Rivaling tradition

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Gallows humor might be the only reasonable response to the accelerating college conference mayhem. Given the disorienting realignments, The Athletic has suggested such potential “traditional rivalries” as the John Denver Classic (Colorado vs. West Virginia—“Rocky Mountain High” vs. “Take Me Home Country Roads”); the John Wooden Bowl (Purdue vs. UCLA); Phil Knight vs. the Scarlet Knights (Oregon-Rutgers).

Don’t even try to connect any of those matchups to leagues that for so long were organized by geographic and institutional ties—leagues that have become incapable of doing math or reading maps. The Big 10 is going to have 18 schools. At last count, the Big 12 has 14 and likely could go to 16. The Atlantic Coast Conference reportedly is considering Stanford and Cal (from the other coast) and SMU (from neither coast) for membership.

Also: Whither and wherefore Notre Dame, which forever banked on its independence but appears adrift in this reshaped financial model.

All the nutty new associations, with everyone seemingly running off to join a more lucrative circus, at least serve to finally acknowledge that college football—the sport responsible for this kaleidoscopic shuffling—has nothing to do with college. Fully professional (except that the players are not paid directly and have neither a union nor guarantees of health care), college football has further evolved into just another version of the NFL.

So why not accept reality and erect a firewall between football and academics, as proposed by Baruch College law professor Marc Edelman years ago? “Maybe,” he said in the wake of repercussions after Northwestern players attempted to form a union in 2014, “there should be a football program that wears blue and maize and plays out of Ann Arbor and is separate from the University of Michigan.” And a team dressed in burnt orange based in Austin, Tex., with no actual connection to that city’s institution of higher learning.

Why not follow the lead of Ithaca College sports media professor Ellen Staurowsky, co-author of the 1998 book “College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA Amateur Myth,” who suggested splitting revenue-generating sports from the amateur, educations process? Football players still could go to classes if they chose to, Staurowsky said, but university athletic departments would lose the role of promoters and brokers of athletic talent and mass sports entertainment.

Or why not establish a National College Football League such as the one recently proposed by Welch Suggs, an associate director for the watchdog Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education and journalism professor at the University of Georgia?

In the Suggs model, there would be one major college football organization—same as the NFL—with manageable regional divisions structured something like of the old Southwest Conference (seven Texas schools plus neighboring Arkansas). The other sports—men’s and women’s basketball and especially the non-revenue sports of gymnastics, field hockey, track and so forth—would be grouped in their own separate conferences, immune from being big-footed by King Football’s insatiable pursuit of TV lucre.

With that, an Oregon volleyball team, not privy to chartered flights always available to the football gladiators, could avoid a cross-country round-trip journey to New Jersey to fulfill a commitment to play at Rutgers in the rejiggered Big 10.

Over and over, the NCAA has demonstrated it had neither the clout nor the will to stop all the gold-digging football gallivanting that is going on now. At a Knight Commission meeting 12 years ago, shortly after the Big 12 had begun to fall apart when Nebraska skedaddled to the Big 10, Missouri and Texas A&M to the SEC and Colorado to the PAC-12, then-NCAA president Mark Emmert declared that his organization “does not have a role in conference affiliations and should never be in the business of telling universities what affiliations they should have.”

So now, we have what New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait called the “logic of untrammeled capitalism” steadily picking up steam, with strategies “now driven entirely by the logic of television contracts” that yearn for expanded elite conferences. “The new mega-leagues,” Chait wrote, “will be too engorged to have real conference [football] champions: There will be too many teams in each league and too few games to fairly crown a winner.”

A decade ago, then-LSU chancellor Michael Martin predicted that “we could end up with two enormous conferences, one called ESPN and the other one called Fox.”

He sounds now like a regular Nostradamus. Or just a realist.

Howzat?

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At the conclusion of this essay, would you mind completing a customer satisfaction survey? You know: Were you Very Satisfied? Satisfied? Neutral? Dissatisfied? Very Dissatisfied?

Would you give this One Star? Two, Three or Four? FIVE!?!?!? Do you wish you had spent the time reading the comics instead?

Just kidding. It seems as if every business out there is using this sort of thing to get quick feedback. Supermarkets. Retail outlets. Pharmacies. Car repair shops. Media organizations. Food-delivery apps. Ride-hailing operations. Doctor’s offices. I wouldn’t want to be left behind regarding this trend.

So: On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being “very likely” and 1 being “no way,” how likely would you be to recommend this to family members or others? Why or why not? Did you have a favorite sentence or paragraph? A particularly compelling punctuation mark?

Please provide your age, height, weight, most recent eye exam, and what your favorite subject was in sixth grade. If you did not have a favorite subject, just write “recess.” Even though that’s not a subject, our survey reviewers will get the point.

And just to get to know you a little better: What is the approximate annual income you wish you had? Legally. All answers are confidential and will be shielded from the IRS.

In your own words, describe what you believe to be the Mets’ greatest deficiency. Speaking of the IRS, you may cite all public financial information in relation to players’ performance (or lack thereof).

Really, this sort of polling is merely a more formal approach than that utilized in the 1980s by three-term New York City mayor Ed Koch, who would ride the subway and stand on street corners greeting passersby with “How’m I doin’?” (Like all public officials, and in something of a good-natured way, Koch was booed whenever he was introduced at the ballpark. A tactic not unlike hanging him in effigy.)

Public criticism might have been gentler then than in these culture-war days. In the newspaper business—my home of employment for a half-century—I don’t recall us specifically soliciting evaluations in the time before social media (which traffics quite regularly in strong language to express all manner of dissatisfaction). But we would occasionally receive a note via snail mail beginning, “Dear [insert vulgar slang for a contemptible person here]….”

It can certainly be argued that evaluations of business performance often run from grumbling to profound unhappiness, which includes addressing the offending person or persons with terms equivalent to guttersnipe or blackguard or the like. Evidence of this can be found every day in “letters to the editor.”

People who are happy with a company’s work—those understandably expecting a certain level of competence—don’t tend to pass along their gratification. Just to complicate matters, though, a 2020 Los Angeles Times investigation found that customer service surveys were “a breeding ground of bad data…all written in pleading language” and annoying to customers who “just want to give them five stars and be on with it.”

Furthermore, the Times report concluded, “companies might be using surveys as prophylactic shields against angry customers who might otherwise vent in public online forums.”

So before you go there: Were your expectations met with this essay? Unmet? Exceeded? How would you characterize your experience?

Your criticisms are very important to us. Although it should be noted that it is not possible to appeal to every level of brow. Hey; show some mercy.

And thanks for reading. May we contact you to follow up on your responses?

Blaim the heroine

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Here is an argument that the Women’s World Cup was not “an unmitigated failure” by the U.S. national team, as Fox Sports commentator and former men’s national player Alexi Lalas called it; that the Americans’ loss to Sweden in the round of 16 would “not be remembered as the day the United States women’s team hit rock bottom,” as it was characterized by a report in The Guardian.

Yes, the Yanks had squeaked into to the knockout round with a win and two ties, and their loss to the Swedes, despite being ranked No. 1 in the world and four times Cup champion, came earlier than in eight previous Cups. So, surprise! That’s sports. That’s part of the lure of it. There is no rubber-stamping a perceived favorite’s success.

And anyone who watched the U.S.-Sweden match had to notice that the Americans controlled the run of play, outshooting the third-ranked Swedes, 21-7. Were it not for the startling, cat-like reflexes of 27-year-old Swedish goalkeeper Zecira Musovic, repeatedly batting away shots ticketed for the back of the net, the Yanks would not have had to endure their own excruciating penalty-shot misses and the necessity of the latest goal-line video technology to confirm Sweden’s ultimate winner, which was not otherwise visible to the naked eye.

Musovic was spectacular, the real difference in a magnificent tug-of-war that went beyond two hours between two skilled, aggressive teams. Her performance was more to the point than so much of the post-match analysis by the sport’s chattering classes bent on assigning blame.

U.S. coach Vlatko Andonovski was widely recommended for dismissal, taken to task for not showing confidence in his bench and assembling a roster that didn’t produce goals, didn’t better manage the midfield, didn’t show more cohesion, etc. Slate called the U.S. team “a shadow of its previous self.” Front Row Soccer enumerated what it judged to be U.S. failures by “looking back on a disaster of a tournament.”

ESPN piled on, too, lamenting the injuries to some American veterans, the drying up of the youth pipeline in the United States compared to the rest of the world, what is perceived as U.S. overconfidence and its players’ “lack of chemistry.” (During a stretch of poor games during the 1999 NBA season, Knicks guard Chris Childs argued that “chemistry is between lovers, not players.”)

Listen: There was a second team involved in that round-of-16 game, and the theatrical display by that other team’s goalkeeper, Musovic, is what repeatedly flummoxed the Americans and eventually put them on desolation row. If any individual must be “blamed” for turning the Yanks’ hearts to stone, that responsibility reasonably (and admiringly) could be attributed to Musovic. That was her job.

All the ferreting out of responsibility—the casting of aspersions on U.S. players, coaches, federation officials and the overall system—smacked of poor sportsmanship, exacerbated by Alexi Lalas’ assertion that the U.S. team had become “unlikeable” because of players’ progressive pronouncements away from the field. Not surprisingly, there were some nasty claims of poetic justice that retiring U.S. forward Megan Rapinoe—who has advocated for LGBTQ rights, equal pay for women in sports and racial justice—missed her penalty attempt.

At the end of a critical summation by The Athletic, which declared “this World Cup has raised massive existential questions about America’s ability to keep moving forward” and cast the result as some sort of apocalypse, someone with a sense of humor commented online, “I blame the Reynas”—aware of the messy aftermath to the men’s World Cup struggles. (Ask your hard-core soccer friends.)

Meanwhile, as the Swedes celebrated their victory, there came through the Melbourne stadium sound system a lively, familiar tune: “Dancing Queen.”

You can dance, you can jive/Having the time of your life.

See that girl/Watch that theme/

She is the Dancing Queen.

That was a No. 1 hit in the United States in the 1970s and lived on on Broadway and the movies. By the Swedish group ABBA.

Mamma Mia!

Inspiration complication

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What Australian soccer star Sam Kerr wished for prior to this women’s World Cup—“a Cathy Freeman moment”—now appears to be an absolute necessity for her team. A wobbly victory over Ireland followed by a crushing loss to Nigeria has left the Aussies—who had entertained expectations of a deep Cup run—in need of Freeman’s long-ago operatic, spellbinding magic just to advance to the tournament’s knockout round.

Kerr was just days past her 7th birthday when Freeman, on Sept. 25, 2000, provided the nation Down Under with a Hollywood ending of exaggerated happiness. So any Australian who pays attention to these sports spectaculars—and anyone lucky enough to have witnessed the 2000 Sydney Olympics—understands the reference.

On what was a grand night of track and field filled with exceptional, dramatic performances in virtually every competition, Freeman’s victory in that Olympic 400-meter final topped all. Not simply because Freeman rendered a smashing stretch run, coming from third place off the final turn in a race that is as close to violence as her sport comes—a tormenting all-out sprint over a quarter mile.

The Aboriginal Freeman was running with the weight of a nation and a people, her country’s most put-upon minority, on her back. Days before, during the Games’ Opening Ceremonies, she had been tasked with the honor of lighting the Olympic flame, a symbol of peace and brotherhood, causing her to worry “what some people would think” about her presence at the heart of the public ritual.

She is the granddaughter of one of Australia’s “stolen children” produced by a shameless national policy that took Aboriginal children and gave them to white families to “be civilized.”

In a way, that made her the conscience of the Sydney Olympics—and of Australia. And led to some incredibly noisy, emotional business in the boomerang event that sends runners out for a simple, exhausting trip, out and back. Fans—there were 112,000 in the stadium—were desperately, vicariously trying to lift Freeman around the track. Flash cameras in the stands followed her around, seeming to turn Freeman into her very own Olympic ceremony.

At the end, Freeman and the two early leaders she passed, straining mightily in the last 50 meters—Jamaica’s Lorraine Graham and Britain’s Katherine Merry—all were left sprawled on the track like survivors from some frightening car accident. Freeman needed several minutes to recover before getting to her feet and walking a victory lap, carrying both the Aboriginal and Australian flags.

It was just a championship race but interpreted by many as theater of “national reconciliation.”

“I don’t like to pass comment on anything political,” Freeman said then. “People like to make me a symbol for all sorts of things. I represent the young Aboriginal person living in a country of unity and enjoying possibilities of everything….

“I share my medal with my husband and my family and whoever else wants can join in.”

Her “moment” has been said to cause a ripple effect inspiring future generations of Aussie athletes in a sports-mad country, still a potent motivational tool—a shining example of grace under pressure. As the 2023 women’s national soccer team players gathered for a pre-tournament session, they were showed a tape of Freeman’s 2000 victory and treated with a surprise appearance by Freeman, who told them, “When you ask yourself, ‘What are you doing here? What are you doing it for?’ It’s because you love who you are and what you’re doing.”

Alas, Kerr—Australia’s career goal-scoring leader and considered among the sport’s top five (at least) global performers—came up lame with a bad calf in a pre-Cup workout and has missed her team’s first two disappointing games. If she can play against a formidable Canada side on Monday, maybe….

A little ancient history

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Hang around long enough and you suddenly could be celebrating your 50th wedding anniversary. A great thing for lots of reasons. And maybe it’s inevitable that on that occasion your spouse gifts you a little paperback that chronicles the culture and events in the year of your nuptials. I got one.

It provides a sort of reverse Rip Van Winkle effect, a somewhat disorienting awakening to the past—even though I’ve been there. A half-century is a substantial amount of time.

A dozen eggs cost 78 cents? A gallon of gas 39 cents? A car, on average, $3,400? Such factoids can mess with your bearings—some of the tidbits staggering to contemplate, yet others remarkably familiar. The President of the United States was facing impeachment. The Supreme Court was sorting out Roe v. Wade. I just read that the so-called stand-alone mustache (no beard or other facial hair; the kind I had in 1973) now is enjoying one of its periodic renaissances.

What goes around comes around?

In that Long Ago, lots of people were smoking marijuana, leading—as humorist Garrison Keillor recently put it—“to pretentious inwardness and contemplation of oneself as a rainbow or a rubber duck or rhubarb.” Keillor contended that “illegality was a big part of the appeal” of weed back then. Well, that’s different.

People were wearing strange clothing in ’73. (Bellbottoms! Tie-dye T-shirts!) Guys were walking around in public with shoulder-length hair and mutton-chop sideburns. Most domestic cars were merrily guzzling gas and resembled flat, wide-bodied boats—and generally were equipped with only AM radios. At home, we still were listening to music by employing black vinyl discs the size of dinner plates, placed on a gizmo called a turntable. Played at 33 rpm. (Ask your grandmother.)

Humans, though mostly speaking to others face-to-face, did have telephones—though those were stationary, stuck to walls or sitting on desks—that didn’t do anything besides function as telephones. People composed letters (which they then put into envelopes and dropped into mailboxes, destined to reach the addressee in just a matter of days), by operating heavy machines known as typewriters, which had keys attached to small metal arms that struck an inked ribbon, thereby imprinting letters on a piece of paper.

Nobody went around saying everything was “awesome” in 1973. Or, worse: “actually awesome.” (The hardly superior cliché then was “far out!”) Mass-marketed computers still were 10 years in the future. There were no laptops, digital cameras, DVDs, hybrid cars, Google, GPS. No fuss over global warming.

Babies were being named Christopher and Jennifer, Jason and Melissa then. No Liams or Noahs, Willows or Madisons. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Some things, I’m going to argue, were better then. Music: The Beatles (even after they split up), Chicago, Bette Midler, Paul Simon, early Springsteen, The Grateful Dead, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder. Tina Turner.

Horses were better: Secretariat.

There were, in 1973, hints of a futuristic world, such as the debut flight across The Pond by the supersonic passenger plane, the Concorde: D.C. to Paris in 3 ½ hours. The Concorde’s marketing pitch was “Arrive before you leave.” (Thirty years after it arrived, the Concorde did an Amelia Earhart. Disappeared.)

There was hope of consequences for political malfeasance: The Watergate hearings. There was a sense with the American troop withdrawal from Vietnam after 18 years that we just might give peace a chance. That summer, the United States and Soviet Union signed an agreement to reduce the threat of nuclear war.

Not that I want to return to 1973. That’s a foreign country which no longer exists, an archeological dig. But it was a special year, a good beginning—certainly in terms of one particular marriage—and therefore is a nice place to visit in the mind. Briefly. But, as the old baseball pitcher Satchel Paige warned, “Don’t look back; something might be gaining on you.”

These are good old days.

This business will self-destruct in…..

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So the suicide watch for newspapers goes on. The New York Times is shutting down its sports section and the Los Angeles Times essentially is doing the same, transitioning away from game stories and team beat coverage to a so-called “magazine” format.

It’s just sports, yes. But as Mark McDonald, one of the countless accomplished ink-stained wretches I have known during a half-century of sportswriting, asked in a Facebook post, “How can you credibly call yourself a first-rate newspaper if you have no Sports section, no baseball standings, no NFL schedule, no Final Four bracket?”

So it’s only sports, and many a condescending newsside reporter has dismissed those of us on the fun-and-games beat as futzing around in the “toy department.” But, to paraphrase the French-born American historian Jacques Barzun, who in the 1950s specifically cited baseball, “whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn” its sports. Because everything in our culture is there in the sports pages: Fair play, competitiveness, illegal drugs, big business, gender equity, race, obsessive attention to celebrity, entertainment, escape.

Yet somehow the New York Times, though sticking with its famous “All The News That’s Fit to Print” slogan, won’t include a sports section anymore, off-loading sports coverage to The Athletic website it purchased last year. George Vecsey, among the most eloquent in a long line of former Times columnists, wrote on his website that the paper’s readers “feel there is a hole in their lives.”

Former sports columnist Mark Whicker, in a post on The Morning After, noted that “once those connections [to the sports section] are severed, fans just walk away. They don’t tell newspapers they are leaving. They’re just gone.

“It’s just another chapter,” he wrote, “in the way newspapers have innovated their way into obsolescence and irrelevance.”

This is a program that was already in progress, of course. Between 2019 and mid-2022, an average of two U.S. newspapers disappeared every week, and a Northwestern University study has estimated that, over the next two years, a third of the nation’s papers will cease to exist.

At Long Island’s Newsday, where I enjoyed full-time employment as a sports reporter for 44 years and continue to do some freelance work, circulation has plummeted from around 600,000 at the start of the century to roughly 97,000 now. Newsday still prints a sports section, but it no longer staffs the Olympics, World Cup soccer, major golf tournaments, Wimbledon tennis, college bowl games or far-flung NCAA basketball tournament games.

The drastic loss of advertising in the digital age has hollowed out budgets that used to support reporters’ travel to teams’ away games. And impossibly early deadlines—so many papers have dispensed with their own printing presses and outsourced that job—leave the likes of Newsday always a full day behind  with final scores and other sports-related information. Radio, television and on-line bulletins—if not nearly as in-depth, analytical or evocative as on-site print reporting has been—is immediate.

And the less a sports staff gives readers, the fewer readers they have.

As a business decision, Tom Jones of the media research organization Poynter reminded that the Times is a union shop and The Athletic is not; so, while the 40 or so members of the Times sports staff reportedly are to be moved to other departments, the shuttering of sports could be a workaround: No need to fire anybody in anticipation that some will leave voluntarily.

Which sounds like another nail in the newspaper coffin. “Media news,” Bruce Arthur wrote in the Toronto Star, “has long been like climate-change news in that there is a lot of it, but very little that doesn’t feel like the first or second reel of a disaster movie.”

From here, it just feels like there won’t be any more sportswriting heroes—from such celebrated names as Frank Deford or Dan Jenkins, Roy Blount Jr. or Robert Lipsyte, Dave Anderson or Roger Angell, to the parade of committed, talented colleagues and fellow travelers who inspired and challenged me.

As Deford put it in his 2012 memoir, “Over Time,” in 50 years “no one will appreciate what sportswriting was really like at its apogee. I fear all you’d know would be blogs and/or statistics—the pole dancing of sports journalism.”

Sure, there’ll be ESPN. But that doesn’t give you elaborate storytelling, the kind of crafted writing that makes you feel you were at the game and had insight into the participants. As Deford wrote, with ESPN “there’s no poetry in its soul.”

I wish I were as optimistic as Dave Kindred, another giant in the business, who responded to the Times news with: “We shall Quixote on, always have, putting words in print, wherever we can, however we can, from cave walls to Substack to whatever’s next.”

Cave walls. There’s an image of how modern newspaper executives think of sports reporting.

Nearer the end

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

It was reported that the late British novelist Martin Amis, when the first of his four grandchildren was born, dryly noted that “being a grandfather is like getting a telegraph from the mortuary.” He was in his 50s at the time.

That’s not a telegraph from the mortuary. This is: One of my best college pals died last month. This, too: Days earlier, the wife of a second close college buddy (and former roommate) called to inform me that her husband has dementia.

Yes, both of them virtually the same age I am—mid 70s, the kind of statistic I almost never think about. Plenty of people are older than that and still functioning quite well. As long as I continue plodding through a morning run, working parttime, attending to such minor domestic duties of mowing the lawn and enjoying the countless benefits of an ideal 50-year marriage, it’s difficult even to think of myself as a grownup—much less an advertisement for “the end is near” premonitions.

I just had an appointment with my doctor to deal with the relatively insignificant issue of an upper-respiratory infection and it occurred to me that he technically has twice saved my life. First, for diagnosing that my asymmetrical hearing loss 20 years ago indicated a brain tumor. (It did; a specialist surgically removed the benign tumor without further incident.) Second, for spotting a heart murmur. (Valve-replacement surgery fixed that.)

I thanked him and we riffed on the unpredictability of human frailty. There are no answers. Though there are some obvious recommendations to increase lifespan—get exercise (physically and mentally), eat a healthy diet, watch your weight, don’t smoke, drink moderately, don’t skip medical checkups—I’ll bet you can think of people who practiced all of that and still were bushwacked by a fatal disease.

And fame doesn’t make anyone immune to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, either. Arthur Ashe, the impeccably fit tennis champion, suffered a heart attack at the peak of his playing career and a second coronary led to quadruple bypass surgery, during which he contracted the HIV virus through a blood transfusion. And died at 49.

It’s possible that he was doomed by the fact that both his father and mother had heart disease. So choose your parents well. And don’t discount luck.

COVID-19 has been a reminder of that. Roughly seven million deaths and no obvious fix on just who was vulnerable and who wasn’t. When the bubonic plague ravaged Europe’s population in the 14th Century, the idea of a Grim Reaper was hatched: A skeletal specter shrouded in a hooded robe, carrying a scythe, indiscriminately collecting souls. The 1918 influenza epidemic made the same point, as graphically illustrated by Katherine Anne Porter’s tale “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” in which the protagonist was an unlikely survivor but her lover died.

Somebody once said that comparative happiness is immoral, so not only does news of the demise of a friend, family member or colleague hit closer to home, but it also stirs some discomfort in the relative knowledge that I’m feeling fine. The “why me/why not me” dichotomy.

Late in his life, the enduring baseball character Casey Stengel noticed that “most of the people my age are dead at the present time.” That happens, but I contend that becoming a grandfather, which didn’t transpire until I was in my 70s, was the opposite of some doomsday-prophesy telegraph; rather, a real red-letter day.

Global hoops

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With increasing frequency, the NBA is helping U.S. sports fans learn world geography. And reminding us that a long-held provincial belief of American basketball exceptionalism is a bit outdated.

The latest examples are the league’s recent draft, in which a young lad from France was chosen No. 1, and the masterful work of the Denver Nuggets’ Serbian headliner in the championship finals.

On the elite level, the game—invented in Massachusetts, yes; but by a Canadian—still is overwhelmingly dominated by Yanks. But two of the first seven players drafted this spring are from Europe. And though it took 31 years of NBA drafts before a non-American was picked No. 1, there now have been 14 players from outside the United States so honored—10 in this century.

In recent years, NBA teams have thrived with a wave of international stars: Greece’s Giannis Antetokounmpo, Cameroon’s Joel Embid, Slovenia’s Luka Doncic, Germany’s Dirk Nowitzki, Argentina’s Manu Ginobili, Latvia’s Kristaps Porzingis, France’s Rudy Gobert. Rosters have included top-notch Spaniards, Australians, Dominicans, Canadians, Chinese.

Really, anyone who has been paying attention to the sport could not have been shocked by Denver being led to its first title by the MVP performance of Serbian Nikola Jokic. In the peripatetic hoops cosmos, non-American efficiency began to become clear at least 30 years ago, back when former collegiate coach Fran Fraschilla, now a TV commentator, noticed that Europeans “took our game and made it more interesting. I fell in love with the way they played the game.”

Before Jokic was born—before, in fact, his native Serbia emerged as an independent nation during the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia in the ethnic wars of the early 1990s—those stomping grounds had become a pipeline of NBA talent.

Five members of the 1990 Yugoslavia team that won the world championship—most notably Vlade Divac, Drazen Petrovic and Tony Kukoc—excelled in the NBA. Four other Yugoslav stalwarts from that era—Dino Rada, Predrag Danilovic, Zarko Paspalj and Jure Zdovc—also were productive NBA regulars. That was about that time that basketball watchers quipped, “The Americans invented it; the Yugoslavs perfected it.”

Yugoslavia won an Olympic basketball gold in 1980 (when the U.S. boycotted Moscow) and silvers in 1968, ’76 and ’88, plus a bronze in ’84. Then, during the 1990 Seattle-based Goodwill Games, a now defunct Ted Turned event aimed at cutting through some of the Olympic politics of East-West boycotts, the U.S. team was humbled in back-to-back games by both the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, mystifying the American players by eschewing a power, slam-dunk approach for passing, moving without the ball and deadeye shooting.

And though American basketball partisans, after the Yanks’ worst Olympic finish of third place at the 1988 Seoul Games, argued that they were being handicapped by international basketball federation rules banning NBA players, in fact U.S. hoops pooh-bahs had been blocking pros’ participation. Those Yankee officials figured our collegiate guys were good enough to win all the time and, more to the point, understood that the entrance of NBA talent also would bring NBA front-office types in to take their jobs.

So it was left to a Yugoslav from the Serbian region, international basketball federation secretary general and International Olympic Committee member Borislav Stankovic, to push for welcoming NBA players into the Games. That happened in 1992, just as the Balkans War was splintering Yugoslavia (and its national team) into what are now seven countries—Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro and North Macedonia.

In the confusion, Croatia competed as an independent nation in the ’92 Olympics, winning the basketball silver medal with former Yugo team members Petrovic and Kukoc. And Yugoslavia, allowed one more Olympic turn with athletes from Serbia and Montenegro, won the basketball silver in ’96. Divac and Paspalj were that team. In 2016, independent Serbia, with a 21-year-old Nikola Jokic aboard, took the Olympic silver—beating Croatia along the way before losing to the United States in the gold-medal final.

Before this month, the only time the Denver Nuggets played for a championship was in 1976, in their final season of the American Basketball Association before merging into the NBA, when their roster—like virtually all teams in the two rival leagues then—featured only fellows from American colleges: Kansas, North Carolina, UConn, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina State, Colorado, Stanford, Michigan State.

Not anymore. Now, along with the always improving, entertaining NBA show, our horizons and geographical knowledge are expanding.

There is traveling in basketball. (Swallow the whistle, ref.)

Par for the course?

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Just what Saudi Arabia expects from buying into the global sports market, and whether its intentions are honorable, isn’t entirely clear. One prominent theory amounts to a sinister take on the 1990s Animaniacs cartoon that featured the whacky characters Pinky and The Brain, whose unwavering purpose was “to take over the world.”

That fun bit of television escape, appropriate for all ages, featured a couple of genetically enhanced laboratory mice: The Brain was the relentless schemer, Pinky his dullard sidekick, and their goal of universal domination—all Brain’s doing, really—never got off the ground.

But what about Saudi Arabia and the Persian Golf War? (“Golf,” not “Gulf,” but more on the latter later.) When the oil-rich kingdom, through its sovereign wealth fund, began luring top pros from the established Western-based PGA in 2021 with obscene amounts of money, the accusation of “sportswashing” immediately was raised. In creating the rival LIV golf tour and populating it with some of the sport’s biggest names, the Saudis were accused of purchasing celebrity spokesmen to fumigate a dismal human-rights record, the crown prince’s apparent role in the 2018 murder and dismemberment of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the kingdom’s funding of terrorism leading up to 9/11.

For almost two years, the PGA mightily and noisily resisted the Saudi’s involvement, ostensibly on moral grounds, precipitating dueling lawsuits. Then, shockingly, they buried the hatchet and negotiated a chumocracy this month—a deal prompted, Slate’s Alex Kirshner wrote, by the unsettling reality that the PGA now “gets to be friends instead of adversaries with an investor who has more cash and lawyers than God.”

That the PGA now appears to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Saudi Arabia coincides with the Saudis’ recent, aggressive push to use sports to gain international prestige. Seemingly inexhaustible Saudi money has been thrown at the World Wrestling Entertainment operation, boxing purses, horse and Formula I racing and the English Premier League team Newcastle United, not to mention a project to poach several of world’s bold-face soccer names for Saudi Arabia’s professional league. Already Cristiano Renaldo of Portugal and France’s Karim Benzema, most recent recipient of the Ballon d’Or as the sport’s best player, have been signed.

Amid significant outrage that the Saudis are using good-old fun-and-games as an odious tradeoff to turn attention from the grisly Khashoggi event, the kingdom’s officials are contending instead that sports is a vehicle to promote diversity in its economy—because oil will not be there forever. Could this just be another step toward a more modern society that in recent years has at last allowed women to drive their own cars and join the workforce?

Of course the whole deal is tangled in geopolitics and the shifting evaluations of U.S. alliances.

Historically—though soccer, cricket and basketball have a place in Saudi Arabian culture—the kingdom hardly has been a sports power. It did not participate in the Olympics until 1972 and would have been tossed out of the organization in 2012 had it not lifted its ban on female athletes. It has yet to win a gold medal.

The Saudis’ first soccer World Cup was the 1994 U.S.-based tournament, four years after the kingdom had provided billions of dollars and a launching place for the American-led coalition in the Persian Gulf War precipitated by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

When the Saudi team arrived that May for the pre-Cup training near Atlantic City, N.J., there was talk that it would be greeted by U.S. general Norman Schwarzkopf, who had been commander of the Gulf War coalition. That didn’t happen, but all was tranquil between the allies at the time..

Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar was living parttime in Vail, Colo., and Saudi King Fahd had contributed to several U.S. colleges. It was King Fahd, in another example of his kingdom’s international relations, who had arranged with Argentine president Carlos Menem to hire Argentine brothers Jorge and Eduardo Solari to coach the Saudi’s ’94 Cup team.

Neither of the brothers spoke Arabic, but a trio of multi-lingual assistants—a Lebanese-born Brazilian, a Palestinian based in Spain and a Saudi sports-medicine official who was schooled in America—fixed that. And the Saudis, then considered the worst of the Cup’s 24 participating nations, conjured upset victories over Morocco and Belgium for a surprising advance into the knockout round—an advance the kingdom has not equaled in five successive tournaments. The Solari brothers had schooled the Saudi players in a sort of Argentine/Brazilian style—short touch passes with an emphasis on creativity.

Demonstrating that sometimes soccer is just soccer. Sports is just sports.

But there is plenty of chin-stroking now over the Saudis swallowing up sporting real estate and, especially, the LIV/PGA partnership, about which The Athletic’s Brody Miller declaration that “Money won. It always has. Maybe it always will….stripping away the norms of professional sports and laying it bare as a money-making enterprise above all else.”

Might that purchasing power remind of those goofy Animaniacs episodes that always ended the same way?

Pinky: “What are we going to do tomorrow, Brain?”

The Brain: “The same thing we do every day, Pinky. Try to take over the world.”

London Bridge is…

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This is about London Bridge. And the traditional children’s nursery rhyme regarding that structure. And Lake Havasu City, Ariz.

It’s about a pair of landmarks I’ve been passing on my morning runs during visits to England since my daughter settled with her husband and young son in East London a couple of years ago.

I’ll start there.

Roughly a quarter mile from my daughter’s place, in expansive Victoria Park—with its crisscrossing paths peopled by runners, bicyclists, walkers, dogs and children—are two stone alcoves that stood on London Bridge from the 12th Century until 1831.

Then that London Bridge fell down. (You know the tune.)

An historic marker near those alcoves—there had been 14 on the bridge—cited their utility as a place for pedestrians to rest from dodging traffic, and that they also “might have served as places of ambush for robbers and cutthroats” until the establishment of night watchmen.

According to Peter Ackroyd’s exhaustive 2000 book, “London: The Biography,” that bridge was “the grandest work” in the city’s massive rebuilding surge during the 1100s; it “rose in stone and became the great highway of commerce and communication,” built on the same site where different iterations of London Bridge have existed for at least 1,500 years.

Isn’t history cool? After that grand stone London Bridge came down, its successor stood from 1831 to 1962, when it no longer could handle an increased load of traffic. At which point the city of London took it apart and sold massive fragments to an Arizona real estate developer who envisioned an odd way to attract tourists and retirement-home buyers.

Granite blocks from the famous span were transported to the Arizona outpost of Lake Havasu City and patched into a crossing over a channel canal that splits off from the Colorado River at the California border.

And in a 1973 country song, “London Homesick Blues,” Jerry Jeff Walker sang:

Well when you’re down on your luck                                                                                                         and you ain’t got a buck                                                                                                                               In London you’re a goner.                                                                                                                          Even London Bridge has fallen down                                                                                                        and moved to Arizona.

I’ve never been to Lake Havasu City, but they still call it London Bridge there, and you can take that reconstructed overpass to one side of the canal and be at Papa Leone’s Pizza; the other way, Barley Brothers Brewery. Not exactly like trekking across the River Thames from the vicinity of the 17th Century St. Paul’s Cathedral, designed by Christopher Wren, to within walking distance of the modern version of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in the London borough of Southwark.

Ackroyd wrote that “the exact date cannot be known” when the original London Bridge was constructed of wood by the Romans, “but it would have seemed a majestic and even miraculous construction.

“Half the legends of London arose upon its foundations; miracles were performed and visions seen upon the wooden thoroughfare. Since its sole purpose was to tame the river, it may then have harnessed the power of a god. Yet the god may have been enraged at the stripping of its riverine authority; thus, all the intimations of vengeance and destruction invoked by the famous rhyme ‘London Bridge is broken down.’”

That enduring ditty may initially have referenced the 1014 Viking attack by Olaf of Norway, who “had his men maneuver their ships close to the bridge,” Ackroyd wrote, “tied them to its wooden piles with ropes and cables, then, assisted by the tide, strained at the wooden supports until they were dislodged and the bridge fell into the Thames.”

But a series of London Bridges, providing the only land transport across the river, endured. By the 14th Century London Bridge, long covered with houses and shops, lent a distinctive “sight of the city” described by Ackroyd: “Above the main gateway of the London Bridge rose iron spikes upon which the remnants of condemned men were fixed…the impaled heads of traitors.”

Not until the late 1890s did the more spectacular Tower Bridge appear (which modern visitors often confuse with the present London Bridge). Now of course there are a number of Thames crossings for cars and trains and, since 2000, the pedestrians-only Centennial Bridge.

And all the knaves and invaders and rascals and architectural geniuses and scallywags later, those alcoves sitting in Victoria Park can take a soul back to a childhood verse’s allusion to a world far away.