Author Archives: johnfjeansonne@gmail.com

About johnfjeansonne@gmail.com

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

The final score….

Leave a reply

So many sportswriting colleagues knew Bobby Knight far better than I, and many found him to be as brilliant and charming as he was intimidating and derisive. Can’t say I’m jealous at having missed out on more exposure to the man. What I witnessed during Knight’s infamously antagonistic behavior during the 1979 Pan American Games in San Juan, Puerto Rico, as well as glancing brushes with his hostility at a few NCAA tournament stops, was quite enough exposure to bullying, demeaning treatment of others: players, women, reporters, officials, et al.

Knight, who died at 83 on Nov. 1, was an enormously successful basketball coach, three times national champion at the University of Indiana and ranked No. 1 in career Division I victories at the time of his 2008 retirement. He was praised widely for sticking to recruiting rules and insisting that his player attend class.

But he was a Professor of Conquest who based his worth on being a winner, and was regularly forgiven his toxic conduct by fellow coaches and basketball administrators because his teams could put the most points on the board. That, in spite of his being publicly and regularly profane, all fury and outrage when things didn’t go his way and never willing to take blame if they didn’t.

Furthermore, he felt put-upon, even when given thoroughly evenhanded evaluations. In a comprehensive 1981 treatment of Knight’s plusses and minuses, Sports Illustrated’s master of human profiles, Frank Deford, cited Knight’s dismissive take on sportswriters (and, by extension, everyone else) with Knight’s argument that “all of us learn to write by the second grade, then most of us go on to other things.”

“At the base of everything,” Deford wrote, “this is it: If you’re not part of basketball, you can’t really belong, you can only distort.”

In other words: Who are you to criticize the winningest coach around?

Given uncommon access to Indiana’s daily hoops operation in the 1985-86 season, Washington Post reporter John Feinstein produced the best-selling book “A Season On the Brink” in which he presented Knight’s detailed game preparations, his high expectations of player deportment (something of an irony, given their coach), his demanding training sessions as well as his huge popularity among Indiana fans.

But, since Feinstein also faithfully recorded Knight’s well-known use of obscenities (though Feinstein downplayed that a bit) and other obvious foibles, Knight accused Feinstein of being “a whore and a pimp.” To which Feinstein, a man of wit and not easily cowed, reacted: “I wish he’d make up his mind so I’d know how to dress.”

“Too many media folks deified him by virtue of his championships and, to a lesser extent, his graduation record,” veteran New York sportswriter Harvey Araton posted upon Knight’s death. “But as the financial rewards created by revenue-producing college sports grew along with his stature, he became what Coach simply cannot be—the most powerful man on campus, subservient to no one. His self-righteousness ultimately consumed all that he was.”

So about the ’79 Pan Am Games. Right out of the box, Knight assumed a superior badgering attitude, bickering with officials from Puerto Rico and Mexico throughout the opening U.S. game against the outmanned Virgin Islands team.

With seven minutes to play in a 136-88 rout by the Yanks, Knight loudly whined about a measly U.S. charging foul and was ejected, leading to a hasty meeting of international basketball authorities the next day to reprimand Knight. Though several U.S. hoops bigwigs refused to condemn Knight, basketball delegates from several Latin American nations flatly branded Knight “the ugly American” and the U.S. Olympic Committee president, Bob Kane, admitted he felt “there is a certain amount of noblesse oblige necessary” from his delegation.

That was before Knight was arrested at a training session for slurring the Brazilian women’s team and getting into a scuffle with a Puerto Rican policeman; before Knight declared that “the only people on this whole goddamn island I care about are my players;” before Knight told a U.S. journalist, whom he assumed to be a local reporter, that “I don’t talk to Puerto Ricans;” before he insulted the natives by saying that “all they know how to do on this damn island is grow bananas.” (Not only a demeaning statement, but inaccurate; Puerto Rico never was known for banana production.)

Knight then justified everything he had done and said, following the United States’ gold-medal victory over host Puerto Rico, by declaring, “I just know we are nine-and-oh [wins and losses] down here. I’m not a diplomat. I don’t know anything about foreign policy. [A worker at the village] told me that when the U.S. picked me to coach, he knew the U.S. had come to win. Well, that’s what we did.”

Worse, Knight would not cease and desist with his rude comments regarding that competition and its hosts. Three years later, at an event sponsored by a hospital in Gary, Ind., Knight told the audience that as he left Puerto Rico, “when the plane was taxiing onto the runway and taking off, I stood up, unzipped my pants, lowered my shorts and turned my bare ass to the window of that plane—because that’s the last thing I wanted those people to see of me.”

Deford wrote in 1981, “Although it’s fashionable to say Knight rules by intimidation, he actually rules more by derision. He abuses the people he comes into contact with…”

Knight and U.S. basketball decision-makers insisted the anecdote in Gary was “just a joke, and dismissed the Hispanic organizations that were calling Knight a racist and demanding he not be kept as the Americans’ 1984 Olympic coach. Ed Steitz, who was president of the U.S. basketball federation, insisted, “We’re not about to tell Bobby Knight, ‘You can’t say this or that.’ He’s a coach of great renown. There is no way we’ll reconsider Bobby Knight’s appointment as U.S. Olympic basketball coach for 1984. We’re convinced he’s the right man to win the gold medal.”

He did win that gold medal. But in the end, that wasn’t the only thing noted in his obituaries. In the end, it wasn’t just about basketball victories.

Give ’em a break

Leave a reply

Here’s a workable definition of Olympic sports: Activities that are (usually) interesting to watch but virtually impossible to perform by the ordinary citizen. Ever try pole vaulting? Fencing? Marathoning? Weightlifting?

The fast-approaching 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris will provide a new example: Breakdancing. Let’s see what you have to offer in that discipline before dismissing it as not being a real sport.

Wikipedia—not that you want to put all your faith in that ubiquitous online site—declares that Olympic entry is limited to sports “based on athleticism or physical dexterity.” Which certainly would qualify breakdancing, though it should be noted that chess and bridge are among the organizations that have petitioned for Olympic recognition.

As a veteran sports journalist who has covered 11 Olympic Games, I am accustomed to—and fascinated by—the ongoing arguments and maneuvering over which endeavors deserve Olympic inclusion.

In his enlightening Sports Illustrated report on the 1972 Olympic Marathon, in which he finished fourth, Kenny Moore noted that even some athletes sometimes questioned the comparative validity of fellow participants. Moore quoted an American rower contending he found it “hard to call people in yachting, equestrian and maybe shooting real Olympians. In my mind an Olympian is an individual who approaches the limits of human performance. That entails enduring a kind of pain that you don’t get riding in a sailboat.”

There have been arguments that Olympic poohbahs ought to raise the drawbridge and refuse to let in any more events. And, indeed, the Games have been struggling with the problem of gigantism for some time—how to organize and fund a 17-day festival which, in its Summer iteration, must accommodate in excess of 11,000 participants, with all the attendant issues of facilities, housing, transportation and so on.

Opposition exists to welcoming perceived “trash sports”—except: who defines what is a trash sport? Might that be any exhibition staged solely for the purpose of being televised, featuring participants whose only qualification is being celebrities? It must be acknowledged that there is no doubt the Olympics is bullish on getting more eyeballs, reaching new fans and thereby banking more TV money.

There have been efforts, for a long time, to get ballroom dancing into the Games—an activity which, frankly, doesn’t seem to be as physically demanding as breakdancing, since ballroom dancers never spin on their heads or strike one-arm handstands. And what about bocce? Bowling? Aerobics? All of them are interested in inclusion.

If sport climbing, rugby and surfing—all new Olympic sports—were lumped under one umbrella of competition, along with the proposed acceptance of cricket, flag football, lacrosse and squash, they could fit the generic description once suggested by a fellow Olympic reporter: Horsing Around.

Times change. Croquet was in the 1900 Paris Games. (And featured the first appearance of women in the modern Olympics.) Golf showed up in 1900 and ’04, then disappeared until 2016. Jeu de Paume, forerunner to modern tennis, was in the 1908 London Games. Motor boating was included in 1904 and ’08. Polo from 1900 through 1936, when the gold-medal final drew 45,000 spectators. Tug of War—now, that entails more pain than riding in a sailboat—was contested from 1900 through 1920.

It could be argued that opposition to some sports is a function of close-minded, provincial judgement that fails to take in different regional tastes and cultural influences. Table tennis? Big in Korea, as is badminton in China, field hockey in the Netherlands and Germany, volleyball in Brazil. Taekwondo, introduced at the ’88 Seoul Games, is widely followed in Korea. Cricket, returning to the Games in 2028 after a 128-year absence, originally was spread by the world-conquering British empire and now has a rabid following throughout South Asia; any India vs. Pakistan cricket match is of Super Bowl importance to citizens of those nations. The only sport more popular in more countries than cricket is soccer.

And the major reason that American football never has been part of the Olympic show is because only one nation embraces it as its No. 1 sport. So it’s not as if there is no reason or rhyme to Olympic acceptance of sports.

Back to Wikipedia, which considers sport to be “any form of physical activity or game, often competitive and organized, that aims to use, maintain or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants and, in some cases, entertainment to spectators.”

So bring on breakdancing, which originated in the Black and Puerto Rican communities of New York City and has expanded globally, promoted by the World Dance Sport Federation. It is road tested, with an array of organizations and competitors “from Switzerland to Kazakhstan” at a recent international competition, according to ESPN.

No need to be fully conversant in breakdancing lingo—toprocks, downrocks, freezes and so on. If you must, think of it as another elite form of horsing around. It’s going to be interesting to watch.

Just in case….

Leave a reply

One circumstance to send journalists scrambling is the sudden discovery that a person of significant accomplishment is seriously ill at a relatively young age. Mary Lou Retton, the 1984 Olympic gymnastics champion who became a household name at 16, is now only 55, but when her daughter announced that Retton was “fighting for her life” against a rare form of pneumonia, the need to prepare a public account of Retton’s life took on great urgency.

It is one thing when superstars and politicians creep into their 70s and 80s and it becomes due diligence to cobble together a chronicle of their unique place in the parade of humanity. As a major newspaper editor once put it, “You would not want to write Hugh Hefner’s obituary on deadline.”

Failing to prepare is preparing to fail. Which is why pre-written obituaries are common in the news business, often supplemented with an interview of the not-yet-departed while he or she is still with us. Organizations such as the Associated Press, aware of average life-expectancy statistics, have hundreds of obits ready on Known People of a certain vintage, including the most prominent members of the Royal Family and the two living Beatles. The New York Daily News’ obituary of Rosa Park, published upon her death at 92 in 2005, had been written more than decade earlier.

But the other scenario is the unanticipated fatality—John Kennedy, Jr., or Princess Diana, as examples—that leaves news outlets frantically piecing together life-story details for swift publication. And here was Retton, something of a sports/marketing giant (though she is only 4-foot-9), abruptly becoming a candidate for a gone-but-not-forgotten review.

Retton’s star turn was brief but of considerable consequence. Her gold medal victory at the ’84 Los Angeles Games was the first by an American female in the Olympic gymnastics all-around individual competition—her sport’s glamor event. That landed her image on boxes of Wheaties, the self-proclaimed “Breakfast of Champions” that had been similarly featuring sports superstars for 50 years. But, before Retton, only men.

Her lightning strike on American gymnastics inspired waves of young girls to take up the sport and eventually led to U.S. women owning the event for the past five Olympics. Previous to Retton, in the eight Olympics in which women’s gymnastics had been contested, competitors from Eastern bloc nations won every all-around gold.

It didn’t hurt Retton that the old Soviet Union, whose athletes had won five of those earlier titles, had boycotted the L.A. Games amid Cold War tensions. And Retton’s impact was boosted by the fact that more than 180 million Americans watched at least part of the ’84 Olympics on TV, precipitating bidding wars among networks for future Olympic rights.

Whatever. Retton’s rollicking Olympic success established her as a boldface name, a cultural figure, in part because she didn’t quite fit the norm. Women’s gymnastics already had evolved into a showplace for girls in their tweens, acrobatic little tykes with nerves of steel.

Retton had been animated by watching the Olympic perfection, eight years earlier, of Romania’s Nadia Comaneci, and her only evidence of anxiousness regarding the dangers of derring-do gym routines was that she bit her nails. But it was Retton’s coach, Romanian defector Bela Karolyi—who had burst onto the international scene as Comaneci’s coach—who identified an evolution in Retton’s style. “You’re not a butterfly,” he told her.

Though only 94 pounds, Retton was built more for strength than speed. Rather than trafficking in the traditional stringy gymnastic grace, she commanded the spotlight with flash more than frills. She was described by USA Today’s veteran Olympic reporter Christine Brennan as “an ever-smiling 16-year-old tomboy, a tiny fullback in a gymnast’s leotard.”

Plus, she was a quick study, making her first big splash at New York’s Madison Square Garden a year before the Olympics by scoring a perfect 10 with a floor exercise introduced to her by Karolyi just five days earlier. She won her Olympic gold a mere five weeks after undergoing arthroscopic surgery for torn knee cartilage.

She retired from the sport just two years later but remained a spokeswoman for various products, a motivational speaker and a recognizable personality on various TV shows. She married, had four children and divorced. She forever was in demand for public recollections of those ’84 Olympics, calling herself “the old pioneer,” and for years topped polls establishing her as the public’s favorite athlete.

There was this moment midway through 1984 L.A. Games when Retton wandered into a newsstand and was flabbergasted by how sprinter/long jumper Carl Lewis, who won four gold medals in track and field, seemed to have become the face of those Olympics. “Gol-lee!” she exclaimed. “Carl Lewis is on the cover of both Time and Newsweek!” By the end of the 17-day festival, she had joined him. And become “America’s Sweetheart.”

Just days after October 2023 reports that Retton was “fighting for her life” came news that she was showing “remarkable progress” in her recovery. So no need for that obituary yet. And while no one gets to write his or her own ending, Retton long ago provided plenty of background for news hounds.

Another new kid on the block

Leave a reply

Perhaps we could emphasize Da’vian Kimbrough’s uncommon situation—this summer, the 13-year-old California lad became the youngest person to sign a professional soccer contract—from a demographic standpoint. According to sociologists who study such vague and unofficial designations, Kimbrough, born in 2010 and having just missed Generation Z, appears to qualify as a member of something called the Alpha Generation.

That puts him quite apart from Japan’s 56-year-old Kazuyoshi Miura, reportedly the oldest still-active soccer pro in the world, who is on the Generation X roster. Italian keeper Gianluigi Buffon, still going strong at 45, is at the most recent end of the X crowd. And there’s Argentine superstar Lionel Messi, 36. A Millennial. Or Gen Y’er.

And as long as we’re throwing these inexact labels around, might the Alpha-Gen Kimbrough now be marked as an up-and-coming Alpha Male, defined as a fellow tending to assume a dominant or domineering role in his chosen field.

For context, consider the case of Freddy Adu.

In late 2003, Freddy Adu similarly was summoned from the kids’ table to join the grownups. He was 14, signed by D.C. United of Major League Soccer, which made him, at the time, the youngest soccer pro ever. (In keeping with the generational thing, Adu, now 34 and retired from the sport, is a Y.)

Unlike Kimbrough, whose contract agreement with the Sacramento Republic of the second-tier United Soccer League was not widely reported, Adu was introduced at a New York City press conference months before his first game with United. He was guaranteed a $500,000 salary, highest among MLS’ 240 players at the time, and had a $1 million Nike endorsement deal but reminded that “I am just a kid” and that his mother probably would drive him to team practices.

Adu was welcomed to the sport by no less than soccer’s all-time wizard, Pele, who declared that Adu reminded him of the genius composer Mozart, “who started when he was 5 years old,” Pele noted.

(Pele was of the Silent Generation, by the way, which followed the Greatest Generation and led to Baby Boomers, which came before…. Well, point made. Mozart, who lived in the late 1700s, apparently missed the Awakening Generation and is more accurately situated in the Classical Period of music eras—between the Baroque and Romantic periods. But that’s another ballgame.)

Anyway, Adu’s own status as a prodigy quickly appeared to have legs. In his April 2004 MLS debut, Adu became the youngest athlete to participate in a major U.S. professional team sport since a pup named Fred Chapman, at 14, pitched for Major League Baseball’s Philadelphia Athletics 117 years earlier.

Chapman never played another Big League game, but Adu, in his second game, drew a national TV audience and sell-out crowd to Washington’s RFK Stadium. In his third game, against the MetroStars at the old Giants Stadium, Adu scored his first goal—and said he would celebrate by just hanging out with his mom.

He did not go on to enduring Mozart- or Pele-like greatness, playing in a handful of tournaments with the U.S. National Team but mostly spending his 15-year career with lower-level teams in Europe, though he wound up with a reported net worth of $12 million.

Kimbrough has not yet played a game for Sacramento, instead assigned to the club’s youth development academy. Between Adu and Kimbrough, a couple of other 14-year-olds—Francis Jacobs, in 2019, and Maximo Carrizo, in 2022, slightly lowered the age of youngest to sign pro soccer deals, though they also remain with their team’s youth programs.

Of course, all these wunderkind developments spice the ever-evolving world of sports. And they remind the rest of us, and probably Kazuyoshi Miura, of bygone generations.

 

Been there, and been done in like that

Leave a reply

If you are old enough—and I certainly am—you might recall a New York Giants’ loss strikingly similar to this season’s 0-40 opening-night shellacking administered by the Dallas Cowboys. Worse, even. Fifty years ago, the Giants were bludgeoned by the then-Oakland Raiders, 42-0.

It could be said that the Giants’ current co-tenants in their New Jersey stadium, the Jets (who likewise have fancied themselves a post-season contender), were not the only team to immediately reveal a certain Achilles heel.

An aside here from the Book of Ecclesiastes (not that there is anything spiritual about the business of professional football): “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

Well, OK, some things are new, or at least a variation on the theme. In ’73, the Giants’ president was Wellington Mara; since his death in 2005, his son John has been the boss, though both at times have been criticized by so-called loyal fans for being too loyal to long-time Giants associates.

In ’73, the Giants entered that Raiders game amid an inferno of a season and had long before abandoned all hope; they were 1-5-1 on the way to 2-11-1. By contrast, the 2023 Giants, before crashing and burning against the Cowboys, were talking about playing deep into January. And, after their comeuppance, insisted they have time to effectively deal with their damaged psyche.

Another significant difference: In 1973, the Raiders still made California their home and the National Football League still marketed its devout campaign against sports betting; now, of course, the Raiders are based in Las Vegas, the world’s gambling capital, and the league gleefully partners with several sportsbook operations.

There is overwhelming evidence that the practice of prognostication is essentially doomed and a pretty good example of addiction. Unless, that is, there is no money involved. Back in the antediluvian days of 1973, Wellington Mara would engage in weekly sessions with his sons, John and Chris, picking winners of the upcoming games. Just for fun, though they would employ those Vegas betting odds. Going into Oakland for the Nov. 4 game, Wellington—either having lost faith in his ’73 team or simply having begun to smarten up about its chances—liked the Raiders minus 11 points. (He wound up having 31 points to spare.)

The Giants coach then was Alex Webster, a former star back for the team and a fellow much admired by Wellington Mara. And Webster—in the room for that guessing game among the Maras—reportedly laughed in a good-natured way at Wellington’s prediction. Not taking it personally, apparently.

During that season’s slog, Mara had made it clear on several occasions that he would not fire Webster and Webster confirmed that he and the boss had “an agreement that I will step down myself if I feel I’m not doing the job.” (Whether he was pushed of jumped, Webster in fact was gone at the end of the season.)

After the Raiders had stomped the Giants the way California winegrowers dealt with grapes, Raider coach John Madden—remember, this was 50 years ago—was stunned by how easy it had been. “They must be a better team than that,” Madden said then. “We really could have scored many more points.”

Unlike the reaction of 2023 Giants players, with their circle-the-wagon assurances that they are capable of avoiding being 0-40 clobberees again, the ’73 Giants players’ 0-42 loss merely intensified a building dyspeptic, churlish in-house mood. Tight end Bob Tucker, who failed to catch a pass for the first time in 47 consecutive games, called his teammates “a bunch of quitters.” Defensive tackle Carter Campbell lamented that “people were laughing at us.” Assistant coach Jim Garrett declared that “there is a distinct need for leadership on this team, to say the least.”

Garrett, of course, would have his own leadership questioned years later when, as head coach of Columbia University in 1985, he called his players “drug-addicted losers.” (He wound up resigning at the end of that season before he could be fired.)

All right. The sun will come up tomorrow. Will there be anything new on the horizon for this New York team?

Miraculous staying power

Leave a reply

Do you believe in nostalgia?

Visit Lake Placid, N.Y., and you will be immersed in countless references, souvenirs and images recalling the moment in sports history when sportscaster Al Michaels hyperbolically asked 34 million American viewers, “Do you believe in miracles?”

It’s a central feature in the village’s international claim to fame as Winter Olympic host. It was a long time ago—43 years—before more than half of the world population was born. But, still: Approaching upstate Lake Placid now from the main road off the New York Thruway, one can’t avoid the various 1980 Olympic sites—the Mount Van Hoevenberg complex with its bobsled and luge run, the biathlon venue, the Olympic ski jump.

At the village’s southern edge, there are the flying flags from the 1980 participating Olympic nations, as if those Games still were going on, just outside the speed skating oval where American Eric Heiden won five gold medals, and adjacent to the imposing Olympic Center that includes two hockey arenas—from the two Lake Placid Winter Games, in 1932 and 1980—situated, naturally, at “Miracle Plaza.”

It has been more than a decade since the New York Times noted how Lake Placid “can feel cryogenically frozen in time—1980 to be exact, which was when this secluded pocket of the Adirondacks hosted its second Winter Olympics” yet continued to “look much as it did when Jimmy Carter was in office.”

And still: Forty-three years on, around town there are pictograms of the various Winter Olympic sports displayed on buildings; an old bobsled perched on a sidewalk; 1980 Olympic jerseys, signed by members of that winter’s U.S. team, hung in hotel lobbies; rows of shops with sweatshirts and caps adorned with 1980 logos; the local newspaper’s masthead proclaiming Lake Placid “host of the 1932 and 1980 Olympic Winter Games;” books and memorabilia chronicling the so-called 1980 “Miracle on Ice.”

On Labor Day weekend—this Labor Day, 2023—the Adirondack Daily Enterprise and the weekly Lake Placid News both ran reports on New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s recent visit to Lake Placid and her specific recollections of that “miracle” 1980 semifinal ice hockey victory by the underdog Americans over the Soviets. Gillibrand even noted that her parents had attended the game. Which apparently prompted current Olympic Regional Development Authority board president Joe Martens’ aside that “It’s kind of a running joke in Lake Placid—there were 8,500 people in here for the game but 30,000 people say they were here.”

It was just a hockey game. But it featured a shocking upset by a rag-tag team of American amateurs over the four-time reigning gold medalists from the old Soviet Union. And amid Cold War tensions, the Yanks’ thoroughly unlikely upset of the so-called Evil Empire was widely cast as a victory for righteousness, somehow evidence of Americans’ morality, and as the game’s final seconds ticked away, Michaels laid it on pretty thick with his “miracles” question.

Forty-three years ago. Sooo yesterday, no? Yet the Lake Placid of 2023 hardly has a Paleolithic feel; rather, it is a thoroughly up-to-date, scenic burg, alive with flora and fauna, centered by serene Mirror Lake with the Adirondack Mountains as a picturesque backdrop.

It teems with energy—joggers, swimmers, dog walkers, baby strollers, kayakers and cyclists—and with community affairs such as the I Love BBQ and Music Festival Weekend surrounding Labor Day, and a state golf championship for seniors and “superseniors” (65-plus).

It’s just that village leaders know how their bread is buttered. So, along with the ongoing Olympic reminiscence is the continued outreach for similar—if less famous—international winter competitions such as last February’s World University Winter Games and next month’s World Figure and Fancy Skating Championships, in which competitors form artistic squiggles on black ice.

The local population is not quite 2,500 but there are year-round crowds of tourists, many speaking in foreign tongues, lured by the village’s international renown and resort status.

“If the town were not smothered in Olympic logos,” the long-ago Times travel piece reported, “visitors might forget about its Olympic connections and think they had wandered into an idyllic Swiss hamlet.

Not likely, that. The miracle has been held over by popular demand.

Rivaling tradition

Leave a reply

Gallows humor might be the only reasonable response to the accelerating college conference mayhem. Given the disorienting realignments, The Athletic has suggested such potential “traditional rivalries” as the John Denver Classic (Colorado vs. West Virginia—“Rocky Mountain High” vs. “Take Me Home Country Roads”); the John Wooden Bowl (Purdue vs. UCLA); Phil Knight vs. the Scarlet Knights (Oregon-Rutgers).

Don’t even try to connect any of those matchups to leagues that for so long were organized by geographic and institutional ties—leagues that have become incapable of doing math or reading maps. The Big 10 is going to have 18 schools. At last count, the Big 12 has 14 and likely could go to 16. The Atlantic Coast Conference reportedly is considering Stanford and Cal (from the other coast) and SMU (from neither coast) for membership.

Also: Whither and wherefore Notre Dame, which forever banked on its independence but appears adrift in this reshaped financial model.

All the nutty new associations, with everyone seemingly running off to join a more lucrative circus, at least serve to finally acknowledge that college football—the sport responsible for this kaleidoscopic shuffling—has nothing to do with college. Fully professional (except that the players are not paid directly and have neither a union nor guarantees of health care), college football has further evolved into just another version of the NFL.

So why not accept reality and erect a firewall between football and academics, as proposed by Baruch College law professor Marc Edelman years ago? “Maybe,” he said in the wake of repercussions after Northwestern players attempted to form a union in 2014, “there should be a football program that wears blue and maize and plays out of Ann Arbor and is separate from the University of Michigan.” And a team dressed in burnt orange based in Austin, Tex., with no actual connection to that city’s institution of higher learning.

Why not follow the lead of Ithaca College sports media professor Ellen Staurowsky, co-author of the 1998 book “College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA Amateur Myth,” who suggested splitting revenue-generating sports from the amateur, educations process? Football players still could go to classes if they chose to, Staurowsky said, but university athletic departments would lose the role of promoters and brokers of athletic talent and mass sports entertainment.

Or why not establish a National College Football League such as the one recently proposed by Welch Suggs, an associate director for the watchdog Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education and journalism professor at the University of Georgia?

In the Suggs model, there would be one major college football organization—same as the NFL—with manageable regional divisions structured something like of the old Southwest Conference (seven Texas schools plus neighboring Arkansas). The other sports—men’s and women’s basketball and especially the non-revenue sports of gymnastics, field hockey, track and so forth—would be grouped in their own separate conferences, immune from being big-footed by King Football’s insatiable pursuit of TV lucre.

With that, an Oregon volleyball team, not privy to chartered flights always available to the football gladiators, could avoid a cross-country round-trip journey to New Jersey to fulfill a commitment to play at Rutgers in the rejiggered Big 10.

Over and over, the NCAA has demonstrated it had neither the clout nor the will to stop all the gold-digging football gallivanting that is going on now. At a Knight Commission meeting 12 years ago, shortly after the Big 12 had begun to fall apart when Nebraska skedaddled to the Big 10, Missouri and Texas A&M to the SEC and Colorado to the PAC-12, then-NCAA president Mark Emmert declared that his organization “does not have a role in conference affiliations and should never be in the business of telling universities what affiliations they should have.”

So now, we have what New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait called the “logic of untrammeled capitalism” steadily picking up steam, with strategies “now driven entirely by the logic of television contracts” that yearn for expanded elite conferences. “The new mega-leagues,” Chait wrote, “will be too engorged to have real conference [football] champions: There will be too many teams in each league and too few games to fairly crown a winner.”

A decade ago, then-LSU chancellor Michael Martin predicted that “we could end up with two enormous conferences, one called ESPN and the other one called Fox.”

He sounds now like a regular Nostradamus. Or just a realist.

Howzat?

Leave a reply

 

At the conclusion of this essay, would you mind completing a customer satisfaction survey? You know: Were you Very Satisfied? Satisfied? Neutral? Dissatisfied? Very Dissatisfied?

Would you give this One Star? Two, Three or Four? FIVE!?!?!? Do you wish you had spent the time reading the comics instead?

Just kidding. It seems as if every business out there is using this sort of thing to get quick feedback. Supermarkets. Retail outlets. Pharmacies. Car repair shops. Media organizations. Food-delivery apps. Ride-hailing operations. Doctor’s offices. I wouldn’t want to be left behind regarding this trend.

So: On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being “very likely” and 1 being “no way,” how likely would you be to recommend this to family members or others? Why or why not? Did you have a favorite sentence or paragraph? A particularly compelling punctuation mark?

Please provide your age, height, weight, most recent eye exam, and what your favorite subject was in sixth grade. If you did not have a favorite subject, just write “recess.” Even though that’s not a subject, our survey reviewers will get the point.

And just to get to know you a little better: What is the approximate annual income you wish you had? Legally. All answers are confidential and will be shielded from the IRS.

In your own words, describe what you believe to be the Mets’ greatest deficiency. Speaking of the IRS, you may cite all public financial information in relation to players’ performance (or lack thereof).

Really, this sort of polling is merely a more formal approach than that utilized in the 1980s by three-term New York City mayor Ed Koch, who would ride the subway and stand on street corners greeting passersby with “How’m I doin’?” (Like all public officials, and in something of a good-natured way, Koch was booed whenever he was introduced at the ballpark. A tactic not unlike hanging him in effigy.)

Public criticism might have been gentler then than in these culture-war days. In the newspaper business—my home of employment for a half-century—I don’t recall us specifically soliciting evaluations in the time before social media (which traffics quite regularly in strong language to express all manner of dissatisfaction). But we would occasionally receive a note via snail mail beginning, “Dear [insert vulgar slang for a contemptible person here]….”

It can certainly be argued that evaluations of business performance often run from grumbling to profound unhappiness, which includes addressing the offending person or persons with terms equivalent to guttersnipe or blackguard or the like. Evidence of this can be found every day in “letters to the editor.”

People who are happy with a company’s work—those understandably expecting a certain level of competence—don’t tend to pass along their gratification. Just to complicate matters, though, a 2020 Los Angeles Times investigation found that customer service surveys were “a breeding ground of bad data…all written in pleading language” and annoying to customers who “just want to give them five stars and be on with it.”

Furthermore, the Times report concluded, “companies might be using surveys as prophylactic shields against angry customers who might otherwise vent in public online forums.”

So before you go there: Were your expectations met with this essay? Unmet? Exceeded? How would you characterize your experience?

Your criticisms are very important to us. Although it should be noted that it is not possible to appeal to every level of brow. Hey; show some mercy.

And thanks for reading. May we contact you to follow up on your responses?

Blaim the heroine

Leave a reply

Here is an argument that the Women’s World Cup was not “an unmitigated failure” by the U.S. national team, as Fox Sports commentator and former men’s national player Alexi Lalas called it; that the Americans’ loss to Sweden in the round of 16 would “not be remembered as the day the United States women’s team hit rock bottom,” as it was characterized by a report in The Guardian.

Yes, the Yanks had squeaked into to the knockout round with a win and two ties, and their loss to the Swedes, despite being ranked No. 1 in the world and four times Cup champion, came earlier than in eight previous Cups. So, surprise! That’s sports. That’s part of the lure of it. There is no rubber-stamping a perceived favorite’s success.

And anyone who watched the U.S.-Sweden match had to notice that the Americans controlled the run of play, outshooting the third-ranked Swedes, 21-7. Were it not for the startling, cat-like reflexes of 27-year-old Swedish goalkeeper Zecira Musovic, repeatedly batting away shots ticketed for the back of the net, the Yanks would not have had to endure their own excruciating penalty-shot misses and the necessity of the latest goal-line video technology to confirm Sweden’s ultimate winner, which was not otherwise visible to the naked eye.

Musovic was spectacular, the real difference in a magnificent tug-of-war that went beyond two hours between two skilled, aggressive teams. Her performance was more to the point than so much of the post-match analysis by the sport’s chattering classes bent on assigning blame.

U.S. coach Vlatko Andonovski was widely recommended for dismissal, taken to task for not showing confidence in his bench and assembling a roster that didn’t produce goals, didn’t better manage the midfield, didn’t show more cohesion, etc. Slate called the U.S. team “a shadow of its previous self.” Front Row Soccer enumerated what it judged to be U.S. failures by “looking back on a disaster of a tournament.”

ESPN piled on, too, lamenting the injuries to some American veterans, the drying up of the youth pipeline in the United States compared to the rest of the world, what is perceived as U.S. overconfidence and its players’ “lack of chemistry.” (During a stretch of poor games during the 1999 NBA season, Knicks guard Chris Childs argued that “chemistry is between lovers, not players.”)

Listen: There was a second team involved in that round-of-16 game, and the theatrical display by that other team’s goalkeeper, Musovic, is what repeatedly flummoxed the Americans and eventually put them on desolation row. If any individual must be “blamed” for turning the Yanks’ hearts to stone, that responsibility reasonably (and admiringly) could be attributed to Musovic. That was her job.

All the ferreting out of responsibility—the casting of aspersions on U.S. players, coaches, federation officials and the overall system—smacked of poor sportsmanship, exacerbated by Alexi Lalas’ assertion that the U.S. team had become “unlikeable” because of players’ progressive pronouncements away from the field. Not surprisingly, there were some nasty claims of poetic justice that retiring U.S. forward Megan Rapinoe—who has advocated for LGBTQ rights, equal pay for women in sports and racial justice—missed her penalty attempt.

At the end of a critical summation by The Athletic, which declared “this World Cup has raised massive existential questions about America’s ability to keep moving forward” and cast the result as some sort of apocalypse, someone with a sense of humor commented online, “I blame the Reynas”—aware of the messy aftermath to the men’s World Cup struggles. (Ask your hard-core soccer friends.)

Meanwhile, as the Swedes celebrated their victory, there came through the Melbourne stadium sound system a lively, familiar tune: “Dancing Queen.”

You can dance, you can jive/Having the time of your life.

See that girl/Watch that theme/

She is the Dancing Queen.

That was a No. 1 hit in the United States in the 1970s and lived on on Broadway and the movies. By the Swedish group ABBA.

Mamma Mia!

Inspiration complication

Leave a reply

What Australian soccer star Sam Kerr wished for prior to this women’s World Cup—“a Cathy Freeman moment”—now appears to be an absolute necessity for her team. A wobbly victory over Ireland followed by a crushing loss to Nigeria has left the Aussies—who had entertained expectations of a deep Cup run—in need of Freeman’s long-ago operatic, spellbinding magic just to advance to the tournament’s knockout round.

Kerr was just days past her 7th birthday when Freeman, on Sept. 25, 2000, provided the nation Down Under with a Hollywood ending of exaggerated happiness. So any Australian who pays attention to these sports spectaculars—and anyone lucky enough to have witnessed the 2000 Sydney Olympics—understands the reference.

On what was a grand night of track and field filled with exceptional, dramatic performances in virtually every competition, Freeman’s victory in that Olympic 400-meter final topped all. Not simply because Freeman rendered a smashing stretch run, coming from third place off the final turn in a race that is as close to violence as her sport comes—a tormenting all-out sprint over a quarter mile.

The Aboriginal Freeman was running with the weight of a nation and a people, her country’s most put-upon minority, on her back. Days before, during the Games’ Opening Ceremonies, she had been tasked with the honor of lighting the Olympic flame, a symbol of peace and brotherhood, causing her to worry “what some people would think” about her presence at the heart of the public ritual.

She is the granddaughter of one of Australia’s “stolen children” produced by a shameless national policy that took Aboriginal children and gave them to white families to “be civilized.”

In a way, that made her the conscience of the Sydney Olympics—and of Australia. And led to some incredibly noisy, emotional business in the boomerang event that sends runners out for a simple, exhausting trip, out and back. Fans—there were 112,000 in the stadium—were desperately, vicariously trying to lift Freeman around the track. Flash cameras in the stands followed her around, seeming to turn Freeman into her very own Olympic ceremony.

At the end, Freeman and the two early leaders she passed, straining mightily in the last 50 meters—Jamaica’s Lorraine Graham and Britain’s Katherine Merry—all were left sprawled on the track like survivors from some frightening car accident. Freeman needed several minutes to recover before getting to her feet and walking a victory lap, carrying both the Aboriginal and Australian flags.

It was just a championship race but interpreted by many as theater of “national reconciliation.”

“I don’t like to pass comment on anything political,” Freeman said then. “People like to make me a symbol for all sorts of things. I represent the young Aboriginal person living in a country of unity and enjoying possibilities of everything….

“I share my medal with my husband and my family and whoever else wants can join in.”

Her “moment” has been said to cause a ripple effect inspiring future generations of Aussie athletes in a sports-mad country, still a potent motivational tool—a shining example of grace under pressure. As the 2023 women’s national soccer team players gathered for a pre-tournament session, they were showed a tape of Freeman’s 2000 victory and treated with a surprise appearance by Freeman, who told them, “When you ask yourself, ‘What are you doing here? What are you doing it for?’ It’s because you love who you are and what you’re doing.”

Alas, Kerr—Australia’s career goal-scoring leader and considered among the sport’s top five (at least) global performers—came up lame with a bad calf in a pre-Cup workout and has missed her team’s first two disappointing games. If she can play against a formidable Canada side on Monday, maybe….