Just in case….

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One circumstance to send journalists scrambling is the sudden discovery that a person of significant accomplishment is seriously ill at a relatively young age. Mary Lou Retton, the 1984 Olympic gymnastics champion who became a household name at 16, is now only 55, but when her daughter announced that Retton was “fighting for her life” against a rare form of pneumonia, the need to prepare a public account of Retton’s life took on great urgency.

It is one thing when superstars and politicians creep into their 70s and 80s and it becomes due diligence to cobble together a chronicle of their unique place in the parade of humanity. As a major newspaper editor once put it, “You would not want to write Hugh Hefner’s obituary on deadline.”

Failing to prepare is preparing to fail. Which is why pre-written obituaries are common in the news business, often supplemented with an interview of the not-yet-departed while he or she is still with us. Organizations such as the Associated Press, aware of average life-expectancy statistics, have hundreds of obits ready on Known People of a certain vintage, including the most prominent members of the Royal Family and the two living Beatles. The New York Daily News’ obituary of Rosa Park, published upon her death at 92 in 2005, had been written more than decade earlier.

But the other scenario is the unanticipated fatality—John Kennedy, Jr., or Princess Diana, as examples—that leaves news outlets frantically piecing together life-story details for swift publication. And here was Retton, something of a sports/marketing giant (though she is only 4-foot-9), abruptly becoming a candidate for a gone-but-not-forgotten review.

Retton’s star turn was brief but of considerable consequence. Her gold medal victory at the ’84 Los Angeles Games was the first by an American female in the Olympic gymnastics all-around individual competition—her sport’s glamor event. That landed her image on boxes of Wheaties, the self-proclaimed “Breakfast of Champions” that had been similarly featuring sports superstars for 50 years. But, before Retton, only men.

Her lightning strike on American gymnastics inspired waves of young girls to take up the sport and eventually led to U.S. women owning the event for the past five Olympics. Previous to Retton, in the eight Olympics in which women’s gymnastics had been contested, competitors from Eastern bloc nations won every all-around gold.

It didn’t hurt Retton that the old Soviet Union, whose athletes had won five of those earlier titles, had boycotted the L.A. Games amid Cold War tensions. And Retton’s impact was boosted by the fact that more than 180 million Americans watched at least part of the ’84 Olympics on TV, precipitating bidding wars among networks for future Olympic rights.

Whatever. Retton’s rollicking Olympic success established her as a boldface name, a cultural figure, in part because she didn’t quite fit the norm. Women’s gymnastics already had evolved into a showplace for girls in their tweens, acrobatic little tykes with nerves of steel.

Retton had been animated by watching the Olympic perfection, eight years earlier, of Romania’s Nadia Comaneci, and her only evidence of anxiousness regarding the dangers of derring-do gym routines was that she bit her nails. But it was Retton’s coach, Romanian defector Bela Karolyi—who had burst onto the international scene as Comaneci’s coach—who identified an evolution in Retton’s style. “You’re not a butterfly,” he told her.

Though only 94 pounds, Retton was built more for strength than speed. Rather than trafficking in the traditional stringy gymnastic grace, she commanded the spotlight with flash more than frills. She was described by USA Today’s veteran Olympic reporter Christine Brennan as “an ever-smiling 16-year-old tomboy, a tiny fullback in a gymnast’s leotard.”

Plus, she was a quick study, making her first big splash at New York’s Madison Square Garden a year before the Olympics by scoring a perfect 10 with a floor exercise introduced to her by Karolyi just five days earlier. She won her Olympic gold a mere five weeks after undergoing arthroscopic surgery for torn knee cartilage.

She retired from the sport just two years later but remained a spokeswoman for various products, a motivational speaker and a recognizable personality on various TV shows. She married, had four children and divorced. She forever was in demand for public recollections of those ’84 Olympics, calling herself “the old pioneer,” and for years topped polls establishing her as the public’s favorite athlete.

There was this moment midway through 1984 L.A. Games when Retton wandered into a newsstand and was flabbergasted by how sprinter/long jumper Carl Lewis, who won four gold medals in track and field, seemed to have become the face of those Olympics. “Gol-lee!” she exclaimed. “Carl Lewis is on the cover of both Time and Newsweek!” By the end of the 17-day festival, she had joined him. And become “America’s Sweetheart.”

Just days after October 2023 reports that Retton was “fighting for her life” came news that she was showing “remarkable progress” in her recovery. So no need for that obituary yet. And while no one gets to write his or her own ending, Retton long ago provided plenty of background for news hounds.

Another new kid on the block

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Perhaps we could emphasize Da’vian Kimbrough’s uncommon situation—this summer, the 13-year-old California lad became the youngest person to sign a professional soccer contract—from a demographic standpoint. According to sociologists who study such vague and unofficial designations, Kimbrough, born in 2010 and having just missed Generation Z, appears to qualify as a member of something called the Alpha Generation.

That puts him quite apart from Japan’s 56-year-old Kazuyoshi Miura, reportedly the oldest still-active soccer pro in the world, who is on the Generation X roster. Italian keeper Gianluigi Buffon, still going strong at 45, is at the most recent end of the X crowd. And there’s Argentine superstar Lionel Messi, 36. A Millennial. Or Gen Y’er.

And as long as we’re throwing these inexact labels around, might the Alpha-Gen Kimbrough now be marked as an up-and-coming Alpha Male, defined as a fellow tending to assume a dominant or domineering role in his chosen field.

For context, consider the case of Freddy Adu.

In late 2003, Freddy Adu similarly was summoned from the kids’ table to join the grownups. He was 14, signed by D.C. United of Major League Soccer, which made him, at the time, the youngest soccer pro ever. (In keeping with the generational thing, Adu, now 34 and retired from the sport, is a Y.)

Unlike Kimbrough, whose contract agreement with the Sacramento Republic of the second-tier United Soccer League was not widely reported, Adu was introduced at a New York City press conference months before his first game with United. He was guaranteed a $500,000 salary, highest among MLS’ 240 players at the time, and had a $1 million Nike endorsement deal but reminded that “I am just a kid” and that his mother probably would drive him to team practices.

Adu was welcomed to the sport by no less than soccer’s all-time wizard, Pele, who declared that Adu reminded him of the genius composer Mozart, “who started when he was 5 years old,” Pele noted.

(Pele was of the Silent Generation, by the way, which followed the Greatest Generation and led to Baby Boomers, which came before…. Well, point made. Mozart, who lived in the late 1700s, apparently missed the Awakening Generation and is more accurately situated in the Classical Period of music eras—between the Baroque and Romantic periods. But that’s another ballgame.)

Anyway, Adu’s own status as a prodigy quickly appeared to have legs. In his April 2004 MLS debut, Adu became the youngest athlete to participate in a major U.S. professional team sport since a pup named Fred Chapman, at 14, pitched for Major League Baseball’s Philadelphia Athletics 117 years earlier.

Chapman never played another Big League game, but Adu, in his second game, drew a national TV audience and sell-out crowd to Washington’s RFK Stadium. In his third game, against the MetroStars at the old Giants Stadium, Adu scored his first goal—and said he would celebrate by just hanging out with his mom.

He did not go on to enduring Mozart- or Pele-like greatness, playing in a handful of tournaments with the U.S. National Team but mostly spending his 15-year career with lower-level teams in Europe, though he wound up with a reported net worth of $12 million.

Kimbrough has not yet played a game for Sacramento, instead assigned to the club’s youth development academy. Between Adu and Kimbrough, a couple of other 14-year-olds—Francis Jacobs, in 2019, and Maximo Carrizo, in 2022, slightly lowered the age of youngest to sign pro soccer deals, though they also remain with their team’s youth programs.

Of course, all these wunderkind developments spice the ever-evolving world of sports. And they remind the rest of us, and probably Kazuyoshi Miura, of bygone generations.

 

Been there, and been done in like that

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If you are old enough—and I certainly am—you might recall a New York Giants’ loss strikingly similar to this season’s 0-40 opening-night shellacking administered by the Dallas Cowboys. Worse, even. Fifty years ago, the Giants were bludgeoned by the then-Oakland Raiders, 42-0.

It could be said that the Giants’ current co-tenants in their New Jersey stadium, the Jets (who likewise have fancied themselves a post-season contender), were not the only team to immediately reveal a certain Achilles heel.

An aside here from the Book of Ecclesiastes (not that there is anything spiritual about the business of professional football): “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

Well, OK, some things are new, or at least a variation on the theme. In ’73, the Giants’ president was Wellington Mara; since his death in 2005, his son John has been the boss, though both at times have been criticized by so-called loyal fans for being too loyal to long-time Giants associates.

In ’73, the Giants entered that Raiders game amid an inferno of a season and had long before abandoned all hope; they were 1-5-1 on the way to 2-11-1. By contrast, the 2023 Giants, before crashing and burning against the Cowboys, were talking about playing deep into January. And, after their comeuppance, insisted they have time to effectively deal with their damaged psyche.

Another significant difference: In 1973, the Raiders still made California their home and the National Football League still marketed its devout campaign against sports betting; now, of course, the Raiders are based in Las Vegas, the world’s gambling capital, and the league gleefully partners with several sportsbook operations.

There is overwhelming evidence that the practice of prognostication is essentially doomed and a pretty good example of addiction. Unless, that is, there is no money involved. Back in the antediluvian days of 1973, Wellington Mara would engage in weekly sessions with his sons, John and Chris, picking winners of the upcoming games. Just for fun, though they would employ those Vegas betting odds. Going into Oakland for the Nov. 4 game, Wellington—either having lost faith in his ’73 team or simply having begun to smarten up about its chances—liked the Raiders minus 11 points. (He wound up having 31 points to spare.)

The Giants coach then was Alex Webster, a former star back for the team and a fellow much admired by Wellington Mara. And Webster—in the room for that guessing game among the Maras—reportedly laughed in a good-natured way at Wellington’s prediction. Not taking it personally, apparently.

During that season’s slog, Mara had made it clear on several occasions that he would not fire Webster and Webster confirmed that he and the boss had “an agreement that I will step down myself if I feel I’m not doing the job.” (Whether he was pushed of jumped, Webster in fact was gone at the end of the season.)

After the Raiders had stomped the Giants the way California winegrowers dealt with grapes, Raider coach John Madden—remember, this was 50 years ago—was stunned by how easy it had been. “They must be a better team than that,” Madden said then. “We really could have scored many more points.”

Unlike the reaction of 2023 Giants players, with their circle-the-wagon assurances that they are capable of avoiding being 0-40 clobberees again, the ’73 Giants players’ 0-42 loss merely intensified a building dyspeptic, churlish in-house mood. Tight end Bob Tucker, who failed to catch a pass for the first time in 47 consecutive games, called his teammates “a bunch of quitters.” Defensive tackle Carter Campbell lamented that “people were laughing at us.” Assistant coach Jim Garrett declared that “there is a distinct need for leadership on this team, to say the least.”

Garrett, of course, would have his own leadership questioned years later when, as head coach of Columbia University in 1985, he called his players “drug-addicted losers.” (He wound up resigning at the end of that season before he could be fired.)

All right. The sun will come up tomorrow. Will there be anything new on the horizon for this New York team?

Miraculous staying power

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Do you believe in nostalgia?

Visit Lake Placid, N.Y., and you will be immersed in countless references, souvenirs and images recalling the moment in sports history when sportscaster Al Michaels hyperbolically asked 34 million American viewers, “Do you believe in miracles?”

It’s a central feature in the village’s international claim to fame as Winter Olympic host. It was a long time ago—43 years—before more than half of the world population was born. But, still: Approaching upstate Lake Placid now from the main road off the New York Thruway, one can’t avoid the various 1980 Olympic sites—the Mount Van Hoevenberg complex with its bobsled and luge run, the biathlon venue, the Olympic ski jump.

At the village’s southern edge, there are the flying flags from the 1980 participating Olympic nations, as if those Games still were going on, just outside the speed skating oval where American Eric Heiden won five gold medals, and adjacent to the imposing Olympic Center that includes two hockey arenas—from the two Lake Placid Winter Games, in 1932 and 1980—situated, naturally, at “Miracle Plaza.”

It has been more than a decade since the New York Times noted how Lake Placid “can feel cryogenically frozen in time—1980 to be exact, which was when this secluded pocket of the Adirondacks hosted its second Winter Olympics” yet continued to “look much as it did when Jimmy Carter was in office.”

And still: Forty-three years on, around town there are pictograms of the various Winter Olympic sports displayed on buildings; an old bobsled perched on a sidewalk; 1980 Olympic jerseys, signed by members of that winter’s U.S. team, hung in hotel lobbies; rows of shops with sweatshirts and caps adorned with 1980 logos; the local newspaper’s masthead proclaiming Lake Placid “host of the 1932 and 1980 Olympic Winter Games;” books and memorabilia chronicling the so-called 1980 “Miracle on Ice.”

On Labor Day weekend—this Labor Day, 2023—the Adirondack Daily Enterprise and the weekly Lake Placid News both ran reports on New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s recent visit to Lake Placid and her specific recollections of that “miracle” 1980 semifinal ice hockey victory by the underdog Americans over the Soviets. Gillibrand even noted that her parents had attended the game. Which apparently prompted current Olympic Regional Development Authority board president Joe Martens’ aside that “It’s kind of a running joke in Lake Placid—there were 8,500 people in here for the game but 30,000 people say they were here.”

It was just a hockey game. But it featured a shocking upset by a rag-tag team of American amateurs over the four-time reigning gold medalists from the old Soviet Union. And amid Cold War tensions, the Yanks’ thoroughly unlikely upset of the so-called Evil Empire was widely cast as a victory for righteousness, somehow evidence of Americans’ morality, and as the game’s final seconds ticked away, Michaels laid it on pretty thick with his “miracles” question.

Forty-three years ago. Sooo yesterday, no? Yet the Lake Placid of 2023 hardly has a Paleolithic feel; rather, it is a thoroughly up-to-date, scenic burg, alive with flora and fauna, centered by serene Mirror Lake with the Adirondack Mountains as a picturesque backdrop.

It teems with energy—joggers, swimmers, dog walkers, baby strollers, kayakers and cyclists—and with community affairs such as the I Love BBQ and Music Festival Weekend surrounding Labor Day, and a state golf championship for seniors and “superseniors” (65-plus).

It’s just that village leaders know how their bread is buttered. So, along with the ongoing Olympic reminiscence is the continued outreach for similar—if less famous—international winter competitions such as last February’s World University Winter Games and next month’s World Figure and Fancy Skating Championships, in which competitors form artistic squiggles on black ice.

The local population is not quite 2,500 but there are year-round crowds of tourists, many speaking in foreign tongues, lured by the village’s international renown and resort status.

“If the town were not smothered in Olympic logos,” the long-ago Times travel piece reported, “visitors might forget about its Olympic connections and think they had wandered into an idyllic Swiss hamlet.

Not likely, that. The miracle has been held over by popular demand.

Rivaling tradition

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Gallows humor might be the only reasonable response to the accelerating college conference mayhem. Given the disorienting realignments, The Athletic has suggested such potential “traditional rivalries” as the John Denver Classic (Colorado vs. West Virginia—“Rocky Mountain High” vs. “Take Me Home Country Roads”); the John Wooden Bowl (Purdue vs. UCLA); Phil Knight vs. the Scarlet Knights (Oregon-Rutgers).

Don’t even try to connect any of those matchups to leagues that for so long were organized by geographic and institutional ties—leagues that have become incapable of doing math or reading maps. The Big 10 is going to have 18 schools. At last count, the Big 12 has 14 and likely could go to 16. The Atlantic Coast Conference reportedly is considering Stanford and Cal (from the other coast) and SMU (from neither coast) for membership.

Also: Whither and wherefore Notre Dame, which forever banked on its independence but appears adrift in this reshaped financial model.

All the nutty new associations, with everyone seemingly running off to join a more lucrative circus, at least serve to finally acknowledge that college football—the sport responsible for this kaleidoscopic shuffling—has nothing to do with college. Fully professional (except that the players are not paid directly and have neither a union nor guarantees of health care), college football has further evolved into just another version of the NFL.

So why not accept reality and erect a firewall between football and academics, as proposed by Baruch College law professor Marc Edelman years ago? “Maybe,” he said in the wake of repercussions after Northwestern players attempted to form a union in 2014, “there should be a football program that wears blue and maize and plays out of Ann Arbor and is separate from the University of Michigan.” And a team dressed in burnt orange based in Austin, Tex., with no actual connection to that city’s institution of higher learning.

Why not follow the lead of Ithaca College sports media professor Ellen Staurowsky, co-author of the 1998 book “College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA Amateur Myth,” who suggested splitting revenue-generating sports from the amateur, educations process? Football players still could go to classes if they chose to, Staurowsky said, but university athletic departments would lose the role of promoters and brokers of athletic talent and mass sports entertainment.

Or why not establish a National College Football League such as the one recently proposed by Welch Suggs, an associate director for the watchdog Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education and journalism professor at the University of Georgia?

In the Suggs model, there would be one major college football organization—same as the NFL—with manageable regional divisions structured something like of the old Southwest Conference (seven Texas schools plus neighboring Arkansas). The other sports—men’s and women’s basketball and especially the non-revenue sports of gymnastics, field hockey, track and so forth—would be grouped in their own separate conferences, immune from being big-footed by King Football’s insatiable pursuit of TV lucre.

With that, an Oregon volleyball team, not privy to chartered flights always available to the football gladiators, could avoid a cross-country round-trip journey to New Jersey to fulfill a commitment to play at Rutgers in the rejiggered Big 10.

Over and over, the NCAA has demonstrated it had neither the clout nor the will to stop all the gold-digging football gallivanting that is going on now. At a Knight Commission meeting 12 years ago, shortly after the Big 12 had begun to fall apart when Nebraska skedaddled to the Big 10, Missouri and Texas A&M to the SEC and Colorado to the PAC-12, then-NCAA president Mark Emmert declared that his organization “does not have a role in conference affiliations and should never be in the business of telling universities what affiliations they should have.”

So now, we have what New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait called the “logic of untrammeled capitalism” steadily picking up steam, with strategies “now driven entirely by the logic of television contracts” that yearn for expanded elite conferences. “The new mega-leagues,” Chait wrote, “will be too engorged to have real conference [football] champions: There will be too many teams in each league and too few games to fairly crown a winner.”

A decade ago, then-LSU chancellor Michael Martin predicted that “we could end up with two enormous conferences, one called ESPN and the other one called Fox.”

He sounds now like a regular Nostradamus. Or just a realist.

Howzat?

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At the conclusion of this essay, would you mind completing a customer satisfaction survey? You know: Were you Very Satisfied? Satisfied? Neutral? Dissatisfied? Very Dissatisfied?

Would you give this One Star? Two, Three or Four? FIVE!?!?!? Do you wish you had spent the time reading the comics instead?

Just kidding. It seems as if every business out there is using this sort of thing to get quick feedback. Supermarkets. Retail outlets. Pharmacies. Car repair shops. Media organizations. Food-delivery apps. Ride-hailing operations. Doctor’s offices. I wouldn’t want to be left behind regarding this trend.

So: On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being “very likely” and 1 being “no way,” how likely would you be to recommend this to family members or others? Why or why not? Did you have a favorite sentence or paragraph? A particularly compelling punctuation mark?

Please provide your age, height, weight, most recent eye exam, and what your favorite subject was in sixth grade. If you did not have a favorite subject, just write “recess.” Even though that’s not a subject, our survey reviewers will get the point.

And just to get to know you a little better: What is the approximate annual income you wish you had? Legally. All answers are confidential and will be shielded from the IRS.

In your own words, describe what you believe to be the Mets’ greatest deficiency. Speaking of the IRS, you may cite all public financial information in relation to players’ performance (or lack thereof).

Really, this sort of polling is merely a more formal approach than that utilized in the 1980s by three-term New York City mayor Ed Koch, who would ride the subway and stand on street corners greeting passersby with “How’m I doin’?” (Like all public officials, and in something of a good-natured way, Koch was booed whenever he was introduced at the ballpark. A tactic not unlike hanging him in effigy.)

Public criticism might have been gentler then than in these culture-war days. In the newspaper business—my home of employment for a half-century—I don’t recall us specifically soliciting evaluations in the time before social media (which traffics quite regularly in strong language to express all manner of dissatisfaction). But we would occasionally receive a note via snail mail beginning, “Dear [insert vulgar slang for a contemptible person here]….”

It can certainly be argued that evaluations of business performance often run from grumbling to profound unhappiness, which includes addressing the offending person or persons with terms equivalent to guttersnipe or blackguard or the like. Evidence of this can be found every day in “letters to the editor.”

People who are happy with a company’s work—those understandably expecting a certain level of competence—don’t tend to pass along their gratification. Just to complicate matters, though, a 2020 Los Angeles Times investigation found that customer service surveys were “a breeding ground of bad data…all written in pleading language” and annoying to customers who “just want to give them five stars and be on with it.”

Furthermore, the Times report concluded, “companies might be using surveys as prophylactic shields against angry customers who might otherwise vent in public online forums.”

So before you go there: Were your expectations met with this essay? Unmet? Exceeded? How would you characterize your experience?

Your criticisms are very important to us. Although it should be noted that it is not possible to appeal to every level of brow. Hey; show some mercy.

And thanks for reading. May we contact you to follow up on your responses?

Blaim the heroine

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Here is an argument that the Women’s World Cup was not “an unmitigated failure” by the U.S. national team, as Fox Sports commentator and former men’s national player Alexi Lalas called it; that the Americans’ loss to Sweden in the round of 16 would “not be remembered as the day the United States women’s team hit rock bottom,” as it was characterized by a report in The Guardian.

Yes, the Yanks had squeaked into to the knockout round with a win and two ties, and their loss to the Swedes, despite being ranked No. 1 in the world and four times Cup champion, came earlier than in eight previous Cups. So, surprise! That’s sports. That’s part of the lure of it. There is no rubber-stamping a perceived favorite’s success.

And anyone who watched the U.S.-Sweden match had to notice that the Americans controlled the run of play, outshooting the third-ranked Swedes, 21-7. Were it not for the startling, cat-like reflexes of 27-year-old Swedish goalkeeper Zecira Musovic, repeatedly batting away shots ticketed for the back of the net, the Yanks would not have had to endure their own excruciating penalty-shot misses and the necessity of the latest goal-line video technology to confirm Sweden’s ultimate winner, which was not otherwise visible to the naked eye.

Musovic was spectacular, the real difference in a magnificent tug-of-war that went beyond two hours between two skilled, aggressive teams. Her performance was more to the point than so much of the post-match analysis by the sport’s chattering classes bent on assigning blame.

U.S. coach Vlatko Andonovski was widely recommended for dismissal, taken to task for not showing confidence in his bench and assembling a roster that didn’t produce goals, didn’t better manage the midfield, didn’t show more cohesion, etc. Slate called the U.S. team “a shadow of its previous self.” Front Row Soccer enumerated what it judged to be U.S. failures by “looking back on a disaster of a tournament.”

ESPN piled on, too, lamenting the injuries to some American veterans, the drying up of the youth pipeline in the United States compared to the rest of the world, what is perceived as U.S. overconfidence and its players’ “lack of chemistry.” (During a stretch of poor games during the 1999 NBA season, Knicks guard Chris Childs argued that “chemistry is between lovers, not players.”)

Listen: There was a second team involved in that round-of-16 game, and the theatrical display by that other team’s goalkeeper, Musovic, is what repeatedly flummoxed the Americans and eventually put them on desolation row. If any individual must be “blamed” for turning the Yanks’ hearts to stone, that responsibility reasonably (and admiringly) could be attributed to Musovic. That was her job.

All the ferreting out of responsibility—the casting of aspersions on U.S. players, coaches, federation officials and the overall system—smacked of poor sportsmanship, exacerbated by Alexi Lalas’ assertion that the U.S. team had become “unlikeable” because of players’ progressive pronouncements away from the field. Not surprisingly, there were some nasty claims of poetic justice that retiring U.S. forward Megan Rapinoe—who has advocated for LGBTQ rights, equal pay for women in sports and racial justice—missed her penalty attempt.

At the end of a critical summation by The Athletic, which declared “this World Cup has raised massive existential questions about America’s ability to keep moving forward” and cast the result as some sort of apocalypse, someone with a sense of humor commented online, “I blame the Reynas”—aware of the messy aftermath to the men’s World Cup struggles. (Ask your hard-core soccer friends.)

Meanwhile, as the Swedes celebrated their victory, there came through the Melbourne stadium sound system a lively, familiar tune: “Dancing Queen.”

You can dance, you can jive/Having the time of your life.

See that girl/Watch that theme/

She is the Dancing Queen.

That was a No. 1 hit in the United States in the 1970s and lived on on Broadway and the movies. By the Swedish group ABBA.

Mamma Mia!

Inspiration complication

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What Australian soccer star Sam Kerr wished for prior to this women’s World Cup—“a Cathy Freeman moment”—now appears to be an absolute necessity for her team. A wobbly victory over Ireland followed by a crushing loss to Nigeria has left the Aussies—who had entertained expectations of a deep Cup run—in need of Freeman’s long-ago operatic, spellbinding magic just to advance to the tournament’s knockout round.

Kerr was just days past her 7th birthday when Freeman, on Sept. 25, 2000, provided the nation Down Under with a Hollywood ending of exaggerated happiness. So any Australian who pays attention to these sports spectaculars—and anyone lucky enough to have witnessed the 2000 Sydney Olympics—understands the reference.

On what was a grand night of track and field filled with exceptional, dramatic performances in virtually every competition, Freeman’s victory in that Olympic 400-meter final topped all. Not simply because Freeman rendered a smashing stretch run, coming from third place off the final turn in a race that is as close to violence as her sport comes—a tormenting all-out sprint over a quarter mile.

The Aboriginal Freeman was running with the weight of a nation and a people, her country’s most put-upon minority, on her back. Days before, during the Games’ Opening Ceremonies, she had been tasked with the honor of lighting the Olympic flame, a symbol of peace and brotherhood, causing her to worry “what some people would think” about her presence at the heart of the public ritual.

She is the granddaughter of one of Australia’s “stolen children” produced by a shameless national policy that took Aboriginal children and gave them to white families to “be civilized.”

In a way, that made her the conscience of the Sydney Olympics—and of Australia. And led to some incredibly noisy, emotional business in the boomerang event that sends runners out for a simple, exhausting trip, out and back. Fans—there were 112,000 in the stadium—were desperately, vicariously trying to lift Freeman around the track. Flash cameras in the stands followed her around, seeming to turn Freeman into her very own Olympic ceremony.

At the end, Freeman and the two early leaders she passed, straining mightily in the last 50 meters—Jamaica’s Lorraine Graham and Britain’s Katherine Merry—all were left sprawled on the track like survivors from some frightening car accident. Freeman needed several minutes to recover before getting to her feet and walking a victory lap, carrying both the Aboriginal and Australian flags.

It was just a championship race but interpreted by many as theater of “national reconciliation.”

“I don’t like to pass comment on anything political,” Freeman said then. “People like to make me a symbol for all sorts of things. I represent the young Aboriginal person living in a country of unity and enjoying possibilities of everything….

“I share my medal with my husband and my family and whoever else wants can join in.”

Her “moment” has been said to cause a ripple effect inspiring future generations of Aussie athletes in a sports-mad country, still a potent motivational tool—a shining example of grace under pressure. As the 2023 women’s national soccer team players gathered for a pre-tournament session, they were showed a tape of Freeman’s 2000 victory and treated with a surprise appearance by Freeman, who told them, “When you ask yourself, ‘What are you doing here? What are you doing it for?’ It’s because you love who you are and what you’re doing.”

Alas, Kerr—Australia’s career goal-scoring leader and considered among the sport’s top five (at least) global performers—came up lame with a bad calf in a pre-Cup workout and has missed her team’s first two disappointing games. If she can play against a formidable Canada side on Monday, maybe….

A little ancient history

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Hang around long enough and you suddenly could be celebrating your 50th wedding anniversary. A great thing for lots of reasons. And maybe it’s inevitable that on that occasion your spouse gifts you a little paperback that chronicles the culture and events in the year of your nuptials. I got one.

It provides a sort of reverse Rip Van Winkle effect, a somewhat disorienting awakening to the past—even though I’ve been there. A half-century is a substantial amount of time.

A dozen eggs cost 78 cents? A gallon of gas 39 cents? A car, on average, $3,400? Such factoids can mess with your bearings—some of the tidbits staggering to contemplate, yet others remarkably familiar. The President of the United States was facing impeachment. The Supreme Court was sorting out Roe v. Wade. I just read that the so-called stand-alone mustache (no beard or other facial hair; the kind I had in 1973) now is enjoying one of its periodic renaissances.

What goes around comes around?

In that Long Ago, lots of people were smoking marijuana, leading—as humorist Garrison Keillor recently put it—“to pretentious inwardness and contemplation of oneself as a rainbow or a rubber duck or rhubarb.” Keillor contended that “illegality was a big part of the appeal” of weed back then. Well, that’s different.

People were wearing strange clothing in ’73. (Bellbottoms! Tie-dye T-shirts!) Guys were walking around in public with shoulder-length hair and mutton-chop sideburns. Most domestic cars were merrily guzzling gas and resembled flat, wide-bodied boats—and generally were equipped with only AM radios. At home, we still were listening to music by employing black vinyl discs the size of dinner plates, placed on a gizmo called a turntable. Played at 33 rpm. (Ask your grandmother.)

Humans, though mostly speaking to others face-to-face, did have telephones—though those were stationary, stuck to walls or sitting on desks—that didn’t do anything besides function as telephones. People composed letters (which they then put into envelopes and dropped into mailboxes, destined to reach the addressee in just a matter of days), by operating heavy machines known as typewriters, which had keys attached to small metal arms that struck an inked ribbon, thereby imprinting letters on a piece of paper.

Nobody went around saying everything was “awesome” in 1973. Or, worse: “actually awesome.” (The hardly superior cliché then was “far out!”) Mass-marketed computers still were 10 years in the future. There were no laptops, digital cameras, DVDs, hybrid cars, Google, GPS. No fuss over global warming.

Babies were being named Christopher and Jennifer, Jason and Melissa then. No Liams or Noahs, Willows or Madisons. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Some things, I’m going to argue, were better then. Music: The Beatles (even after they split up), Chicago, Bette Midler, Paul Simon, early Springsteen, The Grateful Dead, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder. Tina Turner.

Horses were better: Secretariat.

There were, in 1973, hints of a futuristic world, such as the debut flight across The Pond by the supersonic passenger plane, the Concorde: D.C. to Paris in 3 ½ hours. The Concorde’s marketing pitch was “Arrive before you leave.” (Thirty years after it arrived, the Concorde did an Amelia Earhart. Disappeared.)

There was hope of consequences for political malfeasance: The Watergate hearings. There was a sense with the American troop withdrawal from Vietnam after 18 years that we just might give peace a chance. That summer, the United States and Soviet Union signed an agreement to reduce the threat of nuclear war.

Not that I want to return to 1973. That’s a foreign country which no longer exists, an archeological dig. But it was a special year, a good beginning—certainly in terms of one particular marriage—and therefore is a nice place to visit in the mind. Briefly. But, as the old baseball pitcher Satchel Paige warned, “Don’t look back; something might be gaining on you.”

These are good old days.

This business will self-destruct in…..

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So the suicide watch for newspapers goes on. The New York Times is shutting down its sports section and the Los Angeles Times essentially is doing the same, transitioning away from game stories and team beat coverage to a so-called “magazine” format.

It’s just sports, yes. But as Mark McDonald, one of the countless accomplished ink-stained wretches I have known during a half-century of sportswriting, asked in a Facebook post, “How can you credibly call yourself a first-rate newspaper if you have no Sports section, no baseball standings, no NFL schedule, no Final Four bracket?”

So it’s only sports, and many a condescending newsside reporter has dismissed those of us on the fun-and-games beat as futzing around in the “toy department.” But, to paraphrase the French-born American historian Jacques Barzun, who in the 1950s specifically cited baseball, “whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn” its sports. Because everything in our culture is there in the sports pages: Fair play, competitiveness, illegal drugs, big business, gender equity, race, obsessive attention to celebrity, entertainment, escape.

Yet somehow the New York Times, though sticking with its famous “All The News That’s Fit to Print” slogan, won’t include a sports section anymore, off-loading sports coverage to The Athletic website it purchased last year. George Vecsey, among the most eloquent in a long line of former Times columnists, wrote on his website that the paper’s readers “feel there is a hole in their lives.”

Former sports columnist Mark Whicker, in a post on The Morning After, noted that “once those connections [to the sports section] are severed, fans just walk away. They don’t tell newspapers they are leaving. They’re just gone.

“It’s just another chapter,” he wrote, “in the way newspapers have innovated their way into obsolescence and irrelevance.”

This is a program that was already in progress, of course. Between 2019 and mid-2022, an average of two U.S. newspapers disappeared every week, and a Northwestern University study has estimated that, over the next two years, a third of the nation’s papers will cease to exist.

At Long Island’s Newsday, where I enjoyed full-time employment as a sports reporter for 44 years and continue to do some freelance work, circulation has plummeted from around 600,000 at the start of the century to roughly 97,000 now. Newsday still prints a sports section, but it no longer staffs the Olympics, World Cup soccer, major golf tournaments, Wimbledon tennis, college bowl games or far-flung NCAA basketball tournament games.

The drastic loss of advertising in the digital age has hollowed out budgets that used to support reporters’ travel to teams’ away games. And impossibly early deadlines—so many papers have dispensed with their own printing presses and outsourced that job—leave the likes of Newsday always a full day behind  with final scores and other sports-related information. Radio, television and on-line bulletins—if not nearly as in-depth, analytical or evocative as on-site print reporting has been—is immediate.

And the less a sports staff gives readers, the fewer readers they have.

As a business decision, Tom Jones of the media research organization Poynter reminded that the Times is a union shop and The Athletic is not; so, while the 40 or so members of the Times sports staff reportedly are to be moved to other departments, the shuttering of sports could be a workaround: No need to fire anybody in anticipation that some will leave voluntarily.

Which sounds like another nail in the newspaper coffin. “Media news,” Bruce Arthur wrote in the Toronto Star, “has long been like climate-change news in that there is a lot of it, but very little that doesn’t feel like the first or second reel of a disaster movie.”

From here, it just feels like there won’t be any more sportswriting heroes—from such celebrated names as Frank Deford or Dan Jenkins, Roy Blount Jr. or Robert Lipsyte, Dave Anderson or Roger Angell, to the parade of committed, talented colleagues and fellow travelers who inspired and challenged me.

As Deford put it in his 2012 memoir, “Over Time,” in 50 years “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.”

Sure, there’ll be ESPN. But that doesn’t give you elaborate storytelling, the kind of crafted writing that makes you feel you were at the game and had insight into the participants. As Deford wrote, with ESPN “there’s no poetry in its soul.”

I wish I were as optimistic as Dave Kindred, another giant in the business, who responded to the Times news with: “We shall Quixote on, always have, putting words in print, wherever we can, however we can, from cave walls to Substack to whatever’s next.”

Cave walls. There’s an image of how modern newspaper executives think of sports reporting.