Author Archives: johnfjeansonne@gmail.com

About johnfjeansonne@gmail.com

Newsday sportswriter emeritus and adjunct professor in the Hofstra University school of communications.

Drilling down on guilt

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

I wear a 7½ shoe. No Sasquatch here. Still, the recent passage of significant climate-change legislation has me pondering the size of my carbon footprint.

The pandemic’s forced reduction of my automobile use the past two years has been a boon to a clearer conscience regarding any role I might have played in global warming. And no fairytale: I have a gas sipper — 38 to 48 miles to the gallon.

But it is past transgressions I’m lately thinking about. My half century as a journalist involved a fair amount of air travel — not helpful to a warming planet — and there is the matter of acknowledging that the fossil-fuel industry was central in setting me up for a comfortable life. My father was a midlevel executive for Humble Oil Co. (now ExxonMobil) which, when I was growing up, was the nation’s largest producer of petroleum.

Also, my three high school summers working in the oil fields basically paid my way through college. At $1.25 an hour for a 60-hour work week, that amounted to $300 a month. A princely sum for a teenage lad at the time.

Blood money? Of course, that was in the ’50s and ’60s, and global warming hardly was on anyone’s radar. So, am I off the hook? Is there a statute of limitations on potential guilt with respect to this sort of thing?

Upon us now is a cultural conundrum tied to the direct relationship between burning fossil fuels and greenhouse gases: How to kick the oil habit and transition to other energy sources without devastating vast portions of the economy and muddling individual futures.

I was reading recently about this puzzle in my long-ago homesteads. Kern County, in California’s San Joaquin Valley, is resisting state drilling restrictions because Kern’s oil and gas money is so embedded in local budgets, funding everything from elementary schools to firefighting to libraries to mosquito control. Bakersfield, the Kern County seat and my family’s home in the mid-1950s, when my father was superintendent in charge of the local oil field, has the oil business to blame for becoming America’s most polluted city.

Then there is Hobbs, New Mexico, site of my youthful oil-field roustabout gig. In the early ’60s, my father was transferred to Hobbs, just across the Texas border in the Permian Basin, which is home to almost 40% of the nation’s active drilling rigs and recently was declared by the Environmental Protection Agency to be on the verge of “nonattainment” status for acceptable air quality.

The sugar daddy of my youth, ExxonMobil, has continued to dramatically increase oil and gas production there — by 70% between 2019 and 2021, according to the company’s most recent figures. In the Permian Basin, there are more pumpjacks — sort of the unofficial state critter — than there are Friday night football lights.

Not such a healthy situation.

Meanwhile, though, in New Mexico oil has bankrolled free colleges for residents and expanded postpartum medical care up to a year for new mothers. And I considered my father’s vocation to have been a noble one, and labor under the assumption that, in the 21st century, he likely would have helped the company move to cleaner energy.

Having come through the Depression and the war, he was conditioned toward frugality. Turn out the lights when you’re not in the room. Don’t throw out that bar of soap until it literally disappears. Take shorter showers. Wear another layer of clothes if you’re cold.

He kept the family car for 10 years. For my high school transportation, while so many classmates were tooling around in automobiles, I was gifted a hand-me-down Cushman motor scooter. Nine horsepower. My rare appearances at the local service station resulted in a 25-cent fill-up and the attendant’s wise-guy offer to include a “cough in the tires.” Since then, every car I’ve owned maxed out at four cylinders with standard transmission. All trips from the Long Island suburbs into Gotham involve public transportation.

Should I feel remorse now that I can’t deny an awareness of my long-ago part in depleting the ozone layer? No John Muir here. But hindsight is an exact science. And since I’m a believer in science, I shall endeavor to put my foot down against societal and individual objections to being greener.

A desirable job?

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A 73-year-old man becomes King of England and the occasion prompts a contemporary—me—to wonder what might be included in having such a global rank. Big scissors for ribbon-cutting ceremonies? That cool sword for knighting people? All the fish and chips you can eat?

There may not be a more recognizable office on earth. The British monarchy traces back 1,100 years and technically establishes the king as ruler over the United Kingdom and 14 other Commonwealth realms. He’s still recognized as the head of state in Canada, Australia, Jamaica, New Zealand, Belize, the Solomon Islands and on and on. Real clout, culturally if not politically.

If I were now King, rather than that fellow Chuck the Third, I could get my photo on the currency in multiple nations and have my portrait hung on the wall in pubs from Liverpool to Oxford. I could live in several castles and palaces, play polo, regularly wave to the peasants from balconies. On special occasions, I could wear that big hat with 2,868 diamonds, 17 sapphires, 11 emeralds, 269 pearls and four rubies. (Aided by a strong neck brace, no doubt.)

Silly to consider such a possibility, no? In the line of succession, I suspect I would come in much closer to Adam and Eve than the several who had been waiting in line for 70 years before Elizabeth died on Sept. 8. The odds are better for me to become Burger King. Or Old King Cole. Or King Kong.

Yet I am not completely out of touch with Britain’s royal matters, having been to the UK several times. Once shopped with my wife at Harrods (as the Queen had done years ago). Got in the door at Windsor Castle and Kensington Palace (as a tourist). Dipped into the Wales countryside long ago (where I briefly, unthinkingly, drove on the wrong side of road). Recently spent time in Scotland, my son-in-law’s birthplace, not too far from Balmoral Castle. Witnessed the changing of the guard inside the gates at Buckingham Palace (thanks to my daughter, who now lives in London and whose friend’s husband had a connection).

In 1986, on assignment to cover Wimbledon tennis for Newsday, I was among the press contingent seated about 25 feet from the Royal Box, where sat Princess Di. (Like any lowly commoner, I took a snapshot.)

I like soccer. I watch British police procedurals (Vera. Midsomer Murders, Endeavour, Grantchester, Father Brown, Bletchley Circle.) I have walked the zebra pedestrian crossing outside the Beatles’ Abbey Road studio.

OK. Back to the idea of being king, and what it means to theoretically rule over a world of vassals. First, a joke:

Colleagues of a particularly talented court jester, intent on getting that jester in deep trouble with the all-powerful sovereign, challenged him thusly: “You say you are capable of making a pun about any subject? Well, then, make a pun about the king.”

Whereupon the jester slyly pronounced, “The king is not a subject.”

These days, though, the king is a topic of conversation. Should he, and the British monarchy which has reigned over more territories and people than any other in history, continue to exist? What about imperial Britain’s violent narrative of colonialism and slavery?

Beyond those significant headaches, is being a member of the royal family worth the treatment it gets from the British tabloids? Charles, as Prince of Wales, was a frequent target, at turns cast as a fuddy duddy and a cheating husband during his marriage to Diana. Harry and Meghan haven’t cut him any slack in the ravenous media, either.

To be king promises to be subjected to double entendre references about “sitting on the throne,” to be reminded how unnecessary the monarchy has become to much of the younger generation, to hear how the royal family’s lavish lifestyle is financed by millions in public taxes. What, of substance, do they do with the dough?

Also, weren’t Shakespeare’s tragedies routinely about kings and would-be kings? I’ll abdicate in advance. Banquo’s ghost may still be out there.

Never saw him sweat

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In tennis, people retire—at all ages and sometimes more than once. Not the kind of retirement Roger Federer just announced, in which the 20-time major tournament champion will hang up his sneakers and find other things to do. Not what Serena Williams described as her “evolving away” from competition.

No. In tennis, “retire” is the verb the sport uses to describe a player quitting mid-match, usually because of injury or illness. And here’s the irony to Federer’s definitive farewell to competition at 41. He never, in 1,526 singles and 223 doubles matches over 24 years as a pro, left a match prematurely. Though back troubles and several knee surgeries messed with his playing schedule and kept him away from the tour most of the last two years, once he began a match, he never left until it was over.

In a big way, that sums up Federer’ tennis presence. His persistence. His ability to come up with solutions, on the fly, while appearing dispassionate. His serene air of effortlessness. His intuitive feel for the game.

All the inevitable statistical comparisons now being aired of Federer’s place in history alongside his great rivals Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic aren’t really the point. (Nadal and Djokovic, by the way, did retire from matches multiple times.) Numbers—Grand Slam titles, winning percentages, time spent ranked No. 1—are significant, grist for lively sports-talk arguments, but they don’t convey a sense of what it was like to witness Federer in action.

The late novelist David Foster Wallace years ago wrote of hearing a press-bus driver, during the Wimbledon championships, describe watching Federer play tennis as a “bloody near-religious experience.”

Wallace agreed wholeheartedly. “Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments,” Wallace wrote. “These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re OK.”

In 2008, when Federer was in the midst of his most devastating run, reaching 22 of 27 major-tournament finals—and winning 16 of them—an 18-year-old American named Devin Britton, in Britton’s first and only Grand Slam tournament match, drew Federer in the first round of the U.S. Open. After the match, which Federer won handily, Britton related that Federer’s forehand “is so pretty” that Britton, fully aware of the danger to him, purposely hit to that forehand at times—“just to watch.”

At the 2007 U.S. Open, when Federer broke out a pseudo-tuxedo look for night matches—all black, with a silvery stripe down the shorts—it seemed to emphasize how his game was worthy of top hat and tails. Serve-and-volley gone to verve-and-volley.

He seemed to glide around the court, noiselessly in an age of grunting workers, moving his opponent from side to side, back and forth—almost casually—adding spin, subtracting pace. He played without histrionics, without bickering over calls or doing touchdown dances or constantly going to the towel.

For so long, playing Federer could be like shooting rubber bands at Superman. His power and control were the kind of things that could make opponents sleep with the lights on. He was the Swiss army knife of tennis, taking apart opponents as if using a blade, screwdriver, toothpick, tweezer and can opener.

Eight-time major-tournament champion Andre Agassi, whose career was winding down as Federer’s long rule peaked, once compared Federer to Pete Sampras—whose previous record of 14 Slam titles Federer surpassed when Federer was 28:

“You play a bad match against Pete, you lose, 6-4, 7-5,” Agassi said. “You play a good match against Pete, you lose, 6-4, 7-5. You play a good match against Federer, you lose 6-4, 7-5. You play a bad match against Federer, you lose, 1 and 1.”

The only incongruous reaction to Federer, which popped up around 2005, before Nadal and Djokovic began to put the slightest dent in Federer’s reign, was that Federer’s stylish supremacy somehow was bad for tennis.

Federer didn’t always win, of course. Both Nadal and Djokovic wound up having winning records in head-to-head matches against Federer. But Federer’s tennis never ceased to be terrific theatre. Seventeen years into his career, he conjured an aggressive, innovative shot—a charging, short-hop return against second serves. A Geronimo! leap that logically would be service-return suicide, but which occasionally buoyed him in dire situations. The shot was dubbed SABR—Sneak Attack By Roger. More legerdemain from the game’s wizard.

But about retirement, the end-of-career sort. Federer started to hear questions about that more than a decade ago, with still multiple major-tournament titles in his future. Around 2018, a tennis website posted an April Fool’s joke “announcing” Federer’s retirement. “No plans to retire,” he assured in response. “Don’t even use that word.”

He always said he had too much enjoyment for every aspect of his job. The matches. The training. The travel. Everything about his lifestyle. But, as always happens in such occupations, age and diminished physical skills eventually win out. So he will retire. For him, another first.

Don’t encourage them

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Midway through the U.S. Open, the level of tennis was brilliant, at turns violent and clever as Nick Kyrgios and Daniil Medvedev battled, hammer and tongs, in their fourth-round U.S. Open match. They needed 24 points just to get through an intense first-set tiebreaker. Riveting theater.

The question was whether anyone among the sellout crowd, going bonkers in Arthur Ashe Stadium, experienced any pause in rooting for either player. Dazzling athleticism aside, Kyrgios, a 27-year-old Australian, once again was reinforcing his reputation as the sport’s premier miscreant—cursing, hurling his racket, snarling at the chair umpire and even his own support team. And Medvedev, 26, was borderline persona non grata, competing unaffiliated because of tennis officials’ decision that, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, no Russian could compete under his national flag.

Several Ukrainian players have argued that Medvedev and other Russian and Belarussian opponents should have been banned altogether—as they were at this year’s Wimbledon—though it certainly could be argued that Medvedev can’t be held personally responsible for the murderous policies of Vladimir Putin.

Medvedev, last year’s Open champion, did make a poor early impression on Open crowds in 2019 by snatching a towel from a ballboy, displaying a middle finger in response to fans’ booing and being fined for verbal and equipment abuse. At the time, he confessed to having decided long ago to break the occasional racket because he believed spectators “think it’s cool.”

Amid the tumult this time, though, it was Kyrgios who was in full-scoundrel mode, as is his habit. In his brief professional career, he has been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars—for racket abuse, audible obscenities, disrespect of chair umpires, tanking matches, sniping at ballpersons, throwing a chair on court, declaring the men’s tour officials to be corrupt, spitting at a fan. (Off court, he also has been charged with assault of a former girlfriend.)

During a changeover at a match seven years ago, Kyrgios casually informed his opponent (“Sorry to tell you that, mate”) that another player was having sex with that opponent’s romantic partner. The comment was picked up by the on-court microphone.

Greece’s Stephanos Tsitsipas, whom Kyrgios taunted during their match at this year’s Wimbledon, has called Kyrgios’ game “an incessant act of bullying his opponent.” Former Australian star Pat Cash has accused Kyrgios of “cheating, manipulation and abuse.” John McEnroe, long ago christened “Super brat” by British tabloids for his irascible tirades in the 1970s and ‘80s, recently was quoted by The Guardian, “Whenever I watch Kyrgios play and do some stunts, I think, ‘Did I, too? Was I that bad?’”

So, Kyrgios vs. Medvedev: Two guys difficult to root for? Dutch philosophy professor Alfred Archer, in his 2021 academic paper “Fans, Crimes and Misdemeanors,” considered whether it is “permissible to be a fan of an artist or a sports team that has behaved immorally.” Archer argued that there are three ethical reasons to abandon such fandom—because fans’ backing supports the bad behavior, results in a widespread failure to perceive the star’s faults and protects the interests of the star.

But there long has been a rationalization that, in an individual sport such as tennis, spectators yearn for “showmanship” and therefore accept—even are drawn to—outrageous deeds as part of the show. (Though Serena Williams was guilty of a handful of crude eruptions and racket mistreatment during her long career, this historically has been a male issue.)

McEnroe, still a popular figure 30 years after his competitive retirement, was a crazed perfectionist who acted out his frustrations. He and another bellicose past champion, Jimmy Connors—who carried a large chip on his shoulder against a persecuting world—were widely embraced for their “personality.”

And the U.S. Open, which introduced night matches to the major-tournament rotation in 1975, long ago created a howling-at-the-moon chaos that raises the temperature of both fans and players. It was under the lights that the spectators, Medvedev and (especially) Kyrgios threw all restraint to the winds this week.

Kyrgios won, then faced another Russian, Karen Khachanov, in a lower-temperature quarterfinal. Who to root for there? Kyrgios lost that one, but not before flinging three more rackets, slapping a TV camera with his hand and throwing a drink.

Cheers?

Life’s whodunnit

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

Getting old is fine. But personal experience indicates that the aging process does not necessarily guarantee the acquisition of wisdom. It certainly hasn’t solved a number of life’s mysteries for me. Such as: Precisely how does television function, transporting specific video and audio—live and in color—from, say, Jeopardy!’s Alex Trebek Stage at Sony Pictures Studios to the little screen in my den?

A couple of decades of formal schooling, a half-century of gainful employment, endless exposure to brilliant minds and galloping technology, and yet so much remains a puzzle. What exactly transpires with internal combustion? Might the egg in fact have come before the chicken? Who’s on first?

It has become clearer to me over time that existence on this planet is one extended whodunnit, with not nearly enough helpful clues. And hardly any answers. Just how do you hit a round ball with a round bat squarely? Why do we dream? How come pi isn’t a rational number? What’s with cats and cardboard boxes?

Obviously, there are people with different interests and varied talents who can figure out some of these things. My brother has particular engineering insight, is great with his hands, can fix about anything. When I was facing surgery for a heart valve replacement, I noted that he had experience doing valve jobs.

“Not,” he said, “while the engine is running.”

So there you go. Even he didn’t have every solution. Things can be Googled, but there are limits to the insights provided there. Photography baffles me. Even more so in the digital age. The fact that I can handle a camera reasonably well does not prove that I comprehend the first thing about pixels, which are no more real to me than cheerful mischievous sprites.

The birds and the bees. Neither my parents nor anyone else has been able to explain to me how they stay airborne, using entirely different physical equipment.

More enigmas: The James Web Space Telescope’s ability to display light from a distant galaxy that is 13.1 billions of years old. Bitcoin. Artificial intelligence (something like artificial turf?). Trigonometry. Vaccines. WiFi. (“Based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards”? What!?) Dolly the Sheep. Chess.

Let me ask you something, and I’d like an honest answer: Do you understand baseball’s infield fly rule?

Here I am, surrounded by gizmos with inner workings that are inexplicable. Laptop. Wall clock. Microwave oven. Modems and routers. Telephone. GPS. Wireless objects that nevertheless have wires. Hearing aids. Spectacles.

My lifelong circadian habit of reading the daily newspaper has dispelled some degree of ignorance; there’s basic information to be had there. Still, as a career journalist with enormous respect for my fellow ink-stained wretches, I am keenly aware of what I refer to as the dispiriting “third paragraph.” I submit that in any article, after the first couple of enlightening graphs reporting some marvelous discovery, scientific breakthrough or diplomatic agreement, there always seems to be that not-so-fast caution in the third paragraph. Which begins, “But critics say….”

You know how that goes. Even the most optimistic soul is left with significant gaps regarding the unraveling of society’s stubborn riddles. To keep peeling the hypothetical onion can regularly lead to a lachrymose state of mind—and to the sense of knowing less and less about more and more until you don’t know anything at all.

To my considerable benefit, my wife can—and does—fill in a lot of blanks. Financial know-how. A grandchild’s needs and demands. Scheduling issues. As we barrel through the 21st Century, her awareness of the latest boldface names, movie plots, musical genres, best-selling books and so on is crucial. (I know: Keep up.)

Meanwhile, scratching of this head goes on.

He used his time well

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If you can’t join ‘em, beat ‘em. At least that’s how things regularly worked with Pete Carril’s basketball tactics. Coaching at one of the nation’s elite universities, where athletic scholarships were banned and only rich nerds could get in the door, Carril eschewed the folly of mimicking the standard high-flying, muscular NBA blueprint. He instead trained his players to out-think their taller, faster, stronger and more gifted opponents; to be deliberate, exacting, patient.

And in 29 years at Princeton University, Carril, who died this week at 92, experienced only one losing season.

“My strategies,” he said, “are forced on me by the things my players can’t do.”

He was known for his curmudgeonly mien, which mostly was a cover for sly humor. No airs. And he wasn’t so much a heretic as an improviser, making do with the materials at hand. No other men’s basketball coach won 500 games without having the use of athletic scholarships. He’s in the sport’s Hall of Fame.

In many ways, he wasn’t a logical fit. He was not a Princeton man himself, having played college ball (small-school All-American) at Lafayette, and got his graduate degree at Lehigh. Whatever truth there is to the Princeton cliché of a haughty, moneyed lot, Carril appeared in his small office, the one time I had a long conversation with him, his hair unkempt and wearing a golf shirt that appeared to have coffee stains and crumbs on it.

Conditioning his players to stifle the urge to shoot was not merely a desperate stalling device. He wasn’t simply playing keep-away to minimize the opponent’s number of shots and rebounds. Rather, the point was to run through his complete repertoire of offensive patterns, without seriously considering a shot, so that the other team was forced to work on defense longer than it was accustomed. Over and over, it was a test to see how long before the other team lost interest or got lazy.

When, halfway through his career, Carril was faced with the 1985 NCAA imposition of a shot clock—45 seconds to hoist an attempt—the pervasive theory was that Princeton would lose the one edge it had. He considered the rule one more step toward “the disappearance of the cerebral or mental element” of the game.

Yet the shot clock didn’t stop Carril from having Princeton continue to use its time wisely. Exploring and feinting until the most makeable shot presented itself. And in the 1989 NCAA tournament, when his 16th-seeded lads came within one point of shocking top-ranked Georgetown, Sports Illustrated called it “The Game That Saved March Madness” because it provided compelling drama when a dull foregone conclusion had been assumed.

And seven years later, perennial underdog Princeton’s two-point tournament victory over defending national champion UCLA was a delightful shocker to any fan this side of UCLA, summed up by the Daily Princetonian headline: “David 43, Goliath 41.” That was another triumph of time management, of movement without the ball, spacing, passing, misdirection, teamwork. Riveting basketball. Not just following the fashionable trend.

Carril understood the realities—that a lesser team is handicapped by a being in a compulsory hurry, because the team that can run, jump and shoot will spend almost all of its time running, jumping and shooting. So Carril’s Princeton offense—in the face of opposing fans chanting “Boring! Boring!”—in fact provided grand entertainment by bamboozling and discombobulating superior foes.

“I’m not against the 45-second clock,” Carril said when the rule was introduced. “What I’m trying to protect is whatever mentality is left in the game. To be permitted to probe, to look around, to set up, to use your head a little bit. When you put a time factor of, say, 24 seconds, on it [as the NBA had done in 1954], then there’s such a thing as eliminating strategy. Or, maybe ‘eliminating’ isn’t the right word. ‘Reducing.’ Reducing the styles, not only within one game itself, but in making each game different from the next.”

It turns out that Carril’s high school coach in Bethlehem, Pa., believed the best approach was to have a team attempt 100 shots per game, minimum, so Carril had experienced a helter-skelter style. The other dichotomy in his biography was that, while Carril preached at Princeton that “passing is a lost art,” a fellow coach, Paul Westhead, couldn’t resist revealing how, in pickup games with colleagues, “all [Carril] did was shoot 20-foot set shots. He never, never gave up the ball.”

Bottom line: Whatever it took.

Goodbye to all that

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Serena Williams once was asked if there was any player out there whom she feared.

“Yeh,” she said, “Roger Federer.”

We are talking about a tennis superpower here. Gifted, fiery, relentless and justly self-confident. For years—and especially now with Williams’ stated intention of riding off into the sunset after this month’s U.S. Open—the question (albeit hypothetical) regards Williams’ possible status as the greatest tennis player in history. Without necessarily including the “female” qualifier.

It is a sports cliché to traffic in such definitive statements, a fool’s errand to compare eras, especially in what might be the sport most transformed over the decades because of advanced off-court training and revolutionary equipment. (Baseball, for instance, has stuck with wooden bats. Not tennis.)

So it’s all conjecture. But Williams’ 23 titles in Grand Slam events are more than any male player can claim. Rafael Nadal has 22, Novak Djokovic 21, Federer 20. And while the record is 24 by Australian Margaret Court, that total includes 11 wins at Court’s home Slam during a time when top American and European players regularly skipped the grueling trip to Melbourne.

If Williams, who will turn 41 weeks after this year’s Open commences, somehow were to conjure a 24th trophy, she would become the oldest—male or female—ever to win a major title. (Aussie Ken Rosewall, who also benefitted from players’ limited participation at his nation’s Slam, was 37 when he won the last of his 12 major championships in 1972.)

But here’s the deal with Williams: Beyond the current discussion of the gender handicap, her career having been interrupted by pregnancy, and aside from the reality that she hasn’t captured a major since 2017 while the wave of younger talent continues to storm the ramparts, there were roughly two solid decades when it was difficult to fathom how anyone besides Williams ever prevailed in a women’s major.

She has said that she probably should have 30 Slam titles by now and the record bears her out. Since her first Slam appearance 24 years ago, she has missed 18 major tournaments because of various injuries and health issues. She won one Australian Open while some 20 pounds overweight, another while pregnant. Twice in her career, she completed what she coined the “Serena Slam”—winning all four majors in succession—just not in a calendar year.

She has said that “I haven’t lost many matches where the player was playing unbelievably good. Usually, when I lose, it’s because I’m playing unbelievable bad.” A bit self-serving, but true.

The surgical tennis-otomies Williams repeatedly performed on opponents in the biggest matches were so skillfully precise that spectators’ focus typically fell almost entirely on her. On her powerful serve, her paint-the-line backhand, her cracking crosscourt forehand.

Though primarily a baseliner, she always played territorially, moving a step or two into the court as the rallies went on, ready to pounce. When she lost a point, it typically was a product of her aggressively missing wide or long. So often, the opponent was just…there.

It was Williams’ own occasionally uncontrolled passion that cost her at times: Her profane outburst, offering to shove the ball down a diminutive lineswoman’s throat over a foot-fault call, cost her a championship match point in the 2009 Open against Kim Clijsters; her premature celebratory shout in the 2011 Open final against Samantha Stosur resulted in the loss of a crucial game point; her rant against the chair umpire over a penalty point for illegal coaching led to her 2019 Open loss to Naomi Osaka.

In terms of dominating her peers, Williams’ consecutive weeks atop the women’s rankings is a record 186 (equaling Steffi Graf’s previous total). OK, Federer was the No. 1 male for 237 straight weeks. Maybe someone for Williams to fear.

She acknowledged a diminished interest in the tour beyond the majors, passing on plenty of lesser events, and the result is that others have won far more career titles than Williams’ 73—Martina Navratilova with 167, Chris Evert with 154, Graf with 107. But, as the credits roll on the Williams tennis story, it seems appropriate to recall a quote by Larry Scott when he was CEO of the Women’s Tennis Association earlier in the 2000s: “Being a champion is one thing. But being a superstar is another.”

He was the Celtics’ big break

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Beyond basketball, Bill Russell took no guff from racists in and out of his sport and, it has been reasonably argued, sent the NBA on its way to becoming the most socially conscious of any major North American men’s pro league. He was the NBA’s first Black Hall of Fame player, the first Black head coach in a major American sports league, outspoken against the Vietnam War and segregation in Boston schools. Quite the legacy for Russell, who died last week at 88.

But strictly in terms of hoops, think of this: What defined the Boston Celtics during their dominance in the 1950s and ‘60s was their devastating fast break, and that fast break was the direct result of Russell’s pioneering work as a shot-blocker and rebounder.

Nobody had combined the instant board control and trigger-quick outlet pass before Russell—levitating for a rebound, revolving in midair as he fed the nifty Bob Cousy, wheeling into the middle of Boston’s famous parquet floor on the dribble, whipping a pass (sometimes behind the back, sometimes between the legs, off the ear) to Tom Sanders knifing toward the basket for a layup, or Tommy Heinsohn waiting in the corner for a jumper. Or Bill Sharman or Frank Ramsey motoring into the open. Or Russell himself arriving alongside the cavalry charge downcourt.

Before Russell joined the Celtics out of the University of San Francisco in 1956, the Celtics “could run like hell and pass like hell and shoot like hell,” Cousy, the team’s perennial all-star, told me in a long-ago interview. “But we couldn’t control the boards. Not until we got Russ.”

What Russell did for the fast break in basketball was what Babe Ruth had done for the home run in baseball. With the fast break, the Celtics took basketball from subdued strings to electric guitars—from an exhibition of mostly flatfooting set-shooting and orthodox two-handed passing—to an alluring, funneling, eddying, swirling-whirling-twisting-curling vision.

The fast break was rock ‘n’ roll, a cutting-edge response to the introduction of the NBA’s 24-second shot clock in 1954. Up tempo. The band on the run.

In his 1980 book (with Taylor Branch), “Second Wind: Memoirs of an Opinionated Man,” Russell gushed about the fast break: “The ball flies between three offensive players at full speed—Zip! Zip! Zip!—and lastly to the unexpected man cutting under the basket at a rakish angle who goes up and banks the ball off the glass in a layup….All this within two seconds….”

He cited the “collective beauty” of the play—an ensemble production that further illustrated Russell’s functioning as the ultimate team player.

In an appreciation on fivethirtyeight.com, Santul Nerkar and Neil Paine argued against applying “our modern, metrics-obsessed era of NBA analysis” to Russell. He averaged a relatively humble 15.1 points per game and the league had not gotten around to an official count of blocked shots—Russell’s revelatory contribution—until after he retired.

“How exactly,” Nerkar and Paine asked, “would you even measure Russell’s preternatural ability to strategically block shots so they stayed inbounds, triggering a fast break for his teammates to turn into easy points….?” Unlike the typical shot-blocker of the 21st Century, prone to spectacularly swatting the ball into the stands to emphasize personal triumph, Russell ‘s emphasis was on keeping plays alive for his teammates to immediately transition from defense to offense.

Bottom line: Russell was the center of gravity for a constant run of championship teams—twice in college, once at the Olympics, a staggering 11 times (in 13 years) with the Celtics, who never had reached the NBA finals before him. “However great you think Bill Russell was,” Nerkar and Paine concluded, “he was probably greater.”

John Havlicek, a teammate later in Russell’s career, once told Sports Illustrated that Russell “was a fantastic athlete” who “could have been the decathlon champion. He could broad jump 24 feet. He did the hurdles in 13.4. [In college, Russell’s 6-9 ½ high jump tied Charlie Dumas, who in 1956 won Olympic gold in that event.] He just might be the fastest man on the Celtics.”

Russell was 6-10 but, unlike so many plodding big men of his time, was light on his feet—instinctive, quick and agile. His long-time coach, Red Auerbach, said Russell “destroyed” opponents, not only by blocking shots but establishing the mere threat of a defensive disruption.

Nerkar and Paine wrote, “In many ways, Russell created the NBA as we know it today.” In some ways, current NBAers still haven’t caught up.

This mate checks out

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OK. Chess joke:

I was playing chess with my friend and he said, “Let’s make this interesting.”

So we stopped playing chess.

Would Magnus Carlsen laugh at that one? At 31, the five-time world champion from Norway has announced that he won’t take part in next year’s championship match, though it likely would bring him a record-tying sixth title.

Interesting. The guy has been the world’s top-ranked player for a decade. He widely is considered the best player in history, his sport’s Michael Jordan. Yet he was quoted as being “not motivated to play another match….I don’t particularly like it….I don’t have any inclination to play.”

For those of us in the dark when it comes to chess, non-participation might be understandable. Chess generally is portrayed as an activity requiring deep intelligence, patience, concentration, a keen memory and analytical skills, so we dimmer bulbs take a pass. Or stick to checkers.

Nevertheless, as a career sports journalist intrigued by games and competition, it caught my attention to read accounts of Carlsen’s suddenly suspended dominance. And left me rummaging around for insight into how chess works and why Carlsen has been so dominant for the past decade—while I was paying no mind.

Carlsen has been referred to as “The Mozart of Chess,” capable of executing “beautiful, stunning moves,” of “slipping from the opponent’s grasp repeatedly,” with a style that is “bold, brave and brilliant.” He was 13 years old when he knocked off a former world champ, Anatoly Karpov, and first earned the title of grand master.

He now is a multimillionaire, mostly through sponsorships and business deals apart from chess. An NBA fan, he has advised Golden State’s Klay Thompson, made a cameo with Philadelphia 76ers president Daryl Morey, played chess against Bill Gates and been a guest on “The Colbert Report.” TIME magazine cited him among the 100 most influential people in 2013.

Anyway, I am the last person to analyze either Carlsen or the game he plays so well. First of all, I struggle with seeing the drama and strategic expertise while chess superstars such as Carlsen sit for hours, deathly still, bent over the playing surface, frowning slightly, a hand to the face, hair a bit unkempt, staring at little castles and horses and thimbles with crowns.

Maybe if there were BrainCams employed in televised chess coverage, affording a glimpse of the players’ cognitive wheels turning, lightbulbs suddenly flashing, adrenaline coursing—a look at the grey matter chaos along with the intelligent design being applied.

In the meantime, I have researched some rudimentary elements of chess, which leads to some allusions to more familiar sports. Take football, since chess has been described as representing the moves of military pieces, just as football loves to traffic in terms such as “bombs” and “blitzes” and “shotguns” and “winning in the trenches.”

Rooks line up on the edges, like cornerbacks. Bishops, like offensive guards, are inside the knights (tackles). Also, knights—which move in an L shape; two squares one direction, one square another direction—are aerial threats, able to jump over pieces. Kings aren’t much help offensively but can get in the other team’s way. Queens are the most powerful pieces on the board, able to move any number of squares, horizontally or diagonally.

It turns out—everybody knows this but me—that different pieces have different assignments, some able to move forward, some sideways, some diagonally, some one square at a time, some as many squares as desired.

Play-by-play? Be5 (bishop moves to the e5 position on the board). Nf3 (knight to f3). Have I got those right?

The action—if that’s the right word—is carefully considered and therefore strikes an outsider as plodding at best.

OK. Chess joke for those of us who wouldn’t know a pawn from the Nimzo Indian Defence:

I defeated a chess grand master in three moves.

I stood up, picked up a chair and hit him with it.

If the shoe fits….

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When the running boom hit in the early Seventies and I joined that program already in progress, I did what any greenhorn follower of a trend would do. I sought out the brand of running shoes that a real runner, Olympic marathon champion Frank Shorter, was wearing then.

The shoes were Tigers, produced by the Japanese sports company Onitsuka Tiger, founded in 1949. The company is still around, still cranking out shoes, but known since 1977 as Asics. At the time, when the bigger names in athletic footwear were adidas and Puma, Tigers could be found at such locales as the running hotbed of Eugene, Ore., widely distributed at area track meets from the automobile of a former University of Oregon runner named Phil Knight.

That was shortly after Knight and his college coach, Bill Bowerman, had started a franchise known as Blue Ribbon Sports. And after Bowerman, who revolutionized running shoes by using his wife’s waffle iron to produce a more durable, cushioned rubber sole, Blue Ribbon Sports evolved into Nike.

Pretty soon I had a pair of those Waffle trainers. And still do as Nike celebrates its 50th anniversary. (The fact that two-time gold medalist Abebe Bikila had won the 1960 Olympic marathon running barefoot never entered into my decision on how to shod my twinkletoes.)

In a way, it’s a bit of an embarrassment to be investing all these years in a hip product of a multinational corporation that now has an annual revenue of roughly $40 billion. Why contribute to the rich getting richer? Nike long ago settled into a devour-and-conquer mode, the largest supplier of athletic shoes and apparel as well as a major manufacturer of sports equipment; its Swoosh logo is as ubiquitous as Facebook.

According to the New York Times, the Nike behemoth has become “part of the root system that underlies the culture. And not just the sneaker culture….It is part of the movies we watch, the songs we hear, the museums we frequent, the business we do; part of how we think about who we are and how we got here.”

Whoa. Way beyond shoes, beyond a brand, Nike has pulled off the trick of dictating fashion, that dichotomy in which individuality supposedly is about nonconformity—yet being “in style” promotes a sort of standard dress code that, by definition, negates self-expression.

Anybody here old enough to remember the heyday of Chuck Taylor basketball sneakers—the low-cut black beauties that were all the rage in the late 1950s when I was in eighth grade? Logically, a basketball shoe without high-ankle support doesn’t make a lot of sense, but “everybody” wanted to play in low-cut Chuck Taylors then. To proclaim our uniqueness, you see.

In the early days of the running boom, which basically coincided with the Nike invasion, I was covering the Boston Marathon and, during a pre-event gathering, a handful of the race favorites could easily be distinguished from the hoi-polloi—the thousands of everyday joggers—by the top contenders’ non-competitive attire. The most accomplished athletes were dressed in street clothes; the great crowds hopeful of similar legitimacy were styling in sweatsuits and running shoes.

“You can tell the real runners,” said Nina Kuscsik, Boston’s first official women’s champion in 1972, “because they aren’t wearing running shoes.” No need for them to be bragging from soapboxes.

But Nike’s decision-makers realized long ago that they “weren’t just selling sneakers,” as Phil Knight once said;  that the company was moving into every aspect of the culture. The company cozied up to sports superstars—most notably Michael Jordan—and to celebrities, playing on a Be Like Mike urge, that universal longing to express one’s singularity by imitating the in-crowd.

Nike outlets—yes, I still patronize them—are peopled by customers who clearly are not athletes, seeking rather to present the right “look.” I happen to avoid wearing Nikes when in civilian clothes and certainly am not interested in being a billboard for the company (as if it needed me). But, honestly, having dabbled in other running shoe brands years ago, I quickly found Nikes to be the most efficient and comfortable. So that I am more a problem than a solution regarding such an almighty juggernaut.

Anyway, there never was a chance that a specific type of shoe could turn me into Frank Shorter.