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.”

A big loss

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My heroes have mostly been sports journalists, many of whom lived in a magical land called Sports Illustrated. The spiritual home of literary excellence, compelling narratives and revelatory insight, SI was Frank Deford, Roy Blount Jr., Dan Jenkins, Kenny Moore, Gary Smith and plenty more—and I was among the millions who wanted to participate, on some level, in the fun those people were getting away with.

But goodbye to all that. SI’s slow death in the internet age last year was hastened by the equivalent to committing suicide, when the magazine was accused of using artificial-intelligence-generated stories, complete with fake bylines. That sullied SI’s reputation far more than the cheap grab for attention with its annual swimsuit edition, which never had any more to do with sports and sportswriting than old claims by Playboy faithful that they treasured that publication “for the articles.”

Anyway, with SI’s massive layoffs this month, Valhalla is being boarded up. The money-changers who now own the brand are shutting down a primary nurturing place for future knights of the keyboard—as baseball’s sardonic superstar Ted Williams called reporters so adept at covering the business of competitive duels.

I am reminded of Deford’s observation in his 2012 memoir, “Over Time,” in which he predicted that in a not-too-distance life “no one will appreciate what sportswriting was really like at its apogee. I fear all you’d know would be blogs and/or statistics—the pole dancing of sports journalism.”

For followers of athletic entertainment—which certainly will continue to proliferate—the current ruling beast, ESPN, surely will carry on, along with countless podcasts and squawk-radio outlets. But those don’t give you elaborate storytelling, the kind of crafted writing that made you feel you were at the game and had insight into the participants. As Deford wrote of sites like ESPN, “there’s no poetry in its soul”—none of the kind of enticing prose that moved Sports Illustrated editors to corral such literary giants as John Updike, Jack Kerouac and George Plimpton for the occasional freelance article.

It was another noted SI alum, Pulitzer Prize winner and “Friday Night Lights” author Buzz Bissinger, who recently zeroed in on the great contribution of Sports Illustrated’s murderers’ row of stylish scribes. They showed all of us aspiring wordsmiths, Bissinger wrote, “the difference between sportswriting, a mindless layering of cliché upon cliché, and writing about sports.”

Deford once said that “when people hear you’re a sportswriter, they assume you’re more interested in the first half of the word than the second.” For proof of how the emphasis in fact ought to be on the “writer” part, there was—there used to be—Sports Illustrated.

An early exposure to that point came during my time in the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. Late in my senior year, when I was writing a sports column for the Columbia, Mo., city paper run by our J-School, I was summoned one spring day to fetch a widely-known author from the local airport for his appearance on campus.

That was George Plimpton who, at the time, was considered the most successful novelist to deal with the subject of sports. His “participatory journalism”—he wrote of acting in a Western movie, performing a comedy act at Caesars Palace, playing with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra—got the most attention when he wrote of pitching in a Big League exhibition game, sparring with a couple of boxing champions and, especially, training with the NFL’s Detroit Lions in pre-season camp. He first recounted that experience in a 1964 Sports Illustrated series that became his best-selling book (and later a movie), “Paper Lion.”

During our short drive to campus that day in 1969—Plimpton managed, uncomplaining, to fold his lanky 6-foot-4 body into my subcompact MGB—he said that he “would like to get across the idea that I wouldn’t have tried any of these things if I didn’t have a pencil with me at the time. I’m a writer, and I played on these teams to get closer to the people involved.”

Like the crowds of Sports Illustrated heroes I hoped to model, Plimpton perfected that difference between sportswriting and writing about sports. Sports was merely the backdrop for his intriguing yarns. It was typical Sports Illustrated fare. It was the journalism ideal—producing work that was deeply researched and well told.

Stop the presses!

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Guaranteed: There will be some new revelatory tidbit about Travis Kelce unearthed today. And tomorrow and the next day. People Magazine, BuzzFeed, Page Six, social media were made for that. In a culture mesmerized by celebrity, Kelce has become a primary Person of Interest, and therefore fully exempt from too-much-information grumbling.

His even more prominent girlfriend, his brother of equally elite status in pro football, his star turns on television and pod-casting, his fashion sense and philanthropy—all grist for the rumor and gossip mills.

And still there remain some factoids, consequential or not, to be dug up, even after the exhaustive piece in The Athletic that quoted former college teammates, coaches and roommates to describe what Kelce is really like, chronicling the animal-house existence of him and his brother Jason during their time together at the University of Cincinnati. (“So much beer,” it reported.)

So, in the spirit of flogging a hot topic to death, and with the understanding that there always is more that could be known, herewith some tangential nuggets not yet widely disseminated.

There is, on the Cincinnati campus, a 98-year-old building named Swift Hall. (No relation.) Among the university’s notable graduates are President and Supreme Court Justice William Howard Taft, baseball’s first commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, and trumpeter/bandleader Al Hirt. Not to mention Marge Schott, who once owned the major league Cincinnati Reds and once had her name on the school’s baseball stadium until her racist public remarks and comments supporting policies of the Nazi Party surfaced.

Basketball superstar Oscar Robertson and baseball Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax competed for the university. The first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, taught there late in his life.

In the belief that inquiring minds might not want to know—but ought to—there also is this about the Kelce boys’ college: The athletic nickname is Bearcats, and the burning question is: What is a bearcat?

There is such a thing as a Binturong, which is neither a bear nor a cat—at home in the rainforests of Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Palawan Island—that loosely qualifies in appearance to what could be part bear, part cat. And the word “bearcat” is said to be a simple translation of the Chinese word for panda—xiongmao.

Closer to a University of Cincinnati sports connection is the 1914 tale of the school’s football game against the Kentucky Wildcats, in which a Cincinnati gridder named Leonard (Teddy) Baehr—who was either a linebacker, fullback or lineman, depending on the source—excelled. A Cincinnati cheerleader named Norman Lyon supposedly raised an in-game chant, “Come on, Baehr-cat!” and the crowd joined in.

Or the nickname might be traced to a newspaper cartoon, which appeared after that game, depicting a bedraggled Kentucky Wildcat trying to escape a frightening creature labeled “Cincinnati Bear Cat.” (Might the cartoon have been inspired by the Baehr-cat chant?)

Or another, older origin story credits Cincinnati sports editor Jack Ryder declaring the team “played like bearcats” after a 1910 football loss. Which sounds like Ryder meant the moniker as an insult.

None of this has anything to do with Taylor Swift, who did not attend college but is known to be a cat lover—regular cats—and, during a University of Cincinnati game this fall, the school’s bearcat mascot donned a flowing blonde wig in a poor imitation of Swift (while wearing Kelce’s old No. 18 U. of Cincinnati jersey).

No need to keep your eyes peeled regarding more of this sort of thing popping up, though you can rest assured there will be much, much more to surface, whether Kelce’s Kansas City Chiefs continue to progress through the playoffs or not.

A bit much, maybe. But par for the course in these boldface-name-soaked times. And bearable.

 

Attractive trial balloon

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So Minnesota will run it up the flagpole this spring: a new state banner discarding its previous official seal that many Native Americans found offensive. An added plus to the change is the ditching of a flag cliché employed by more than 20 other states, all centering their insignia on an uninspired solid blue background.

Here’s a salute, then, to the new design. There are reports that it has been greeted by much of the public with a sort of golf applause (polite but hardly raucous), a reminder that widespread opposition to any change is rampant in modern culture. Still, something is afoot here, with a handful of states either having recently re-worked their flags or commissioned a study to do so.

This has my attention as someone who might argue having been a vexillologist before that term for flag aficionado existed. I was in fifth grade in the late 1950s when I mimicked a version of the California state flag by drawing that cool brown bear on an old white bedsheet; it was at least a year later when an American scholar named Whitney Smith was credited with coining vexillology—combining the Latin vexillum (that referred to flags carried by Roman cavalry) with logia for “study.”

Let’s study Minnesota’s search for a redesign. A call for submissions in the fall brought more than 2,600 suggestions—from children’s drawings to professional mockups. They featured stars and loons (the state bird), water (“Land of 10,000 Lakes”) and trees. Plus, there were some not-really-serious (they weren’t serious, were they?) portrayals of the unofficial state bird, the mosquito, and of hot dish, Minnesota’s popular take of the casserole.

Given the sly rejoinder typical among Minnesotans regarding their embrace of the state’s wintry reputation—“It keeps the riff-raff out”—my smart-aleck proposal was to emblazon the new flag with the universal prohibition sign (red circle/backslash symbol) superimposed over a cartoon member of the riff-raff, possibly wearing sunglasses and shorts, surrounded by snowflakes.

My friend Jay, a St. Paul resident, thought we could add an ice fisherman catching a curler through a hole in a lake. Give the guy one of those Elmer Fudd hats with ear flaps and it sounded like a winner.

Listen: New York, my home for a half-century, could stand an upgrade from its flag’s busy combination of sun symbol, two regal-like “supporters,” an eagle and “excelsior” banner, all on a humdrum blue field. How about, instead, an illustration of author Henry Miller’s characterization of New York as “a gigantic infant playing with explosives”?

But, no, this is not some gag. Sarcasm and scorn have no place here. Rhode Islanders, just because their state is 488 times smaller than Alaska and 251 times smaller than Texas, shouldn’t be saddled with a dishrag-sized flag to emphasize that inconsequential fact. You can’t give Idaho a potato logo and leave it at that.

Flag design ought to deal seriously with a state’s self-image and history, while tiptoeing around the dangers of poor design, forgettable images or—as with the former Minnesota gonfalon, offensive scenes of disenfranchised people. (There are 11 federally recognized tribes in the state.)

While Illinois, Michigan and Maine (which has a recent, striking plan for a single pine tree on a yellow field) are contemplating redesigns, Utah has come up with a simplified and eye-catching banner displaying a beehive, symbolizing the industriousness of its Mormon pioneers, backed by snow-capped mountain peaks. It’s simple and unique, like Texas’ lone-star ensign and the flag of New Mexico (a personal favorite), a plain yellow field with red Zia sun, referencing the state’s Indigenous nation.

There are memorable flags for Arizona (red star and sunburst), Alaska (big dipper), Colorado (big red ‘C’ on blue-and-white stripes), Tennessee (red with three white stars in a blue circle), Maryland (a jumble of red-and-white colliding with black and gold). Not great, but OK. Certainly different. Plus, of course, there is California’s distinct look.

Most state flags, though, are dull, barely recognizable from a distance or too similar to their neighbors’ (Florida and Alabama, both white with red X patterns).

Minnesota has the right idea. Working with a base design contributed by a 24-year-old man on the state’s southwestern border with Iowa and South Dakota, the State Emblem Redesign Commission, which spent $35,000 on the flag facelift project, came up with a final version that evokes the state motto—the North Star, positioned on a stylized depiction of the state’s shape and a nod to Minnesota’s waterworks, its 10,000 lakes and its source of the great Mississippi River.

Ted Kaye, a real vexillologist (secretary of the North American Vexillological Association), has given the new Minnesota flag an A+ for its simplicity, uniqueness and inclusion of meaningful symbols.

Thrown against the wall and sticking?

War (and) Games

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Let’s say you’re an optimist. In late November, United Nations members overwhelmingly passed an International Olympic Committee resolution calling for the worldwide cessation of violence during the two weeks of next summer’s Paris Olympic Games. Uplifting, no?

It’s called the Olympic Truce, a tradition first invoked 1,247 years ago—776 B.C.—when Greece’s warring rival city-states agreed to suspend all fighting to stage the first of the ancient Olympics’ elaborate sporting festivals. Merely a time out from butchery, but a ray of hope.

Let’s say you’re a pessimist. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has now been raging for almost two years, an aggression that in fact began with the annexation of Crimea in 2014. The recent Israeli-Hamas truce fell apart just days after it was implemented and fears of an expanded and brutal Middle East war persist. Can a collection of international sports poohbahs really expect to somehow put the brakes on these things?

Or, to cut that baby in half, what if the best you can expect is pragmatism?

In 2000, the Olympic Truce Centre was formally established in Athens and veteran diplomat and human rights activist Stavros Lambrinidis was named director. “We are not claiming to have a magic wand, where governments and religious organizations have failed,” Lambrinidis, now European Union ambassador to the United States, said when the Games returned to their ancient birthplace in 2004. “We hope to communicate to the world during the biggest peaceful celebration of humanity, where 12 more countries are members [of the IOC] than the United Nations, that with every representative in the stadium, of every religion, every color, every political point of view, you cannot fight and play at the same time. You can’t.

“You shouldn’t send some of your youth to play and some of your youth to die.”

Before the Truce Centre debuted, Olympic officials regularly had pitched the old call to give peace a chance—at least during the couple of weeks of their global athletic competition—with the slight possibility that all the world’s leaders and policy makers might like the idea.

In 1992 for the Barcelona Summer Games, the IOC cited its Truce tradition to grant Olympic status to Bosnia-Herzegovina, the breakaway Yugoslavia republic that was then taking a beating from the Serbs in their bloody civil war. Two years later, during Opening Ceremonies at the Lillehammer Winter Games, the IOC got a one-day pause in the ongoing Yugoslav war to allow 10,000 children from both sides of the conflict to be inoculated.

Then-IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch, in an unusual plea at the Lillehammer Opening Ceremonies, asked on-site spectators “and even those watching from your homes” to stand for a moment of silence for former Yugoslav city of Sarajevo, which had hosted the 1984 Winter Games, “whose people for over two years have suffered too much.

“Please,” Samaranch begged, “stop fighting. Please, stop killing. Drop your guns, please.”

No such thing happened for another year. In 1998, the Clinton administration was pressured to delay bombing raids in Iraq during the 1998 Nagano Winter Games. The Bush administration likewise was convinced to temporarily cease attacks on Afghanistan during the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. Neither of those military halts was permanent. And among the contradictory Olympic messages is how its Opening Ceremonies typically feature both a symbolic release of the “doves of peace”—and a military flyover. Not to mention the Games’ rampant nationalism even as they offer a brief alternative of play.

“I understand the cynicism,” Truce Centre director Lambrinidis said at the 2004 Athens Olympics. “This is a hard world. If it were a loving, peaceful world, you wouldn’t need an Olympic Truce. I’m willing to talk to any cynic—who, usually, by the way, are closet romantics. Is this a partly romantic appeal? Absolutely. Is it unrealistic? Absolutely not. The question is whether you can be a hard-headed realist and do some good. The question is: Do world leaders want to take this and run with it?”

He called himself “a convert” to the Olympic Truce tradition, a belief that beyond providing merely a diversion from bad news in the real world, it is an attempt to confront what is behind the discouraging front-page headlines. “The fact that the war doesn’t stop is not proof the Olympics Truce doesn’t work,” he said. “Whether it will stop wars for 16 days is not a legitimate yardstick.

“The power of this is that it’s not just a call for one more truce; it’s tied to an event in which every county in the world wishes to participate. You must create not just a police shield, but a moral shield around the Games that exercises public-relations pressure, even on non-state actors. Why treat terrorists as differently?

“It is not our job to decide what is a legitimate conflict and what isn’t, or whether a war is for self-defense or not. And these are Games for the youth of the world. You cannot punish the youth of the world for the sins of their leaders. We cannot use the stick approach, but we can use the carrot.”

Shutout

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Well, I almost spoke to Henry Kissinger once. Not about his Secretary of State career nor engineering the Unites States’ opening to China, nor negotiating the American military exit from Vietnam, nor reshaping U.S. relationships with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, nor creating a legacy that, upon his death at 100, is being described as both enormously powerful and not-a-little hypocritical.

No, no. It was about soccer. And, anyway, he didn’t come to the phone.

This was in early 1990 and was related to the efforts of a South African-born son of German and Scottish parents who at the time lived in England but was attempting to cut through some red tape to expedite his naturalization as a U.S. citizen. The urgency was for the fellow to be eligible to play for the Yanks’ side in that summer’s World Cup.

Sounded like the kind of thing a world-famous strong-armed diplomat such as Kissinger could fix, no?

The athlete in question was Roy Wegerle, then 25 years old. Wegerle believed that, based on various national connections, he should be permitted to choose his “home team” among (then-West) Germany, Scotland or England—all of which had qualified for the quadrennial soccer championship. Yet he preferred wearing the U.S. colors because he was married to an American woman, whom he had met when both were students at the University of South Florida, and he intended to settle on these shores. Unsaid—and maybe not to the point, but true nevertheless—talent was much thinner on the U.S. side and therefore Wegerle’s best bet to see plenty of playing time.

What I knew those days about Kissinger, beyond the obvious—that he was a shaker and mover known for getting his way—was that he once said world soccer politics “make me nostalgic for the Middle East.” Described as the “No. 1 U.S. soccer fan” before the sport really caught on in the States, Kissinger served as chairman of the board of the old North American Soccer League, which gained sudden attention in the late 1970s when the sport’s legendary Brazilian Pele finished his career with the New York Cosmos. He was convinced to take that leap, Pele said, by Kissinger, who once compared the game to warfare—and also ballet.

There meanwhile was an NASL tie to Wegerle, who had signed his first professional contract with the Tampa Bay franchise right out of college.

I was not aware, until reading it in last week’s New York Times obituary, that Kissinger—as a young lad in his native Germany just as Hitler was ratcheting up the Holocaust machinery—was so “passionate about soccer….that he risked confrontations with Nazi toughs to see games even after signs had gone up at one stadium declaring ‘Juden Verboten.’”

So, as the opening of that ’90 World Cup approached, the word was out that Kissinger would be the ideal person to expedite Wegerle’s naturalization. Because Wegerle’s wedding had occurred in July of 1987, that left him one month short of eligibility for U.S. citizenship in time for ’90 Cup’s early June start.

Oddly, though Wegerle was meanwhile thriving in the English Premier League as a proven scoring threat for London’s Queens Park Rangers, U.S. national team coach Bob Gansler was noticeably cool to welcoming Wegerle aboard.  Besides, immigration lawyers weren’t sure Wegerle’s green card would be valid since he had been living and working outside the United States for almost four years.

Anyway, with the U.S. national soccer team among my Newsday assignments, it was time for a phone call to Kissinger Associates, the New York City-based international geopolitical consulting firm which had been founded and run since 1982 by the former Secretary of State and former National Security Advisor.

Didn’t get past his spokeswoman, though. She made it clear that Kissinger had better things to do (and more important people to talk to), saying that the Wegerle situation was “not something he would get involved in.”

So: Close but no cigar.

Wegerle did become an American citizen within a couple of years and did play for the U.S. national team (for 14 years) and did appear in two World Cups with the Yanks (in 1994 and ’98), then turned to professional golf.

But I really did speak to Pele a couple of times.

Nov. 22 (a long time ago)

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Surely it is ironic that I and my fellow high school journalism students—theoretically the news hounds of the future—were among the last to get the word on Nov. 22, 1963. Because our classroom’s intercom unit was on the blink, we blithely wandered into the cafeteria for lunch, puzzled by the atmosphere there that was somewhere between frenzy and dumb bewilderment, with no clue that President John Kennedy had just been shot.

Even now, 60 years later—sixty!—what transpired then feels a bit like a teenagers’ warped gag: Whaddya think about Kennedy being shot? (Yeh, right.)

This was in Hobbs, N.M., my junior year. A Friday. Even more surreal than the day’s unsettling news, it shortly was determined—not too long after Walter Cronkite solemnly removed his spectacles and confirmed on national television that Kennedy had died—that the evening’s football game between us Hobbs Eagles and the visiting lads from nearby Roswell would go on as scheduled. We were told that Kennedy would have wanted it that way, though it occurred to me that Hobbs High School officials could not have discussed this with the President either before, and certainly not after, his demise.

We lost the game. I didn’t play a down and went home to watch TV reports on the day’s events as well as historical references to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination 98 years earlier. Then, weirdness squared, I was among the millions of citizens watching the tube two days later when Kennedy’s accused killer, a U.S. Marine veteran and defector to the Soviet Union named Lee Harvey Oswald, was murdered by strip-club owner Jack Ruby in the Dallas police station garage as the cameras rolled. All of this, it should be noted, long before America’s growing embrace of the gun culture.

Now, with another anniversary of that spooky weekend upon us, and with Kennedy’s fact-challenged nephew Robert Jr. currently attempting a nonsensical Presidential campaign, a vague mood of disbelief endures. (A related moment of disorientation happened in early June of 1968, when I was wakened by a radio report that Bobby Kennedy had been shot dead after a political appearance. “Dummies,” I remember thinking, half-conscious, “that was John Kennedy—and it was five years ago!”)

It now has been 30 years since a business trip to Dallas facilitated my visit to the orange-brick Texas School Book Depository, where the sixth-floor corner window was still ajar above Dealey Plaza. From that window, Oswald—using a scope on his rifle in his so-called “sniper’s perch”—fired as the Presidential motorcade, creeping toward him up Houston Street, slowed to take a sharp left turn below, onto Elm. Just 265 feet away.

I was with a journalism colleague that 1993 day, determined to trace some key movements of Nov. 22, 1963. From the sniper’s perch, by then transformed into a museum, we took the short drive to the hospital where Kennedy had been whisked and, like Oswald two days later, was pronounced dead; then to the city’s Municipal Building where Oswald, like Ruby two days later, was locked in the same cell. (A kindly policewoman, who gave us a tour of the place, asked if we were interested in seeing where Ruby was shot. Her sly answer, pointing to her stomach, was “right here.”)

I naturally had seen the Zapruder film, the silent 8mm color home movie shot by a Ukrainian-born American clothing manufacturer who accidentally captured the instant of the President’s assassination. I had heard the conspiracy theories about the grassy knoll and a second shooter. Whatever; Kennedy was long gone and there was no going back.

Except it was natural enough to think what the country and the world might have been like if Kennedy had lived. And in 2011, I read Stephen King’s novel 11/22/63, drawn to it not such much as a hard-core history buff but curious about possible new insights into yet another day in infamy.

King’s tome, almost 900 pages, proved to be as phantasmagorical as the happenings in November ’63—which should have occurred to me, given King’s art form: horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, fantasy. It’s far too late for a spoiler-alert review, but King’s plot involved an English teacher who travels back through time in an attempt to prevent the Kennedy assassination.

I won’t tell how the book came out. Except to affirm that Kennedy is still dead. (Sixty years!)

Everlasting Moby Fumble

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Might this suggest immortality? Veteran sportswriter Mark Whicker, in an early October edition of his regular The Morning After posts that address various developments in the sports world, cited a memorably bizarre last-minute event in a 1978 NFL game that he said “became known as “Moby Fumble….”

Hey! That’s what I labeled it back then. It lives on?!

Whicker was comparing a recent case of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory—Miami University’s turnover with 24 seconds to play earlier this season that gifted Georgia Tech the decisive score—to the enormous blunder, 45 years earlier, by the New York Giants. In ’78, the Giants—ahead by five points with ball possession, no time outs remaining, the clock running down from 20 seconds—chose not to have their quarterback take a knee and bollixed a handoff that instantly resulted in a Philadelphia Eagles return for the winning score.

A whale of an error. So: Moby Fumble.

It was a thing of such enormous negligence, so thoroughly illogical, and Whicker noted that it “hadn’t been seen again” until the ghastly Miami-Georgia Tech finish. He resurrected my appellation from my days as Giants’ beat writer for Long Island’s Newsday. (Well, he also noted that, in Philadelphia, the positive spin on such an unlikely turn had been “The Miracle of the Meadowlands”—that’s where the game was played).

It is not common for some lowly wordsmith to coin a phrase—much less one that endures. The fleeting impact of a journalist’s wordplay is such that Norm Miller, a colleague on the Giants beat with the Daily News at the time, often reminded of newspapers’ day-after use: Fishwrappers. Perfect for keeping your fish-and-chips warm and absorbing grease.

Not that that truth stopped us scribblers in our Ahab-like maniacal quest to hunt down illusive word pictures.

Because the apparent doofus-ness of the Giants’ play selection on that long-ago day, to attempt a handoff—when they literally could have sat out the final seconds—my original description of the moment was “The Most Incredible Play Call (And Fumble).” Not so catchy and far too wordy, but none of the Giants players—certainly not quarterback Joe Pisarcik—had agreed with such a lulu of a strategy, and the assistant who called the play that Sunday, Bob Gibson, was fired on Monday.

That same day, I was perusing my book shelf, stalled in preparing to file a follow-up report, and stumbled onto Herman Melville’s acclaimed novel. Nothing to do with football, but an example, certainly, of the futility of the human struggle in a senseless world. Thus the first draft to appear in Newsday: “Moby Fumble (Thar the Giants blow it!).”

From that game’s theatre-of-the-absurd conclusion, the far-reaching repercussions meant another title had to be conjured to encapsulate what the one play had wrought. A week after the assistant coach’s quick dismissal, the team debuted what has come to be known as the “victory formation,” wherein three players are positioned tightly around the quarterback, circling the wagons for a static hike-and-kneel-down motion. Too late for those Giants. Both the head coach, John McVay, and the general manager, old Giants playing hero Andy Robustelli, were gone at the end of the season. The entire organization, leveled by a single blow, had to be rebuilt.

I felt compelled to offer some other allusions of the fumble’s affect as the gathering storm played out: “The Archduke’s Assassination.” “The Big Ooops.” “The Great Stumblebum Play.” But to get right to the point, just: Moby Fumble.

Everlasting? Destined to live in perpetuity? Doubtful. And I was just Ishmael, the narrator. But call me grateful for Mark Whicker’s little recollection.

The final score….

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So many sportswriting colleagues knew Bobby Knight far better than I, and many found him to be as brilliant and charming as he was intimidating and derisive. Can’t say I’m jealous at having missed out on more exposure to the man. What I witnessed during Knight’s infamously antagonistic behavior during the 1979 Pan American Games in San Juan, Puerto Rico, as well as glancing brushes with his hostility at a few NCAA tournament stops, was quite enough exposure to bullying, demeaning treatment of others: players, women, reporters, officials, et al.

Knight, who died at 83 on Nov. 1, was an enormously successful basketball coach, three times national champion at the University of Indiana and ranked No. 1 in career Division I victories at the time of his 2008 retirement. He was praised widely for sticking to recruiting rules and insisting that his player attend class.

But he was a Professor of Conquest who based his worth on being a winner, and was regularly forgiven his toxic conduct by fellow coaches and basketball administrators because his teams could put the most points on the board. That, in spite of his being publicly and regularly profane, all fury and outrage when things didn’t go his way and never willing to take blame if they didn’t.

Furthermore, he felt put-upon, even when given thoroughly evenhanded evaluations. In a comprehensive 1981 treatment of Knight’s plusses and minuses, Sports Illustrated’s master of human profiles, Frank Deford, cited Knight’s dismissive take on sportswriters (and, by extension, everyone else) with Knight’s argument that “all of us learn to write by the second grade, then most of us go on to other things.”

“At the base of everything,” Deford wrote, “this is it: If you’re not part of basketball, you can’t really belong, you can only distort.”

In other words: Who are you to criticize the winningest coach around?

Given uncommon access to Indiana’s daily hoops operation in the 1985-86 season, Washington Post reporter John Feinstein produced the best-selling book “A Season On the Brink” in which he presented Knight’s detailed game preparations, his high expectations of player deportment (something of an irony, given their coach), his demanding training sessions as well as his huge popularity among Indiana fans.

But, since Feinstein also faithfully recorded Knight’s well-known use of obscenities (though Feinstein downplayed that a bit) and other obvious foibles, Knight accused Feinstein of being “a whore and a pimp.” To which Feinstein, a man of wit and not easily cowed, reacted: “I wish he’d make up his mind so I’d know how to dress.”

“Too many media folks deified him by virtue of his championships and, to a lesser extent, his graduation record,” veteran New York sportswriter Harvey Araton posted upon Knight’s death. “But as the financial rewards created by revenue-producing college sports grew along with his stature, he became what Coach simply cannot be—the most powerful man on campus, subservient to no one. His self-righteousness ultimately consumed all that he was.”

So about the ’79 Pan Am Games. Right out of the box, Knight assumed a superior badgering attitude, bickering with officials from Puerto Rico and Mexico throughout the opening U.S. game against the outmanned Virgin Islands team.

With seven minutes to play in a 136-88 rout by the Yanks, Knight loudly whined about a measly U.S. charging foul and was ejected, leading to a hasty meeting of international basketball authorities the next day to reprimand Knight. Though several U.S. hoops bigwigs refused to condemn Knight, basketball delegates from several Latin American nations flatly branded Knight “the ugly American” and the U.S. Olympic Committee president, Bob Kane, admitted he felt “there is a certain amount of noblesse oblige necessary” from his delegation.

That was before Knight was arrested at a training session for slurring the Brazilian women’s team and getting into a scuffle with a Puerto Rican policeman; before Knight declared that “the only people on this whole goddamn island I care about are my players;” before Knight told a U.S. journalist, whom he assumed to be a local reporter, that “I don’t talk to Puerto Ricans;” before he insulted the natives by saying that “all they know how to do on this damn island is grow bananas.” (Not only a demeaning statement, but inaccurate; Puerto Rico never was known for banana production.)

Knight then justified everything he had done and said, following the United States’ gold-medal victory over host Puerto Rico, by declaring, “I just know we are nine-and-oh [wins and losses] down here. I’m not a diplomat. I don’t know anything about foreign policy. [A worker at the village] told me that when the U.S. picked me to coach, he knew the U.S. had come to win. Well, that’s what we did.”

Worse, Knight would not cease and desist with his rude comments regarding that competition and its hosts. Three years later, at an event sponsored by a hospital in Gary, Ind., Knight told the audience that as he left Puerto Rico, “when the plane was taxiing onto the runway and taking off, I stood up, unzipped my pants, lowered my shorts and turned my bare ass to the window of that plane—because that’s the last thing I wanted those people to see of me.”

Deford wrote in 1981, “Although it’s fashionable to say Knight rules by intimidation, he actually rules more by derision. He abuses the people he comes into contact with…”

Knight and U.S. basketball decision-makers insisted the anecdote in Gary was “just a joke, and dismissed the Hispanic organizations that were calling Knight a racist and demanding he not be kept as the Americans’ 1984 Olympic coach. Ed Steitz, who was president of the U.S. basketball federation, insisted, “We’re not about to tell Bobby Knight, ‘You can’t say this or that.’ He’s a coach of great renown. There is no way we’ll reconsider Bobby Knight’s appointment as U.S. Olympic basketball coach for 1984. We’re convinced he’s the right man to win the gold medal.”

He did win that gold medal. But in the end, that wasn’t the only thing noted in his obituaries. In the end, it wasn’t just about basketball victories.

Give ’em a break

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Here’s a workable definition of Olympic sports: Activities that are (usually) interesting to watch but virtually impossible to perform by the ordinary citizen. Ever try pole vaulting? Fencing? Marathoning? Weightlifting?

The fast-approaching 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris will provide a new example: Breakdancing. Let’s see what you have to offer in that discipline before dismissing it as not being a real sport.

Wikipedia—not that you want to put all your faith in that ubiquitous online site—declares that Olympic entry is limited to sports “based on athleticism or physical dexterity.” Which certainly would qualify breakdancing, though it should be noted that chess and bridge are among the organizations that have petitioned for Olympic recognition.

As a veteran sports journalist who has covered 11 Olympic Games, I am accustomed to—and fascinated by—the ongoing arguments and maneuvering over which endeavors deserve Olympic inclusion.

In his enlightening Sports Illustrated report on the 1972 Olympic Marathon, in which he finished fourth, Kenny Moore noted that even some athletes sometimes questioned the comparative validity of fellow participants. Moore quoted an American rower contending he found it “hard to call people in yachting, equestrian and maybe shooting real Olympians. In my mind an Olympian is an individual who approaches the limits of human performance. That entails enduring a kind of pain that you don’t get riding in a sailboat.”

There have been arguments that Olympic poohbahs ought to raise the drawbridge and refuse to let in any more events. And, indeed, the Games have been struggling with the problem of gigantism for some time—how to organize and fund a 17-day festival which, in its Summer iteration, must accommodate in excess of 11,000 participants, with all the attendant issues of facilities, housing, transportation and so on.

Opposition exists to welcoming perceived “trash sports”—except: who defines what is a trash sport? Might that be any exhibition staged solely for the purpose of being televised, featuring participants whose only qualification is being celebrities? It must be acknowledged that there is no doubt the Olympics is bullish on getting more eyeballs, reaching new fans and thereby banking more TV money.

There have been efforts, for a long time, to get ballroom dancing into the Games—an activity which, frankly, doesn’t seem to be as physically demanding as breakdancing, since ballroom dancers never spin on their heads or strike one-arm handstands. And what about bocce? Bowling? Aerobics? All of them are interested in inclusion.

If sport climbing, rugby and surfing—all new Olympic sports—were lumped under one umbrella of competition, along with the proposed acceptance of cricket, flag football, lacrosse and squash, they could fit the generic description once suggested by a fellow Olympic reporter: Horsing Around.

Times change. Croquet was in the 1900 Paris Games. (And featured the first appearance of women in the modern Olympics.) Golf showed up in 1900 and ’04, then disappeared until 2016. Jeu de Paume, forerunner to modern tennis, was in the 1908 London Games. Motor boating was included in 1904 and ’08. Polo from 1900 through 1936, when the gold-medal final drew 45,000 spectators. Tug of War—now, that entails more pain than riding in a sailboat—was contested from 1900 through 1920.

It could be argued that opposition to some sports is a function of close-minded, provincial judgement that fails to take in different regional tastes and cultural influences. Table tennis? Big in Korea, as is badminton in China, field hockey in the Netherlands and Germany, volleyball in Brazil. Taekwondo, introduced at the ’88 Seoul Games, is widely followed in Korea. Cricket, returning to the Games in 2028 after a 128-year absence, originally was spread by the world-conquering British empire and now has a rabid following throughout South Asia; any India vs. Pakistan cricket match is of Super Bowl importance to citizens of those nations. The only sport more popular in more countries than cricket is soccer.

And the major reason that American football never has been part of the Olympic show is because only one nation embraces it as its No. 1 sport. So it’s not as if there is no reason or rhyme to Olympic acceptance of sports.

Back to Wikipedia, which considers sport to be “any form of physical activity or game, often competitive and organized, that aims to use, maintain or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants and, in some cases, entertainment to spectators.”

So bring on breakdancing, which originated in the Black and Puerto Rican communities of New York City and has expanded globally, promoted by the World Dance Sport Federation. It is road tested, with an array of organizations and competitors “from Switzerland to Kazakhstan” at a recent international competition, according to ESPN.

No need to be fully conversant in breakdancing lingo—toprocks, downrocks, freezes and so on. If you must, think of it as another elite form of horsing around. It’s going to be interesting to watch.