Does anybody know what times it is?

That 2:01 a.m. finish of the Sofia Kenin-Venus Williams U.S. Open match this week really was just a new twist on the event’s after-midnight folklore. Ever since it became the first Grand Slam tournament to introduce night tennis, in 1975, the Open has produced an almost predictable late-evening/early-morning Dracula-like transformation that for years has turned Arthur Ashe Stadium into a vampire-state building, the carnivorous dog-eat-dog tennis causing fans (and players, too) to howl at the moon.

Maybe it has something to do with New York City’s DNA. The 20th Century journalist, novelist, essayist and poet Christopher Morley called Gotham “the nation’s thyroid gland,” and with the ratcheting up of tension in an extended, no-end-in-sight tennis dual —not to mention the presence of adult beverages among the spectators—the scene rendered can be worthy of a Stephen King work. During day sessions at the Open, polite tennis etiquette mostly prevails, but past the clock striking 12….

Of this phenomenon, a personal favorite happened 18 years ago, when American Andy Roddick and Latvia’s Ernests Gulbis, in a second-round match, battled each other so long that both players literally aged a year in the process. They had begun play at 10:41 pm on Aug. 30, when Roddick was 25 years old and Gulbis 19, and didn’t wrap up until 1:34 a.m. on the 31st, which happened to be Roddick’s 26th birthday and Gulbis’ 20th.

The hour when Roddick at last prevailed did not approach the Open’s still-standing last-call record of 2:26 a.m., first set in 1993 by Sweden’s Mats Wilander over countryman Mikael Pernfors. Those two wrangled in the first iteration of Louis Armstrong Stadium before Ashe Stadium opened six years later and Armstrong was rebuilt in 2018.

And neither did Kenin-Williams carry on as long as Wilander-Pernfors after their calendar change this year, though the Kenin-Williams conclusion was the latest in a first-round Open match. And was the latest-ever start of an Open match: 12:13 a.m.

It should be noted that tennis, possibly more than any other spectator sport, is notorious for its lack of punctuality. A 7 p.m. evening start, for instance—even when previous contests have long been over and weather conditions (and closed roofs) are favorable—often doesn’t even commence player warmups until 7:20 or so. But the crowds remain (possibly because they have forked over so much money for tickets ranging from $65 to more than $20,000).

Fashionably late? It’s not anarchy, exactly, but the magnitude of the Open—its expansive rolling-with-punches comparison to something like the 24-book “Odyssey”—does lend itself to keeping an open mind regarding personal schedules. Even before one stirs New York City and Happy Hour into the mix.

The best attitude toward all this likely was demonstrated by Roddick after that 2018 exhibition of endurance. “This is kind of what people come to expect of night matches here,” he said then. “You get in there and it’s kind of a brawl and the atmosphere is great. I looked up [during a changeover] and there are girls on the [stadium’s] big screen dancing on top of their tables in the suite and some guy and girl dancing in the corner. I love that. I’m having a blast out there, watching that. The atmosphere is a little crazier with the New York crowd, so that’s actually something that’s an advantage for me.”

Gulbis, who was a fourth-year pro ranked 40th at the time, had expressed a certain embrace of the situation as well. “I hope the people enjoyed it,” he said then. “I think they did.”

Venus Williams, now 46 years old and 32 years after her professional debut, noted that she “never played a match that late before, but I was happy to see that so many people stuck around for that. It was a real honor to play in front of them.”

Just waiting for the moon to say “Good night.”

Elbowing way to the top

Tommy John—whose 26 big-league seasons are second most among pitchers in the so-called modern era—died Saturday at 83. But Tommy John Surgery lives on at 52. The innovative elbow reconstruction pioneered by Dr. Frank Jobe (who died in 2014 at 88) still is saving countless ballplayers’ careers.

If induction into baseball’s Hall of Fame really is about Forever, acknowledging individuals who put a permanent imprint on the sport, why is neither man enshrined in Cooperstown? I’m all-in with Mark Whicker’s Tommy John appreciation in his “The Morning After” Substack, recommending “a shared plaque” at the Hall “with John and Jobe as an entry.”

It is possible that more people out there are aware of Tommy John Surgery than the man first subjected to it. The procedure—replacing a torn ulnar collateral ligament in the pitching elbow with a tendon harvested from elsewhere on the patient’s body (in John’s case, the right wrist)—reportedly has been performed on 40 major-league pitchers just this season, and in excess of 2,600 MLB players since its original, eponymous victim. That’s a lengthy roll call of the patients of Jobe.

In 2013, John and Dr. Jobe were invited to Cooperstown during induction weekend and appeared together during a brief press opportunity. There was some irony to the fact that Tommy John Surgery might have been considered a form of performance enhancement at a time when baseball was up to its eyebrows in the nefarious aspects of augmentation.

Among the eligible former players on that year’s Hall ballot were Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mike Piazza, Craig Biggio, and Sammy Sosa—all of whom had been tainted by, or accused of, doping. And for the first time in 48 years, members of the Baseball Writers Association of America—with their St. Peter-at-the-Pearly-Gates function—had barred the gates to all.

“There’s a myth out there that after Tommy John Surgery, you can pitch better than you did before,” Jobe said during that appearance. “Well, that’s not true. All it does is put it back to where it was and, if they have a good rehab program, they may pitch better than they did just before they got hurt, when they were beginning to go downhill. In their mind, they think, ‘I’m better than I ever was.’ But they’re not.”

John was 31 years old, 12 seasons into his big-league career when he tore the ligament in his elbow in 1974, and Jobe gave him roughly a one percent chance of returning to the mound after the then-experimental operation. “He said, ‘You don’t need surgery; you’ll be fine,’” John recalled Jobe telling him. “He said, ‘You can play catch with your kids and throw batting practice to your kids, but you’ll never be able to pitch major league baseball again.’

“I wanted to pitch major league baseball.”

So Jobe grafted the tendon from John’s other wrist, while admitting he wasn’t sure if the transplanted tendon would be rejected as a foreign body “or would wear out and break loose. That’s why I told him he had only about a 100-to-1 chance.

“This was the age,” Jobe related during that 2013 Hall of Fame weekend, “when surgeries were just being developed for athletes. And they weren’t life-saving.”

But John pitched another 14 seasons, three times winning at least 20 games.

“I didn’t do another one for two years,” Jobe said, “and then when he was pitching pretty well, we had Brent Strom [a journeyman who was the second player to have Tommy John Surgery] come in. So I did another one, and another year went by and Tom Candiotti came in. He was just a Single-A player at the time, and I had to decide whether this should be done on everybody that has a torn ligament, because you can live without it. Or should it be done just on major league players?”

Candiotti, a knuckleballer, convinced Jobe he was a big-league “prospect.” And post-surgery, he indeed spent 16 years in the Majors with five teams. “So I fixed a prospect,” Jobe said.

So a torn ulnar collateral ligament had become a curable disease. Victims regularly proceeded apace with their careers. But even John worried, years later, about a downside, that the operation’s availability could eliminate reasonable caution in young pitchers and their parents, and the “epidemic of kids from 12 to 17 pitching year-round can mean “they’ll probably be seeing a doctor down the road to do Tommy John Surgery.” A large percentage of those procedures now are done on high school, college, minor league and amateur pitchers. And Jobe agreed: “That’s a sad thing.”

Still, in the right hands (elbows?), the John-Jobe collaboration was Hall of Fame stuff.

Holy moly!

This is about the separation of church and sport. Just this week, former Newsday colleague Bob Keeler, via his Substack newsletter “Peace of Mind” (you should check it out), thoughtfully questioned the Chicago White Sox one-game promotion of offering specially ticketed spectators a papal miter—it’s a pointy pope hat—emblazoned with the team’s insignia, based on the fact that new Pope Leo XIV, a native of Chicago’s South Side, is known to be a Sox booster.

There was a lengthy report in the New York Times about the characteristic connection of an American lad to his hometown team, as it applied to the former Robert Prevost. And how the Sox, in a typical bit of American capitalism, have seized on what the Times described as a promotional and marketing “Godsend.”

Keeler, citing “a pope who loves baseball and hates war”—and a U.S. president who “clearly loves war”—wrote that he is “rooting for the Chisox” because of that Leo link. But that “the unusual promotion [of the pope’s miter] leaves me with mixed feelings, to put it mildly. Those pointy hats have always turned me off. They seem sharply out of keeping with the way Jesus described his vision for the leaders of his movement. Somehow, I can’t get it into my head that this bit of show-off haberdashery was what Jesus had in mind when he prescribed servant leadership.”

A parable: As a sixth grader, I signed up for the Little League team at my Catholic grade school, my first participation in organized sports. One of the first admonitions from our gangly, soft-spoken coach, Mr. Buck, was that there would be no supplications for the Almighty to come to the aid of our team. (And, by extension, work against our opponent.)

That lesson actually predated the increasingly common custom of baseball players gesturing toward the heavens after hitting home runs, NFL players praying in the end zone after scoring, victorious jocks in various sports thanking The Lord for helping them make winning plays.

William J. Baker, in “Playing with God,” argued that such public displays amounted to “an athlete using a moment to sell a product, like soap”—in effect merely calling attention to the athlete’s accomplishment. Such conflating of godliness with an athlete’s heroics once led to a British newspaper posting the headline, “Leave me out of your petty games.—Love, God.”

Just to be clear: Victory and personal stardom hardly are against my religion. And when University of North Caroline students ask, “If God isn’t a Tar Heels fan, why is the sky Caroline Blue?”—isn’t that more like acknowledging another member of the appreciative audience (i.e., a fellow fan) as opposed to invoking the Puppet Master? It doesn’t work as a boast of salvation.

To trivialize faith and religion by hinting that God confers success on the more moral team, the more moral player, may not be staying in one’s lane with athletic endeavors.

I would argue that my Little League coach—God bless Mr. Buck—understood that if the outcomes of at-bats and games indeed are determined by God, wouldn’t that equate athletic failure and defeat with somehow already being on the road to hell? Isn’t that getting into the foothills of a flimsy evangelism?

In 1959, my then-hometown team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, were about to commence play in the World Series. (Against, by the way, those self-same Chicago White Sox. The future Pope Leo was only two years old at the time, so his interest in the eventual outcome is unknown—and not to the point, anyway.) There I was in my seventh grade class at Our Lady of Peace grammar school, where the nun who taught the class determined that it wouldn’t hurt anyone if we all listened to the first game on the radio.

There absolutely were no prayers offered. It was just baseball. And when the White Sox scored two runs in the first inning and seven in the third, on the way to an 11-0 victory, Sister’s reasonable reaction was to switch off the radio and get on with our general education.

That the Dodgers ended up winning the Series in six games was exciting stuff. But redemptive? Soul saving? If only.

Cuba. Si.

The billboard said, “Bienvenidos a Havana.” Welcome to Havana. A kindly greeting. And, sure enough, a more hospitable experience it could not have been.

This was just last week, at the entrance to the Broadway musical “Buena Vista Social Club.” So, no, not actually Havana. But a New York City happening that transported me 35 years and more than 1,300 miles back to Cuba. It summoned a long-ago afternoon when a couple of us Yankee newspapermen, taking a brief break from covering the Pan American Games, stepped into El Floridita, the historic fish restaurant and cocktail bar in Old Havana that was famous for having been one of Hemingway’s favorite hangouts.

We walked in to find a live band performing, with a sound and energy that is so impeccably rendered by the 2026 “Buena Vista Social Club,” in which the assembly of musicians prominently own the stage throughout the show. Intense percussion, complex polyrhythms, call-and-response vocals. There are bongos, pianos, guitars (especially the tres, the Cuban variety of a Spanish guitar), a base, a trombone, a trumpet, a flute, woodwinds.

As I often offered apologetically during that 1991 trip to the real Havana—“No entiendo muy bien el español”—I spent the entire production of “Buena Vista Social Club” only vaguely understanding some of the Spanish lyrics. Hardly a loss there. “Remember,” the show’s music consultant Juan de Marcos wrote in the Playbill’s introduction to the various numbers, “the music speaks for itself and comes straight from the heart. Enjoy the moment!”

There have been, in recent days and weeks, plenty of reports on how Donald Trump is predicting Cuba’s collapse; how he has imposed an oil blockade that has pushed the island into its worst-ever energy crisis; how Cubans clearly are suffering yet continue to demonstrate an extraordinary talent to adapt. As they have for nearly seven decades of U.S. political pressure, they are defying the odds, with a grit and resourcefulness to make do.

And that was so obviously in evidence during my sample of the actual Cuba in ‘91. Back then, as now, there was severe rationing of bread to citizens. Almost no traffic because there was almost no fuel to be had. Yet those natives who, despite being mystified by the U.S. government’s apparent intent on starving folks 90 miles from Miami, cordially interacted with us Yanqui visitors. One cabbie invited a colleague and myself to have coffee at his home. Another happily shared his knowledge that Hemingway “always wrote with a No. 2 pencil.”

Upon flying 600 miles East of Havana to Santiago de Cuba, which was serving as a second site for the Pan Am competition, we found more tumble-down buildings, more neglect and rubble. But also a nine-piece band waiting at the airport, pounding out toe-tapping local music. “Everybody,” a local greeter told us, “dances here.”

We made an excursion to the Bay of Pigs, where the doomed, ill-conceived Kennedy administration’s 1961 military attack not only failed to oust dictator Fidel Castro but cemented Fidel’s emergence from that victory as a charismatic leader. He had, after all, originally brought doctors and schools to pockets of extreme poverty following the rule of Fulgencio Batista, who had been aligned with the wealthiest sugar-plantation landowners and the American Mafia.

During my old adventure, some of us wondered if, post-Fidel, Cuba would evolve away from Castro’s anti-U.S. rule and his intolerance of homegrown dissent, or whether Cuba might merely digress to the Batista days, featuring a small upper echelon of the super rich and affluent tourists while again consigning the majority of Cubans to be an underpaid and under-educated servant class. It would represent the sort of regime change that appears to be Trump’s goal, seeking economic opportunities for U.S. businesses and, especially, based on his well-documented greed, himself and his family.

He is selling his strategy by labeling Cuba a “threat to national security,” a highly unlikely circumstance for a mostly destitute island, with roughly 32 times fewer residents than the United States. Especially since Cuba’s sugar daddy, the Soviet Union, collapsed in late 1991. And, even if Trump were aware of the existence of Cuba’s distinct, soaring music, he likely would be inclined to cast that as subversive as well. Another abject prevarication.

Anyway. Seeing and hearing “Buena Vista Social Club”—it’ll make sparks fly around your head—was for me a thoroughly engrossing (and educational) trip back to El Floridita and Santiago de Cuba. A respite from the xenophobia and ignorance that has become so prominent among our so-called leaders.

Bienvenidos a una comprension mas amplia. Welcome to a wider understanding.

Should you read this?

There is too much to read and too little time. Emails and texts—from friends and work associates and politicians and total strangers and would-be influencers. There is endless breaking news, available in the Antediluvian manifestation known as a newspaper, and especially online. The updates and parsing of everything from AI to midterm elections to Canadian wildfires to the evil influence of lettuce on diarrhea outbreaks—cyclosporiasis!—to the prime minister’s bloodless coup in the United Kingdom. Not to mention accounts of the many angles, far beyond soccer, associated with the recent World Cup.

And here comes this thing you’re reading now, just one more in the proliferation of Substack posts that flood inboxes. Something like a letter to an imaginary friend. Don’t be discouraged; most of those out there are fascinating, reporting and ruminating on so many levels of human existence. For me, there is plenty of content available on personal interests such as the state of journalism (the source of my employment over a half-century), grade inflation (I’m giving up my 17-year teaching gig), the disappearance of manual transmission cars (but I still have mine), arguments confronting the idea of a “just war” with Iran.

There is plenty of humor to digest and examples of optimism to be found in these dispirited times, thoughtful mullings by former colleagues and other masters of composition. So, so much to read. Attention must be paid, long past two cups of coffee each morning.

It’s ironic that, while on this hamster wheel of attempting to catch up with all the tidings and scuttlebutt and scandal (and with the conviction that I might learn something), the August issue of The Atlantic magazine arrived, announcing in its cover headline, “The Age of Reading is Over.” Author Rose Horowitch, citing the growing dominance of phone scrolling, video, X, Tik Tok and Instagram as primary information sources, posited that America hasn’t exactly devolved into being illiterate so much as becoming “postliterate.”

Which is one more topic to pore over. Horowitch noted the disappearance of newspapers as a central factor. (According to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, the United States continues to lose print newspapers at a rate of more than two per week, roughly 800 having ceased printing since 2000, while my former employer, Long Island’s Newsday, has lost 90 percent of its print circulation in less than a decade).

Horowitch wrote that “reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society,” one element leading to Donald Trump becoming “our first postliterate president,” the product of an electorate “where information is primarily spread through text.” (With questionable punctuation, according to another Atlantic piece.)

She quoted media theorist Joshua Meyrowitz’s belief that, with the decline of print media, the public shuns “authority and institutions in favor of the candidate who [makes] good television.” Voters have come to focus on “dating criteria” instead of “resume criteria” in picking their leaders.

And AI contributes enormously in threatening the “continued existence of writing,” Meyrowitz was quoted, jeopardizing critical thinking and judgement.

Still, there is no stemming the flow. In that latest Atlantic issue alone, there are 13 articles, beyond Horowitch’s, to tackle. In my house, there are roughly 500 books—probably 490 that have been read by my wife but maybe 50 by me—so there is a lot of catching up to do. It’s not as if I have the problem of that 31-year-old fellow in New York City who was faced with an eviction notice because his landlord objected to him housing 10,000 volumes in his studio apartment.

But I only now got through Richard Wright’s unsettling memoir of poverty, racism and hunger in the Jim Crow South, “Black Boy,” a mere 81 years after such an important tome was published. I didn’t get around to “War and Peace” until Covid dictated a lot of down time a couple of years ago. On another bookshelf, Shakespeare’s plays—I think our daughter read them all—seem to accusingly await my attention. As a member of my wife’s monthly library book discussion group, more immediate reading adventures also loom.

And now, with all the fuss over that new “Odyssey” movie, is there an obligation to finally read Homer’s original 3,000-year-old poem? Unless Monica Hesse unwittingly offered me absolution in a recent Washington Post column by arguing, “You can’t read everything, and it’s never too late to read something.”

OK. Bring on the words. But I do need more time.

Illegal aliens

The unsettling thing about the annual UFO festival in Roswell, N.M., recently detailed in a New York Times report, is that it reminds of our federal government’s current demonization of “illegal aliens.” At Roswell’s carnival, the cosplay of attendees dressing up as visitors from outer space—little green folks; “people of color!”—feels a little like some frightening invitation to be riddled with bullets by ICE thugs.

The event is the result of Roswell having come to fancy itself the nation’s UFO capital, playing on the 1947 “Roswell Incident” in which a discovery of metallic and rubber debris, apparently from a military balloon, triggered speculation of a flying saucer crash there.

I spent my high school years during the mid-1960s in Hobbs, N.M., roughly 100 miles away but connected to Roswell by our sports teams’ regular duels, without the “Incident” ever coming up in conversation. It wasn’t until the 50th anniversary of the happening, in the late ‘90s, that the then-mayor of Roswell helped launch the commemorative UFO fair that now draws tourists from across the country. They participate in “Incident” tours, check out the local UFO museum, take in a laser-light show and a parade, wear funny bulbous glasses and, in some cases, arrive in cars modified to look like flying saucers.

And—sign of the times—many deal in conspiracy theories that U.S. officials aren’t telling us what really happened 79 years ago, harboring suspicions that the deep state is hiding a long-ago inability to secure the intergalactic border, that some Commie plot may have consisted of hiring spacemen to invade our homeland.

It has been reported that Steven Spielberg’s fascination with that still-mysterious event has influenced his film work, including his latest science-fiction blockbuster, “Disclosure Day,” though other reviews cite, as that movie’s genesis, Spielberg’s stargazing when he was growing up in Arizona, one state to the west of New Mexico.

I shot a text to my old Hobbs High School buddy Larry Schear about the long-ago UFO situation, based on the fact that Larry attended the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell—on his way to the Naval Academy and his real-life Tom Cruise-like stint as a Top Gun. No revelations there; Larry did not remember “anyone at NMMI talking of the UFO Roswell incident,” nor or any knowledge of it in our Hobbs High days. It was just a vague thing in the distant past, no more personally impactful than the failure of the Spanish Armada.

I’d guess I spent maybe half a day in Roswell back then, when our football team finished the 1964 season there—a loss—and I sat on the bench. A year earlier, on the evening that President Kennedy was shot, the decision was made to go on with our home football game against Roswell—also a loss—after we were assured that Kennedy “would have wanted it that way,” though it occurred to me that Hobbs officials could not have discussed that with the President either before, and certainly not after, his demise.

Beyond that, the only specific memories of Roswell were of its high school basketball team defeating our Hobbs lads two consecutive years in the state tournament—each time by a single point! So, no special warmth for the inhabitants of that burg.

Anyway, here’s the tale of the ’47 Roswell Incident to be found on Google and other depositories of history….

The Roswell Daily Record of July 8 headlined:

RAAF Captures Flying Saucer

On Ranch In Roswell Region

 

Subhead:

No Details

Of Flying Disc

Are Revealed

 

The U.S. Army Air Forces’ original announcement of finding said “flying disc”—the debris discovered by a rancher was actually 75 miles north of Roswell—was retracted within a day. The wreckage may have been from linked balloons and assorted equipment that was part of a top-secret program to detect Soviet nuclear tests, or perhaps was merely from a conventional weather balloon. Some 30 years later, a retired U.S. Air Force officer said the weather balloon was a cover story and that the debris was on extraterrestrial origin. (E.T., call home.)

A 1980 book added speculation of involvement by multiple governments, of grey aliens—What? Not green?—fueling the conspiracy theorists (dogs chasing their tails?) that the military in fact had discovered a craft from outer space and captured its occupants.

Interplanetary and ufology intrigue aside, there is a haunting, earthly 2026 reaction at work here, best expressed in the cartoon of two obviously extraterrestrial beings, standing outside a sign for “Roswell,” pondering a close encounter. One says to the other, “Let’s give it shot. I hear it’s a sanctuary city.”

Pyrotechnics

Accidentally—thanks to my wife setting the agenda—I found the ideal way to mark America’s 250th birthday weekend. Two Broadway revivals, “Ragtime” and “Death of a Salesman,” that dealt with the status of the American Dream. Plus abundant World Cup action on television that included the American nightmare of Donald Trump’s buzzkill interference in soccer protocol leading into the Yanks’ much-anticipated match against Belgium.

As a spectator sport, the theatrical performances in New York City, one a musical and the other a drama, were as exhausting as witnessing England’s survival—down a man, gasping in the heat and altitude of Mexico City, desperately holding off the home team—and Norway’s late rally against Brazil behind frightening striker Erling Haaland, and Argentina conjuring a 3-2 victory after being behind Egypt by two goals with 11 minutes to play.

Talk about fireworks.

The thing about the World Cup that clearly escapes Trump is the observation that American poet/writer Rowan Ricardo Phillips expressed in a New York Times opinion discussion, that political nationalism “too often struggles” to accept that “soccer nationalism asks you to love your side; it doesn’t require you to deny the legitimacy of the other.”

Trump’s meddling with the sport’s governing body FIFA, in overturning the red-card suspension of U.S. scoring threat Folarin Balogun, essentially took the air out of the American-Belgium tilt. And conjured the themes of both “Ragtime” and “Death of a Salesman.”

The first recalled how, at the turn of the 20th Century, the cards were stacked against Blacks and immigrants, which felt like a meditation on the Trump administration’s current priorities, the restricted Trump vision of who belongs in America. In “Wheels of a Dream,” John Clay III (as “Ragtime’s” featured Black pianist Colehouse Walker Jr., seeking dignity and justice against prominent racist attitudes), sings of his baby’s future, “When he is old enough I will show him America.”

Of course the audience could see the dead end ahead, just as for the play’s penniless Jewish artist Tateh, a proxy for the many faceless immigrants at the time. And for those now, again, in the news.

Same with the portrait in “Salesman” of Willy Loman (Nathan Lane), clearly faced with no future, relieved of his lifetime vocation, strapped for money, too proud to admit it, constantly fooling himself about his very worth. The acting—and in “Ragtime,” the dancing and singing, choreography and so on—is so energetic and emotional as to be draining, excruciating. Possibly because of a sense, 250 years on—decades since Arthur Miller wrote “Death of a Salesman” and E.L. Doctorow penned “Ragtime”—that the nation is stuck in its failure to assure that all men are treated equally and provided a realistic pursuit of happiness. Or, worse, is going backwards.

So many outside the privileged elite straining to score that elusive goal.

More from Phillips in the New York Times: “I don’t think it’s a mistake to look at the World Cup politically….What it can do, however, is show us something politics often obscures: conflict conducted under shared rules, rivalry that requires the legitimacy of the opponent, grief and joy that people enter into freely. The World Cup isn’t a mirror of politics so much as a reminder of what politics has forgotten how to stage—great acts of empathetic togetherness.”

One review of “Ragtime,” when it most recently was revived during the last presidential election, called it “apt timing for a show that rummages through an American moment to interrogate the American soul.” “Death of a Salesman,” too, examines not just where we were during its original iteration in 1949, but where the country is now.

So the Yanks lost to Belgium, with no thanks to Trump for providing the Belgians with added motivation by disregarding the rules. That particular sporting challenge, the fairly riveting World Cup action and a pair of gripping Broadway history lessons aside, it’s pretty clear we have been down this patchy road before, reminders that 250 years on, perhaps America can consider itself in stoppage time. Still, theoretically, with a shot at the universal Dream.

Sing along

What’s not to like about an international sports festival where an Argentine native who lives in Spain, working as coach of the United States national soccer team, gleefully joins his players and the celebrating spectators in post-match sing-alongs of a half-century old tune that celebrates rural America?

That coach, Mauricio Roberto Pochettino Trossero, wasn’t brought into this world until 1972, a year after “Take Me Home Country Roads” hit the U.S. charts. He hails from the South American town of Murphy, named for an 1800s Irish immigrant who became a wealthy Argentine landowner. And Murphy is a long way from Roswell, N.M., where Henry John Deutschendorf Jr.—later known as John Denver—was born and, at the height of his country/folk career, recorded “Country Roads.”

The ditty name-checks West Virginia, but in fact alludes to the comfort of a simpler, peaceful existence; it’s not really about geography as much as an emotional refuge found somewhere in a happy past. Denver’s co-authors, Bill Danoff and his wife Taffy Nivert, were inspired by affections for the rustic, very American byways in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Maryland.

What’s not to enjoy about a real all-over-the-map event? Though technically a victory anthem in this soccer setting, “Country Roads” evokes feelings for one’s beloved home, and that fits right into the World Cup’s melting pot of international visitors and the diaspora of hyphenated Americans giddily demonstrating their affection for cultural ties. And no passport required to participate in the fun.

Beyond just an elite soccer tournament, the World Cup is flags, anthems, chants, languages, geography and glimpses of citizens and life beyond these shores. Scotland’s kilted, bagpiping Tartan Army of fans. Norway’s Viking-mimicking followers pulling imaginary oars. The La Mancha Amarilla—Yellow Stain—of the Colombia fanbase gathering for matches attired in yellow. The Dutch supporters’ dress code of orange. Always orange. There is a constant global awareness, an ethnic and religious pluralism, that Americans really can use right now—maybe more than ever—at a time of rampant institutionalized xenophobia.

What could be a problem with the fact that, of the tournament’s original 48 national teams, 28 are coached by managers from other countries? According to The Athletic, of the World Cup’s 1,248 players, just under a quarter are representing a team other than their country of birth. There was a bad joke, during the 1990 World Cup in Italy, when Ireland was scouring beyond its boundaries for better soccer talent, that anyone with an Irish grandparent or long-lost ancestor—even anyone who owned an Irish setter—was welcome to play for the Ould Sod. In fact, it’s fairly typical for players to have the choice of representing their birth nation or that of their parents.

A prime example is the Americans’ early goal-scoring leader, Folarin Balogun, who was eligible to play for Nigeria (his mother’s home), England (when he was raised) or the United States, where he was born during his mother’s visit to New York. This sort of thing tends to take the jingoism out of national consciousness.

So there is the Denver recording, requested by U.S. Soccer officials when FIFA—soccer’s international governing body, which operates the World Cup—queried teams for their preferred songs to be played on stadium sound systems after victories. Reportedly, Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” and Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” were considered along with “Country Roads,” with “Sweet Caroline” eliminated because England preferred that one.

Whatever. “Country Roads” is just the ticket. It references, rather than a narrow, us-against-them patriotism, an identity to home and/or forebears. So members of Ecuadoran communities, Cape Verde communities, Portuguese communities and so on gather to celebrate teams that represent, at some point in personal histories, their people.

Whether your side wins or loses, what makes the World Cup so appealing is the mood of the John Denver song.

Country roads, take me home, to the place I belong….

Universal truths

GOAL. The World Cup format of grouped round-robin play before single elimination matches gives everybody a chance to get rolling and enjoy the opportunity to be part of massive global event. And builds tension toward the knockout phase.

YELLOW CARD. Soccer’s insistence on labeling a score on a deflected shot an “own goal,” somehow crediting to the defender who last touched the ball instead of that defender’s opponent, the fellow who actually initiated the shot and whose mates benefit on the scoreboard. And “own goal” is not necessarily a botched play and therefore thoroughly fails to describe how the score was created. Compare that statistical failure to the recent Stanley Cup overtime score by Las Vegas’ Shea Theodore, when his shot bounced off the boards, off Carolina winger Jordan Martinook’s stick and off Carolina goalie Brandon Bussi’s skate and into the net. Theodore, rightfully, was credited with the goal. Not the last-man-to-touch-it: Bussi. There is such a thing as a pin-ball wizard, who deserves the kudos for a successful attack.

GOAL. Old goalkeepers from tiny World Cup debut nations, giving us terrific athletic drama as well as a glimpse of little noticed lands and cultures. Curacao’s Eloy Room, 37, produced a World Cup-record 15 saves in a scoreless tie against Ecuador. (Curacao is a Caribbean Island within the kingdom of Netherlands, with only 156,000 residents who often are annoyed that foreigners only are aware of neighboring Aruba.) Then there is Cape Verde’s 40-year-old Josimar José Évora Dias, who goes by Vozinha—Portuguese for “Little Granny”—who shut out former Cup champion Spain and followed that with a 2-2 tie against two-time Cup champion Uruguay. Little Granny is so-called because he was raised by his grandparents. (Cape Verde—Cabo Verde in Portuguese—is a volcanic archipelago of 10 islands off Africa’s West Coast, first settled by Portuguese sailors, strategically positioned to have given it a significant role in the transatlantic slave trade during the 16th and 17th centuries.)

GOAL. Argentine superstar Lionel Messi’s ability to essentially play possum—walking, walking, walking around the pitch while his teammates defend, organize offensive build-ups—only to materialize at just the right instant, in just the right spot, with the ball, to repeatedly demonstrate an uncanny ability to conjure a score. Seemingly out of thin air.

RED CARD. The Trump administration’s repeated actions throwing sand into the gears of a global party: Withholding visas from various international fans; refusing to admit to the U.S. a soccer official from Somalia as well as several Iran team officials; ordering the Iranian team, whose games were in Los Angeles and Seattle, to relocate its original training/hotel base in Arizona to Mexico.

YELLOW CARD. Miami police reflected the Trump’s inhospitable agenda. When the Tartan Army of Scottish fans, who had charmed Boston—singing, dancing, bagpiping and partying in kilts when their team played two matches in Foxborough—arrived in Florida for their third game, local cops scuttled the Scots’ giddy ritual of placing orange traffic cones on the heads of public statues. In Massachusetts, the Scots had been embraces for their behavior and enthusiasm (and spending lots of money in pubs), as well as the coning thing.

GOAL. Reports of U.S. communities welcoming international teams and their fans, mixing with players at their training sites, hotels and restaurants. It’s the DEI ideal, uplifting antidotes to spreading xenophobia and a measure of hope that U.S. citizens can make America friendly again to outsiders. As with Scotland’s Tartan Army of fans, Norway’s followers who delighted locals with their public “Viking row.”

GOAL. Group L’s opening match between England and Croatia—won by England, 4-2—was about as theatrical as the sport can be and set the tournament tone. Goalie saves, penalty kicks, indefatigable runs up and down the pitch, another look at England’s brilliant striker Harry Kane, who can do with his feet—passing, shooting, defending—what most athletes can’t produce using both hands. Well, some athletes can do what Kane does: Messi, France’s Kylian Mbappe, Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo, Norway’s Erling Haaland, Spain’s 18-year-old Lamine Yamal, whose goal against Saudi Arabia made him only the second player that young to score the World Cup’s opening goal. (Pele was 17 when he did so in 1958.)

GOAL. Team kits. (What Americans call uniforms). The best are creative versions of national identification, such as this year’s U.S. flaggish shirt with a waying red stripe and Norway’s equally unmistakable red flag shirt, a white- bordered navy Nordic cross. Ironically, the Yanks’ first match was against Paraguay, which has a remarkably similar “home” kit with vertical red stripes though, to avoid total confusion, Paraguay was attired in its “away” shirts, a swirling mix of “new Navy” and “tropical blue” color. Argentina was nattily attired in its classic Albiceleste, the white-and-sky-blue stripes that mimic Argentina’s flag; Croatian in the red-and-white checkerboard from that nation’s coat of arms; Germany with its traditional black, red and yellow stripe on white; Brazil in yellow shirts, as always.

RED CARD. FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, banned Haiti’s kits hours before the team’s opening match because the shirt featured a small flag-raising illustration from the 1803 Battle of Vertieres, when self-liberated slaves of Haiti defeated Napolean Bonaparte’s forces to secure independence as the world’s first Black republic. FIFA called that “forbidden political imagery,” though FIFA president Gianni Infantino has been cited for “repeated breaches” of the organization’s duty of political neutrality, all in relation to the FIFA president’s public championing of President Trump. That included the bogus, first-of-its-kind FIFA “peace prize” Infantino presented Trump last winter as he has enthusiastically embraced the man who started a war in Iran, seized Venezuela’s president and vowed to militarily intervene in Greenland and Cuba.

RED CARD. U.S.-centric pre-tournament claims that “nobody cares” about the World Cup, widely argued by many American closed-door advocates, have proved to be just as ill-informed as similar rants leading up to the last time the event was in the United States in 1994. The ’94 tournament set a still-standing Cup attendance record of 3.6 million—68,991 per game—with the current Cup on pace to shatter that mark, in spite of FIFA’s roundly criticized dynamic pricing (rip-off), the Trump administration travel restrictions and building anti-American sentiment overseas. Facts on the ground: A Reuters analysis cited stadiums being 99.6 percent full. This is a hyphenated nation; every team has American citizen with roots in its country. National flags are being displayed by fans from their home nations or, in many cases, the land of their ancestors. The World Cup reminds of the positive influence of immigrants.

Call a medic. And maybe a shrink.

To a point, I understand all the howling at the moon by New Yorkers giddy-fied by the Knicks winning the professional basketball championship last weekend. It’s been 53 years since that happened and the Knicks’ title provided a certain reinforcement of the Big Town’s belief in its general global superiority. Plus, spectator sports is a form of shared entertainment, theatrical and—dare we say?—unifying.

Then there was the P.T. Barnum show outside the White House Sunday evening, attended by bold-face names, government officials and thousands of frenzied fans, with multiple reports that it was, as ESPN.com put it, “One of the most entertaining shows of the year.”

There was a lot of serious bleeding by the contestants in that Ultimate Fighting Championship program—and certainly untold brain damage. I was not tempted to watch the manosphere exhibition of punching, head-butting, kicking and the general administration of knocking the stuffing out of each other.

Here’s a confession: In July of 1979, in Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico, just outside San Juan, I was covering the boxing competition in the Pan American Games when a boxer appeared to separate his opponent’s soul from his body. The “knockee”—as the early 20th Century sports columnist and short story writer Ring Lardner described a knockout victim in his short story, “Champion”—was left lying on his back, his head dangling over the ring apron, tongue hanging out and unmoving, like some chicken who had just had his neck rung.

It occurred to me then why I chose sportswriting over a career as war correspondence. I wasn’t interested in witnessing death. The poor fellow—I can’t remember his name or country—was soon revived, but in the relatively few times I was assigned to cover boxing (both amateur and professional fights) over the years, I was reminded of the barbaric geometry of fitting roundhouse punches into a square ring. Accompanied, on almost every occasion, by fevered, exulting spectators thrilled to see a man administer a lullaby to his opponent with his fists. And boxing, essentially, is far more civil than the UFC wars it led to.

There is more than a hint of ancient Rome, when the original gladiators entertained the public by engaging in mortal combat. Fight nights are a festival of adrenaline, a celebration of testosterone, with so many “manly-art” clichés. Bow-tied referees suggest a courtliness; women in underwear and high heels, prancing around the ring to announce the number of the upcoming round, communicate a stag party.

My last boxing assignment in 44 years reporting fulltime for Newsday was at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center in March 2013, during which a welterweight named Keith Thurman gave macho voice to his “love for putting people to sleep,” and the main event featured 46-year-old Bernard Hopkins as the poster boy of prizefighting persistence at a time of growing concern over traumatic head injury in all sports.

Hopkins retained his world light heavyweight title that night and declared himself “an inspiration” to young kids. There was plenty of blood-letting in all of the evening’s bouts, while the crowd called for more of the same. Public demand, after all, was what allowed organizers of the first Madison Square Garden fight, in 1882, to skirt laws at the time against prizefighting by calling their enterprise, featuring John L. Sullivan, “an illustrated lecture on pugilism.”

It was British sportswriter Pierce Egan who, in 1813, counterintuitively termed boxing the “Sweet Science,” convinced that the endeavor wasn’t just about random pummeling but rather strategizing one’s path to victory. Except there is no getting around the fact that the singular goal of boxing—and, more so, of the savage UFC brand—is to leave an opponent with little imaginary birds twirling over his head. At the least.

Years ago, for the short-lived magazine Inside Sports, I was tasked with seeking out brain specialists and boxing physicians to describe fighting’s potential dangers and learned how the brain isn’t much more than a blob of jello, floating in a fluid and held in place by a scaffolding of fibers. Though well-housed in a skull that doesn’t crack easily, the brain is susceptible to severe damage caused by any blow, by a whiplash of that jello or its bruising from bouncing off the opposite wall of the skull and back again. There can be tremendous torque, “sheer forces,” jerking different spoonsful of the jello mass in several directions at once, tearing brain tissue. Very bad news. And, worse, an epidural hematoma, in which the skull is fractured, severing an artery, and blood fills the space between skull and brain, mashing the brain. Literally to death.

Still, on Sunday, thousands gathered gleefully to encourage the White House thuggery, both in person and at delirious watch parties, surely evidence of the public’s prevailing taste for brutality. Which may parallel Masterpiece Theater’s inability to match the ratings of shows with exploding aliens and heavy artillery. And, furthermore, could be confirmation that we are not a profound people.

As for the Knicks fans, not all the celebrants were civil, either. But that hardly links the UFC’s branding of its competitions as “Cage Fights”—so called because they are staged inside an enclosed, eight-sided chain-link enclosure known as the “Octagon”—with a long-ago portrayal of basketball players as “cagers.”

That dates to the 1890s, when the sport was played inside wire-mesh or rope cages simply to separate players from fans. Those enclosures were phased out by the 1930s, but sports journalists—it’s always the crazy media causing trouble—kept the “cagers” slang around for decades afterwards.

Pretty sure I used that label a couple of times myself in a previous era. But I never had to chronicle outright cruelty—physically or culturally.