Author Archives: johnfjeansonne@gmail.com

About johnfjeansonne@gmail.com

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

Mind games

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One danger in sports journalism, a profession I have enjoyed for a half-century, is engaging in amateur psychology. That may be because there are so many occasions for potential malpractice, such as addressing tennis champion Naomi Osaka’s recent public scuffle regarding her self-worth.

At 23, Osaka’s sporting achievements already have made her fabulously compensated, uncommonly marketable and widely admired. And, by her own account, thoroughly joyless. After the latest of her rare on-court disappointments, a third-round loss in this year’s U.S. Open—which she has won twice—she tearfully announced an indefinite sabbatical. Because, she said, “when I win, I don’t feel happy. I feel more like relief. And then when I lose, I feel very sad. And I don’t think that’s normal.”

An unqualified shrink, armed with only a press credential, might wonder about the irony of such dissatisfaction. Or the source. Might the expectations that haunt Osaka come from so much early success? Or from the relentless winning-is-the-only-thing culture that pervades the sports world, echoed by fans, Internet scolds, talk radio and the athletic community itself?

Shortly before the Open commenced, Osaka posted on social media that she was ready to leave her “extremely self-deprecating” habits behind, admitting she has felt “I’m never good enough….I’ve never told myself that I’ve done a good job, but I know I constantly tell myself that I suck or I could do better.”

It’s easy to marvel at how a life of elite athletic competition not only would have established that the existence of a scoreboard is evidence that the goal of playing is to win, but also that sport is a zero-sum thing: There always will be a loser as well as a winner.

“It sucks in tennis that there’s a winner and loser every single day,” top-ranked Ashleigh Barty said after she was beaten midway through the Open. “But you can’t win every single tennis match that you play….”

At Wimbledon, the oldest and most celebrated of the sport’s major tournaments, two lines from Englishman Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” are written on the wall of the players’ entrance to Centre Court:

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two imposters just the same…

There are other versions of that, countering the cliché that athletic victory is a defining moral trait (though they are not necessarily embraced by athletes or their followers). Grantland Rice—a sportswriter!—declared in the 1940s that “it’s not that you won or lost but how you played the game.” Modern Olympic founder Pierre de Coubertin said that “the most important thing…is not winning but taking part.”

The reality, of course, is that a faulty, straight-line connection between hoisting a championship trophy and one’s personal merit—between a sports loss and some character flaw—constantly is reinforced by so many who have the critic’s megaphone or an Instagram account.

After losing at the Open, another of the tournament’s former champions, Sloane Stephens, posted that more than 2,000 abusive messages were sent her way, though she had been beaten by a worthy opponent, three-time major-tournament winner Angelique Kerber. From total strangers, there were curses, threats of physical harm and suggestions that Stephens be jailed.

Sometimes the other player wins. And so what? Even an amateur should realize that the psychological danger is the all-too-common habit of seeking to assign blame for a loss.

 

What if….

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My idea of play changed after 9/11. But not quite as I expected. As a sports journalist, working in the world of fun-and-games—reporting from the “toy department” in the estimation of many newsside colleagues—my immediate reaction to that day included the realization, hardly atypical, of how insignificant ball games were.

Amid a national mood that ranged from insecurity to ethnic profiling to seeking revenge through American military might—with an entire country, Afghanistan, initially targeted over the deeds of the guilty terrorists—a sporting emphasis was difficult to rationalize.

Until I read an essay in Salon by Allen Barra shortly after the attacks. To Barra, a problem with Afghanistan, which had become a safe haven for the likes of al-Qaeda and the brutal Taliban, was that it was “badly in need of some national pastimes.

”Forget about cutting back on games here [in the United States],” he wrote. “Maybe we should look to getting them involved over there. Before we drop bombs on them, maybe we should try some basketballs.”

Basketballs? As an answer to the some 3,000 murdered and 25,000 injured in four coordinated attacks on the East Coast? Frivolous? Or, as Barra argued, a far better source of activity—not to mention a model for young people to emulate—than more violence?

Barra’s was the sort of reasoning that Johann Olav Koss, the great Olympic speedskating champion, cited for organizing the donation Of 12 tons of sports equipment that he personally delivered to children amid civil strife in Eastern Africa in the 1990s. He had seen how “the martyrs” during Eritrea’s war against Ethiopia had become the standard of admiration there.

“I don’t think that’s good for children to have people who die in wars as their ideals,” Koss said. ”If they could have sport, to be healthy, to have a social connection, that would be good.”

Shortly after the 9/11 destruction, when so many of us were trying to figure out why and who, I sought out some with first-hand experience in Afghanistan. It hadn’t been that long ago—before the Soviets invaded in the late 1970s and years of war set the stage for religious extremists there—that Afghanistan in fact had basketballs to occupy citizens.

Tom Gouttierre, recently retired after 40 years as director of the Center of Afghan Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, had spent 10 years of Peace Corps service in Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1970s.

With his Peace Corps buddies, Gouttierre created a set of basketball leagues there, finding “excellent athletes” among the natives, “these mountain people who can run like gazelles and run forever, with tremendous lung capacities. I used to love for other teams from sea level to come into Afghanistan and play us. We’d run ‘em to death.”

At one point, Gouttierre learned that a young American basketball pro and Rhodes Scholar was visiting and asked him to give his players tips on shooting jump shots. The player was the Knicks star Bill Bradley.

Gouttierre translated basketball lingo into Persian and gave names of historical figures in Afghan history to his formations, so Genghis Khan was a 1-3-1 defense and Iskandar (Alexander) was 1-2-2. At the time, he said, soccer was popular, and volleyball , field hockey and team handball, with a long history of Afghan wrestling and boxing. Girls and women played sports then, especially basketball and volleyball, before sports lost out to ongoing wars.

By the late 1990s, when the United Nations refused to recognize the Taliban government, Afghanistan became the only one of the International Olympic Committee’s 200 nations suspended by the IOC, which cited the fact that women had been banned from sport, a direct violation of IOC rules.

Gouttierre said the Taliban reminded him of H.L. Mencken’s description of a Puritan’s “living in mortal dread that somewhere someone is having fun.”

So, maybe if there had been some more fun to be had over there….

 

How to be a good teammate

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(A version of this appeared in Newsday’s Opinion pages)

Start with the obvious. Social distancing will not facilitate sacking the quarterback. Or just about any other jock endeavor. Competitive sports cannot happen from home via Zoom on a laptop. And masking, though helpful in some situations, clearly isn’t the answer for athletic duties that involve physical proximity, relentless travel and adhering to schedules that are not conducive to quarantine interruptions.

You can see where this is going. Incapable of operating remotely, sports leagues, more than most businesses, need their employees to be vaccinated to avoid Covid cooties and the attendant headaches.

Just as clear, in a land where the sports establishment is deeply embedded in our culture and its wars, is the fact that some high-profile athletes are protesting the inoculation push. So let’s consider how their arguments are not particularly sound.

The freedom-and-personal-choice claim, for instance. What are the chances that the National Football League will stand still for having unvaccinated players gumming up its massive financial commitments to provide televised entertainment? This, after all, is the so-called No Fun League, known for meting out punishment against such picayune violations as untucked jerseys and touchdown celebrations.

In an occupation that promises Darwinian competition for jobs and historically short careers, the NFL has further tightened the noose for survival: Unvaccinated players this season will face the loss of paychecks if they are the cause of Covid outbreaks resulting in forfeitures.

The National Hockey League reportedly is considering withholding per-game salaries for any player sidelined by the virus. Major League Baseball so far has opted for extending more personal privileges—more freedom!—to vaccinated players while stopping short of a vaccine mandate, aware that it must negotiate the matter with the players union and that their collective bargaining agreement expires in December.

Since athletes’ livelihoods are based on their physical well-being, there certainly are those who (irrationally) reject the vaccine in the belief that they possess greater knowledge of the human body than the medical community. (“I’m not a doctor but I’m playing one now…”) Or that they don’t yet have enough information regarding vaccine safety, though league officials, team doctors, union reps and government officials have been broadcasting the relevant data for months. Now that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has given its stamp of approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, that player defense has collapsed.

So here’s a quid pro quo that sounds overwhelmingly reasonable for both sides: If all players do their teams (and the general public) the kindness of submitting to vaccines, the players in exchange will be freed from enduring last year’s annoying protocols of competing in fan-less “bubbles” away from home and family, traveling in split parties, quarantining, undergoing constant testing and holding team meetings on Zoom.

And here might be a bonus, beyond providing the safe resumption of spectator fun and games for the masses: As semi-celebrities, accomplished athletes often are granted the status of role-modeling. They don’t necessarily have the expertise, nor the intellectual horsepower, to discourse on matters of science. But that doesn’t stop them from receiving disproportionate attention whenever they air wide-ranging pronouncements.

Given that reality, doesn’t it follow that professional athletes’ public acceptance of Covid vaccines would reinforce mandates similar to New York City’s requirement that all public high school athletes and coaches be inoculated to participate in the “high-risk” sports—defined as football, basketball, wresting, volleyball, lacrosse and rugby? (Nassau and Suffolk officials have not taken this step.)

As a sports journalist for half a century, I am a fan of athletic performance, drawn to the drama of games, the participants’ physical feats, the presence of quirky characters. But when it comes to a pandemic and the anti-vaccine blatherings from the likes of baseball’s Anthony Rizzo and football’s Cole Beasley, among other impressively skilled athletes, I’m convinced that our real freedom is having access to the educated judgement of all-star epidemiologists.

These players need to take one for the team.

A sporting chance?

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Herschel Walker was a 19-year-old college junior when bumper stickers around the University of Georgia campus implored, “Herschel for Governor.” The exhortation had nothing to do with young Walker’s political stances, executive experience, legislative ambitions or anything of the kind. It merely reflected the ga-ga adoration for a star athlete, the non sequitur leap from celebrity status to legislative bona fides.

Forty years later, it is Walker himself proposing “Herschel for Senator,” even though his resume remains essentially the same: Football player of legendary proportions. He has whopping name recognition but no government-related training or experience. And there are some skeletons in his closet that still have skin on them.

He has acknowledged dealing with a multiple-personality disorder and violent behavior, has been accused by his ex-wife of death threats, and his current wife is being investigated for voting illegally. He is running for a Senate seat representing his native Georgia but has lived in Texas for decades. He has been cited for greatly exaggerating business profits while dramatically undercounting the number of his employees to apply for a federal Paycheck Protection Program loan.

So the question is whether mere sportsworld fandom, with its low threshold of curiosity regarding administrative knowhow or personal flaws, might again lift a well-known athletic figure into office, as it did with former Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville. Caitlin (ne: Bruce) Jenner might be counting on a similar dynamic in California’s gubernatorial recall.

Walker did attain electoral victory in winning the 1981 Heisman Trophy, college football’s top honor—when all the voters were sportswriters, sportscasters and former Heisman winners.

That prompted him to skip his senior year at Georgia and commence an impressive 16-year professional playing career, first with the upstart—and short-lived—USFL’s New Jersey Generals before playing 13 years for four NFL teams. The Generals, originally owned by Oklahoma oil tycoon J. Walter Duncan, were sold in Walker’s second season to a New York real estate developer named Donald Trump, who now happens to be the loudest voice pushing Walker’s senate run.

Now 59, Walker long has considered himself a renaissance man—he has branded his food services business with that title—who never saw the need for traditional job preparation. He declined to participate in spring football practice at Georgia because he preferred running track and he eschewed weight lifting because he “reckoned” he was plenty strong without it.

“All my life,” he said, “people would say, ‘Herschel, you can’t do this. Herschel, you can’t do that.’ All my life I’ve done things I’m not supposed to be able to do….As long as you don’t tell your mind what you are, you can be anything you want.”

Admirable self-confidence. But his “anything” always was rooted in his football reputation, including being recruited to attempt Olympic bobsledding, a sport with a tiny talent pool in the United States. He met the basic requirements of having sprinter’s speed, to propel the sled’s start, and 212 pounds of ballast, to hurry it down the mountain. (He and his sled pilot finished seventh at the 1992 Winter Olympics, only Walker’s second and final competition in the sport.)

Upon Walker’s declaration last month to seek the senate, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported from his rural Georgia hometown of Wrightsville (population: 3,600) that the town’s favorite son—whose name graces his old high school football field and a road leading to the school—is widely loved by local residents and can’t help but win the election. Minus any policy discussion.

Just numbers

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

Looking in the mirror doesn’t shock me. I don’t appear a bit older than yesterday. But coming across the numbers in a check register from my college days, unearthed among a stack of old papers and photos, produced quite a jolt.

Look: A check for a month’s rent for an off-campus room, $36.56. For a pair of slacks, $5.13. Lunch at the local smorgasbord restaurant, $1.37. A year’s university tuition and fees, $445. Talk about old.

This is the kind of conclusive evidence — more specific than carbon dating; better than counting the rings in a tree trunk or checking a building’s cornerstone — that will zero right in on the age-old old-age question. That, and a related query: When was the last time anyone wrote checks for these items?

I read where it’s possible to calculate the age of cattle or horses by examining their teeth. And it can be concluded a dog is old by noting that it “lays around a lot.” Hmm. More precisely: When you hear a cicada rattling, you can be sure it just turned 17.

But regarding us humans, if you were one of those carnival workers who charge customers $5 to guess their age, just on sight, guided only by evaluating wrinkles, saggy skin, lack of hair color and so forth, I’d argue you are practicing art, not science. (Or something closer to a scam than a scheme.)

Let’s say the subject in question wouldn’t let you get close enough for the pinch test. (Pinch the skin on the back of his or her hand to see how long before the skin snaps back. One to two seconds, she’s under 30. Five to nine seconds, he’s between 45 and 50. Anywhere from 35 to 55 seconds, you’re looking at a septuagenarian.)

All right, then, first names could offer a hint. If I were a Noah or a Liam, I likely would have been born around 2010, not yet a teenager — just as a woman christened Madison would likely be near a 21st birthday. Michael of Mary? Hitting 70 years old. Christopher or Jessica? Thirty-something.

But those of us with a common handle like John could be from such recent vintage as the 1960s or from as far back 1920s (and going out of style long before our name has). A more specific age figure might be conjured via a culture quiz, determining one’s awareness that Drake isn’t necessarily a university in Des Moines, Iowa, and The Weeknd doesn’t refer to Saturdays and Sundays.

Still, there is a lot of guesswork involved in this matter. I’ve known people in their 90s who still had all their marbles and others well past 80 who hadn’t lost anything off their figurative fastball. Hard to pinpoint their time among us. I thought I had found a formula on the Internet (yes, I’ve heard of the Internet!) that would eliminate the gray area in assessing graybeards’ total trips around the sun, a method to identify the museum candidates.

Except the sixth of the seven steps (see below) is dependent on already knowing one’s birthdate, so what’s the challenge there?

1) Pick the number of times a week (more than zero, less than 10) you would like to go out to eat; 2) Multiply by two; 3) Add five; 4) Multiply by 50; 5) If you already have had your birthday this year, add 1,757. (If not, add 1,756.); 6) Subtract the four-digit year you were born; 7) Of the remaining three-digit number, the last two digits give your age.

Bogus, no? And after running through all that convoluted math, I was informed that I am 60, which I confess is off by more than a decade.

So, back to my old check register, unsettling as its information is, for the facts. There was a check for 11.1 gallons of gas for my car: $4. For tennis shoes: $10.05. For a winter coat: $25.75.

All sobering proof that time has marched on. (Which isn’t all bad.) And no pinch test necessary.

That’s rich

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This is an old man speaking, susceptible to How Things Used To Be. Feel free to opt for trendier fare. TikTok videos. Look-at-me Instagram posts. Instant messages composed entirely of acronyms.

Nevertheless, I shall rail against the latest realignment of college athletic conferences, which really has nothing to do with colleges and very little to do with athletics as a whole. These days, it’s all about football “programs;” nobody calls them “teams” anymore, because their function is to serve as cash cows for television, coaches and athletic directors.

My problem—and here I acknowledge a fusty nostalgia—is believing in the outdated sense that conferences should reflect regional ties, traditional rivalries and institutional similarities.

Alas, the universities of Texas and Oklahoma which, in the public mind, are not so much bastions of higher learning as football operations in pursuit of wealth, have announced they will leave the already diminished Big 12 to join the nation’s richest league, the Southeastern Conference. It feels like a modern version of the priority voiced 70 years ago by Oklahoma president George L. Cross: “We’re working to develop a university that our football team can be proud of.”

I admit to loving the college game in spite of its meaner aspects, including a long history of tenuous connections to academics. In the late 1800s, for goodness sakes, the original football factory was Yale University. But there was a fairly recent time when a reasonable percentage of the hired guns were actual students and conferences facilitated contests for nothing more consequential than neighborhood bragging rights.

Then the big bucks got a little too big and the social climbing commenced, in the 1990s destroying the Southwest Conference that was modeled on geography, a collection of Texas colleges plus Arkansas. Roughly 20 years on, the Big 12—a grouping of mid-America/breadbasket schools which had cherrypicked four former SWC teams—went into decline with the departure of Nebraska (to the Big 10), Colorado (to the Pac-12), Missouri and Texas A&M (both to the SEC.)

When that shameless gold-digging was afoot, NCAA president Mark Emmert washed his hands, telling the watchdog Knight Commission in 2011 that his organization “does not have a role in conference affiliations and should never be in the business of telling universities what affiliations they should have.”

At that same Knight confab, though, then-Knight co-chair Brit Kirwan, at the time president of the University of Maryland system, expressed “great concerns over the fragmented governing structure” in which football establishments, seeking the most affluent league connections, were “wreaking havoc on a number of institutions” and their non-football athletes.

Kirwan recognized “the dance going on” to be based on the urge for Bowl Championship Series eligibility; i.e., more TV payouts. The next year, sure enough, Maryland—a founding member of the ACC more than a half-century earlier—jumped to the higher income bracket available in the Big 10.

It was then-LSU chancellor Michael Martin who in 2011 guessed, presciently, that “we could end up with just two enormous conferences, one called ESPN and the one called Fox.” Which sounds far more likely than the argument put forward in a recent article by Michael Benson, president and professor of history at Coastal Carolina University.

Benson claimed that “the two biggest brokers in these conversations” are not football muscle and TV riches; rather, “the role of academics and a given school’s ‘institutional fit.’” He cited the Big 10’s insistence that it welcomes only members of the Association of American Universities, the most exclusive club of pre-eminent research-intensive schools that includes only 64 of the nation’s roughly 4,000 degree-granting institutions (1.6 precent).

But Nebraska, now firmly ensconced in the Big 10, recently was booted out of the AAU. And when my dear old alma mater, the University of Missouri, jumped to the SEC in 2012, it became only the fourth of the league’s 14 schools—along with Vanderbilt, Florida and Texas A&M—that is inside the AAU’s velvet ropes. Texas would be No. 5. Oklahoma does not belong to the AAU, though it is doubtful that the Oklahoma football team’s pride is hurt by that fact.

Consider: Of the 23 Division I national football championship games dating to 1998, 16 were won by non-AAU schools. So much for the role of academics in these matters. Just follow the money.

Which gets back to my earlier Yale reference. Only last week, Don Kagan, Yale’s former professor of history and the classics, died at 89. In 1987, when Kagan was serving as Yale’s interim athletic director, we had a chat about that school—and its fellow conference members in the Ivy League—having long-ago chosen scholarly might over football supremacy.

Kagan said then, “This desire to gain [football] glory is understandable, and to a certain extent, not contemptible. But you have to realize that you’d still be great if you never won another football game. You have to think: Is it glorious to hire a bunch of mercenaries and then, when you win, say ‘Our mercenaries can beat your mercenaries’? What’s the point?”

No comparison

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Now that all the Olympic gymnastics drama is over, maybe people will stop speaking for Kerri Strug. Whatever there is to consider regarding Simone Biles’ untimely onset of competitive insecurity—risk vs. reward, outside expectations vs. individual awareness, the so-called culture of “winning at all costs” vs. various interpretations of “courage”—to compare her situation to Strug’s 25 years ago at the Atlanta Games is a leap. With a high degree of difficulty.

Mostly, the juxtaposition of those two Olympic moments amounts to nothing more than Twitter conjecture mixed with sermonizing.

One ill-informed post declared that Strug “is rolling over in her grave now” because “she finished the Olympics (and brought home the gold) on a broken leg. [While] Simone Biles just quit on her team.”

Strug, it should be noted, is not rolling over in her grave because she is not—thank God—in her grave. She is a healthy 43-year-old mother of two, veteran of several marathons, author of a children’s book and autobiography, with a master’s degree and a resume that includes work in the Treasury and Justice departments.

She also did not, as the “grave” tweet claimed, execute that 1996 vault on a broken leg. She had damaged two ligaments in her ankle on her first of two vault attempts and went ahead with a second try, which at first was believed to be necessary for the Americans to sew up a team gold medal. (Later calculations revealed that her score wasn’t necessary for the victory, but Strug’s final jump was captivating sports theater.)

Anyway, to segue from that to concluding that Biles “quit on her team” in Tokyo not only is blatant Monday-morning quarterbacking but unrelated to Strug’s situation. Strug was carrying on in spite of physical pain; Biles was unsettled by a dangerous case of the “twisties,” a sudden sense that, in the air, she “couldn’t tell up from down.”

Just as speculative was a headline on Slate.com making the case that Biles’ no-mas resolution somehow proved that “Kerry Strug shouldn’t have been forced to do that vault” a quarter-century earlier. NBC’s website went the next step by claiming Strug “praises Simon Biles’ decision,” offering as evidence nothing more than a Strug tweet that simply said she was “sending love to you @Simon Biles.”

There was no direct contact with Strug to substantiate that, by “sending love,” she meant to “praise” Biles’ choice to withdraw.

A writer for something called Bustle.com claimed the personal recollection that Strug, in 1996, “rocketed down the vault runway….just 18 years old, only 4-9 and muscular, blonde….” But, in fact, Strug—though she in fact was 18 at the time—was 4-foot-7 and had close-cropped brown hair.

OK, that’s a quibble. But context matters, and it’s important to report that, immediately after Strug’s instantly famous vault, there was outrage with the assumption that Strug—a girl!—had been bullied into soldiering on by coach Bela Karolyi. The bearish, intimidating Karolyi indeed believed wholeheartedly in gymnastics’ Darwinian survival ethic. But more to the point was the fact that an 18-year-old boy, in a similar situation, could have counted on lavish praise for “playing hurt” and “taking one for the team.”

It also was clear that Strug typified a gymnastics truth that, at 18, she had not yet reached puberty and wouldn’t until she retired from the sport, which typically requires a training regimen so physically demanding that girls in their late teens often have not gained enough body weight to attain sexual maturity. Strug at the time looked and, with her canary voice, sounded like a 12-year-old.

Still. That day she said her final vault was her call. “I’m 18. I can make my own choices.”

Was it a smart move? Was it right? “The public wants to see us as dainty little girls,” Strug said during a lengthy phone interview in 2000, four years after the fact. “We are strong young individuals who have to make a lot of tough decisions. We’re away from home, on a strict diet, not going to regular schools, and if a child doesn’t want to do all of that, you can’t force them to.”

At the time, she found it a “little perplexing” that there still was a big fuss over her vault. “To me,” she said, “the injury thing was just another little sacrifice toward achieving my goals. And why should my goals be any different from a boy’s?”

In the end, could it be that Strug—like Biles 25 years later, and under entirely different circumstances not to be compared—had used the muscles in her head? In each case: Her call.

Horns of a dilemma

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There is nothing wrong with the acronym G.O.A.T.—a label being thrown around incessantly by commentators, sportswriters and athletes themselves—except that it’s pretentious, grandiose, sanctimonious. And a cliché.

It stands for Greatest of All Time, an assertion that can’t possibly be substantiated. How is it reasonable to compare a 21st Century performer to someone from, say, 1921, who functioned in an era of prehistoric nutrition, training methods and equipment?

There certainly are great modern-day champions, folks of unprecedented accomplishment, running around loose these days. And it is simple enough to quantify their specific successes. But this braying of singular majesty, often self-congratulatory and regularly perpetuated by the subject of the claim, not only invites the wrath of vicious social-media trolls on the rare occasions of a stumble, but also recalls an earlier sportsworld term that meant just the opposite.

For decades, the “goat” was the player who goofed up—spectacularly—by dropping the potential winning pass, running the wrong way, surrendering the decisive home run, failing to touch base, calling a timeout that didn’t exist, signing an inaccurate scorecard. The last thing any jock wanted to be called was a goat.

But here we are. Tom Brady has been declared the G.O.A.T. And Michael Jordan. LeBron James. Tiger Woods. Serena Williams. But if one of them is indeed the Greatest of All Time—by definition, unequalled by any other from the past, present or future—how can there be so many of them?

This isn’t just about the extraordinary Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and her agonizing realization that she couldn’t continue at the Tokyo Games while “fighting with [my] own head.” But the question has been raised in some precincts whether the relentless promotion of Biles as the G.O.A.T of these Olympics—the one-to-watch among 11,000 athletes—likely contributed to wearing her down.

She in fact has cited the weight of expectations.

To Slate.com’s Justin Peters, NBC especially “turned the Tokyo Games into the Simone Biles Games…It is a bit rich for NBC to report on the psychological pressures faced by Biles without also reflecting on ways in which its choice to make Tokyo the Simone Games surely intensified those pressures. It’d be sort of like if your boss announced to an auditorium filled with your co-workers that the fate of the company was riding on your work output, and then took you aside to sympathetically observe that you looked stressed and that the key to happiness was a healthy work-life balance.”

Plenty of reports from former sports journalism colleagues likewise hung Biles out there as something of a G.O.A.T. pinata, a challenge to be knocked off, accentuating her skills with prose filled with twists and rolls and handsprings and somersaults and roundouts.

Biles herself had begun showing up two years ago in a competition leotard with the sequined outline of a goat’s head, just as G.O.A.T. tattoos have been sported by several athletes of recent vintage. This week Robert Andrews, a sports performance consultant who counseled Biles before the 2016 Olympics, told Yahoo Life, “I don’t like it. I think it’s misplaced. I think it’s misused and I think it puts a big target on athletes’ backs.”

There’s this hyperbole: While Biles has dominated her sport for most of the past decade and set new standards in the sport—and has won more world gymnastic championship gold medals (19) than anyone in history—she is not the most celebrated Olympian in her sport.

Now in her second Olympics, Biles so far has collected six medals—four gold, a silver and a bronze. Brilliant work. But Larisa Latynina, competing for the Soviet Union, remains the all-time leader in that department—18 medals (nine gold, five silver, four bronze) over three Olympics from the mid-1950s to mid-‘60s. (Plus 14 world championship medals.) Old tapes verify that Latynina’s skills were pedestrian compared to the airborne gyrations all elite gymnasts can do now, but that’s not the point.

In her day, Latynina was the best. Since the early 2010s, Biles has been the best. And a head-to-head challenge might not be fair. Biles is struggling with her confidence. But Latynina is 86 years old.

Carry on?

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As a journalist, my job is to be skeptical but not cynical. As something of an Olympic patriot, furthermore, I don’t want to be too judgmental about whether the Tokyo Games should be carrying on as the pandemic surges again; whether the absence of spectators renders the event nothing more than a studio TV show; whether NBC, corporate sponsors and the International Olympic Committee have prioritized financial gain over the health of athletes and the Japanese public; whether it is time to consider doing away with the Olympics altogether.

But it was New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, I believe, who said the responsibility of a journalist is to wonder and worry and poke and prod. So, here goes.

Even amid the usual athletic drama and skill playing out—compelling attractions, for sure—it is not possible to ignore so many of the Olympics’ 21st Century ills currently on display, beginning with the organizers’ deaf ear to overwhelming public sentiment against soldiering on.

Virus positives (predictably) had eliminated two dozen Olympians, including teenaged tennis star Coco Gauff, days before the Games started. With fans (wisely) barred, the all-too-common post-Olympic uselessness of excessively expensive arenas, White Elephantism, already has set in. The Atlantic described the Opening Ceremonies, typically an uplifting kickoff to the quadrennial 17-day international festival, as a “mournful mishmash…that only emphasized its dark context.”

There is a stark reminder of doping issues as Russia has fielded more than 300 competitors who somehow managed to dodge an international sports ban on that nation for systemized drug use in recent years. A judo player from Algeria has been dismissed for refusing to compete against an Israeli, and a second one from the Sudan sent himself home for the same reason.

Having covered 11 Olympics, I long ago came to the conclusion that the Games are too big, too expensive, too political, too corporate, too prone to cheating and insider deals among IOC officials and authoritarian leaders. But, too, I came to accept what John MacAloon, Chicago philosophy professor and Olympic historian, articulated two decades ago: “We can’t eliminate all the problems. That’s why the Games are interesting. They’re life itself. If the Games were more pure and perfect, they’d be less appealing. They mirror not just a dream version of life; they also mirror the things we struggle with as ordinary human beings. None of us lives a dream. We live messy, ordinary lives.”

Skeptically but not cynically speaking, then, the argument that the Olympics—now 2,813 years since the first Ancient Games—is worth keeping is the (not always realized) ideal of seeking global understanding. Sort of the United Nations in sneakers. MacAloon again: “Sports in service of intercultural communication and a better world.” Not the worst ongoing experiment.

During the 2000 Sydney Games, Australian psychologist Amanda Gordon offered her sense that having the Olympics in town was “a way for people around the world to learn about each other. You see these athletes do something terrific and you say, ‘Where’s Bulgaria? Let’s have a look on the map. What do they like to do? What do they like to eat?’ From that point of view, the Olympics is extremely important. It says, ‘Let’s get together.’”

The great Norwegian speedskater of the 1990s, Johann Olav Koss, argued that the Olympics is “for peace. It’s for education. It’s for health. It’s to reach absolutely everybody in the world to understand how to win, but also how to lose and how to respect everyone.”

A major problem with the Tokyo Games, of course, is that while roughly 11,000 athletes from 200-plus countries are on site, Covid protocols have dictated that there is no world there. There is no international crowd, stoking the fire. Performances feel forced—barely more than practice sessions.

Perhaps my most memorable evening of Olympic coverage came in Sydney, when the raucous involvement of 112,000 shrieking spectators was as much a part of the show as a handful of excruciatingly tense track and field finals. Australia’s Cathy Freeman stood her nation on its head with a come-from-behind 400-meter victory; American Michael Johnson won a second consecutive Olympic men’s 400; American Stacy Dragila outdueled Aussie Tatiana Grigorieva in the first Olympic women’s pole vault; Romanian Gabriela Szabo edged Ireland’s Sonia O’Sullivan in an exhausting 5,000, after which neither woman could summon the strength to raise her arm to acknowledge the cheering; Ethiopia’s Haile Gebrselassie won the 10,000—6.2 miles—of step-for-step dueling with Kenya’s Paul Tergatby by less than one second.

In each case, who was carrying whom—the athletes straining with the weight of expectation on their backs or the fans desperately, vicariously trying to lift them—wasn’t clear, but it was incredibly noisy business. The athletes, winners and non-winners, later remarked on the “energy in the stadium;” how “you can’t find words to describe this crowd;” how “the adrenaline in the place was amazing.”

So television now can show the world’s best athletes running, jumping, throwing, swimming, kicking, skateboarding, surfing and so on. But a viewer can’t feel the Olympics without an in-person audience. Television can’t conjure the typical Olympic scene beyond the playing fields—a diverse picnic in countless languages, an amusement-park ride in which the riders really are half of the amusement.

Stripped of that mix—no fault of Tokyo’s organizers—this Olympic recess (however brief) from the world’s troubles is left feeling too close to the 11 o’clock news. Overwhelmed with reports on all that’s wrong with the Modern Games.

Should that mean that Tokyo ought to be the last Olympics? Especially since a major focus on the upcoming Winter Games, to be hosted by Beijing in 2022, so far has been on China’s human-rights violations and its anti-democratic bent—and whether Western nations therefore should consider boycotting?

No clear answers will be forthcoming here. It’s important to acknowledge that, despite plenty of journalistic skepticism, I’ve found covering the Olympics to be culturally enlightening, competitively dramatic and generally great fun. Higher, faster and stronger than everyday stuff.

Tests: negative. Adventure: positive.

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LONDON—I’m here to tell you that it’s possible to fly across the Atlantic wearing a mask, deal with 10 days of quarantining, undergo four COVID tests in a period of three weeks, slump through an untimely head cold, stress over a lost key and dysfunctional entryway to a rented flat—and still have a great time.

It rained a lot. Randomly timed calls from the British authorities, meant to assure we were not spreading the virus, were disconcerting. (Big Brother!). Britain’s prime minister, appearing as disorganized as his hair, announced national “Freedom Day” from virus restrictions simultaneously with news that he was forced to self-isolate. At times, the three weeks were a bit like being in a surreal Monty Python skit—but not as funny.

So what?

You haven’t lived until you’ve been to a wedding in which the groom and bride—he pedaling a three-wheel cargo bike while she rides in the delivery unit, the velocipede complete with “just married” signs and tin cans trailing noisily behind—exit the ceremony through local streets escorted by a bagpiper while local residents applaud through open windows and surprised, grinning passers-by offer congratulations.

That was our daughter in the cargo bin, the star of the show.

Long delayed by the maddening pestilence, the formalization of their vows—the ceremony, bagpiping march back to the garden in their flat, the meal, balloons, cake-cutting, champagne-toasting (all planned and executed by the newlyweds)—included their baby boy and a small gathering of the couple’s friends. And us, arriving from The Colonies.

Evolving coronavirus protocols already had eliminated the pub site for their reception and kept festivities almost exclusively outdoors. There had been persistent predictions of heavy rain for the day and a last-minute email that rescinded earlier approval on the wedding site. That and other pop-up issues were resolved favorably, and in the end, the light morning drizzle couldn’t dampen anything. And we stayed another week to hang out with the grandboy. A cute little bugger.

Our stay reinforced my feeling that London is a swell place, diverse and alive, even in the midst of the modern plague. Parks and playgrounds are in abundance and everywhere are runners, bicyclists, children, dogs. Outdoor marketplaces and pubs bustle in spite of the distancing edicts.

In previous times, a night or two at the theatre, day at the museum or concert at St. Martin-in-the-Fields was on the schedule. And maybe a lunch of fish-and-chips or an activity as touristy as walking the zebra crossing on Abbey Road. Not now. But our stay, specifically the isolation stage, coincided with televised coverage of two favorite sporting events—Wimbledon tennis and the European soccer championships, both of which involved top-of-the-news English accomplishments and the attendant local fuss.

If you had been there for the whole thing, you would never forget it.

We’ll be back, of course.