Author Archives: johnfjeansonne@gmail.com

About johnfjeansonne@gmail.com

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

Tennis’ continuum of future, past, present

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(2017 Australian Open)

From here, it’s almost always tomorrow in Australia, 16 hours in the future. But through to the magic of the DVR, it was possible to repeatedly retrieve yesterdays throughout the two weeks of the Australian Open tennis championships, during which events seemed to pass along a continuum, back and forth, from the day after through the past to the present.

Both the men’s and women’s title matches offered a glimpse of ancient history recycled and updated—the Williams sisters crossing swords for the 28th time in their careers, the 15th time in a Grand Slam tournament and the eighth time in a major final, followed by a 35th revival of Roger Federer vs. Rafael Nadal, further creating the sensation of being unstuck in time.

These are the acts you’ve known for all these years, especially the Serena Williams-Venus Williams show. The first time they dueled in a Slam final, at the 2001 U.S. Open, Federer was still two years away from the first of his 18 major titles, with Nadal’s first of 14 Slam trophies four years in the future.

In 2001, the Williamses already were the biggest news in tennis, Venus at 21 and Serena about to turn 20, their Open showdown timed perfectly with the first scheduled prime-time television coverage of a major tennis championship final.

The packed house of 23,023 in Arthur Ashe Stadium included a raft of entertainment and sports celebrities, among them Spike Lee, Robert Redford, New York Yankees manager Joe Torre and Diana Ross, who sang “God Bless America,” then offered a pre-match handshake and hug to both sisters. Also in attendance that night was Mary Tyler Moore; how’s that for a then-and-now reflection?

(2001 U.S. Open)

It was three days before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, so the Big Town had no trouble throwing massive attention into a tennis match, which proved to demonstrate that a sibling rivalry is not necessarily a spectator sport. Not since 1884 had sisters played each other in a major tennis championship—19-year-old Maud Watson defeated older sister Lilian for the Wimbledon title back when the sport was contested by amateurs and both Watsons played in white corsets and petticoats.

The Williamses, once down to business, were caught in what Serena called a “weird atmosphere,” the crowd unsure about taking sides and the players bumbling around in a disorienting psychological study, at turns overaggressive and cautious.

“Sisters are rivals,” Serena said after losing in straight sets. “A lot of people in families fight, and I guess our fighting is done out on the court, because we never fight. Maybe older sisters and older brothers wanted to see Venus win, and younger sisters and younger brothers wanted to see me win. Right now, I have zero difficulty with that.”

That was Venus’ fourth major crown, but Serena quickly turned the tables in their next four Slam finals matches—at the 2002 French, Wimbledon and U.S. Open and 2003 Australian—at which time Belgium’s perennial contender, Justine Henin, declared that “people are getting bored” by Williams-vs.-Williams championship matches. “Fans don’t know who to root for.”

Maybe. But there was not a single tournament director on the pro women’s tour who didn’t relish having the Williamses’ star power over the past decade and a half.  Prior to this year’s Aussie final, the sisters had last played each other in a major at the 2015 U.S. quarterfinals, with Serena attempting a calendar sweep of the four Slams, and there was nothing subtle about the power and passion that both she and Venus brought to that battle.

That may have produced the most fascinating athletic narrative in their long rivalry, a three-set victory for Serena in a feisty, noisy combat. What the 2017 Australian Open reinforced is that Serena, at 35, remains the most dominant player in women’s tennis. And that Venus, at 36, still is capable of managing an autoimmune disorder well enough to occasionally compete at the highest level.

In 1997, when Venus, at 17, made her first Grand Slam splash by advancing to the U.S. final (a loss to then No. 1 Martina Hingis) while playing with 1,800 colored beads in her hair, she announced that she was “completely different. I’m tall, I’m black, everything’s different about me than what’s been around….Face the facts.”

The facts are that Althea Gibson was tall and black and completely different 40 years earlier, when she became the first black player to win the U.S. title in 1957. Between Gibson and Venus, there was a handful of other black women on the pro circuit—Renee Blount, Leslie Allen, Zina Garrison, Lori McNeil….

(The sisters in 1996)

But there is no getting around the uniqueness of the sister act that continues to play out on the sport’s largest stages. And there’s no guarantee it won’t stay around a bit longer. That—and more of what Federer and Nadal offered in Melbourne—hints at some inextricable connection between the present, future and past.

Locker room banter, hazing and respectful reactions

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Let’s think about the weekend’s massive protest marches in terms of physics. For every action, according to Newton’s third law, there is an opposite and equal reaction.

It just might take a while. So a presidential candidate was exposed for his vulgar bragging about sexual assault in an October revelation and, about three months later—after scores of more indignities, and after the serial aggressor has become president and sworn to reverse “American carnage”—demonstrations organized by women turned up in at least 500 U.S. cities with 3.7 million participants. That’s one of every 100 Americans (my wife among them).

The marchers, including men and children as well as women, voiced a variety of agendas and fears, but it might be safe to say that all were responding to the new executive’s repeated aversion to “political correctness.” Which is, after all, simply a commitment to showing respect to all individuals and groups.

I come from a mostly male-dominated world, having worked as a sports journalist for roughly a half century. In that environment, especially regarding team sports, there certainly is a history of boys’ club exclusion and assumed dominance. But the difference between that, and our president’s argument that his molestation of women was “just locker room banter,” is that we have arrived at 2017 with a gradual expectation of chivalrous conduct.

A case in point would be the long, long overdue new Major League Baseball prohibition, announced in December, targeting the practice of veteran players forcing rookie teammates to dress as women in annual end-of-the-season hazing rituals.

That, too, took a while. It has been 11 years since Long Island’s Adelphi University invited hundreds of coaches and school administrators to a five-hour conference on hazing. My Newsday editor, in fact, still considered it to be a cute thing the following year when he assigned me to chronicle that “time-honored tradition” as the Yankees required rookies to dress as Wizard of Oz characters, including Dorothy, the Wicked Witch and other females.

Sports psychologist Susan Lipkins, an expert on the dangers of hazing, noted that by compelling men to dress as women, it sent the message that to be a woman is less than to be a man, thereby denigrating both the male dressing as a woman and women in general.

Anyway, in October—about the time that Hollywood Access audio tape surfaced of our future leader’s crass (and, in fact, criminal) claims—the New York Mets’ veterans ordered rookie teammates to don wigs, dresses and fake breasts as characters from the movie “A League of Their Own.” And to publicly fetch coffee in that attire for the old pros.

Maybe it took the outrage expressed by a handful of female sportswriters to finally move baseball officials to assume the role of adults and put an end to such bad behavior, after more than 30 years of rookies being ordered to wear tutus, cheerleader costumes or the outfits of female superheroes during the team’s final road trip.

“Before the ‘lighten up, it’s just a joke’ crowd has the chance to chime in,” Julie DiCaro wrote on the CBS Chicago web site at the time, “think about this: What if the rookies were all dressed in blackface as a joke? What if they were all dressed like Negro League players? Is that OK? “

That prompted SUNY-Oswego professor Brian Moritz, on his Sportsmediaguy.com web site, to question the “The Casual Sexism of the NY Mets.” Although, he admitted, a little late.

Some players continued to rationalize it as a harmless fraternal initiation. As “team-bonding.” As “fun.” (Something like “locker room banter” to them, no doubt, not to be nixed by “political correctness.”)

But any expert on hazing will argue that it is fun at someone else’s expense, that it is a means of reinforcing a pecking order of power and status. One of those experts, Roger Rees, told me years ago that hazing “legitimizes anti-social behavior” when sports, ideally, is supposed to “teach self-respect and respect for others.” Mets general manager Sandy Alderson, a former Marine aware of similar practices in the military, was among those who strongly backed the MLB ruling to end what he call something “divisive [that] undercuts morale.”

Divisive and undercutting morale? Hmmm. Forward…march.

Bonds, Clemens, fame and notoriety

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This shouldn’t be complicated. According to the dictionary definition of “fame,” neither Barry Bonds nor Roger Clemens requires the blessing of self-important baseball scribes to qualify for inclusion among the sport’s most widely known players.

Still, the annual Hall of Fame voting this week raised the topic again. Should Bonds and Clemens eventually be inducted into Cooperstown? Are they getting closer each year?

Listen: Bonds and Clemens already have their fame. By doing what they did, as arguably their generation’s most dominant hitter and pitcher, they long ago achieved far-reaching acclaim. And they did so, according to overwhelming evidence, powered by banned substances, which only served to raise their public conspicuousness. (“Fame” also can mean recognition of an unfavorable kind; notoriety.)

So, a couple of modest proposals:

1. Take away the St. Peter-at-the-Pearly-Gates function of the Baseball Writers Association of America. The organization was founded in 1908 to improve the writing conditions of baseball reporters. To subsequently empower its members to canonize ballplayers—to make news, rather than reporting it—is a perversion of journalism.

Too much attention is paid to the BBWAA members’ arguments over what weight should be       given to players’ moral behavior, especially since the writers have demonstrated a sliding           scale of acceptance, as indicated by the yearly increase in the number of votes for Bonds and     Clemens. Baseball historian John Thorn has argued that the system “permits sportswriters…to   see themselves as guardians of a sacred portal, the last best hope for truth and justice. And       it’s all hogwash and baloney.”

2. Take away the “sacred portal.” In no way should Bonds or Clemens get a pass for having cheated their way to grand statistical accomplishments. (Just as Major League Baseball should not get off the hook for having turned a blind eye to steroid use for years after other sports organizations tested and penalized juicers.) So, by demystifying Cooperstown—by dispensing with the venerated status for really good athletes by hanging their plaques in a reverential hall, conferring on them the title of Great Men—there would be no need to confuse exceptional baseball skill with a place in Heaven. (Angels—from the Los Angeles team—could still qualify for acknowledgement.)

The museum aspect of Cooperstown’s Hall already is a fabulous depository of baseball history and artifacts, good and bad. Even persona non grata figures Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose have some personal items in the museum, so the records of Bonds and Clemens—the complete records, with statistics alongside reports of their misdeeds—would have their place.

Baseball is unquestionably a significant piece of our culture, something to celebrate. But hero worship is a risky thing, just as consigning reality—good or bad—to the dustbin solves nothing. Better to skip the BBWAA’s editorial judgments and accept that Bonds and Clemens already made their own fame.

Winning isn’t the only thing

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Among the paradoxes and absurdities routinely accepted as establishing a human being’s greatness are football won-lost records and coaching authoritarianism. Just think of two famous quotes related to the legendary Vince Lombardi (neither of which was necessarily accurate, but still):

Lombardi supposedly gave us the decree that “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” (In fact, Red Saunders, who coached Vanderbilt and UCLA in the 1940s and ‘50s, first espoused that narrow doctrine of existence.)

Lombardi’s winning secret was attributed by his Hall of Fame tackle Henry Jordan to be that he “treated us all the same. Like dogs.” (Except Jordan’s teammate, Jerry Kramer, wrote in a 1997 New York Times opinion piece that Jordan’s flippant remark was “wildly inaccurate. Lombardi’s genius was that he treated us all differently.”

Anyway, this faulty, straight-line connection between unyielding demand and grid sainthood came to mind with the references this week to two old coaches, Paul (Bear) Bryant and John McVay—one universally celebrated, the other completely under the radar except for a single moment of disaster-movie proportions in 1978.

Because the University of Alabama was playing for coach Nick Saban’s potential sixth national championship on Jan. 9, there were repeated media genuflections to the late Bryant, who had won six titles for the school between 1961 and 1979. Bryant, though he affected a humble shuffle and a slow Southern mumble, was known as a sometimes brutal taskmaster and, late in his career, acknowledged his regret at having driven away one of the best players during his stint at Texas A&M in the mid-1950s.

The other fellow recently mentioned—almost in passing—was McVay, on the occasion of his 30-year-old grandson, Sean McVay, being hired as head coach of the Los Angeles Rams. I covered John McVay’s 2 ½ years as coach of the New York Giants in mid ‘70s, and witnessed the ability of a decent, respectful man to squeeze some pretty good results out of a rag-tag bunch of players. More than that, McVay demonstrated grace (even humor), especially in the face of a monumentally botched play that eventually cost him the Giants’ job.

That was on Nov. 19, 1978. McVay, who had been hired before the ’76 season with vague scouting and assistant coaching duties before being handed an 0-7 team midway through ’76, was about to get the Giants’ record even at 6-6 in ’78. They were leading the Philadelphia Eagles by five points and had the ball with only 20 seconds to kill. Philadelphia was out of time outs, and all the Giants had to do was take a knee. But McVay’s assistant, Bob Gibson, whom McVay had entrusted with the play-calling, ordered a handoff.

The Giants, shockingly, fumbled. In a heartbeat, the ball bounced directly into the hands of Philadelphia defensive back Herman Edwards for an against-all-odds 26-yard romp to the winning score.

It was Moby Fumble—Thar the Giants Blow It! It was the Archduke’s Assassination. Management fired Gibson, a McVay friend, the next day. General manager Andy Robustelli quit at season’s end and McVay’s contract was not renewed. A wrecking ball was taken to the entire organization.

But what I remember most was McVay’s demeanor, fully aware of crushing disappointment and the dire consequences in a bottom-line business—and yet….

When he showed up for his post-game remarks after the fumble, facing a roomful of pencils and pads and microphones poised to demand the (impossible) explanation, McVay leaned back against the wall and thrust both arms to the side. As if to say, “Go ahead; crucify me.”

He faced a roiling fuss over his preference for eschewing a headset, for not second-guessing his assistant’s calls from high in the press box. So, for the next game, he reported (slyly), “The way we’ll do it is put all the ugly coaches upstairs and all the good-looking guys on the sideline.”

His was the sort of perspective, and consummate endurance, that English poet Rudyard Kipling envisioned in his poem “If—“, two lines of which are written on the wall of the players’ entrance to Wimbledon’s Centre Court, essentially declaring that winning is not the only thing…

    If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

   And treat those two imposters just the same…

This is not to say that Bryant was a bad person for his unbending coaching style. I crossed paths with him only twice during his career, and neither occasion was unpleasant, though both times there was an undeniable reverence afforded him. All those victories made him something of a deity.

In December of 1968, my senior year at the University of Missouri, I was football beat reporter for the Journalism School’s Columbia Missourian assigned to Mizzou’s Gator Bowl game against Alabama, when Missouri coach Dan Devine told his kidding-on-the-square Bryant joke at a pre-game banquet.

“One night in the winter,” Devine said, “Bear had just gotten into bed and Mary Harmon”—Bryant always called his wife by her full maiden name—“said to him, ‘God, your feet are cold.’ And Bear said to her, ‘You can call me Paul.’”

Fourteen years later, dispatched by Newsday to Memphis for the Liberty Bowl to chronicle Bryant’s last game, I was reminded of Bryant’s exalted state by such extravagant recollections as this: Once, in a post-game dressing room, a reporter sat eyeing Bryant’s trademark houndstooth hat on a chair. Not planning anything untoward, just thinking what a prize it could be. When the reporter raised his eyes, an Alabama state trooper was looming over him, ordering, “Freeze!”

Only a month after that Liberty Bowl game, Bryant died of a heart attack and flags were ordered at half-staff both in Alabama and in Arkansas, where he was born. A state legislator during Bryant’s last years, Alabama grad Finis St. John III, had sponsored a bill to waive the mandatory retirement age of 70 for Bryant because “it is right for him in the South, in Alabama. People down here take their football very, very seriously, and so did Bryant.”

And so does Nick Saban. On Nov. 10, two days after the Presidential election, the current Bama coach admitted to reporters that he “didn’t even know [the election] was happening. We’re focused on other things here.”

Juxtapose that to John McVay who, during his tenure as University of Dayton coach, made a point of taking his players to see Niagara Falls before a road game in Buffalo. “It was part of their education,” he told me. “Let them see things. Now, I don’t want to say we were having a bad year,” he added with a twinkle in his eye, “but damned if they didn’t turn off the falls that day.”

In fact, McVay had few bad years. His first head coaching job in the pros was with the Memphis Grizzles of the short-lived World Football League, winning 17 of 20 games their debut season and sitting 7-4 when the WFL collapsed the next year.

After his brief tour with the Giants, he left coaching for a front-office job with the San Francisco 49ers, where for 17 years he collaborated with head coach Bill Walsh in operating one of the most successful reigns in NFL history, including five Super Bowl titles and the NFL’s executive-of-the-year honor in 1989.

Not that many people noticed. The Sports on Earth web site last year called McVay the “silent architect of the 49ers dynasty.”

So he doesn’t have a statue like Bear Bryant. McVay believed that “football can be fun.” He was known for shaking every player’s hand after every game, win or lose. He saw the wisdom of his one-time boss at Michigan State, Duffy Daugherty, that a team always can use a little luck. “And Duffy used to say, ‘It’s bad luck to be behind at the end of a game.’”

But not the only thing.

The (hackneyed) Gatorade bath

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Football bowl season again has saturated us with sport’s most absurd cliché, the Gatorade bath for victorious coaches. In the past three weeks, players ceremoniously have dumped tubs of icy liquid on the heads of virtually every winning mentor at the conclusion of the 42 post-season bowls—New Mexico’s Bob Davie, Old Dominion’s Bobby Wilder, Wake Forest’s Dave Clawson, Oklahoma State’s Mike Gundy, South Florida’s Charlie Strong, Air Force’s Troy Calhoun, and on and on—in this stale choreography that is well past its expiration date.

It really is a trite ritual, with not an ounce of imagination or originality. It is the ultimate copy-cat routine, whose practitioners surely don’t realize that it had its roots in avenging the demanding coach, rather than honoring him.

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, the seventh week of the 1985 NFL season:

The New York Giants, after consecutive losses, were 3-3 and preparing to play division rival Washington. Third-year Giants coach Bill Parcells, known for his sarcastic motivational tactics, was “trying all week to light a fire under [nose tackle] Jim Burt,” according to his Giants teammate then, linebacker Harry Carson, “by hinting that Washington center Jeff Bostic might be too quick and too strong for Burt.

“So Burt does a great job all game long and we win [17-3],” Carson recalled years later, “and Jim comes over to me and says, ‘Let’s get Parcells. Let’s get that [blankety-blank] with the Gatorade.’ When Parcells took his headphones off, we drenched him. It was Jim Burt’s concept.”

That appeared to be the end of such an impolite thing. Until the second game of the next season, when the Giants rose up to smite the San Diego Chargers after an opening-game loss to Dallas. Carson considered how Parcells was “very superstitious; if you do something one week and you win, you continue to do that.”

So he revived the Gatorade bath and continued it through the 1986 season. By the time the Giants had won the Super Bowl, TV’s most visible football commentator, John Madden, had begun to draw diagrams of the Gatorade stunt as if it were a key third-down play. At one point, Carson borrowed a security guard’s overcoat to allow him to sneak up on Parcells with the bucket—as if, by then, Parcells didn’t know what was coming.

In his 1987 “autobiography”—one of those quick-turnaround, as-told-to tomes by a sudden celebrity—Parcells related his conclusion that “those showers turned out to be symbolic” of players demonstrating that the coach was “one of them” in their triumphs.

Of course, the whole business—still prominent in televised coverage and game highlights—was a windfall for Gatorade, even if the dunking regularly was done with plain water. A Gatorade spokesman once told me that “you really couldn’t plan to market something as well as the dunk has for us, because it highlights our presence on the sidelines, that we stand for fueling athletic performance in the pursuit of victory.”

He also admitted that, “while we loved the fact that it’s affiliated with victory celebrations, Gatorade is about drinking it, not throwing it. We want to promote its consumption.”

Anyway, here we are, more than 30 years since Jim Burt imposed angry retribution on his coach’s disagreeable tactics, being repeatedly subjected to a custom that not only is juvenile but possibly dangerous.

In December, 1990, veteran coach George Allen told The Associated Press that he had not being feeling well in the six weeks after his Long Beach State players gave him a Gatorade bath at the end of their football season. Days after that public comment, Allen, 72, died.

A subsequent autopsy established Allen’s cause of death as cardiac arrest, though both his attorney and his son said Allen’s death was totally unrelated to a bout with pneumonia which had had him feeling poorly those last few weeks. But a doctor I knew confirmed that there could be “some potential of risk in shocking the body” with an icy shower, because “extreme cold is a significant cardiac stressor.”

Maybe that’s why Kansas State’s players, after defeating Texas A&M in the Dec. 28 Texas Bowl, doused coach Bill Snyder with a bucket of confetti.

Snyder is 77. May he—and all of us—outlive the banality of the Gatorade bath.

NFL: Stealth and surveillance

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Once again, the NFL has evoked Mad Magazine’s goofy Cold War-inspired cartoon “Spy vs. Spy.” How else to consider the recent heavy-handed punishment of New York Giants head coach Ben McAdoo? When his league-approved encrypted communication device, which pipes his voice covertly into his quarterback’s helmet, malfunctioned, the dastardly McAdoo resorted to the use of a walkie-talkie.

McAdoo was hit with a $50,000 fine and the Giants assessed an additional $150,000 penalty, as well as a degradation in their 2017 draft order. All because the walkie-talkie, unlike the NFL’s authorized CoachComm system, did not have a cut-off switch to discontinue the coach’s play-calling instructions with 15 seconds remaining on the play clock.

That theoretically unfair advantage over the Dallas Cowboys, who still were operating with the cut-off switch, nevertheless led to a drive-ending interception against the Giants. Still, the league must be forever vigilant in assuring a level playing field! Paranoia reigns among coaches, whose inherent tendency toward micromanagement—as a function of self-preservation—pairs with advancing technology to emphasize stealth and surveillance.

For a sport that sees itself as a simulation of war, with its blitzes and bombs and field generals, clandestine strategizing is of great consequence. Thus the strict rules against the use of, say, Navajo code talkers or Enigma machines.

(Enigma machine)

It’s all secrecy vs. chicanery—with teams, for decades, bivouacking in huddles to guard again pilfered campaign intelligence, and more recently deploying sideline pantomimes and the helmet implant.

Football wasn’t far beyond its rugby roots when Washington D.C.’s Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, devised the first huddle in 1892 to shield Gallaudet’s hand signals from opponents, themselves often hearing impaired and therefore conversant in signing.

For a century afterwards, huddles worked wonderfully for all players because quarterbacks—without the coaches’ direct involvement—called plays out of earshot of the opposition. Then, in the 1950s, Cleveland Browns coach Paul Brown, not satisfied to leave strategy to his soldiers on the field, began using “messenger guards” to shuttle play calls into his quarterback.

There were tales that wise-guy Browns quarterback George Ratterman once told rookie guard Joe Skibinski to “go back and get another play” when he didn’t like the one delivered from the sideline. So Brown took the next step, recruiting two Ohio inventors to build the first radio receiver into Ratterman’s helmet. That was in 1956.

“My helmet acted as an antenna,” Ratterman told me in a telephone conversation a few years before his death in 2007. “And I had to turn a certain way to hear, so I’d be standing outside the huddle, revolving around, trying to tune in the signal.”

Worse, Ratterman said, in a game against Detroit, the Lions got wind of the experiment, “so the Lions kept saying to each other, ‘Kick the helmet. Kick the helmet.’ And I kept trying to explain to them that my head was inside the helmet,” Ratterman said.

(George Ratterman’s wired helmet–without his head)

“Then, in Chicago,” he recalled, “we played a benefit game at Soldier Field against the Bears and they were planning all kinds of sets and displays for a halftime show. All during the first half, I was picking up walkie-talkies of these workers, setting up the displays. I couldn’t hear Brown at all, but I kept hearing stuff like, ‘Hey, Joe, set that up over there.’”

Brown’s messengers soon were employed by other coaches and, in the 1970s, Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry began shuffling quarterbacks after every play, something neither Roger Staubach nor Craig Morton much appreciated. As play-calling came to be wrested almost completely away from players by coaches, the NFL moved to provide direct communication that could cut through stadium noise via CoachComm, which became standard equipment in 1994. (Quarterbacks wired to receive transmissions from the coach’s headset wear small green dots on their helmets, and a fan of secret agents might make an immediate connection to the CIA. In a 1998 novel, veteran journalist Jim Lehrer wrote that CIA snoops had purple dots affixed to their license plates as a special privilege to warn off police and tow trucks.)

There are, meanwhile, many instances of coaches relaying signals by using coded placards, and coaches’ crafty hand-over-the-mouth delivery of commands. Because spies are everywhere.

In his 2007 book, “The GM,” celebrated sportswriter Tom Callahan recounted a classic undercover scheme in a 1977 game between the Colts (then in Baltimore) and New England Patriots. With Baltimore trailing late in the game and stuck with a third-and-18 on its own 12-yard line, the Colts had Bobby Colbert—then head coach at hearing-impaired Gallaudet—read the lips of New England’s defensive coordinator as he called for “Double safety delayed blitz.”

Colbert relayed the message to the Baltimore bench, which passed it on to Colts quarterback Bert Jones, who changed the play and threw an 88-yard touchdown pass for the winning score.

And that is why the always wary NFL, with Ben McAdoo’s walkie-talkie misbehavior, ruled that up with this it would not put.

Streaking

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According to the U.S. Running Streak Association, I have just become an “experienced” runner. That is how the organization—to which I have not paid the annual $20 dues and therefore am not a member—classifies people who have run “at least one continuous mile within each calendar day under one’s own body power” for at least 10 years.

If I were a USRSA member, I would be ranked 156th in the country. Which isn’t bad as long as one doesn’t consider that the longest unbroken streak—as of Dec. 13, 2016—is 17,369 days, or 47.55 years. That belongs to a fellow named Jon Sutherland, listed on the USRSA Web site as 66 years old, a writer from West Hills, Calif., whose circadian habit was the subject of a 2015 CBS Evening News report.

I have crunched the numbers. For me to rise to No. 1 on the list (which is available at runeveryday.com), the 155 folks ahead of me would have to take a day off—not bloody likely—and I would have to persist in pounding the pavement every day until I am 107 years old. (Plus, I’d have to start paying that yearly $20 fee.)

But that’s not the goal, any more than brushing my teeth every morning for the next 37-plus years is. It’s just custom now.

It wasn’t until my mid-20s that I was moved to attempt occasional jogs, mostly after a colleague greeted me one day with, “Welcome to Fat City,” and partly because my newspaper assignments included coverage of elite track and field meets. I often was surrounded by people giddy about physical activity, just as the running boom began to spread beyond accomplished athletes to everyday citizens.

So I joined the program already in progress.

By the time I had lined up a series of interviews with 1972 Olympic marathon champion Frank Shorter at his Boulder, Colo., home in early ’76, I was fit enough—barely—to join Shorter on the first three miles of his 10-mile afternoon run, which had followed his 10-mile morning run. He generously (and drastically) slowed his pace, until I went into oxygen debt and watched him disappear over the horizon.

But the thing about running is that you trundle around for a while, begin to feel the mental and physical benefits and, before you know it, you’re hooked.

“It is an addiction,” 2004 Olympic marathon silver medalist Meb Keflezighi told me recently. “If you miss a day or get injured—elite athletes get it, others get it—you don’t feel good.” Mary Wittenberg, who was race director of the New York City Marathon for 10 years, argued that running “is not a sport you dabble in. The more you do it, the easier it gets.”

(Finishing the 1978 Long Island Marathon, with Pete Alfano)

My two marathons are now decades in the past, and I no longer am interested in knowing how fast I’m going. (More accurately, how slow.) But, somehow, the two or four days off per month, through some 30 years of loping and rambling and trotting, disappeared as well. I went for a leisurely 5-mile run on Dec. 13, 2006 and haven’t missed a day since, putting me in the company of those listed by the USRSA. There are dietitians, teachers, attorneys, salespeople, bankers, coaches, landscapers, pastors, photographers, journalists, nurses, engineers, accountants, concert pianists…all manner of humans.

And all, apparently, are carriers of what Shorter has called “the disease of running,” which he once described as a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

“Oh, yeh, you’re OCD,” Shorter confirmed to me during a chat in 2012. “You’re just channeling it. I think some people are born with a need to move and a need to exercise. And it doesn’t go away. So why fight it? You’re lucky.”

One of the New York City Marathon’s marketing pitches was its Run for Life “manifesto,” calling on all citizens to “run for the rush, run to be strong, run off dessert, run to like yourself better in the morning, run to keep your thighs from rubbing together, run because endorphins are better than Botox, run to sweat away your sins, run so bullies can never catch you, run with your thoughts, run your troubles the hell out of town…”

A morning ramble gets the show on the road. It guarantees that something has been accomplished that day. It makes the breakfast Cheerios taste better. Even if, at 3,654 consecutive days, I still am 196 days short of my wife’s daily streak of brisk walks (which are fast approaching my running pace), I feel as if I’m getting somewhere.

The chess crowd went wild!

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magnus

Action photos of last week’s World Chess Championship final were about what one would expect. Images of the two adversaries, deathly still, bent over the playing surface, frowning slightly, a hand to the face, hair a bit unkempt. Staring at little castles and horses and thimbles with crowns.

To all of us unschooled in the “combative nature” of the Sicilian Defence (as it has been branded by English chess grandmaster John Nunn), not to mention the wily possibilities of the Noah’s Ark Trap or the Morphy Defence’s ability to “put the question to the white bishop,” it is easy to miss the presence of tension and danger.

Maybe if there were BrainCams, affording a glimpse of the players’ cognitive wheels turning, lightbulbs suddenly flashing, adrenaline coursing. That could help educate the unintentionally apathetic among us.

To those in the know, there were gushing reports of the two-week combat, which so excited The Guardian’s Stephen Moss that he fantasized about a future of Norwegian champion Magnus Carlsen and Russian runner-up Sergey Karjakin “playing in stadiums filled to overflowing, while [English soccer superstar Wayne] Rooney and Co. play in local parks in front of a handful of aging spectators clutching plastic bags.”

Moss called Carlsen’s winning move “akin to the holy grail in chess—a queen sacrifice…bold, brave, brilliant….Something,” he wrote, “that makes you continue to believe in the sport even in the bad times.”

There are folks who contend that chess isn’t a sport in the first place and, based on my half-century of experience as a sports journalist, I hold that belief to be reasonable—and no insult to chess players or chess fans. If a sport requires physical exertion—as well as skill, competition, defense and strategy—chess appears to fall into the category of games.

More to the point, possibly, is a discussion of whether the sound minds of chess stars ever can vie for the kind of widespread spectator passion stirred by the sound bodies in football, baseball, basketball, soccer and so on. (This may parallel Masterpiece Theater’s inability to match the ratings of shows with exploding aliens and heavy artillery and, furthermore, could be evidence that we are not a profound people.)

It is a fact that the closest chess came to water cooler discussion and barstool arguments was in 1972, when impetuous, egocentric American Bobby Fischer tangled with the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland. The Cold War implications of that duel weren’t nearly as arresting as the weird circus Fischer created by demanding a larger prize pool, walking away from a second game rather than continue with the presence of TV cameras and finally, that forfeit loss behind him, conjuring his first victory in a small backstage room and forcing organizers to ditch cameras in the main stage for the rest of the tournament.

1972

The cloak-and-dagger maneuvers fueled surprising attention to coverage on public television, first aired in New York but soon spread to national outlets. Because there were no pictures from Iceland, the TV show consisted of updates by a chess amateur, Shelby Lyman, mostly filibustering from a bare-bones studio in Albany, N.Y.

Lyman, a Harvard-educated sociology teacher, went about occupying the mostly dead time—long stretches of absolute inaction while Fischer and Spassky pondered their next moves—by interviewing chess experts. Eventually, a little bell would ring, stirring Lyman to announce, “We have a move!” and to hustle to a huge chess board behind him to illustrate the latest play.

Against all odds, Lyman—who kept various chess pieces in his pockets to be ready to demonstrate the match progress—became an instant sensation, proclaimed the Julia Child of Chess, even compared to flamboyant football and boxing commentator Howard Cosell. As Fischer set about his comeback from an 0-2 game deficit to win Games 3, 5, 6, 8 and 10, there were reports of bartenders being asked to switch their TVs from Mets games to the chess, as an aid to the clientele’s friendly wagering; of the flagship station pressured into pre-empting “Sesame Street” to expand its chess show; of public preference for Lyman’s play-by-play over coverage of the Democratic National Convention.

Still, it was chess. My friend Dave D’Alessandro, for years a crack sports journalist before going on to bigger things as a member of the Newark Star-Ledger editorial board, parodied those oddball Fischer-Spassky dispatches by emailing me this sendup of the Shelby Lyman narration:

“We’re talking with grandmaster Max Euwe, live on the phone from Reykjavik. Doctor, what do you think of the match so far?”

“Eh, I think they oughta move the horses and ashtrays more.”

pieces

ash

The thing is, Dave happens to know what a Nimzo Indian Defence is. And probably a fianchetto, too. And I can’t tell a knight from a rook, wallowing in ignorance while the New York Times quoted chess experts who declared the Carlsen-Karjakin confrontation of wits “one of the most exciting championship matches in history,” with Carlsen “applying unrelenting pressure” on Karjakin and Karjakin, in turn, showing a “remarkable ability to eke out draws [and] defending brilliantly….

“The energy of the crowd [at the Manhattan competition site] at moments was unmistakable,” the Times reported, “if never exactly at the level of Alabama versus Clemson.”

Magnus Carlsen was referred to as “The Mozart of Chess.” Slate’s headline on its match coverage judged Carlsen’s title-clinching play “one of the most beautiful, stunning moves in the history of the World Chess Championship….a beautiful coda” after Karjakin had “slipped from his opponent’s grasp repeatedly….”

Gladiatorial stuff, no? While Carlsen stroked his chin, And Karjakin rubbed his forehead.

2016

Hooray for brain surgeons

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This December 3rd is my 13th anniversary of still being here. I can explain with the essay below, which I wrote for the American Academy of Neurology trade magazine Neurology Today in 2005 (when a former Newsday colleague was an editor there) about my Dec. 3, 2003 brain surgery.

neuroma

Old but good advice: Listen to your body. And should you become aware that you are beginning to hear, in only one ear, whatever messages are available, pay attention. It could be telling you that an acoustic neuroma has come into your life and that a translabyrinthine craniotomy is in your future.

Personal experience: I was going deaf in one ear. I had a brain tumor. It was benign. Didn’t feel a thing during eight hours of surgery. Everything is fine.

But here’s the cautionary tale: An earlier diagnosis, or a bit more urgency when occasional vertigo cropped up five years earlier and when hearing started to dim in the left ear, might have meant dealing with a smaller tumor. Which might have meant allowing surgeons to yank the thing out of my head without having stretched the No. 7 nerve so badly that it never bounced back.

Because the tumor turned out to be larger than suspected, the procedure—I love the medical term, “translabyrinthine craniotomy”—knocked out the use of the No. 7 nerve, which controls the left side of the face. That partial facial paralysis necessitated two more operations—a quick-hit 45-minute job a month later to insert a tiny gold weight in my left eyelid, allowing me to close the eye and then, a year later, a five-hour nerve-replacement deal restoring muscle tone to the left side of my face and now permitting me the hint of a grin. The nerve-replacement operation was coupled with minimal plastic surgery (just pulling up the skin a dab on that side, which I describe as a half-assed facelift) and has pretty much straightened the line of my mouth.

Bottom line: Life is good. I quickly returned to work as a newspaper reporter and, almost as quickly, got back into a normal daily routine which includes driving, mowing the lawn, taking out the garbage, and morning runs at a modest speed. I sometimes am aware of a low-grade dizziness. No big deal. I can’t hear out of my left ear. No big deal.

I was out of work for three months following the craniotomy, but I never was in any pain whatsoever. And if someone wanted to see the scar from my brain surgery, I could show the 2½-inch mark near my bellybutton where surgeons harvested blubber to plug my head closed and keep my brain from leaking. This recalls the old George Burns-Gracie Allen joke about her brother’s appendectomy, in which George noticed a scar near the brother’s neck and Gracie explained that he was “ticklish down there so they had to go in” near his tonsils. Why show people the 2-inch crescent-shaped cut behind my ear, which I can’t see anyway, when instead I could reveal my “brain surgery scar” on my abdomen?

Anyway, here is some 20/20 hindsight: Though I did check out original symptoms of dizziness in the spring of 1999, a series of doctors couldn’t find anything untoward and, for some reason, never did an MRI. I soon noticed diminished hearing in my left ear but, again, standard hearing tests—no MRI—led to the wishy-washy diagnosis that I merely was getting older (mid-50s then).

It wasn’t until late 2003, after complaints that my tin ear was becoming more annoying, that my wife insisted I see another primary care physician, who cited asymmetrical hearing loss as a red flag and immediately put me onto a better ear specialist, who immediately ordered an MRI, which immediately spied the tumor.

Two specialists’ opinions and three weeks later, a team of five surgeons at New York-Presbyterian Hospital were doing their rocket science inside my head. It turned out that the tumor, which doctors said could have been 10 to 15 years old, was starting to press on my brainstem. In retrospect, that was the scary part, because when the brainstem goes, so does the patient.

I thought of an old country-music lyric: “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” But listen: If something about your body doesn’t sound right, make sure the medics keep looking for the cause. I’d rather have a translabyrinthine craniotomy than a neuroma coma.

 

Fidel was everywhere

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Cuban president Fidel Castro (C) participates in the "wave" while watching the Pan American games women's basketball semi-final between Cuba and the United States of America, 10 August 1991, in the Latinoamericano stadium. Cuba won 86-81.

I remember Fidel as something of a shopping mall Santa Claus, showing up everywhere that our small band of American reporters went while covering the 1991 Pan American Games in Cuba. It was as if there was more than one Fidel, like Mickey Mouse at Disney World, materializing at the basketball arena, the track stadium, the water polo pool, the softball field. Often on the same day.

At a Cuba vs. U.S. women’s basketball game, Fidel joined the crowd in doing the wave. He posed for pictures with medal winners of multiple sports. He so insinuated himself into the operation, personally hanging medals around winners’ necks—especially Cuban winners, but others, too—that U.S. sports officials began to grumble that he was violating Olympic and Pan Am protocol.

rowing

Technically, as head of state of the Pan Am host nation, his only involvement was to officially open the games with a brief, scripted declaration, then become a mere spectator. But he played all the parts in the production.

At one point during the Games, there were rumors that he had suffered a heart attack, gossip immediately put to rest when he showed up at the Pan Am bowling lanes. We Yanks constantly were on the lookout at public gatherings for the familiar bearded presence, so easy to spot in his green fatigues (the emperor’s old clothes), an exercise we likened to a weird game of “Where’s Waldo?”

waterpolo

We were just sports journalists, but what was eminently clear then, as in the reports in the days since Fidel’s death at 90, was how omnipresent he was in all Cubans’ lives. In the wake of his 1959 revolution, he had engendered fierce loyalty among the public for bringing education and health care to the lowest classes, yet he eventually became widely feared for restrictions—often brutal—on speech and assembly, and hated by Cuban exiles for his strong-arm nationalization of private enterprise.

At the time of the ’91 Pan Am Games, Cuba had just lost its most dependable sugar daddy with the 1989 collapse of the Soviet Union, and Fidel’s economic policies were failing most citizens. Yet he toured the Games in a caravan of Mercedes limousines, while most of the populace lived in ramshackle buildings and had to stand in line for a daily ration of two loaves of bread, no bigger than baseballs, as well as each family’s once-in-every-nine-days schedule to obtain a chicken. So much for Fidel’s defiant maxim of “Socialism or Death.”

Ironies were everywhere. Cuban athletes delivered to us the party line that representing their country, and by extension Fidel’s revolution, in amateur competition was far preferable to lucrative professional careers abroad. Yet they acknowledged that sports champions received well above the average Cuban’s income, were afforded free cars and free apartments and never had to wait in bread lines. (This, even as there were persistent reports of Cuban jocks defecting in search of U.S. contracts.)

Too, there was obvious tourist apartheid. A colleague and I visited Veradero Beach, two hours east of Havana, a playground for rich capitalists on holiday from Europe and Canada (no regular Cubans allowed), a sort of Hilton Head resort smack in the middle of epidemic poverty. We drove there in a rented new Nissan, available to foreign visitors while Cubans were stuck with decaying pre-revolution American cars or rickety little Russian Ladas.

Then there was the incongruity of the Pan Am shooting competition in Cotorro, an isolated piece of land just east of Havana, where a small band of U.S. military personnel were in full evidence. They had guns. And they didn’t miss.

It was a thoroughly apolitical situation, of course—members of the Marines or U.S. police forces who competed on the American team as amateur target-practice elites. No counter revolution or anything like that was going on. But it was such an unlikely scene, given Fidel’s rigid rejection of U.S. imperialists. The Yank sharpshooters were roundly cheered by Cuban spectators as they blazed away at flying clay pigeons and stationary targets.

A 33-year-old Air Force captain named Bill Roy set a world record for accuracy, then took pains to argue that it was “an opportunity to be anything but an Ugly American.” He said his real job was as an English professor at the Air Force Academy, “teaching Beowulf and his search for fame” to academy freshman. Still, You Know Who was in everybody’s thoughts.

“Why isn’t Fidel here?” American shooting team member Roxanne Thompson wanted to know. “He’s a military guy.”

Back at our hotel in downtown Havana, the Habana Libre, I had been getting calls from an apparent government functionary, inviting me to share a drink. (His name was Dmitry or Sergei or Yuri, some Russian name that was not unusual for a Cuban after all those years of USSR relationships.) I kept putting him off with the excuse—based on fact—that I had a busy, unpredictable schedule.

Finally, he corralled me in the hotel lobby. He said he just wanted to talk about what I thought of Cuba and Cubans and the Games, though fellow U.S. reporters said they suspected he wanted to monitor—or somehow already was monitoring—whether I was reporting on issues beyond mere sport.

I was, of course. A few details about how Cubans could be fined, and possibly arrested, for fraternizing with foreigners. About the ghost-town aspects of Havana shops that were available to citizens, in contrast to the stylish restaurants and bars frequented by visitors. About a day trip to the Bay of Pigs, site of the ill-conceived 1961 U.S. attempt to overthrow Fidel with a brigade of Cuban exiles, and Fidel’s emergence from that victory as a charismatic leader. About a brief pass through Santiago de Cuba, where Fidel’s first attempt at a revolution in 1953, against president Fulgencio Batista—believed by many Cubans to be a tool of the U.S.-based mafia—had failed, leaving bullet holes in the walls of the Moncada Barracks that still were visible.

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Nothing came of Dmitry’s (or Yuri’s) interest in my work, though our brief chat was one more reminder of the ubiquitous Fidel.

During that 1991 assignment, some of us wondered if, without Fidel, Cuba would evolve away from the dictator’s half-century of sulfurous anti-U.S. rule and an intolerance of homegrown dissent. Or would Cuba return to the Batista days, with a small upper echelon of super-wealthy landowners and affluent tourists, again consigning the majority of Cubans to be an underpaid and under-educated servant class.

Back then, it was hard to see that he ever would be out of the picture.