Author Archives: johnfjeansonne@gmail.com

About johnfjeansonne@gmail.com

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

Professor of The Big Picture

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Take it from an old sportswriter who knows the score (though not much else). For the guru-on-the-mountaintop illumination of What It All Means, for how otherwise superficial endeavors fit into real life, there are folks like Hofstra University history professor Michael D’Innocenzo.

I was reminded of this last week in attending the school’s dedication of D’Innocenzo’s eponymous seminar room on campus. It was just the most recent in a fairly endless stream of awards, fellowships, recognitions and widespread praise earned by D’Innocenzo for his teaching, researching and writing about major events and consequential human affairs over six decades. And counting,

The man is a walking, talking historical landmark. An activist for non-violent social change. An expert on immigration and civil rights. (He was an instrumental figure in bringing Martin Luther King Jr. to Hofstra for a 1963 speech.) A big-picture guy who, for me, has been a vital source for understanding that sports—recess; fun and games—in fact are of significant consequence.

We met when my wife was taking D’Innocenzo’s “Sports and the American Character” class at Hofstra in 1974, and among the suggestions he posed to his students then was a doctoral dissertation on the effect of sports on the aspirations of people, particularly minority groups. Or sports’ effect on the male-female relationship. Or the effect of college athletic recruiting. On winning. On losing.

He spoke of how, for so long, “scholars, sad to say, looked at sports as frivolous,” never bothering to go beyond “mythology.” He saw the connection between sports’ “No. 1 mentality” and Teddy Roosevelt’s Big Stick Policy and how Americans “have always thought of themselves as models for the rest of the world. Sports has been an enormous factor in this country since the 1920s.”

Babe Ruth, he said, “was a sign of early America—up from the bottom with his broken home,” and ultimately a symbol of America’s post-World War I power.

D’Innocenzo noted the “robber-baron mentality” of sports, that “succeeding is the thing, no matter how you do it. Offensive holding is accepted as a part of football. Think of Ty Cobb in the ‘20s sharpening his spikes; anything to steal that base.”

So now I teach a sportswriting course at Hofstra, as an osmotic beneficiary of D’Innocenzo’s learned observations, and one of my objectives is to reinforce the fact that covering sports is more than balls and strikes. That it requires something of a sports anthropologist, willing to consider issues of race, gender equity, performance-enhancing drugs, the almighty dollar.

During the New York Yankees’ run of nine consecutive first-place finishes in the early 2000s, when they were operating with the league’s highest payroll, D’Innocenzo compared their ability to “go and buy some established player” to the United States “using its leverage with NATO to project our influence elsewhere in the world. Historians call that dollar diplomacy.”

In the relatively early days of the Super Bowl, as the National Football League began to wallow in self-importance, the league offered a $10,000 college grant to the teenager who submitted the best essay on “The NFL’s Role in American History.” D’Innocenzo found it interesting that the winner was a female “because she is not part of it, except from the outside. She is reinforcing the old status-quo that men participate and women appreciate.”

That is changing. And none of this is to say that D’Innocenzo is anti-sports. He’s a Mets fan, for goodness sakes, and for decades has been an eager practitioner of tennis and softball. He believes in “so many affirmative values in sports,” he said. “Discipline, though it can be perverted. The camaraderie. The sense of getting beyond one’s self.” He said he would love to see more of those qualifies in the classroom setting.

But surely it is a healthy thing to be shaken out of our passive spectating stupor by considering things beyond the final score. Long ago, I wrote down this quote from D’Innocenzo: “Anytime you study something closely you will find yourself being critical of parts on it. Even in the competitive world of sports I have come to know and love.”

I should get to work on one of those doctoral dissertations….

Serena Williams, rules and fairness

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It’s complicated, of course. The Serena Williams incident in this year’s U.S Open championship final has taken us far beyond a discussion of tennis rules and proper sporting behavior. Almost immediately, the debate veered toward male privilege, identity politics, racism and crowd dynamics.

Was Williams the victim of a power imbalance in which a chair umpire is not to be challenged? Was that exacerbated by the fact that the umpire, Carlos Ramos, is a man and the player, Williams, a woman—and a woman of color at that?

Did Williams, without question the superstar of women’s tennis, deserve special consideration regarding the application of the sport’s arcane regulations at such a crucial time in such a big match? Did Williams’ past fits of pique, profanely threatening a lineswoman at the 2009 Open and fuming, “I truly despise you,” to a female chair umpire at the 2011 Open, factor into the Ramos-Williams dispute?

And what about the Arthur Ashe Stadium crowd, which poured fuel on Williams’ fiery protests with sustained booing that ultimately diminished 20-year-old Naomi Osaka’s eventual victory?

That last aspect recalled the chaos of a 1979 second-round Open match between John McEnroe and Ilie Nastase who, by the way, embodied what Williams cited as past behavior by men that she rightly said was worse than her on-court actions. That night, opponents widely disparaged as “Nasty” and “Super Brat” baited each other with whining and childish delays until chair umpire Frank Hammond—unable to control the non-action or the booing spectators—defaulted the match early in the fourth set.

Hammond had struggled to enforce the rules, as well as an order by tournament referee Mike Blanchard to “put Nastase on the clock—or else.” Yet when an exasperated Hammond finally (and correctly) proclaimed a premature end to the match, he was taken out of the chair and replaced by Blanchard to appease the unruly crowd. The craziness resumed toward a McEnroe victory.

Then even Hammond admitted afterwards that the players’ star power had superseded tennis law, calling Nastase, the more guilty of the two parties that night, “very colorful. He’s great for tennis.”

Last Saturday, Carlos Ramos chose not to apply a similar immunity to Serena Williams, in spite of her unprecedented accomplishments and vast popularity. After what amounted to a formal warning when Ramos cited Patrick Mouratoglou‘s illegal coaching hand-signals to Williams—a violation Williams denied but Mouratoglou acknowledged—Ramos docked Williams a point for smashing her racket, then a game when she called him a “liar” and “a thief,” leaving her on the brink of defeat.

Ramos’ series of verdicts were cast by Williams, and many observers, as evidence of a double standard applied to women—not only in tennis but in all of society’s venues.

Rebecca Traister, in The Cut column for New York Magazine, wrote that “a male umpire prodded Serena Williams to anger and then punished her for expressing it….She was punished for showing emotion, for defiance, for being the player she has always been—driven, passionate, proud and fully human.”

Furthermore, Traister wrote, Williams’ rage was an understandable means to “defy those rules designed and enforced by, yet so rarely forcefully applied to, white men.”

It is beyond dispute that McEnroe, Nastase, Jimmy Connors and—early in his career, Andre Agassi—were among male players repeatedly guilty of crass and offensive displays. And that, because large crowds paid to see them, they often got away with such boorish behavior. But Martina Navratilova, whose 18 major-tournament singles titles compare nicely with Williams’ 23, argued in a New York Times opinion piece, “I don’t believe it’s a good idea to apply a standard of ‘If the men get away with it, women should be able to, too.’ Rather, I think the question we have to ask ourselves is this: What is the right way to behave to honor our sport and to respect our opponents?”

A core ideal in sports—theoretically the one true meritocracy, no matter the participants’ ethnicity, appearance, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, economic status—is fairness. The “level playing field” and all that. In protesting Ramos’ application of code violations against her, by complaining, “It’s not fair,” Williams was reminding that sports can be as imperfect as the real world, populated as it is by flawed humanity; that the same rules in fact are not always applied to everyone.

So. In the end, was it fair—to both her and Naomi Osaka—to apply the rules to Williams?

 

 

Touchdown Elvis

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I was thinking that night about Elvis

Day that he died. Day that he died.

—“Elvis Presley Blues,” sung by Jimmy Buffett

 

Approximately nobody missed the news flash on Aug. 16, 1977, that Elvis had died. Think of this week’s response to Aretha Franklin’s death, but with a heavier blow because Elvis was only 42, almost half Franklin’s age. So on that day, exactly 41 years earlier, the main topic of conversation in the New York Giants’ lockerroom at their Pleasantville, N.Y., summer training camp wasn’t the least bit unusual.

It’s just that it was slightly more personal than might have been expected. A thousand miles from Graceland, the connection went beyond the fact that Elvis had claimed football to be his second most passionate interest, after music. Specifically, he had been a very public fan of the short-lived World Football League franchise in his Memphis hometown. And no fewer than 11 members of the 1977 Giants—eight players and three coaches, including head coach John McVay—were refugees from the recently defunct Memphis Southmen.

If I had been a more alert journalist, I would have offered the bosses at Newsday an instant sidebar on the Giants’ thoughts about their close encounters with the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Instead, I filed a not-so-earthshattering piece on how the Giants coaches were switching fourth-year pro Ray Rhodes from wide receiver to defensive back. (“Yeh, I’m a cornerback,” Rhodes said, “but I’m giving no interviews. I got nothing to say.”)

Certainly Rhodes, who wound up playing four more years and coaching another 30 in the NFL, was all shook up that day. But the real story was Elvis and, by extension, the former Memphis players who shared some thoughts about the man.

They were aware that Elvis had been in the building, Memphis’ Liberty Bowl, with 30,121 other spectators for the Southmen’s debut on July 10, 1974. It was reported that Elvis sat with country singer Charlie Rich, and that when Rich returned to his seat after singing the national anthem, Elvis observed, “That’s a tough song to sing, ain’t it?”

Memphis was a good team, winning 17 of 21 games in 1974 and had a 7-4 record the next year when the league folded mid-season. Which led to the migration North, from Memphis to the Giants, by running backs Larry Csonka and Willie Spencer, receivers Ed Marshall and Gary Shirk, center Ralph Hill, linebacker Frank Marion, guard Ron Mikolajczyk and defensive back Larry Mallory—along with McVay and his assistants Jay Fry and Bob Gibson.

Pro football never returned to Memphis despite an effort by Elvis’ foundation in the early 1990s, long after his death, for a franchise to be named the Hound Dogs. What was left behind was “an Elvis-owned and –used WFL football” given to him by Southmen owner John Bassett and offered at auction at Graceland during the annual Elvis Week in 2017.

According to a letter of authenticity from Elvis’ bodyguard Sonny West, who died months before that auction, “Elvis used this football on the grounds of Graceland in the ’70s….

“Elvis and some of us guys went to some of the [Southmen] home games as a guest of the owner and sat in his box. Elvis and John became friends quickly. John got the ball and gave it to Elvis. I’m sure it was a game ball at one time but had passed the newness of that stage and became a practice ball for the team. Elvis and I passed the ball a few times in the backyard of Graceland.”

Likely, then, the future Giants Csonka, Marshall, Shirk, Spencer and the others had handled that ball at some point in practice. The Elvis ball. I wish I’d asked a few more questions in 1977 about such small degrees of separation.

But, now, full circle, thinking about the day that Aretha Franklin—born in Memphis, by the way—died. Among the countless tributes of respect for her influence and eclectic musical gifts was a recollection of her rendition of the Star Spangled Banner before a 2016 Thanksgiving Day game between the Detroit Lions and Minnesota Vikings. Passionate, four-and-a-half minutes long, with gospel phrasing and ad-libs—“It is the land of the free,” she threw in—it surely would have moved Elvis to marvel, “That’s a tough song to sing that way, ain’t it?”

Real person. Real sport.

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Frank Carroll is retiring at 80. He coached figure skating for 58 years, most widely known as the mentor of five-time world champion Michelle Kwan and five other Olympic medalists, including 2010 Olympic winner Evan Lysacek.

In a half-century of covering sports, I can’t say I crossed paths with too many characters more memorable than Carroll. All those heroes and villains in what my sportswriting brethren typically considered real sports—football, baseball, basketball—all those physically gifted protagonists, psychologically vulnerable troupers, philosophically aware artistes and occasionally fanatical wingnuts, yet one of the really fascinating humans was encountered in…skating. Go figure.

(I must acknowledge that in reporting on five Winter Olympics, I long ago was disabused of any notion that, a) figure skating lacked arresting personalities and b) that it was not a sport. An early lesson came from 1992 U.S. pairs skater Calla Urbanski, a 31-year-old once-divorced, remarried former waitress who partnered on the ice with Rocky Marval, the 26-year-old owner of a small trucking company. The Waitress and the Truck Driver. “To say this isn’t a sport, just because we wear fancy outfits,” Urbanski lectured, “I’d like to challenge the guys who say that to get their butts into the air and turn three times and land on an eight-inch blade. And then tell me it’s not a sport.”)

Not that there isn’t a theatrical aspect to the endeavor. And Carroll—who spun humorous, involved tales that he illustrated with hand gestures and dramatic expressions—was an ideal example. For a brief time in his youth, after all, he had been an actor. Sort of.

“There were these bad beach party movies that I was in, in the mid-‘60s,” he said. “I was a body. I’m Irish. I’m like Casper the Ghost with this skin, but I had blond hair then and I was the perfect beach bum/surfer. They would spray me tan!”

He is the only son of a teacher who grew up in Worcester, Mass., with a pond near his home that lured him into skating. Take a breath, and listen….

“I used to go to the movies and see those old Movietone newsreels that had pictures of [1948 Olympic gold medalist] Barbara Ann Scott and Dick Button [the 1952 and ’56 Olympic champ]. Then they built an indoor rink in Worcester, across the street from my house.

“I was 12. I was the second person on the ice when it opened. [The owner] was the first. He gave me a key and said, ‘Frankie, if this rink isn’t being used for hockey or lessons, it’s yours.’ I was a very good skater very early because I’d practice at home on the floor. I’d put a dishrag down on the linoleum floor and skate around on that.”

He enrolled at Holy Cross and, based on his regional skating title, was given a partial athletic scholarship and awarded a varsity letter for skating, “even though they didn’t have a skating team,” he said.

“I’d practice early in the morning before the Holy Cross hockey team got on the ice, and they’d line up along the boards, waiting with their hockey sticks. If I missed one thing in my routine, they’d take their sticks and bang on the boards and boo me.

“But if I skated well, they’d all cheer.

“When I finished school, well, you know, you go on with your life. My father thought skating was frivolous or stupid, but I was 21 years old and I signed for more money in a week with the Ice Follies than my dad ever made in a year in his entire life: $250 a week.”

He wound up going to Hollywood at the invitation of friends and found his way, temporarily, into bit parts of those beach movies. “I didn’t know I wanted to coach at all. I’d go to the beach, go to the gym to work out. But there was this little rink in Van Nuys where I gave skating lessons to beginners, and these kids began to improve and I got in demand. So I eventually gave up the cattle call at the studio.”

Just as elaborately—with asides and not-especially pertinent detail—Carroll told of how his accidental discovery of music for a Kwan skating program resembled finding a winning lottery ticket in the street; of how his coaching theory lacked talk of winning because that was “destructive language; it doesn’t make any sense to be promising and building hopes up in the sky”); yet how, before Kwan’s 1998 Olympic final in Nagano, Japan, he “prayed a lot. I went to the Catholic church here because that’s my church, and then I went to the [Buddhist] temple, just to cover my bases.”

Kwan, though the favorite, was beaten by Tara Lipinski that year, and retired with a silver and bronze in two Games. But Carroll—voted into a handful of skating halls of fame—long ago was safely inside the velvet ropes, and got his Olympic coaching gold with Lysacek eight years ago.

He covered his bases. He left his mark. He made things interesting. In a real sport.

Vanishing News

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On my early morning runs these days, I can spot a newspaper in the driveway of maybe one house in 20. As an ink-stained wretch who has been attempting to commit journalism for a half-century, that feels like a personal affront.

And now the New York Daily News, which once sold more than two million papers a day, up and fired half its staff.

Hitting even closer to home, those News “layoffs” included 25 of the 34-person sports department. I consider myself a patriot of sports journalism, having practiced the craft since high school and, beginning in 1970, at Long Island’s Newsday.

Furthermore, I have been clinging to the notion that, no matter what, there always will be a demand for newspapers. Radio didn’t kill them. Television didn’t kill them. So, for the past decade, I’ve been teaching a sportswriting course at Hofstra University, on the theory that 21st-Century students can find the same enjoyment I experienced in chronicling the unscripted drama of grand athletic events, which are so often tangled up in community identification. (And politics and big business and considerations of fair play.)

But of course, the Internet happened. Smart phones and iPads and blogs. The Bermuda Triangle of newspapering. Belatedly, I’ve come to fear that old friend Tom Callahan, who has written sports about as beautifully and knowledgably as anyone, had a point when he slyly wondered, “Why not teach something useful—like trolley car driving?”

The world is changing, no?

My first job out of college was at United Press International’s New York City wire service office. We were based in the Daily News building, the Art Deco skyscraper, built during the Depression, with its fabulous lobby dominated by an enormous globe that lent the place—and the business—an almost sacred formality. It somehow reinforced my belief in journalism’s noble status.

Gotham, furthermore, was then a metropolis awash in newspapers. Straphangers devoured the tabloid Daily News and Post on packed subway cars, where standing-room-only necessitated special skills to read the broadsheet New York Times. (Bob Stewart, a senior presence at UPI, schooled me on how to fold the Times, vertically, into quarter pages.)

Soon enough, New York’s Big Three papers became direct competition when I signed on with Newsday, and the Daily News, especially, was a menacing presence because of its vast readership. Any ill-advised show of pride in producing a scoop during my six years of covering the New York Giants was parlayed by a favorite News character, Norm Miller, who would demand sarcastically: “What’s your circulation?” (To which Vinny DiTrani of New Jersey’s Bergen Record would retort, “120 over 80.” But Norm had a point.)

The Daily News was a behemoth, and its sportswriters were minor celebrities, widely known, and so often with a wiseguy whimsy that fit New York so well. Miller, plenty aware of the ephemeral condition of newspaper stories, often referred to the News as “the Daily Fishwapper.” Quickly out with the trash.

Apparently—sadly—the current News owners feel the same way about all the journalistic talent they have tossed aside. Colleagues and former comrades are rightly lamenting how the gutted News has been severely hobbled in its role as political watchdog and voice of the people. Just as devastating, to my mind, is the loss of all those folks who brilliantly dealt with fun-and-games, the crucial diversions from a Real World spinning out of control.

Bob Klapisch, veteran baseball writer now based with the Bergen Record, posted this on Twitter:

“Daily News Customer Service, can I help you?”

“I want to cancel my subscription.”

“May I ask why?”

“You just fired several of my friends.”

“Can I ask what section you read most?”

“Sports.”

“Well, we’re still going to have a great sports section.”

“No you’re not.”

That’s one less newspaper in a driveway.

 

Meeting Mandela

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This was in 1992, on the morning of the Opening Ceremonies of the Barcelona Olympics. Apartheid officially had ended in South Africa, allowing that nation’s athletes to be welcomed back into the Olympic family after 32 years of isolation, so a colleague and I took the crosstown subway ride to the seaside Olympic Village to seek South African athletes’ thoughts on the tangle of sports and politics.

As we were leaving, Nelson Mandela suddenly appeared, trailed by no more than a half-dozen reporters and a TV camera. We had stumbled into an ad hoc news briefing and, given the accidental opportunity, tossed a couple of questions Mandela’s way.

It is not every day that one blunders into meeting and addressing a person who truly was changing the world. Mandela, who would have turned 100 today, July 18—he died in 2013—was then two years past his 27 years of imprisonment for having agitated for blacks’ rights, still two years from being voted in as South Africa’s first democratically elected president.

A month earlier, with riots in the black townships threatening to slow the process of integration, he had suggested that South African athletes stay away from the Barcelona Games. There were only eight blacks in South Africa’s 95-person Olympic delegation. But as he would do in embracing the mostly white national rugby team during the 1995 World Cup as a unifying force in South Africa’s transition away from racist minority rule, Mandela reversed field, choosing a “one-team, one-nation” strategy, another of his many signals for harmony.

“Let’s let bygones be bygones,” he said that morning in 1992. “Let’s concern ourselves with our presence here. I urge you to come along with me, to forget the past and get on with the future.”

He posed for cameras in the village with a handful of green-and-yellow-clad athletes—black and white—and expressed the often-empty Olympic hope that united sport somehow can lead a splintered world in the right direction.

“It’s important for our young people to participate,” said Mandela, who lit up to recall his youthful days as a boxer and track athlete when asked about his own sporting inclinations.

“There is no doubt in my mind,” he said, “that this is the correct decision, and I am quite satisfied in the racial breakdown of the team. I would have liked it to be a reflection of our population”—at that point, 26 million of the 32 million South Africans were black—“but there has to be a starting point.”

In South Africa, newspaper editorials had been encouraging Olympic participation as a spur in negotiations between Mandela’s black African National Congress and white South African president F.W. de Klerk, and as an emotional way to appeal to the most radical constituents on both sides.

A white South African equestrian in the Mandela group that day, Peter Gotz, reported that “Olympic fever has been raging in South Africa . . . . It’s been a very nice gesture to have Mr. Mandela here. He told us, as a team, that he was proud of us, and that the whole country is proud of us. I guess I don’t feel so much a part of history as I feel a part of the present and the future.”

That dumb-luck crossing of paths 26 years ago with such a historic figure was exhilarating, and a comfort to be reminded that a long career of covering sports events doesn’t limit one to meaningless frivolity. Among Mandela’s beliefs of reconciliation and hope was the acceptance of how sports could grab headlines and wield surprising power, could even be used to narrow a brutal black-white divide in his country.

A person really can bump into heroes in the sports journalism business.

The World Cup escape

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Comparative happiness is immoral. I’m not about to take pleasure in the fact that England currently suffers with some dreadful politicians stoking fear of immigrants and other perceived grievances. Besides, that sort of thing is abundantly available right here at home.

On the contrary, I am a bit jealous of how the English were afforded a temporary, euphoric respite from anti-social turmoil by the World Cup and their national team’s delightful run in the tournament.

It was just soccer and, in the end, the English lads didn’t necessarily reverse a self-deprecating “narrative of decline” described by Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker, that it’s been “all downhill since the end of the Second World War, or the end of the Empire, or 1066…”

Or the Brexit chaos that reportedly has Prime Minister Theresa May facing the possible collapse of her government. But by changing the subject—“Don’t You Know There’s a Bloody Game On?” the Sun newspaper headlined amid bad bureaucratic developments—the soccer team unleashed a unifying giddiness in pushing to the Cup semifinals for the first time since 1990.

From my perch in New York, and with the United States having failed to qualify for the first time since 1986, I allowed myself multiple, shifting allegiances from the start of the tournament. Spain, for its buzzing, precise passing and teamwork. Portugal, just to watch Cristiano Renaldo’s out-of-the-blue strikes. Argentina, in anticipation of Lionel Messi’s magic. Mexico, because our neighbors to the South deserve a break. Brazil, because Brazilian soccer is true performance art. Panama, because a tiny country making its World Cup debut is a beautiful thing, however it fares. France, based on a family ancestry going back many generations, and with the discovery of France’s wondrous teenager Kylian Mbappe.

The whole thing, even without a home team to follow, was a welcome escape from the daily—hourly—assault of depressing national and international news, an uplifting antidote to spreading xenophobia.

By the end of group play, I was all aboard the English bandwagon. Marveling at goalie Jordan Pickford’s lightning reactions. Raheem Sterling’s downfield sprints. Harry Maguire’s precise headers. Manager Gareth Southgate’s formal attire (a vest?). Harry Kane’s relentlessly unmussed hair in spite of his diving, lurching, rumbling charges toward goal—not to mention his role as the target of repeated fouls. (“A friend,” reported my daughter, who now lives in London, “called him ‘the most English person possible.’”)

Even England’s excruciating extra-time loss to Croatia in the semifinals couldn’t break the celebratory fever. The soccer anthem “Three Lions,” with its bullish chorus originally written when England hosted the 1996 European Championships, was revived with a vengeance:

It’s coming home/It’s coming home/It’s coming/Football’s coming home.

Because England invented soccer, the natives nurture an assumed superiority regarding the sport—but offset by the contained melancholy of knowing their side has won the World Cup only once, in 1966. And, since then, repeatedly has endured the cruelest of losses in major international tournaments, six times beaten in penalty shootouts, beginning with the 1990 World Cup semis.

A sidebar: I covered that shootout loss for Newsday, in Turin, Italy. The English manager then was Bobby Robson, who gamely declared that he and his team had “to put on a bright smile and accept it. There’s nothing you can do about it.” The English had played the Germans to a 1-1 tie through 90 exhausting minutes of regulation, plus 30 of extra time, only to lose the sport’s version of a game of H-O-R-S-E. Or something akin to taking turns throwing a football through a tire.

Of course it was noted then that the Germans had been England’s victims in the ’66 final, and that called to mind the English sportswriter who is said to have written, on the eve of the ’66 title match, a wickedly clever reference to matters beyond soccer:

“Fret not, boys, if on the morrow we should lose to the Germans at our national game, for twice this century we have defeated them at theirs.”

But, as I say, comparative happiness is immoral. And this World Cup did a good job of sidelining political stuff and cultural differences. While the English jauntily sang their “Three Lions” song (the title referencing the team’s official shield with national roots dating to the 12th Century):

Three lions on a shirt/Jules Rimet still gleaming/Thirty years of hurt/never stopped me dreaming. (Jules Rimet was the longtime soccer official after whom the World Cup trophy is named.)

It’s coming home/It’s coming home/It’s coming/Football’s coming home.

After England eliminated Sweden in the quarterfinals, my daughter texted that “People are driving around honking horns and singing out of windows….I just saw a young white kid on a bike yell, ‘It’s coming home’ and high-five two old black guys sitting on a bench as they yelled it back to him….Everyone here is talking about weather (in a good way) and the World Cup. It’s a lovely change in atmosphere.”

We could use some of that here in the Colonies.

Tennis seeding: Fair warning?

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Today we’re going to discuss seeding in Grand Slam tennis tournaments. Is it fair to all concerned that Wimbledon officials have included Serena Williams, seven times the event’s champion but currently ranked 183rd in the world, among the 32 seeds? By contrast, had this year’s French Open visited an injustice upon Williams, who hadn’t competed in 16 months while on maternity leave, by refusing to seed her there?

In both cases, it should be noted, Williams was welcomed into the competition. (She withdrew from the French with an injury after winning three matches, two against seeded players.) An essay on the website The Undefeated by Michael Fletcher argued that failing to seed Williams again “would have punished sports fans, who want to see the biggest stars perform on the biggest stages.” Fletcher’s comparison was that Tiger Woods “is eligible to play the Masters and PGA Championships for life” in spite of a long absence from the golf tour because of a back injury, and that the same applies to former champs however far past their prime.

But withholding a seeding position is not the same as banning Williams from the biggest stages. The Women’s Tennis Association, in fact, allows women who miss time because of childbirth to enter events based on their pre-absence ranking—in Williams’ case, No. 1—just without a guarantee of seeding.

And while Williams complained at the French that she should have been afforded a spot among the seeds—that she should not be penalized for becoming pregnant—there hardly is full agreement among her peers. Mandy Minella, a 32-year-old pro from Luxembourg, told the New York Times that she expected to have to earn her seeding, which is based on world rankings, after giving birth last October.

And what exactly does seeding accomplish? Belgium’s Kim Clijsters was unseeded when she won the U.S. Open in 2009, 17 months after giving birth. She had been away from competition for almost three years, but was gladly accepted as a wild card based on her Open title four years earlier.

So, the point?

Theoretically, by seeding the top 32 players in a Grand Slam field of 128, tournament officials “protect” those with the highest ranking against having to face any other seeded player through the first two rounds. That not only is considered a reward for the best players but also a guarantee to spectators and TV executives that the big names will be around longer.

The flip side of that premise is that players good enough to be seeded 17 through 32 might prefer facing one of the top 16 early—when the pressure is on the more accomplished player—rather than in the third round or later, when the stars are rolling.

It was only in 2001 that the major tournaments doubled the number of seeds from 16 to 32. The late Bud Collins, who was the sport’s premier historian as a newspaper and television reporter, said he preferred the maximum of eight seeds in effect prior to 1971. “Why not have some first-round fun?” he reasoned, by putting the best players in immediate danger.

Collins furthermore was mystified by the primary source of women’s seeding, the WTA rankings computer, which he nicknamed “Medusa” after the female in Greek mythology with living venomous snakes in her hair.

But back to Serena Williams.

In 2006, when she was 24 years old and already had won seven of her open-era record 23 major tournament titles, Williams had been kept inactive by a chronic knee injury for so long that her ranking plummeted to No. 91 by the time she entered the U.S. Open. As a consequence, she was unseeded.

Her reaction then? “I don’t really feel like an unseeded player ‘cause I don’t think about it. Obviously, I am. But I just feel I am who I am and I’m out there to perform. I don’t know too many people that see ‘Serena Williams’ next to their name and they’re, like, ‘Yes!’”

No kidding. It’s not as if having an unseeded Williams disables opponents’ alarm systems. Surely that still applies.

So she’s seeded 25th and her Wimbledon draw is a kind one. After her first-round victory over the Netherlands’ Arantxa Rus, ranked 107th, she will face Bulgaria’s Viktoriya Tomova, No. 136. Then, either No. 57 Tatjana Maria of Germany or No. 62 Kritina Mladenovic of France.

Meanwhile, Slovakia’s Dominika Cibulkova, the 2014 Australian Open finalist who was bounced from No. 32 to unseeded when Williams got the 25th spot, must play No. 44 Alize Cornet of France, with the likelihood she next would have to deal with Johanna Konta, seeded 22nd and playing for her British home crowd, in the second round.

And Poland’s Agnieszka Radwanka, who inherited Cibulkova’s apparent No. 32 seed, has dispensed with No. 195 Elena-Gabriela Ruse of Romania and gets No. 66 Lucie Safarova of the Czech Republic next.

“I don’t think it’s the right thing to do,” Cibulkova told BBC before the tournament. “I think it’s just not fair.”

Discuss.

 

Celebrating Panama’s World Cup debut

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Maybe it takes an American of a certain age to understand that Panama should feel no shame in its World Cup results—three losses in three games, including that 6-1 pounding by England last Sunday. Someone who witnessed the United States’ showing in the 1990 Cup certainly can relate.

Back then, it was perfectly clear that the label “American soccer player” was an oxymoron, like “living dead” or “jumbo shrimp.” The Yanks had showed up at the Cup for the first time in 40 years with a collection of callow amateurs in a den of hardened professionals, in no way comparable to other Cup participants. And they immediately were humiliated by Czechoslovakia, 5-1, on the way to an 0-3 record.

It was a requiem for a lightweight and brought mocking headlines from the soccer-savvy Europeans. The newspapers in Italy, that year’s host nation, dismissed the Yanks as “poor kids, thrown to the massacre,” with a defense “made of butter.” (Only one other time in that tournament did a team allow 5 goals as the 1990 per-game average of 2.2 set the still-standing record for lowest in the 88-year history of the event.)

But here’s the thing: One of the U.S. players, Chris Sullivan, made the point right after being publicly humbled by Czechoslovakia that “we deserved this. But just remember: We’re the students here. Why not have the rest of the world read that 5-1 score and know that we’re the students of the game? We’re still learning.”

Yes, and now we have Panama’s burdensome trial in Russia, its first dance at sport’s biggest international party. Though not as soccer-challenged as that 1990 U.S. team, though boxing and baseball are more entrenched in its sports culture, Panama competes with a pool of talent severely limited by a population, 4.1 million, that is less than half that of New York City.

“When the coach [Hernan Dario Gomez] said we were coming here to learn, that is exactly what he meant,” said Panama’s 37-year-old captain Felipe Baloy, known as Pipe (Pee-pay). “We were coming up against world-class teams with great players.”

Baloy realized that, the final score aside, to have produced his country’s first World Cup goal late in that England match was “something big. We’re learning a lot. The result makes us sad, but the first goal is important.” It merely set off national merrymaking.

The newspaper Marca in Spain declared that “Panama found themselves in front of a cyclone, they came up against a deluge of goals and found themselves inundated.” Italy’s Gazzetta dello Sport called the game “not a match” but “an English stroll.”

In sports, of course, everyone is looking for a Rosy Scenario, something akin to the ideal romantic partner. But sometimes, you don’t have to win to win.

In 1990, a central character on the U.S. team, Tab Ramos, was 23 years old and devoid of professional experience. Immediately after he and his mates were taken apart by Czechoslovakia, Ramos’ thoroughly reasonable attitude was, “This is the greatest experience of my life. If I had to go through it again, just the same way, I would.”

Not signing any articles of surrender, that. Ramos recognized the expectations, that American soccer barely was crawling then. Sure enough, he wound up playing in two more World Cups as the Yanks grew into legitimate Cup actors—their failure to make this year’s tournament notwithstanding. Amid their run of six consecutive World Cups, they pushed to the quarterfinals in 2002.

So Panama lost three games and went home. What’s so bad about that? Its players, and its nation’s fans, got a front-row seat at the most watched sports event on earth. Of the 201 national teams worldwide, Los Canaleros—“the Canal Men”—were one of only 32 to make it to this summer’s big show.

“We qualified [for the World Cup],” Gomez said. “We have to celebrate that.”

Felipe Baloy got it. “The experience in Russia has been top-notch,” he said. “We hope that Panama can keep going. As a group, we’ve had a good coexistence in which we’ve spent time with younger players, who will stay with us.”

There is a verse in the Panamanian national anthem that, translated to English, goes like this:

Progress caresses your path.
To the rhythm of a sublime song,
You see both your seas roar at your feet
Giving you a path to your noble mission.

See you in 2022, Panama.

Embodiment of World Cup shockers

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(Bahr’s on the right, vs. England at the 1950 World Cup)

It seems appropriate that the World Cup would be in progress when Walter Bahr died. And that soccer blasphemy would be in the air—plucky little Iceland tying the Goliath Argentina, often-disappointing Switzerland drawing with five-time champion Brazil, long-suffering Mexico upsetting defending champ Germany. In each case, the humble being exalted, although Bahr had to wait decades for his acclaim.

Bahr, who was 91, was the last living member of the 1950 U.S. team—a collection, essentially, of weekend warriors who somehow defeated England, the sport’s original superpower. Bahr, in fact, directly facilitated the winning goal 68 years ago in what has been considered the most shocking result in Cup history.

What was so different about Bahr’s grand moment—compared to the televised, monetized, scrutinized 2018 Cup doings—was that approximately nobody in Bahr’s nation noticed his team’s heroics. It wasn’t until 1990, when the United States ended a 40-year World Cup drought and our soccer-illiterate country began to wonder about an activity that didn’t involve the legal use of hands, that Bahr became something of a star.

(40 years later…)

“We hadn’t even heard of the World Cup until we went and played in it,” Bahr, then 63, told me during a 1990 chat. “When we got to Brazil”—host of the ’50 Cup—“we realized it was going to be a pretty big deal. But at the time, no one knew we left and no one knew we came back.”

If Bahr had been given to telling fish stories when a trickle of U.S reporters began to show some soccer curiosity in 1990, he might have spun yarns of his prominent role against mighty England. He might have described nifty dribbling through the English defense, being an American version of Argentina’s Lionel Messi, Brazil’s Neymar or Portugal’s Cristiano Renaldo. He might have regaled us with recollections of ticket-tape parades and heroes’ welcomes.

On the contrary. He came clean.

“If we had one reporter at our games, that was a lot,” he said. “Dent McSkimming, who was with the St. Louis paper, was a soccer fan. So he paid his own way to Brazil and he’d go to the games and call his office with the score and maybe a paragraph or two. In those days, no one ever interviewed you, anyway.”

Too bad. Bahr was a delightful subject whose front-row seat to those pioneer days in America help orient us Yanks about how far behind the rest of the world we had been in the sport. So far behind that, with virtually no attention paid the ’50 World Cup in the U.S. media, the monumental triumph over England did not become a watershed moment. The founding of MLS, the States’ professional soccer league, was still 46 years in the future.

On that 1950 team, “the closest thing to a professional player we had,” Bahr said, was a Scottish-born defensemen named Ed McIlvenny, who lived in Philadelphia, where Bahr was working as a full-time schoolteacher. Joe Gaetjens, the Haitian-born striker whose diving header converted Bahr’s seemingly harmless 20-yard shot into the winning score against England, worked as a dishwasher in New York City. Defenseman Harry Keough and midfielder Frank Wallace were mailmen in St. Louis. Goalie Frank Borghi was an undertaker in St. Louis. Belgian-born defenseman Joe Maca was an interior decorator in New York. Midfielder Charlie Colombo was a carpenter in St. Louis. Midfielder Gino Paraiani was a cannery worker in St. Louis, with a paper route on the side. Forwards John Souza and Ed Souza—who weren’t related but both hailed from Fall River, Mass.—were a knitting plant foreman and part-time truck driver, respectively. One team member, Ben McGloughlin, didn’t make it to Brazil because his boss wouldn’t give him time off from his job managing flow meters.

“I played on every national team for 10 years,” Bahr said, “but I only had 18 international appearances. You could never get our whole team together for practice.”

Under the radar, Bahr enjoyed a Hall of Fame career as both a player and coach—his Penn State University teams regularly appeared in the national championship tournament—yet for years he was more widely known as the father of Chris and Matt, NFL placekickers who won two Super Bowls apiece. They and a third son, Casey, all played professional soccer.

When people suddenly wanted to hear about the ’50 World Cup, four decades later, Bahr said, “I don’t have any great single memory of the game,” except that “it was a big deal to the Brazilian fans. The crowd for the championship game, Brazil against Uruguay, is still listed as the largest attendance ever—199,000 and something. The crowd for our game with England was 20,000, 30,000. [Officially, in World Cup records, it was only 10,151.] But they seemed pro-American to me. See, England was favored to win the World Cup and Brazil wanted no part of the English. But I thought they were cheering for us.”

In telling these stories, Bahr cautioned, “Make sure that all this is listed under ‘Ancient history.’”

OK. But well worth the retelling at World Cup time.