Five W’s and four legs of Journalism

Leave a reply

Could this year’s Triple Crown series somehow be an allegory for current events? A thoroughbred named Journalism—its name referencing an honorable profession that, at its best, represents accuracy, fairness, the elimination of bias and a prohibition against making things up—finishes runner-up in the Kentucky Derby to Sovereignty—whose moniker screams authoritarianism.

Then, at the Preakness, with Sovereignty off somewhere else—Saudi Arabia? Qatar? United Arab Emirates?—Journalism prevails despite a roughhousing stretch run in which he appears to be fouled by ponies on either side of him yet threads the needle and slingshots to victory. The two adversaries who nearly erase him are Goal Oriented and Clever Again, but may as well have been called Truth Social and X.

Running too far with this metaphor? When Sovereignty, after accepting the gift of a day off at the Preakness, returns for the upcoming Belmont Stakes on June 7, Journalism is expected to be there. And perhaps the winner of that race will offer some hint into where we all are headed. (But with the weird possibility that some gaslighting exercise could label Journalism to be Fake News.)

Yes, it’s just horseracing. In those strict terms, at this point, Journalism has been ranked by the National Thoroughbred Racing Association poll as the sport’s top 3-year-old, with Sovereignty second. And there will be at least five other ponies contending for the Belmont title.

There already have been plenty of comments on the presence of Journalism—with the eponymous industry lately being hobbled—in these high-visibility events. Is Journalism “overrated”? Can Journalism “write his way into horse racing history”? as the website BloodHorse asked before the Derby.

The Washington Post asked, “Can Journalism (the horse) give a boost to journalism (the industry)?” After the nag’s second-place finish in the Derby, observations included “journalism doesn’t pay,” “A dark day for journalism,” “The year is 2025 and journalism officially has been defeated.”

Remarks, by the way, very possibly conjured by the wordsmiths we know as journalists (of which I was one for a half-century).

Meanwhile, on a less symbolic, less unsettling level and skipping any leanings toward a parable, there is the interesting process of finding a good name for a racehorse. Journalism was named by co-owner Aron Wellman, who told several publications that he had “often been accused of being a disgruntled sportswriter because of all the writing I do” for the Eclipse weekly newsletter he founded after a law career. “So journalism is something that I value very much, and I appreciate responsible and diligent journalists.”

Wellman had long ago been sports editor of his high school newspaper in Beverly Hills, Calif., and believed “good horses should have good names.” Certainly, arriving at a name—one not already among the hundreds of thousands registered with the Jockey Club—can be a challenge.

There are all sorts of rules in that game. No using names currently on the Jockey Club’s “permanent” list, which not only covers winners of races in the Triple Crown series but also famous horses in popular culture. There will never be another Secretariat or American Pharoah. Or Black Beauty. Or Silver. Or Trigger.

Names of living persons are allowed only with written permission from that person. There can be no names with clear commercial significance, and the name must be limited to 18 characters—including spaces between words. (In the case of a horse named Twitter, the thoroughbred’s christening in 1992 preceded the creation of the social networking service by 14 years.)

Also verboten are names that are suggestive or vulgar, in poor taste or offensive to specific groups. (It must be noted that a few risqué monikers have slipped by the name police, the less racy among them being Boxers or Briefs and Hoochiecoochiemama.)

There is plenty of creativity involved—sly puns, nutty combinations, references to the horse’s pedigree or to present-day doings. Not surprisingly, the wider world of sports regularly is mined, so there have been thoroughbreds called Three Pointer and Slam Dunk, Hat Trick, Home Run, Touchdown. Also, playing on marquee athletes without appropriating their full names, there has been an A Rod, an Eli and a Peyton. And a Le Brown James.

So let’s say you have $825,000 to spare, the amount it had cost to buy Journalism at the 2023 yearling sale, and you’re looking for a catchy name. Something memorable. Maybe you could go for a tag that speaks to the racehorse’s lot in life. There has been a Trotsky, a Meal Ticket, a Don’t Look Back, a Long Shot, a Wishful Thinking.

Another source of potential names could be songs dealing with the Sport of Kings.

    I’ve got the horse right here

    His name is Paul Revere

….from the tune Fugue for Tinhorns in the 1955 Broadway Show “Guys and Dolls.” Paul Revere, in fact, is on the Jockey Club’s permanent list. The “Race Is On,” a 1964 country hit by George Jones, presented possibilities in mimicking a track announcer’s race call to detail romantic relationships….

    Now the race is on

    And here comes Pride down the backstretch,

    Heartache’s goin’ to the inside,

    My Tears are holdin’ back,

    They’re tryin’ not to fall.

    My Heart’s out of the runnin’

    True Love’s scratched for another’s sake.

    The race is on and it looks like Heartache

    And the winner loses all.

Sure enough, Pride was accepted by the Jockey Club in 2006, Heartache in 2014, True Love in 1993. That does leave My Tears and My Heart.

There have been sobriquets that address racing’s tendency toward excitement and surprise. Zoot Alors and the Anglicized version of that expression, Holy Smoke. Also, Magic Carpet Ride. Dog and Pony Show. Eat My Dust.

So let’s say I have an extra $825,000 on hand—now that’s Wishful Thinking—and am inclined to name my imaginary horse friend with a nod to my many years in journalism. There was a Suddenbreakingnews in the 2016 Derby. There has been a Headliner, a Wordsmith and a Rewrite, even a Laptop Computer. I might have liked Inkstained Wretch.

Meanwhile, I’ll just root for Journalism (capital and small ‘j.’)

Welcome to the U.S. World Cup?

Leave a reply

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here for the 2026 World Cup soccer tournament. Whichever of the 47 visiting national teams you come to support during the month-long competition, to be hosted mostly by the United States (along with Canada and Mexico), there is the specter of Trump’s Inferno.

The “welcome” that Vice President JD Vance has offered foreign visitors to the 78 matches scheduled for 11 U.S. cities really is an ominous warning: As soon as the event is done, Vance said, “we want them to go home.” Overstaying visas, he said, would result in dealing with Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and the suggestion of a deportation round-up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

“Don’t overstay your visa,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy added during a task-force meeting regarding preparations for next year’s June 11-july 19 production. “Don’t stay too long.”

So already the Trump administration has thrown sand in the gears of what figured to be a financial gold mine and global party. According to Politico, Human Rights Watch is urging Gianni Infantino, president of soccer’s international governing body, FIFA, to “be prepared to reconsider” staging games in the United States at all, based on “grave concerns” over U.S. border policies. In soccer terminology, creating such concerns amounts to an “own goal” by the White House.

Since the World Cup last was contested in the United States, in 1994, the tournament has doubled in size—from 24 national teams to 48, from 52 matches to 104—and therefore doubled in economic potential. In ’94, the event generated a $1.45 billion profit—mining more than $84 million in ticket sales, more than $90 million from television rights, more than $60 million in merchandizing.

The irony then was that, leading up to the tournament, there had been a general sense of “Who needs World Cup soccer in the United States?” Soccer still was widely considered a furrin sport on these shores, not yet challenging baseball, basketball, football or hockey for fervid spectator interest. There was not yet a major professional soccer league here. At the time, the great Sports Illustrated sportswriter Frank Deford’s sly perception—that “USA” stood for “Uninterested in Soccer A-Tall”—was on the mark.

Yet that 1994 tournament set an attendance record that still stands after seven subsequent Cups—68,626 per match, 3.57 million total. It proved, beyond America’s taste for spectacles and America’s aptitude for hucksterism and merchandizing, that the United States indeed is a hyphenated nation. The great majority of Americans are descended from somewhere else, after all—Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, German-Americans, Argentine-Americans and so on—and so many were able to feel a connection with, and the allure of, teams from the ancestors’ Old Country.

There is no specific data on the percentage of foreign fans who added to the ’94 tournament’s rollicking success, but it was clear that a huge number came along with their visiting teams, enlivening the American competition venues.

Contrast that with current build-a-wall politics, with the rolling up of the U.S. welcome mat, with the Trump administration’s demonization of virtually all immigrants and non-citizens. (An exception appears to be white people from South Africa, whom the White House has welcomed as refugees it considers persecuted in their Black-majority homeland. The paradox is that white South African fans would be following a national team, which is so far dominating its World Cup qualifying group, that is composed of mostly Black players—a team informally known as “Bafana Bafana,” which is a Zulu term that translates to “the boys, the boys.”)

All this Cup uncertainty is unfolding amid declines of 10 to 17 percent in international visits to America because of foreigners’ negative perceptions of U.S. policies, reports of detentions and deportations, higher tariffs related to travel (among other things), and many nations advising their citizens to skip treks to the United States.

The New York Times just reported that the U.S. is on track to lose $12.5 billion in international travel spending in 2025, from $181 billion to around $169 billion since last year. Land trips into the U.S. by Canadians are down more than 20 percent. Western Europeans’ holidaying from across the pond has declined for the first time in four years.

The inhospitable vision of Trump, the isolationist bent and irrational xenophobia, recall novelist Henry Miller’s observation from 80 years ago: “It isn’t the oceans which cut us off from the world. It’s the American way of looking at things.”

These days, it’s the rude go-back-to-where-you-came-from decrees.

In the public domain

1 Reply

Let me tell you about the very famous. They are different from you and me. Upon achieving prominence or notoriety, they live their lives in the public eye, which can lead to effusive praise from their noble peers but also scrutiny from the hoi polloi.

Take Rory McIlroy, the pro golfer from Northern Ireland who just completed, a month short of his 36th birthday, a career Grand Slam of his sport’s four major tournaments—after he had been struggling for 11 years to win the last one, the hallowed Masters.

McIlroy, you may recall, appeared on the pro tour at 18 among considerable fanfare, the epitome of the rugged young hairy-chested hero, cited by some as the Next Tiger Woods. Given that early station in life, Public Figure, McIlroy not only was in the cross hairs for the deafening storms of applause but also for gossipy “human interest” tales.

So, when he began a three-year romantic relationship in 2011 with Danish tennis star Caroline Wozniacki—she, like McIlroy reached the world’s No. 1 ranking in her sport—it quickly became fodder for the masses. A match of sporting royalty. But was followed, just three months after their official engagement, by McIlroy’s 10-minute phone call informing Wozniacki that he was jumping ship. The magnifying glass of celebrity made that news bigger.

And led to one of the most memorable ledes in sports journalism history—summing up, as it did, the People Magazine syndrome.

That came at the 2014 U.S. Open tennis championships. Two years earlier, at a major tennis exhibition in New York’s Madison Square Garden, Wozniacki, in the midst of her match, had playfully summoned McIlroy out of the capacity crowd to play a pitty-pat point against Maria Sharapova. Very cute.

At the 2014 Masters that April, Wozniacki had caddied for McIlroy, only to have McIlroy lower the boom shortly after—just as Wozniacki, at the height of her popularity among fans, commenced competition in the tennis Open that August, when she was passionately embraced by spectators’ repeated shouts of love.

And Filip Bondy, an elite recontour chronicling the event for the New York Daily News, began his report—this may be a paraphrase since I couldn’t lay my hands on the original copy, but I read it at the time with great appreciation—“Everybody wants to marry Caroline Wozniacki except Rory McIlroy.”

Naturally, that brilliant line, about how fame makes private lives everybody’s business, leapt to mind at this year’s Masters’ Sunday as McIlroy’s winning putt on the first playoff hole dropped, and what amounted to celebratory gunfire burst from the crowd and from television’s commentators.

The fellow had been, at 23, the youngest player to reach $10 million in career earnings on the PGA tour. He had spent more than 100 weeks ranked No. 1. Right from the start, he was regarded as one of the most marketable athletes in the world, behind only the global soccer stars Neymar and Lionel Messi as long ago as 2013.

He had become, in 2011, the youngest player ever to hold a first-round lead at the Masters and was in front of the field by four strokes after 54 holes. Only to shoot an eight-over-par 80 in the final day, a crash imprinted on the public’s mind—and likely his own—especially when he double-bogeyed the first hole in the Masters’ final round this year to relinquish his lead. He called it “a burden” to have repeatedly fallen short at Augusta until this tournament.

Meanwhile, ESPN included in its coverage of the event an interview with none other than Caroline Wozniacki, the other party in that 2014 fractured fairytale. That, too, was a reminder how the constant exposure of the very famous can blur the lines between public and private life and mess with personal space. There had been stories, back then, that McIlroy ended the relationship after Wozniacki posted an unflattering photo of McIlroy sleeping with his mouth open. (Too much information about a celebrity!)

It was another tennis star who—at the end of a 21-year career of being very famous, having publicly evolved from a mere athletic talent into a champion and a man of substance; who had arrived as apparently undisciplined and self-centered, the latest in tedious parade of misbehaving tennis personalities; whose first short marriage (to actress Brooke Shields) led to his enduring union with tennis great Steffi Graf—articulated how his situation differed from yours and mine.

There were regrets, Andre Agassi said shortly before his final pro tournament in 2006, of “dragging some of the closest people in my life, and the fans of the sport, through some of my most difficult moments.”

To have the eyes of the world on each step of one’s life story, he said, “is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”

New deal

Leave a reply

These are days of global awareness, of headlines on tariffs and imports. Cars from Japan and Germany, avocados from Mexico, computers from China, coffee from Colombia, wine from Italy….

Ice hockey from Canada.

These are days of irony. The fellow who just set the career record for goals in hockey’s premier league, the NHL—which is based mostly in American cities but is a Canadian commodity—is a Russian import working these past 25 years in Washington, D.C.

And no surprise: this turn of events has its political implications.

Alex Ovechkin, originally from Moscow but a U.S. resident throughout this century, has surpassed Wayne Gretzky, the Canadian national hero who has become chummy with the American president who lately has denigrated Gretzky’s country.

These are disorienting times. Consider that, during the latter days of the Cold War in the 1980s, American president Ronald Reagan declared Ovechkin’s homeland—then, technically, the Soviet Union—to be “the evil empire.” But over a remarkably productive career with the Capitals, Ovechkin often has been said to be as beloved in Washington as that old Commie detractor Reagan had been there.

It would be difficult to characterize Ovechkin as a Communist (as opposed to Yankee capitalist) given that, according to Forbes magazine, he has earned roughly $160 million in player salary and bonuses and never has dropped below $2.5 million in off-ice earnings for 13 years.

Of course, the universal appreciation of professional hockey skill is a heartwarming thing, with Ovechkin honored by teammates, fans and the sport’s officials from all over the map. During this season’s pursuit of Gretzky’s record, the Washington area has been flooded with lawn signs and goal counters urging Ovechkin on.

But these are the days of philosophical whiplash.

Gretzky recently has come under attack in his homeland for siding with U.S. president Trump and the latter’s calls for making Canada America’s 51st state (with, Trump added, Gretzky as that new “state’s” governor). Gretzky, who played the last 11 seasons of his 21-year NHL career for U.S. teams, has lived south of the border since 1988, noting on a radio show this week that he has “five American kids, seven American grandchildren, an American wife, a 103-year-old American mother-in-law….”

Ovechkin likewise settled two decades ago near his U.S. workplace, living now in McLean, Va., just across the Potomac from D.C. He is a much-admired star in this nation of sporting celebrity.

For years, New York Ranger fans have, in their backhanded way, showered attention on Ovechkin for his outsized impact on the ice, by singling him out each period with 8:08 to play (8 is Ovechkin’s uniform number) by counting down “8-7-6 . . .” to a thoroughly uncreative chant: “Ovi sucks!”

“You know, it’s nice,” Ovechkin has said. It means “you’re still out there and still get some respect.”

Still, we appear to be knee deep in ideological drift. Ovechkin in 2018 founded a organization to promote the Russian presidential campaign of Vladimir Putin, an act which—not so long ago–would have put both men officially among America’s Bad Guys. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ovechkin, who reportedly has Putin’s personal phone number, has declined several of his team’s requests to remove a profile photo of him with Putin from his Instagram account.

Ovechkin has insisted that he is “not a politic; I’m an athlete.” Meanwhile, someone who is “a politic,” the current occupant of the White House, has also embraced Putin’s Russia, thoroughly unlike Ronald Reagan, by inaccurately shifting the responsibility for starting that war from Putin to Ukraine. (Which, it happens, is the land of Gretzky’s ancestors. Not that that has anything to do with international diplomacy or hockey’s new goal-scoring record.)

More unsettled territory: When Russian troops stormed into Ukraine, Gretzky was among distinguished personalities from the sports world who called to ban Russian teams from international events, a prohibition which has ended—at least for now—Ovechkin’s long participation on the Russian national team in world hockey championships and the Olympics.

The NHL clearly has no such ban on individuals. So these are days of migration and Ovechkin rule. Records, like alliances, can be broken.

On the road again

Leave a reply

There is no Oakland in Oakland anymore. At least in terms of a major professional sports team. No “here” there on the home schedules of long-term Oakland tenants in basketball, football and baseball. A sort of Gertrude Stein take on the vanishing past.

The Warriors left Oakland in 2019 for San Francisco, their first Bay Area location. The Raiders moved to Las Vegas in 2020. And now the A’s, committed to settling in Vegas three years hence, have commenced doing current business in Sacramento (without acknowledging that city’s existence in their official title; the organization simply is branding itself “the Athletics” or “the A’s”).

Business is business and the grass always appears greener somewhere else, of course. In that sense, it figures to have this geographical reversal of the California gold rush phenomenon that was triggered by the 1848 eureka moment at Sutter’s Mill (just up the road from Sacramento).

The Eastward-Ho fortune-seeking not only has led to Oakland’s loss of three Big League teams in five years, but also the monetary scramble by two major college operations away from the vicinity last year: The University of California, based five miles from Oakland in Berkeley, and Stanford, 34 miles away in Palo Alto, both absconded to the Atlantic (Atlantic!) Coast Conference, while eight other schools were fleeing the Pac-12. (“Pac” for Pacific.)

There goes the neighborhood.

For fans, such wanderlust obviously is disorienting, though Oaklanders have been through this before with these pro franchises. The basketball Warriors, who had been based in Philadelphia since 1946, first set up their West Coast shop in ’62 at a joint called the Cow Palace—technically located in Daly City, Calif. (though the Cow Palace parking lot was intersected by the San Francisco city line).

Then it was on to the University of San Francisco campus and the S.F. Civic Auditorium before relocating to Oakland in 1971 while taking on their current “Golden State” name. The team also spent a couple of years playing home game in San Jose, 40 miles from Oakland while the Oakland Coliseum was being renovated, then returned to San Francisco and its Chase Center six years ago.

More footloose were the Raiders, who spent the 1982 NFL season working daily at their old practice site adjacent to the Oakland airport—in view of the Oakland Coliseum that had been home since ’63—but played their “home” games in Los Angeles, 365 miles away. Almost all of the players lived in Oakland, a couple full-time in L.A. Among those rattled by all the travel was Dick Romanski, the Raiders’ equipment manager at the time, complaining that airline flights necessary even for “home” games “screwed up my whole golf game.”

A “permanent” move to L.A. was finalized the next season but ended after 13 years, and it was back to Oakland for the next 24. Until at last reaching Paradise. (That’s the official name of the Raiders’ most recent digs on the southern edge of Las Vegas.)

So now the Athletics’ fortune-seeking ghost ship has landed them in a small minor-league park—technically in West Sacramento, across the river from the city proper—in what a Sacramento radio host described as an “Airbnb” while they await the construction of a Las Vegas stadium. The players, as something of a GPS aid, wear a “Las Vegas” patch on one uniform sleeve.

The franchise was founded in Philadelphia in 1901, transferred to Kansas City in 1955 and to Oakland in 1968. Of the Majors’ existing 30 teams, the Athletics are one of only nine to leave their original port of call, the only one to do so three times, and one of only two (the Braves went from Boston to Milwaukee to Atlanta) to do so more than once. And virtually all of that other traipsing around happened from the 1950s into the early ‘70s.

But for this team, the wandering in the wilderness goes on, and the interim stop halfway across Northern California has mystified at least one opposing player, Cubs pitcher Ryan Brasier, who wondered during a television interview why the Athletics didn’t remain at “maybe not a perfectly good ballpark in Oakland, but a big-league ballpark….I really don’t get it; not playing in Oakland as opposed to playing in Sacramento.”

Then again, the sellout crowd of 12,119 that fit into Sacramento’s minor-league park for the Athletics’ 2025 “home” opener out-drew the A’s 2024 Oakland average of 11,628—last in the Majors. Anyway, everything is temporary.

Great expectations

Leave a reply

Here’s proof that expectations—and, therefore, potential criticism—of any sports team are based on the degree of interest among the populace. Exhibit A: The American soccer community is beside itself with the U.S. men’s national team’s lackluster performance in a fourth-place finish at last week’s four-team Nation’s League mini-tournament.

The Yanks were beaten by Panama and Canada—there’s some political irony there, in terms of who owns whom, no?—and are being lambasted by pundits and fans. For the fourth-place match against Canada, L.A.’s 70,000-seat SoFi Stadium was virtually empty at kickoff.

And it’s one thing for self-proclaimed experts—commentators and that lot—to be throwing brickbats. But retired national team players from recent years, fellows who had something to do with America’s overdue arrival to top-level international soccer competition—have been among the most prominent disparagers.

Landon Donovan: “I’m so sick of hearing how ‘talented’ this group of players is and all the amazing clubs they play for. If you aren’t going to show up and actually give a [deleted] about playing for your national team, decline the invite. Talent is great, pride is better.”

Clint Dempsey: “You would hope that they would get up for [these games], that there would be more pride to try to get things back on track and try to get this fanbase behind them…”

Tab Ramos: “….all of the important guys are saying ‘We need to … work harder.’ Well yeah, of course. But you need to stop talking about it. You need to start doing it.”

Alexi Lalas: “Does this team even care?”

The going up—our lads won the previous three Nation’s League titles—certainly didn’t make the coming down any easier.

Exhibit B: This is what being labeled the “golden generation” of U.S. men’s soccer talent will get you in dropping two of three matches last fall while hosting Copa America and now going 0-2 at home. It pretty much wipes out the fact that it hasn’t been that long—a mere generation or so—since the Yanks could have suffered such setbacks and no one on these shores would have noticed.

The angst over recent failures, with next summer’s World Cup returning to the United States (as co-host with Mexico and Canada) is a reminder of how dramatically (and how quickly) soccer has progressed on these shores.

When the World Cup was last here, in 1994, the U.S. soccer federation was still trying to scrape together a national team with a jury-rigged collection of recent college players. There was no U.S. professional league because there was no demand for one. The rag-tag team that had qualified for the Italy-based 1990 World Cup—the Yanks’ first World Cup appearance in 40 years—did so, in large part, because the region’s perennial power, Mexico, had been banned for using ineligible players.

Even so, the Yanks barely squeezed into that championship tournament and were promptly destroyed by Czechoslovakia, 5-1. The most skilled player on that U.S. team was Ramos. And, after that 5-1 thrashing in Florence, Italy, in 1990, Ramos was one of only a few U.S. players brave enough to face reporters’ post-game interrogations: If he somehow could have known beforehand how disappointing his World Cup debut would be, might he have preferred to take a pass?

“This,” he said then, “is the greatest experience of my life. If I had to go through it again, just the same way, I would.”

It was, after all, 1990. Frontier days. “It’s not something to be ashamed of. If we lived in another country and lost, 5-1, we couldn’t go home. But we’ll go home and walk through Kennedy Airport and no one will recognize us, anyway.”

Ramos, born in Uruguay and settled with his family in New Jersey when he was 7, knew very well the pecking order of American sports at the time, when soccer was “a way of life everywhere but in the U.S. Everywhere else, your team loses, you cry and stay home from work the next day because you’re so upset. Your team wins, you don’t go to work because you’re so happy.”

There was no need to feel sorry about having been an “American soccer player,” because that was an oxymoron—like “living dead” or “definite maybe”—in those days.

Now, the reality is markedly different. Major League Soccer, the U.S. professional league, is in its 29th season, with 30 teams. American players regularly star for top European club teams. Soccer, as a spectator sport in the States, now is on the order of ice hockey, just behind the big three of football, baseball and basketball.

A run of seven consecutive World Cup qualifications—interrupted in 2018—has caused enough Americans to care enough that the national team has gone through five coaches since then, expecting bigger things. Mauricio Pochettino is the sixth and, after just six months and eight matches, already is hearing grumbles, much of it questioning his ability to generate more player effort.

Now, U.S soccer’s problem not only is qualifying but also making some impact in the 2026 World Cup. Because, it the Yanks don’t, a lot of people will notice. (And they will recognize the players walking through any airport.)

Don’t forget

Leave a reply

Last week’s erasure of Jackie Robinson from the Department of Defense website, as brief as it was, amounted to the latest example of Donald Trump’s dystopian vision of American society. If the President’s edict against all forms of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is to rule the day, then an historic figure such as Robinson—who served in World War II, became the first Black man in the most significant professional sport of his time and spent his life fighting racial discrimination—apparently had to be disappeared.

The blowback to that act of moral turpitude was immediate and widespread, prompting administration officials to clumsily shift blame to artificial intelligent tools for the “error.” But the message had been sent and was perfectly clear.

It summed up Trump’s long personal history of disparaging minorities. It signaled that DEI has become, as The Nation’s Dave Zirin wrote, “an all-purpose term to demonize anything that promotes the histories and experiences of Black and brown people.” It broadcast, as Zirin put it, “that Robinson’s accomplishments are fraudulent and exalted only because of the color of his skin.”

Veteran Atlanta journalist Terrence Moore pointed out that, beyond Robinson’s Hall of Fame baseball career, which was so visible in embarrassing the country’s Jim Crow leanings, “Robinson was Rosa Parks 11 years before Rosa Parks,” who famously refused to sit in the back of a Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955. Robinson had declined to leave the front of an Army bus during military service in ’44 and was court-marshalled for it. (He subsequently was acquitted and received an honorable discharge.)

When Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 on his solitary mission to personally integrate the Major Leagues, baseball was a central piece of American culture, legitimately the “national pastime” to a populace barely aware of the NFL or the brand-new NBA.

Joe Dorinson, the prominent Jackie Robinson scholar who co-coordinated a massive Long Island University academic conference on the 50th anniversary in 1997 of Robinson’s breakthrough, noted that “Babe Ruth changed baseball. But Jackie Robinson changed America, which in the long run is more important.” At that LIU event, Yeshiva University English professor Manfred Weidhorn called Robinson “a rare case of applied Christianity.” Turning the other cheek to vile racist treatment and carrying on.

The late historian Jules Tygiel (who had participated in that Robinson symposium) believed that “Jackie Robinson’s story, like the story of Passover, has to be retold each year. As the Jews were once slaves in Egypt, blacks were slaves in America, and the Jackie Robinson story brings renewal and hope.”

Major League Baseball, in retelling Jackie’s story, officially retired Robinson’s uniform No. 42—leaguewide—in 1997 and, since 2008 has marked the anniversary of Robinson’s debut, April 15, by having every player on every team wear Robinson’s uniform No. 42 on that date.

But given the White House’s chainsaw attack on DEI, its monetary bullying of any organization that continues to traffic in diversity, Terrence Moore wondered if Jackie Robinson Day “might be “going, going, gone….”—that “just to make sure the U.S. government doesn’t unleash its considerable wrath on their industry that made a record $12.1 billion last season,” MLB could pull the plug on such a celebration.

MLB indeed might be hinting at that, having already removed references to “diversity” from its home page and issued a statement that it is “in the process of evaluating our programs for any modifications to eligibility criteria that are needed to ensure our programs are compliant with federal law as they continue forward.”

If there is some positive to be found in these dehumanizing, history-cancelling actions by the reigning President, perhaps it was provided by veteran Minnesota Twins reporter La Velle E. Neal III of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, who wrote that he would like to “express my gratitude toward the Department of Defense for reminding us of the impact of one of our greatest Americans.

“Because of the DoD’s reckless slicing and dicing of everything it deemed to fall into their diversity, equity and inclusion danger zone,” Neil wrote, “webpages lauding the contributions of many who proudly fought for this country were erased.

“One of those histories was of Jackie Robinson. A man who lettered in four sports at UCLA, served his country during World War II, then broke baseball’s color barrier while fighting discrimination and segregation the entire way.

“Because of the DoD’s gaffe, Robinson’s legacy is back in the conversation. And just in time for the approaching baseball season. And in time for Jackie Robinson Day on April 15, when his career will be remembered across Major League Baseball.

“Jackie should be celebrated with more gusto than ever this year.”

Then again, as Joe Dorinson emailed upon the news of the temporary Robinson benching, “Fascism’s footfalls grow louder each day.”

Money in this piggy bank

Leave a reply

I consider the hero of this story to be, at the very least, terrific. Radiant. Humble.

Some pig.

With apologies to E.B. White, and a nod to those exalting descriptions in “Charlotte’s Webb” of White’s protagonist barnyard critter Wilbur, I am speaking instead of an anonymous real-life porker. Mine was a domesticated, omnivorous mammal belonging to the genus Sus who lived, I assume, somewhere in Iowa (based on the odds, since that is the leading state for hog production) .

That particular pig somehow had been designated an organ donor. And when—on the medical advice of my cardiologist, given the heart murmur I developed several years ago—I was judged in need of an aortic valve replacement, the aforementioned swine (and I use that term with ultimate respect) supplied the needed equipment.

That life-sustaining procedure indeed became a variant on bringing home the bacon. Not that I will tolerate any petty puns related to my circumstance or my benefactor. To eat ham or pork or sausage—which I rarely do, anyway—does not make me a cannibal. I do not have increased leanings toward a chauvinist pig. In basketball, I believe is passing to the open man, eschewing the role of ball hog.

Of course I am fully aware that, as a cultural symbol, the pig is employed as a stand-in for many human aspects, often derogatory: As slang for police (a “pig” is on the dismissive level of “the fuzz”). As an informal insult of someone perceived to be disgusting or greedy.

In George Orwell’s 1945 satire “Animal Farm,” about anthropomorphic creatures who rebel against their human farmer in hopes of creating a society of equal, free and happy animals, a pig named Napoleon is the bad guy, emerging as the dictator who causes the farm to wind up in a state worse than before. (Orwell was referencing Joseph Stalin of the early 20th Century Soviet Union, but his allegory somehow feels relevant to the United States in 2025.)

Meanwhile, it could be argued that the Looney Tunes character Porky Pig, with his terrible stutter, was not such a good model for an earlier generation of cartoon-watching children. And, in the Chinese Zodiac legend, the Year of the Pig is last in its 12-year calendar cycle because, when the Emperor organized a race to ascertain the order of animals in the Zodiac, the pig arrived late—last—and was thereby termed the “lazy pig,” who had stopped to eat and fell asleep.

Then again, the third of the Three Little Pigs was resourceful and brilliant, clever enough to fortify his house against the wolf with bricks. Miss Piggy, of Muppets lore, may have been a bit temperamental, a diva superstar, but knew a little French and was a terror in karate. Hiiii-YAH!

I never quite got the nursery rhyme about little pigs who respectfully “went to market, stayed home, had roast beef, got nothing at all and cried all the way home,” paired with a grownup simultaneously pulling on a young child’s toes. But let me be on record as a fan of the Beatles 1968 song “Piggies,” a George Harrison number which has been interpreted as a metaphor for human nature, in which the big guys lord it over the lesser folks. (2025 again?)

Anyway, to dismiss the contribution of my Iowa patron, whose aorta valve has kept me rolling along these last six years; who has, unknowingly, allowed me to feel as normally active as any septuagenarian around? In a pig’s eye!

Tick tock

Leave a reply

First of all, Daylight Savings Time doesn’t save any daylight; it just moves it. For one day. What’s the big deal? If you don’t want to change your clocks twice a year, from Standard to Daylight Time and back again, there is the option of relocating to Quito, Ecuador, 14 miles from the equator. There, from early November to early March—and all year, really—the time of sunrise and sunset varies by roughly one minute. Up a bit after 6 a.m., down shortly after 6 p.m.

On the other hand, think of this: Residents of Utqiagvik, on the northern tip of Alaska, have sunshine all day at the beginning of Summer, and darkness all day when Winter commences. Clocks’ impact on behavior becomes sort of academic. (No wonder the Alaskan Senate has introduced a bill to exempt the state, hardly in need of more sunshine in summer months, from Daylight Savings Time altogether.)

All the bi-annual weeping and rending of clothes over turning clocks back one hour in the Fall then ahead one hour in the Spring, seemingly worthy of some Great Debate between Lincoln and Douglas, has been going on a long time. A passionately partisan dispute, so pervasive that a few years ago, there was a New Yorker cartoon of a fellow on display as a circus “oddity” with the invitation, “COME SEE THE MAN WHO HAS NO OPINIONS ABOUT DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME.”

So it’s an old, old story. But there is a body of thought that, when Ben Franklin proposed in a letter to the Journal of Paris in 1784 that clocks in France be re-set—calling out the Parisians’ perceived laziness by suggesting the locals wake up an hour earlier—he was kidding!

Clocks were changed in World War I, first in Europe and then the U.S., with the intention of saving energy. The practice was reinstated during World War II and institutionalized in the United States by the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which set specific dates for beginning Daylight Savings Time on the last Sunday in April and ending on the last Sunday in October—though individual states could pass laws not to participate. (Two states, Hawaii and Arizona, still stick to Standard Time year-round and, just to complicate matters, several states are split by time zones, leaving some people forever an hour ahead or behind their neighbors, all year.)

In 1974, during the energy crisis, clock-changing was suspended but soon reinstated. In 2005, the Energy Policy Act extended Daylight Savings Time from the second Sunday of March to the first Sunday of November. And in 2022, the Senate passed legislation to make Daylight Savings Time permanent, calling it the Sunshine Protection Act—which sounds as if the opposite of sun block is being applied.

But that never was approved by the House and, since then, there have been rumblings for a law to instead stick fulltime to Standard Time, a theoretical Keep-Your-Hands-Out-of-My-Pocket(watch) Bill. There have been studies contending that year-round Daylight Savings Time would make people more productive, well-rested and happier, but also opposite claims by sleep scientists that it would be better never to venture from Standard Time. (Which would have benefited Lewis Carroll’s forever tardy White Rabbit.)

It was Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, in the previous century, who declared that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” But that was advocating for transparency and accountability—a belief that making government actions more public would help stamp out corruption, (and which might be applied to a certain so-called “efficiency” movement afoot now). It wasn’t about what time the sun should rise and set.

More appropriate to this discussion could be the 1969 rock group Chicago song: Does anybody really know what time it is.

Canada builds a wall

Leave a reply

If hockey goonery is your cup of tea, then the Four-Nations mini-tournament between the United States and Canada certainly provided. As much off the ice as on. Beyond the fairly predictable player fights—that’s hockey!—leading up to the championship final were the partisan fans booing the opposing national anthems, triggered by the gasbag Trump administration’s belittling of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and his sovereign nation—“soon to be known as governor of our 51st state.”

Canadian fans, in the end, weren’t shy about interpreting their Four Nations title as a triumph over their potential “11th Province,” and Trudeau got in his shot by declaring, “You can’t take our country—and you can’t take our game.” At the title joust, singer Chantal Kreviazuk made her own statement regarding independence by massaging a line in “O Canada!” from “in all our command” to “that only us command.”

But, too—and this saved the event—there was the best of the sport’s delightful, excruciatingly entertaining on-the-fly drama, and a respectful acknowledgement by players on both sides that the sport survived the political toxicity to cultivate new fans. There was the traditional post-championship handshake, hockey’s unique version of respect and diplomacy.

The final was the fourth most-watched NHL-affiliated game in history and biggest draw since the modern Nielsen era began in 1988.

Certainly, there was the reminder that sports always is political and that national rivalries add plenty of juice. For the Empire State Building and Toronto’s CN Tower to be lit up in the championship combatants‘ respective national colors was a nice touch, even as real hockey fans—while taking their patriotic sides—were fully aware (and appreciative) of crossover loyalties to the athletes.

The U.S. team was filled with players who work for Canadian-based NHL teams, and visa versa. And it hasn’t been that long—maybe 50 years–since Canadians overwhelmingly peopled all NHL teams, the majority of which represented U.S. cities. A New York Rangers fan, Chicago Blackhawks fan, Detroit Red Wings fan, Boston Bruins fan, in rooting for his or her home team really was rooting for “our Canadians against your Canadians.” The father of superstar Connor McDavid, whose overtime goal won the Four Nations trophy for Canada, in fact was reportedly a big Boston Bruins fan. Cross-border allegiance, neighborly appreciation.

I thought of Corky DeGraauw, who was a 20-year-old from Toronto playing for the minor-league Long Island Ducks in 1971 when I was assigned to the team’s week-long bus trip to North Carolina and Pennsylvania. DeGraauw thought of how he would prefer flying to road games, “because it’s nice to look down at the ground that you’ve always seen before on maps, and see that there really isn’t a big red line which separates Canada and the U.S….”

We’re neighbors. L Cavanaugh’s Four-Nations summary in the Los Angeles Times mused that “Good neighbors are always there for each other.” He cited how the forestry minister of Canada’s Alberta province had sent firefighters to Los Angeles last month, returning a favor from 2023 when “California firefighters bravely supported Alberta in a time of great need.”

Cavanaugh wrote of “the goons who fought in Montreal” during the preliminary U.S.-Canada match, that “instead of playing their hearts out for their country, they deliberately put themselves in the penalty box. All pain, no gain. But that’s what goons do. They choose the performative over performance, spectacle over contribution, me over we—the exact opposite of what the legendary gold-medal winning 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team was all about” amid its “Miracle on Ice” upset of the Soviet Union, that real Evil Empire.

Cavanaugh cited Canadian columnist Pete McMartin of the Vancouver Sun lamenting, “Goodbye America. … I’ve reached that point in our relationship where any admiration I have had for you has been replaced by a new, angry resolve, which is: I won’t consort with the enemy.”

The New York Times quoted a Canadian fan in the crowd for the final that “Canadians are so pumped to win this game. Because we can’t beat Trump, right? It’s the only thing we can beat them at — hockey.”

The match was enormously appealing theatre, given the showdown between the world’s two best national teams on such a highly visible stage—as big as the Olympics, in some ways. “With more than a decade of built-up tension between the two rivals, heat on the ice was inevitable,” according to the New York Times. “But for many, the championship game wasn’t about bragging rights alone.”

That clearly was because of the Trump administration’s economic and geopolitical bullying—the lack of statesmanship and tact fouling the North American air. It was a reminder, as the L.A. Times’ Cavanaugh put it, of goonery in the mix. “Goons never really win,” Cavanaugh wrote, “because they’re all about pulling down others.”