Just another night….

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Election Night transpired without me. I was in London, visiting family. But I certainly was curious to know the results and was reminded, as with every Tuesday after the first Monday of November, of the most invigorating aspect of having attempted journalism for a half century—the dare to provide information of significant public interest. On deadline.

For reporters and editors, Election Night is a figurative trip down a steep mountain trail without guardrails. A survival test. And though I never covered that specific event, working instead in the world of sports journalism, I have been there.

Allow me to cite a relevant remembrance by former New York Times columnist George Vecsey on the occasion of former Times sports editor Joe Vecchione’s death at 85. Vecsey wrote of “the midnight hour” in October 1986 when Mookie Wilson’s apparently harmless ground ball somehow conjured an impossible New York Mets World Series victory over Boston.

“…fans were screaming,” Vecsey wrote, “and nearly a dozen New York Times writers were pounding away at their laptops, shouting into phones, bustling noisily to update their early stories for the last print deadline of the evening. Enlightened cacophony.”

He noted that Vecchione, in the stadium press box, was coordinating with his staff at the game and at the paper’s office, making decisions on the fly, and in the end was approached by a “young Times news reporter, doing spot duty to cover fan madness, police activity, etc.” Having witnessed the under-the-gun performance of the sportswriters—“so often maligned as ‘the toy department,'” Vecsey pointed out—the news man marveled to Vecchione, “Wow, that was impressive.”

To which Vecchione replied, “We do it every day.”

That tale of Vecchione and his “toy department” troops executing under bludgeoning pressure helps assuage feelings of inferiority among those of us who fought our deadline battles dealing with less-consequential winners than candidates for the Presidency, Senate or House of Representatives.

On this year’s Election Night, The New Yorker editor David Remnick recalled in a brief post the “festive” atmosphere of news institutions’ tradition in which “editors and writers stayed late, ate cold pizza and rapped out news stories and instant analyses as best they could.” While the clocked ticked relentlessly.

Of course, the result of a ball game hardly matters as much as Election Night balloting, but the journalistic requirements are the same: Accuracy, fairness, clarity—all at breakneck speed—using just the right words and images. The sports author Dan Jenkins, through one of his characters, once described journalism as “literature in a hurry.”

So it’s been a burr under sportswriters’ saddles forever that, on Election Night, newspaper newsrooms order in pizza and soft drinks to sustain reporters through a long night of sifting great quantities of news to crank out readable copy. Followed by signs appearing the next day around the office acclaiming the “Great Job!” done during that once-a-year endeavor.

While those of us in the toy department would shake our heads and mutter, “Every night is Election Night in sports.” Minus the pizza.

At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, there were six of us from Newsday’s sports department—and one newsside fellow—wrapping up reports on the day’s activities when the aforementioned news reporter asked one late afternoon, around 6 p.m., where everyone was going for dinner. We had to inform him that the night was just beginning, with some five hours of deadline work still ahead. To be followed for the next couple of weeks by regular day-night doubleheaders. Casual dining was not part of the deal.

In retirement, I remain drawn to the drama of an occasional ball game on television. But, as contests progress late into the evening, with the outcome still in doubt, my first thought is not to wonder about the potential winner but to empathize with the on-site sportswriters and their building challenge, their adrenaline pumping while deadline—the enemy, the problem, the ax about to fall—looms.

Times baseball writer James Wagner, detailing the chaos of a last-minute order to cover a 2017 World Series game—his scramble to organize background information, adjust in real time to the game developments and shape his dispatch in clear, bright English—noted that, “While the most dramatic, mind-bending games are fun to watch on the couch or at the bar or in the stands, trying to capture the many late-game twists and turns as the final print-edition deadline nears can be nerve-racking.”

But, too, another form of great fun, with an enormous sense of satisfaction when it is done. Dave Anderson, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning sports columnist for the Times—after having again out-dueled deadline with yet another well-crafted story—always departed the scene with a wink and the perfect sign-off: “Fooled ‘em again.”

A day at the races

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

I am not a king, so I cannot claim horse racing is my sport. Nevertheless, on rare occasions I take myself to the track for an afternoon of hoping to channel Nostradamus — without the unreasonable expectation of leaving the place a hundredaire. (At the very best.)

The potential entertainment, alongside timid $2 wagers on a handful of races, includes the occasional surge of adrenaline as the steeds charge down the homestretch but mostly consists of idle chatter with a friend. Because cashing a bet really is nothing more than a magnificent coincidence.

An old horseplayer’s joke goes something like this: I bet on a nag at 10-to-1. He didn’t come in until quarter past two.

On a recent venture to play the ponies—though it always feels like they are playing me—I joined former Newsday racing writer Ed McNamara, who has been to 116 tracks on four continents and fully understands the handicapping truths. Among those: Pursuing winners is a Captain Ahab kind of thing. There is no appeals court when you fail. You need not be in the desert to encounter a mirage.

Anyway, we patronized Aqueduct Racetrack, which is in Ozone Park adjacent to that parking lot known as the Belt Parkway. Not because the relatively shabby, vaguely ghostlike Aqueduct was a first choice, but because of a temporary construction-related closure at Belmont Park, the far more pleasantly rustic layout on the Queens-Nassau line.

Weirdly, the New York Racing Association had labeled its fall meeting “Belmont Park at the Big A,” a geographical misnomer something like marketing the local NFL team as “the New York Giants of East Rutherford, New Jersey.”

The Aqueduct crowd, actually just a sparse assembly, was overwhelmingly male, of the older variety, several chewing on unlit cigars, mostly positioning themselves in the immediate vicinity of the lobby’s betting terminals. Outside, on a lovely, clear autumn day, while jets lazily ascended from nearby Kennedy Airport, the seats were virtually empty.

The day’s adventure began by purchasing a $20 voucher at an impersonal touch-screen terminal, since there was no evidence of the betting windows where human beings used to take one’s cash. Simple enough, but just two races into my attempts at clairvoyance, I failed to retrieve my voucher with its remaining worth of $16.

At that point, I had lost one $2 gamble, then won $6.40 off a second $2 try, which briefly had me feeling like Jesse James. Until I realized, too late, that the aforementioned $16 was gone without the fun of investing it in further efforts to pin the tail on a donkey.

So, I bought another $10 voucher.

I had approached the day’s challenge scientifically, arriving with my wife’s choices culled from morning entry lists and based, she said, on those horses’ names that best telegraphed “attitude”: Arrogant Lady, Arctic Arrogance, Alpine Queen and Shortsinthewinter.

My own criterion was the highly sophisticated technique of playing hunches. Java Buzz in the second race (he was my one winner, a figurative caffeine jolt that quickly dissipated), Prairie Fire in the fourth, Wanna Winna in the fifth, Fouette in the sixth. Should I have considered the horses’ past performances? Interpreted their post positions as lucky numbers? Maybe zeroed in on those being ridden by prominent jockeys?

“It’s a horse race,” Ed counseled. “Not a jockey race.”

The day’s consequences: Arrogant Lady led until the final 200 yards but finished second. Arctic Arrogance led until the final 150 yards but faded to second. Alpine Queen came in fourth. Prairie Fire flamed out, stumbling from the gate and immediately giving up the chase. Wanna Winna was no winna; sixth. Fouette lumbered home fourth. Shortsinthewinter, who went off at 57-to-1 odds, would have paid $114 if he had won. Alas, he was eighth, frozen out in a field of 10.

You see the pattern. The whole exercise was something like climbing Mount Everest without Sherpa guides, hand holds or ropes. Ed and I, our good visit done, quit before the last couple of races, playing the odds of beating the traffic home on the Belt. Lost that one, too.

Won the big game but lost their poise

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At first, the headline in Slate seemed about right: “Tennessee Over Alabama Is Why God Invented College Football.” A dramatic midseason passion play between unbeaten longtime rivals, decided by the absurdly over-the-top score of 52-49 amid wild last-minute fluctuations, the show—especially the ending—was worth an exuberant yahoo!

First of all, Alabama—arrogant, insatiable Alabama, which has played in six of the last seven national championship games, winning three—had lost, a result that certainly delighted a major portion of college football followers. More delicious to the Tennessee crowd, in excess of 100,000 people, was that the home team had ended a 15-year losing streak against much-despised Alabama.

Slate emphasized the significance of the Tennessee upset by declaring that validation in college football comes “from two things: Beating the team you hate the most, and having the time of your life with you friends. That’s what Tennessee provided.”

Except. When it was over, Tennessee students and fans stormed the field, ripped down the goalposts and, overpowering security guards and police, dumped pieces of the posts into the Tennessee River behind the stadium. During the chaos, a county sheriff’s officer was sent to the hospital after being struck in the head by a bottle, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel, which listed dozens of arrests for public intoxication and assault.

David Ubben, writing for The Athletic, chronicled the post-game madness in a lengthy piece that was thoroughly reported—but somehow came to the conclusion that the delinquents’ destructive rumble was “a little piece of heaven,” just an exuberant collecting of big-win souvenirs.

“For at least a few minutes,” Ubben wrote, “traffic laws didn’t exist and vandals were given clemency. All is forgiven on a night like this. And the police can’t hand out 500 jaywalking tickets.”

The Southeastern Conference could—and did—levy a $100,000 fine against the university for the fans’ rampage, yet The Athletic, in a follow-up post, posited that “the fine is completely worth the enthusiastic mayhem of Saturday in Knoxville.”

University president Randy Boyd didn’t exactly reveal himself to be a model of rectitude, either. Victory cigar in hand, Boyd, when asked how much the haywire celebration might cost his school, glibly assured that “it doesn’t matter. We can do this every year.” Sports Illustrated joined the endorsement of hooliganism by calling Boyd’s response “appropriate.”

So, OK: Herewith the fuddy-duddy reaction to Tennessee fans’ neanderthal behavior, starting with how it utterly perverted the definition of poise—”keeping one’s head while all those around you are losing theirs.”

That Tennessee’s gridders had at last knocked off mighty Alabama after 15 consecutive losses—on national television, with possible national-title consequences and maximum style points—was accurately described by Slate as “an exorcism,” and by winning coach Josh Heupel as “college football at its best.” The game itself was undeniably grand theatre, with an on-the-edge-of-your-seat finish. Enormously satisfying for all but Alabama rooters.

But so many in the Tennessee mob lost their moorings in the wake of the winning field goal. It was a form of tribal joy gone wrong, using the occasion of a significant victory as justification for wreaking havoc (and endangering people). It has happened too often in cities whose teams have won the World Series, the Super Bowl or the NBA title, and on campuses when “having the time of your life with your friends” metastasizes into anarchy.

A few years ago, Sports Illustrated cited Tennessee’s Neyland Stadium, the campus and surrounding Knoxville area for providing the best college football weekend experience in the nation.

After the Tennessee-Alabama game, though, you can have that experience.

Drilling down on guilt

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

I wear a 7½ shoe. No Sasquatch here. Still, the recent passage of significant climate-change legislation has me pondering the size of my carbon footprint.

The pandemic’s forced reduction of my automobile use the past two years has been a boon to a clearer conscience regarding any role I might have played in global warming. And no fairytale: I have a gas sipper — 38 to 48 miles to the gallon.

But it is past transgressions I’m lately thinking about. My half century as a journalist involved a fair amount of air travel — not helpful to a warming planet — and there is the matter of acknowledging that the fossil-fuel industry was central in setting me up for a comfortable life. My father was a midlevel executive for Humble Oil Co. (now ExxonMobil) which, when I was growing up, was the nation’s largest producer of petroleum.

Also, my three high school summers working in the oil fields basically paid my way through college. At $1.25 an hour for a 60-hour work week, that amounted to $300 a month. A princely sum for a teenage lad at the time.

Blood money? Of course, that was in the ’50s and ’60s, and global warming hardly was on anyone’s radar. So, am I off the hook? Is there a statute of limitations on potential guilt with respect to this sort of thing?

Upon us now is a cultural conundrum tied to the direct relationship between burning fossil fuels and greenhouse gases: How to kick the oil habit and transition to other energy sources without devastating vast portions of the economy and muddling individual futures.

I was reading recently about this puzzle in my long-ago homesteads. Kern County, in California’s San Joaquin Valley, is resisting state drilling restrictions because Kern’s oil and gas money is so embedded in local budgets, funding everything from elementary schools to firefighting to libraries to mosquito control. Bakersfield, the Kern County seat and my family’s home in the mid-1950s, when my father was superintendent in charge of the local oil field, has the oil business to blame for becoming America’s most polluted city.

Then there is Hobbs, New Mexico, site of my youthful oil-field roustabout gig. In the early ’60s, my father was transferred to Hobbs, just across the Texas border in the Permian Basin, which is home to almost 40% of the nation’s active drilling rigs and recently was declared by the Environmental Protection Agency to be on the verge of “nonattainment” status for acceptable air quality.

The sugar daddy of my youth, ExxonMobil, has continued to dramatically increase oil and gas production there — by 70% between 2019 and 2021, according to the company’s most recent figures. In the Permian Basin, there are more pumpjacks — sort of the unofficial state critter — than there are Friday night football lights.

Not such a healthy situation.

Meanwhile, though, in New Mexico oil has bankrolled free colleges for residents and expanded postpartum medical care up to a year for new mothers. And I considered my father’s vocation to have been a noble one, and labor under the assumption that, in the 21st century, he likely would have helped the company move to cleaner energy.

Having come through the Depression and the war, he was conditioned toward frugality. Turn out the lights when you’re not in the room. Don’t throw out that bar of soap until it literally disappears. Take shorter showers. Wear another layer of clothes if you’re cold.

He kept the family car for 10 years. For my high school transportation, while so many classmates were tooling around in automobiles, I was gifted a hand-me-down Cushman motor scooter. Nine horsepower. My rare appearances at the local service station resulted in a 25-cent fill-up and the attendant’s wise-guy offer to include a “cough in the tires.” Since then, every car I’ve owned maxed out at four cylinders with standard transmission. All trips from the Long Island suburbs into Gotham involve public transportation.

Should I feel remorse now that I can’t deny an awareness of my long-ago part in depleting the ozone layer? No John Muir here. But hindsight is an exact science. And since I’m a believer in science, I shall endeavor to put my foot down against societal and individual objections to being greener.

A desirable job?

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A 73-year-old man becomes King of England and the occasion prompts a contemporary—me—to wonder what might be included in having such a global rank. Big scissors for ribbon-cutting ceremonies? That cool sword for knighting people? All the fish and chips you can eat?

There may not be a more recognizable office on earth. The British monarchy traces back 1,100 years and technically establishes the king as ruler over the United Kingdom and 14 other Commonwealth realms. He’s still recognized as the head of state in Canada, Australia, Jamaica, New Zealand, Belize, the Solomon Islands and on and on. Real clout, culturally if not politically.

If I were now King, rather than that fellow Chuck the Third, I could get my photo on the currency in multiple nations and have my portrait hung on the wall in pubs from Liverpool to Oxford. I could live in several castles and palaces, play polo, regularly wave to the peasants from balconies. On special occasions, I could wear that big hat with 2,868 diamonds, 17 sapphires, 11 emeralds, 269 pearls and four rubies. (Aided by a strong neck brace, no doubt.)

Silly to consider such a possibility, no? In the line of succession, I suspect I would come in much closer to Adam and Eve than the several who had been waiting in line for 70 years before Elizabeth died on Sept. 8. The odds are better for me to become Burger King. Or Old King Cole. Or King Kong.

Yet I am not completely out of touch with Britain’s royal matters, having been to the UK several times. Once shopped with my wife at Harrods (as the Queen had done years ago). Got in the door at Windsor Castle and Kensington Palace (as a tourist). Dipped into the Wales countryside long ago (where I briefly, unthinkingly, drove on the wrong side of road). Recently spent time in Scotland, my son-in-law’s birthplace, not too far from Balmoral Castle. Witnessed the changing of the guard inside the gates at Buckingham Palace (thanks to my daughter, who now lives in London and whose friend’s husband had a connection).

In 1986, on assignment to cover Wimbledon tennis for Newsday, I was among the press contingent seated about 25 feet from the Royal Box, where sat Princess Di. (Like any lowly commoner, I took a snapshot.)

I like soccer. I watch British police procedurals (Vera. Midsomer Murders, Endeavour, Grantchester, Father Brown, Bletchley Circle.) I have walked the zebra pedestrian crossing outside the Beatles’ Abbey Road studio.

OK. Back to the idea of being king, and what it means to theoretically rule over a world of vassals. First, a joke:

Colleagues of a particularly talented court jester, intent on getting that jester in deep trouble with the all-powerful sovereign, challenged him thusly: “You say you are capable of making a pun about any subject? Well, then, make a pun about the king.”

Whereupon the jester slyly pronounced, “The king is not a subject.”

These days, though, the king is a topic of conversation. Should he, and the British monarchy which has reigned over more territories and people than any other in history, continue to exist? What about imperial Britain’s violent narrative of colonialism and slavery?

Beyond those significant headaches, is being a member of the royal family worth the treatment it gets from the British tabloids? Charles, as Prince of Wales, was a frequent target, at turns cast as a fuddy duddy and a cheating husband during his marriage to Diana. Harry and Meghan haven’t cut him any slack in the ravenous media, either.

To be king promises to be subjected to double entendre references about “sitting on the throne,” to be reminded how unnecessary the monarchy has become to much of the younger generation, to hear how the royal family’s lavish lifestyle is financed by millions in public taxes. What, of substance, do they do with the dough?

Also, weren’t Shakespeare’s tragedies routinely about kings and would-be kings? I’ll abdicate in advance. Banquo’s ghost may still be out there.

Never saw him sweat

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In tennis, people retire—at all ages and sometimes more than once. Not the kind of retirement Roger Federer just announced, in which the 20-time major tournament champion will hang up his sneakers and find other things to do. Not what Serena Williams described as her “evolving away” from competition.

No. In tennis, “retire” is the verb the sport uses to describe a player quitting mid-match, usually because of injury or illness. And here’s the irony to Federer’s definitive farewell to competition at 41. He never, in 1,526 singles and 223 doubles matches over 24 years as a pro, left a match prematurely. Though back troubles and several knee surgeries messed with his playing schedule and kept him away from the tour most of the last two years, once he began a match, he never left until it was over.

In a big way, that sums up Federer’ tennis presence. His persistence. His ability to come up with solutions, on the fly, while appearing dispassionate. His serene air of effortlessness. His intuitive feel for the game.

All the inevitable statistical comparisons now being aired of Federer’s place in history alongside his great rivals Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic aren’t really the point. (Nadal and Djokovic, by the way, did retire from matches multiple times.) Numbers—Grand Slam titles, winning percentages, time spent ranked No. 1—are significant, grist for lively sports-talk arguments, but they don’t convey a sense of what it was like to witness Federer in action.

The late novelist David Foster Wallace years ago wrote of hearing a press-bus driver, during the Wimbledon championships, describe watching Federer play tennis as a “bloody near-religious experience.”

Wallace agreed wholeheartedly. “Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments,” Wallace wrote. “These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re OK.”

In 2008, when Federer was in the midst of his most devastating run, reaching 22 of 27 major-tournament finals—and winning 16 of them—an 18-year-old American named Devin Britton, in Britton’s first and only Grand Slam tournament match, drew Federer in the first round of the U.S. Open. After the match, which Federer won handily, Britton related that Federer’s forehand “is so pretty” that Britton, fully aware of the danger to him, purposely hit to that forehand at times—“just to watch.”

At the 2007 U.S. Open, when Federer broke out a pseudo-tuxedo look for night matches—all black, with a silvery stripe down the shorts—it seemed to emphasize how his game was worthy of top hat and tails. Serve-and-volley gone to verve-and-volley.

He seemed to glide around the court, noiselessly in an age of grunting workers, moving his opponent from side to side, back and forth—almost casually—adding spin, subtracting pace. He played without histrionics, without bickering over calls or doing touchdown dances or constantly going to the towel.

For so long, playing Federer could be like shooting rubber bands at Superman. His power and control were the kind of things that could make opponents sleep with the lights on. He was the Swiss army knife of tennis, taking apart opponents as if using a blade, screwdriver, toothpick, tweezer and can opener.

Eight-time major-tournament champion Andre Agassi, whose career was winding down as Federer’s long rule peaked, once compared Federer to Pete Sampras—whose previous record of 14 Slam titles Federer surpassed when Federer was 28:

“You play a bad match against Pete, you lose, 6-4, 7-5,” Agassi said. “You play a good match against Pete, you lose, 6-4, 7-5. You play a good match against Federer, you lose 6-4, 7-5. You play a bad match against Federer, you lose, 1 and 1.”

The only incongruous reaction to Federer, which popped up around 2005, before Nadal and Djokovic began to put the slightest dent in Federer’s reign, was that Federer’s stylish supremacy somehow was bad for tennis.

Federer didn’t always win, of course. Both Nadal and Djokovic wound up having winning records in head-to-head matches against Federer. But Federer’s tennis never ceased to be terrific theatre. Seventeen years into his career, he conjured an aggressive, innovative shot—a charging, short-hop return against second serves. A Geronimo! leap that logically would be service-return suicide, but which occasionally buoyed him in dire situations. The shot was dubbed SABR—Sneak Attack By Roger. More legerdemain from the game’s wizard.

But about retirement, the end-of-career sort. Federer started to hear questions about that more than a decade ago, with still multiple major-tournament titles in his future. Around 2018, a tennis website posted an April Fool’s joke “announcing” Federer’s retirement. “No plans to retire,” he assured in response. “Don’t even use that word.”

He always said he had too much enjoyment for every aspect of his job. The matches. The training. The travel. Everything about his lifestyle. But, as always happens in such occupations, age and diminished physical skills eventually win out. So he will retire. For him, another first.

Don’t encourage them

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Midway through the U.S. Open, the level of tennis was brilliant, at turns violent and clever as Nick Kyrgios and Daniil Medvedev battled, hammer and tongs, in their fourth-round U.S. Open match. They needed 24 points just to get through an intense first-set tiebreaker. Riveting theater.

The question was whether anyone among the sellout crowd, going bonkers in Arthur Ashe Stadium, experienced any pause in rooting for either player. Dazzling athleticism aside, Kyrgios, a 27-year-old Australian, once again was reinforcing his reputation as the sport’s premier miscreant—cursing, hurling his racket, snarling at the chair umpire and even his own support team. And Medvedev, 26, was borderline persona non grata, competing unaffiliated because of tennis officials’ decision that, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, no Russian could compete under his national flag.

Several Ukrainian players have argued that Medvedev and other Russian and Belarussian opponents should have been banned altogether—as they were at this year’s Wimbledon—though it certainly could be argued that Medvedev can’t be held personally responsible for the murderous policies of Vladimir Putin.

Medvedev, last year’s Open champion, did make a poor early impression on Open crowds in 2019 by snatching a towel from a ballboy, displaying a middle finger in response to fans’ booing and being fined for verbal and equipment abuse. At the time, he confessed to having decided long ago to break the occasional racket because he believed spectators “think it’s cool.”

Amid the tumult this time, though, it was Kyrgios who was in full-scoundrel mode, as is his habit. In his brief professional career, he has been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars—for racket abuse, audible obscenities, disrespect of chair umpires, tanking matches, sniping at ballpersons, throwing a chair on court, declaring the men’s tour officials to be corrupt, spitting at a fan. (Off court, he also has been charged with assault of a former girlfriend.)

During a changeover at a match seven years ago, Kyrgios casually informed his opponent (“Sorry to tell you that, mate”) that another player was having sex with that opponent’s romantic partner. The comment was picked up by the on-court microphone.

Greece’s Stephanos Tsitsipas, whom Kyrgios taunted during their match at this year’s Wimbledon, has called Kyrgios’ game “an incessant act of bullying his opponent.” Former Australian star Pat Cash has accused Kyrgios of “cheating, manipulation and abuse.” John McEnroe, long ago christened “Super brat” by British tabloids for his irascible tirades in the 1970s and ‘80s, recently was quoted by The Guardian, “Whenever I watch Kyrgios play and do some stunts, I think, ‘Did I, too? Was I that bad?’”

So, Kyrgios vs. Medvedev: Two guys difficult to root for? Dutch philosophy professor Alfred Archer, in his 2021 academic paper “Fans, Crimes and Misdemeanors,” considered whether it is “permissible to be a fan of an artist or a sports team that has behaved immorally.” Archer argued that there are three ethical reasons to abandon such fandom—because fans’ backing supports the bad behavior, results in a widespread failure to perceive the star’s faults and protects the interests of the star.

But there long has been a rationalization that, in an individual sport such as tennis, spectators yearn for “showmanship” and therefore accept—even are drawn to—outrageous deeds as part of the show. (Though Serena Williams was guilty of a handful of crude eruptions and racket mistreatment during her long career, this historically has been a male issue.)

McEnroe, still a popular figure 30 years after his competitive retirement, was a crazed perfectionist who acted out his frustrations. He and another bellicose past champion, Jimmy Connors—who carried a large chip on his shoulder against a persecuting world—were widely embraced for their “personality.”

And the U.S. Open, which introduced night matches to the major-tournament rotation in 1975, long ago created a howling-at-the-moon chaos that raises the temperature of both fans and players. It was under the lights that the spectators, Medvedev and (especially) Kyrgios threw all restraint to the winds this week.

Kyrgios won, then faced another Russian, Karen Khachanov, in a lower-temperature quarterfinal. Who to root for there? Kyrgios lost that one, but not before flinging three more rackets, slapping a TV camera with his hand and throwing a drink.

Cheers?

Life’s whodunnit

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

Getting old is fine. But personal experience indicates that the aging process does not necessarily guarantee the acquisition of wisdom. It certainly hasn’t solved a number of life’s mysteries for me. Such as: Precisely how does television function, transporting specific video and audio—live and in color—from, say, Jeopardy!’s Alex Trebek Stage at Sony Pictures Studios to the little screen in my den?

A couple of decades of formal schooling, a half-century of gainful employment, endless exposure to brilliant minds and galloping technology, and yet so much remains a puzzle. What exactly transpires with internal combustion? Might the egg in fact have come before the chicken? Who’s on first?

It has become clearer to me over time that existence on this planet is one extended whodunnit, with not nearly enough helpful clues. And hardly any answers. Just how do you hit a round ball with a round bat squarely? Why do we dream? How come pi isn’t a rational number? What’s with cats and cardboard boxes?

Obviously, there are people with different interests and varied talents who can figure out some of these things. My brother has particular engineering insight, is great with his hands, can fix about anything. When I was facing surgery for a heart valve replacement, I noted that he had experience doing valve jobs.

“Not,” he said, “while the engine is running.”

So there you go. Even he didn’t have every solution. Things can be Googled, but there are limits to the insights provided there. Photography baffles me. Even more so in the digital age. The fact that I can handle a camera reasonably well does not prove that I comprehend the first thing about pixels, which are no more real to me than cheerful mischievous sprites.

The birds and the bees. Neither my parents nor anyone else has been able to explain to me how they stay airborne, using entirely different physical equipment.

More enigmas: The James Web Space Telescope’s ability to display light from a distant galaxy that is 13.1 billions of years old. Bitcoin. Artificial intelligence (something like artificial turf?). Trigonometry. Vaccines. WiFi. (“Based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards”? What!?) Dolly the Sheep. Chess.

Let me ask you something, and I’d like an honest answer: Do you understand baseball’s infield fly rule?

Here I am, surrounded by gizmos with inner workings that are inexplicable. Laptop. Wall clock. Microwave oven. Modems and routers. Telephone. GPS. Wireless objects that nevertheless have wires. Hearing aids. Spectacles.

My lifelong circadian habit of reading the daily newspaper has dispelled some degree of ignorance; there’s basic information to be had there. Still, as a career journalist with enormous respect for my fellow ink-stained wretches, I am keenly aware of what I refer to as the dispiriting “third paragraph.” I submit that in any article, after the first couple of enlightening graphs reporting some marvelous discovery, scientific breakthrough or diplomatic agreement, there always seems to be that not-so-fast caution in the third paragraph. Which begins, “But critics say….”

You know how that goes. Even the most optimistic soul is left with significant gaps regarding the unraveling of society’s stubborn riddles. To keep peeling the hypothetical onion can regularly lead to a lachrymose state of mind—and to the sense of knowing less and less about more and more until you don’t know anything at all.

To my considerable benefit, my wife can—and does—fill in a lot of blanks. Financial know-how. A grandchild’s needs and demands. Scheduling issues. As we barrel through the 21st Century, her awareness of the latest boldface names, movie plots, musical genres, best-selling books and so on is crucial. (I know: Keep up.)

Meanwhile, scratching of this head goes on.

He used his time well

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If you can’t join ‘em, beat ‘em. At least that’s how things regularly worked with Pete Carril’s basketball tactics. Coaching at one of the nation’s elite universities, where athletic scholarships were banned and only rich nerds could get in the door, Carril eschewed the folly of mimicking the standard high-flying, muscular NBA blueprint. He instead trained his players to out-think their taller, faster, stronger and more gifted opponents; to be deliberate, exacting, patient.

And in 29 years at Princeton University, Carril, who died this week at 92, experienced only one losing season.

“My strategies,” he said, “are forced on me by the things my players can’t do.”

He was known for his curmudgeonly mien, which mostly was a cover for sly humor. No airs. And he wasn’t so much a heretic as an improviser, making do with the materials at hand. No other men’s basketball coach won 500 games without having the use of athletic scholarships. He’s in the sport’s Hall of Fame.

In many ways, he wasn’t a logical fit. He was not a Princeton man himself, having played college ball (small-school All-American) at Lafayette, and got his graduate degree at Lehigh. Whatever truth there is to the Princeton cliché of a haughty, moneyed lot, Carril appeared in his small office, the one time I had a long conversation with him, his hair unkempt and wearing a golf shirt that appeared to have coffee stains and crumbs on it.

Conditioning his players to stifle the urge to shoot was not merely a desperate stalling device. He wasn’t simply playing keep-away to minimize the opponent’s number of shots and rebounds. Rather, the point was to run through his complete repertoire of offensive patterns, without seriously considering a shot, so that the other team was forced to work on defense longer than it was accustomed. Over and over, it was a test to see how long before the other team lost interest or got lazy.

When, halfway through his career, Carril was faced with the 1985 NCAA imposition of a shot clock—45 seconds to hoist an attempt—the pervasive theory was that Princeton would lose the one edge it had. He considered the rule one more step toward “the disappearance of the cerebral or mental element” of the game.

Yet the shot clock didn’t stop Carril from having Princeton continue to use its time wisely. Exploring and feinting until the most makeable shot presented itself. And in the 1989 NCAA tournament, when his 16th-seeded lads came within one point of shocking top-ranked Georgetown, Sports Illustrated called it “The Game That Saved March Madness” because it provided compelling drama when a dull foregone conclusion had been assumed.

And seven years later, perennial underdog Princeton’s two-point tournament victory over defending national champion UCLA was a delightful shocker to any fan this side of UCLA, summed up by the Daily Princetonian headline: “David 43, Goliath 41.” That was another triumph of time management, of movement without the ball, spacing, passing, misdirection, teamwork. Riveting basketball. Not just following the fashionable trend.

Carril understood the realities—that a lesser team is handicapped by a being in a compulsory hurry, because the team that can run, jump and shoot will spend almost all of its time running, jumping and shooting. So Carril’s Princeton offense—in the face of opposing fans chanting “Boring! Boring!”—in fact provided grand entertainment by bamboozling and discombobulating superior foes.

“I’m not against the 45-second clock,” Carril said when the rule was introduced. “What I’m trying to protect is whatever mentality is left in the game. To be permitted to probe, to look around, to set up, to use your head a little bit. When you put a time factor of, say, 24 seconds, on it [as the NBA had done in 1954], then there’s such a thing as eliminating strategy. Or, maybe ‘eliminating’ isn’t the right word. ‘Reducing.’ Reducing the styles, not only within one game itself, but in making each game different from the next.”

It turns out that Carril’s high school coach in Bethlehem, Pa., believed the best approach was to have a team attempt 100 shots per game, minimum, so Carril had experienced a helter-skelter style. The other dichotomy in his biography was that, while Carril preached at Princeton that “passing is a lost art,” a fellow coach, Paul Westhead, couldn’t resist revealing how, in pickup games with colleagues, “all [Carril] did was shoot 20-foot set shots. He never, never gave up the ball.”

Bottom line: Whatever it took.

Goodbye to all that

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Serena Williams once was asked if there was any player out there whom she feared.

“Yeh,” she said, “Roger Federer.”

We are talking about a tennis superpower here. Gifted, fiery, relentless and justly self-confident. For years—and especially now with Williams’ stated intention of riding off into the sunset after this month’s U.S. Open—the question (albeit hypothetical) regards Williams’ possible status as the greatest tennis player in history. Without necessarily including the “female” qualifier.

It is a sports cliché to traffic in such definitive statements, a fool’s errand to compare eras, especially in what might be the sport most transformed over the decades because of advanced off-court training and revolutionary equipment. (Baseball, for instance, has stuck with wooden bats. Not tennis.)

So it’s all conjecture. But Williams’ 23 titles in Grand Slam events are more than any male player can claim. Rafael Nadal has 22, Novak Djokovic 21, Federer 20. And while the record is 24 by Australian Margaret Court, that total includes 11 wins at Court’s home Slam during a time when top American and European players regularly skipped the grueling trip to Melbourne.

If Williams, who will turn 41 weeks after this year’s Open commences, somehow were to conjure a 24th trophy, she would become the oldest—male or female—ever to win a major title. (Aussie Ken Rosewall, who also benefitted from players’ limited participation at his nation’s Slam, was 37 when he won the last of his 12 major championships in 1972.)

But here’s the deal with Williams: Beyond the current discussion of the gender handicap, her career having been interrupted by pregnancy, and aside from the reality that she hasn’t captured a major since 2017 while the wave of younger talent continues to storm the ramparts, there were roughly two solid decades when it was difficult to fathom how anyone besides Williams ever prevailed in a women’s major.

She has said that she probably should have 30 Slam titles by now and the record bears her out. Since her first Slam appearance 24 years ago, she has missed 18 major tournaments because of various injuries and health issues. She won one Australian Open while some 20 pounds overweight, another while pregnant. Twice in her career, she completed what she coined the “Serena Slam”—winning all four majors in succession—just not in a calendar year.

She has said that “I haven’t lost many matches where the player was playing unbelievably good. Usually, when I lose, it’s because I’m playing unbelievable bad.” A bit self-serving, but true.

The surgical tennis-otomies Williams repeatedly performed on opponents in the biggest matches were so skillfully precise that spectators’ focus typically fell almost entirely on her. On her powerful serve, her paint-the-line backhand, her cracking crosscourt forehand.

Though primarily a baseliner, she always played territorially, moving a step or two into the court as the rallies went on, ready to pounce. When she lost a point, it typically was a product of her aggressively missing wide or long. So often, the opponent was just…there.

It was Williams’ own occasionally uncontrolled passion that cost her at times: Her profane outburst, offering to shove the ball down a diminutive lineswoman’s throat over a foot-fault call, cost her a championship match point in the 2009 Open against Kim Clijsters; her premature celebratory shout in the 2011 Open final against Samantha Stosur resulted in the loss of a crucial game point; her rant against the chair umpire over a penalty point for illegal coaching led to her 2019 Open loss to Naomi Osaka.

In terms of dominating her peers, Williams’ consecutive weeks atop the women’s rankings is a record 186 (equaling Steffi Graf’s previous total). OK, Federer was the No. 1 male for 237 straight weeks. Maybe someone for Williams to fear.

She acknowledged a diminished interest in the tour beyond the majors, passing on plenty of lesser events, and the result is that others have won far more career titles than Williams’ 73—Martina Navratilova with 167, Chris Evert with 154, Graf with 107. But, as the credits roll on the Williams tennis story, it seems appropriate to recall a quote by Larry Scott when he was CEO of the Women’s Tennis Association earlier in the 2000s: “Being a champion is one thing. But being a superstar is another.”