Author Archives: johnfjeansonne@gmail.com

About johnfjeansonne@gmail.com

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

Believing is seeing

Leave a reply

This is a full-throated tribute to eyeglasses. My first pair, when I was a freshman in high school, did wonders for my jump shot. Now, just a few years on, I offer a big shout out to Benjamin Franklin, the visionary whose keen insight led to the invention of—among other things—bifocal spectacles.

The familiar story is that Ol’ Ben, as he aged and experienced deteriorating eyesight, found he couldn’t focus on objects right in front of his face without constantly having to alternate spectacles—one pair for distance, the other for reading. Same thing happened to me just recently, after undergoing cataract surgery in each eye.

The surgeries were a rollicking success. Colors are dramatically more vibrant, the surrounding world somehow more alive. No complaints here whatsoever. Except there was a period of several weeks after those procedures—until I could get a new bifocal prescription to offset the altered visual acuity brought on by the operations—that I was back in Franklin’s early days of the 1780s, able to see fairly well at a distance but in dire need of a reading lens.

More to the point, spoiled by years of having taken bifocals for granted, my frustration with a one-pair-on, one-pair off shuttle of glasses had me feeling foiled again and again. Franklin—this was a guy who created the lightning rod, the Franklin Stove, the odometer, the position of postmaster to develop efficient mail delivery routes in his city of Philadelphia, swim fins (swim fins!)—solved the issue with his “double spectacles” innovation: Cut in half the lenses from two different pairs of glasses, combine them in a single frame—top half to see far-away objects, bottom half for up-close viewing. Voila!

I have read that, around the turn of the 20th Century, the monocle—a single-lens eyeglass which required the wearer’s eyebrow and cheek muscles to hold it in place—had become not only a significant aid for reading but also, somehow, was widely considered a decorative fashion accessory. But the monocle soon got the side eye from enforcers of popular trends in personal adornment. Or maybe folks’ eyebrow and cheek muscles needed a rest.

So. Herein a new appreciation for Franklin—that grand American statesman, author—and for one of the electrifying discoveries attributed to him.

It should be noted that I never was put off by the long-ago youngsters’ schoolyard insult of “four eyes,” a form of bullying all glasses-wearers as “outsiders.” The sticks-and-stones-will-break-my-bones retort was pretty effective. And, hey: Clark Kent wore glasses. As a “disguise,” yes, and one intended to render him a bit of a meek nerd, but we all knew he was Superman. (There is a website for Banton Frameworks, a United Kingdom-based designer of eyeglass frames, that chronicles the various spectacle styles of all the actors who have played Clark Kent/Superman in the movies and on television. My frames are probably closest to what the actor George Reeves wore in the old 1950s Superman TV series. Maybe a bit out of vogue….)

Listen: Lots of famous people are distinguished by their choice of eyewear: John Lennon, Harry Potter, Elton John, Gandhi, Buddy Holly. Not quite as many women come to mind, which conjures the long-out-of-date line from Dorothy Parker’s 1926 poem “News Item:” “Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses.” (The 1970s song “Bette Davis Eyes” is not about her glasses.)

Anyway. Happy to experience how various eyesight problems can be dealt with, and more than glad to acknowledge Ben Franklin’s contribution. A man who figuratively could read a room, see the forest and the trees.

Over-inflated?

Leave a reply

So a Tom Brady statue was unveiled last month outside the New England Patriots football stadium, the old quarterback depicted with a right arm raised in triumph. The thing weighs 12,300 pounds and stands 17 feet tall, but appears a bit out-of-proportion; the head is too small, floating above all that padding.

The obvious intent was to glorify the seven-time Super Bowl champion, so it might have been an opportunity to embody a hackneyed modern sports cliché by sculpting Brady’s little noggin on the body of a goat. Anyway the effigy, which is a poor man’s Michelangelo’s David with clothes, feels excessively worshipful of a fellow whose most significant impact on humanity was throwing a football—accurately, yes, but just a football—and therefore maybe a tad over the top.

Not that such a rite is unusual. There are massive bronze renditions of accomplished jocks in abundance—from baseball’s Babe Ruth to golf’s Tiger Woods, boxing’s Oscar de la Hoya to football’s Johnny Unitas, soccer’s Diego Maradona to hockey’s Wayne Gretzky, as well as sculptures of coaches and sports executives—most having been unveiled while the actual human being was still alive.

But the argument here is that such forms of adoration are better reserved for long-dead figures—therefore not feeding on the objects’ self-importance, as if they are being canonized, somehow representing a purity of virtue impossible for any human being to live up to.

Penn State’s Joe Paterno had been feted for his wildly successful football coaching record with a bronze statue on campus in 2001—only to have it ignominiously removed and hidden away 11 years later. It was judged to have a become a “source of division and an obstacle to healing” after Paterno was found to have covered up allegations of child sexual abuse by his veteran assistant coach. Possibly if the school had waited until Paterno’s complete history was available, and he was safely in his grave, before considering affording him such an honor.

A recent essay by Sally Jenkins in The Atlantic pondered a better use of sports-related sculptures—as representations of something beyond the individual’s specific accomplishments on the playing field. First of all, she noted, “Of all the public indignities great athletes are subjected to, from the meme to the boo to the hurled bottle, undoubtedly the worst is the bad statue. A bronze figure in a stadium plaza is so much more permanent than an insult, and the irony is that a Dwyane Wade or a Michael Jordan has to accept the thing as a compliment. The statue’s intent is to immortalize. Instead, it kills its subject dead.”

It is a common slur, after all, to describe any athlete’s resemblance to a statue, thereby invoking the image of being frozen-in-place while action swirls around him or her.

Jenkins argues that “only one truly great bronze rendering of a renowned athlete [that was] produced in recent decades is the abstract” of tennis champion Arthur Ashe at New York City’s National Tennis Center—which “surges from the earth like a lightning bolt striking upward instead of down. The sculpture, unveiled by the artist Eric Fischl in 2000 and titled Soul in Flight, is worth pausing to look at, for its instructive power and its indictment of the ponderous slabs of metallurgical debris that litter other stadiums and arenas.”

That statue isn’t really a rendering of Ashe, and is not so much lionizing his reign among jocks as a visual of wider possibilities. He was the rare athletic champion who actually connected with the real world—an activist against South African apartheid, a public face in the fight against HIV (which he had contracted through a blood transfusion after a second heart attack), an advocate for children’s education, a published historian.

There is, by the way, a statue in Richmond, Va., that captures a real-life image of Ashe, holding a tennis racket in one hand—but with a message beyond sports. Ashe is surrounded by children, with a stack of books in his other hand. It’s another tableau of wider possibilities.

Meanwhile, there happens to be a rare memorial willing to immortalize a star athlete’s infamous moment. In 2012, six years after French soccer hero Zinedine Zidane was ejected from the World Cup final for headbutting an Italian opponent, that confrontation was cast in bronze and placed in Paris. Zidane had been ejected from the game for his misdeed and France lost the match. The statue was christened “Coup de tete”—“Headbutt.”

Its sculptor, Algerian-born French artist Adel Abdessemed, said the aim of his work was to promote conversations about “stress on athletes…and the importance of dealing with issues of mental health.” Real-life stuff.

What if—in the spirit of sports’ (and human) imperfection, of the undeniable temptations to win-at-all-costs—the new Tom Brady statue had showed, in his upraised hand, an air-deficient football, recalling the January 2015 AFC Championship controversy over allegations that Brady had ordered deliberate removal of air from game footballs to aid his passing in New England’s victory over Indianapolis? Brady wound up being suspended for the first four games of the following season and his team was fined $1 million and forced to forfeit two 2016 draft picks. That’s part of his record, too.

They could call the piece “Uninflated.”

A different sort of tennis backhand

Leave a reply

The recent U.S. Open tennis dust-up between American Taylor Townsend and Latvia’s Jelena Ostapenko—kicked up by Ostapenko over a virtually meaningless gesture that somehow has become fairly common in the sport—begs for the insight of the late Bud Collins.

For more than a half-century before his death at 86 nine years ago, Collins was tennis’ premier historian and conscience, his informative writing and commentary brightening newspaper, magazine and television accounts. He employed humor based on his feeling that “sports wasn’t the end of the world.”

He conjured wonderful nicknames for players, mixed his even-handed and sometimes critical—but never mean—reporting with lighthearted irreverence and sly puns. On one occasion, after an Israeli tennis pro named Shlomo Glickstein executed a winning shot and NBC-TV immediately followed it with a replay, Collins alerted viewers: “Here’s Schlomo in Slow-Mo.”

Collins’ powers of observation included citing the otherwise unnoticed bottle of liquid tucked in the umpire’s chair at Wimbledon, ostensibly to refresh any player in need. In all his years at the tournament, Bud confided, no player had ever touched the stuff.

Bud was known by one and all, thoroughly recognizable with his bald head, big smile, sweater thrown jauntily over his shoulders and pants with patterns so loud they could speak for themselves. A colleague among us sports journalists, Bill Glauber of the Baltimore Sun, once referred to him as “the human press credential,” able to move as freely around those crowded, chaotic competition venues as a Rod Laver or Billie Jean King.

So: What might Bud have said about the Townsend-Ostapenko fracas, in which Ostapenko accused Townsend of failing to acknowledge a lucky bounce during a straight-sets second-round victory? The transgression in question was the routine by a player, benefitting from a so-called net-cord winner—when his or her ball ticks the top of the net and falls, unplayable, to the opponent’s side of the court—offering a (hardly sincere) apologetic gesture of a raised hand or raised racket to the point’s victim.

It was Townsend skipping that little nicety that apparently set off Ostapenko—that and what Ostapenko characterized as Townsend rudely starting their pre-match warmup at the net rather than the baseline. After the match, Ostapenko shook a finger at Townsend and accused her of having “no class” and “no education.”

(Several of her fellow pros noted Ostapenko’s documented history of questionable gamesmanship. In the Townsend match, she appeared to be messing with Townsend’s concentration by taking a lengthy bathroom break, begging a timeout after a lost game and challenging an electronic line call. Plus, there were the condescending optics of Ostapenko, a white Latvian, publicly scolding Townsend, who is Black, about “class” and “education.”)

All this as if Townsend, or anyone else, could be capable of engineering a shot that would catch just enough of the net cord to stop, think, then drop barely into Ostapenko’s side of the court.

That’s the sort of thing Bud Collins surely would have used to put the situation in perspective, as well as adding some real education about the sport and its history. Bud had published, in 1980, a 665-page “Modern Encyclopedia of Tennis,” and in that tome—along with exhaustive accounts of the sport’s notable players and matches—is a detailed glossary of the sport’s rules and all manner of “tennis lingo.” There are basic definitions, everything from “ace” to “Wimbledon,” including what a “net cord” is.

Better, and more up Bud’s alley, is the description of the no-longer extant “net judge”—“An official,” the encyclopedia clarified, “seated at one end of the net, usually below the umpire’s chair, to detect ‘lets’ on serve. During the serve, he rests one hand on the net cord to feel whether the ball hits the top of the net. If it does, he calls ‘Net!’ and the serve is replayed as a ‘let’ if the ball lands in the proper court.”

Bud always called that official “Fingers Fortescue,” though there clearly were different people, men and women, on duty at different events. Alas, technology since has eliminated the job and, anyway, the Ostapenko complaint wouldn’t involve the devoted work of “Fingers” because a ball catching the net already in play—as opposed to one on a serve—remains in play.

Furthermore, Ostapenko’s claim that “there are some rules in tennis which most of the players follow and it was [the] first time ever that this happened to me on tour” clearly mischaracterized previous acts of what is, at most, merely a courtesy. There certainly is no rule requiring the bit of politeness, which hardly is a real apology for winning a point—what former major tournament champion Svetlana Kuznetsov has called a “typical ‘Sorry; not sorry.’”

“Here’s the thing about tennis etiquette,” Aron Solomon posted on the Tennisuptodate website. “It’s not the Magna Carta. There’s no line in the rulebook requiring you to murmur ‘sorry’ after a net-cord dribbler….What is in the rulebook—and what the sport actually has to enforce—is the simple idea that you can’t verbally abuse your opponent.”

In the end, Ostapenko issued what she described as an apology for her outburst, pleading that “English is not my native language, so when I said ‘education’ I was speaking only about what I believe as tennis etiquette….”

Now that is a “Sorry, not sorry.” And Bud Collins would have added a pertinent, probably humorous anecdote. And possibly a quote from Fingers Fortescue.

Streetwise

Leave a reply

One way to navigate London roads—those zigzagging, mostly narrow paths often without their names posted at intersections; the one ways, the dead ends, the traffic circles—is to follow a 5-year-old grandson on his bike from his school to the local playground and then to his home. That works quite well. But that covers only about 6 miles, and London has 70,000 streets—just a few of them straight—that traverse roughly 9,200 miles.

There is a website, nextvacay.com, that judges London to be the second most difficult city of negotiable roadways in the world—only No. 2? With Toronto first?—and there is no argument here.

This is not to disparage the United Kingdom’s capital. London is a swell place, diverse and alive. Aside from the abundance of must-see attractions, there are parks and playgrounds in abundance; everywhere are runners, bicyclists, children, dogs. Outdoor marketplaces and pubs bustle.

There is the possibility of a night at the theatre—equal to New York City’s Broadway fare—a day at one of many museums or an uplifting classical music concert at St. Martin-in-the-Fields. A lunch of fish-and-chips. Such touristy activities as walking the zebra crossing on Abbey Road. Going to the Tower of London. Checking out Big Ben. In early summer, there are afternoons at the pub watching Wimbledon tennis on outdoor big-screen televisions in a garden setting.

But, the truth is, you wouldn’t want to drive in London. (I did—many, many years ago—but I learned my lesson.) To get around, those familiar red double-decker buses are handy and efficient—if you know the number of the bus to board for your destination. The Tube or Underground—in existence since 1863, with 11 lines that cover 250 miles in 32 boroughs—is really nifty, though sometimes one of the 272 stations is a healthy walk away.

Walking, in fact, is a great option. But, even on foot, it’s easy to lose one’s sense of direction. Unlike, say, New York’s central borough of Manhattan, London is not laid out on an easily navigable grid. London’s streets are wormy; they don’t go North/South and East/West. And they’re quite narrow because they existed long before automobiles did. A bus ride in London—especially viewed from the upper deck—is an eye-roller of an adventure, providing an impressive, and sometimes unnerving, insight into the need for precise skills required with motorized traffic in confined spaces.

I have now been to London 27 times. On vacations, on assignments as a Newsday reporter, back when our daughter chose London for her NYU semester abroad, and mostly in recent years since she settled there with her Scottish-born husband and their young son. And I’m still not especially confident that, on my own, I could find my way from Paddington Station to Regent’s Park. Or between any other pair of sites.

I certainly don’t have, and only recently have read about, The Knowledge, derived only in a severely demanding three-year-long process put to prospective London taxi drivers, whereby they successfully commit to memory every street, address and landmark in the city. Test-takers have been asked to name the whereabouts of flower stands, laundromats, commemorative plaques.

The London street map has been described as “a mess….a preposterously complex tangle of veins and capillaries, the cardiovascular system of a monster….’’ Peter Ackroyd, author of the 800-page “London; the Biography,” has written that Londoners themselves are “a population lost in [their] own city.”

According to a New York Times report, the trial a London cabbie endures to gain The Knowledge “has been called the hardest test, of any kind, in the world. Its rigors have been likened to those required to earn a degree in law or medicine.” One fellow claimed to have logged more than 50,000 miles on a motorbike and on foot to win his cabbie’s badge.

There was a cognitive neuroscientist who studied the human hippocampus, an engine of memory deep in the brain, and found that the hippocampus in London cabbies would grow and be strengthened like a muscle. After that study was publicized, a London cabbie named David Cohen told the BBC, “I never noticed part of my brain growing. It makes you wonder what happened to the rest of it.”

This may be small-minded: I’ll just follow that young lad on his bike and enjoy the show.

When is running no longer age-appropriate?

Leave a reply

 

I know a 78-year-old man whose thoughts during his morning runs sometimes include wondering how much longer he’ll be capable of sustaining that exercise routine. Not surprisingly, a form of leg oldsheimers is setting in as 80 approaches. Power walkers often pass him by. Some things just don’t get better with experience.

But a habit is a habit. And what doesn’t kill a person is meant to make him stronger, no?

OK, about running and death: In the early days of the running boom, when it became clear that ordinary people could safety attempt long distances on foot, a fellow named Jim Fixx died of a heart attack in the midst of his daily jog.

The irony was that Fixx had been something of a jogging/running drum major. In 1977, he had published a best-selling book, The Complete Book of Running, and thereby was a key missionary in the American fitness revolution. His own running regimen had transformed him from an overweight 214-pound, two-pack-a-day smoker to a healthy, happy dude.

But it turned out that his earlier habits and genetic predisposition did him in. At just 52.

In 2007, during the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials, 28-year-old Ryan Shay—among the nation’s elite runners with a handful of national titles to his name—collapsed and died just 5 ½ miles into that race. Autopsy results were inconclusive, but Shay reportedly had a lurking pre-existing condition, an enlarged heart.

Amby Burfoot, a former Boston Marathon champion, argued at the time that “marathoning is remarkably not dangerous. I’m biased but, to me, obesity is a much greater health crisis than marathoning.” Burfoot still runs daily. He’s 78, too.

That other 78-year-old, the one cited at the top of this discourse—he once ran a couple of marathons but never was close to championship material—had been informed two decades earlier by a just-widowed neighbor that his wife used to worry that the guy passing on his daily jaunt was going to kill himself. A twist of fate, that.

And, for him, there have been interrupting, albeit unrelated, health issues along the way. Thyroid surgery. Brain surgery. Valve-replacement surgery. Some potential skin-cancer issues. Still, the daily perambulations continue to appeal. Hard to say exactly why. And people who do this sort of thing typically are not of an evangelical bent.

The uninitiated tend to see runners as either inspirational or, more likely, crazy, and it’s best to leave it at that. But the number of Americans who regularly participate is reportedly around 50 million—whether casually or competitively, solo or in a group, and in any of those forms the practice is widely considered an ideal means of releasing stress and maintaining fitness.

Beginning in the 1970s, running began spreading like a communicable disease; the bug was caught by hundreds, then thousands, of ordinary folks—including the 78-year-old geezer referenced above. Citizen road races and marathons sprang up, drawing increasing crowds, giving lie to the expression associated with a 1959 short story, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.

A primary influencer of the movement—a good word for it—was Frank Shorter, whose televised 1972 Olympic marathon victory began to spread what Shorter has benignly called a “disease.” (At 77, Shorter still has the virus.)

Now, consider Fauja Singh of India. At 89 years old, with a scraggy beard that reached his chest and attired in a yellow turban, Singh returned to his youthful passion of running and, over the following eight years, completed nine full marathons—26 miles, 385 yards—and, living in London, also bettered UK age-group records at 200, 400, 800 and 3,000 meters as well as the mile. Leading up to the 2012 London Olympics, he was among the torch-bearers of the Olympic flame. His last marathon came when the Turbaned Tornado was 100, making him the oldest known finisher at that distance in history.

Singh died earlier this month, at 114. But running didn’t kill him. He was on a walk in his native village of Pujab, hit by a car in a hit-and-run incident.

So tenure guarantees nothing. But that man I know intends to persist with his daily excursions on foot.

Taunting Penalty?

Leave a reply

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sports purgatory

Leave a reply

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

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

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

Could a Wrexham thing happen in the United States?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marathon mama

Leave a reply

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not-so-brave New World

Leave a reply

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing about it will be on the level.

Five W’s and four legs of Journalism

Leave a reply

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    I’ve got the horse right here

    His name is Paul Revere

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

    Now the race is on

    And here comes Pride down the backstretch,

    Heartache’s goin’ to the inside,

    My Tears are holdin’ back,

    They’re tryin’ not to fall.

    My Heart’s out of the runnin’

    True Love’s scratched for another’s sake.

    The race is on and it looks like Heartache

    And the winner loses all.

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

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

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

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