Hockey proxy

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If we’re going to hang our conviction of American exceptionalism on Olympic hockey tournament results, we at least ought to include credit to the women who also serve in that war-without-bullets.

Yes, the U.S. men this week conjured a rollicking gold-medal overtime victory over Canada, their first Olympic title since the so-called “Miracle on Ice” of 1980, a semifinal shocker over the Soviet Union, cast in the role of international menace. (Talk about a morality play!)

But it somehow was only reluctantly acknowledged by the self-appointed manly man in the Oval that the American women’s team was equally successful at the Milan Cortina Games.

In fact, if it’s global superiority Donald Trump yearns to reinforce through hockey, there is the matter of three gold medals won by the American women in eight Olympic tournament appearances, with four silver and a bronze in the other five. The U.S. men, meanwhile, now total three golds in 26 Winter Games over 106 years.

One of those successes by the guys, of course—the most recent before Sunday, 46 years ago—set off a similar beating-of-the-chests on these shores. But in far different circumstances.

In 1980, the Soviets were the established international hockey heavyweights and, on an implied level, were the athletic extension of a government considered the world’s most dangerous nuclear-age bully, its players assumed to be malevolent Communist robots.

Real enemies, if you will. Contrast that to the fact that this year’s winning American men’s goalie plays professionally in Canada, for Winnipeg, and 22 of the 25 members of the Canadian Olympic team make their living with U.S.-based teams. So this bunch of international opponents are now returning to NHL action as familiar professional teammates.

There were no NHL pros involved in ’80, the Cold War still was raging, and the Olympics—theoretically above politics but so often a proxy for ideological and political conflict—was handy for some sabre rattling and nationalistic bluster. Plus, we Yanks were hungry for some form of self-assurance, in a funk of insecurity over the Iran hostage crisis and outraged by the USSR invasion of Afghanistan two months earlier.

(Twenty-one years later, U.S. policy makers invaded Afghanistan, but that’s another story.)

So the meaning of that big game in Lake Placid was immediately inflated—perverted, really—as a representation of global pre-eminence. Herb Brooks, the U.S. coach, called his team’s 4-3 victory evidence that our way of life was better than the Soviets’. U.S. editorials declared that the hockey triumph “lifted the spirits of Americans everywhere.” The whole thing was schmaltzified—splendid hockey gone to hokey—and eventually Disneyfied in the 2004 movie “Miracle.”

Thoughtful people right after the 1980 game lamented the war mentality attached to that hockey summit, and how flimsy it was to hang one’s hat on the result of a sporting event. ABC-TV’s Jim McKay, widely respected for his work amid the Olympics’ brotherhood-of-man idealism, nevertheless hadus veered into jingoism when he signed off at the close of those Games, sounding near tears over the U.S. hockey victory. “What an Olympics!” McKay gushed. “What a country! Let’s say it here: We are a great people!”

Except: What if our hockey lads hadn’t won the Big Door Prize that winter? And what about the fact that, overall, the East Germans (23) and Soviets (22) both accumulated more medals in those Games than the Americans (12)? Were we therefore a lesser form of humans?

Plus, there was this: Because of the USSR military incursion into Afghanistan shortly before the Lake Placid Opening Ceremonies, President Jimmy Carter—who twice telephoned Herb Brooks with congratulations and called the hockey players “American heroes”—had ordered a U.S. boycott of the Summer Olympics in Moscow scheduled that summer.

A U.S. Summer Olympian, volleyball player Debbie Green, was among those outraged by the political hypocrisy. “The athletes in the Winter Games,” she said, “get all the praise for their work, and now just because our Games are in Moscow, we’re accused of being un-American” for wanting to compete.

Of course sports always is an Us-against-Them exercise. You choose your side, identify with your tribe. Here in 2026, you add Donald Trump’s Manifest Destiny pretentions and his mob-boss vision of Canada as the 51st state, wrapping himself in the flag figuratively raised by our athletes in those two Olympic finals against our Neighbors to the North.

Let’s say it here: Whatever the hockey skills and player grit at work—and the championship games were fabulous theatre on the big stage—winning Olympic gold is no test of national strength, no proof that God is on our side. The competition is Us-against-Them, but the result is not a manifestation of Good-vs.-Evil, no verification of special virtue in the United States. Or, in this case, no evidence that it is a man’s world.

As Abigail Adams cued a previous U.S. President: “Remember the ladies.”

To do. Or just to watch.

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Is anyone out there, while witnessing the athletic adventures being televised from Northern Italy, tempted to try a Winter Olympic sport? To have yourself shot out of a ski start house, over the edge of a mountain, or flung down a twisting ice tunnel, face-first, on a skeleton sled? To have a go at spins and leaps—even backflips!—on a frozen surface while balancing on thin blades of steel? To push the envelope of risk in search of potential chaos, just to see what can be done?

To mainstream American sports fans—to most American residents, in fact—we are talking about conversing in a foreign language. Pig Latin at best, and I am not claiming to be fluent.

But what if I told you I have attempted a few of these endeavors. (Well, sort of.) As a newspaper reporter who covered the Winter Games five times, I occasionally was presented with something of an Olympics-for-Dummies beginner’s course.

Figure skating. (I use the terms “figure” and “skating” loosely.) In 1994, prior to the Games in Lillehammer, Norway, Michelle Kaufman, who was the Olympic beat writer for the Detroit Free Press, organized what was the first—and, as far as I know, last—National Media Figure Skating Championships. With the usual rabble of Olympic reporters all in Motown for the U.S. Olympic figure skating trials, Kaufman arranged for the use of a rink, rental skates, even some recorded music to accompany our…ahem…routines. (We were on our own for skating outfits, which I recall ran toward sweatshirts and jeans.)

There were a couple of folks among us who actually knew what they were doing. I recall a woman who wrote for a skating magazine who was demonstrating spins and jumps, some real dipsy-doodling. But, as Randy Harvey of the Los Angeles Times noted, “We can see that at a figure skating event anytime.” He preferred the Larry-Curley-Moe bits, such as the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s Jay Weiner shuffling around as half of a pairs team—the other half being a chair. I suspect it was not so much a prop as a device to prop him up.

Having grown up in warm-weather locales with scant experience on ice, I took a similarly safe approach. The “judges,” some Olympic coaches and officials who had joined the frivolous morning hijinks, were situated at one end of the rink, so I chose to glide—shamble? totter? lumber?—to the opposite end, whereupon I did a few ponderous back-and-forth repeats before making a quiet exit.

Listen: The Quad God was still three decades in the future, and I did avoid producing a “double cheek” (falling on my wallet). And was abundantly rewarded. One of the appointed judges, Linda Leaver, who had coached 1988 gold medalist Brian Boitano and therefore was eminently knowledgeable of all things figure skating, presented me with a perfect 6.0—the highest possible score in the sport at the time.

“I don’t know what you did,” she said. “You were too far away. I just figured it must have been okay.”

Bobsledding. In early 1993, I was assigned by Newsday to attend a session on bobsled science at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid, N.Y., and that weekend’s working trip was a rare opportunity to bring my wife and daughter for a little sightseeing.

It happened that conference organizers invited anyone in our group to take a bobsled run, executed—should I use that word?—in one of the older, less rapid models. So, with two professionals—one steering and the other braking—sandwiched around my wife, 13-year-old daughter and me, off we went, barreling down the icy chute at about 50 miles per hour through the half-mile plunge. Bobsledding has been described, not inaccurately, as “the champagne of thrills.”

And then there was the ride on a luge.

In late 1997, prior to the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, some of us ink-stained wretches, in town to do a bit of pre-Olympic reporting, were offered—dared?—to try out the luge track after getting brief instructions:

Lie on your back on the sled. Head back. Legs straight. Feet turned in slightly. Grab the small handles on the sled just under your knees. Though a real luger steers by subtly shifting his or her toes, barely shrugging a shoulder or ever-so-slightly lifting a knee, we were told: “Don’t do that. Don’t move. Just hang on.”

The reporter who went immediately before me—a woman I didn’t happen to know—was barely on her way when I heard her piercing screams, which didn’t stop until she had reached the bottom.

But I let them pack me on the sled, and immediately experienced that the gravity of the situation was the gravity of the situation. The luge, yanked downhill on an elevation drop of 300 to 400 feet—a bit like sailing off a 30-story building—rapidly gains momentum amid a clattering not unlike a passing train.

We amateurs had cheated that day by starting our runs halfway down the Nagano track, but were hurtling along at 40 to 45 miles per hour after just one turn—about half the speed Olympians reach—wind whistling in the ears despite a crash helmet. The real revelation was feeling, at the conclusion of the trip, completely out of breath, as if I’d sprinted down the hill rather than having laid as passively as possible on that conveyor.

Far less taxing was curling, which a handful of us journalists sampled in Salt Lake City prior to the 2002 Games. It may be worth noting that David Wallechinsky, in his series of exhaustive “Complete Books of the Olympics,” called curling a sport that “allows non-athletes to take part in the Winter Olympics.”

It’s like horseshoes or shuffleboard or bowling; requires no running or lifting or jumping. A 42-pound granite stone, resembling a tea kettle because of the shape and handle, is slid toward a bullseye-like target 146 feet away called the “house.” Teammates brush the ice in front of the moving stone; the faster they sweep, the farther the stone will go, with the intention of reaching the scoring area, maybe to guard the target against an opponent’s stone or bumping said stone out of its advantageous position.

Our experience in Salt Lake City was short-lived. My appointed teammate, with an apparent rush of adrenaline, sailed the stone so rapidly toward the house that I, at a full sprint, never caught up to it; never got close enough to apply a broom. It swept right past me.

There is a bottom line here: Some sporting activities are better for spectating than participating.

Changing seasons

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This is to suggest, now that the Winter Olympic Games are upon us, that these quadrennial versions of international sleigh rides and snowball fights could stand to promote more diversity, equity and inclusion. As varied as they are—featuring men and women from 92 national delegations skiing, skating, bobsledding, curling, snowboarding, biathloning across Northern Italy during the current edition—the Winter Games pretty much remain the “white man’s (and women’s) Olympics.”

Think of the not-so-wealthy countries populated by people of color. In Modern Olympic history, Cuba has won all of its 244 medals at the Summer Games. None in the Winter. Brazil (170 medals), Kenya (124), Jamaica (94), Argentina (80) have the same imbalance, with no Winter Olympic hardware.

Jamaica’s bobsled team at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics was an unlikely sensation, of course, inspiration for the 1993 film “Cool Runnings” and that tropical land’s first of regular Winter Games appearances. But from the original 30th-place finish in the two-man event, Jamaica’s best showing since has been no higher than 14th.

A major factor is geography, of course, and related meteorology. Live in the Alps or other snowy climes and the odds of developing one’s luge or ski-jumping skills are greatly enhanced. It’s hardly a surprise, then, that less than half the globe’s countries show up at the Winter Games, and that, according to nbcolympics.com, there were only five African nations—Eritrea, Ghana, Madagascar, Morocco and Nigeria, fielding a total of six athletes—at the 2022 Beijing Winter Games. A record low. That was down from eight African countries at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics in South Korea.

But, wait. There is a solution to this inequity, a way of promoting marginalized countries and peoples to reach wintry Olympic heights: Move some sports from the Summer Olympic program to the Winter Games. And logically.

Basketball, for instance, is mostly contested in winter since it was created in December 1891 as a means to keep Canadian-born instructor James Naismith’s students at the Springfield, Mass., YMCA Training School fit during long New England winters. And, P.S.: When basketball made its Olympic debut at the 1936 Berlin Summer Games—outdoors—it didn’t make much sense. Especially when a pouring rain descended on the gold medal final in which the United States slogged through a 19-8 victory over Canada on a water-logged clay tennis court.

Olympic boxing certainly can happen in the wintertime. And volleyball. Wrestling. Weightlifting. Based on past results, moving those sports to the Winter Games surely would bring the first non-Summer medals to Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rice, Bahamas, Chile, Dominican Republic, Indonesia and others.

It is a fact that the Olympic Charter specifies that Winter Olympic sports are to be contested on snow or ice. But need that be settled law? Especially at a time when global warming has made snow and ice harder to come by. Studies indicate that man-made snow, which has become common (and necessary) in recent Olympic cycles, exacerbates climate change, and further research warns that, without artificial snow, only four cities in the world would be capable of hosting the Winter Games by 2050.

So, as the Winter Olympics continue to literally melt away, this isn’t a call for, say, boxing on ice—oh, that’s called hockey—though that might be interesting. This isn’t backing how some Olympic poohbahs have envisioned adding “snow volleyball” (quite a reverse from some chauvinist IOC member recommendations, upon the appearance of beach volleyball in the 1996 Summer Games, that it would get more attention if women should wear skimpier outfits).

Just last June, newly elected IOC president Kirsty Coventry organized a working group focused on possibly altering Winter/Summer Olympic lineups. Not exactly a push for rebranding the operation into Indoor Olympics and Outdoor Olympics, but Coventry herself is the personification of how assumptions can sometimes be misleading. A former swimming champion from Zimbabwe, Coventry’s seven medals make her Africa’s most decorated Olympian. She is white.

Anyway, Coventry’s task force has been assigned with “identifying ways for sports to be added to or removed from the program through a clear and transparent process. It will also consider the suggestion that traditional Summer or Winter sports could cross over.” Two sports that are pushing for admission into the Winter Games are cross-country running and cyclocross—neither contested on snow or ice—but clearly meant to add diversity to the Winter event. Sebastian Coe, the former Olympic middle-distance running champion who is president of track and field’s international federation, has said as much, citing cross-country in the Winter program as a way to put African athletes in position for Winter medals.

Let the Games diversify.

Greenland invades the Olympics!

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It may be too late for a pair of siblings, competing in the upcoming Winter Olympics biathlon competition, to put Greenland on the map (as the illogical expression goes). Even for, say, a certain geographically challenged, arrogantly xenophobic American who doesn’t appear to know the world’s largest island (836,000 square miles) from nearby Iceland.

But we can hope that 24-year-old Ukaleq Slettemark and her 21-year-old brother Sondre generate some unprecedented attention for their birthplace that is enlightening. One of the grand features of the Olympics is the glimpse it can provide of generally ignored regions, their customs, history and people. If Ukaleq Slettemark, racing in her second Olympics, or her brother could somehow win a medal (though that isn’t likely), there would have to be, for instance, some public explanation of why Greenland’s red-and-white flag—the Erfalasorput, which means “our flag”—would not be raised.

Greenland has its own ski federation, founded in 1969, is a member of at least five international sports federations and competes independently at the Arctic Winter Games since their inception in 1970. But as a semiautonomous territory in the Kingdom of Denmark, and without its own national Olympic committee, Greenland’s athletes compete under Denmark’s red-and-white Nordic-cross flag, the Dannebrog.

Greenland, with only 57,000 citizens—roughly half the population of Tuscaloosa, Ala.—hardly boasts a massive talent pool, and too much attention always is paid to Olympic medal counts that mostly reflect the food chain with the largest, richest, most powerful countries on top. Yet the Slettemarks, amid the Games’ universal display of competitive joy—with which anyone, anywhere, could identify—might open a window on learning of sports in Greenland and Greenlanders’ contribution to Denmark’s Olympic participation.

Three Greenlandic skiiers were part of the Danish team at the 1998 Nagano Winter Games and one of those, Michael Binzer, got plenty of attention back home for finishing 41st in the men’s 50-kilometer cross-country freestyle event. Among the handful of Greenlanders who wore Demark’s colors in past Games was the Slettemarks’ father, Oystein, in the 2010 Vancouver Games’ biathlon event, which combines cross-country skiing and rifle shooting. The Slettemarks’ mother, Uiloq, also was a biathlete who competed in the 2012 World Championships and, on the side, founded the Greenland Biathlon Federation; she raced when she was 7 months pregnant with Ukaleq and was still active, with her husband, on the World Cup circuit in their 40s.

Here are more potential discoveries, courtesy of the Slettemarks’ Olympic presence: When Ukaleq was born, the family lived in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, the northern-most (and one of the smallest) capital cities in the world, thought to have the highest percentage of aboriginal people in the world among its 20,000 residents. Nuuk sits on a fjord on the Southwest edge of the nation, with no roads connecting it to the rest of Greenland, though there is an international airport and boat traffic.

When she was 4, young Ukaleq was traveling widely to competitions with her parents and, since conditions for biathlon training are better in Norway, the family lived there parttime when Ukaleq first tried the sport. All were back in Greenland for the Arctic Winter Games when Ukaleq, not yet a teenager, entered the biathlon competition as a last-minute replacement. And won.

She won Greenland’s first-ever medal at a major international event with a gold in the 2019 Youth World Championships in Slovakia and made her World Cup debut in 2020 in Austria. At the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, she finished 53rd in the individual biathlon race and 65th in the sprint.

So it’s safe to say that the Slettemark family knows a lot more about the world than the world knows of their homeland. A recent Associated Press dispatch quoted Ukaleq’s thoughts that demonstrate she clearly has been paying attention:

–Her dream is racing “under the Greenland flag, but at the same time, I feel like everyone knows that we’re Greenlandic and we will race with our own suit that we designed with some Greenlandic markings on it,” she said. “And we feel well taken care of by the Danish Olympic Committee.”

–She works as a sustainability ambassador in the face of global warming. “I come from Greenland, I see the changes. I care about winter not disappearing.”

–And, about the deranged White House rumblings threatening ownership of Greenland: “Terrifying….I’m very good friends with the U.S. athletes. I think they’re all really nice people. [But] we’re imagining the worst-case scenario….”

She said she has heard people on the biathlon circuit hoping that, as Russia remains banned from the Olympics since its invasion of Ukraine, the same should happen if the United States attempts to forcefully take over Greenland. “I feel,” she told The AP, “more strongly connected to the Danish team because of everything that’s going on in the international politics. I think it’s really special that Greenland and Denmark stand strong together.”

There must be a lesson about allies in all this.

It’s just talk

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Ahm fixin’ to declare that Ah don’t talk with a drall.

[Throat clearing here] OK, radio voice…

An essay in The Atlantic’s One Story to Read Today newsletter, “The Last Days of the Southern Drawl,” just caught my eye. I recall, when I was growing up and my father was regularly transferred—Mississippi to Texas to California to New Mexico—there were classmates at each new family stop who would study me, one eye halfway closed, trying to pinpoint why I talked funny. Gol-lee. And when I settled in New York after college, visits to my siblings in Texas and Missouri and to my aunts and cousins in Louisiana brought remarks from them about my apparent altered mode of communication. Oy.

It seems there was something of a moving target in my speech patterns—literally based on moving. Might I have been saying “Y’all” at times, then “You guys” at others? Maybe mimicking, intentionally or otherwise, different regional accents to which I was exposed, with some unavoidable genetic link? (Both parents were born and raised in Louisiana.)

In that Atlantic piece, Tennessee native Annie Joy Williams wrote that she had been determined not to have a Southern accent when she grew up because, as a child, she had “watched people snicker at the redneck characters on television who always seemed to play the town idiot. I knew what the accent was supposed to convey,” she said. “Sweet but simpleminded.”

I don’t recall any such self-analysis or thoughts of rejecting my roots in the way I spoke. But there possibly were subconscious, changing patterns of adaptation to different regional language. As a rule, people here in New York—my home since college graduation a half-century ago—do speak more rapidly than high school pals did in Hobbs, N.M., and fellow students in Columbia, Mo. And, I mean, you have to keep up.

(There was a period, years ago, when I briefly was my newspaper’s ice hockey beat reporter, spending a fair amount of time around Canadians, and suddenly detected myself ending sentences with “Eh?”)

I’m going to assert that I never conversed in a full-out drawl, which I have seen defined as “speaking in a slow, lazy way with prolonged vowel sounds.” Lazy!? In his delightful 1977 book “Crackers,” Roy Blount, Jr. railed against Northeasterners’ dismissal of the accent from his native Georgia as a sign of ignorance, prejudice or bumpkinism. As if the way he talked somehow was confessing to hating Blacks or “confessing to being barefooted,” which he wrote would prompt him to “get right up there at the dinner table or whatever it is and show them my shoes. Not that I’m wearing shoes for any Northern person’s benefit.”

In the Crackers chapter titled “Being from Georgia,” Blount wrote, “I am talking the way it feels right in my mouth. ‘Pore,’ for instance, is a lot better way of pronouncing the word poor than ‘pooor.’ When you say ‘pooor,’ you purse your lips like a rich person. When you say ‘pore,’ you say it the way poor folks and poor old souls and poorhouse residents say it when they say, ‘This is a poor excuse for living.’”

Blount argued that “you’re supposed to sound like the way you grow up. Advancing it along and remixing it, up to a point.” He had relocated from Georgia to Massachusetts (and then with a second home in New Orleans), and related how “people back down home accuse me of losing my accent. And then I get off the plane on the other end and people are saying, “You’re not from the city, heeya. I thot I heard a little….”

That’s what I’m talking about here. New childhood friends in California, after our family had arrived from Texas, likely placed me somewhere between a cowboy and a rube. My sister recalls schoolyard peers calling us “Tex.” Then, going back the other direction, to New Mexico, the locals again put me in the outsider category based on my speech. (Maybe with the hint of a Valley Guy accent? Was I saying “like” too often?)

By the time I got to Missouri, where that state’s natives themselves don’t even sound the same, depending on whether they’re from rural “Mizzou-RUH” or citified “Mizzou-REE”—there was yet another transmogrification of my larynx detected.

I have, somewhere among my various (insignificant) possessions, a “Texas Passport” that I purchased at a Dallas airport curio shop years ago. That document helpfully emphasizes some Texas assumptions with a couple of pre-printed personal statistics: For height, it says, “6-foot-6.” For sex, “Yes.” As if that stereotype somehow defined me beyond a doubt.

Shaped by geography, social class, ethnicity, listening to sports radio play-by-play on the radio, it is reasonable that my pronunciation and pacing might vary. My daughter, raised on Long Island without, I insist, a Lawn Guyland accent, lives now in London with her Scottish-born husband and English-born son, and I’ve certainly noticed that my grandson says “Toe-MAH-toe.” While I say “Toe-MAY-toe.”

But sociolinguistics have noticed that things can change. The Atlantic article noted how early years of the Great Migration, from South to North in the U.S., resulted in the older generation “taking their accents with them,” but that their descendants, part of the more recent relocation to Southern climes, don’t talk the same way. Not to mention online influences at work over the years. YouTube and such.

Listen: I refuse to be pigeonholed merely based on articulation. Drawl, schmawl. I self-identify as a Citizen of the World.

Not necessarily my type

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As a proud alumnus of the Bodoni Romans, my college’s intramural softball team, I hesitate to criticize the use of serif typefaces (of which Bodoni Roman is an ideal example). But the Trump administration’s recent decree that all official government documents employ only serif fonts—which are more difficult to read than sans serif alternatives, particularly for people with dyslexia and other visual disabilities—is just too weird.

The action hardly is anywhere near as low as freezing child care funding or unleashing gun-toting ICE agents against an unarmed Minnesota woman. Still, by rejecting cleaner, easier to digest sans serif type, the White House appears to be imposing another curb on full public accessibility. Let the Great Unwashed strain their eyes on serifs, those little “feet” at the bottom of letters.

All U.S. diplomatic posts have been ordered to employ only serif type, supposedly to “restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work.” But could it be, as Timothy Noah of the New Republic argues, that the administration’s rejection of sans serif lettering is “because they think it’s DEI bullshit”?

Serifs date back to use in ancient stonework and later were thought to add weight and clarity to written and printed texts. Long ago, the marketing business instead embraced sans serif fonts, in part because they were easier to decipher from a distance and thus provided more of a universal outreach for eyeballs. With the coming of the World Wide Web, sans serif likewise was judged to provide a better display for Everyman.

In 2023, the Biden administration joined that move toward modernization by switching State Department communications away from serif fonts to the sans serif Calibri typeface (which is being used in this dispatch). It since has been demonstrated repeatedly, or course, that Trump is bent on negating anything Biden implemented.

Serif fonts remain dominant in books, magazines and most newspapers. (Remember newspapers?) And I, as a lifelong fan of newspapers and a half-century working for a print daily, naturally have a close relationship with serif printing. In my Journalism School days at the University of Missouri, we used serifs—specifically, bold Bodoni Roman headlines—in the Columbia Missourian. That’s what led to christening our J-School softball team the Bodoni Romans. (A pretty good outfit: good fielding, decent hitting, a nice esprit de corps.)

In those days of so-called “hot type,” composing headlines consisted of assembling slugs of metal letters by hand on a Ludlow machine. And to assure the headline would fit the space allotted, “counting” letters was required. (Most lowercase letters counted a half-unit; figures and questionmarks one unit, capital letters—except M and W, which were 2s—1 ½ units.)

In the Missourian’s unionized backshop, an employee would physically put the letters in place on the Ludlow for our suggested headlines. So when our letter counting wasn’t precise—leaving a headline too long—that employee would suggest sarcastically that we “use rubber type next time.” Ha.

Or, in my experience with one of our favorite backshop fellows, an imposing man more than six feet tall and probably 250 pounds—we called him “Tiny”—he would quietly step away and let us students futz around in search of a new, shorter word and—sometimes—use spacing that was less than optimal between words.

So the result would be something LikeThis. (A teaching moment, that.)

These days, or course, the Ludlow is long gone because everyone uses “cold type,” and a headline simply is typed on a computer screen and activated with the “enter” button. But still, for many, many papers and books, most often featuring serif fonts.

All this aside, it just seems terribly silly that our government insists on a type that is increasingly less fashionable and less user friendly. Like demanding that authorities write in Old English text, or the likes of “Chiller” or STENCIL” fonts, which look about how one would envision them. Why not Wingdings—the series of symbols implemented by Microsoft in the 1990s as packaging for word processors? When you type a letter on your keyboard, a squiggly, nonsensical Wingdings symbol—theoretically for aesthetic purposes but not helpful for communication—appears instead.

(The celebrated 18th Century typographer Giambattista Bodoni, by the way, was not Roman—though he worked there for years. He was from Parma in Northern Italy. There is no record of him ever playing softball.)

 

 

Not exactly deja vu

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Might the Strauss-Howe Generational Theory—a psychohistorical supposition that describes recurring cycles—apply here? The return of the University of Missouri football team to the Gator Bowl during the recent holidays, though obviously a minor occurrence among life’s circumstances, nevertheless was a vivid ghost-of-Christmastime-past appearance for this old Mizzou alum.

In December of 1968, my senior year, I was one of two football beat reporters for our Journalism School’s Columbia Missourian daily newspaper. (Remember newspapers?) That fall, classmate Joe Rhein and I covered the footballers’ exploits in what—believe it or not—was our scholarly duty, our semester’s assignment for a reporting class. Which made the so-called “Missouri Method” of J-School—learning by doing—about as much fun as one can have without laughing. (Though we certainly had some yukks along the way.)

Rhein and I alternated the driving chores to away games in Kentucky, Illinois, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma, mixed in with witnessing five home games. And when the gridders had the good fortune of being invited to a high-visibility post-season event in Jacksonville. Fla., Rhein and I were afforded special scholarships (valued at a whopping $100 apiece) to fly to the Sunshine State and chronicle the team’s preparation and bowl participation.

Over the years—many, many years—I continued attempting to commit sports journalism for Long Island’s Newsday, assigned to Super Bowls, soccer World Cups, Olympic Games, Triple Crown races, tennis Grand Slams, NBA playoffs, March Madness, World Series, Stanley Cup playoffs, on and on—during which I was introduced to various cultures, fascinating people and exotic locales. Still, that the ’68 Gator Bowl was an early step into the Big Time.

So to notice, more than a generation later, that the Mizzou lads were returning to that scene from 57 years ago conjured the old Mark Twain quote: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

Almost everything about this sort of do-over was different. In 1968, the Gator was a big deal, one of only 10 major college bowl games. This winter, there were 41. That ’68 game was played in the original Gator Bowl stadium, demolished in 1994 after 48 years. But the Gator Bowl game, now burdened with one of those sponsored titles so common in sport’s relentless money grab, still is played on the same site, in what is now the NFL Jacksonville Jaguars’ palace, and has retained the west upper deck and ramping system from the original infrastructure.

The old joint, the one I attended in ’68 and again on assignment for Newsday to cover the 1980 Gator Bowl—because it featured that season’s Heisman Trophy winner George Rogers of South Carolina—had been home to the eponymous bowl game since 1946. That included the one in 1955 that was the first nationally televised bowl game.

The Beatles, during their first American tour in 1964, had played the Gator Bowl, though only after the Fab Four demanded that concert organizers nixed plans for a segregated audience. The Gator Bowl stadium also was host to the annual Florida-Georgia game, in which a football rivalry broke out amid the repeatedly raucous tailgating that caused the event to be known as the “World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.”

All of this history is just a reminder of how old I am. Yet that theory devised by William Strauss—author, playwright, theater director, lecturer—and Neil Howe—author, consultant, senior associate at the Center for Stategic and International Studies’ Global Aging Initiative—asserts that stuff that happened long ago comes back. Major crises and societal reconstruction, things like revolution and wars.

Sure enough, 1968 was a year of global upheaval, the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive, the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, widespread anti-war and civil rights protests, violent clashes at the Chicago Democratic Convention.

And here, as 2025 slipped into 2026, we have conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, political unrest regarding migration and the Trump administration’s autocratic, bullying leanings, what feels like unremitting gun violence, uncertainly regarding AI and robotics, struggles with climate disasters.

So Missouri was back in the Gator Bowl on Dec. 27, playing (and losing to) the University of Virginia, this time while I was thousands of miles away at my daughter’s place in London, and the 1968 date with Alabama came to mind:

First day in Florida, there in late December, we saw Santas roaming around in shorts, not what blow-ins from the Midwest expected. It was 70 degrees. Rhein and I waded in the ocean and did our duty reporting on all happenings related to the team’s game preparation, including the fact that—during the team’s leisure time at the beach, assistant manager Stan Biggs had his right eye blackened by a stray surfboard.

There was a pre-game banquet at which Missouri coach Dan Devine told his kidding-on-the-square joke on Alabama’s enormously successful and widely venerated coach, Paul Bryant, whom everyone knew as Bear.

“One night in the winter,” Devine said, “Bear had just gotten into bed and Mary Harmon”—Bryant always called his wife by her full maiden name—“said to him, ‘God, your feet are cold.’ And Bear said to her, ‘You can call me Paul.’”

Days before the game, Devine dismissed a key offensive lineman from the team—a player he called the best blocking center he had had—for what he called “unwillingness to abide by team rules” and never further clarified the offense. (Would that happen now?)

In the game, Mizzou rolled Alabama like dice in a surprising 35-10 victory that didn’t include a single completed pass by the winning side. The academic research of Strauss and Howe aside, that statistic may never be repeated.

Those were the days….

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Here’s the chorus:

I loved life as we knew it/I still can’t believe we threw it away

Goodbye, that’s all there is to it/Life as we knew it ended today.

Sound like just another musical reference to a romantic relationship?

Or a lament of the moral, legal, judicial and physical destruction of American life triggered by the results of the 2024 presidential election? Perhaps a regret, put to music, for having installed in the Oval Office an authoritarian bent on cruel treatment of the disadvantaged, on stifling dissent and speech, targeting political opponents, pardoning criminally inclined allies, bypassing the legislature, using the military for domestic control, defying the courts, controlling the news media, intimidating universities, using his power for personal profit?

I loved life as we knew it/I still can’t believe we threw it away

Goodbye, that’s all there is to it/Life as we knew it ended today.

Here’s another ditty that seems to apply to the present:

Yeah, let’s impeach the president for hijacking
Our religion and using it to get elected
Dividing our country into color

And still leaving Black people neglected.

Fact check: The first tune indeed is about a love match gone sideways, written by Walter Carter and Fred Koller and recorded by Kathy Mattea in 1988. But the echo in there, loud and clear now?….Life as we knew it thrown away?

The other example, authored by Neil Young—Canadian-born naturalized Yank—is from 1973, the year that a blowhard real estate tycoon named Donald Trump, working for his father’s New York operation, counter-sued the U.S. government for $100 million (equivalent to more than $700 million now) over charges that Trump’s properties had discriminated against Black applicants and tenants.

If this should arise on a test, the answer is pretty clear that Young was protesting Tricky Dick Nixon’s misdeeds in the White House rather than demonstrating some sort of clairvoyance 50 years into the future. But the current, overwhelming march away from life as we knew it manifests itself as what some medical experts describe as an earworm, the inability to dislodge a song and prevent it from repeating itself in our heads.

I loved life as we knew it….

A John Prine lyric from a few years ago could also fit about now:

Some humans ain’t human
Some people ain’t kind
They lie through their teeth
With their head up their behind

And I’m also hearing in my head a catchy number recorded by Willie Nelson (and his friend Merle Haggard):

Now it’s all going to pot
Whether we like it or not
The best I can tell
The world’s gone to hell
And we’re sure gonna miss it a lot

Given Willie’s personal reputation for long endorsing the use of weed, there certainly is a whiff of marijuana there. But think bigger picture. The world’s gone to hell….

Music is a great thing, a soundtrack of our lives, our emotions and experiences. And not always uplifting. It can make you think.

Okay. Bottom line: I can’t sing. I pretended to play the guitar years ago; got a Beatles songbook with all the chords and so on. Like so many Boomers, I witnessed some terrific concerts, mostly enjoying the gigs by the likes of Pete Seeger and the sly Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez. Dylan. Protest anthems. There were lots of anti-war songs around my college days, Kris Kritofferson’s “Good Christian Soldier” among the best.

‘Cause it’s hard to be a Christian soldier, when you tote a gun
And it hurts to have to watch a grown man cry
But we’re playin’ cards, writin’ home, an’ ain’t we havin’ fun
Turnin’ on and learnin’ how to die

I just read the obituary about a man named John Cleary, who had survived being shot in the chest by Ohio National Guard troops during an antiwar protest at Kent State University in 1970, a chilling moment in American history that suddenly doesn’t seem so abnormal, with ICE agents and the National Guard terrorizing citizens in Chicago and elsewhere. Back then, Neil Young weighed in…

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming/We’re finally on our own

This summer I hear the drumming/Four dead in Ohio.

It turns out that Neil Young is still holding powerful people’s feet to the fire, musically, with his rocking “Big Crime:”

Don’t need no fascist rules, don’t want no fascist schools

Don’t want soldiers walking on our streets

Got big crime in DC at the White House

There’s big crime in DC at the White House

 Chorus:

 No more great again, no more great again/Got big crime in DC at the White House.

 Not life as we knew it.

Preface

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Someday I really do intend to write a book. Seems that ought to be a requirement for a person who has made a living as something of a wordsmith—44 years as a sports journalist for Long Island’s Newsday after four years of preparatory scribbling through college, plus another decade or so of freelance newspaper and magazine work. And now with my own Substack newsletter, (Mostly) Hot Topics—musings on journalism, geezerhood and current events (beware the occasional curmudgeonly inclination).

Lots of former colleagues—most of them, it seems—meanwhile have gotten around to writing at least one book.

I haven’t checked that box, and it feels like a failure of sorts. I think of my freshman-year college roommate, Skip. He had taped a large sign above our shared dorm room desk that lectured, “Procrastination is not an art.” Which didn’t prevent him from routinely putting off studies while he played music or cards or vacated the premises altogether in pursuit of a little relaxation.

But here I linger. It’s not as if I have writer’s block. I calculate that, over the years of newspapering, in attempting to produce information and possibly profundity on deadline, I cranked out as many as 200 articles a year, at an average length of 700 words—and not the very same words, either. Total, I’ve published something like 7 million such units of language. When one considers that the typical book runs from 70,000 to 120,000 words, that theoretically translates to 65 or 70 books.

Non-fiction. But, alas, disconnected and unbound. Not a single real book. I almost could write a book about never writing a book. First sentence: Call me indolent.

Part of the problem is settling on a topic. Anything biographical, along the lines of personal war stories—I use “war” only as a metaphor for personal frontline involvement—isn’t likely to get much traction. I have not chased any white whales; set out for California after being driven out of Oklahoma by drought, economic hardship and bank foreclosures; worked at a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. A straight memoir is out of the question.

I’ve certainly come across some fascinating characters in my decades as a journalist, people who could do the work for me of storytelling, contributing humor and insight, relating rare experiences. But my brief encounters with book agents have left me with the impression that a subject is not especially marketable unless he or she already is a ragingly successful celebrity.

Except, when I proposed a book some 45 years ago on Al Oerter, who already had won four Olympic gold medals throwing the discus but, at the time, was 43—11 years past athletic retirement and attempting to resurrect some Olympic greatness at the 1980 Games—I was told that a publisher would only be interested if I could guarantee that Oerter would pull off a fifth Olympic victory. Entirely unlikely at his age.

Oerter was a piece of work—sportsman, philosopher, regular human being. An enlightening interview subject, entertaining and thoughtful. But only a happy ending would do?

There was an old football veteran named Ray Mansfield who, days before he and his Pittsburgh Steelers mates won the 1976 Super Bowl, dismissed the idea that only heroes should be fodder for a good book. “Winning is too serious, a serious business,” he said. A better volume, he said, “would be about the old, inept Steelers [from earlier in his career]….who were so much fun to be around.”

Forget prose based on facts, real events, and real people. Perhaps, instead, the working hypothesis might be to present something unusual, quirky, amazing, shocking. Emotionally gripping. A tome based on an adventure, a dilemma, establishing a mystery the reader would want to solve. Possibly shaped into an historical novel.

Where to start, though? I have read War and Peace—587,287 words and, to my mind, in need of a good editor to trim out about half of that verbiage. The first sentence, translated from the French, is a quote, “Well, my Prince, Genoa and Lucca are now no more than possessions, estates, of the Buonaparte family”—said to set the stage for the novel’s political and social themes at the start of the Napoleonic Wars.

More of a grabber, to me, is Kurt Vonnegut’s first line of Slaughterhouse-Five: “All this happened, more or less.” Or the “Notice” preceding the Introduction to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”

That’s the ticket! So I’m jealous. Of Tolstoy, Vonnegut, Twain or anyone else with the discipline, planning and crafting of any form of literary work.

There is no white smoke here. Persons likely to come across such an output by this would-be author most likely will die of old age.

No kidding

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Oh, the violence! The bloodshed!

House speaker Mike Johnson had characterized Saturday’s No Kings protests—there were more than 2,700 nationwide, with roughly seven million participants—as “Hate America” rallies that he said would unleash “Marxists, socialists, Antifa advocates, anarchists and the pro-Hamas wing of the far-left Democrat party.” Michigan Republican Lisa McClain portrayed the brewing events as guaranteed to feature a “mob of radicals.” Other Trump GOP toadies and kowtowing lickspittles predicted terrorist activity.

So there I was at the local No Kings gathering near my Long Island home, recalling the history of Edward R. Murrow’s dire greeting to American radio listeners in 1940 amid the Nazis’ 57-day bombing blitz of the British capital: “This is London.” Would we all live through it?

In reality, the two-hour gathering of some 3,000 people at Long Island’s Babylon Town Hall was about as destructive—as hostile, as murderous—as a bake sale. You could encounter far more danger trying to cross any local street overrun by speeding, lane-changing knuckleheads. What the Republican leaders envisioned—what they tried to sell—was their alternate reality of invading undesirables torching public property and inflicting injury. Something akin to—ahem—a January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters.

Talk about fake news. Here’s some of the stuff I witnessed in what was nothing more than citizens’ peaceful resistance to a decidedly unpopular President:

Most of the crowd toted signs, many creatively expressing an opposition to Donald Trump’s authoritarian policies and the corruption in his administration. “Deport Dictators.” “No Kings Since 1776.” “You’re Fired!” “Never Again Is Now.” “Orange Lies Matter.” “MAGA: Morons Are Governing America.”

Plenty of American flags were waved, with chants of “U.S.A! U.S.A!” along with other rejections of Trump’s depiction of their involvement, such as “I’m Not Being Paid to Protest.”

The folks lined the side of a busy highway, generating cacophonous cheering and horn-honking from the endless stream of passing motorists, who regularly lent raised fists, thumbs-up and applause in solidarity with the demonstrators. Many on-the-move observers raised cell phones at their car windows to record the thoroughly non-threatening action.

It was festive. Gregarious. The only bit of nastiness came from two—maybe there were three—fellows among the thousands driving by who brandished a middle finger to the rallying crowd. Those gestures were answered cheerfully with peace signs and drowned out by occasional chanting.

“This is what democracy looks like!” “No Kings! No Kings!” “Hey, hey, ho, ho; Donald Trump has got to go!”

A few posters paired the slang numerical term “to cancel” or “get rid of” with Trump’s place in the order of U.S. presidents: “86 47.” The day’s tone was nothing like “hate;” rather, it was concern. There was no haranguing or provocation. Just we vassals reminding of the country’s real social order. “These,” one sign announced, “are what patriots look like.”

Some protesters wore goofy inflatable costumes. Some sported “No Kings” sweatshirts. Most, like me, had gray hair. A 26-year-old guessed that more people from his age group “don’t care as much” about current realities, though he was quick to add that he was there because “I care.” An older fellow guessed at the thinking of those absent youngsters: “What’s democracy?”

The satirist Andy Borowitz “reported” that speaker Johnson “accused participants in Saturday’s No Kings protests of “blatantly exercising their First Amendment rights,” and that “when the framers of the Constitution wrote the First Amendment, they did not intend people to take it literally.”

Worse, what Johnson actually said at the conclusion of the No Kings rallies was that “there were a lot of hateful messages,” and that “we have video and photos of pretty violent rhetoric….saying fascists must die and all the rest.”

Somehow I missed all that. There were seven policemen on hand for the assumed apocalypse I attended. The most pressing duty required of any of them, in assuring that no lives were lost, was when one of the cops offered to press the traffic signal button to allow a couple of folks, unsteady with walking canes, to navigate a crosswalk.

Really.