He was the Celtics’ big break

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Beyond basketball, Bill Russell took no guff from racists in and out of his sport and, it has been reasonably argued, sent the NBA on its way to becoming the most socially conscious of any major North American men’s pro league. He was the NBA’s first Black Hall of Fame player, the first Black head coach in a major American sports league, outspoken against the Vietnam War and segregation in Boston schools. Quite the legacy for Russell, who died last week at 88.

But strictly in terms of hoops, think of this: What defined the Boston Celtics during their dominance in the 1950s and ‘60s was their devastating fast break, and that fast break was the direct result of Russell’s pioneering work as a shot-blocker and rebounder.

Nobody had combined the instant board control and trigger-quick outlet pass before Russell—levitating for a rebound, revolving in midair as he fed the nifty Bob Cousy, wheeling into the middle of Boston’s famous parquet floor on the dribble, whipping a pass (sometimes behind the back, sometimes between the legs, off the ear) to Tom Sanders knifing toward the basket for a layup, or Tommy Heinsohn waiting in the corner for a jumper. Or Bill Sharman or Frank Ramsey motoring into the open. Or Russell himself arriving alongside the cavalry charge downcourt.

Before Russell joined the Celtics out of the University of San Francisco in 1956, the Celtics “could run like hell and pass like hell and shoot like hell,” Cousy, the team’s perennial all-star, told me in a long-ago interview. “But we couldn’t control the boards. Not until we got Russ.”

What Russell did for the fast break in basketball was what Babe Ruth had done for the home run in baseball. With the fast break, the Celtics took basketball from subdued strings to electric guitars—from an exhibition of mostly flatfooting set-shooting and orthodox two-handed passing—to an alluring, funneling, eddying, swirling-whirling-twisting-curling vision.

The fast break was rock ‘n’ roll, a cutting-edge response to the introduction of the NBA’s 24-second shot clock in 1954. Up tempo. The band on the run.

In his 1980 book (with Taylor Branch), “Second Wind: Memoirs of an Opinionated Man,” Russell gushed about the fast break: “The ball flies between three offensive players at full speed—Zip! Zip! Zip!—and lastly to the unexpected man cutting under the basket at a rakish angle who goes up and banks the ball off the glass in a layup….All this within two seconds….”

He cited the “collective beauty” of the play—an ensemble production that further illustrated Russell’s functioning as the ultimate team player.

In an appreciation on fivethirtyeight.com, Santul Nerkar and Neil Paine argued against applying “our modern, metrics-obsessed era of NBA analysis” to Russell. He averaged a relatively humble 15.1 points per game and the league had not gotten around to an official count of blocked shots—Russell’s revelatory contribution—until after he retired.

“How exactly,” Nerkar and Paine asked, “would you even measure Russell’s preternatural ability to strategically block shots so they stayed inbounds, triggering a fast break for his teammates to turn into easy points….?” Unlike the typical shot-blocker of the 21st Century, prone to spectacularly swatting the ball into the stands to emphasize personal triumph, Russell ‘s emphasis was on keeping plays alive for his teammates to immediately transition from defense to offense.

Bottom line: Russell was the center of gravity for a constant run of championship teams—twice in college, once at the Olympics, a staggering 11 times (in 13 years) with the Celtics, who never had reached the NBA finals before him. “However great you think Bill Russell was,” Nerkar and Paine concluded, “he was probably greater.”

John Havlicek, a teammate later in Russell’s career, once told Sports Illustrated that Russell “was a fantastic athlete” who “could have been the decathlon champion. He could broad jump 24 feet. He did the hurdles in 13.4. [In college, Russell’s 6-9 ½ high jump tied Charlie Dumas, who in 1956 won Olympic gold in that event.] He just might be the fastest man on the Celtics.”

Russell was 6-10 but, unlike so many plodding big men of his time, was light on his feet—instinctive, quick and agile. His long-time coach, Red Auerbach, said Russell “destroyed” opponents, not only by blocking shots but establishing the mere threat of a defensive disruption.

Nerkar and Paine wrote, “In many ways, Russell created the NBA as we know it today.” In some ways, current NBAers still haven’t caught up.

This mate checks out

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OK. Chess joke:

I was playing chess with my friend and he said, “Let’s make this interesting.”

So we stopped playing chess.

Would Magnus Carlsen laugh at that one? At 31, the five-time world champion from Norway has announced that he won’t take part in next year’s championship match, though it likely would bring him a record-tying sixth title.

Interesting. The guy has been the world’s top-ranked player for a decade. He widely is considered the best player in history, his sport’s Michael Jordan. Yet he was quoted as being “not motivated to play another match….I don’t particularly like it….I don’t have any inclination to play.”

For those of us in the dark when it comes to chess, non-participation might be understandable. Chess generally is portrayed as an activity requiring deep intelligence, patience, concentration, a keen memory and analytical skills, so we dimmer bulbs take a pass. Or stick to checkers.

Nevertheless, as a career sports journalist intrigued by games and competition, it caught my attention to read accounts of Carlsen’s suddenly suspended dominance. And left me rummaging around for insight into how chess works and why Carlsen has been so dominant for the past decade—while I was paying no mind.

Carlsen has been referred to as “The Mozart of Chess,” capable of executing “beautiful, stunning moves,” of “slipping from the opponent’s grasp repeatedly,” with a style that is “bold, brave and brilliant.” He was 13 years old when he knocked off a former world champ, Anatoly Karpov, and first earned the title of grand master.

He now is a multimillionaire, mostly through sponsorships and business deals apart from chess. An NBA fan, he has advised Golden State’s Klay Thompson, made a cameo with Philadelphia 76ers president Daryl Morey, played chess against Bill Gates and been a guest on “The Colbert Report.” TIME magazine cited him among the 100 most influential people in 2013.

Anyway, I am the last person to analyze either Carlsen or the game he plays so well. First of all, I struggle with seeing the drama and strategic expertise while chess superstars such as Carlsen sit for hours, deathly still, bent over the playing surface, frowning slightly, a hand to the face, hair a bit unkempt, staring at little castles and horses and thimbles with crowns.

Maybe if there were BrainCams employed in televised chess coverage, affording a glimpse of the players’ cognitive wheels turning, lightbulbs suddenly flashing, adrenaline coursing—a look at the grey matter chaos along with the intelligent design being applied.

In the meantime, I have researched some rudimentary elements of chess, which leads to some allusions to more familiar sports. Take football, since chess has been described as representing the moves of military pieces, just as football loves to traffic in terms such as “bombs” and “blitzes” and “shotguns” and “winning in the trenches.”

Rooks line up on the edges, like cornerbacks. Bishops, like offensive guards, are inside the knights (tackles). Also, knights—which move in an L shape; two squares one direction, one square another direction—are aerial threats, able to jump over pieces. Kings aren’t much help offensively but can get in the other team’s way. Queens are the most powerful pieces on the board, able to move any number of squares, horizontally or diagonally.

It turns out—everybody knows this but me—that different pieces have different assignments, some able to move forward, some sideways, some diagonally, some one square at a time, some as many squares as desired.

Play-by-play? Be5 (bishop moves to the e5 position on the board). Nf3 (knight to f3). Have I got those right?

The action—if that’s the right word—is carefully considered and therefore strikes an outsider as plodding at best.

OK. Chess joke for those of us who wouldn’t know a pawn from the Nimzo Indian Defence:

I defeated a chess grand master in three moves.

I stood up, picked up a chair and hit him with it.

If the shoe fits….

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When the running boom hit in the early Seventies and I joined that program already in progress, I did what any greenhorn follower of a trend would do. I sought out the brand of running shoes that a real runner, Olympic marathon champion Frank Shorter, was wearing then.

The shoes were Tigers, produced by the Japanese sports company Onitsuka Tiger, founded in 1949. The company is still around, still cranking out shoes, but known since 1977 as Asics. At the time, when the bigger names in athletic footwear were adidas and Puma, Tigers could be found at such locales as the running hotbed of Eugene, Ore., widely distributed at area track meets from the automobile of a former University of Oregon runner named Phil Knight.

That was shortly after Knight and his college coach, Bill Bowerman, had started a franchise known as Blue Ribbon Sports. And after Bowerman, who revolutionized running shoes by using his wife’s waffle iron to produce a more durable, cushioned rubber sole, Blue Ribbon Sports evolved into Nike.

Pretty soon I had a pair of those Waffle trainers. And still do as Nike celebrates its 50th anniversary. (The fact that two-time gold medalist Abebe Bikila had won the 1960 Olympic marathon running barefoot never entered into my decision on how to shod my twinkletoes.)

In a way, it’s a bit of an embarrassment to be investing all these years in a hip product of a multinational corporation that now has an annual revenue of roughly $40 billion. Why contribute to the rich getting richer? Nike long ago settled into a devour-and-conquer mode, the largest supplier of athletic shoes and apparel as well as a major manufacturer of sports equipment; its Swoosh logo is as ubiquitous as Facebook.

According to the New York Times, the Nike behemoth has become “part of the root system that underlies the culture. And not just the sneaker culture….It is part of the movies we watch, the songs we hear, the museums we frequent, the business we do; part of how we think about who we are and how we got here.”

Whoa. Way beyond shoes, beyond a brand, Nike has pulled off the trick of dictating fashion, that dichotomy in which individuality supposedly is about nonconformity—yet being “in style” promotes a sort of standard dress code that, by definition, negates self-expression.

Anybody here old enough to remember the heyday of Chuck Taylor basketball sneakers—the low-cut black beauties that were all the rage in the late 1950s when I was in eighth grade? Logically, a basketball shoe without high-ankle support doesn’t make a lot of sense, but “everybody” wanted to play in low-cut Chuck Taylors then. To proclaim our uniqueness, you see.

In the early days of the running boom, which basically coincided with the Nike invasion, I was covering the Boston Marathon and, during a pre-event gathering, a handful of the race favorites could easily be distinguished from the hoi-polloi—the thousands of everyday joggers—by the top contenders’ non-competitive attire. The most accomplished athletes were dressed in street clothes; the great crowds hopeful of similar legitimacy were styling in sweatsuits and running shoes.

“You can tell the real runners,” said Nina Kuscsik, Boston’s first official women’s champion in 1972, “because they aren’t wearing running shoes.” No need for them to be bragging from soapboxes.

But Nike’s decision-makers realized long ago that they “weren’t just selling sneakers,” as Phil Knight once said;  that the company was moving into every aspect of the culture. The company cozied up to sports superstars—most notably Michael Jordan—and to celebrities, playing on a Be Like Mike urge, that universal longing to express one’s singularity by imitating the in-crowd.

Nike outlets—yes, I still patronize them—are peopled by customers who clearly are not athletes, seeking rather to present the right “look.” I happen to avoid wearing Nikes when in civilian clothes and certainly am not interested in being a billboard for the company (as if it needed me). But, honestly, having dabbled in other running shoe brands years ago, I quickly found Nikes to be the most efficient and comfortable. So that I am more a problem than a solution regarding such an almighty juggernaut.

Anyway, there never was a chance that a specific type of shoe could turn me into Frank Shorter.

Homing in?

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Here come the Judge.

Time to break out that old catchphrase—grammatically iffy—that was all the rage in the Sixties, popularized by the TV sketch comedy “Laugh-In.” It’s thoroughly applicable now that Yankee outfielder Aaron Judge, just short of baseball season’s halfway mark, is on pace to out-do Roger Maris’ 61 homers in 1961.

Hear ye, hear ye.

Judge hit his 29th home run on June 29, and this advance on Maris’ mark is significant because there are baseball connoisseurs who contend that Maris still holds the true single-season home run record. The argument is that Barry Bonds (who hit 73 in 2001), Mark McGwire (70 in 1998 and 65 in ’99), and Sammy Sosa (63 in ’98 and 66 in ’99), all were tainted by doping, leaving Maris as “legitimate” holder of the sport’s sexiest accomplishment.

Personal flashback: At an eighth-grade graduation party in suburban Los Angeles in June of 1961, several of us awkward 14-year-old boys became easily distracted from pool activities and hesitant attempts to dance with the young lasses because of a transistor-radio news bulletin: Roger Maris had just hit another homer against the local expansion team, the Los Angeles Angels.

At the time, the hallowed standard of 60 homers, set by the mythical Babe Ruth, had been around for 33 years. The closest anyone had come to Ruth over that span were the 58 each by Jimmie Foxx in 1932 and Hank Greenberg in ’38. That Maris and his Yankee teammate Mickey Mantle became engaged in a neck-and-neck chase to challenge that mark was a big deal in 1961, a fascinating rarity.

There have been other such home-run derbies since then, as when McGwire surpassed Maris’ mark 37 years later in 1998 while closely pursued by Sosa. The previous year, in fact, a similar multiple-player quest was afoot, to such an extent that Newsday sent me, mid-summer, to the West Coast in anticipation of a sort of early Louisville Slugger election return.

McGwire, then with the Oakland A’s, and Seattle’s Ken Griffey Jr. both had accumulated more homes in mid-July of ’97 than Maris had at the same point of the ’61 season. So had Tino Martinez of the Yankees. Not that any of them wanted to talk about their possibilities.

“It ain’t a movie,” Griffey said.

Except it was, really. Just as a ruling on Judge is now, though the performers then obviously didn’t know any more about how the plot will unfold than the audience does.

“I know you want me to say something interesting,” Martinez said at the time. “But I’m not thinking about that.”

McGwire then: “It’s going to be tough. Really tough.”

Griffey finished with 56 in ’97, Martinez with 44, McGwire—warming up for his 70 the next year—58, with the odd twist of having been traded to the St. Louis Cardinals at the end of July.

Sandy Alderson, the A’s general manager at the time, mused just before the trade that, “No, this is not something that happened to Roger Maris. Start with the premise that trading a player within range of Babe Ruth’s home run record wouldn’t even have been thought of in 1961. It wouldn’t even have been in the realm of possibility.”

But Maris wasn’t about to become a free agent. Alderson also noted, just before the trade, that Oakland had played more games than several other teams, so McGwire “could go to another team and end of playing more than 162 games,” which could prompt what Alderson called a “double asterisk if Mark breaks the record.”

Of course that stirred baseball’s numbers crunchers, still fussing over the fact that Maris’ 61 homers came in the first season that the Majors had expanded schedules from 154 to 162 games. What if McGwire got, say, 164 games? (He wound up with 156 for his 58 homers.)

More “ifs” to chew on. In 1932, rainouts before the fifth inning of two games wiped out two Jimmie Foxx homers, leaving him with 58 instead of a Ruth-tying 60. And Foxx later claimed he was gypped out of a dozen other homers that year by hitting a screen above the right-field fence in St. Louis’ old Sportsman Park, keeping the ball in play. That gripe appeared in rare, and difficult to pin down, accounts that surfaced much later.

Anyway, now we have Judge, who decreed after he walloped No. 29 that a season’s-end total in the 60s “would be something that’s pretty cool. But I think having a ring on my finger at the end of the year would be even better.”

Meanwhile, then, the Judge watch certainly has appealing drama for baseball aficionados—a reason to study daily box scores (thank you, Henry Chadwick, for that invention in 1858)—as well as grist for readers of the stars (the ones in the sky) and planets.

Might there be something to the fact that Ruth, Maris and Judge all were Yankees? Will Newton’s Second Law of Motion somehow apply? Could the pseudoscientific practice of numerology be helpful, since Ruth wore No. 3, Maris No. 9 and Judge wears 99? Something called powerfulmystic8.com declares that, “whether the Prophetic Numbers 3’s and 9’s repeatedly appears in dreams, visions, waking life or synchronicities, it is a sign and message that you are on the right path….”

Hmmm.

CBS.com recently polled four of its “baseball experts” whether they believed Judge would get to 60 homes. Two said “no,” one “yes” and the other “I hope so.”

Another recurring line from the old “Laugh-In” works pretty well: Sock it to me.

Days of our lives

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

I’m only going to say this one time. June 3 was National Repeat Day.

In more ways than one, it’s a redundancy. We already have Groundhog Day in February—a metaphor for replication. And the last thing we need is an occasion to revive that old childhood inquiry meant to torture a younger sibling into a maddening echo. Remember? “Pete and Repeat were in a boat; Pete fell in and who was left?”

Of course, the answer, over and over, was “Repeat,” triggering a theoretically endless, monotonous refrain until the persecuted party pleaded for parental intervention. Or just clobbered the annoying questioner.

Anyway, National Repeat Day does not repeat itself. Right on schedule with the next sunrise, June 4 arrives and brings—listen to this—National Shopping Cart Day. More proof that there are too many frivolous designations on the calendar.

It’s one thing to have an annual nod to Cinco de Mayo and Labor Day, Memorial Day and Veterans Day, occasions originally meant to recall significant history. But National High Five Day (a moveable feast on the third Thursday in April)? Especially in these pandemic times of social distancing, a universal smacking of hands doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Go to an Internet near you and you will be inundated with wacky, exhaustive lists of these Days, including National Bobblehead Day (January 7), National Dog Biscuit Day (February 23), National Open an Umbrella Indoors Day (March 13), National Barbershop Quartet Day (April 11), National Paperclip Day (May 29), National Yo-Yo Day (June 6), National Wiggle Your Toes Day (August 6), National Punctuation Day (September 24!!!), National Pins and Needles Day (November 27), National Sock Day (December 4).

There are—no surprise—a surfeit of suggested food-related celebrations. Just in the month of June, there is National Hazelnut Cake Day (on the 1st), National Egg Day (3rd), National Cheese Day (4th), National Gingerbread Day (5th), National Applesauce Day (6th), National Chocolate Ice Cream Day (7th). National Fudge Day (16th)—followed immediately by the antidote of National Eat Your Vegetables Day (17th). If one lives through that barrage of cholesterol-restoration sessions without having to see a doctor, National Junk Food Day is July 21.

Okay. Apart from gastronomy-related commemorations is September 8, National Ampersand Day, when we are encouraged to use that curly symbol in place of the word “and.” Milk & cookies? Bread & butter? Rough & ready?

November 4 is National Common Sense Day, when it could be reasonable not to use an ampersand. April 23 is National Talk Like Shakespeare Day, which is said to promote the substitution of “thou,” “thee” and “ye” in your conversation in place of “you” and “they,” or to stick entirely to rhyming couplets. All of which could make you sound dreadfully out-of-date. Or just pompous. (To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from Day to Day….)

Speaking of out-of-date: October 20 is National Suspenders Day.

But here’s a favorite to someone who has attempted to practice journalism for a half-century: April 4, Hug a Newsperson Day. And another, for those of us who never seem to get things right on the first try: October 17, National Mulligan Day.

It should be noted that today is not National Essay Day. That’s February 28, the birthdate of Michel de Montaigne, a French Renaissance philosopher (born Feb. 28, 1533) whose Essais influenced both French and English literature in thought and style.

True; philosophical this is not.

So, in the spirit of not-taking-this-too-seriously: Why not a National Take Three Years Off Your Age Day? To be celebrated every February 29.

A royal rejection?

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Once the Queen is dead, might Australians dispense with moving right to “Long live the King”? Their country is 9,500 miles from their head of state. And it is not unkind to consider that Elizabeth II—at 96 and celebrating 70 years on the throne—before long will be shuffling off this mortal coil. Might it make sense for Aussies to finally dispense with flying the Union Jack on their national flag, to once and for all throw off the last vestiges of the British monarchy and declare themselves a republic?

The report that newly elected Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese has appointed his nation’s first “minister for the republic” has raised this possibility, though experts Down Under told the New York Times that the chances of ditching the royal family remain slim. (Even in the United Kingdom, there is some thought that the royal family increasingly feels like something from the historical attic. Garrison Keillor wondered in a recent essay about how the “English regard for monarchy is rather bewildering, paying people so much money to stand on a balcony and wave.”)

Anyway, my first real awareness of this plausible tipping point came while covering the 2000 Sydney Olympics, specifically when I stumbled onto the work of celebrated Australian troubadour John Williamson. His songs are filled with a passionate, folksy take on how apart his culture is from jolly old England, full of references to kangaroos, emus, gum trees (eucalyptus), kookaburras and Aussie slang.

“Surely it’s time that we got rid of the colonial flag,” Williamson said in introducing his tune “I Can’t Feel Those Chains Any Longer.” “For the time being, we can at least fly the fair-dinkum flag as a suggestion of what we might have.”

As a prop for his pub appearances around Australia during the two decades previous to that, Williamson had been designing alternative national flags to “keep the debate open,” as he put it on his website, “to get the right kind of Republic….”

He made clear that “if my dream of purely Australian flags is seen to be anti-British, then I am sorely misunderstood.” But it had been 100 years since Australia gained its independence, and more than 200 years since the British had landed at Botany Bay on the island’s Southeast shore and established a penal colony there (among the Indigenous folks who had been around for 65,000 years). Williamson sang….

I can’t feel those chains any longer, can you?/I’m footloose and free/

I can’t see the sense in red, white and blue/It’s still Union Jack to me.

His call was not for revolution but for an overdue separation from the crown. As long ago as 1984, Ninian Stephen, then Australia’s governor-general—the Queen’s largely ceremonial representative—proclaimed green and gold, which had been popularly embraced by Australian sports teams since the 1800s, to be the nation’s official colors. Williamson sang….

Glory to Australia/Glory to the green and gold/

We’ve come a long way from Botany Bay/And we’re two hundred years old.

Of course Australia is not the only British commonwealth still around, most of them former colonies or dependencies of those colonies. There are 54! And Elizabeth II still is technically the majordomo to all. But only Australia and New Zealand retain the Union Jack symbol on their flags. Canada, for instance, moved on to the Maple Leaf flag in 1965.

As the Beatles sang around that time, “Her majesty’s a pretty nice girl….” But it does seem that the Queen now is something of a lame duck. To her Aussie subjects, a lame platypus?

Champion in deed and word

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The cliché is that athletic failure at an early age is a primary inspiration to become a sportswriter. Which didn’t apply to Kenny Moore, who died last month at 78. Neither did the generalization that elite physical performance gifts do not translate into producing compelling narration of such.

Moore was a world-class runner and an eloquent correspondent for Sports Illustrated. He “was the rare athlete,” Nicholas Dawidoff noted in his 2012 essay, “The Power and the Glory of Sportswriting,” “who wrote as well as he ran.” So those among us drawn to the drama of sports as well as the appreciation of good writing—whatever our abilities in either sphere—have lost something with Moore’s passing.

He was a national cross-country champion and two-time Olympic marathoner who brought to his sports journalism career a degree in philosophy and master’s in creative writing, both of which showed in his work.

He in no way fit the lame assumption, laid out in an Atlantic column years ago, that “kids who loved sports but were too small to play football or too fragile to carry water turned to sportswriting as a natural alternative.” Nor did he traffic, as a lyric wordsmith, in trite themes or self-centered vanity.

In his prolific writing, mostly but not entirely about distinguished runners, Moore called himself an “observer….to avoid a relentless ‘I’ being interposed between subject and reader, to lull the latter into an unwarranted sense of objectivity.

“It is a device,” he acknowledged, “that can become tedious, especially when the watching euphemism is known to be always me, but I’m going to leave it in, because in the case of this observer, it is perfectly apt. I am conscious of myself as an outsider, shy, peculiarly suited to peering for a while into lives and worlds, then withdrawing to muse over what seems interesting.”

In this age of snarky, look-at-me Twitter declarations and “hot takes,” shoving personal opinions in the faces of readers and listeners, Moore’s “observer” approach is a reminder that good sportswriting is, essentially, storytelling. And therefore not about the storyteller, whatever his or her personal experience in the game.

Even in his fascinating long-form tale of the 1972 Olympic marathon, “The Long Blue Line”—unavoidably a first-person account because Moore was the fourth-place finisher in that race—his observations are what carried the piece. Weaved throughout his account of the 26-mile competition were flashbacks and asides, personal details of fellow Olympians, descriptions and reactions to the Palestinian terrorist attack on the Israeli compound during the Games, colleagues’ thoughts on politics, race, nationalism, the very meaning of the Olympics.

In that marathon report, which read like a prize-winning short story, Moore presented characters fit for a novel. Among them was teammate Doug Brown, caught pilfering cherries during a pre-Olympic training run in Oslo (Brown apologized to the cheery-tree owner) and Moore concluded that the incessantly loquacious Brown “must have been a hyperkinetic child, for he is now a hyperkinetic postadolescent.”

Moore described how defending Olympic champ Mamo Wolde, then 40 years old, “runs, soundless of foot and breath, with his head tipped slightly forward…knock-kneed and pointing his toes slightly out.” While Derek Clayton, then the world’s fastest marathoner, was “full of movement, his arms clawing high across his chest, his head bobbing…his tongue rolled in and out of his mouth.”

During those tumultuous Games, Moore gave voice to the thoughts of wrestlers, boxers, shot-putters. He reflected on how the attack on the Israelis “violated the sanctuary of the Games.”

“For two weeks every four years we direct our kind of fanaticism into the essentially absurd activities of running and swimming and being beautiful on a balance beam,” he wrote. “Yet even in the rage of competition we keep from hurting each other, and thereby demonstrate the meaning of civilization.” Only to have that illusion “shattered.”

It was Moore’s celebrated Sports Illustrated colleague, Frank Deford, who once said that “when people hear you’re a sportswriter, they assume you’re more interested in the first half of that word than the second.” Moore was at least as involved in the second as the first, exploding another cliché.

I spoke with him a couple of times, mostly to get his early recollections of Frank Shorter, Moore’s close friend whose ’72 Olympic marathon victory was so central to powering the American running boom. Moore had been a major player in that revolution, as well; he ran collegiately at Oregon for coach Bob Bowerman, the co-founder of Nike. But more than that, as a middling leisure runner and sportswriter, I tried to learn something from Moore’s perceptive, stylist writing. A hero, of sorts.

Shake

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The End.

This is an argument that a primary highlight to every hockey playoff series doesn’t happen until it’s over: The traditional handshake line between the victor and the vanquished.

The sport’s handshake rite—the date and specifics of its origin are unknown—is especially appealing because it isn’t logical. After all the unruly intensity between opponents, the gratuitous post-whistle shoving and barking, the cheap shots and occasional fisticuffs, there is this counterintuitive postscript—would you say “denouement” when the games are in French-speaking Quebec?—that is thoroughly polite and downright heroic. The formal handshake line at mid-ice, after it’s all over but the shouting, apparently has been standard since at least the early 1920s.

There is this gentility in the wake of relentlessly stormy deeds. There is this disorienting twist on the old boxing cliché—Fight and come out shaking hands. All the Mr. Hydes exit as Dr. Jekylls. Intimidation tactics give way to gentlemanly behavior. Watch: It’s going to keep happening throughout the pursuit of the Stanley Cup.

No other sport condones fighting as “part of the game.” Punch a guy in the mouth and all you get is five minutes in the sin bin. Yet no other sport pivots so dramatically to a public display of sportsmanship, a final demonstration of healing. The message, most involved have come to agree, simply is: When it’s over, it’s over.

Not that all potential participants agree. Among the minority who have skipped the routine over the years was Islanders goalie Billy Smith, a four-time Stanley Cup champion in the 1980s. He claimed that he was inspired by Boston goalie Gerry Cheevers, Smith’s hero, who eschewed the practice before him. “I saw that and I said, ‘He is so right; there’s a guy who’s smart,’” Smith said. “I didn’t have the right feeling doing it, so why should I do it? I won’t shake hands when I lose, so I won’t shake hands when I win. I’d be a—what’s the word?—hypocrite.”

Cheevers once justified his non-participation to the Toronto Sun by asking, “Do you really mean it? Do you say: ‘Thanks for bashing my brains in the past seven games and taking $15,000 out of my pocket?’” (That would be closer to $200,000 now for Cup champions.)

Muzz Patrick, who had played on the Rangers’ 1940 Cup winners, long ago observed that there are “some human beings who wouldn’t shake hands with their mother. If you were the losing team, you really had to grit your teeth and go out there and do it. But a lot of guys made excuses. We’d go into the locker room and say, ‘Why didn’t you shake hands with those guys?’ and they’d say, ‘Well, I got my hand hurt on that last shift and couldn’t shake.’ Baloney.”

Smith’s former goalie mate, Glenn Resch, argued that the point of the handshake is “more idealistic than hypocritical. It’s the kind of thing that raises sport to being a sport. It raises us above just animals.”

Hockey rivals in fact can resemble animals, producing the occasional broken jaw, dislocated appendage, a little spilled blood. Yet they routinely conclude their version of survival-of-the-fittest with what amounts to a show of respect, or at least a mutual understanding: What you do to me in the name of your team, in the pursuit of victory, honors you—and thus do I honor you. Shake.

If the act of shaking hands indeed came into fashion thousands of years ago as a demonstration of peaceful intent, a way to show that the hand holds no weapon, hockey’s custom at least signifies that the weapons have been laid down.

“It’s not compulsory,” Resch said, “which is fine, and it’s different not to do it, so I think that maybe those guys who don’t do it feel they look more intense, or that they wanted it more. But it’s like an argument. Even if you never see the person again, it’s good for your own peace of mind to know how you left it. It’s more for yourself.”

One rationale for maintaining the observance, as Resch thoughtfully put it, was that “anyone who wins enjoys being congratulated, and the loser who doesn’t congratulate the winner is trying to steal a little satisfaction from the winner. Even sore losers don’t like sore losers.”

Another justification, sometimes noted by players who join the handshake line reluctantly, is: Those guys might be your teammates the next season.

Resch again: “It’s human relations. It’s learning to control your emotions. It’s maturity, being able to put things in perspective. When you’ve lost, it’s one of the toughest things in the world to do. But that’s the beauty of it. Anyone can do something that’s easy.”

The point of playing the games is, by definition, to win. That done, the consequence of hockey’s handshake line is to blend winner and loser together, making one as good as the other again.

A beginning.

And they’re (not all of them) off…

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This is about thoroughbred racing. So play your hunches.

Would the sport be better off—for the horses’ health, for wider popularity, for more compelling matchups—if the Triple Crown series altered its schedule to provide more time between races? Or would discarding the demanding format devalue the accomplishment of a three-peat champion?

It’s an old discussion, revived because the handlers of Rich Strike, the darkest of horses before he won the Kentucky Derby, chose to bypass the Preakness on the not-uncommon intuition that their suddenly valuable steed needed at least a month of recovery time.

For decades, the Derby has been followed just two weeks later by the Preakness and, three weeks after that, by the Belmont Stakes. Plenty of the industry’s principals—trainers, owners, bettors—routinely argue that the galloping five-week campaign sets the standard for greatness. Even while acknowledging that it might not be thoroughly sound horse sense.

Handicap this: In the 147 years that all three races have existed, only 13 horses have won the Triple Crown, clear evidence of the difficulty involved. There is a yearning to maintain tradition, but it must be noted that the Triple Crown order has moved around a bit, with the Preakness run before the Derby 11 times—and twice on the same day.

More relevant to this question of whether the Crown’s current schedule is too taxing is the Jockey Club statistic that thoroughbreds, on average, race only about half as often as they did 46 years ago—5.95 times throughout 2021, 10.23 times in 1975.

The Baltimore Sun last week quoted Kathy Guillermo, senior vice president of the animal rights organization PETA, expressing hope that Rich Strike’s absence from the Preakness “will prompt the racing industry to modernize the demanding Triple Crown schedule by extending the time between the three races to less-inhuman intervals of one-month each.”

Rather than the horses’ well-being, though, what keeps resurrecting debate about the taxingly compressed Derby-Preakness-Belmont schedule are the long gaps between Triple Crown champs—25 years from 1948 (Citation) to ’73 (Secretariat), 37 years from ’78 (Affirmed) to 2015 (American Pharoah).

Long-time Newsday colleague Ed McNamara, a true racing connoisseur who has visited 116 tracks on four continents, noted that Hall of Fame trainer D. Wayne Lukas is among several horse people who long ago suggested the Preakness be pushed back from the third Saturday of May to Memorial Day and the Belmont moved from early June to July 4. Still, such a change never has been taken under advisement by any of racing’s officials, and McNamara envisions no benefit would result to any of the three races.

That includes the Preakness. Still run in the fairly decrepit, 152-year-old Pimlico Race Course, and so often left with a small field in the wake of the Derby spectacle, the Preakness has faced hints of being relocated and, in the mid-1980s, of being replaced on the Triple Crown calendar.

In 1985, a swaggering New Jersey builder named Robert Brennan lured Derby champion Spend a Buck away from the Preakness with a $2.6 million bonus to run his Jersey Derby at the rebuilt Garden State Park in Cherry Hill. Brennan strongly suggested his race would become a permanent stand-in for the Preakness—“I do believe there will some adjustments made in the industry in relation to the Triple Crown series,” he said.

On the contrary, no Derby winner ever tried the Jersey Derby again, Garden State Park closed in 2001 and Brennan that year was found guilty of money-laundering and bankruptcy fraud, winding up in prison for a decade.

Meanwhile, the Preakness persists, as well as contentions that the middle race could be better served if it weren’t so closely tailgated by the Derby. A Plan B putting at least three weeks between the races theoretically would guarantee not only the presence of the Derby winner at Pimlico but also that winner’s most obvious challengers, horses that had introduced themselves to the hard-core and casual fan in the Derby. And therefore the potential for Triple Crown rivalries that could endure through the series.

Might all that ramp up bigger crowds, increased TV audiences, massive wagering? More clout for the sport? Or does the Triple Crown’s traditional appreciation for abbreviation—three races in five weeks—prevail, a folkloric commitment to the superhorse crucible?

OK. Here’s $2 on the status quo. Just a feeling.

Twisted

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Regarding the Western nations’ announcement of sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s close associates, should it be a surprise they include a woman, 32 years his junior, long identified as his mistress? Putin, currently directing the murder of thousands in neighboring Ukraine, isn’t exactly a man who heeds accepted moral or ethical norms.

Should it be a shock, furthermore, that the woman, Alina Kabaeva (sometimes spelled Kabayeva), was an Olympic champion whose athletic career was interrupted by a positive drug test—an uncommonly regular development in Putin’s Russia?

Beyond instigating real wars, Russia, which Putin has ruled as president or prime minister since 2000, has a well-earned reputation for subverting the conventions of international sports—the so-called wars-without-bullets. Through a systematic, state-supported doping program, more Russian competitors have been caught using banned stuff than athletes from any other nation.

The number of busted Russians is beyond 150, and the total of Russians stripped of Olympic medals is a world-leading 46, four times that of the next-highest country. Leading up to, and during, the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia—where Putin reportedly enjoys vacation time on the Black Sea and has built a second government office—Russia deployed what was identified as “the disappearing positive test methodology” to cover up hundreds of failed tests by its athletes.

The director of Sochi’s 2014 Olympic doping laboratory later blew the whistle on Russian officials and intelligence service members who surreptitiously replaced Russians’ drug-tainted urine samples with clean urine by passing bottles back-and-forth through a small hole in the lab’s wall.

Yes, foreign substances have turned up in athletes from many other countries, including the US of A. (Juicing without borders.) But it generally is accepted that the original state-sponsored doping operation was perfected in the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in the 1970s, when more than 10,000 unsuspecting East German jocks were given massive doses of banned anabolic steroids. (Check our Steven Ungerleider’s book, Faust’s Gold.)

It’s interesting to note that Vladimir Putin, working at the time for the Soviet Union’s notorious KGB, was stationed in the GDR at the time, in Dresden, and one function of the snooping KGB would have been to know about such skullduggery.

Might a similar government-coordinated process have been at work this winter when Russian figure-skater Kamila Valieva’s failed drug test before Beijing’s Winter Games belatedly became public, creating the latest Olympic scandal? Valieva, just 15, claimed to have been unaware of any illegal pharmaceuticals in her system and Putin publicly defended her, presented her with a state award, and declared that she was another case of Russian athletes victimized by discrimination based on nationality.

Meanwhile, about Kabaeva, Putin’s alleged paramour, who won a gold medal at the 2004 Athens Olympics in the quirky sport of rhythmic gymnasts, in which women perform 75- to 90-second routines cavorting with hoops, ropes, clubs, balls and ribbons. (We smart-aleck Olympic journos sarcastically called the discipline “whips and chains.”)

Rhythmic gymnasts essentially are contortionists—flipping, handspringing, cartwheeling while balancing the various pieces of apparatus—and Kabaeva was a star, a European and world champion by the time she was 16. But at 18, she was stripped of the 2001 world title after testing positive for the diuretic furosemide—outlawed because, as well as facilitating weight loss, it typically is used to mask other performance-enhancing substances. (Coincidental note: The woman who subsequently inherited that world title was Tamara Yerofeeva. A Ukrainian.)

Kabaeva nevertheless has continued to live a charmed and fabulously compensated life—presented by Putin with the top state honor, the Order of Friendship; appointed to a seat in Russia’s lower house of parliament; made chairwoman of the board overseeing state-controlled media; chosen to be among the final torchbearers for the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Just last month, appearing at a junior gymnastics festival in Moscow, she praised Putin for the war effort, which really is nothing but an invasion, in Ukraine.

Feels like another variation on the theme of Putin treachery. Another parable of tyranny. More whips and chains.