Author Archives: johnfjeansonne@gmail.com

About johnfjeansonne@gmail.com

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

Taunting Penalty?

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There is no refuge from Trump’s bullying and grandstanding. Even in the sports section. Trump’s defiant, ruthless exertion of power in all matters, his self-serving flexing of immunity muscles granted by the Supreme Court and his insistence on umpiring cultural standards, now has metastasized into his ordering the NFL’s Washington Commanders to revert to their former nickname—Redskins—a dictionary-defined slur against Native Americans that was retired five years ago.

It is another stop on the Current Occupant’s revenge tour against all who have offended him—this one a payback for the decades of rejection of entry into the exclusive NFL club in his failed bids for team ownership. This getting-even inclination is so constant that the satiric Borowitz Report recently envisioned Trump offering to “end his war with Harvard University if it admits him to its freshman class.”

“Harvard blew their chance to admit Donald J. Trump in 1964,” in Andy Borowitz’s mock telling of a Trump social media post, “and now they can fix that. Or else.”

Now Trump has actually threatened to rechristen the Washington team “Redskins.” Or else he will scuttle the team’s plans for a new stadium in D.C.

This is one more instance, too, of Trump’s twisted application of civil rights. Restoring the team’s old name, he said, wouldn’t disparage Indigenous Americans but somehow preserve their “heritage and prestige.” Because “massive numbers” of Native Americans want the name switched back, he claimed—though there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

According to Reuters, “These mascots and names do not honor Native Peoples,” the Association on American Indian Affairs said in a statement. “They reduce us to caricatures. Our diverse Peoples and cultures are not relics of the past or mascots for entertainment. Native Nations are sovereign, contemporary cultures who deserve respect and self-determination, not misrepresentation.”

But this is a perfect example of Trump’s supercilious convictions, his need to butt into everyone’s business for no other reason than feeding his Brobdingnagian ego and getting his way. Here he is, one of the world’s most powerful political figures, again barging into inconsequential matters.

Was it really his influence, as the White House claimed, that finally got star Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders selected in the sixth round of this year’s NFL draft—five rounds later than widely predicted? Was the late Pete Rose, long ago found guilty of violating the baseball cardinal sin of gambling on the game, made eligible for the Hall of Fame because Trump threw his weight around? Twinning with his Commanders-to-Redskins demand is a similar insistence of insensitivity—that Cleveland’s baseball team, now the Guardians, also insult Native Americans by reverting to calling themselves the Indians.

It should be noted that, in 2013, according to Politico, when then-President Barack Obama joined a growing chorus to drop Washington’s racist nickname, a reality TV personality named Donald Trump tweeted, “President should not be telling the Washington Redskins to change their name—our country has far bigger problems! FOCUS on them, not nonsense.”

Now among Trump’s meddling in affairs outside his purview are his noises about fixing the chaos of college sports’ name/image/likeness guidelines. (While wars rage in Ukraine and Gaza and America’s traditional European allies make plans to exist without a U.S. partner, and global markets grasp for some sense of order among threatened American tariffs. Not to mention the fuss over Trump’s past associations with the sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Bigger problems indeed.)

Shortly before Trump’s current railing about the Commanders’ nickname, he directed the same sort of counterintuitive argument via U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, that a New York state mandate forcing a high school on Long Island to discard its demeaning Indian mascot somehow would “silence the voices of Native Americans, and discriminatorily choose which history is acceptable to promote or erase.” Native American groups have argued just the opposite for half a century.

Forty years ago, Trump—then an attention-hog real estate developer—bought the New Jersey franchise in the one-year-old USFL spring league, angling to force a merger with (and his personal entry into) the NFL. Two seasons later, the USFL’s demise was sealed by Trump’s insistence it move to the fall and go head-to-head with the NFL.

During the USFL’s suit against the NFL, which the USFL won but was awarded just $1 in damages (tripled to because it was an antitrust case), Trump repeatedly was cited for lying in his testimony. One whopper was that then-NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle had offered Trump an NFL team in exchange for keeping the USFL season in the spring, which Rozelle denied. Six days after the trial, the USFL folded. (My own interview with Trump shortly after he had purchased the USFL’s New Jersey team also rendered a handful of his—um—inaccuracies, easily exposed with a little follow-up reporting.)

Over the next several years, NFL owners denied Trump bids to buy the then-Baltimore Colts, the Dallas Cowboys, the New England Patriots and the Buffalo Bills. In 2014, the Washington Post reported that Trump had been effectively “blackballed” from NFL team ownership. In 2016, when San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick precipitated a players’ protest of racial injustice and police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem, Trump—amid his ongoing feud with the league and disdain for minorities—called for firing those players.

Just another grievance. Another prejudice. There’s no escaping it.

Sports purgatory

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What if, modeling soccer’s English Premier League—widely considered the most popular and commercially successful in the world—American professional sports adopted the relegation/promotion arrangement? That is the practice whereby the Premier League standings’ three bottom-feeders at the end of each season are demoted to a lower league and replaced for the next year by the lesser league’s top three finishers.

It is pretty much standard procedure throughout Europe, unheard-of on this side of The Pond, yet it appears part of a startling vision of Gianni Infantino, the 55-year-old Italian-Swiss president of soccer’s international federation. On something of a star turn in the U.S. as his sport’s Club World Cup and the regional Gold Cup tournaments unfold this month, Infantino has declared that, in “three to four, maximum five years,” soccer will be “top, top, top” among Yank sports fans. And that “one of the beauties of promotion and relegation” is that it results in “surprises…and the little one can beat the big one, right?”

He noted the success of Wrexham AFC, the Welsh team that has climbed into Americans’ awareness partly via back-to-back-to-back British league promotions—up from the country’s fifth tier of competition to one step short of the Premier League—but mostly known for being featured in the FX television series “Welcome to Wrexham” and for its free-spending owners, Canadian-American actor Ryan Reynolds and American actor, producer, writer Rob McIlhenney.

Could a Wrexham thing happen in the United States?

Based on last season’s NFL football standings, the three teams with the worst records—all 3-14—were the Cleveland Browns, Tennessee Titans and New York Giants. But, unlike Europe, there are no comparable pools of independent minor league teams that could be promoted to replace relegated teams. So even if the Giants, New York’s oldest grid franchise, were to be busted down to—let’s see, the combined USFL/XFL spring league?—would a logical replacement be the XFL’s St. Louis Battlehawks—currently winners of eight of 10 games? Or perhaps the Big Ten’s reigning national champion Ohio State Buckeyes?—whose facilities, finances and well-compensated stars clearly amount to a professional venture.

Here’s a related thought, just as buggy: What if there were relegation and promotion among college football conferences? Penn State up to the SEC; Mississippi State down to the three-team Pac 12.

Theoretically, the promotion/relegation system ensures more competitive urgency throughout the professional season right down to the struggling franchises. Instead of finding solace in receiving a high draft pick by continuing to lose, the failing clubs in a relegation set-up are motivated to avoid being kicked downstairs to a minor league, since that can knock a hole in broadcasting, sponsorship and attendance revenue. (And motivate the best players to seek an un-relegated home.)

The way American sports are organized, relegation surely would introduce financial instability for some teams. Consider even one season of the New York Giants sent to XFL/USFL purgatory. Similarly, wouldn’t the NBA’s Utah Jazz—winners of 21 percent of their games last season and therefore ticketed for a demotion the following season in a relegation scenario, lose significant spectator and financial commitments if forced into the NBA’s developmental G League against the likes of Osceola and Stockton?

The U.S. majors are built on a franchise model, tied to big cities, huge stadiums and arenas. Demoting the Chicago Black Hawks, who had the second worst record in the NHL this past season, and substituting the AHL’s first-place Laval Rockets representing a municipality of roughly 450,000 on the outskirts of Montreal—obviously would play havoc with perceptions of what is a “major league” city.

Especially since the Windy City’s lowly White Sox, whose 121 losses in 2024 set a modern MLB record for ineptness, also would be shipped out—to the International League or Pacific Coast League?—in a relegation framework. (Based on current standings, the White Sox apparently would relinquish their MLB home to the Lehigh Valley IronPigs or the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp.)

So while the relegation landscape rewards success and punishes failure with a tiered league structure, the Yanks’ model focuses on maintaining the stability of franchises and balancing leagues through such mechanisms as free agency and the draft.

Upon sober reflection, and not to dismiss Gianni Infantino’s futuristic views, not everything about big-time sports translates from English (and European) to American. “Ultimately,” a 2016 Sports Illustrated report declared, “the likelihood of [U.S.] major leagues introducing promotion and relegation is about as likely as America joining most of the rest of the world in embracing soccer as its national sport.”

Marathon mama

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Most people in the late 1960s and early ‘70s couldn’t comprehend anyone racing long distances on foot. The running boom had not yet boomed. And to a young Long Island grade-schooler named Tim Kuscsik, running appeared “wasteful,” his mother recounted with good humor years later, “because he kept hearing how we always were ‘breaking records’ when we ran. And he thought running was dangerous because he would always hear me talk about ‘dying’ on the course.”

At the time, Nina Kuscsik was in the process of becoming the first celebrity of women’s marathoning. It’s just that the youngest of her three children was operating with the conventional wisdom of that time, when the rare jogger could be expected to hear a snarky recommendation, shouted from a passing car, to “get a horse.” As citizen races began to appear, one of my colleagues in Newsday’s sports department, an otherwise open-minded reporter, grumbled about “a bunch of crazy people running around in their underwear. Why is that worth a story?”

By the time Nina Kuscsik died in early June at 86, it long ago had become abundantly clear how ordinary the running lifestyle is, and how much Kuscsik had to do with normalizing the activity—especially for women and girls—competitively and otherwise.

In 1970, Kuscsik was the only female to compete in the inaugural New York City Marathon, which had a total of 127 entrants, 55 of them finishing the 26-mile, 385-yard challenge. (Battling a fever, she did not finish, but was New York’s first female champion in both 1972 and ’73.)

These days? There were 55,646 finishers in last year’s New York race, roughly half—24,732—women.

Kuscsik was the first official women’s champion in the Boston Marathon, the only race at that distance widely known outside of the Olympics, in 1972. She had first run Boston as a “bandit” three years earlier, because the grand pooh-bahs of foot racing banned women from such long-distance efforts. That prohibition, she said, was “because they thought your uterus was going to fall out.”

It took her New York victories and that barrier-breaking first official Boston women’s title in ‘72 to rattle the Old Boys’ club. When women at last were allowed, in 1984, to run the Olympic race that had been in the men’s Olympic program since 1896, Kuscsik qualified—at 45—for the U.S. Marathon Trials, but an injury suffered when she had experimented with tennis kept her from qualifying for the Games.

It was Kuscsik’s persistence, both as a competitor and as chairperson of the women’s long-distance committee, that finally got females their own Olympic marathon. She once held the record for the 50-mile (80-kilometer) run and was the first woman to finish the gimmicky (but challenging) Empire State Building Run-Up in 1979, 1980 and 1981.

She was such a regular presence on her Long Island community’s roads, training 70 to 100 miles a week, that she found she could “take one of the kids to the doctor and the doctor wanted to talk to me about running,” she once said. She was so omnipresent in the running world that, when she chose to run the 1977 women’s national marathon championship in Minneapolis, instead of the New York City race the same day, her phone call to the New York Road Runners Club for a progress report from the Big Apple brought the news that “Miki Gorman was leading, Gayle Barron second and Nina Kuscsik third.”

“Sometimes,” Kuscsik once said, “I guess I almost feel responsible for everything. Title IX and everything. Of course, I’m not. Still, Title IX aside, women wouldn’t have started running long distance if we”—her fellow pioneers included Katherine Switzer, Roberta Gibb, Beth Bonner—“hadn’t showed them it was possible. And to see women and girls are out there running…I get chills every time I see that.”

Over a half-century, she demonstrated that running was neither wasteful nor dangerous. And that, as she once said, was “neither masculine or feminine. It’s just healthy.”

Not-so-brave New World

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Perhaps all you need to know about the proposed Enhanced Games, billed as an Olympic-style competition in which athletes will be permitted—even encouraged—to engage in doping, is that the Trump family reportedly is involved.

The envisioned project amounts to a gold-digging form of roguish entertainment, a poke-in-the-eye of the elite athletic establishment, a dismissal of long-honored sports values. It amounts to an assault on ethical, moral, safety and health standards, and is closer to an AI-generated production than one emphasizing human talent, dedication and achievement. Real fake news.

It is hardly a surprise that international anti-doping officials have called the Enhanced Games’ grotesque format a “clown show” that mocks fair play and argue that it will not only ruin athletes’ health but also their careers in real sports. Even as the brainchild of the Enhanced Games—Australian-born, London-based businessman Aron D’Souza—insists that his event will be “one of the most-watched sporting events in history” and will “capture the global imagination.”

The first Enhanced Games are to be staged over four days next May in—naturally—Las Vegas, well known for legalized gambling, widespread adult entertainment and a general tolerance of vices unacceptable in most respectable venues. (Although there is a Las Vegas law against riding camels on local highways.) Competitors in swimming, track and weightlifting will be given full access to drugs and therapies otherwise banned throughout the traditional sports world.

Promoters call this twisted creation a revolution, an embrace of a future in which pharmaceutical and technological juicing will be normalized. Their plan says nothing about tradeoffs regarding the fundamental integrity of sport, the level-playing field ideal—not to mention the negative influence on youth who would potentially be encouraged to engage in dangerous practices in pursuit of their sporting dreams.

The whole thing is so 2025, another rejection of institutional norms. No longer afoot, apparently, is the kind of widespread outrage that was triggered at the 1988 Seoul Olympics when Canadian sprint champion Ben Johnson was busted for steroid use after his record-setting 100-meter victory. At the time, International Olympic Committee member Anita DeFrantz—herself a former Olympic rower—summed up what she called a sadness “that an athlete of such stature was, essentially, a coward. The basic issue here is whether an athlete has the courage to compete on his own, without using a crutch. To use drugs is cowardly. It’s cheating. It’s disgusting. It’s vile.”

But now the Enhanced Games promises $1 million bonuses for world-record times from athletes powered by performance-boosting drugs. (“Under medical supervision,” the EG blueprint is quick to stipulate. As if that makes it any less nefarious.)

Funding, according to a report in The Guardian, is coming from 1789, a firm led by Donald Trump, Jr., and his partners; from a hedge fund with stakes in cryptocurrency and AI ventures. The involvement of Trump-aligned investors is described by D’Souza as a natural fit. “I’ve had the great fortune of working alongside many members of the administration and other prominent figures of the Trump movement over the years,” he said in February. “To know that some of the most significant figures in American social and political life support the Enhanced Games is more important to us than any investment.”

This clearly is a perverted model of conventional competition, but perhaps D’Souza could argue for public acceptance based on how professional wrestling has thrived for decades—in spite of its history of being steroid-fueled (and choreographed). A rationale put forth by EG backers is that, by openly inviting athletes to dope, they are dispensing with the hypocrisy of jocks in various high-profile sports who haven’t necessarily toed the line against prohibited substances, and somehow rectifying the failures of anti-doping police to thoroughly root out the cheats.

As long ago as the 1970s, there was an American Olympic weightlifter named Mark Cameron who suggested that, if his fellow competitors were told that eating scouring pads would make them stronger, there would not be a clean pot within miles of any gym. Ben Johnson’s drug guru, Jamie Astaphan, told a federal Canadian inquiry in the wake of Johnson’s 1988 Olympic disqualification that “everyone” was doping, and that a drug-free Canadian Olympic team “wouldn’t even come in last” in global competition. The old “if you ain’t cheatin’ you ain’t tryin’” excuse.

At least, though, major sports organizations have continued with and enhanced (sorry for the word choice) their anti-doping efforts. There still are rules, still attempts at law and order. Still guardrails.

Silly, according to D’Souza. Outdated limitations. His vision, launched from a suburb of the fringe, is to create “superhumanity.”

Nothing about it will be on the level.

Five W’s and four legs of Journalism

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Could this year’s Triple Crown series somehow be an allegory for current events? A thoroughbred named Journalism—its name referencing an honorable profession that, at its best, represents accuracy, fairness, the elimination of bias and a prohibition against making things up—finishes runner-up in the Kentucky Derby to Sovereignty—whose moniker screams authoritarianism.

Then, at the Preakness, with Sovereignty off somewhere else—Saudi Arabia? Qatar? United Arab Emirates?—Journalism prevails despite a roughhousing stretch run in which he appears to be fouled by ponies on either side of him yet threads the needle and slingshots to victory. The two adversaries who nearly erase him are Goal Oriented and Clever Again, but may as well have been called Truth Social and X.

Running too far with this metaphor? When Sovereignty, after accepting the gift of a day off at the Preakness, returns for the upcoming Belmont Stakes on June 7, Journalism is expected to be there. And perhaps the winner of that race will offer some hint into where we all are headed. (But with the weird possibility that some gaslighting exercise could label Journalism to be Fake News.)

Yes, it’s just horseracing. In those strict terms, at this point, Journalism has been ranked by the National Thoroughbred Racing Association poll as the sport’s top 3-year-old, with Sovereignty second. And there will be at least five other ponies contending for the Belmont title.

There already have been plenty of comments on the presence of Journalism—with the eponymous industry lately being hobbled—in these high-visibility events. Is Journalism “overrated”? Can Journalism “write his way into horse racing history”? as the website BloodHorse asked before the Derby.

The Washington Post asked, “Can Journalism (the horse) give a boost to journalism (the industry)?” After the nag’s second-place finish in the Derby, observations included “journalism doesn’t pay,” “A dark day for journalism,” “The year is 2025 and journalism officially has been defeated.”

Remarks, by the way, very possibly conjured by the wordsmiths we know as journalists (of which I was one for a half-century).

Meanwhile, on a less symbolic, less unsettling level and skipping any leanings toward a parable, there is the interesting process of finding a good name for a racehorse. Journalism was named by co-owner Aron Wellman, who told several publications that he had “often been accused of being a disgruntled sportswriter because of all the writing I do” for the Eclipse weekly newsletter he founded after a law career. “So journalism is something that I value very much, and I appreciate responsible and diligent journalists.”

Wellman had long ago been sports editor of his high school newspaper in Beverly Hills, Calif., and believed “good horses should have good names.” Certainly, arriving at a name—one not already among the hundreds of thousands registered with the Jockey Club—can be a challenge.

There are all sorts of rules in that game. No using names currently on the Jockey Club’s “permanent” list, which not only covers winners of races in the Triple Crown series but also famous horses in popular culture. There will never be another Secretariat or American Pharoah. Or Black Beauty. Or Silver. Or Trigger.

Names of living persons are allowed only with written permission from that person. There can be no names with clear commercial significance, and the name must be limited to 18 characters—including spaces between words. (In the case of a horse named Twitter, the thoroughbred’s christening in 1992 preceded the creation of the social networking service by 14 years.)

Also verboten are names that are suggestive or vulgar, in poor taste or offensive to specific groups. (It must be noted that a few risqué monikers have slipped by the name police, the less racy among them being Boxers or Briefs and Hoochiecoochiemama.)

There is plenty of creativity involved—sly puns, nutty combinations, references to the horse’s pedigree or to present-day doings. Not surprisingly, the wider world of sports regularly is mined, so there have been thoroughbreds called Three Pointer and Slam Dunk, Hat Trick, Home Run, Touchdown. Also, playing on marquee athletes without appropriating their full names, there has been an A Rod, an Eli and a Peyton. And a Le Brown James.

So let’s say you have $825,000 to spare, the amount it had cost to buy Journalism at the 2023 yearling sale, and you’re looking for a catchy name. Something memorable. Maybe you could go for a tag that speaks to the racehorse’s lot in life. There has been a Trotsky, a Meal Ticket, a Don’t Look Back, a Long Shot, a Wishful Thinking.

Another source of potential names could be songs dealing with the Sport of Kings.

    I’ve got the horse right here

    His name is Paul Revere

….from the tune Fugue for Tinhorns in the 1955 Broadway Show “Guys and Dolls.” Paul Revere, in fact, is on the Jockey Club’s permanent list. The “Race Is On,” a 1964 country hit by George Jones, presented possibilities in mimicking a track announcer’s race call to detail romantic relationships….

    Now the race is on

    And here comes Pride down the backstretch,

    Heartache’s goin’ to the inside,

    My Tears are holdin’ back,

    They’re tryin’ not to fall.

    My Heart’s out of the runnin’

    True Love’s scratched for another’s sake.

    The race is on and it looks like Heartache

    And the winner loses all.

Sure enough, Pride was accepted by the Jockey Club in 2006, Heartache in 2014, True Love in 1993. That does leave My Tears and My Heart.

There have been sobriquets that address racing’s tendency toward excitement and surprise. Zoot Alors and the Anglicized version of that expression, Holy Smoke. Also, Magic Carpet Ride. Dog and Pony Show. Eat My Dust.

So let’s say I have an extra $825,000 on hand—now that’s Wishful Thinking—and am inclined to name my imaginary horse friend with a nod to my many years in journalism. There was a Suddenbreakingnews in the 2016 Derby. There has been a Headliner, a Wordsmith and a Rewrite, even a Laptop Computer. I might have liked Inkstained Wretch.

Meanwhile, I’ll just root for Journalism (capital and small ‘j.’)

Welcome to the U.S. World Cup?

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Abandon all hope, ye who enter here for the 2026 World Cup soccer tournament. Whichever of the 47 visiting national teams you come to support during the month-long competition, to be hosted mostly by the United States (along with Canada and Mexico), there is the specter of Trump’s Inferno.

The “welcome” that Vice President JD Vance has offered foreign visitors to the 78 matches scheduled for 11 U.S. cities really is an ominous warning: As soon as the event is done, Vance said, “we want them to go home.” Overstaying visas, he said, would result in dealing with Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and the suggestion of a deportation round-up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

“Don’t overstay your visa,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy added during a task-force meeting regarding preparations for next year’s June 11-july 19 production. “Don’t stay too long.”

So already the Trump administration has thrown sand in the gears of what figured to be a financial gold mine and global party. According to Politico, Human Rights Watch is urging Gianni Infantino, president of soccer’s international governing body, FIFA, to “be prepared to reconsider” staging games in the United States at all, based on “grave concerns” over U.S. border policies. In soccer terminology, creating such concerns amounts to an “own goal” by the White House.

Since the World Cup last was contested in the United States, in 1994, the tournament has doubled in size—from 24 national teams to 48, from 52 matches to 104—and therefore doubled in economic potential. In ’94, the event generated a $1.45 billion profit—mining more than $84 million in ticket sales, more than $90 million from television rights, more than $60 million in merchandizing.

The irony then was that, leading up to the tournament, there had been a general sense of “Who needs World Cup soccer in the United States?” Soccer still was widely considered a furrin sport on these shores, not yet challenging baseball, basketball, football or hockey for fervid spectator interest. There was not yet a major professional soccer league here. At the time, the great Sports Illustrated sportswriter Frank Deford’s sly perception—that “USA” stood for “Uninterested in Soccer A-Tall”—was on the mark.

Yet that 1994 tournament set an attendance record that still stands after seven subsequent Cups—68,626 per match, 3.57 million total. It proved, beyond America’s taste for spectacles and America’s aptitude for hucksterism and merchandizing, that the United States indeed is a hyphenated nation. The great majority of Americans are descended from somewhere else, after all—Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, German-Americans, Argentine-Americans and so on—and so many were able to feel a connection with, and the allure of, teams from the ancestors’ Old Country.

There is no specific data on the percentage of foreign fans who added to the ’94 tournament’s rollicking success, but it was clear that a huge number came along with their visiting teams, enlivening the American competition venues.

Contrast that with current build-a-wall politics, with the rolling up of the U.S. welcome mat, with the Trump administration’s demonization of virtually all immigrants and non-citizens. (An exception appears to be white people from South Africa, whom the White House has welcomed as refugees it considers persecuted in their Black-majority homeland. The paradox is that white South African fans would be following a national team, which is so far dominating its World Cup qualifying group, that is composed of mostly Black players—a team informally known as “Bafana Bafana,” which is a Zulu term that translates to “the boys, the boys.”)

All this Cup uncertainty is unfolding amid declines of 10 to 17 percent in international visits to America because of foreigners’ negative perceptions of U.S. policies, reports of detentions and deportations, higher tariffs related to travel (among other things), and many nations advising their citizens to skip treks to the United States.

The New York Times just reported that the U.S. is on track to lose $12.5 billion in international travel spending in 2025, from $181 billion to around $169 billion since last year. Land trips into the U.S. by Canadians are down more than 20 percent. Western Europeans’ holidaying from across the pond has declined for the first time in four years.

The inhospitable vision of Trump, the isolationist bent and irrational xenophobia, recall novelist Henry Miller’s observation from 80 years ago: “It isn’t the oceans which cut us off from the world. It’s the American way of looking at things.”

These days, it’s the rude go-back-to-where-you-came-from decrees.

In the public domain

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Let me tell you about the very famous. They are different from you and me. Upon achieving prominence or notoriety, they live their lives in the public eye, which can lead to effusive praise from their noble peers but also scrutiny from the hoi polloi.

Take Rory McIlroy, the pro golfer from Northern Ireland who just completed, a month short of his 36th birthday, a career Grand Slam of his sport’s four major tournaments—after he had been struggling for 11 years to win the last one, the hallowed Masters.

McIlroy, you may recall, appeared on the pro tour at 18 among considerable fanfare, the epitome of the rugged young hairy-chested hero, cited by some as the Next Tiger Woods. Given that early station in life, Public Figure, McIlroy not only was in the cross hairs for the deafening storms of applause but also for gossipy “human interest” tales.

So, when he began a three-year romantic relationship in 2011 with Danish tennis star Caroline Wozniacki—she, like McIlroy reached the world’s No. 1 ranking in her sport—it quickly became fodder for the masses. A match of sporting royalty. But was followed, just three months after their official engagement, by McIlroy’s 10-minute phone call informing Wozniacki that he was jumping ship. The magnifying glass of celebrity made that news bigger.

And led to one of the most memorable ledes in sports journalism history—summing up, as it did, the People Magazine syndrome.

That came at the 2014 U.S. Open tennis championships. Two years earlier, at a major tennis exhibition in New York’s Madison Square Garden, Wozniacki, in the midst of her match, had playfully summoned McIlroy out of the capacity crowd to play a pitty-pat point against Maria Sharapova. Very cute.

At the 2014 Masters that April, Wozniacki had caddied for McIlroy, only to have McIlroy lower the boom shortly after—just as Wozniacki, at the height of her popularity among fans, commenced competition in the tennis Open that August, when she was passionately embraced by spectators’ repeated shouts of love.

And Filip Bondy, an elite recontour chronicling the event for the New York Daily News, began his report—this may be a paraphrase since I couldn’t lay my hands on the original copy, but I read it at the time with great appreciation—“Everybody wants to marry Caroline Wozniacki except Rory McIlroy.”

Naturally, that brilliant line, about how fame makes private lives everybody’s business, leapt to mind at this year’s Masters’ Sunday as McIlroy’s winning putt on the first playoff hole dropped, and what amounted to celebratory gunfire burst from the crowd and from television’s commentators.

The fellow had been, at 23, the youngest player to reach $10 million in career earnings on the PGA tour. He had spent more than 100 weeks ranked No. 1. Right from the start, he was regarded as one of the most marketable athletes in the world, behind only the global soccer stars Neymar and Lionel Messi as long ago as 2013.

He had become, in 2011, the youngest player ever to hold a first-round lead at the Masters and was in front of the field by four strokes after 54 holes. Only to shoot an eight-over-par 80 in the final day, a crash imprinted on the public’s mind—and likely his own—especially when he double-bogeyed the first hole in the Masters’ final round this year to relinquish his lead. He called it “a burden” to have repeatedly fallen short at Augusta until this tournament.

Meanwhile, ESPN included in its coverage of the event an interview with none other than Caroline Wozniacki, the other party in that 2014 fractured fairytale. That, too, was a reminder how the constant exposure of the very famous can blur the lines between public and private life and mess with personal space. There had been stories, back then, that McIlroy ended the relationship after Wozniacki posted an unflattering photo of McIlroy sleeping with his mouth open. (Too much information about a celebrity!)

It was another tennis star who—at the end of a 21-year career of being very famous, having publicly evolved from a mere athletic talent into a champion and a man of substance; who had arrived as apparently undisciplined and self-centered, the latest in tedious parade of misbehaving tennis personalities; whose first short marriage (to actress Brooke Shields) led to his enduring union with tennis great Steffi Graf—articulated how his situation differed from yours and mine.

There were regrets, Andre Agassi said shortly before his final pro tournament in 2006, of “dragging some of the closest people in my life, and the fans of the sport, through some of my most difficult moments.”

To have the eyes of the world on each step of one’s life story, he said, “is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”

New deal

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These are days of global awareness, of headlines on tariffs and imports. Cars from Japan and Germany, avocados from Mexico, computers from China, coffee from Colombia, wine from Italy….

Ice hockey from Canada.

These are days of irony. The fellow who just set the career record for goals in hockey’s premier league, the NHL—which is based mostly in American cities but is a Canadian commodity—is a Russian import working these past 25 years in Washington, D.C.

And no surprise: this turn of events has its political implications.

Alex Ovechkin, originally from Moscow but a U.S. resident throughout this century, has surpassed Wayne Gretzky, the Canadian national hero who has become chummy with the American president who lately has denigrated Gretzky’s country.

These are disorienting times. Consider that, during the latter days of the Cold War in the 1980s, American president Ronald Reagan declared Ovechkin’s homeland—then, technically, the Soviet Union—to be “the evil empire.” But over a remarkably productive career with the Capitals, Ovechkin often has been said to be as beloved in Washington as that old Commie detractor Reagan had been there.

It would be difficult to characterize Ovechkin as a Communist (as opposed to Yankee capitalist) given that, according to Forbes magazine, he has earned roughly $160 million in player salary and bonuses and never has dropped below $2.5 million in off-ice earnings for 13 years.

Of course, the universal appreciation of professional hockey skill is a heartwarming thing, with Ovechkin honored by teammates, fans and the sport’s officials from all over the map. During this season’s pursuit of Gretzky’s record, the Washington area has been flooded with lawn signs and goal counters urging Ovechkin on.

But these are the days of philosophical whiplash.

Gretzky recently has come under attack in his homeland for siding with U.S. president Trump and the latter’s calls for making Canada America’s 51st state (with, Trump added, Gretzky as that new “state’s” governor). Gretzky, who played the last 11 seasons of his 21-year NHL career for U.S. teams, has lived south of the border since 1988, noting on a radio show this week that he has “five American kids, seven American grandchildren, an American wife, a 103-year-old American mother-in-law….”

Ovechkin likewise settled two decades ago near his U.S. workplace, living now in McLean, Va., just across the Potomac from D.C. He is a much-admired star in this nation of sporting celebrity.

For years, New York Ranger fans have, in their backhanded way, showered attention on Ovechkin for his outsized impact on the ice, by singling him out each period with 8:08 to play (8 is Ovechkin’s uniform number) by counting down “8-7-6 . . .” to a thoroughly uncreative chant: “Ovi sucks!”

“You know, it’s nice,” Ovechkin has said. It means “you’re still out there and still get some respect.”

Still, we appear to be knee deep in ideological drift. Ovechkin in 2018 founded a organization to promote the Russian presidential campaign of Vladimir Putin, an act which—not so long ago–would have put both men officially among America’s Bad Guys. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ovechkin, who reportedly has Putin’s personal phone number, has declined several of his team’s requests to remove a profile photo of him with Putin from his Instagram account.

Ovechkin has insisted that he is “not a politic; I’m an athlete.” Meanwhile, someone who is “a politic,” the current occupant of the White House, has also embraced Putin’s Russia, thoroughly unlike Ronald Reagan, by inaccurately shifting the responsibility for starting that war from Putin to Ukraine. (Which, it happens, is the land of Gretzky’s ancestors. Not that that has anything to do with international diplomacy or hockey’s new goal-scoring record.)

More unsettled territory: When Russian troops stormed into Ukraine, Gretzky was among distinguished personalities from the sports world who called to ban Russian teams from international events, a prohibition which has ended—at least for now—Ovechkin’s long participation on the Russian national team in world hockey championships and the Olympics.

The NHL clearly has no such ban on individuals. So these are days of migration and Ovechkin rule. Records, like alliances, can be broken.

On the road again

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There is no Oakland in Oakland anymore. At least in terms of a major professional sports team. No “here” there on the home schedules of long-term Oakland tenants in basketball, football and baseball. A sort of Gertrude Stein take on the vanishing past.

The Warriors left Oakland in 2019 for San Francisco, their first Bay Area location. The Raiders moved to Las Vegas in 2020. And now the A’s, committed to settling in Vegas three years hence, have commenced doing current business in Sacramento (without acknowledging that city’s existence in their official title; the organization simply is branding itself “the Athletics” or “the A’s”).

Business is business and the grass always appears greener somewhere else, of course. In that sense, it figures to have this geographical reversal of the California gold rush phenomenon that was triggered by the 1848 eureka moment at Sutter’s Mill (just up the road from Sacramento).

The Eastward-Ho fortune-seeking not only has led to Oakland’s loss of three Big League teams in five years, but also the monetary scramble by two major college operations away from the vicinity last year: The University of California, based five miles from Oakland in Berkeley, and Stanford, 34 miles away in Palo Alto, both absconded to the Atlantic (Atlantic!) Coast Conference, while eight other schools were fleeing the Pac-12. (“Pac” for Pacific.)

There goes the neighborhood.

For fans, such wanderlust obviously is disorienting, though Oaklanders have been through this before with these pro franchises. The basketball Warriors, who had been based in Philadelphia since 1946, first set up their West Coast shop in ’62 at a joint called the Cow Palace—technically located in Daly City, Calif. (though the Cow Palace parking lot was intersected by the San Francisco city line).

Then it was on to the University of San Francisco campus and the S.F. Civic Auditorium before relocating to Oakland in 1971 while taking on their current “Golden State” name. The team also spent a couple of years playing home game in San Jose, 40 miles from Oakland while the Oakland Coliseum was being renovated, then returned to San Francisco and its Chase Center six years ago.

More footloose were the Raiders, who spent the 1982 NFL season working daily at their old practice site adjacent to the Oakland airport—in view of the Oakland Coliseum that had been home since ’63—but played their “home” games in Los Angeles, 365 miles away. Almost all of the players lived in Oakland, a couple full-time in L.A. Among those rattled by all the travel was Dick Romanski, the Raiders’ equipment manager at the time, complaining that airline flights necessary even for “home” games “screwed up my whole golf game.”

A “permanent” move to L.A. was finalized the next season but ended after 13 years, and it was back to Oakland for the next 24. Until at last reaching Paradise. (That’s the official name of the Raiders’ most recent digs on the southern edge of Las Vegas.)

So now the Athletics’ fortune-seeking ghost ship has landed them in a small minor-league park—technically in West Sacramento, across the river from the city proper—in what a Sacramento radio host described as an “Airbnb” while they await the construction of a Las Vegas stadium. The players, as something of a GPS aid, wear a “Las Vegas” patch on one uniform sleeve.

The franchise was founded in Philadelphia in 1901, transferred to Kansas City in 1955 and to Oakland in 1968. Of the Majors’ existing 30 teams, the Athletics are one of only nine to leave their original port of call, the only one to do so three times, and one of only two (the Braves went from Boston to Milwaukee to Atlanta) to do so more than once. And virtually all of that other traipsing around happened from the 1950s into the early ‘70s.

But for this team, the wandering in the wilderness goes on, and the interim stop halfway across Northern California has mystified at least one opposing player, Cubs pitcher Ryan Brasier, who wondered during a television interview why the Athletics didn’t remain at “maybe not a perfectly good ballpark in Oakland, but a big-league ballpark….I really don’t get it; not playing in Oakland as opposed to playing in Sacramento.”

Then again, the sellout crowd of 12,119 that fit into Sacramento’s minor-league park for the Athletics’ 2025 “home” opener out-drew the A’s 2024 Oakland average of 11,628—last in the Majors. Anyway, everything is temporary.

Great expectations

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Here’s proof that expectations—and, therefore, potential criticism—of any sports team are based on the degree of interest among the populace. Exhibit A: The American soccer community is beside itself with the U.S. men’s national team’s lackluster performance in a fourth-place finish at last week’s four-team Nation’s League mini-tournament.

The Yanks were beaten by Panama and Canada—there’s some political irony there, in terms of who owns whom, no?—and are being lambasted by pundits and fans. For the fourth-place match against Canada, L.A.’s 70,000-seat SoFi Stadium was virtually empty at kickoff.

And it’s one thing for self-proclaimed experts—commentators and that lot—to be throwing brickbats. But retired national team players from recent years, fellows who had something to do with America’s overdue arrival to top-level international soccer competition—have been among the most prominent disparagers.

Landon Donovan: “I’m so sick of hearing how ‘talented’ this group of players is and all the amazing clubs they play for. If you aren’t going to show up and actually give a [deleted] about playing for your national team, decline the invite. Talent is great, pride is better.”

Clint Dempsey: “You would hope that they would get up for [these games], that there would be more pride to try to get things back on track and try to get this fanbase behind them…”

Tab Ramos: “….all of the important guys are saying ‘We need to … work harder.’ Well yeah, of course. But you need to stop talking about it. You need to start doing it.”

Alexi Lalas: “Does this team even care?”

The going up—our lads won the previous three Nation’s League titles—certainly didn’t make the coming down any easier.

Exhibit B: This is what being labeled the “golden generation” of U.S. men’s soccer talent will get you in dropping two of three matches last fall while hosting Copa America and now going 0-2 at home. It pretty much wipes out the fact that it hasn’t been that long—a mere generation or so—since the Yanks could have suffered such setbacks and no one on these shores would have noticed.

The angst over recent failures, with next summer’s World Cup returning to the United States (as co-host with Mexico and Canada) is a reminder of how dramatically (and how quickly) soccer has progressed on these shores.

When the World Cup was last here, in 1994, the U.S. soccer federation was still trying to scrape together a national team with a jury-rigged collection of recent college players. There was no U.S. professional league because there was no demand for one. The rag-tag team that had qualified for the Italy-based 1990 World Cup—the Yanks’ first World Cup appearance in 40 years—did so, in large part, because the region’s perennial power, Mexico, had been banned for using ineligible players.

Even so, the Yanks barely squeezed into that championship tournament and were promptly destroyed by Czechoslovakia, 5-1. The most skilled player on that U.S. team was Ramos. And, after that 5-1 thrashing in Florence, Italy, in 1990, Ramos was one of only a few U.S. players brave enough to face reporters’ post-game interrogations: If he somehow could have known beforehand how disappointing his World Cup debut would be, might he have preferred to take a pass?

“This,” he said then, “is the greatest experience of my life. If I had to go through it again, just the same way, I would.”

It was, after all, 1990. Frontier days. “It’s not something to be ashamed of. If we lived in another country and lost, 5-1, we couldn’t go home. But we’ll go home and walk through Kennedy Airport and no one will recognize us, anyway.”

Ramos, born in Uruguay and settled with his family in New Jersey when he was 7, knew very well the pecking order of American sports at the time, when soccer was “a way of life everywhere but in the U.S. Everywhere else, your team loses, you cry and stay home from work the next day because you’re so upset. Your team wins, you don’t go to work because you’re so happy.”

There was no need to feel sorry about having been an “American soccer player,” because that was an oxymoron—like “living dead” or “definite maybe”—in those days.

Now, the reality is markedly different. Major League Soccer, the U.S. professional league, is in its 29th season, with 30 teams. American players regularly star for top European club teams. Soccer, as a spectator sport in the States, now is on the order of ice hockey, just behind the big three of football, baseball and basketball.

A run of seven consecutive World Cup qualifications—interrupted in 2018—has caused enough Americans to care enough that the national team has gone through five coaches since then, expecting bigger things. Mauricio Pochettino is the sixth and, after just six months and eight matches, already is hearing grumbles, much of it questioning his ability to generate more player effort.

Now, U.S soccer’s problem not only is qualifying but also making some impact in the 2026 World Cup. Because, it the Yanks don’t, a lot of people will notice. (And they will recognize the players walking through any airport.)