Leaves of grass (not the poetry)

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Grass is back. No, no; not that. Not cannabis, Mary Jane, weed, pot, dope. This is not an update on the 1960s counterculture, Woodstock or the hippie revolution. (Although amended laws in fact have recently given marijuana a new life.) Rather, this is a consideration of how football playing surfaces, after almost a half century of experimentation with synthetic flooring, have reversed field a bit. Or, in some cases, stuck with what the late sports commentator Bud Collins referred to as “God’s own greensward.”

This comes to mind with the annual razzmatazz that surrounds the Super Bowl, which has now been played 57 times with the same fellow overseeing the landscaping at each host stadium. That person is George Toma, now 94 years old, a superstar groundskeeper who has ably dealt with his corner of earth being trod upon by behemoth athletes and all manner of elaborate halftime productions.

In some ways, the just-completed 2023 championship game illustrated the imperfection of what often is referred to, redundantly, as “natural grass.” (Grass is grass; it’s natural.) Sports Illustrated huffed that the game was “completely marred by horrible field conditions”—with players at times unsteady on the Bermuda-grass lawn in Arizona’s Glendale stadium.

It should be noted that exactly half of the NFL’s 32 teams employ grass on their fields, including both of this year’s Super Bowl participants, so neither the Kansas City Chiefs nor Philadelphia Eagles should have had an edge in the big game. Furthermore, several of the losing Eagles refused to moan about the surface flaws, reminding that the Chiefs had to navigate the same ground.

But given modern technology and science, there has come to be an overwhelming expectation of flawlessness in major sporting events—in playing conditions, refereeing, athletic performance—which can get a little silly at times. Lost is the idea that the beauty of competition can be enhanced by what coaches call “things beyond our control.” Why not see how fabulously paid jocks can handle some rain, snow, wind, dirt?

Since we’re on the topic, then: Artificial playing surfaces originated with AstroTurf in 1965 after Houston’s baseball team, housed in the world’s first multi-purpose domed stadium, found that grass didn’t grow well indoors. It was assumed, correctly to some extent, that artificial turf would require less maintenance and be less susceptible to unpredictable weather, and both pro and college teams rushed to join the fake grass movement.

Early reviews were glowing. Dan Jenkins, covering the University of Tennessee’s 1968 season-opener in Knoxville, declared in his Sports Illustrated game story, “The question of whether a good football game can be played on your living room carpet has been answered pretty much to everyone’s satisfaction down on a rim of the Smokies in the Old South. The University of Tennessee has won the sport’s interior decorating award with its new synthetic turf….”

Jenkins wrote that, at the conclusion of a 17-17 tie with Georgia, “everything sagged mercifully except the gleaming nylon playing field….still as rich green and spotless as it had been three hours earlier. And this was after a truckload of Tennessee cheerleaders had driven on it, after a Tennessee walking horse had pranced around it, after a Georgia bulldog had gnawed at it and after a Georgia coach had flicked ashes on it.”

Alas, artificial turf did not grow back.

Return with me to the 1976 Super Bowl at Miami’s since-demolished Orange Bowl Stadium, which was an early convert to fake grass using something called Poly-Turf. In its seventh season, the Poly-Turf had come to resemble a 100-yard banana peel, with rips and bumps. Toma—the God of Sod, the Sodfather, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Man who is on record as preferring grass—was working the 10th of his 57 Super Bowls in ‘76, putting in 12-hour days alongside his crew in the week leading up to the game.

“We crawl every seam on our hands and knees,” Toma said then, “and anywhere that even a fingernail would go under, we glue, using a contact glue, which will hold for a couple of weeks. It’s like the glue you might use on Formica table tops at home.

“Then we take a tractor over it to press it down good. We sewed up a couple of rips. The way the surface has matted unevenly, we can’t do much about that. There will be some slick spots….Where there’s a few bumps, like you might get in your rug in your house, we’ve taken scissors and shaved off the top.”

After that game, the Orange Bowl returned to grass and stayed with the real stuff until it closed in 2008. Hard Rock Stadium, which replaced the Orange Bowl as Miami’s big-time football stadium in 1987, always has featured grass. Tennessee’s Neyland Stadium, cite of that 1968 artificial turf debut chronicled by Dan Jenkins, has been back to grass since 1994.

This year’s Super Bowl runner-up Eagles, by the way, were the first NFL team to use artificial turf in their home stadium—in 1969 when they played at Franklin Field on the University of Pennsylvania campus. From 1971 to 2002, their place of business was Philadelphia’s multipurpose Veteran’s Stadium, so infamous for the gaps and uneven patches in its synthetic floor that it because known as the “Field of Seams.” Since 2003, the Eagles have been settled in Lincoln Financial Field, which is equipped with grass. So maybe there isn’t a better mousetrap after all.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

None the wiser

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

The goal is not to be that old man sitting on a mountaintop, reading something like “Wisdom for Dummies” and expecting young whippersnappers to come seeking enlightenment. It seems a bit arrogant to assume that advanced age automatically provides all the answers.

Go ahead, hit me with a knock-knock joke. I still have to ask, “Who’s there?”

That said, can we consider the possible devolution of the elderly’s status in our society? A friend — like me, classified as a senior — wondered if there might be less respect these days for us geezers. We have decades of vocational participation, have had a front-row seat to remarkable advances and challenges and interactions with all manner of people. We’ve done stuff, seen things. Do young people need to hear about that? Should they want to?

Roughly a half-century into working in the newspaper business, I set about moonlighting by attempting to teach journalism to college students. The theory was that I might be able to pass along a bit of insight — about the trapdoors to be avoided, the expectations to deal with, various tricks of the trade. But the light-speed changes in technology, and of life in general, have rendered my experiences, compared with those of 19- and 20-year-old undergrads, as relatable as if I were from Saturn.

Honestly, does it do the Millennials and Gen-Z people any good to know about dial telephones, typewriters and the old-timey information-delivery systems such as Western Union? (Carrier pigeons were before my time.)

Furthermore, there appears to be ample evidence that the basic process of accumulating birthdays is no special skill. Longevity doesn’t translate into being talented, well-regarded, morally upright, kind and beneficent. Which prevents me from supposing that, just because such vastly accomplished souls as Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, John Updike and Satchel Paige didn’t make it past my current age, I somehow am in that ballpark of masterly sagacity.

And when I ponder having learned the newspaper trade, I must allow that I likely processed as much pertinent information from colleagues as from the grandfatherly set, from others who were in the moment with me. Role models.

Either way, though, knowledge was not coming from within, and it slowly began to sink in that the secret to good journalism — and, frankly, to competence in virtually any profession — is curiosity. And that curiosity leads directly to contemplating history. Which, you could say, is another word for “geriatric.” We old buzzards can accurately be described as “history.”

Here’s the thing: Today’s youth doesn’t need a wrinkled old oracle to set them on the path of becoming overachievers. Sage advice — so much of it blindingly obvious — is readily available from multiple sources without having to chase up a mountain in search of some venerable guru: Be prepared. Keep an open mind. Value information. Whistle while you work. Don’t take yourself too seriously (because no one else does.) I can’t offer anything more profound than “always have a pencil and pad with you.”

There is never any harm, though, in having a little guidance to agitate intellect and logic, to demonstrate the familiar maxim that one should learn something new every day.

Certainly the issues that confronted the more mature among us are barely recognizable now.

We didn’t have Google or cellphones or the internet and, yes, we from the Pleistocene era now need to worry about keeping up. But since the past really is prologue, it is not esteem, per se, that the youngsters owe old-timers; rather, the opportunity of having ancients among them to stir some critical thinking.

There is an unattributed quote that goes, “Listen to your elders’ advice. Not because they are always right but because they have more experience of being wrong.” (I found that on the internet!)

Baruch’s illusive star

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In 2013, during a reporting assignment that took me to Baruch College’s Manhattan campus, I did not happen to bump into George Santos. Which was not unusual at a school with almost 20,000 students. And anyway Santos, the recently elected Republican Congressman from a district near mine, has said he graduated three years earlier from Baruch. Summa cum laude and in the top one percent of his class.

Santos has said he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and finance there, an area of study with only a glancing relationship to the presentation I was attending on the occasion. The topic that day, addressed by Baruch law professor Marc Edelman, was the legal and ethical issues surrounding the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s adamant, ongoing stance against sharing its enormous profits with its athletes.

“Not every criticism of big business is right,” Edelman, whose writing on sports and law included The Sports Judge column for Forbes, argued then. “But, in the context of the NCAA, it is very difficult to sympathize with the association.”

Of course Baruch, then and now, hardly was in the class of colleges Edelman cited for funding quasi-professional sports operations in which the workers were not compensated and which therefore encouraged the unseemly practice of loyal alums at big-time athletic factories helping to recruit prominent jocks with under-the-table money. “Maybe,” Edelman proposed, “it makes sense if schools have to sell off their sports programs” to create a firewall between sports and academics. “Maybe 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.”

Not an issue at Baruch, existing at it always has in the NCAA’s lowest rung of Division III, without access to massive TV rights deals or even the benefit of income from ticket sales. So there logically is no record that George Santos had  been lured to the school by a volleyball scholarship, as he claimed, because Division III schools do not grant athletic scholarships to anyone. Or that Santos, as he described himself in a 2020 radio interview, was a star on the 2010 Baruch men’s volleyball team that really did win 33 of 39 matches.

But, then, there is no evidence that Santos was even a member of that team. Or that he attended Baruch that year. Or any year.

Though George Santos regularly has noted his Brazilian roots, it also would be dangerous to assume that he might be the same Santos who was a member of the 2012 Brazilian Olympic volleyball team that won the silver medal in London. Fact check: That was Sidnei Santos, known as Sidao, with whom I also did not cross paths since the last of 11 Olympics I covered was the 2006 Turin Winter Games.

I can attest that George Santos did not compete in any of the Super Bowls, NBA Finals, World Series, NHL Finals, soccer World Cups, Grand Slam tennis tournaments, Indianapolis 500s, college football bowl games or thoroughbred Triple Crown races I chronicled in my half-century of sportswriting.

I must acknowledge that the first time I was aware of Baruch fielding athletic teams, however humble the circumstances, came years into reporting local, national and international sports for Newsday—and only then because Roy Chernock, whom I knew while he was building a track and field power at Long Island’s C.W. Post College (now LIU-Post), was hired in the mid-1970s to coach Baruch’s track team.

OK. Back to that early Fall day in 2013 when I was on the Baruch campus. I recall enjoying a cup of coffee on the school’s recently opened pedestrian plaza—the block of 25th Street between Lexington and 3rd Avenues—surrounded by young Baruch scholars and, surely, several true Baruch student-athletes. As I said, it was not unreasonable that I didn’t come across George Santos then, beyond the fact that he never had been a Baruch student nor an athlete.

That day, Professor Edelman was predicting that increasing litigation against the NCAA was “lurking very, very closely on the horizon.” And, sure enough, a decade later, the NCAA indeed is faced with its former sins, trying to get a handle on the recent NIL policy that allows its athletes to bank on the “name, image and likeness” established by their athletic accomplishments. Technically, even at the Division III level, George Santos would have been allowed to leverage his Baruch volleyball stardom to be paid for hawking beer or crew neck sweaters or horn-rimmed glasses. If he had been a Baruch volleyball star. Which he wasn’t.

Play on?

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Since Buffalo Bills defensive back Damar Hamlin went into cardiac arrest early in his team’s Jan. 2 game in Cincinnati, there has been a steady stream of thoughtful essays considering the appropriate response to that unsettling incident.

Are we—fans, reporters, the game’s marketers and promoters—all “complicit in the NFL’s violence” by contributing to the sport’s massive popularity?—New York Times.

Is football “designed to be deadly”?—Salon.

Is it “the ethos of football…to play on” no matter the players’ risk?—The New Yorker.

“Should a civilized culture really be sanctioning” football’s “most inescapable reality show”?—The Atlantic.

All reasonable questions, and there will be no good answers here, though I have dealt with a handful of incidents in a half-century of working as a sports journalist that could have triggered similar contemplations.

I happened to be covering a 2010 college game in which a player was paralyzed by a kickoff collision. I was asked to interview the father, brother and associates of Darryl Stingley one year after Stingley famously was left a paraplegic during a 1978 NFL exhibition game. I have reported on the increasingly common evidence of the degenerative brain disease CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, found in deceased former players, and have spoken to forensic neuropathologist Bennet Omalu who, in a 2002 autopsy of former Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster, first recognized CTE in a football player.

What made the Hamlin episode different, and instantly more terrifying, was that it appeared after a typical play-ending tackle, didn’t result from one of those crippling head blows, yet brought medical personnel racing onto the field to administer CPR. Everything—fellow players, officials, spectators—stood eerily still even after Hamlin was carted away in an ambulance 10 minutes later. Almost as hour passed before the game was postponed, with Hamlin said to be in critical condition at a local hospital.

So, about those earlier questions: New York Magazine’s Will Leitch found “progress” in the league’s decision to stop play, citing the opposite decision minutes after Chuck Hughes of the Detroit Lions, the only NFL player to die on the field, collapsed with a heart attack during a 1971 game.

Such standard procedure to play on applied in ’78, when a vicious blow from Oakland’s Jack Tatum levelled New England star receiver Stingley, putting him in a wheelchair for life (he died on 2007), but didn’t stop the game. And, in 2010 at the New Jersey Meadowlands, as soon as Rutgers University lineman Eric LeGrand was carried off the field on a stretcher—he attempted to give a thumbs-up but had no feeling below the neck—action against Army resumed.

And somehow these sobering moments didn’t put a dint in attraction to the sport—for fans, officials, teammates and the gravely injured players themselves. In Rutgers’ victorious but glum locker room after that 2010 Army game, LeGrand’s teammates acknowledged, in the words of linebacker Antonio Lowery, how it was “hard going back out there after [seeing LeGrand motionless on the field]. Everybody had watered eyes. It’s hard. Violent game.”

Yet he added, “It’s what I do. I love it to death. [Such an injury] is one of those things you have to deal with.”

In my 1979 interview with Stingley’s father and brother, both of whom were former football players at a lower level, there was happy reminiscing recalled from a recent Father’s Day gathering. No regrets, his brother Wayne recalled, only that “Darryl said, ‘Hey, I gave it my all and it took something from me.’ That’s what he said. ‘I gave it my all and it took something from me.’”

Chris Nowinski, a former Harvard player who is a behavioral neuroscientist and founding CEO of the nonprofit Concussion Legacy Foundation that studies CTE, cautioned in a New York Times essay that as alarming as Hamlin’s injury was, it was “focusing attention on a single, dramatic outlier rather than the chronic medical conditions that pose by far the greatest danger to players.”

Nowinski cited chronic heart disease and the long-term effects of traumatic brain injuries for robbing “countless players of their health, their happiness and even their lives but do not receive the same medical or cultural attention because they happen away from the cameras.” He ticked off the names and ages of nine former players who died of heart disease between 26 and 46 years old since 2015.

Of course, the good news is that Hamlin, who is only 24, is in the midst of a remarkable recovery and there even has been speculation whether he might ever play football again. But here’s another question with no answer: Should he?

No introduction required

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He signed autographs “Edson=Pele.” Because “I want people to always remember Edson,” he said. “Edson is the base.”

Edson Arantes do Nascimento was the poor Black child from the Brazilian mining town of Tres Coracoes who left home at 14 with minimal schooling but whose soccer wizardry transformed him into a rich global celebrity. Pele spent the rest of his life—he died Thursday at 82—among the half-dozen most recognizable names on the planet.

“I thought [after a playing career that ended in 1977],” he said a few years ago, “I would go back to Brazil and be Edson again. But I continue.”

Born shortly after electrical power came to his parents’ hometown, he was named after the inventor of the phonograph, motion picture and lightbulb and wound up being the Thomas Edison of soccer, illuminating his sport and his country.

As a child, he picked up the sobriquet “Pele” in playground soccer. Maybe that name derived from young Edson’s mangled pronunciation of his favorite player Bile (bee-LAY), who was the Vasco da Gama goalkeeper, evolving into peh-LAY. Or from Sao Paulo natives’ vernacular for street soccer: Pelada. Or from a shortening of the Portuguese word for “lightfoot”—pe ligeiro. Pele himself said he never knew the origin of his nickname.

It was his primary role in Brazil’s first of five World Cup titles in 1958, when Pele was only 17, that was embraced at home and abroad as an example of his nation’s style and competence. Repeat Cup championships in ’62 and ’70 for Brazil and Pele cemented his status as national treasure of Brazil, a legal means to prevent foreign teams from signing him, even as his club team, Santos, remained in demand around the globe, further spreading the word of his—and his country’s—capacity.

And when, at 35, he came out of retirement to join the New York Cosmos of the fledgling North American Soccer League in the mid-1970s, it was the spark that prompted Americans to investigate the appeal of what had been a “foreign” sport on these shores.

Before Pele, the United States was a soccer wasteland. Only 3,746 people attended the Cosmos’ inaugural game in 1970, prompting the team’s early vagabond existence over the next seven years, from Yankee Stadium to Hofstra and Randalls Island’s decaying and since-demolished Downing Stadium.

Upon Pele’s arrival in 1975, a reported 2,000 fans showed up for his first practice session; 21,278 packed the Downing dump for an exhibition game two days later; three days after that, 22,500 somehow squeezed into the old joint for Pele’s official NASL debut.

His presence prompted other global stars to join him on the Cosmos’ roster, most notably German Franz Beckenbauer and Italian Giorgio Chinaglia. By 1977, the Cosmos had moved into the new Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., and were drawing crowds in excess of 75,000.

Though Pele’s earlier 1970s appearances in New York exhibition games allowed him “to go to the supermarket in New York and buy things,” he soon could go nowhere without being recognized. “Kids, 8 years old”—born decades after he stopped playing—“they are calling to Pele,” he said.

Coaxed by his mentor and first Cosmos coach, Julio Mazzei, to further his education, Pele worked to communicate with the children who looked up to him and with movers and shakers in business and government.

“I try to speak the languages,” he said. “I try to speak English, French, Italian, Spanish. And [Brazil’s national language] Portuguese, of course. Soccer opens the door. When I first played for Santos, I don’t even speak Portuguese well, and I start to get uncomfortable with that fact.”

He remained soccer’s globe-trotting sovereign, a sort of benevolent ruler who shook hands and kissed babies and endorsed products and lent an aura to virtually any soccer event of significance. He was presidential, known to all—no introduction or passport required. Upon Pele’s death, current Brazilian superstar Neymar called him “eternal.”

As Edson had said of Pele, “I continue.”

Big-game mascots

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Here’s another vote affirming that the 2022 men’s World Cup tournament was pretty pretty good. Fabulous sporting theater, with a championship final that just might have been the greatest soccer game ever played. (It certainly was the best I’ve seen. But it is difficult to accept that anyone has witnessed each of the 22 World Cup title matches dating to 1930, let alone every soccer game throughout history, so such a definitive statement clearly is on shaky ground. I’ve seen a mere nine Cup finals, two in person, and maybe a few hundred other games, total, in a sport that has been around for more than 150 years.)

Of course there were imperfections beyond the playing field, given the collision of convivial fun-and-games with the ugly back story of Qatar’s corrupt acquisition of the event, the host nation’s treatment of immigrant workers and its general strong-armed opposition to dissent.

But, OK, even if we don’t ignore those particulars—the way Fox TV did—it’s fair to wonder how the tense, riveting athletic drama could have been any better.

So let’s move on to the aspect of marketing, which is the soul of any such enterprise these days, and one relatively overlooked facet during the Qatar extravaganza was the 2022 World Cup mascot.

It happens that I fancy myself an aficionado of international sports mascots, having been on site for 11 Olympic Games and two World Cups. (The photo above is a team picture of the Olympic mascots I collected.)

In modern times, the mascot’s primary function is to symbolize a particular event or organization, a sort of branding exercise, and at the Qatar tournament the mascot, La’eeb, did check significant cultural and soccer-related boxes. La’eeb’s  personification was of a white, floating ghutrah—the traditional headdress worn by Arab men—with eyes, eyebrows and an open mouth, and its name is the Arabic word meaning “super-skilled player.”

Similar comparisons were Italy’s 1990 Cup mascot, a stick-figure with a soccer head called “Ciao,” the familiar Italian greeting, and Mexico’s 1970 “Juanito,” attired in a Mexican soccer uniform and a sombrero. FIFA, the sport’s international ruling body which owns and operates the World Cup, described La’eeb as being from “a parallel mascot-verse that is indescribable.”

But Sam Knight, in a wide-ranging and thoroughly enlightening World Cup report for The New Yorker, found La’eeb, being a sort of ghostly thing, reminded of the thousands of reported fatalities during the construction of the Cup venues by “hundreds of thousands of workers, imported from the Global South and frequently abused in one of the smallest and riches countries on earth.”

Knight wrote that, seeing La’eeb, “everyone was encouraged to find his or her own meaning, even if that meaning was death.”

Beyond that, a typical purpose of a big-event mascot is to plug the wares of official sponsors, and in Qatar’s case, that wasn’t about to happen after the local authorities’ last-minute ban on beer sales at Cup venues. Though Budweiser had a $75 million contract with FIFA and reportedly wound up losing at least $5 million during the tournament, the promotion of its product suddenly became out of the question.

So La’eeb obviously was no Cobi, a classic mascot role model from the 1992 Summer Olympics. A little cartoon dog, Cobi was depicted everywhere in Barcelona during those Games, a shameless huckster for Olympic sponsors: Lifting a bottle of Coca Cola, holding hands with an m&m (plain) and on and on. My friend Jay envisioned Cobi having a New York agent constantly on the phone lining up endorsement deals for the little dog.

Cobi was so named as a play on COOB which, translated and unscrambled, stood for Barcelona Olympic Organizing Committee, and was created by local artist Javier Mariscal, who had caused a bit of a stir by claiming he was “enjoying the most wonderful drug” when he first drew the critter.

Anyway. Cobi was a memorable token of that event. As were the polar bears, Hidy and Howdy, at Calgary’s 1988 Winter Olympics; and Neve and Gliz, a snowball and ice cube, at the 2006 Turin Winter Games; and the kookaburra (called Olly for Olympic), platypus (Sid for Syndey) and Millie (for millennium) at the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics.

Then there was Atlanta’s 1996 Izzy, impossible to be classified as a person, place or thing, so mysterious that its original name was Whatizit. Izzy didn’t appear to stand for anything—not the host nation, the fact that those were the Centennial Summer Olympics, nor something as relevant as the Olympic motto of “higher, swifter, stronger” that was embodied by a coyote, hare and bear at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games. At least with the ’84 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, the first in the United States in 52 years, organizers trotted out Sam the Eagle, an allusion to the national bird.

Up next, it recently was announced, will be a pair of anthropomorphic female caps for the 2024 Paris Games. They are Phryges—soft, generally red hats worn by freed slaves in Phrygia in an ancient Greek kingdom of what is now Turkey, but said to have a strong connection to French history because they were worn at the time of the French Revolution as a symbol of freedom.

Ultimately with these global hullaballoos, though, as the 2022 World Cup demonstrated, the main thing is showing off super-skilled players.

Artistry?

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(self portrait)

(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

Hands are a problem. I can doodle. I can sketch. I can produce what passes for cartoons: An oval-shaped head, dots and lines for eyes, nose, mouth, ears; bendy arms and legs. But draw hands that actually look like hands? That’s what separates the men from the boys.

I’m convinced that for any prospective artist, the mightiest challenge is to render realistic images of those human appendages with 27 bones, 27 joints, 34 muscles, more than 100 ligaments and tendons as well as plenty of blood vessels and nerves. Years — decades — of attempts haven’t gotten me much past depicting hands that resemble prehistoric claws or microwaved sausages. Hands that stick out like a sore thumb.

Nevertheless. In semiretirement, I find drawing to be great fun. My artwork is not up to most professional standards — OK, just a couple of steps up from stick people or the kind of creations that parents are known to display on the refrigerator door — but good enough to design goofy cards for my 2-year-old grandson without subjecting myself to scorn. I can do Mickey Mouse (who, by the way, has only four digits on each hand, so that helps). I recently have been gifted colored pencils, watercolors, pastels. It’s nice to be humored if not specifically encouraged.

It was as a grade-schooler that I began religiously perusing the daily funny pages, the start of a lifelong attraction to newspapers, and I commenced fashioning my own regular four-panel comic strip — short-lived and seen only by my mother. I was a “Dick Tracy” fan. “Peanuts” and “Beetle Bailey” came later, and I soon migrated to studying the sports pages so that, by high school, I was endeavoring to be both a sports writer and a sports cartoonist. Which came to pass. Sort of.

By the time I had enrolled in the University of Missouri School of Journalism, I was mimicking the work of Murray Olderman, whose columns and cartoons were in the midst of a 35-year run of syndication in 750 daily newspapers.

Olderman — who died at 98 in 2020 — had taken a journalism degree at Mizzou, where his drawings of sports figures first appeared in the Columbia Missourian, the daily paper operated by the journalism school. Roughly a quarter-century later, I too was getting my pictures and words published in the Missourian. I was on my way. Sort of.

 

(published in 1967)

Among the establishments I solicited for a postgraduate job in the late 1960s was the Newspaper Enterprise Association, of which Olderman was then editor, sports columnist and sports cartoonist. The reason he declined to hire me, he explained with kindness, was not my obvious inability to master realistic hands; rather, that I was likely to be drafted during the Vietnam War.

I never was. And several years on, having settled into my career as a Newsday sports writer, I took another shot at the cartooning thing. At the time, Newsday had a murderer’s row of elite artists, the most prominent being Bob Newman (who was appalled by any draftsperson who couldn’t draw hands). The art director then was Paul Back, credited with having given the paper in 1968 a distinctly attractive look that endured for 25 years, until his death, and it was Back who threw my request out on its ear. Having me draw pictures for the paper, he said, would be almost as silly as having him cover sports.

Still, occasional attempts at animation fascinated me and, with more time to myself now, they have become a fairly regular practice. It’s a hobby that can be applied to homemade holiday cards, family birthday greetings, jokey dispatches.

Hands present another problem for an artistic dilettante, though. The slight tremors that are not uncommon to aging can mess with some already unsteady portraiture. Noses slightly off-kilter, wiggly edges, inelegant forms. If what I’m generating is surrealism, I admit it’s accidental.

Is bigger better?

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At the risk of sounding snobbish, is it fair to ask whether high-profile sports championship tournaments are becoming too inclusive?

The trend is everywhere in the land of fun and games. Major League Baseball this year invited 12 teams to compete for a World Series title, 10 more than its original format used until 1969, and one result was that a team (Philadelphia) with the sixth-best won-lost record during the regular season wound up playing for all the marbles.

The NFL, since its first Super Bowl in 1967, has gone from four to eight (1970) to 10 (1978) to 12 (1990) to 14 (2020) playoff teams. The NBA, which had six playoff teams in its first 30 years, grew to 10 in 1975, 12 in 1977 and 16 in 1984. The NHL presently advances half of its 32 teams to the so-called second season, which is 10 teams more than made up the entire league in the mid-60s.

That’s nothing. College basketball grandees are expressing support for bulking up the men’s March Madness from 68 teams to as many as 80, 96 or even 128. That would be approaching half of the total—358—in Division I. And college football’s upper echelon, already awash in 43 annual post-season bowl games, has announced it will enlarge its championship playoff format from four teams to 12 after the 2024 season.

Likewise, the quadrennial men’s soccer World Cup, now in the process of whittling down a 32-nation field in pursuit of the big prize, will reappear in 2026 with a field of 48. “If you don’t make that expanded field,” The Athletic declared, “fire everyone on the staff.”

Amid this Mae West take on post-season play—that “too much of a good thing can be wonderful”—perhaps it is a bit curmudgeonly to ponder the potential drawbacks of overabundance. Might the bar-lowering of post-season qualification reduce regular-season competition to a mere limbering-up exercise?

In a lengthy discussion between basketball authors Eamonn Brennan and Brian Bennett, posted on The Athletic, Bennett asked, “Why play a season if you can limp along….never showing any consistent winning ability whatsoever, and still get in [to the championship tourney]?”

Participation trophies all around? During an HBO interview not long ago, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie suggested that missing out on a championship event as a consequence of too many in-season losses might be a good life lesson. “I made sure that my kids were Mets fans so they could understand adversity,” Christie said.

Is the point of a more-the-merrier post-season meant to give teams a second chance after they have failed—maybe because of injuries or other not-their-fault challenges—to dominate the regular season? Provide another bite at the apple? Is it really a matter, as the NCAA’s National Football Playoff executive director, Bill Hancock, put it, a way of assuring that “more teams and more access mean more excitement for fans, alumni, students and student-athletes”?

Or is it just a money grab for the sport’s poohbahs, since such expansion of the College Football Playoff reportedly is expected to bring about $450 million in additional gross revenue for the conferences and schools that participate? The CFP’s current 12-year contract with ESPN runs through the 2025-26 season and CFP officials want to explore adding multiple broadcast partners in the next cycle.

This is happening barely more than a decade since Graham Spanier, then president of Penn State and chairman of the college presidents’ Oversight Committee, proclaimed that a football playoff of any size 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.”

Sure. And barely one year later, in 2012, Spanier was dismissed by Penn State in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal and the Oversight Committee voted to implement the four-team playoff in 2014—which two years hence will have three times the participants.

Among the observers not offended by such inflation is Slate’s Alex Kirschner, who happily accepted that baseball’s inflated post-season “is not a foolproof way to find the best team.” Because considering the early playoff elimination of two MLB division champions and a third 100-game winner to be a crisis was “at odds with a fundamental point about what we’ve decided sports are on this continent: an entertainment product designed more to be fun than to separate the wheat from the chaff.”

Kirschner contended that we should not be “asking for sports to be something that most American fans have never wanted them to be: more predictable. Most people do not want to get rid of the potential for magic.”

The cliched Cinderella Story, the shocking playoff upset by the Little Guy, indeed continues to play well to wider audiences and, in fact, is a core element of the bracketed, knock-out progression of post-season play. Over and over, it has been proven that such unexpected events hold significant appeal to viewers beyond the hard-core fan.

So: The potential for more spectators. More money, more television, more playoff teams. Wonderful?

But about the laundry…

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It was inevitable. Pundits and spectators who rarely pay attention to soccer—but apparently were lured into taking notice of the significant World Cup match between the potential insurrectionist Americans taking on imperial England—rushed to label the resulting 0-0 tie as “boring.” At least when long-ago sports columnist Jim Murray wanted to make that sort of personal observation about the sport, back when most Yanks still dismissed soccer as a foreign enterprise, he did so with some snarky humor: “I’d tell you the final score but there wasn’t any.”

Fine. I will not work myself into a high dudgeon in defense of what I found to be a tense and dramatic duel in the globe’s most-followed athletic event. The argument over soccer’s relative appeal remains a truly dull one. You like soccer or you don’t. Like poetry or gardening.

What obviously was boring were the American uniforms. “Kits,” in the soccer vernacular. A humdrum monochromatic blue? Blue shirts, blue shorts, blue socks? (With black splotches upon really close examination.)

There are teams running around loose at the World Cup nattily and appropriately attired: Argentines in their classic Albiceleste, the white-and-sky-blue stripes that mimic Argentina’s flag; Croatians in the red-and-white checkerboard from that nation’s coat of arms; Germans with a wide vertical black stripe on white; Brazilians in their traditional yellow shirts; Mexicans in inventive alternate jerseys of white covered with red doodles representing the country’s pre-Hispanic memory and current cultural touchstones.

In ranking the top uniforms in this World Cup, a cbssports.com post previewed “which teams will look the most stylish in Qatar and why the USMNT [U.S. Men’s National Team] won’t be among them.” (The English outfits aren’t much better—white with pale-blue touches, hardly summoning England’s white flag with red St. George’s cross—though England’s alternate uniforms, all red, save the day.)

The Americans’ present sartorial tedium recalls 1990, when the United States qualified for its first World Cup appearance in 40 years and showed up in unremarkable white duds with some blue trim. It was fellow journalist John Powers of the Boston Globe, exposed to that drab kit, who argued that the Yanks should have come “looking like Apollo Creed, all stars and stripes.” (Creed, kiddies, was the fictional boxer, sort of a pugilist Uncle Sam, played by Carl Weathers in the series of 1970s and ‘80s “Rocky” movies.)

Then, voila! For the U.S.-based World Cup in 1994, the athletic outfitter adidas tailored a pair of bespoke outfits for the home team that indeed broadcast stars and stripes in national colors. One uniform featured a faded blue shirt of imitation denim—very American—with huge stretched-out white stars and red trim and red shorts; the other consisted of a white shirt with wavy red stripes and blue shorts—very flaggish. (Photo above)

Of course, the whole uniform project—then as now—always is based on marketing, and most of the U.S. players were startled, and not particularly thrilled, upon being introduced to the ’94 outfits, which they found a bit gaudy. “I opened the box and said, ‘There must be some mistake,’” John Harkes said at the time. “But,” he added with a shrug, “it kind of grows on you, actually.” Alexi Lalas—now a World Cup commentator with the standard middle-aged businessman’s appearance but then a lanky goateed, flowing-locks redheaded defender—was said by a couple of teammates to “look like Raggedy Ann” in the red-striped shirt.

Now, with the ’22 World Cup in progress, and really not much to say about the Americans’ attire—impossible to describe it as chic or snappy or dapper or modish—it was interesting to come across an exhaustive report on The Athletic website resurrecting the then-shocking departure from the norm with those 1994 outfits: How most of the players initially were appalled by the kits, which were unlike anything soccer had ever seen, yet over time have embraced them, partly based on fond memories of having made a surprise run to the Cup’s knockout round that year.

Honestly, fellow World Cup observers—whatever you think of soccer—is there anything about the current U.S. kits that fits Nike’s claim that they “inspire unity, symbolize diversity and celebrate [a] commitment to expanding the game for the next generation on and off the pitch…”? Is there anything interesting about them at all?

Sorry. Boring.

Love for the underdog

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Americans are a fortunate lot, born to moon landings and miracles on ice on other unprecedented successes. We assume a degree of superiority in comparison to other peoples, an over-the-top arrogance based on a history of industrial and technological advances. We invented the airplane, chemotherapy, chocolate chip cookies. Baseball.

But we ain’t perfect, and the start of another World Cup tournament is a reminder to have some humility. As Will Leitch noted in a New York magazine essay, “In no other context outside international soccer are Brazil, Argentina, Belgium and Denmark global powers and the U.S. a plucky upstart.”

So, no, there is no expectation that the Yanks will bring home the Cup from the month-long event being staged out of season and out of the sport’s normal zone of influence—in the tiny oil-rich, culturally restrictive Persian Gulf nation of Qatar. Of the Cup’s 32 participating countries, the United States is ranked roughly in the middle, with—according to FiveThirtyEight website predictions—a 1 percent chance of going all the way. FiveThirtyEight gives the U.S. only a 53 percent hope of surviving the three-game opening round.

The Leitch article accurately headlines the World Cup “the only real American underdog story,” even as Leitch posits that this situation “makes the team considerably more fun to cheer for.” The lovable underdog. And, while there is plenty of evidence that the 2022 Yank team has a number of handicaps—the second-youngest roster in the tournament, a disappointing run-up to the tournament in terms of victories, perfect health and firepower—it ought not to be forgotten how far American soccer (and American soccer fandom) has come in the last 40 years.

1983. Caracas, Venezuela. Pan American Games. There was a first-round U.S. soccer match against Guatemala, a country with roughly 1/20th the population of the United States, in which the Yanks had their rather large heads handed to them. 3-0, I think it was.

The Latino fans in attendance were kind, not averse to showing appreciation for the Americans’ efforts but fully aware of the chasm of competence and how foreign the sport was to the 1980s American scene. One could imagine a thought bubble over the fans’ heads, with the words: Gringos, this is a football. It is round. Are we going too fast?

It was another seven years before a collection of U.S. college lads, lining up against hardened pros from around the globe, barely sneaked into their first World Cup in 40 years only to remind that “American soccer player” was widely regarded as an oxymoron. Like “jumbo shrimp.”

Then again, how much adventure is there in rooting for a team always assured of victory? How real is that? When the Yanks trampolined into the second round of the 2002 World Cup with shocking wins over Portugal, then fifth in the world, and longtime rival Mexico, U.S. soccer spokesman Bryan Chenault summed up the giddy reaction—and sudden interest from the opinion-shaping media—saying, “Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. And they’re all welcome. There’s plenty of room.”

Something clearly was afoot. That year, as the Americans came within a referee’s failure to penalize a German’s illegal touch of surviving a 1-0 quarterfinal loss, talk-radio and sports-column pundits began to unreasonably fret over the possibility that soccer somehow could shoulder aside the place of football, baseball and basketball in the pantheon of U.S. sports. As if that were the point.

The truth is that a large portion of the American citizenry has come to acquire a taste for soccer, and their national team—not a world-beater but clearly competitive—has added to the appeal of the World Cup’s top-notch sporting theatre.

Old friend George Vecsey, among my sports journalism heroes, who has written a book about the eight World Cups he covered for the New York Times, has just posted thoughts on the Yanks’ present football situation, including this (to me, surprising) observation: “The accumulation of injuries and benchings and transfers lead to my conclusion that the best days of American soccer just might be—I hate to say this—in the past.”

Whoa. But we still have chocolate chip cookies.