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About johnfjeansonne@gmail.com

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

The sports time machine

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(Florence)

Maybe you have noticed, during the three-plus months of compulsory sports inertia due to the coronavirus pandemic, a forced nostalgia among the chroniclers of competitive fun and games.

With almost nothing happening on the world’s playing fields, we are hostage to video of bygone championships. Arguments over whether Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays or Duke Snider ruled center field in the 1950s. Personal yarns of having Been There when this or that “classic” unfolded.

Television, talk radio, newspapers and magazines have rolled out their version of the WABAC Machine—that delightful “Peabody’s Improbable History” segment in the old Rocky-and-Bullwinkle cartoons. (Talk about nostalgia.)

Okay. If you can’t beat ‘em….

Thirty years ago, Newsday dispatched me to Italy to cover soccer’s month-long World Cup tournament. At the time, the vast majority of Americans were thoroughly uninformed about, and mostly uninterested in, that no-hands sport. The 1990 U.S. team, furthermore, was the Yanks’ first to qualify for the Cup in 40 years, a collection of wet-behind-the-ears lads metaphorically doing the doggy paddle in a pool full of Michael Phelpses. No threat to capture a nation’s attention.

But the idea then was to acquaint our local readers with a significant global event that would be coming to the United States for the first time four years hence. (It’s an irony now not only that soccer has gotten a solid foothold on these shores but especially that, with the lack of other programming, soccer—from the professional European leagues—currently is the most available live sport on American TV.)

That 1990 adventure played out over 35 days, requiring travel via trains, cars, busses and, on one occasion to reach the island of Sardinia, a plane—24 trips among 11 cities—eight of them competition sites for the 24 national teams, the other three team training camps.

Florence on Sunday, Pisa on Monday, Florence on Tuesday, Montecantini of Wednesday, Florence on Thursday, Milan on Friday, Rome on Saturday….

As much as the soccer, geography and culture were stars of the show, all the stunning Renaissance architecture and layers of history to experience. (“Ancient footprints are everywhere,” as a Dylan lyric describing Rome goes.) To a furriner, of course, there were a few challenges among the plentiful visual and culinary delights.

No two Italian cities did anything the same way. Telephones. Train accommodations. Signage. All different.

Restrooms were marked “signore” and “signori,” but some forms of signore apparently could mean either “ladies” or “sirs.” And there were no little pictures on the signs. Traffic patterns best could be described as chaotic. “Anarchy,” an Italian explained to me with delight.

The American players certainly were naïve travelers, out of their depth off the field as much as on. With an average age of 23, they were the youngest—and least worldly—team in the tournament. Just settling into their training base on the coastal town of Tirrenia, on a U.S. military site known as Camp Darby, the Yanks complained of skimpy breakfasts consisting of toast and jelly. They wanted eggs and pancakes and so on, the luxury of air conditioning and a refrigerator in each room. The Italian daily La Republica slyly described them as “ben nutriti”—well fed.

Florence on Sunday, Genoa on Monday, Tirrenia on Tuesday, Naples on Wednesday, Rome on Thursday…

Patriotic fans from across Europe constantly were in evidence. Scots arriving at games in team shirts and kilts. Austrians touring the Vatican with their red-and-white national flag draped over shoulders. Italians flying their green-white-and-red colors next to the laundry from apartment balconies, from car windows, from the passenger seats of motorbikes.

On game days in venue cities, wine and beer were banned in restaurants, a decidedly un-Italian circumstance. But more than a few establishments navigated that problem by serving wine in green mineral-water bottles, leading to the observation that they were “turning wine into water.”

A couple of soccer clichés were at work during the tournament: 1) The widespread lack of scoring. (Jim Murray, the snarky Los Angeles Times columnist, once wrote of the sport that had too many 0-0 ties for his taste, “I’d tell you the final score but there wasn’t any.”) And 2) hooliganism.

At the time, England’s club teams had just had lifted a five-year ban on playing in continental Europe because of thuggish English fan behavior. For the ’90 Cup, England’s national team, for its three first-round matches, was sentenced to Sardinia—reachable only via plane or boat—to better screen potentially troublesome followers. There were a handful of scuffles with police, though no problems at the stadiums.

Florence on Friday, Cagliari on Saturday and Sunday, Tirrenia on Monday, back to Florence on Tuesday…Turin by the weekend, then Rome, then Bologna and back to Florence…

Oh, yes. The soccer. Cameroon was a revelation, knocking off reigning champion Argentina in the Cup opener, giving the otherwise defensive-oriented tournament jolts of rare creativity and style and advancing to the quarterfinals. Cameroon’s star was 38-year-old Roger Milla and its coach a Siberian who spoke Russian and used Cameroon’s Soviet Embassy chauffeur to translate instructions to his players.

Italy’s Salvatore (Toto) Schillaci, a 25-year-old journeyman from Sicily who started the tournament on the bench, became an overnight sensation with six goals in six games—five of them game-winners. Argentina’s Diego Maradona was a shadow of his heroic 1986 World Cup self, except for one exquisite assist that saved his mates from a mid-tourney elimination against Brazil.

The Americans lost all three of their first-round games and were sent home, no surprise, though their 1-0 loss to host Italy established their worthiness as a Cup participant. West Germany—the official reunification of East and West still was three months away—won the dull championship final against Argentina on an anticlimactic penalty kick.

There you have it: Another proxy for a real-time 2020 sports story.

If fans had a choice….

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What is so different about Major League Baseball’s current absence, not counting the familiar owners- vs.-players wrangle over money, is the total lack of options for sports spectators. Three previous work stoppages resulted in cancelled games, but in each of those cases—in 1972, 1981 and 1994-95—other forms of sporting frivolity were readily available.

There was some shock in ’72 over history’s first player strike, which left big-league parks briefly empty from April 1 to 13. That unprecedented labor action by professional jocks disrupted “normal” routine, but it certainly was not in a league with the real-world crises of 2020—a global pandemic, crashing economy and roiling demonstrations against racial injustice.

Think of this: ESPN has been so desperate for sports news that its website’s lead headline on Tuesday ballyhooed, “Bucs release photos of Tom Brady in his new uniform.”

In April of ’72, among the plentiful alternative sporting entertainment in a MLB-free nation were NBA and/or NHL playoffs progressing in 13 major-league cities. It happens I was on assignment in Los Angeles for Newsday at the time, covering the NBA semifinals between the Lakers and Milwaukee Bucks. Yet even on an off day in that series, I found live baseball—with a decidedly big-league feel—on the University of Southern California campus.

SC was the reigning national collegiate champion then, playing a non-conference game against nearby Westmont College. One of the game’s umpires was Emmett Ashford, who had been MLB’s first black umpire and regularly worked SC games following his retirement from the Bigs two years earlier.

There was a high school lad sitting behind home plate that day, having set up a microphone and tape recorder to work on his play-by-play voice. Instead of referring to the teams as SC and Westmont, he called them the Angels and the Twins. So when SC outfielder Fred Lynn, who two years later would make his debut with the Boston Red Sox and went on to play 17 years in the Majors, struck out, poor Tony Oliva—a 15-year veteran with the Twins then on strike with his fellow pros—got blamed for it by the prep announcer.

That SC team resembled the L.A. Dodgers of 1972, relying on pitching and, in that particular game, going hitless until the sixth inning. The SC coach, for that year and 44 others, was Rod Dedeaux, who won 11 NCAA titles and played annual exhibitions against the Dodgers. (SC won their 1971 meeting, 10-9, before 31,000 fans.)

Dedeaux’s close relationship with Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda brought offers (which Dedeaux declined) to join the Dodger coaching staff. Besides Lynn, Dedeaux’s former SC players who enjoyed significant big-league success included Tom Seaver, Mark McGwire, Dave Kingman, Ron Fairly, Don Buford, Roy Smalley, Steve Kemp and Randy Johnson. Kingman was among the handful of striking players who worked out at SC during the work stoppage.

Back to the future: The coronavirus—the monster under our beds—is still there, and now baseball commissioner Rob Manfred is frightening the sport’s followers with noises about cancelling the 2020 season to show the players’ union who’s boss.

Other pro sports may return to action before the Majors do, which has moved fivethirtyeight.com to ask whether MLB’s labor fight might remind potential customers that there will be other choices out there soon.

“If history is any guide,” fivethirtyeight concluded, “a labor dispute isn’t likely to dampen enthusiasm for the game for long. In the past, fans have returned—and often quickly.” The piece cited a 3.7 percent drop in attendance in 1972 that was reversed with a 6.8 increase the next season. And “fans weren’t likely to attend games in a shortened 2020 season anyway because of COVID-19 concerns.”

Still, when the NBA comes back. And the NHL. And the NFL. And USC….

Sports? Now?

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Let’s say spectator sports were to return tomorrow. A dominant theme in the nation’s sports pages, ever since the coronavirus shut down the world of fun and games almost three months ago, has been how badly we miss and need sports. To take our minds off our disrupted lives. To resume business as usual. To get back to “normal.”

But tomorrow, who would be comfortable with the health risks? The virus is still out there. More to the point, given the more urgent crisis—a white Minnesota policeman’s video-captured murder of a black man named George Floyd and the national rage it has triggered—who would be okay with the priorities? Who would buy into oft-cited function of sports “healing” during times of fear and uncertainty?

This is not like moving on from a hurricane. Or even 9/11. After that 2001 trauma, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam, writing for ESPN’s web site, asked if sports in fact provided “badly needed relief from the darker concerns and burdens of our lives, as so many people (most of them connected to the world of sports, and therefore with no small amount of vested interest) keep saying?”

His answer was, “I have my doubts. Strong ones, as a matter of fact.”

In a piece for New York Magazine last week, Will Leitch acknowledged that, having sheltered in place since mid-March, “the populace seemed starved, downright lustful for live sports. But now? Would you find it appropriate to sit down and watch a baseball game? Or would you find it obscene?”

Especially given the irony of how Floyd’s death has revived the sports establishment’s traditional distancing from civil rights issues. And specifically, the juxtaposition of that cop violently kneeling on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes while—four years ago—San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt, peacefully, during the National Anthem to call attention to police mistreatment of blacks.

“Two knees,” Sally Jenkins wrote in the Washington Post. “One protesting in the grass, one pressing on the back of a man’s neck. Choose. You have to choose which knee you will defend. There are no half choices….only the knee of protest or the knee on the neck.”

The NFL chose the latter four years ago. Kaepernick was blackballed by the NFL, while a Greek chorus of many fans and media joined Donald Trump in branding Kaepernick anti-American. Only now has league commissioner Roger Goodell reversed field, confessing that “we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest.” He never mentioned—nor apologized to—Kaepernick.

In an interview on NPR, ESPN’s Howard Bryant noted how professional sports “have backed themselves into a corner. Especially post-9/11, they have embedded police into their business model. You have Armed Forces Appreciation Days. You have police as part of the entertainment of the game, in terms of hometown heroes and all of this. And when you have moments like this, these moments of unrest, these moments of police brutality or impropriety, you see the box these teams are put in.”

Sports Illustrated’s Michael Rosenberg argued that “mainstream white America is going to reconsider Kaepernick at some point—the way it reconsidered Muhammad Ali years after he refused to go to Vietnam, the way it reconsidered Jackie Robinson and Jack Johnson. Progress comes in fits and starts, and this country tends to punish those who urge it to move faster. The reconsideration of Kaepernick has begun.”

Maybe. Herman Edwards, the former NFL player and coach who now coaches at Arizona State, recently suggested that the nation needs to initiate a conversation not unlike how his gridiron lads strategize tactics that serve everyone going forward. “A huddle,” he said.

Better than just games. Better than business as usual.

The Times didn’t bury the news

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Because he was almost two decades my senior, Stan Isaacs seemed the right person to ask what it was like to have been around during something as consequential as World War II. He barely was a teenager at the time, but might he have pondered what would happen if the bad guys won?

“I mostly wondered,” he said, “when the war was over, what they’d put on the front page.”

That conversation was years ago. But I had been thinking, these last couple of months, about what they’re going to put on the front page when this modern plague is over. Then came the New York Times dramatic Sunday cover. Isaacs, who was among my newspapering mentors and heroes at Long Island’s Newsday, surely would have appreciated the Times’ powerful text-only presentation—the numbing, seemingly endless list of American victims of the coronavirus.

In condensed type over six grey columns (and continued on two more inside pages) was a roll call of names, ages, hometowns, occupations and personal anecdotes of 1,000 people—and those a mere one percent of the pandemic’s U.S. toll. No photos, ads, news articles, references to other sections of the publication. Just miniature obituaries. The rival New York Post summed up the effect as “unusual, chilling…heartbreakingly sweet, one-line anecdotes of the lives lost to the virus…”

U.S. DEATHS NEAR 100,000, AN INCALCULABLE LOSS was the sobering headline.

It was the day’s essential information, and there was no getting away from it. It was not a plot or a hoax or alarmist. It was cold, hard fact, to be dismissed at our peril. Cutting edge journalism.

My friend Bill Glauber, who can cover anything that moves and these days works for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, recently messaged, “Tell your journalism students to take notes. I tell all the younger reporters that 20 years from now, some kid is going to ask you what it was like in the 2020 pandemic. You will have a hell of a story to tell.”

Since we all began living on Coronavirus Standard Time in mid-March, the best ink-stained wretches have been telling the story every day on front pages. Reports of how the virus has devastated nursing homes. How the search for testing and a vaccine is going. How supply chains are disrupted, jobs lost, bankruptcies declared. How social distancing is crucial. How weird, unscientific treatments are being pushed by the president.

We have been kept up to date on how mandated quarantines are crushing the travel industry while shelter-in-place rules meanwhile cut down on pollution resulting from reduced traffic. How demonstrations have broken out against the medically wise lockdowns regarding bars, restaurants and houses of worship. How black and brown people, poor people, have been hit hardest by the disease. How students have been disoriented by remote schooling and colleges are frantic over losing enrollment. How traumatized doctors and nurses are searching for coping mechanisms while operating in fear that a second wave of infections is coming. How the sports and entertainment industries are pining for the clearance to return.

How people have died at a staggering rate.

World War II ended. Pretty soon there was other news on the front page. Pretty soon there was some degree of certainty about the future. Pretty soon life was “normal” again.

Surely that will happen again. In the meantime, we know where to look to see the current state of affairs.

Can nobody be like Mike?

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A primary manifestation of the “The Last Dance” documentary—but hardly news—was the glorification of Michael Jordan’s ferocious competitiveness. All the subplots aside—Jordan’s soaring dominance, the Chicago Bulls team dynamics, the spoils of victory—front and center was Jordan’s embodiment of the historical romanticizing of every sport’s success obsession: The zero-sum I-gain-by-your-loss addiction.

Over and over, we saw Jordan as the “hypercompetitive weirdo,” as labeled in a New York Magazine review; as what The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner found to be “borderline pathological” in contests of any nature. Slate’s Joel Anderson reasonably judged that Jordan was “portrayed as a distant, win-at-all-costs guy, abusive to teammates.”

Chicago reporter Sam Smith had established as much with his 1992 book, “The Jordan Rules.”  So, no surprise there. It in fact is a cliché in all sports: Doing anything—anything—to win is admirable. And, by contrast, losers lose because they don’t care enough; don’t give their all; are not “competitors.” As if sheer ability wasn’t the essential ingredient. As if the runner-up hadn’t lent just as much commitment to the struggle.

“When people see this,” Jordan says during “The Last Dance,” “they’re going to say, ‘Well, he wasn’t really a nice guy. He may have been a tyrant.’ But that’s you. Because you’ve never won anything.”

That Jordan was a basketball wizard, plenty worthy of spectator awe, is immune to overstatement. His hoops contemporary Larry Bird once called him “God disguised as Michael Jordan.” Jerry West, among the previous generation’s stars, said Jordan was “the modern-day Babe Ruth.”

There were revelatory NBA performers before Jordan—Elgin Baylor and Julius Erving, just to cite two with similar styles of suspended-animation flights and fluid creativity; singular talents such as Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, Kareem Abdul Jabbar—but Jordan’s mesmerizing skill unquestionably ascended to another level.

And he certainly filled record books: Six league championships. Ten times the NBA’s leading scorer. Five times regular-season MVP. Records for the highest career scoring averages in the regular season (30.12 points per game) and playoffs (33.45). And on and on.

Yet “The Last Dance,” beyond providing some timely nostalgia for a golden NBA era while the current world plague holds live sports in abeyance, felt a lot like Jordan’s need to insist that he could—and would—get the better of any man. Any time. And that such athletic superiority is supremely important to him.

Several commentators have raised an eyebrow over the appearance of “The Last Dance” just when barstool arguments have been put forward for LeBron James’ candidacy as history’s best player. Before the coronavirus pandemic brought this season to a screeching halt, James appeared on his way to the NBA finals for a 10th time. Four more than Jordan had.

Such comparisons dealing with different eras are a fool’s errand. Still, “The Last Dance” deification of Jordan came across as his reminder that he is the sport’s rightful king. NBA fans in an ESPN poll at the documentary’s conclusion agreed—73 percent picked him over James.

That kind of public regard is how Jordan long ago made Nike a global superpower and supplied, along with Bird and Magic Johnson, the glitz that moved Olympic officials to finally welcome NBA pros. It caused Harvard historian and intellectual Henry Louis Gates to proclaim Jordan “the greatest corporate pitchman of all time.”

“The Last Dance,” two decades since Jordan’s retirement as a player, demonstrated that Jordan not only retains the marketing Midas touch, but that the thing he markets best is himself. The competition goes on.

Zooming in place

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Zoomology might be defined as the study of suggested human performance in such matters as education and business. It’s not real. Its specific activity, Zooming, doesn’t manage to accomplish much beyond freeing its users, exiled from classroom or office, from the guilt that they aren’t getting stuff done.

This is not to say that the 2013 debut of Zoom, a video conferencing service founded by California techie Eric Yuan, wasn’t a bright idea. Nor that the sudden, massive nationwide adoption of Zoom in March wasn’t a timely response to shelter-in-place orders necessitated by the modern plague. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

There are reports that Zoom parties and Zoom visits with socially distanced family and friends provide a decided comfort while we all are on Coronavirus Standard Time. But arguments exist that telephone calls are more personal. And, according to technology mavens, Zoom has privacy and security issues which should concern us.

Generally speaking, a two-month immersion in Zoomology reveals that, mostly, Zoom’s without-a-body experience can’t possibly substitute in-person discussion and brainstorming.

For one thing, the format is visually disconcerting, those rows of faces-in-boxes that recall, to us folks of a certain age and questionable television habits, the long-ago Brady Bunch intro or Hollywood Squares game show. As a Wall Street Journal headline noted in describing the potential exhaustion of meeting via Zoom, “Being gazed at by giant heads can take a mental toll.”

In place of back-and-forth communication involving physical presence, the remoteness of Zoom produces distractions in the form of participants’ absent-minded Z-gr-ooming—checking their hair in their Zoom cameras. Or, in contrast to that, those college students—technically present for online instruction—whose involvement can be better described as Zzzzzzzooming, their eyelids drooping while they lie in bed.

That is, if they haven’t opted for the no-camera look in which they are represented by a blank, black square.

Then you have the instances of Zoom-looming—children, cats or dogs wandering in and out of the process. Or some folks’ attention-deficit inclination to nose around a co-worker’s living quarters, possibly making judgments about the wallpaper, kitchen fixtures or garage-like environment. The New York Times recently zoomed in (lower-case ‘z’) on the bookshelves of celebrities during quarantine interviews—including Prince Charles, Stacey Abrams and Cate Blanchett—to wonder what certain tomes, spied in the background, might reveal about them.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld, in a Times interview, dismissed the inclination toward that sort of snooping, insisting, “I don’t want to see how you really live. We’re all just sick of people’s houses.”

More likely, we’re just sick of the circumstances that require another Zoomsday. In an essay for the online platform Medium, Kelli Maria Korducki pointed out that “we’ve reached the irritation phase of this pandemic.”

My own experience, since being thrown the Zoom lifeline to continue conducting a college sportswriting class, is that online sessions feel increasingly detached from sports, writing and anything resembling a class. After seven weeks of this, a Zoom fatigue—Zoom-and-gloom—clearly has set in.

And it’s doubtful that one alternative to real-time video contact, the so-called “asynchronous” Zoom meeting, isn’t worse, because that consists of recording all the previously mentioned shortcomings for later viewing. Which guarantees even less human interaction. It sounds like, and is akin to, remaining asymptomatic while carrying a Zoom virus.

So here we are: The breakneck increase of Zoom’s daily use—up from roughly 10 million people in December to around 300 million now—is replicating the galloping Covid-19 spread. Maybe we couldn’t get along without it, given the social distancing trap visited upon us all.

That doesn’t make the desire for a Zoom vaccine any less urgent.

Going, going, gone…..

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There are sports fans who consider “loser” a four-letter word. A slur, a label of failure. Maybe this coronavirus thing will help strip away the negative connotation.

That’s because, with the pandemic, the sudden and total absence of sports “is a loss,” Hofstra psychology professor William Sanderson confirmed. Sports “is something that’s part of the fabric of our lives and now it’s gone. And there literally is a grief reaction. Just like when someone dies….”

Certainly for my Hofstra sportswriting students, not having sports is a deprivation. Their semester assignments were to include coverage of a high school game, a college game, a press conference with some university official, coach or athlete. That those possibilities—and all other sporting activity—disappeared in mid-March is hardly some scarlet letter of disgrace.

So to discuss the mental and emotional aspects of the situation—and to keep the journalistic gears oiled—we invited Sanderson to our recent life-without-sports remote-class Zoom session.

“Think about this,” he said. “The fact is that, unless you bet on the game—and hopefully you’re not—it has no bearing on your life. You’re not a member of the team. You didn’t accomplish anything….but watching sports and aligning with a team satisfies a need” which he traced to evolutionary history of warfare and competition. (It’s kind of a guy thing, he noted, yet a cultural reality.)

“In the scheme of things,” Sanderson said, “is this really important? No. Is it in our DNA and therefore important? Absolutely.”

People are dying. Jobs are disappearing. No end to the plague—no medical solution—is in sight. Yet among the widespread accounts of public sorrow and bewilderment are these prominent laments over cancelled ball games. That is partly because “we don’t really have a lot of distractions now,” Sanderson said. “So we right now miss [sports] even more. The absence is probably more profound in the context of so many other losses.”

There is the issue of fractured routine. “Humans are creatures of habit,” he said. “We like predictability, certainty, schedules, and the disruption of schedule is creating a huge problem for people.”

There is the matter of sharing. “Humans are a social species, and that’s another loss. People like to go to games, be part of a group; say, be with other Yankee fans.”

There is—for the athletes as well as fans—that “many are suffering from a [misplaced] sense of meaning, and when you lose your meaning, you become more depressed. It’s a more abstract loss than losing your job, but definitely a factor.”

To a degree, Sanderson said, people are adjusting to being on Coronavirus Standard Time. “If you go back to March 10, there was more anxiety, people fearful of getting sick, and I think we’ve seen a lessening of that anxiety. People get used to circumstances. Even being bombed in Europe in World War II, people sort of got used to that; people are remarkably resilient.

“But the concern now is more sadness and depression, because the losses—and that’s the key word in depression—the losses are enormous. Things cancelled, lost jobs, lost loved ones, and even lost sports, which are so important to us. Everyone is suffering right now.

“I imagine that people who are gamblers and now have lost this, it would be equivalent to smokers all of a sudden having their cigarettes disappear, without a chance to wean off them. Some are fans and some are not, but this is their dopamine rush, and all of a sudden it’s gone.”

There could be a silver lining, Sanderson said. Maybe sports gamblers would be “forced to deal with this and, once they stop, if they can go through that difficult phase….”

More likely, those folks will find something else on which to play odds. As for the rest of us, staggered by this pandemic sucker punch, Sanderson expects a sports recovery. A win somewhere down the road when the metaphorical “watch this space” signs will disappear from empty stadiums and arenas.

Meanwhile, we’re all losers. Or, more accurately, victims.

It’s all speculation now

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(My alma mater. Now. Not then.)

 

What if something like this coronavirus thing had happened 50 years ago? I was graduating college then, just as several of the students in my Hofstra University sportswriting class hope to do—virtually, no doubt—next month. What if, during my senior year, shelter-in-place orders and social distancing had gone into effect?

I would have been cornered in my off-campus apartment with two other lads. We had no television and no reason to be there beyond getting a night’s sleep. We never cooked; there never was any food in the place. What if all on-campus dining had been shuttered as well as the townie restaurants. How often could I have stomached the old Ku-Ku Burger drive-through? (15-cent burgers.)

The Journalism School building—my real home at the time, where I spent most of my waking hours on the Columbia Missourian staff—would have been off limits. My daily routine of reporting and writing about local and regional sports would have been kaput because, as we now know, all sports are suspended during a pandemic. Besides, with the Internet and digital journalism still decades in the future, how likely was it that the Missourian could have pivoted to being produced remotely? We had typewriters and telephones (dial; not smart) but none of the fall-back technology so crucial to 21st Century communication.

Restrictions on travel and on the gathering of crowds would have cancelled the University’s annual Journalism Week conference, which would have meant that prominent guests such as the vice president of United Press International, who flew in from New York City, would not have participated in what resembled a jobs fair. Which meant he would not have stumbled onto some of my work in the Missourian. Which meant he would not have offered me immediate gainful employment in the real world. Which meant….

I’m of the belief that alternative history belongs in novels, unsettling what-ifs such as Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” and Stephen King’s “11/22/63.” Or poems—Frost’s “Road Not Taken.” In real time, our lives play out in a series of developments that, in retrospect, feel like simple twists of fate. And we carry on.

There was no communicable disease raging a half-century ago. The only minor interruptions in my senior year were a split lip sustained in an intramural softball game and a brief bout with mono. The UPI offer came through. I set off for the Big Town the day after graduation. Moved to Long Island’s Newsday a year later and stayed for 44 years. Met my wife at Newsday. Had a daughter. Traveled widely on assignments. Met fascinating people. Learned stuff. Had a lot of yukks.

Some people have all the luck. But suppose such a discombobulating event as COVID-19 had hit in 1969 or ’70, when I was looking no farther down the road than another day of newspapering, experiencing just what I had wanted to be when I grew up.

Now, part of my duty is to offer those Hofstra students some insight into the journalism business, but the world is shifting under all our feet. Maybe the best advice is the John Lennon lyric—“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” I have no answer to “What if?”

A sickly little rhyme

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If it’s possible that there is something worse than a communicable disease, that something very well could be bad poetry.

Nevertheless, I persist…

There now is a virus, corona

It’s spread by anonymous donors

So shelter in place

And don’t touch your face

It’s the Whale and you could be Jonah

…

Perchance, create a soliloquy

As long as you stay six feet from me

With everything closed

No folks juxtaposed

Lock your door and throw out the key

…

In this pinch at least we have Zoom

To virtually fight off the gloom

But the raging pandemic

Is downright systemic

Optimism is key, I’d assume

…

We miss shopping and concerts and sports

As well as group things of all sorts

But listen to Fauci

It’s not just about ye

In this storm all need a safe port

Stay healthy…..

 

Another April Fools’ Day

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(Stan Isaacs)

It’s April Fools’ Day, but this is not exactly a prank. This is an earnest attempt to honor my late Newsday colleague and mentor Stan Isaacs, who died in 2013 at 83. It is inspired by the fact that, each April Fools’ Day during Stan’s long and distinguished career there, Newsday published his whimsical rankings of decidedly inconspicuous topics, calling them IRED—the Isaacs Ratings of Esoteric Distinction. The purpose, he said, was to offer “an appraisal in areas that are generally ignored by raters,” and he declared that “no category is too arcane” to grade.

IRED, he said, was “a loving spoof of the Ring Magazine boxing ratings….a rush to respond to the unrecognized need for evaluations of qualities like the Bridges Across the River Seine.” For each April 1 edition, he began with his personal classification of chocolate ice creams and, from there, quantified such universal matters as Fred Astaire’s dancing partners; TV remote buttons; “Things that Aren’t As Good as They Used to Be;” bowling pins. “The IRED never glittered more,” he once noted, “than when it evaluated People Who Were Neither On the Way Up or Down.”

Grantland’s Bryan Curtis, in an appreciation shortly after Stan’s death, insightfully recognized him as “a fierce opponent of whatever he was ‘supposed’ to be writing, an insurrectionist with a smile.” That was the key to making Stan a journalism hero. Worldly and creative, and admirably goofy. A keen observer with a twinkle in his eye. A man, certainly, who understood the need for an April Fools’ Day giggle.

As a pale tribute, then—and even in these strange times—here is my 2020 rip-off of his delightful parody:

Historical figures for the Age of Coronavirus: 1, Lady MacBeth (wash your hands). 2, Ignaz Semmelweis (19th Century pioneer of antiseptic procedures). 3, Edvard Munch (don’t touch your face like that).

Now part of the daily language: 1, In an abundance of caution. 2, Social distancing. 3, Flatten the curve. 4, Shelter in place. 5, Postponed. 6, Zoom.

Possible 2020 Opening Days in baseball: 1, May 1st. 2, June 1st. 3, July 1st. 4, August 1st. 5, April 1st, 2021.

Telephone functions (circa 1970): 1, Telephone.

Telephone functions (circa 2020): 1, Mail. 2, Camera. 3, Newspaper. 4, Clock. 5, Calendar. 6, Map. 7, Encyclopedia. 8, Book. 9, Stopwatch. 10, Record player. 11, Calculator. 12, Notebook. 13, Compass. 14, Alarm. 15, Radio. 16, Television. 17, Diary. 18, Tape recorder. 19. Technological wizardry I have not yet deciphered. 20, Telephone.

Familiar structures personally visited: 1, New York City’s Chrysler Building. 2, Shanghai’s “Bottle opener” (World Financial Center). 3, Sydney’s Opera House. 4, St. Louis’ Gateway Arch. 5, Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia cathedral. 6, Athens’ Parthenon. 7. The Leaning Tower of Pisa. 8, London’s Westminster Abbey. 9, Starbucks.

Minor league baseball team nicknames (then and now): 1, Montgomery Biscuits. 2, Reading Coal Heavers. 3, Lancing Lugnuts. 4, Chattanooga Lookouts. 5, Akron Rubber Ducks. 6, Allentown Peanuts. 7, Albuquerque Isotopes. 8, 2019 Miami Marlins.

Music genres: 1, Classical. 2, Blues. 3, Country. 4, Folk. 5, Ska. 6, Rock. 7. Roll.

Famous quarterbacks: 1, Tom Brady. 2, Joe Namath. 3, Joe Montana. 4 (tie) Archie, Payton and Eli Manning. 5, Doug Williams. 6, Monday morning. 7, Armchair.