of Missouri—made a second straight appearance in the SEC title game this year. (So our lads lost again; our acclaimed journalism school students still had something to report.)

Here’s how I rationalize my spectating interest: No less a wordsmith than F. Scott Fitzgerald considered that “the test of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Yes, big-time college sports, for all its fabulous entertainment value, is blatantly hypocritical, and I am under no delusion about the mercenary aspect of the Missouri football roster. But I do root for the Knight Commission to have more impact in its work to better align athletic programs with the academic missions of their respective schools.

I don’t need to have my school win a television-ministered version of the Super Bowl. And I hope more reasonable associations such as the Ivy League can hang in there against Michael Martin’s understandable ESPN-Fox Conference fears.

Yanqui-Cuba. Si.

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It’s as if President Obama had spent three weeks with me and a handful of fellow American reporters in Cuba to cover the 1991 Pan American Games. That experience, while hardly an all-access look at the inner workings of the Castro government and its many faults, offered frequent glimpses of how the decades-old U.S. embargo of Cuba was failing miserably.

The U.S. policy hardly was putting a dent into Fidel Castro’s grip on power, or his lifestyle, while it was bleeding the Cuban people white. The bearded old dictator, who once was considered a pitching prospect by the New York Giants before he led the 1959 Cuban revolution and commenced casting the United States as an evil empire, toured those Pan-Am Games in style, ferried around by a fleet of Mercedes.

Most citizens, meanwhile, lived in ramshackle buildings and had to stand in line for a daily ration of two loafs of bread no bigger than baseballs, as well as each family’s once-in-every-nine-days schedule to obtain a chicken.

Communications with the outside world—telephones, television—virtually were non-existent, while Fidel enjoyed the good life: A basketball court on his presidential grounds and satellite dish, provided by Ted Turner in the mid-1980s, to watch NBA games at his leisure.

From the 15th floor of the Hotel Habana Libre, reporters’ headquarters during the Pan-Am Games, Havana seemed a Caribbean paradise: Sun, palm trees and the shining Gulf of Mexico. But on the ground, tumbledown stores had 95 percent of their shelf space empty. Medical care was a top priority, one of Fidel’s claims to fame, but sanitation was years behind the times. Streets were clean—no graffiti anywhere—and free of traffic, but that mostly was because there wasn’t enough fuel to power all those 1950s Chevys or aging rattletrap Russian Ladas parked around the city.

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The freshest paint on most buildings appeared to be at least 25 or 30 years old. Everywhere were banners proclaiming “Socialism or Death,” the principle of superiority Fidel claimed over decadent capitalism in the United States. In fact, though, “tourist apartheid” was in clear evidence, hardly a one-for-all and all-for-one utopia.

Visitors with hard currency, from Canada or Europe, were welcome at such resorts as luxurious Veradero Beach, two hours east of Havana, which felt like Hilton Head plopped in the middle of the Mississippi delta. Even in the midst of rundown Havana neighborhoods, where Cubans were stuck with virtually worthless pesos, tourists could patronize Ernest Hemingway’s old hangout, the Floridita Bar, a living museum of the pre-revolutionary Cuba.

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At the Floridita, built in 1916, small Cuban bands entertained in air-conditioning comfort (not available in the residents’ shopping areas) among the polished red-and-black art deco and brass. What was completely out of reach for everyday Cubans—plentiful gasoline, food, shops, efficient transportation, with new Nissans and Suzukis to rent—was there for tourists.

A surprise was the complete lack of discomfort in being a U.S. citizen there. To the Cuban hoi polloi, John Kennedy was the devil, remembered for the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion meant to overthrow Fidel, and later American presidents, too, were considered evil for sustaining the economic embargo. Cubans didn’t see the point of a rich nation needing to strangle 10 million people just because they happened to live 90 miles from Florida.

Yet that didn’t stop them from treating visiting Nordamericanos royally. Fellow journalist Jay Weiner and I, having hired a taxi to interview the only golf pro in all of Cuba, were invited by the cabbie—a junior high school teacher named Eduardo Azcue—to have coffee with him and his wife at his meticulously kept but well-worn home. We talked about family, not politics.

Certainly, there was paranoia among the citizens. Piddling little gifts from American reporters—left-over toothpaste tubes, shaving cream, cookies—were accepted with grateful tears by hotel maids, but only on the sly, as if it were some sort of illegal drug deal. While young kids along the Malecon, Havana’s picturesque waterfront, begged for gum, older youths made it clear that speaking to foreigners would risk arrest.

At the Bay of Pigs—Cubans refer to the 1961 battle simply by the name of the small village there, Giron (pronounced HE-rone)—a small museum commemorates the event, framed by vacation cottages, an outdoor restaurant, the turquoise sea, white-sand beach, shade from orange-flowered flamboyant trees. A lovely, peaceful place to have a nice meal on the porch in benign breezes.

In a way, the Bay of Pigs was the Cubans’ Pearl Harbor, a bloody invasion of an outside power. The U.S. lost that little war, and seemed—during that three-week adventure in 1991 by some possibly naïve reporters—to be losing the fight to do right by the Cuban people. Thus does the Obama call to restore relations with Cuba feel like a better path toward full human rights.

It’s Just Football

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Two things happen every early December: Army plays Navy in football and many Americans mark the anniversary of Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor that triggered the U.S. entry into World War II. Because both events are linked to the military—and because of football’s traditional affection for warlike analogies—the tenuous connections can get a little weird.

There annually are over-the-top references to the Army and Navy players “preparing for battle,” as if strategizing for touchdowns somehow resembles life-and-death circumstances. Or strange expressions of anxieties assuming that gridiron mediocrity at West Point and Annapolis—for years on a level below the fully professional operations at Alabama, Florida State, Ohio State and so on—somehow translates into a creeping incompetence among U.S. soldiers and sailors.

Beyond that, Navy players in the late 1980s, in the midst of a three-game losing streak to Army, resorted to seeking motivation in what they called the “rumor” that whenever Navy would lose four consecutive years to Army, it meant the United States would go to war. Navy in fact had lost four straight right before World War I and, in the mid-1930s, before World War II broke out. Too bad Navy’s recent dominance—13 victories in a row, begun the year after 9/11, and counting—couldn’t do anything to negotiate the end to American involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq over the same period.

It’s a tired old maxim that sports (and especially rough-and-tumble football) not only are a proxy for war but also a training ground for real international conflict. Britain’s Duke of Wellington is supposed to have said that the “battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” But, while fitness and persistence surely are as helpful in war as they are in football, what happens after every Army-Navy game is that everybody can just go out to dinner in peace.

In the midst of World War II, after Army won the 1944 game against Navy, victorious coach Red Blaik received a giddy telegram from the Pacific theater: “The greatest of all Army teams (stop) –we have stopped the war to celebrate your magnificent success.” It was signed by General Douglas MacArthur, a West Point grad (MacArthur played baseball there) sounding every bit like a proud alum. Army’s victory, of course, did nothing to end those global hostilities.

More reasonable is to recall the memory of many fans attending the NFL game between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers on Dec. 7, 1941, when news came of the devastating Pearl Harbor attack. They were struck by the incongruity of such a grave reality—the disorientation a younger generation felt on Sept. 11, 2001—intruding on a carefree afternoon at the stadium.

Football—sports in general—is better confined to its entertainment value than some good-vs.-evil world order. In fact, one beauty to the Army-Navy game is how immutable it is—same “fight” songs, same pre-game rituals, same mascots—while there remains hope that war is not permanent.

When Army and Navy played on Dec. 7, 1991—50 years after Pearl Harbor—there were appropriate halftime acknowledgments of that significant anniversary. But, too, the world had moved on. In the parking lot at the Philadelphia stadium that day, scores of Japenese cars, which had brought Americans to the game, were in evidence.

There is such a thing as ancient history. And games are just games.

Stop godding them up

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The nice feature on former Yankee pitcher Jim Abbott’s 1993 no-hitter, aired this week by the Yankees cable network, is a good starting point to discuss an old conundrum in sports journalism—how a highly visible athlete’s inspirational feat too easily can be interpreted as a morality play.

That Abbott, who was born with only one hand, could overcome what he called his “situation” to pitch in the Big Leagues—let alone throw a no-hitter—marvelously demonstrated the power of the human spirit. A motivating, heartening triumph. It did not necessarily establish Abbott’s superior moral fiber.

Don’t misinterpret that. From all reports—including my own brief contact with Abbott six years before his pitching gem—he earned a reputation as a bright and decent man, roundly liked by his peers and easy for any spectator to root for. In 1987, still pitching for the University of Michigan, Abbott was named to the U.S. National team, which positioned him to compete in Havana, Cuba, as the Cold War still raged. He called that experience, and another shortly thereafter at the Pan-American Games in Indianapolis, a “great way….to close the gap of understanding between ourselves and others.” He was 19 at the time.

During the Americans’ series in Cuba, Abbott’s leaping stop of a Cuban batter’s infield grounder, and his in-one-motion throw for the putout—all with his one hand—had Cuban fans “on their feet,” he said then, “going crazy, buzzing for about five minutes.” Abbott was an instant sensation there, and even shook hands with Cuban president Fidel Castro.

When Abbott was asked, during the Pan-Am Games, what the football coach at his college—a certain taskmaster named Bo Schembechler—would think of a Wolverine shaking the hand of a Communist leader, Abbott’s good-humored (and insightful) answer was, “Actually, there is a very similar presence between the two men. Fidel’s much bigger. About 6-4 and real wide. But there is a tough-guy, dictator sort of presence about both of them.”

And no judgement beyond that. So here’s the point: What so impressed those Cuban fans about Abbott’s athletic skill, the same ability that thrilled Yankee fans in 1993, realistically must be kept in a “love the win, not the winner” perspective.

In a post for Indiana University’s sports journalism center Web site a couple of years ago, veteran sportswriter Dave Kindred told of long-ago sports editor Stanley Woodward advising a young Red Smith (on Smith’s way to becoming the first sports journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize), “Stop godding up the players.” That jocks have an ability—much envied, for sure—to hit home runs, shoot three-pointers and evade tackles does not automatically make them better people. They still are just people.

Think of double-amputee Oscar Pistorius, whose fairly miraculous Olympic races on carbon-fiber prostheses made him the self-described “fastest man on no legs” and overturned the definition of “disabled.” Or O.J. Simpson, not only a football superstar but (personal experience here) among the most accommodating and respectful of interview subjects during his playing career—and wildly popular among teammates. Or Lance Armstrong, outrageously dominant on a bike and enormously life-affirming to fellow cancer survivors.

It turned out that what those folks could do on the playing field was no window on the soul. And reminded that, if we’re not careful, we set ourselves up with counterfeit idols.

Just as true, though: Jim Abbott’s story indeed was thoroughly uplifting.