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

Homing in?

Here come the Judge.

Time to break out that old catchphrase—grammatically iffy—that was all the rage in the Sixties, popularized by the TV sketch comedy “Laugh-In.” It’s thoroughly applicable now that Yankee outfielder Aaron Judge, just short of baseball season’s halfway mark, is on pace to out-do Roger Maris’ 61 homers in 1961.

Hear ye, hear ye.

Judge hit his 29^th home run on June 29, and this advance on Maris’ mark is significant because there are baseball connoisseurs who contend that Maris still holds the true single-season home run record. The argument is that Barry Bonds (who hit 73 in 2001), Mark McGwire (70 in 1998 and 65 in ’99), and Sammy Sosa (63 in ’98 and 66 in ’99), all were tainted by doping, leaving Maris as “legitimate” holder of the sport’s sexiest accomplishment.

Personal flashback: At an eighth-grade graduation party in suburban Los Angeles in June of 1961, several of us awkward 14-year-old boys became easily distracted from pool activities and hesitant attempts to dance with the young lasses because of a transistor-radio news bulletin: Roger Maris had just hit another homer against the local expansion team, the Los Angeles Angels.

At the time, the hallowed standard of 60 homers, set by the mythical Babe Ruth, had been around for 33 years. The closest anyone had come to Ruth over that span were the 58 each by Jimmie Foxx in 1932 and Hank Greenberg in ’38. That Maris and his Yankee teammate Mickey Mantle became engaged in a neck-and-neck chase to challenge that mark was a big deal in 1961, a fascinating rarity.

There have been other such home-run derbies since then, as when McGwire surpassed Maris’ mark 37 years later in 1998 while closely pursued by Sosa. The previous year, in fact, a similar multiple-player quest was afoot, to such an extent that Newsday sent me, mid-summer, to the West Coast in anticipation of a sort of early Louisville Slugger election return.

McGwire, then with the Oakland A’s, and Seattle’s Ken Griffey Jr. both had accumulated more homes in mid-July of ’97 than Maris had at the same point of the ’61 season. So had Tino Martinez of the Yankees. Not that any of them wanted to talk about their possibilities.

“It ain’t a movie,” Griffey said.

Except it was, really. Just as a ruling on Judge is now, though the performers then obviously didn’t know any more about how the plot will unfold than the audience does.

“I know you want me to say something interesting,” Martinez said at the time. “But I’m not thinking about that.”

McGwire then: “It’s going to be tough. Really tough.”

Griffey finished with 56 in ’97, Martinez with 44, McGwire—warming up for his 70 the next year—58, with the odd twist of having been traded to the St. Louis Cardinals at the end of July.

Sandy Alderson, the A’s general manager at the time, mused just before the trade that, “No, this is not something that happened to Roger Maris. Start with the premise that trading a player within range of Babe Ruth’s home run record wouldn’t even have been thought of in 1961. It wouldn’t even have been in the realm of possibility.”

But Maris wasn’t about to become a free agent. Alderson also noted, just before the trade, that Oakland had played more games than several other teams, so McGwire “could go to another team and end of playing more than 162 games,” which could prompt what Alderson called a “double asterisk if Mark breaks the record.”

Of course that stirred baseball’s numbers crunchers, still fussing over the fact that Maris’ 61 homers came in the first season that the Majors had expanded schedules from 154 to 162 games. What if McGwire got, say, 164 games? (He wound up with 156 for his 58 homers.)

More “ifs” to chew on. In 1932, rainouts before the fifth inning of two games wiped out two Jimmie Foxx homers, leaving him with 58 instead of a Ruth-tying 60. And Foxx later claimed he was gypped out of a dozen other homers that year by hitting a screen above the right-field fence in St. Louis’ old Sportsman Park, keeping the ball in play. That gripe appeared in rare, and difficult to pin down, accounts that surfaced much later.

Anyway, now we have Judge, who decreed after he walloped No. 29 that a season’s-end total in the 60s “would be something that’s pretty cool. But I think having a ring on my finger at the end of the year would be even better.”

Meanwhile, then, the Judge watch certainly has appealing drama for baseball aficionados—a reason to study daily box scores (thank you, Henry Chadwick, for that invention in 1858)—as well as grist for readers of the stars (the ones in the sky) and planets.

Might there be something to the fact that Ruth, Maris and Judge all were Yankees? Will Newton’s Second Law of Motion somehow apply? Could the pseudoscientific practice of numerology be helpful, since Ruth wore No. 3, Maris No. 9 and Judge wears 99? Something called powerfulmystic8.com declares that, “whether the Prophetic Numbers 3’s and 9’s repeatedly appears in dreams, visions, waking life or synchronicities, it is a sign and message that you are on the right path….”

Hmmm.

CBS.com recently polled four of its “baseball experts” whether they believed Judge would get to 60 homes. Two said “no,” one “yes” and the other “I hope so.”

Another recurring line from the old “Laugh-In” works pretty well: Sock it to me.

Days of our lives

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

I’m only going to say this one time. June 3 was National Repeat Day.

In more ways than one, it’s a redundancy. We already have Groundhog Day in February—a metaphor for replication. And the last thing we need is an occasion to revive that old childhood inquiry meant to torture a younger sibling into a maddening echo. Remember? “Pete and Repeat were in a boat; Pete fell in and who was left?”

Of course, the answer, over and over, was “Repeat,” triggering a theoretically endless, monotonous refrain until the persecuted party pleaded for parental intervention. Or just clobbered the annoying questioner.

Anyway, National Repeat Day does not repeat itself. Right on schedule with the next sunrise, June 4 arrives and brings—listen to this—National Shopping Cart Day. More proof that there are too many frivolous designations on the calendar.

It’s one thing to have an annual nod to Cinco de Mayo and Labor Day, Memorial Day and Veterans Day, occasions originally meant to recall significant history. But National High Five Day (a moveable feast on the third Thursday in April)? Especially in these pandemic times of social distancing, a universal smacking of hands doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Go to an Internet near you and you will be inundated with wacky, exhaustive lists of these Days, including National Bobblehead Day (January 7), National Dog Biscuit Day (February 23), National Open an Umbrella Indoors Day (March 13), National Barbershop Quartet Day (April 11), National Paperclip Day (May 29), National Yo-Yo Day (June 6), National Wiggle Your Toes Day (August 6), National Punctuation Day (September 24!!!), National Pins and Needles Day (November 27), National Sock Day (December 4).

There are—no surprise—a surfeit of suggested food-related celebrations. Just in the month of June, there is National Hazelnut Cake Day (on the 1^st), National Egg Day (3^rd), National Cheese Day (4^th), National Gingerbread Day (5^th), National Applesauce Day (6^th), National Chocolate Ice Cream Day (7^th). National Fudge Day (16^th)—followed immediately by the antidote of National Eat Your Vegetables Day (17^th). If one lives through that barrage of cholesterol-restoration sessions without having to see a doctor, National Junk Food Day is July 21.

Okay. Apart from gastronomy-related commemorations is September 8, National Ampersand Day, when we are encouraged to use that curly symbol in place of the word “and.” Milk & cookies? Bread & butter? Rough & ready?

November 4 is National Common Sense Day, when it could be reasonable not to use an ampersand. April 23 is National Talk Like Shakespeare Day, which is said to promote the substitution of “thou,” “thee” and “ye” in your conversation in place of “you” and “they,” or to stick entirely to rhyming couplets. All of which could make you sound dreadfully out-of-date. Or just pompous. (To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from Day to Day….)

Speaking of out-of-date: October 20 is National Suspenders Day.

But here’s a favorite to someone who has attempted to practice journalism for a half-century: April 4, Hug a Newsperson Day. And another, for those of us who never seem to get things right on the first try: October 17, National Mulligan Day.

It should be noted that today is not National Essay Day. That’s February 28, the birthdate of Michel de Montaigne, a French Renaissance philosopher (born Feb. 28, 1533) whose Essais influenced both French and English literature in thought and style.

True; philosophical this is not.

So, in the spirit of not-taking-this-too-seriously: Why not a National Take Three Years Off Your Age Day? To be celebrated every February 29.

A royal rejection?

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Once the Queen is dead, might Australians dispense with moving right to “Long live the King”? Their country is 9,500 miles from their head of state. And it is not unkind to consider that Elizabeth II—at 96 and celebrating 70 years on the throne—before long will be shuffling off this mortal coil. Might it make sense for Aussies to finally dispense with flying the Union Jack on their national flag, to once and for all throw off the last vestiges of the British monarchy and declare themselves a republic?

The report that newly elected Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese has appointed his nation’s first “minister for the republic” has raised this possibility, though experts Down Under told the New York Times that the chances of ditching the royal family remain slim. (Even in the United Kingdom, there is some thought that the royal family increasingly feels like something from the historical attic. Garrison Keillor wondered in a recent essay about how the “English regard for monarchy is rather bewildering, paying people so much money to stand on a balcony and wave.”)

Anyway, my first real awareness of this plausible tipping point came while covering the 2000 Sydney Olympics, specifically when I stumbled onto the work of celebrated Australian troubadour John Williamson. His songs are filled with a passionate, folksy take on how apart his culture is from jolly old England, full of references to kangaroos, emus, gum trees (eucalyptus), kookaburras and Aussie slang.

“Surely it’s time that we got rid of the colonial flag,” Williamson said in introducing his tune “I Can’t Feel Those Chains Any Longer.” “For the time being, we can at least fly the fair-dinkum flag as a suggestion of what we might have.”

As a prop for his pub appearances around Australia during the two decades previous to that, Williamson had been designing alternative national flags to “keep the debate open,” as he put it on his website, “to get the right kind of Republic….”

He made clear that “if my dream of purely Australian flags is seen to be anti-British, then I am sorely misunderstood.” But it had been 100 years since Australia gained its independence, and more than 200 years since the British had landed at Botany Bay on the island’s Southeast shore and established a penal colony there (among the Indigenous folks who had been around for 65,000 years). Williamson sang….

I can’t feel those chains any longer, can you?/I’m footloose and free/

I can’t see the sense in red, white and blue/It’s still Union Jack to me.

His call was not for revolution but for an overdue separation from the crown. As long ago as 1984, Ninian Stephen, then Australia’s governor-general—the Queen’s largely ceremonial representative—proclaimed green and gold, which had been popularly embraced by Australian sports teams since the 1800s, to be the nation’s official colors. Williamson sang….

Glory to Australia/Glory to the green and gold/

We’ve come a long way from Botany Bay/And we’re two hundred years old.

Of course Australia is not the only British commonwealth still around, most of them former colonies or dependencies of those colonies. There are 54! And Elizabeth II still is technically the majordomo to all. But only Australia and New Zealand retain the Union Jack symbol on their flags. Canada, for instance, moved on to the Maple Leaf flag in 1965.

As the Beatles sang around that time, “Her majesty’s a pretty nice girl….” But it does seem that the Queen now is something of a lame duck. To her Aussie subjects, a lame platypus?

Champion in deed and word

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The cliché is that athletic failure at an early age is a primary inspiration to become a sportswriter. Which didn’t apply to Kenny Moore, who died last month at 78. Neither did the generalization that elite physical performance gifts do not translate into producing compelling narration of such.

Moore was a world-class runner and an eloquent correspondent for Sports Illustrated. He “was the rare athlete,” Nicholas Dawidoff noted in his 2012 essay, “The Power and the Glory of Sportswriting,” “who wrote as well as he ran.” So those among us drawn to the drama of sports as well as the appreciation of good writing—whatever our abilities in either sphere—have lost something with Moore’s passing.

He was a national cross-country champion and two-time Olympic marathoner who brought to his sports journalism career a degree in philosophy and master’s in creative writing, both of which showed in his work.

He in no way fit the lame assumption, laid out in an Atlantic column years ago, that “kids who loved sports but were too small to play football or too fragile to carry water turned to sportswriting as a natural alternative.” Nor did he traffic, as a lyric wordsmith, in trite themes or self-centered vanity.

In his prolific writing, mostly but not entirely about distinguished runners, Moore called himself an “observer….to avoid a relentless ‘I’ being interposed between subject and reader, to lull the latter into an unwarranted sense of objectivity.

“It is a device,” he acknowledged, “that can become tedious, especially when the watching euphemism is known to be always me, but I’m going to leave it in, because in the case of this observer, it is perfectly apt. I am conscious of myself as an outsider, shy, peculiarly suited to peering for a while into lives and worlds, then withdrawing to muse over what seems interesting.”

In this age of snarky, look-at-me Twitter declarations and “hot takes,” shoving personal opinions in the faces of readers and listeners, Moore’s “observer” approach is a reminder that good sportswriting is, essentially, storytelling. And therefore not about the storyteller, whatever his or her personal experience in the game.

Even in his fascinating long-form tale of the 1972 Olympic marathon, “The Long Blue Line”—unavoidably a first-person account because Moore was the fourth-place finisher in that race—his observations are what carried the piece. Weaved throughout his account of the 26-mile competition were flashbacks and asides, personal details of fellow Olympians, descriptions and reactions to the Palestinian terrorist attack on the Israeli compound during the Games, colleagues’ thoughts on politics, race, nationalism, the very meaning of the Olympics.

In that marathon report, which read like a prize-winning short story, Moore presented characters fit for a novel. Among them was teammate Doug Brown, caught pilfering cherries during a pre-Olympic training run in Oslo (Brown apologized to the cheery-tree owner) and Moore concluded that the incessantly loquacious Brown “must have been a hyperkinetic child, for he is now a hyperkinetic postadolescent.”

Moore described how defending Olympic champ Mamo Wolde, then 40 years old, “runs, soundless of foot and breath, with his head tipped slightly forward…knock-kneed and pointing his toes slightly out.” While Derek Clayton, then the world’s fastest marathoner, was “full of movement, his arms clawing high across his chest, his head bobbing…his tongue rolled in and out of his mouth.”

During those tumultuous Games, Moore gave voice to the thoughts of wrestlers, boxers, shot-putters. He reflected on how the attack on the Israelis “violated the sanctuary of the Games.”

“For two weeks every four years we direct our kind of fanaticism into the essentially absurd activities of running and swimming and being beautiful on a balance beam,” he wrote. “Yet even in the rage of competition we keep from hurting each other, and thereby demonstrate the meaning of civilization.” Only to have that illusion “shattered.”

It was Moore’s celebrated Sports Illustrated colleague, Frank Deford, who once said that “when people hear you’re a sportswriter, they assume you’re more interested in the first half of that word than the second.” Moore was at least as involved in the second as the first, exploding another cliché.

I spoke with him a couple of times, mostly to get his early recollections of Frank Shorter, Moore’s close friend whose ’72 Olympic marathon victory was so central to powering the American running boom. Moore had been a major player in that revolution, as well; he ran collegiately at Oregon for coach Bob Bowerman, the co-founder of Nike. But more than that, as a middling leisure runner and sportswriter, I tried to learn something from Moore’s perceptive, stylist writing. A hero, of sorts.

Shake

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The End.

This is an argument that a primary highlight to every hockey playoff series doesn’t happen until it’s over: The traditional handshake line between the victor and the vanquished.

The sport’s handshake rite—the date and specifics of its origin are unknown—is especially appealing because it isn’t logical. After all the unruly intensity between opponents, the gratuitous post-whistle shoving and barking, the cheap shots and occasional fisticuffs, there is this counterintuitive postscript—would you say “denouement” when the games are in French-speaking Quebec?—that is thoroughly polite and downright heroic. The formal handshake line at mid-ice, after it’s all over but the shouting, apparently has been standard since at least the early 1920s.

There is this gentility in the wake of relentlessly stormy deeds. There is this disorienting twist on the old boxing cliché—Fight and come out shaking hands. All the Mr. Hydes exit as Dr. Jekylls. Intimidation tactics give way to gentlemanly behavior. Watch: It’s going to keep happening throughout the pursuit of the Stanley Cup.

No other sport condones fighting as “part of the game.” Punch a guy in the mouth and all you get is five minutes in the sin bin. Yet no other sport pivots so dramatically to a public display of sportsmanship, a final demonstration of healing. The message, most involved have come to agree, simply is: When it’s over, it’s over.

Not that all potential participants agree. Among the minority who have skipped the routine over the years was Islanders goalie Billy Smith, a four-time Stanley Cup champion in the 1980s. He claimed that he was inspired by Boston goalie Gerry Cheevers, Smith’s hero, who eschewed the practice before him. “I saw that and I said, ‘He is so right; there’s a guy who’s smart,’” Smith said. “I didn’t have the right feeling doing it, so why should I do it? I won’t shake hands when I lose, so I won’t shake hands when I win. I’d be a—what’s the word?—hypocrite.”

Cheevers once justified his non-participation to the Toronto Sun by asking, “Do you really mean it? Do you say: ‘Thanks for bashing my brains in the past seven games and taking $15,000 out of my pocket?’” (That would be closer to $200,000 now for Cup champions.)

Muzz Patrick, who had played on the Rangers’ 1940 Cup winners, long ago observed that there are “some human beings who wouldn’t shake hands with their mother. If you were the losing team, you really had to grit your teeth and go out there and do it. But a lot of guys made excuses. We’d go into the locker room and say, ‘Why didn’t you shake hands with those guys?’ and they’d say, ‘Well, I got my hand hurt on that last shift and couldn’t shake.’ Baloney.”

Smith’s former goalie mate, Glenn Resch, argued that the point of the handshake is “more idealistic than hypocritical. It’s the kind of thing that raises sport to being a sport. It raises us above just animals.”

Hockey rivals in fact can resemble animals, producing the occasional broken jaw, dislocated appendage, a little spilled blood. Yet they routinely conclude their version of survival-of-the-fittest with what amounts to a show of respect, or at least a mutual understanding: What you do to me in the name of your team, in the pursuit of victory, honors you—and thus do I honor you. Shake.

If the act of shaking hands indeed came into fashion thousands of years ago as a demonstration of peaceful intent, a way to show that the hand holds no weapon, hockey’s custom at least signifies that the weapons have been laid down.

“It’s not compulsory,” Resch said, “which is fine, and it’s different not to do it, so I think that maybe those guys who don’t do it feel they look more intense, or that they wanted it more. But it’s like an argument. Even if you never see the person again, it’s good for your own peace of mind to know how you left it. It’s more for yourself.”

One rationale for maintaining the observance, as Resch thoughtfully put it, was that “anyone who wins enjoys being congratulated, and the loser who doesn’t congratulate the winner is trying to steal a little satisfaction from the winner. Even sore losers don’t like sore losers.”

Another justification, sometimes noted by players who join the handshake line reluctantly, is: Those guys might be your teammates the next season.

Resch again: “It’s human relations. It’s learning to control your emotions. It’s maturity, being able to put things in perspective. When you’ve lost, it’s one of the toughest things in the world to do. But that’s the beauty of it. Anyone can do something that’s easy.”

The point of playing the games is, by definition, to win. That done, the consequence of hockey’s handshake line is to blend winner and loser together, making one as good as the other again.

A beginning.

And they’re (not all of them) off…

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This is about thoroughbred racing. So play your hunches.

Would the sport be better off—for the horses’ health, for wider popularity, for more compelling matchups—if the Triple Crown series altered its schedule to provide more time between races? Or would discarding the demanding format devalue the accomplishment of a three-peat champion?

It’s an old discussion, revived because the handlers of Rich Strike, the darkest of horses before he won the Kentucky Derby, chose to bypass the Preakness on the not-uncommon intuition that their suddenly valuable steed needed at least a month of recovery time.

For decades, the Derby has been followed just two weeks later by the Preakness and, three weeks after that, by the Belmont Stakes. Plenty of the industry’s principals—trainers, owners, bettors—routinely argue that the galloping five-week campaign sets the standard for greatness. Even while acknowledging that it might not be thoroughly sound horse sense.

Handicap this: In the 147 years that all three races have existed, only 13 horses have won the Triple Crown, clear evidence of the difficulty involved. There is a yearning to maintain tradition, but it must be noted that the Triple Crown order has moved around a bit, with the Preakness run before the Derby 11 times—and twice on the same day.

More relevant to this question of whether the Crown’s current schedule is too taxing is the Jockey Club statistic that thoroughbreds, on average, race only about half as often as they did 46 years ago—5.95 times throughout 2021, 10.23 times in 1975.

The Baltimore Sun last week quoted Kathy Guillermo, senior vice president of the animal rights organization PETA, expressing hope that Rich Strike’s absence from the Preakness “will prompt the racing industry to modernize the demanding Triple Crown schedule by extending the time between the three races to less-inhuman intervals of one-month each.”

Rather than the horses’ well-being, though, what keeps resurrecting debate about the taxingly compressed Derby-Preakness-Belmont schedule are the long gaps between Triple Crown champs—25 years from 1948 (Citation) to ’73 (Secretariat), 37 years from ’78 (Affirmed) to 2015 (American Pharoah).

Long-time Newsday colleague Ed McNamara, a true racing connoisseur who has visited 116 tracks on four continents, noted that Hall of Fame trainer D. Wayne Lukas is among several horse people who long ago suggested the Preakness be pushed back from the third Saturday of May to Memorial Day and the Belmont moved from early June to July 4. Still, such a change never has been taken under advisement by any of racing’s officials, and McNamara envisions no benefit would result to any of the three races.

That includes the Preakness. Still run in the fairly decrepit, 152-year-old Pimlico Race Course, and so often left with a small field in the wake of the Derby spectacle, the Preakness has faced hints of being relocated and, in the mid-1980s, of being replaced on the Triple Crown calendar.

In 1985, a swaggering New Jersey builder named Robert Brennan lured Derby champion Spend a Buck away from the Preakness with a $2.6 million bonus to run his Jersey Derby at the rebuilt Garden State Park in Cherry Hill. Brennan strongly suggested his race would become a permanent stand-in for the Preakness—“I do believe there will some adjustments made in the industry in relation to the Triple Crown series,” he said.

On the contrary, no Derby winner ever tried the Jersey Derby again, Garden State Park closed in 2001 and Brennan that year was found guilty of money-laundering and bankruptcy fraud, winding up in prison for a decade.

Meanwhile, the Preakness persists, as well as contentions that the middle race could be better served if it weren’t so closely tailgated by the Derby. A Plan B putting at least three weeks between the races theoretically would guarantee not only the presence of the Derby winner at Pimlico but also that winner’s most obvious challengers, horses that had introduced themselves to the hard-core and casual fan in the Derby. And therefore the potential for Triple Crown rivalries that could endure through the series.

Might all that ramp up bigger crowds, increased TV audiences, massive wagering? More clout for the sport? Or does the Triple Crown’s traditional appreciation for abbreviation—three races in five weeks—prevail, a folkloric commitment to the superhorse crucible?

OK. Here’s $2 on the status quo. Just a feeling.

Twisted

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Regarding the Western nations’ announcement of sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s close associates, should it be a surprise they include a woman, 32 years his junior, long identified as his mistress? Putin, currently directing the murder of thousands in neighboring Ukraine, isn’t exactly a man who heeds accepted moral or ethical norms.

Should it be a shock, furthermore, that the woman, Alina Kabaeva (sometimes spelled Kabayeva), was an Olympic champion whose athletic career was interrupted by a positive drug test—an uncommonly regular development in Putin’s Russia?

Beyond instigating real wars, Russia, which Putin has ruled as president or prime minister since 2000, has a well-earned reputation for subverting the conventions of international sports—the so-called wars-without-bullets. Through a systematic, state-supported doping program, more Russian competitors have been caught using banned stuff than athletes from any other nation.

The number of busted Russians is beyond 150, and the total of Russians stripped of Olympic medals is a world-leading 46, four times that of the next-highest country. Leading up to, and during, the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia—where Putin reportedly enjoys vacation time on the Black Sea and has built a second government office—Russia deployed what was identified as “the disappearing positive test methodology” to cover up hundreds of failed tests by its athletes.

The director of Sochi’s 2014 Olympic doping laboratory later blew the whistle on Russian officials and intelligence service members who surreptitiously replaced Russians’ drug-tainted urine samples with clean urine by passing bottles back-and-forth through a small hole in the lab’s wall.

Yes, foreign substances have turned up in athletes from many other countries, including the US of A. (Juicing without borders.) But it generally is accepted that the original state-sponsored doping operation was perfected in the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in the 1970s, when more than 10,000 unsuspecting East German jocks were given massive doses of banned anabolic steroids. (Check our Steven Ungerleider’s book, Faust’s Gold.)

It’s interesting to note that Vladimir Putin, working at the time for the Soviet Union’s notorious KGB, was stationed in the GDR at the time, in Dresden, and one function of the snooping KGB would have been to know about such skullduggery.

Might a similar government-coordinated process have been at work this winter when Russian figure-skater Kamila Valieva’s failed drug test before Beijing’s Winter Games belatedly became public, creating the latest Olympic scandal? Valieva, just 15, claimed to have been unaware of any illegal pharmaceuticals in her system and Putin publicly defended her, presented her with a state award, and declared that she was another case of Russian athletes victimized by discrimination based on nationality.

Meanwhile, about Kabaeva, Putin’s alleged paramour, who won a gold medal at the 2004 Athens Olympics in the quirky sport of rhythmic gymnasts, in which women perform 75- to 90-second routines cavorting with hoops, ropes, clubs, balls and ribbons. (We smart-aleck Olympic journos sarcastically called the discipline “whips and chains.”)

Rhythmic gymnasts essentially are contortionists—flipping, handspringing, cartwheeling while balancing the various pieces of apparatus—and Kabaeva was a star, a European and world champion by the time she was 16. But at 18, she was stripped of the 2001 world title after testing positive for the diuretic furosemide—outlawed because, as well as facilitating weight loss, it typically is used to mask other performance-enhancing substances. (Coincidental note: The woman who subsequently inherited that world title was Tamara Yerofeeva. A Ukrainian.)

Kabaeva nevertheless has continued to live a charmed and fabulously compensated life—presented by Putin with the top state honor, the Order of Friendship; appointed to a seat in Russia’s lower house of parliament; made chairwoman of the board overseeing state-controlled media; chosen to be among the final torchbearers for the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Just last month, appearing at a junior gymnastics festival in Moscow, she praised Putin for the war effort, which really is nothing but an invasion, in Ukraine.

Feels like another variation on the theme of Putin treachery. Another parable of tyranny. More whips and chains.

Fool us once, shame on you….twice, shame on us

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Maybe ESPN’s exhaustive “Before Jerry Sandusky; the Untold Story of the Most Dangerous Player in College Football” could too easily be interpreted as targeting the monumental failures at one college, by one powerful coach, to deal with violent misogyny. Maybe the meticulously researched 30,000-word report of a 1970s serial rapist could seem to be painting all big-time football players with the same brush: That of entitled, sub-human brutes with no fear of institutional or judicial guardrails.

In fact, “Untold” is an invaluable piece of journalism that gives voice to the victims in a disturbingly common culture that normalizes sexual assault. And it’s another warning of the age-old tendency to God-up our athletic stars, and how that allows sports organizations to bank on a hear-no-evil, see-no-evil disposition among fans.

It is the lurid tale of Todd Hodne, who had been a Long Island high school football star and, briefly, a scholarship player at Penn State more than 40 years ago, when his string of horrific crimes began to surface (yet were widely covered up). More than that, the story is what co-author Tom Junod called the “prelude to what happened in the Jerry Sandusky scandal” at Penn State 33 years later.

It was in early November 2011 that Sandusky, a celebrated veteran assistant coach at Penn State, was indicted for abusing scores of young boys. That led to the firing of Joe Paterno, Penn State’s sainted head coach, for having failed to act on complaints against Sandusky.

Immediately after those bombshells, Newsday dispatched me to Penn State’s next game in State College, Pa., where students and fans were in stages of anger and disbelief: That such a menace could have gone on for years right under their noses; that football and Paterno had become such mighty forces, bringing in $53 million the previous season, that such evil digressions could essentially be ignored; that Paterno could be guilty in any way, given his fatherly title of “JoePa,” his on-campus life-sized cardboard cutouts called “Stand-Up Joes,” his “success with honor” motto claiming to prioritize morality over athletic doings.

But there it was. And not, we learned from “Untold” by Junod and co-author Paula Lavigne, for the first time.

The Hodne story, beyond the kind of satanic details to set off creep-o-meter alarms, is about what Lavigne previously discovered in her exposes of sexual violence by athletes at Baylor and Michigan State. “If there is one universal,” Lavigne recently told Richard Deitsch on his Sports Media podcast, “it is certainly that there is an effort to keep things quiet, to protect the brand, find ways to deflect and conflate and put the blame elsewhere, make the argument that this is one bad apple.

“What we find typically is that it is not one bad apple. These incidents often point to systemic issues, and those system issues often, not always, involve a lack of transparency.”

Enough unsettling examples are out there to realize the Hodne piece can’t simply be about Penn State’s and Paterno’s sins of priority, that worshippers at the temple of jock celebrity continue to facilitate a blind-eye syndrome. The Cleveland Browns just traded for quarterback Deshaun Watson, facing sexual misconduct civil lawsuits by 22 women, and rewarded him with a $230-million, five-year deal. Jameis Winston was never charged in a rape case while starring at Florida State University—police reportedly did not investigate the allegation—and became a top NFL draft choice. The NFL’s Washington Commanders currently are being investigated by the House Oversight Committee for widespread workplace sexual harassment after years of accusations.

A 2019 USA TODAY investigation noted that NCAA rules allow athletic transfers to continue their playing careers even after criminal convictions, team suspensions or being expelled. The report identified more than two dozen athletes over a five-year period who, after having been disciplined for sexual offenses, simply found another school (and team) and resumed playing, and five others whose careers at their original schools were not interrupted by either convictions or judicial discipline.

There are some heroic figures in the “Untold” piece—specifically, Hodne’s Penn State victim Betsy Sailor and a Hodne teammate, Irv Panky, who helped Sailor confront her predator, the school’s football establishment and the justice system. But co-author Junod found far too familiar a pattern between the Hodne and Sandusky cases.

Junod told Deitsch that, with the publication of the gruesome Hodne narrative, there was plenty of Twitter defense of Paterno—just as there had been a great rush to his side in the Sandusky saga. “I think [Paterno] is an ambiguous figure,” Junod said. “There are definitely times when he is telling people to tell the truth, and there are definitely times when he’s telling people not to talk to the police without his permission. I don’t think that you can view Joe Paterno clearly unless you also view through this lens that we have created, that before Todd Hodne there was Jerry Sandusky…a second serial sexual predator that Joe Paterno had under his administrative oversight.”

“You would think that Joe Paterno learned something. And either he didn’t, or he learned the wrong thing.”

The whole nine yards

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

This is about death and taxes. Not the message in that familiar expression, a banality concerning fatalistic certainties. Rather, the subject here is clichés. As a practicing wordsmith all my life — and I do mean “practicing” — I am painfully aware of being forever engaged in the battle to avoid stock phrases. To instead think, you know, outside the box. To conjure novel descriptions that are just the ticket. Find terms that fit the bill.

It’s important to document that in my profession, journalism, the endless struggle to present the most pertinent, accurate information — and do so concisely — regularly happens on deadline. The clock is ticking and the urgency to put things into the ideal lingo, to avoid worn-out images and overused idioms, is no picnic.

Over and over, you’re faced with the perfect storm. A real can of worms. You’re under the gun. Up the creek without a paddle. Sweating bullets. And since handy clichés are a dime a dozen, avoiding them at all costs is a tough row to hoe.

Still, I believe in the need to constantly keep up the guard against lazy, trite prose. I read where the French poet Gerard de Nerval said, “The first man who compared a woman to a rose was a poet. The second, an imbecile.” Likewise, while the original employment of the expression “dodging a bullet” landed as a brilliantly vivid metaphor, the subsequent ad nauseam use of that figure of speech is beating a dead horse.

This is why I admonish my college sports journalism students to avoid clichés like the plague.

But that can be a slog. It was once noted by the late Roger Kahn (of “Boys of Summer” fame) that good writing is “what amateurs call effortless” because it is so easy on the reader, yet its production is just the opposite of leisurely. “Everyone who has written seriously,” Kahn wrote, “knows that sustaining a flowing style is as effortless as cleaning the Augean stables with a water pistol.”

Avoiding hackneyed verbiage, painting word pictures in precise, fresh language, is an admirable and enviable thing that disguises the labor involved. To compose sentences, paragraphs, chapters, that are clear as a bell is the holy grail of all us scribblers.

In an interview several years ago with The Atlantic, Russell Baker, the late award-winning columnist for The New York Times, argued that “if you haven’t sweated over [a piece of writing], it’s probably not worth it. … The doing of it is hard work. People don’t usually realize what it takes out of you. They just see you sitting there, staring at the wall, and they don’t know that you’re looking for the perfect word to describe a shade of light.”

Stephen King, the crafty author of suspense and horror, has described spending weeks and months and even years settling on the first sentences of a novel to properly get the show on the road.

Easier said than done, obviously. Clichés — as common as dirt — constantly are lurking in the subconscious, giving the writer a quick and trouble-free solution. And the problem is that clichés function in such generalized terms, without specifics appropriate to the occasion, that they render the writing dull as dishwater. The been-there-done-that sense depresses impact. Makes the composition go over like a lead balloon.

Not surprisingly, you win some and you lose some. Surely, though, continued exertion will reveal the light at the end of the tunnel. As long as you don’t bite off more than you can chew. Leave no stone unturned. Keep plugging away.

At the end of the day, all’s well that ends well.

April poetry (sort of)

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