Author Archives: johnfjeansonne@gmail.com

About johnfjeansonne@gmail.com

Newsday sportswriter emeritus and adjunct professor in the Hofstra University school of communications.

If the sun doesn’t get in your eyes….

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Version 1.0.0

An eclipse-related thought:

Years ago, while on assignment in Chicago, I was listening to a White Sox game on the car radio. The garrulous, excitable Harry Caray—in the midst of his half-century of inimitable sportscasting—was doing play-by-play. And for one inning, a young lad, maybe 10 years old, had been invited to be a “color commentator” alongside Caray; a gimmick, sure, but an appealing treat to the listener and a taste of the Big Time for the kid.

There was a fly ball that dropped untouched, apparently misplayed by an outfielder. When Harry, as was his wont, registered disgust with what he judged to be an inferior performance, the little guy came to the fielder’s defense.

“I think,” he piped in his canary voice, “he lost it in the sun.”

To which Harry gruffly bellowed, “He’s from Mexico!” As if an assumed familiarity with Sol in more Southern climes could prevent such a mishap.

So here’s the connecting thought: On Monday, with Major League games scheduled to be played in a couple of cities that will be smack in the path of the total solar eclipse, has anyone wondered if an outfielder could lose the ball in the moon?

For two or three minutes on the afternoon of the Cleveland Guardians’ first home game of the season, it will be really dark as the moon gets between the earth and sun. The same will be true for the Texas Rangers’ scheduled game in Arlington, Tex.

So, if there were to be a fly ball in those locales, coinciding with the eclipse, and a fielder accustomed to flipping down his sunglass lenses while looking skyward were to become disoriented in the blackout and lose the ball….

Base hit? Error?

First of all, baseball Rule 10.12a won’t be much help. It specifies:

“The official scorer shall charge an outfielder with an error if such outfielder allows a fly ball to drop to the ground if, in the official scorer’s judgment, an outfielder at that position making ordinary effort would have caught such fly ball.”

Nothing about losing the ball in the sun. Or the moon.

Obviously, the latter would be an extremely rare situation. To begin with, how often are fielders likely to lose sight of batted balls in the firmament? On average, only about a third of balls in play are hit in the air—and that includes the unplayable ones launched triumphantly into the outfield seats by annoyingly admiring sluggers.

More to the point, there never have been Major Leaguers performing on the day of a total eclipse in a city that is in the so-called “path of totality.” And the next possibility of a solar eclipse anywhere in the contiguous United States—forget limiting that to Big League burgs—won’t come for another 20 years. In Cleveland, specifically, a total solar eclipse hasn’t happened since 1806 and won’t again until 2444.

Besides, both the Guardians and Rangers decided to start their games several hours after the precise moment that the earth, moon and sun will perfectly align to produce a full midnight-at-midday experience.

Of the five other MLB cities that day that will be hosting games while experiencing, briefly, a 90-percent blockage of the sun, only one—New York—originally intended to stick with an afternoon (2:05) starting time that theoretically would synchronize the couple of minutes of celestial stagecraft with someone at bat. The plan in Gotham was to employ stadium lights all afternoon while the disc of moon slowly blotted out most of the sun and then went on its way between 2:10 and 4:36—roughly, the expected length of the game.

That raised the potential circumstance of a ball in the air just as the moon cancelled most of the sun’s light—possibly with runners on the bases, the game’s outcome in doubt, a fielder suddenly groping for a fix on the ball’s flight.

Alas, just four days before the eclipse, the Yanks turned a blind eye to the intriguing possibilities and moved their first pitch four hours later, around natural twilight. A time, by the way, when baseballs are known to be lost in the darkening sky.

So the moon is off the hook for interfering. At least for another few decades.

Political footballer

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A college football star pursued by the revered Green Bay Packers and later recruited to be Vice President of the United States?

It’s been done. Gerald Ford.

You were thinking of Aaron Rodgers? Had in mind the surreal 2024 Presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy Jr. and his public musings to consider the still-active 40-year-old NFL quarterback as running mate?

The far-fetched idea of Rodgers somehow becoming a heartbeat away from Leader of the Free World lasted barely a week before Kennedy’s spokespeople signaled that he would go a different direction. So we never even got around to addressing the pay cut Rodgers would have to take, from a three-year, $112-million contract with the New York Jets to the Vice President’s reported annual salary of $284,000.

Although, as The Nation’s John Nichols wrote of Rodgers’ complete lack of qualifications for the job, he “couldn’t be any worse than [Dick] Cheney. Or Dan Quayle, for that matter.”

Cheney: George W. Bush’s VP. The guy who falsely alleged that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction after the Sept. 11 attacks, supported torture techniques against suspected terrorists and eventually left office with a 13-percent approval rating.

Quayle: George H.W. Bush’s Veep. Mostly remembered for dumb quotes such as “Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child” and “I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy—but that could change.”

Aaron Rodgers? As Vice President, he would make a terrific quarterback. About the only thing that made sense about a Rodgers candidacy was that, like RFK Jr., his is a widely known name. Think of Kennedy’s relentless reminders that he comes from political royalty, the son of 1968 Presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy and nephew of President John Kennedy (“Jack” to friends and family). Quayle, in a real stretch, attempted a similar association during the 1988 campaign by constantly comparing himself to John Kennedy.

“Senator,” Lloyd Bentsen said to Quayle during one Vice Presidential debate, “I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

Prominent members of the Kennedy family have said essentially the same thing about RFK Jr. And Rodgers? Available evidence indicates that, beyond being a bold-face name in a sports-obsessed nation, his apparent value to RFK Jr. involved their sharing of wackadoodle conspiracy theories regarding Covid vaccines. And a general skepticism of authority. (Also, loyalty. Rodgers was on record that he would vote for Kennedy.)

Certainly there have been several distinguished professional athletes who became politicians without turning an ankle, notably NBA Hall of Famers Bill Bradley (18 years in the U.S. Senate) and Dave Bing (six years as Detroit’s mayor). NFL receiver Steve Largent wound up in the House of Representatives and Jack Kemp, after a long career quarterbacking the Buffalo Bills to two championships in the pre-Super Bowl AFL days, was the 1988 Republican Vice Presidential candidate running with Bob Dole. (They lost to incumbents Bill Clinton and Al Gore.)

Anyway, the football-to-highest-executive-office kind of thing had been done. Gerald Ford was a celebrated offensive lineman on two national championship teams at the University of Michigan. When he graduated in 1935, the NFL still was a year away from its first annual college player draft, but Ford was invited to try the pros by both the Packers and the Detroit Lions.

He chose instead to attend Yale law school and spent 25 years in Congress. A popular career pol, he nevertheless was something of an accidental Vice President, recruited to replace indicted tax evader Spiro Agnew during the Watergate mess. And then an ad hoc President when the disgraced Richard Nixon resigned.

The other future U.S. Presidents who had played college football were Dwight Eisenhower, at West Point, and Ronald Reagan, at Eureka College, the small private school in central Illinois, in 1930 and 1931. (At Harvard, John Kennedy played JV football and FDR was on the freshman team years earlier.) Eureka coach Ralph McKinzie later recalled Reagan as “just a fellow who wanted to play football but didn’t have too much talent.”

Aaron Rodgers, of course, was a real jock, both at Cal, where he set passing records in his two varsity seasons, and for 18 years at Green Bay. But he does not have a college degree, having skipped his senior year for the NFL draft. And he doesn’t appear to have credentials beyond the gridiron, except as a self-promoting, self-styled “critical thinker.” He has called himself a victim of “cancel culture,” “woke mobs” and media “witch hunts.”

But now that his name apparently has been removed from RFK Jr.’s short list, Rodgers could always dismiss the Vice Presidency as an unworthy goal in the first place, “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”

But that appraisal had been done. By John Adams.

Look at this!

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What would Ted Kluszewski think? Major League Baseball has unveiled—that seems to be the appropriate word—a uniform design that features pants so sheer they appear to reveal players’ underpants. (A New Yorker piece about the new duds was headlined “I See England, I See France.”) Connor McKnight, who hosts pre- and post-game shows on the Chicago White Sox Network, told NPR that player reaction is running “anywhere from incensed to really embarrassed.”

“When you’re on display for the nation and for your fans to watch,” McKnight said, “you don’t want to be quite as on display as a lot of players have been” during this Spring Training season.

Oh; Ted Kluszewski. He was a slugging first baseman in the 1950s, an All-Star for the Cincinnati Reds during the peak of his 15-year Big League career. No Givenchy, Ralph Lauren, Christian Dior; no designer of haute couture. But Kluszewski did make a bold baseball fashion statement by exposing more than was traditional on the ball field.

He bared his bulging biceps by cutting off the sleeves of his uniform top. In some quarters, the exhibition of his considerable muscles was reckoned to be an intimidation factor on opposing pitchers, though Kluszewski claimed that full sleeves merely constricted his ability to swing a bat. And he insisted he would not compromise his swing.

It is a fact that baseball players—all athletes, really—often correlate performance with attire, both physically and psychologically. A sort of dress-for-success conviction. In his best-selling 1974 book, “Ball Four,” pitcher Jim Bouton’s diary of the 1969 season, he wrote that former Yankee teammate Joe Pepitone “refused to take the field if his uniform isn’t skintight.” And another, Phil Linz, “used to say that he didn’t know why, but he could run faster in tight pants.”

Bouton quoted Dick Stuart, a contemporary, believing an even harder-to-substantiate claim that he could add 20 points to his batting average “if he knows he looks good.”

There was a 1994 Seinfeld episode purported to address more practical terms. In response to player complaints that the polyester uniforms then in style were too hot, George Costanza convinced Yankee manager Buck Showalter to dress the team in cotton—with the predictable gag result that the cotton outfits shrank and severely hampered player effectiveness.

In the real world of competitive attire, college football went through a period in the 1970s when tear-away jerseys were a thing, allowing ball-carriers to run through finger-tip tackling, leaving behind only a ripped piece of cloth. And that bit of dressing down led to the so-called crop-top jersey which exposed stomachs, made famous by Georgia’s Herschel Walker and Alabama’s Johnny Musso. But it hardly was a good look for some of the more corpulent linemen, and the style has long-since been banned by the NCAA.

But now we have another occasion, apparently, of sporting attire that allows too much to be seen. In his New Yorker report on baseball’s sartorial innovation, Zach Helfand noted that “sheer is hot. Sheer is in.” But while league officials contend that the new uniforms improve mobility by providing 24 percent more stretch (and thus more comfort), Helfand wrote that “some people were scandalized….a few players, caught bending over, or just sitting down, displayed silhouettes of genitals which were remarkable for their clarity and detail. One player reportedly resorted to buying his own pants at Dick’s Sporting Goods.”

The whole episode conjures some weird vision of baseball players, during their walk-up to the batter’s box, red-carpet-like, being queried, “Who are you wearing?” With the possible response, “Fruit of the Loom.”

There have been player grumbles, beyond the see-through situation, that the new clothes are chintzy; that, instead of pants being tailored to individual players, there merely are four cuts to choose from: Slim, standard, athletic (whatever that means) and muscular. Logos and lettering no longer appear to be stitched on; rather, are apparently cheap patches. Sports uniform maven Paul Lukas, on his uni-watch.com site, meanwhile spotted at least three teams whose road jerseys and pants were of different shades of gray. Not so dapper.

Designed and produced by two giants of the sports gear and memorabilia businesses (which will get no free advertisement here), the latest Big League get-ups nevertheless have not only failed to impress the wearers but also major-league designers. Transparency’s trendiness aside.

One, Isaac Mizrahi, told the New Yorker, “If you like bodies—and I like bodies—to some extent, you’re kind of excited when you first hear something like this. But this? This has a creep connotation. It’s none of our business.”

This is official

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Herewith a report on official products affiliated with sports teams, events, athletes and other bold-face personages for the purposes of brainwashing—or, if you prefer, “marketing”—to target audiences. Sort of what the new breed known as influencers trafficks in.

Some of these business alliances are obvious. Old Spice is the official deodorant of the NFL. Omega is the official timekeeper of the Olympic Games. Dairy Queen is the official post-game destination of Little League Baseball and Big League Chew is the official bubblegum of Major League Baseball. Inglasco, which makes hockey pucks, is the official supplier of such necessary implements of the NHL.

Beyond those connections, think in terms of assumed purchasing habits of sport’s primary prey, the fans. Gambling: You have FanDuel as the official sportsbook of every major pro sports league—football, baseball, basketball, hockey, golf and tennis. Cars: Toyota, official automotive partner of the NFL. And, of course, beer: Michelob is the official beer of the NBA, Bud Lite of the NFL, Budweiser of Major League Baseball. (Might having Anheuser-Busch and its various brands as official alcohol products of NASCAR create an uncomfortable image of drinking and driving fast?)

There are all sorts of official shoes of one organization or another; official soft drinks, official banking partners, official cookies, official team watch parties, not to mention an official cryptocurrency platform of the Dallas Cowboys. There even, according to that great source, Google, is an official state car of the president of the United States.

Anyway, here’s the latest. The United States Swimming federation has just announced that a company named Cirkul, identified as “a modern beverage platform,” has been designated the organization’s “official hydration supplier.” In effect, U.S. Swimming’s official water. Which prompted my friend, veteran Olympic reporter Jay Weiner, to ask, “Aren’t swimmers already wet enough?”

This fundamental collaboration recalls a thoroughly reasonable, if not entirely serious, suggestion years ago by Olympic official Bob Condron that there ought to have been an official cigar of the Cuba-based 1991 Pan American Games. And if one were inclined toward sarcasm, given a sporting event so often tainted by its champions caught doping, should there be an official steroid of the Tour de France?

Jay recalled another incident that might have led to product endorsement, the occasion when Olympic figure skater Paul Wylie, late for a news conference, apologized by explaining, “Sorry, guys. I was moisturizing.”

Stifle that giggle. According to a 2016 post on nba.com, there might well be a market for an official moisturizer of the NBA. In the report, a handful of Portland Trail Blazers discussed moisturizing preferences—maybe Aveeno or Jergens?—and one player, Gerald Henderson, noted that he was keen on any brand with cocoa butter.

It certainly seems to be an article of faith among advertisers that potential customers want to eat the same cereal and drive the same truck as their celebrity or athletic heroes. Still, the Cleveland Browns’ deal last season in introducing white “throwback” helmets sounded a little too—ahem—personal.

The team announced that its so-called “White Out Series” of games in which the Browns wore those helmets was “presented by DUDE Wipes,” which the product’s company bragged were “flushable wipes” responsible for “billions of butts wiped” and a “hole revolution against toilet paper.”

Such a contractual agreement logically avails a team and its players to all the perks and benefits that entails. So when Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Archie Bradley revealed in an interview that he had a bowel accident during a game, he received a shipment of said DUDE Wipes—which he then broadcast on social media. After New York Jets running back Isaiah Crowell celebrated a touchdown in 2018 and pretended to swab his derriere with the football, DUDE Wipes signed him up to do endorsements. (Crowell also got an official unsportsmanlike conduct penalty.)

Let’s move on. Beyond such harmlessly goofy promotions as Finnair’s claim to be the official airline of Santa Claus, there was the appalling legislation proposed by the fabulist George Santos, before he was summarily booted out of Congress, to make the AR-15 assault rifle the official gun of the United States. And, speaking of prevarications, there was a social media post claiming that “Marathon” was the official cigarette of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Just a hoax, though there apparently is a Marathon-brand cigarette produced in Greece, which really is the original home of the Olympics. Officially.

Before Caitlin Clark

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Kudos to The Athletic for its detailed origin story relative to the Caitlin Clark must-see entertainment frenzy: “Iowa’s sizzling popularity in women’s basketball was born in the state’s 6-on-6 tradition.”

As Scott Dochterman reported in the piece, “six-player basketball was more than just a sport in Iowa. It was the game of the winter, and its legacy flourishes through this Hawkeyes women’s basketball team” that features Clark’s binocular-range shooting, nifty passing and the enthralled sellout crowds celebrating her.

For long before Clark’s assault on virtually every college scoring record—by both women and men—long before Clark, 22, was born, high school girls in Iowa were starring in their unique brand of the sport that dates to the early 1920s and which, by the 1950s, was front-page news throughout Iowa. Their championship tournament was carried by radio and television stations in up to nine Midwestern states. There can be a strong argument that, for decades, nowhere else was the high school girl accepted as an athlete as she was in Iowa.

Susan Edge was a University of Missouri Journalism School colleague in the late 1960s who clued me in to the phenomenon. She had been a scoring machine for her Iowa high school’s six-on-six team, and her tales of community involvement were so compelling that I eventually convinced my editors at Newsday, 10 years later, to cover the season-ending event.

The whole business was a revelation. The six-on-six format—each team required to keep three defenders on one half of the court while three offensive teammates worked the other half—was a relic of Paleolithic times when females were thought incapable of extensive running. Yet it fit nicely into Iowa’s rural aesthetic: maximum possibilities for the few.

Six-on-six rules—a two-dribble limit before passing or shooting—rendered a crisp, fast-paced game of passing, moving without the ball, back-door cuts. That produced astounding offensive numbers, shooting percentages by the best players in the 60s and 70s, point totals such as Denise Long’s 70.5 average in the 1968 tournament. Long, whose small community high school north of Des Moines had just 120 students and a senior class of 34, once scored 111 points in a 32-minute game. She was such a headliner that she appeared on the Johnny Carson show and was drafted by the NBA’s Golden State Warriors—though the commissioner at the time, Walter Kennedy, considered that a publicity stunt and negated the pick.

That was in 1969, three years before Title IX of the Education Amendments Act decreed that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

But when Title IX administrators attempted to outlaw Iowa’s six-on-six play, arguing in the early 1980s that those girls restricted to defense-only were at a disadvantage for scholarship opportunities, Iowa officials and the Iowa public rebelled. Still the only state with separate bodies governing boys’ and girls’ sports, Iowa cited the popularity of the girls’ game—consistently outdrawing the boys’ state tournament and, even 45 years ago, generating rights fees for its own tournament in excess of six figures.

Not until 1993 did Iowa reluctantly abandon six-on-six for the standard five-per-team arrangement. And not without widespread regret among those who had reveled in the celebrity of being a six-on-six high school player. When 2019 state legislation to force the merger of Iowa boys’ and girls’ high school athletic associations failed, Iowa governor Kim Reynolds, who had played six-on-six high school basketball in the mid-1970s, told the Des Moines Register, “I’m still trying to get over the fact that we left six-on-six and went to five.”

There is a 2004 book, “The Only Dance in Iowa: A History of Six-Player Girls’ Basketball.” There was a 2008 Iowa Public Television special, “More Than a Game: Six-on-Six Basketball in Iowa.” There even was a 2009 stage show in Des Moines, “Six-on-Six: The Musical.” It had 18 original songs and a cast of 30. Iowa has a Granny Basketball League, formed in 2005, for women 50 and older who play by the 1920s rules and wear 1920s-style uniforms.

So the fuse was lit long ago for the current University of Iowa success and attendant spectator passion, with women from several generations drawn to the Caitlin Clark magic show—including Iowa head coach Lisa Bluder—fondly reminded of their six-on-six playing days.

Clark, for all her unprecedented feats, undeniably is being carried by the tides. “I’ve had so many people come up to me, like, ‘I played six-on-six basketball, and I just can’t believe the crowd you draw and how much fun you guys have playing,’” Clark told The Athletic. “These women who played 30, 40 years ago are just so mesmerized by our team and what we’re doing for women’s basketball. That never gets old. That’s super cool. A lot of those people are some of our biggest fans.”

Does the Mark Twain line from “The Gilded Age” fit here? “History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”

Becoming book-ish

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Don’t tell anyone, but I still haven’t finished Faulkner’s famous short story, “The Bear,” which was assigned during English lit class my first semester of college. Just the kind of negligence that happens when a person who delights in reading nevertheless limits himself to sports pages and magazines for far too long.

It was not the ideal approach to wider knowledge, especially for someone aspiring to be a journalist—a wordsmith of sorts. But I am here to report that there can be redemption. Over time, surrounded by Renaissance women and men—wife, friends, daughter, colleagues—becoming more well-read has rubbed off.

So while there remain literally scores of tomes on the multiple bookshelves around the house that have not yet been cracked by this reader, the perusal of literary works—joining a program already in progress among the cognoscenti—now continues apace. And boosted by this interesting new stimulus: Joining a monthly book discussion group at the local library.

It’s a bit like being back in school, in the sense of realizing there is no faking one’s way through the session just by reading the inside dust cover. The difference, though, is that the too-prevalent expectation among so many students—a good grade rather than more knowledge—is not the point in this gathering of committed bookworms.

On my own, I tend to marvel at authors’ skills to produce word pictures for scene-setting or to create realistic dialogue—how do they do that?—but the exchanges in a book discussion assemblage bring out musings on character development, relationships, plot twists and takes on the past beyond the dull recitation of historical dates and names. To hear the impressions of the others, prompting a hadn’t-thought-of-that insight, is like reading a good book review.

How did the setting figure into the story? Was there a significance to the protagonist’s name? What about some of the subtle literary references? Was the tale dramatic? Realistic? Humorous? Schmaltzy?

During my half-century as what we in the world of newspaper print called an ink-stained wretch, it regularly was made clear that reading—reading anything—is what leads to writing well. It’s a conviction that was embraced by no less an expert than the late novelist Larry McMurtry, who also was a rare-book scout and book store owner. In “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen,” one of three memoirs penned by McMurtry, he offered the delightful metaphor that the ranch life of his Texas youth, cowboys tending cattle, resembled the mission of a writer.

“What is [writing],” he asked, “but a way of herding words? First I try to herd a few desirable words into a sentence, and then I corral them into small pastures called paragraphs, before spreading them across the spacious ranges of a novel.”

A member of our discussion group had tipped “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen” to me. Probably would have missed it, otherwise. And my wife, leader of the library’s book discussion gatherings, zeroes in on volumes beyond my usual lighthearted fare and sticking with favorite authors.

We were assigned a book—a series of books, actually—about septuagenarians in a retirement complex who solved murders; another about siblings, their broken family, nostalgia and…a house; another with residents of an English Channel island relating their days under Nazi occupation during World War II—with their book club in a starring role; and one that is a collection of short stories loosely linked to travel situations.

In bygone days, when I traveled a lot for work, I occasionally would stop into out-of-town bookstores and check out the first page or two of the latest best sellers on display. Not taking time to get especially involved in the story; just another stab at examining the writing craft—what seemed to work and what didn’t. Maybe I could learn something.

There is a difference, as we journalists regularly and snarkily would remind each other, between writing and just typing. So, for anyone interested in the art of composition, to keep studying how the pros do prose—to get a glimpse into their bag of tricks—can never hurt. And the more minds to help sift through some notable scrivener’s yarn, the better.

Here’s the play….

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There was a recent headline on the website Yahoo!Sports asking if college football is “ready to get out of the stone age” by implementing in-game coach-to-player communication via tiny speakers inside players’ helmets. By copying that NFL system in effect since 1994, college coaches could further remove judgement calls from quarterbacks—who just happen to be the fellows in the cockpit of action—and endorse coaches’ control-freak impulses. There even have been reports that, unlike the NFL shut-off deadline of ending communication with 15 seconds left on the play clock, college coaches might be allowed to continue giving directions as a play unfolds.

“Joe’s open at the 10-yard line. Throw to him!”

My first thought, as a card-carrying member of the stone age, was of appalling micromanagement. Autocracy. Something between a general discouragement of athletes using their heads and complete player subservience. Isn’t decision-making an important role in individual performance, a demonstration of competitive awareness that abets physical skill?

“Interfering with the quarterback destroys his confidence,” Col. Red Blaik, who won three national championships during his 18-year career coaching Army, once argued. “He loses his faith in the coach….If the coach has worked properly with his quarterback [in training, the quarterback] knows more about running the works than does the coach.”

OK, Blaik coached in the 1940s and ‘50s. Ancient history. By the time Cleveland Browns coach Paul Brown began shuttling “messenger guards” into games with play calls in the mid-50s, the evolution toward robotic quarterbacking had begun in earnest. Brown, in fact, was the first to attempt the use of in-helmet walkie-talkies to decree a specific play, though those primitive gadgets sometimes picked up local radio stations and air-traffic controllers and soon were discarded.

That obviously didn’t stop the march toward dictating real-time orders from the sideline, leaving only the implementation of actions to the on-field cast. By the 1970s, Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry was shuttling his quarterbacks into the huddle on successful plays, a system that neither Roger Staubach nor Craig Morton appreciated.

But typically, critics—fans and commentators—so often ascribe blame for failure to the workers, not the boss. So the modern coach figuratively calls for a forward pass of the buck. (Once, when coach John McKay was asked what he thought of the on-field “execution” of his forever bumbling Tampa Bay Bucs, a first-year expansion team in 1978, he said, “I’m in favor of it.”)

It is difficult to imagine that, for decades, college football had a rule banning any instructions relayed from the bench—subject to a 10-yard penalty. The NFL, too, had such a prohibition until 1944. The first college coach to use baseball-like signals to telegraph plays from the sideline, in 1967, reportedly was Ohio State’s Woody Hayes. (Not that Hayes’ schemes appeared especially creative with a team known for its predictable “three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust” attack.)

Understandably, coaches seek as much control over developments as possible, given that retaining their jobs depends on winning. A belt-and-suspenders approach therefore has come to predominate. Coaches are electronically attached via headsets to assistants who are doing reconnaissance of the enemy from the press box. Signals are sent from the sidelines on “picture boards”—the photo of a bald-headed celebrity (no hair=no running backs) indicates the formation to the players; a drawing of an elephant might signify as so-called “heavy package” of extra tight-ends for short yardage; pictures of books could telegraph that players “read” the defensive alignment. Coaches wave arms, point fingers, pat their heads to relay instructions.

Plus, of course, there is the ubiquitous sight of the coach peering intently at a large laminated card on which he has various options. (A silly social media post, from some Brits self-styled as the Exploding Heads, just surfaced after the Super Bowl, wherein a English bloke accustomed to soccer wonders at many American football oddities, including, “Why is the coach holding a take-away menu?”)

All this military-like maneuvering, and especially the need for secrecy, of course has intensified after the University of Michigan was accused this past season of stealing opponents’ signs. Prominent NCAA coaches have contended that electronically transmitting commands—coach’s lips-to-player’s-ears—would solve the problem and, after some testing at a few bowl games, ought to be implemented forthwith.

From a stone-age perspective, that sounds like giving the coach a joystick and closing in on Esports.

Then and now

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What are the chances, when Notre Dame and Army renew their long-standing college football quarrel in New York City this coming Fall, that some sports journalist—steeped in history of the sport and of the profession—begins his or her game recap with some twist on “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky….”?

That’s how Grantland Rice commenced his report from the Polo Grounds a hundred years ago, a lede that has been called the most memorable in sportswriting history.

Of course, everything has changed since then—the evolution of sports coverage, mostly away from the “Gee-Whiz” tenor of Rice’s time; the rules and strategies and downright danger of football. This time, the two old rivals will meet at Yankee Stadium, long since Army (6-6 last season) has been a football power. In 1924, Army had lost only twice the previous two seasons and Notre Dame was on its way to a perfect 10-0 record.

They essentially were the two “national” college teams at the time, as Indiana University professor Murray Sperber documented in “Shake Down the Thunder,” his 2002 book that traces the history of Notre Dame football. Furthermore, as Allen Barra wrote in a 1999 New York Times recollection of that ballyhooed match, the 1920s “were the golden age of myth-making sports journalism.” And Grantland Rice was “king of the Gee-Whizzers,” the new breed of sportswriter that trafficked in “the most florid and exciting prose.” (And seen as opposing a more circumspect “Aw Nuts” school of scribes.)

Anyway, the story is that a Notre Dame press assistant happened to liken the 1924 Notre Dame backfield to a recent film, “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” and Rice ran with that ball:

Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army football team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds yesterday afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down on the bewildering panorama spread on the green plain below.

Rice rhapsodized (and maybe embellished) Notre Dame’s dominance—the final score, after all, was a thoroughly competitive 13-7—“through the driving power of one of the greatest backfields that ever churned up the turf of any gridiron in any football age.” Those Notre Dame backs “seemed to carry the mixed blood of the tiger and the antelope,” and when Layden scored the first Notre Dame touchdown, Rice described the 10-yard run “as if he had just been fired from the black mouth of a howitzer.”

Another factor at work that day was what Sperber cited as Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne’s media savvy, an understanding that playing in New York City—which had 11 daily newspapers at the time—was a marketing gold mine (and birthed the school’s so-called Subway Alumni). And Rice, columnist for the New York Herald Tribune whose work was syndicated widely, was “by far the most famous sportswriter of his era,” according to “King Football,” the 2004 book by Oregon State University liberal arts professor Michael Oriard—a former player, by the way, for both Notre Dame and the Kansas City Chiefs.

Rice’s Four Horsemen narrative, for all its poetic use of imagery and spectacle, left wide gaps of information that would not meet current editing standards. He did not use first names of players. He did not provide cumulative statistics such as team or individual yardage gained. His report was vague about when the scoring transpired. There is not a single quote in the piece, from coach or player or official.

That was the fashion then. Just as the exploits of the Horsemen—fullback Jim Crowley, halfbacks Elmer Layden and Don Miller and quarterback Harry Stuhldreher—were decidedly feeble compared to numbers common in today’s wide-open offenses. Stuhldreher threw only 33 passes all season (completing 25), hardly in the same ballpark as 2023 Notre Dame quarterback Sam Hartman’s average of 25 passes and 16 completions per game. Miller was Notre Dame’s leading rusher during the 1924 season with 763 yards, followed by Crowley’s 739, according to Sports-Reference.com. (There are no game statistics available for the Blue-Gray October Sky game.)

Still, as Barra wrote, the rise of college football in the 1920s, to a status in the American sports pantheon just behind Major League Baseball, “coincided with the rise of the sports pages” and “combined to make each other. And both helped to create Grantland Rice.” Even now, that first paragraph in Rice’s Oct. 18, 1924 Herald Tribune tale of the Four Horsemen riding to victory against Army endures in anthologies of sportswriting.

It could be argued that the opening lines are as memorable in the sports journalism universe as some of the great ledes in literature: “Call me Ishmael.” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” “It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

Or this one, from Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five,” which, come to think of it, recalls a certain extravagance in Rice’s account: “All this happened, more or less.”

The NFL bet

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Fifty years ago, the idea of putting the Super Bowl in Las Vegas, coupling the two primary examples of American excess, was as surreal as those two prodigious entities. Mostly because the National Football League—its Super Bowl showcase already out of control in 1974 and proclaimed by a commentator in that year’s host city of Houston to be “the championship of the solar system”—was adamant in its holier-than-thou stance against gambling.

“I would go anywhere,” then-NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle declared during Super Bowl Week of ‘74, “to testify against any proposals favoring legalized betting in pro sports. There is no doubt about the suspicions involved with betting, and we must be above suspicion.”

But here we are. The NFL now gleefully partners with multiple sportsbook operations—MGM, Caesars, FanDuel, DraftKings—has bookmaking establishments inside NFL stadiums that are open on game days, and debuted official NFL slot machines in Vegas days before this year’s big game. Where there is money to be made by the league…

It was right to the point, then, for the New York Times last week to note that the first Super Bowl played in Sin City “feels like a moment manufactured for” Hunter S. Thompson “as Las Vegas furthers the polishing of its image with the imprimatur of the NFL, which has made a seminal turn of its own with a public embrace of the gambling industry.” Thompson, creator of the subjective, first-person narrative he called “gonzo journalism,” attended that 1974 Super Bowl and produced a Rolling Stones magazine article headlined “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl.”

That was a take-off on Thompson’s best-selling 1971 book, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.” And the idea of the Rolling Stones piece was to subject the NFL to Thompson’s critical eye; though he considered himself a football fan, he cast himself as apart from what he saw as the NFL’s self-serving model of integrity.

For Rolling Stone, Thompson wrote that the Super Bowl headquarters hotel in Houston was “jammed with drunken sportswriters, hard-eyed hookers, wandering geeks and hustlers (of almost every persuasion) and a legion of big and small gamblers from all over the country who roamed through the drunken, randy crowd….”

That Super Bowl Week, I spent the better part of one day with Thompson, assigned by my Newsday editor to study the then-36-year-old, slightly bald, bespectacled, casually dressed celebrity author who smoked Benson & Hedges through a cigarette holder. (Not the only thing he smoked.) And the irony was that he appeared to be searching in vain for the Las Vegas cliché of rampant immorality.

During lunch in the lobby of the aforementioned hotel, he muttered about the absolute normality surrounding him. Where were the players and high rollers propositioning prostitutes? He drove me without warning to a dilapidated roadside bar—which appeared to be a topless joint, though not in use for that activity mid-day—but quickly left, with nothing to report.

We spent some time at a Super Bowl practice session for one of the teams—Miami eventually clobbered Minnesota in the dull title game to come—and Thompson decided that “the players almost all strike me as being the same person. I’ve never seen so many boring people.”

Then, as now, the hordes of reporters had no real news to unearth; everything about Super Bowl opponents already has been widely disseminated by the time they gather at the championship site. “I feel like calling my editor and telling him there’s no story here,” Thompson said. “There really isn’t anything happening.”

He subsequently wrote for Rolling Stone, “For eight long and degrading days, I had skulked around Houston with all the other professionals, doing our jobs—which was actually to do nothing at all except drink all the free booze we could pour into our bodies, courtesy of the National Football League, and listen to an endless barrage of some of the lamest and silliest swill ever uttered by man or beast…”

It must be noted that “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was straightforward in Thompson’s depictions of his own drug-induced haze—pill-popping, pot-smoking, tequila-swilling, acid-dropping. And that, in “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl,” he described his “crazed and futile effort to somehow explain the extremely twisted nature of my relationship with God, Nixon and the National Football League…”

The Super Bowl—I covered seven of the extravaganzas—never appeared to reach the level of disreputable behavior perceived by Thompson, though his radar likely was more sensitive to such grotesqueries. The event most definitely is over-the-top—a massive royal ball for the elite, scripted as a morality play of American values and competitiveness, sold as entertainment for the masses—thanks to the reach of television. In short, a voracious money magnet for the league and its partners.

Hunter S. Thompson died in 2005, of suicide. But he appeared to sense, a half-century ago, this just-consummated no-guilt relationship, which nicely fits Sin City’s marketed dispensation that “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” There already are hints that the Super Bowl could return there annually.

If so, they’re made for each other.

Football. And football.

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Pondering big football doings on the horizon…

First, an aside: A long-ago Dallas Cowboys star running back, Duane Thomas, when informed that having starred in the Super Bowl must have been “like going to the moon,” marveled in response, “You been to the moon, man?” Thomas’ reply to assertions that the Super Bowl was the “ultimate game” was similarly restrained. “If it’s the ultimate game,” he said, “how come they’re playing it again next year?”

So, with all due respect to the upcoming Super Bowl, America’s most-watched television event and cultural benchmark, the topic here is the football competition paramount in the eyes of most Earthlings: Soccer’s quadrennial World Cup tournament. And, interestingly, how that event’s return in 2026 to these shores is an example of retrofitting international expectations—physically as well as enthusiastically—into American mores.

Word has just come down that the World Cup championship final will be played on July 19, 2026 at the home stadium of American football’s two New York teams, the Giants and the Jets, in the New Jersey Meadowlands. This is a big deal, and more evidence that football—sorry, soccer—continues to be melded into the U.S. entertainment fabric.

We are well past the time when most of us in The Colonies reflected the great sportswriter Frank Deford’s perception that “USA” stood for “Uninterested in Soccer A-tall.” The 2026 World Cup essentially is guaranteed to set records for attendance and profit, in part because the tournament will be expanded to 48 participating teams, up from 32 in the last seven iterations. For the first time, three nations—the United States, Canada and Mexico—will share hosting duties, with the U.S. getting 78 of the tournament’s 104 matches.

And this time, 32 years since the U.S. staged the 1994 World Cup, the 11 U.S. stadiums in use will feel far less like mongrel soccer facilities, now better equipped to convert their gridirons to pitches to meet global requirements with widened playing surfaces and grass floors.

American football fields, Yank officials had to be reminded back in ’94, are 120 yards long and 53.3 yards wide, while soccer matches are played out on a 115- by- 75-yard layout. On grass; not artificial turf. Back then, before MetLife Stadium replaced Giants Stadium as New York metro’s primary football theatre, officials proposed what sounded like growing hair on a bald man’s head.

The idea was to construct a grass playing field on an elevated platform suspended by a scaffolding almost 12 feet above the permanent floor and extending six or seven rows into the Giants Stadium stands.

By the time World Cup sites officially were awarded then, the goofy platform idea had been ditched and great pallets of sod were trucked in from a North Carolina farm and placed over the fake turf. Likewise, grass was brought from a farm in California to temporarily cover the artificial stuff in the Pontiac Silverdome outside Detroit. (There was a lot of slipping and sliding on that grass inside the roofed Silverdome during the opening game there.)

These days, stadiums routinely cover their plastic grass with the real stuff to hold major soccer events. A Rhode Island outfit—Kingston Turf Farms—advertises having installed sod over the artificial surface for years at MetLife Stadium: “We bring in a crew to truck the specialty sod in, transport the sod to the field and install the sod over specialized turf protection layer…to transform an artificial playing surface to a natural grass surface in a 24-hour period,” Kingston Turf Farms broadcasts on its website.

And to make their field wider to meet soccer standards, MetLife officials plan to remove 1,740 seats, estimating a decrease in capacity from the 83,367 attendees at an October Giants-Jets Game to 74,895.

Of the other 2026 World Cup stadiums in the United States, those in Arlington, Tex.; Atlanta, Foxborough, Mass.; Houston, Inglewood, Calif.; Seattle and Vancouver also will cover their artificial turf with grass. (“Natural grass,” as the often-used redundancy has it.) And several stadiums are expected to figure out some way to widen their playing surfaces.

When international soccer officials granted the United States its first World Cup in 1994, it came with the stipulation that this country would establish an elite professional soccer league and, beginning in 1996, Major League Soccer materialized. And one consequence of that creation was the new league’s rejection of hybrid football/soccer venues. By 1999, the first “soccer-specific” stadium—with a wider field of grass—was opened in Columbus, Ohio and, of the 26 MLS teams now based in the United States, 22 of them compete in such arenas.

Such stadiums, by the way, were the brainchild of Lamar Hunt, an original founding investor in MLS. And a real football guy, however you define “football.” Hunt was a principal founder of the American Football League and of the charter member Dallas Texans. Who became the Kansas City Chiefs, beneficiaries of the 1966 AFL/NFL merger avidly pursued by Hunt.

The same Chiefs, of course, now attempting to win a big game that Lamar Hunt was first to call the “Super Bowl.”