Author Archives: johnfjeansonne@gmail.com

About johnfjeansonne@gmail.com

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

Fee-fi-fo-fum

Leave a reply

English vs. Spanish (Armada)

Things that were worth paying attention to in this month’s 2024 European soccer tournament:

—There was plenty of highly entertaining sports theatre, concluding with Spain’s championship victory over England that was conjured with a bare four minutes remaining in the title match.

—The riveting final result came after England’s repeated narrow escapes from early elimination in the tournament had helped ratchet up the drama. (Especially for me, watching a couple of those tense matches at my daughter’s home in London.)

—More than the competitive sparks, though, the whole exercise, as England coach Gareth Southgate noted, was as much a national incident as a sporting contest.

There were, leading up to the final, references to longstanding hostilities between the contestants, starting with last year’s women’s World Cup, when Spain defeated England. And reaching back as far as the mid-16th Century attempt by the Spanish Armada to invade England. (Spain lost that one.) Such historical allusions seem unavoidable before these big games, as when one English sportswriter previewed England’s 1966 World Cup final with a reminder to “Fret not, boys, if on the morrow we should lose to the Germans at our national game, for twice this century we have defeated them at theirs.”

There is a root-root-root-for-the-home-team vigor on steroids, most of it in good fun. Flag-waving, chanting crowds flocked to stadiums in Germany, the tournament’s host nation, as well as to pubs and watch parties in their home countries. A Spanish newspaper reported that 87 percent of the populace took in the final. Powerful examples of national identity were manifested through soccer.

That England fans were marching through Germany singing “Football’s Coming Home”—a decades-old ditty referencing the country’s status as the sport’s birthplace and its only international championship at the ‘66 World Cup—was ripe for interpretation by non-English supporters as English arrogance and entitlement. Even, perhaps, a reminder that the English empire had once been the largest in history, ruling over more than a quarter of the globe.

“As English fortunes have risen,” University of Limerick psychology professor Orla Muldoon wrote on the eve of the championship final, “so too has the sense that there are many among us who really want the winners to be Anybody But England.” Muldoon, acknowledging “a strong sense of national identity” based on “passionate support for national teams,” further argued for what she called “disidentification.”

“It’s not indifference,” she wrote, “but rather an active process [that] allows us to actively express out dissimilarity and dissatisfaction from those who support English football.” The point is for Europeans who happen to share the English language to reject any connection to stereotypical “lager louts and violent hooligans” who have been associated with English soccer, and a “sense that the reputation of the English abroad is poor.”

Meanwhile, another zeitgeisty situation with national identity—immigration—was at work during the championships. Spain’s breakout star was Lamine Yamal, still 16 years old when he scored the goal to put his team into the title game. He had become the youngest player to appear in the European championships, the youngest to score a goal and the youngest to play in the final, turning 17 the day before that match, in which he assisted on the first of Spain’s scores in the 2-1 victory over England.

He emerged, according to one dispatch, as “the young prince of Spain.” But he was born to parents who immigrated from Equatorial Guinea and Morocco and hailed from the Catalan city of Mataro—near Barcelona—which right-wing politicians had branded as one of country’s “multicultural shitholes,” according to a report in The Guardian. So when Yamal celebrated his decisive semifinal goal by using his fingers to spell out the post code of his hometown, a former Spanish equality minister took the occasion to declare that “it’s very important we remind people who say that Spain isn’t big enough for everyone, or that there’s a problem with immigration that brings crime…that Spain is Lamine Yamal.”

In the moment, Yamal’s heroics seemed to cast him as thoroughly Spanish to national-team fans, the flip-side of what had happened to English forward Bukayo Saka, born in London to Nigerian immigrants. Four years ago, after Saka was one of three Black players who failed to convert penalty kicks in a shootout loss to Italy that left England as European runner-up, he and the other two players were targeted by relentless racial abuse on social media.

So it might be just soccer. But among the hoi polloi, national unity is best facilitated by success. Prior to this year’s Euro final, King Charles lightheartedly encouraged the English team to “secure victory before the need for any last-minute wonder-goals or another penalty drama” so that “the stresses on the nation’s collective heart rate and blood pressure would be greatly alleviated!”

Think of this, though: Charles reigns over a nation, the United Kingdom, that includes Scotland and Wales, two non-English lands whose ardent soccer supporters fit comfortably into Professor Muldoon’s theory of disidentification. And who likely welcomed that the championship trophy went to “Anybody But England.”

 

O Art! (Going for the gold)

Leave a reply

With the Olympics’ return to Paris this summer after precisely 100 years, Pierre de Coubertin lives. Well, not really. But his imprint on the Games endures. Mostly.

What hasn’t changed is the fact that de Coubertin—the French-born aristocrat, educator and historian—was responsible for the Olympic revival in 1896, some 1,500 years after the Ancient Games disappeared, and his idealistic concept of promoting international brotherhood, however imperfect, soldiers on.

But his brainstorm of melding strong body/strong mind competitions—by adding contests in painting, sculpture, architecture, music and literature alongside the physical activity—has not persisted. De Coubertin died in 1937 and his Olympic art competitions were gone after the 1948 Games.

He had wanted egghead tug-of-wars as a “pentathlon of the Muses.” His plan was to award medals to the best in creativity as well as to those ectomorphs, endomorphs and mesomorphs making a muscle in pursuit of the Olympic motto: “Citius, Altius, Fortius.” (Latin for “Higher, Faster, Stronger;” a motto suggested by de Coubertin, by the way.)

“Deprived of the aura of the Arts contests,” he reportedly declared in introducing efforts of imagination in 1912, “Olympic Games are only World Championships. From now on, [Art] will be part of each Olympiad, on a par with the athletic competitions.” It was his conviction that one doesn’t have to go into oxygen debt to produce something memorable.

So, for the 1912 Games in Stockholm, just to make sure there would be participants in the literature playoffs, de Coubertin entered his own poem, a flowery tome he called “Ode to Sport” (though he did so under two fictitious names, George Hohrod and Martin Eschbach).

It won!

O Sport (it went), pleasure of the Gods, essence of life, you appeared suddenly in the midst of the grey clearing which writhes with the drudgery of modern existence, like the radiant messenger of a past age, when mankind still smiled. And the glimmer of dawn lit up the mountain tops and flecks of light dotted the ground in the gloomy forests.

Second stanza:

O Sport, you are Beauty! You are the architect of that edifice which is the human body….

And so on through seven more grandiose sections…

O Sport, you are Justice!…And O Sport, you are Audacity!….O Sport, you are Honour!….O Sport, you are Joy!….O Sport, you are Fecundity!….O Sport, you are Progress!….O Sport, you are Peace!….

O Boy!

A Russian-born American named Walter Winans, who had won Olympic gold in the long-discontinued sporting test of “running deer shooting, double shot” in 1908 and silver in “team running deer shooting, single shot” four years later, then took aim at the new arts challenge in ’12 and came away with the first-ever gold in sculpture.

No animals were injured in “team running deer shooting,” which employed a moving deer-shaped target 110 yards from the shooter. Anyway, when Winans’ took the podium to receive the medal for “American Trotter,” his bronze casting of a 20-inch-tall horse pulling a small chariot, he “waved proudly to the crowd,” according to Smithsonian magazine. A champion again.

There is no record of de Coubertin’s reaction to winning the first composition competition (and, in fact, it apparently wasn’t common knowledge that he actually was George Hohrod and Martin Eschbach until years later). So, he was involved in nothing comparable to the medal ceremony at those Games in which King Gustav of Sweden publicly declared that American Jim Thorpe—winner of both the five-event pentathlon and 10-event decathlon—was “the greatest athlete in the world.” (That’s when Thorpe reportedly responded, “Thanks, King.”)

There were 151 artistic Olympic medals awarded from 1912 to 1948, and in ’48 the British artist John Copley, at 73, may or may not have become the oldest Olympic medalist in history with a silver for his engraving titled “Polo Players.” Alas, David Wallechinsky, the crack Games historian, in his regularly updated editions of The Complete Book of the Olympics, instead cites Oscar Swahn, who was 72 when he won gold in 1908 as part of Sweden’s running deer shooting, single-shot team.

The only person to win two Olympic gold medals in art, a recent New York Times article noted, was Luxembourg’s Jean Jacoby, the 1924 winner in “mixed painting” in 1924 and 1928 champ in “drawing and water colors.” Jacoby died in 1936 but, like de Coubertin, earned a piece of immortality when his design was used on Luxembourg postage stamps for the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki. And his own image was featured on a Luxembourg stamp in 2016.

The only woman to win an arts gold was Finland’s Aale Maria Tynni for “lyric works” in 1948. Her poem, “Laurel of Hellas,” referenced the laurel wreath, symbol of sporting victory dating to Ancient Games in Hellas (the Greek name for Greece).

When Avery Brundage, an ardent proponent of the Olympic poohbahs’ often hypocritical “pure amateurism” edict, became IOC president in 1952, he ended Olympic arts competitions and had all their results stricken from official records, arguing that the arts entrants typically were professionals in their fields.

But if Pierre de Coubertin and his arts concept were still around now….

Think of the 1981 movie “Chariots of Fire,” which focused on the dramatic journeys of British sprinters Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell toward victories in the 100 and 400 meters during the last Paris Olympics, in 1924. The film won four Academy Awards. One of those for Best Original Score by the Greek composer Vangelis.

Gold-medal Olympic art, that.

Sport’s uncertainty principle

Leave a reply

The thing about sports and athletes is that their performances remain entirely unscripted. Unpredictable. No guarantees. This thought occurred with reports that Jerry West, a veritable poster boy for basketball excellence, has died at 86.

In his 14 pro seasons, West was an NBA All-Star 14 times. His Los Angeles Lakers made the playoffs each of those years and West literally came to embody the entire league—for a long time, we’ve known that is his silhouette on the NBA’s official logo—reliably stupendous, especially at the most crucial moments. He was known as Mr. Clutch.

Yet he played on only one NBA championship team despite his exceptional resume. And I was there during an exceedingly rare moment—especially atypical because Newsday rarely sent me on a pro basketball assignment—when West briefly went from hoops superman to a Clark Kent disguise. A fallible human.

That was during the 1972 playoff semifinals. The Lakers, who that season had won a then-record 33 consecutive games, were struggling mightily against the Milwaukee Bucks. In the series-opening 21-point Lakers loss, West—a career 47-percent shooter; a jump-shot master—made only 4 of 19 field goals. All layups.

“Kids of any age,” he lamented after the game, “should be able to shoot better than we did”—27 percent attempts converted by the team; a mere 21 percent by West. The Lakers won the next two games, but in the fourth, West missed 14 of 23 shots (31 percent) during another loss. And with a post-game shrug, the flummoxed West, who somehow couldn’t find the hoop with a search warrant, muttered, “God heal my jump shot.”

An anomaly, that. Though quickly overcome. The Lakers wound up winning the series and the championship final against the New York Knicks. And West, by the way, had lent a vast contribution to his team’s offense with a team-leading 8.3 assists per game during the Bucks series. So it was impossible to judge him guilty of dereliction based on the unforeseen reality of his sickly jump shot.

Still, that series hardly fit the West narrative of consistent brilliance that he carried beyond his playing days to coaching and front-office work. More to the point, it was an example of what can—and occasionally does—happen in the quirky universe of sports.

When the Lakers moved to L.A. from Minneapolis, having just used their No. 1 pick in the 1960 draft on West, I was in eighth grade, living in The Valley, so that was my team. West already was a widely recognizable star, the best player on the University of West Virginia team that was 1959 NCAA tournament runner-up. (A close-but-no-cigar result that would become a recurring, frustrating experience for West.)

On our playgrounds then—and despite the fact that televised NBA games were uncommon and we were left to visualize the Lakers through the voice pictures of radio’s frenetic Chick Hearn—our models to mimic were Elgin Baylor and West.

Baylor could defy gravity, the NBA’s first aerial showman (Julius Erving before there was a Julius Erving; Michael Jordan before there was a Michael Jordan) with a hang-in-the-air jumper. Also on the Lakers then was West’s predecessor as West Virginia hero, a guy with a more picturesque name, Hot Rod Hundley. But it was West who was the model of perfection with his unerring line-drive jump shot, his knack for rebounding, passing and octopus-arm defense. We mostly wanted to be Jerry West.

For that 1972 playoff series years later, he was 33, in his 11th season, still at his best. During the ’71-‘72 regular season, he had averaged 25.8 points and a league-leading 9.7 assists per game. So it was a bit of a shock—bewildering, really—to witness West’s transitory descent into mediocrity.

Bottom line: His jump shot quickly was healed. He finally got his championship ring. But foregone conclusions are not the point in what was his world.

Bill Walton: The early days

Leave a reply

Back then, in the early ‘70s, Bill Walton was what you might call an enigmatic figure, a mum college hoops superstar—all action, no talk—a long-haired hippie in the stay-in-your-lane world of jocks.

This was during widespread student protests against the Vietnam War. And while Walton, who died last week at 71, hardly was a bomb-throwing revolutionary, he was culturally and politically at odds with his celebrated coach, John Wooden, known to lecture Walton about getting haircuts and curbing his use of obscenities. And when Walton was arrested for participating in the blockade of the UCLA administration building, Wooden had to provide bail.

So in December 1973, with Walton and his top-ranked UCLA mates, winners of 78 straight games over 2½ seasons, about to play No. 2 North Carolina State—itself unbeaten in 29 consecutive games—my Newsday editors judged that it was time to set up an interview with the mysterious Walton and report on What He Was Really Like. Go to Los Angeles, was the order, then to St. Louis for that highly anticipated UCLA-N.C. State game days later.

I did not speak to Walton on that assignment. I did not learn that Walton struggled so mightily with a stutter that he revealed, years later, he “could not say ‘hello.’ Could not say ‘thank you.’” I certainly got no insight into the loquacious basketball commentator of the future, whose hyperbolic, sometimes oddball, strikingly knowledgeable observations came to entertain sports fans.

All I saw then was a player of exceptionally diverse skills, who brought far more to the sport than his size (6-foot-11) implied. A sleight-of-hand passer uncommon for a big man, he led his team in assists as well as scoring and rebounding.

But in that short time, I did get a strong impression of how highly Walton’s teammates valued him beyond the basketball basics.

Tommy Curtis, UCLA’s a flashy senior guard, offered to arrange an unprecedented one-on-one with Walton. To do so Curtis, who had befriended the L.A. Lakers future Hall of Fame pro Wilt Chamberlain, proposed that I meet him at Chamberlain’s Bel-Air mansion in the Santa Monica foothills, where Curtis also would invite Walton.

It was then standard UCLA athletic department policy that its players be shielded from prying interrogations by the press. Before Walton, Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) had been similarly protected. Wooden, who at the time was in the midst of coaching a record 10 NCAA championship teams—in a 12-year-period, yet—typically would designate one player to be available to reporters after games. And a general rule was that players would speak publicly only when teammates were not watching.

Yet on separate occasions while I was hanging around, Curtis and freshman Rich Washington volunteered bits for a Walton portrait. “The main thing with Walton,” Curtis said during the Chamberlain-mansion visit—at which Walton never appeared—”is that Bill is tired of writers and fans saying this is a one-man team. He has a tremendous feeling for other people and he knows there are other guys on this team who have feelings, too. He doesn’t want it always said that Walton won the game.”

At the time, Walton already had been named college basketball player of the year twice—and was on his way to a third consecutive honor—though he was surrounded by the likes of Keith Wilkes, Dave Meyers and Curtis, all future NBA draft choices. (Only Curtis did not play professionally). Plus, there was Walton’s close friend Greg Lee, whom Curtis described as “the greatest passer you will see” and who also saw time in the pros.

Washington found Walton to be “very aware of things happening today. He’s very involved. He asked the coaches to sign his petition against Nixon [during the Watergate scandal]. They didn’t, but they didn’t give Bill a hard time, either. I guess they understand that he is trying to fight against always being associated with basketball, like he is struggling for a new identity other than all-American.’”

Curtis said that Walton “brought up transcendental meditation at our first practice session [for that 1973-74 season]. He said it was something that helped him cope with all the pressures of the world. Coach Wooden said, ‘Fine, and any of the players interested in this should talk to Bill about it.’” Several players followed through with daily 20-minute meditation sessions as well as Walton’s vegetarianism.

For that 1973 showdown vs. North Carolina State, which five months earlier had sold all of the 18,000-plus tickets and which was covered by 200 reporters, the UCLA player assigned to speak to the press after his team’s victory was Wilkes. UCLA’s team manager guarded the lockerroom door against trespassers, telling one ink-stained wretch that “I won’t throw you out. Just don’t go in.”

Walton waited in the room for a half hour, then flipped a blue hood over his head and slipped away, ignoring all questions.

It was during Walton’s early pro days with the Portland Trail Blazers that an intimate profile of the man began to surface, especially with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian David Halberstam’s 1981 book, “The Breaks of the Game.” There was some irony to the fact that Halberstam reportedly had chosen the Trail Blazers—whom Walton led to the 1977 NBA title— for a day-by-day account of a pro basketball season because of the Trail Blazers’ reputation for offering reporters full access.

Ironically, too, Walton—who missed all of the ’78-’79 season because of chronic foot injuries and eventually underwent 37 orthopedic surgeries—had just left the Trail Blazers for San Diego when Halberstam began his research.

It took a while for Walton to emerge as more than a basketball heavyweight, more than a kid attuned to his generation’s concerns and style—the lanky, publicly silent fellow wearing tie-dyed t-shirts and reveling in Grateful Dead concerts. And time to fully overcome his debilitating stutter, which he slyly described as “my greatest accomplishment….and your worst nightmare.”

Not really. A lot of people had wanted to hear what he had to say for a long time.

Graduates, faculty, parents, guests…..

Leave a reply

Been working on my commencement speech. You know; just in case. Not that any establishment of higher learning has asked, or that any have the position still open.

As for my qualifications: There is evidence that a person need not be a Nobel or Pulitzer Prize winner, a politician, activist, academic, actor, film producer, motivational speaker, or business leader to get the gig. A frog (Kermit) once spoke to the Southampton College grads here on Long Island.

Montana State University invited Flint Rasmussen, a former professional rodeo clown, to address its graduating class in early May. Michigan’s Hillsdale College presented television game-show host Pat Sajak to its students. Graduates at D’Youville University, a small private school in upstate New York, were addressed by an artificial intelligence robot named Sophia. Even a football placekicker with 1940s political and social values was enlisted by Kansas’ Benedictine College.

A lot of schools recruit an alum. I checked; my alma mater, the University of Missouri, already had a series of ceremonies for its various schools earlier this month. So I will have no role in bringing down the curtain for those departing scholars.

It’s just that Dartmouth is going to have former tennis star Roger Federer speak and, well, I covered tennis for more than 40 years during my sportswriting career at Newsday. I also chronicled a number of Mets games, and I noticed that Seton Hall had Gary Cohen, the Mets’ play-by-play man, deliver its commencement address. Maybe if tennis or baseball knowledge can be related to advice for the future leaders of the world….

Where to go with that, though? The thing about college commencement speeches is how ephemeral they tend to be, how easily forgotten they are. Only via some hand-me-down recollection from a former Mizzou colleague (who had to be reminded by another grad) was I recently informed that the acclaimed playwright Tennessee Williams had addressed our 1969 class. And for all I remember about what he said—which is not a word—it could have been Tennessee Ernie Ford who did the honors.

I wonder if Williams mentioned that day how, during his two years taking courses in my alma mater’s journalism school—the first in the world and still highly ranked—he was said to be so bored (and distracted by unrequited love for a girl) that his father brought him home.

I have polled several people about this, and the general sense—with no disrespect to the prominent folks who work so hard to produce their words of inspiration and instruction—is that commencement addresses essentially are boiler plate. Guidance that is no more revelatory than “Be Prepared.” “Take notes.” “Don’t count your chickens.” “Wear sunscreen.”

When I think about it, some of the best life wisdom can be found in the lyrics of the late John Prine. His tune “Safety Joe” counsels how it was “too bad” that the protagonist “never got too sad” but also “never got too happy,” wearing “a seat belt around his heart.” Prine sang

If you don’t loosen up the buckle

On your heart and start to chuckle

You’re gonna die of boredom, Safety Joe.

 In “That’s the Way That the World Goes ‘Round,” Prine cautioned

You’re up one day, the next, you’re down

It’s a half an inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown.

And he put in a good word for the benefits of education in “It’s a Big Old Goofy World.”

So I’m sitting in a hotel
Trying to write a song
My head is just as empty
As the day is long
Why it’s clear as a bell
I should have gone to school
I’d be wise as an owl
‘Stead of stubborn as a mule.

In one of those regular New York Times liberal vs. conservative editorial “conversations” between staffers Gail Collins and Bret Stephens, Collins noted that in past commencement addresses she had given, “I could tell that most of the audience was hoping I’d make them laugh. Just in a way that made them feel it was OK to celebrate their achievements by having a good time with their families and friends.”

Stephens took more of an ivory-tower approach, writing that he would urge grads to cultivate an inner life, memorize poetry, imitate writers and artists they admired. And—maybe a bit more down-to-earth—”please stop photographing your damn meals.”

All right. There it is. There’s the speech. Wear sunscreen.

 

 

 

 

Athletic DNA

Leave a reply

From the Department of Being Comfortable in One’s Genes:

Top-ranked women’s golfer Nelly Korda recently enjoyed a record-equaling run of five consecutive tournament titles; might her athletic ability be related to the fact that her father, Petr, was among the top tennis pros of the 1990s? Also in the sports news lately is the splendid work of New York Knicks guard Jalen Brunson; his father, Rick, was a member of the last Knicks team, in 1999, to play in the NBA Finals.

Taking this another step: Nelly Korda’s mother, the former Regina Rajchrtova, represented her native Czechoslovakia in the 1988 Olympics and once reached No. 26 in the international tennis rankings. And Nelly’s siblings also are world-class athletes—sister Jessica, once ranked as high as 13th in golf, and brother Sebastian, among the globe’s top 30 tennis players.

Both of Brunson’s parents were accomplished athletes as well. His mom Sandra was a volleyball player for Temple University when she met Rick.

Petr Korda, good enough to have won the Australian Open in 1998, used to punctuate a meaningful victory with his Pete Townshend celebratory hop, an exuberant scissors kick that mimicked the Who’s singer/songwriter. Now we’re talking about Nelly’s generation; when she teed off in her first senior championship in 2013, one of 19 amateurs in a 156-player field and a month shy of her 15th birthday, she toured the course with who she called her “caddy daddy.”

Nelly described her father’s contribution to staying within seven strokes of the lead that day as fairly typical caddy stuff: “He calms me down. When I start walking a little fast, he’s like, ‘Slow down a little.’ But when I make a birdie, he’s like, ‘Let’s go. Next hole.’”

So: How inevitable was it that Petr’s sporting dominance would be passed along? Is that an inheritable trait, like blue eyes, blood type or baldness?

In the case of the Brunsons, the son—Jalen—has emerged as a star this Spring, averaging more than 36 points a game in the playoffs, while the father—Rick—spent his nine NBA seasons as a rarely used sub, playing little for that 1999 Knicks team. Anything to be drawn from that?

Of course there are scholars in the field considering how far apples fall from the proverbial athletic tree. The Science In The News website reported that “athletic ability can be an inherited trait” by citing the EPOR gene—which “provides instructions for making protein called the erythropoietin receptor” and directs the production of red blood cells and the ACTN3 gene, which “produces powerful contractions in glycolytic type II skeletal muscle fibers…”

Got that?

Then there is the nature-vs.-nurture aspect: While genetics influence an individual’s physical and psychological characteristics, the environment (including relationships and experiences) also impacts development. So genes certainly can matter, but there also is the aspect that a child of a notable sports figure grows up in the sports culture.

There are plenty of examples of enormously successful jocks (men and women) whose children (boys and girls) have exhibited a similar level of talent, including some who thrived in a different sport than the parent. Football’s Archie Manning and his sons, Peyton and Eli. Baseball’s Bobby and Barry Bonds as well as Ken Griffey and Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball’s Pat Mahomes and his football son Patrick. Basketball’s Dennis Rodman and his soccer daughter Trinity. Hockey’s Bobby and Brett Hull. Tennis’ Yannick Noah and his basketball son Joakim. And currently  waiting in the wings for his anticipated NBA gig is Bronny James, son of superstar LeBron.

To further muddle this riddle is a need for attention to the fact that different sports require distinct physical attributes: Fast-twitch muscle fibers for powerful bursts of movement as opposed to slow-twitch muscle fibers that are best for endurance sports, for instance. And keen eyesight, hand-eye (or, in soccer, foot-eye) coordination. Just more DNA mysteries.

A study by Lisa M. Guth and Stephen M. Roth, available on the National Library of Medicine site, found “more than 200 genetic variants…associated with elite athletic status” and acknowledged that “a favorable genetic profile, when combined with an optimal training environment, is important for elite athletic performance.

“However,” they concluded, “few genes are consistently associated with elite athletic performance, and none are linked strongly enough to warrant their use in predicting athletic success.”

Maybe, then, athletic prowess—an art rather than a science?—is a particularly individual thing.

Bad racing form

Leave a reply

There is something very East German about thoroughbred racing’s state of affairs just as the Triple Crown season commences. Not, specifically, the past year of on-track equine deaths that have been attributed to various circumstances, including drug use. Rather, the fact that the sport’s athletes—the racehorses—have no say in practices meant to boost them toward the winner’s circle.

It’s bad enough when elite human athletes choose to ingest banned substances to get that extra little edge. (And then, busted, express shock that a performance-enhancing drug could possibly have found its way into their system.) But the nagging realization that homo sapiens purposely expose unsuspecting nags to risky, illicit medication goes to a new (lower) level.

That human capacity to manipulate unwitting subjects in dastardly experiments is what sports psychologist Steven Ungerleider detailed in his 2001 book “Faust’s Gold.” From the 1960s through the ‘80s, Ungerleider reported, the former East Germany put more than 10,000 uninformed youngsters on a steroid regimen in a state-mandated quest to dominate worldwide sports events. Which led both to championship performances and long-lasting health problems.

At work then, and now in racetrack cases, was the dishonest circumvention of basic communication. The dirty little secret is that coaches and officials have been known to subject their human charges to various “vitamin” supplements without the athletes’ knowledge. A horse, meanwhile, not only does not know a Triple Crown from an eighth pole, but can’t possibly know if its trainer is spiking the oats.

Responsibility for a failed drug test therefore clearly rests with the trainer, the principal caretaker of his horses and a primary beneficiary of his horses’ success. Thus the ongoing Kentucky Derby suspension of Bob Baffert, whose horses have won that historic race four times and is third in the career earnings list with more than $385 million in purses, but who has a lengthy record of doping violations. Baffert is shouldering the blame for his colt Medina Spirit who, after winning the 2021 Derby, tested positive for a potent corticosteroid used to reduce pain and inflammation.

Obviously Medina Spirit, who died five months later, hadn’t been aware of the betamethasone in his system.

“Does a horse even know he’s in a race?” asked James Ross in a horse-sense post unrelated to doping on theconversations.com. “The answer is likely ‘no.’

“From a horse’s perspective,” Ross wrote, “there are few intrinsic rewards for winning a race. Reaching the end might mean relief from the pressure to keep galloping at high speed and hits from the jockey’s whip, but the same is true for all the horses once they pass the finishing post….there is very little direct, intrinsic benefit to the horse that would motivate it to voluntarily gallop faster to achieve this outcome.”

Logically, then, what incentive would a thoroughbred have to use substances that could endanger its future well-being—even if it somehow understood the possible competitive benefit?

The late Phil Johnson, a Hall of Fame trainer who had been a middle-distance runner in high school, once explained to me that the crucial difference in coaching a human vis-à-vis a horse is the language barrier.

“If I’m training a man to run track,” he said, “I can sit down and talk with him about his career, what he hopes to accomplish and how he can go about it. With a horse, you can’t do that. You can’t sit him down and say, ‘Look, I’m gonna kick you off the team if you don’t shape up.’”

A human runner can be advised of the benefit of extensive training, maybe even offered the suggestion of an illicit chemical enhancement. An equine runner typically is asked to take a brisk but brief morning gallop and have a nice day in the stall. Horses “can get bored a lot quicker [than humans],” Johnson said. “They can’t be told what they’re training for….and what really sours a horse is the boredom of the track.”

So good trainers are careful not to upset their horses, which are at their best when they are happy and eager to run. Thoroughbreds are not driven by the ego-centric possibility of a world record or alluring publicity or defeating a particular rival.

For a stars-in-his-eyes trainer, grasping for more money and more fame, to slip his unassuming horse a mickey—in the fashion of those old East German taskmasters—truly is a definition of “dehumanizing.” The trainer, that is.

Jury duty

Leave a reply

Has anybody else out there wondered what it would have been like to be among the 96 prospective jurors brought to Manhattan Criminal Court last week and grilled about their alleged impartiality and ability to be unbiased in an historic trial?

On the grounds that I may incriminate myself, I’m going to admit that—on the few occasions I was summoned for jury duty—I experienced the ambivalence of wishing to fulfill a foundational civic duty even while uneasy about weighing the fate of another human being.

Furthermore, there is jury duty and then there is this front-page, in-the-headlines jury duty in which the court of public opinion appears to apply to the jurors as well as the wildly polarizing defendant. This rough-and-tumble affair could put a different spin on the term “hung jury.”

Anyway, I bring limited judgment to the process. I did see the Broadway production of Twelve Angry Men years ago. (Famous quote from Juror No. 10: “I’m sick and tired of facts. You can twist ‘em any way you like.”) As a young lad, watched TV’s Perry Mason (ask your grandmother) and enjoyed the recent Netflix series “Lincoln Lawyer,” which provides as many beauty shots of Los Angeles landmarks as it does of courtroom drama.

It could be argued that television tends to glamorize crafty defense attorneys for finding loopholes in the prosecutors’ claims, and that can make for good entertainment. But there also is the old joke: What do you call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean floor? A good start.

OK, then. There were only two occasions when I came close to serving on a jury. In the mid-1980s, I didn’t even make it through the first round of questioning in the notorious racial case of four white youths who had attacked three Blacks in Howard Beach, Queens. What apparently got me eliminated from jury consideration then was my occupation—newspaper reporter, though I almost strictly covered sports—and the assumption that I surely was up to speed on details of that widely publicized crime.

In 2001, for a trial on Eastern Long Island involving a drunk driver who had caused serious injury, I progressed all the way to the final round of the lawyers’ interrogations. After quite a wait in a holding room, then sitting through the detailed questioning of the shrinking pool of potential jurors (“What is your occupation? What does you spouse do? Do you have children? How do you get your news?”), there was a building sense of feeling that I ought to be in the game.

Alas, one of the attorneys wanted to know whether I could identify when a person is inebriated. Though I admit having thought, when the charges originally were laid out—“Guilty! Fry him!”—I had become convinced that I could consider all the evidence before coming to a conclusion. Just as I was dismissed.

The sense that there is a prejudice—is that the right word?—against impaneling journalists because our job is to keep up with the news strikes me as thoroughly downside-up and outside-in. Because a good journalist must remain open to learning all the facts and understands that nothing is black and white; there always are gray areas to examine. Lots and lots of them.

But in the end, my glancing familiarity with the inside of courtrooms—and I am not unhappy about this—has been restricted to covering a handful of appearances of athletes and other personnel from the sports world charged with untoward behavior.

In the summer of ’86, I was in Houston on another assignment the same day two New York Mets, Tim Teufel and Ron Darling, appeared for at a 45-minute hearing for aggravated assault charges during a barroom brawl. In 1991, I was in Indianapolis, chronicling a gymnastics championship, when my editor ordered me to file a report on boxer Mike Tyson’s arraignment there on rape charges. (That included an 80-minute post-hearing lecture by boxing promoter Don King that Tyson was only guilty of fighting against the “celebrity burden” faced by such boldface names as James Dean, Jayne Mansfield, John Belushi, Marilyn Monroe and Freddie Prinze.) Tyson later was convicted.

In 2011, when Jets wide receiver Braylon Edwards entered a guilty plea in a DWI case, reporting duties brought me to the same courthouse where a certain former reality television personality now is on trial for paying hush money to a porn star.

There also was my editor’s insistence to monitor the 2012 appearance of a Mets clubhouse manager/traveling secretary accused of running a gambling ring, stealing team memorabilia and skimming hotel money. He later acknowledged such dark deeds.

I contend, in bearing witness to these things, that I was impartial and unbiased. As for the culpability of the defendant in the show trial just starting now—con man? convict?—not my job.

If the sun doesn’t get in your eyes….

Leave a reply

Version 1.0.0

An eclipse-related thought:

Years ago, while on assignment in Chicago, I was listening to a White Sox game on the car radio. The garrulous, excitable Harry Caray—in the midst of his half-century of inimitable sportscasting—was doing play-by-play. And for one inning, a young lad, maybe 10 years old, had been invited to be a “color commentator” alongside Caray; a gimmick, sure, but an appealing treat to the listener and a taste of the Big Time for the kid.

There was a fly ball that dropped untouched, apparently misplayed by an outfielder. When Harry, as was his wont, registered disgust with what he judged to be an inferior performance, the little guy came to the fielder’s defense.

“I think,” he piped in his canary voice, “he lost it in the sun.”

To which Harry gruffly bellowed, “He’s from Mexico!” As if an assumed familiarity with Sol in more Southern climes could prevent such a mishap.

So here’s the connecting thought: On Monday, with Major League games scheduled to be played in a couple of cities that will be smack in the path of the total solar eclipse, has anyone wondered if an outfielder could lose the ball in the moon?

For two or three minutes on the afternoon of the Cleveland Guardians’ first home game of the season, it will be really dark as the moon gets between the earth and sun. The same will be true for the Texas Rangers’ scheduled game in Arlington, Tex.

So, if there were to be a fly ball in those locales, coinciding with the eclipse, and a fielder accustomed to flipping down his sunglass lenses while looking skyward were to become disoriented in the blackout and lose the ball….

Base hit? Error?

First of all, baseball Rule 10.12a won’t be much help. It specifies:

“The official scorer shall charge an outfielder with an error if such outfielder allows a fly ball to drop to the ground if, in the official scorer’s judgment, an outfielder at that position making ordinary effort would have caught such fly ball.”

Nothing about losing the ball in the sun. Or the moon.

Obviously, the latter would be an extremely rare situation. To begin with, how often are fielders likely to lose sight of batted balls in the firmament? On average, only about a third of balls in play are hit in the air—and that includes the unplayable ones launched triumphantly into the outfield seats by annoyingly admiring sluggers.

More to the point, there never have been Major Leaguers performing on the day of a total eclipse in a city that is in the so-called “path of totality.” And the next possibility of a solar eclipse anywhere in the contiguous United States—forget limiting that to Big League burgs—won’t come for another 20 years. In Cleveland, specifically, a total solar eclipse hasn’t happened since 1806 and won’t again until 2444.

Besides, both the Guardians and Rangers decided to start their games several hours after the precise moment that the earth, moon and sun will perfectly align to produce a full midnight-at-midday experience.

Of the five other MLB cities that day that will be hosting games while experiencing, briefly, a 90-percent blockage of the sun, only one—New York—originally intended to stick with an afternoon (2:05) starting time that theoretically would synchronize the couple of minutes of celestial stagecraft with someone at bat. The plan in Gotham was to employ stadium lights all afternoon while the disc of moon slowly blotted out most of the sun and then went on its way between 2:10 and 4:36—roughly, the expected length of the game.

That raised the potential circumstance of a ball in the air just as the moon cancelled most of the sun’s light—possibly with runners on the bases, the game’s outcome in doubt, a fielder suddenly groping for a fix on the ball’s flight.

Alas, just four days before the eclipse, the Yanks turned a blind eye to the intriguing possibilities and moved their first pitch four hours later, around natural twilight. A time, by the way, when baseballs are known to be lost in the darkening sky.

So the moon is off the hook for interfering. At least for another few decades.

Political footballer

Leave a reply

A college football star pursued by the revered Green Bay Packers and later recruited to be Vice President of the United States?

It’s been done. Gerald Ford.

You were thinking of Aaron Rodgers? Had in mind the surreal 2024 Presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy Jr. and his public musings to consider the still-active 40-year-old NFL quarterback as running mate?

The far-fetched idea of Rodgers somehow becoming a heartbeat away from Leader of the Free World lasted barely a week before Kennedy’s spokespeople signaled that he would go a different direction. So we never even got around to addressing the pay cut Rodgers would have to take, from a three-year, $112-million contract with the New York Jets to the Vice President’s reported annual salary of $284,000.

Although, as The Nation’s John Nichols wrote of Rodgers’ complete lack of qualifications for the job, he “couldn’t be any worse than [Dick] Cheney. Or Dan Quayle, for that matter.”

Cheney: George W. Bush’s VP. The guy who falsely alleged that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction after the Sept. 11 attacks, supported torture techniques against suspected terrorists and eventually left office with a 13-percent approval rating.

Quayle: George H.W. Bush’s Veep. Mostly remembered for dumb quotes such as “Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child” and “I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy—but that could change.”

Aaron Rodgers? As Vice President, he would make a terrific quarterback. About the only thing that made sense about a Rodgers candidacy was that, like RFK Jr., his is a widely known name. Think of Kennedy’s relentless reminders that he comes from political royalty, the son of 1968 Presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy and nephew of President John Kennedy (“Jack” to friends and family). Quayle, in a real stretch, attempted a similar association during the 1988 campaign by constantly comparing himself to John Kennedy.

“Senator,” Lloyd Bentsen said to Quayle during one Vice Presidential debate, “I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

Prominent members of the Kennedy family have said essentially the same thing about RFK Jr. And Rodgers? Available evidence indicates that, beyond being a bold-face name in a sports-obsessed nation, his apparent value to RFK Jr. involved their sharing of wackadoodle conspiracy theories regarding Covid vaccines. And a general skepticism of authority. (Also, loyalty. Rodgers was on record that he would vote for Kennedy.)

Certainly there have been several distinguished professional athletes who became politicians without turning an ankle, notably NBA Hall of Famers Bill Bradley (18 years in the U.S. Senate) and Dave Bing (six years as Detroit’s mayor). NFL receiver Steve Largent wound up in the House of Representatives and Jack Kemp, after a long career quarterbacking the Buffalo Bills to two championships in the pre-Super Bowl AFL days, was the 1988 Republican Vice Presidential candidate running with Bob Dole. (They lost to incumbents Bill Clinton and Al Gore.)

Anyway, the football-to-highest-executive-office kind of thing had been done. Gerald Ford was a celebrated offensive lineman on two national championship teams at the University of Michigan. When he graduated in 1935, the NFL still was a year away from its first annual college player draft, but Ford was invited to try the pros by both the Packers and the Detroit Lions.

He chose instead to attend Yale law school and spent 25 years in Congress. A popular career pol, he nevertheless was something of an accidental Vice President, recruited to replace indicted tax evader Spiro Agnew during the Watergate mess. And then an ad hoc President when the disgraced Richard Nixon resigned.

The other future U.S. Presidents who had played college football were Dwight Eisenhower, at West Point, and Ronald Reagan, at Eureka College, the small private school in central Illinois, in 1930 and 1931. (At Harvard, John Kennedy played JV football and FDR was on the freshman team years earlier.) Eureka coach Ralph McKinzie later recalled Reagan as “just a fellow who wanted to play football but didn’t have too much talent.”

Aaron Rodgers, of course, was a real jock, both at Cal, where he set passing records in his two varsity seasons, and for 18 years at Green Bay. But he does not have a college degree, having skipped his senior year for the NFL draft. And he doesn’t appear to have credentials beyond the gridiron, except as a self-promoting, self-styled “critical thinker.” He has called himself a victim of “cancel culture,” “woke mobs” and media “witch hunts.”

But now that his name apparently has been removed from RFK Jr.’s short list, Rodgers could always dismiss the Vice Presidency as an unworthy goal in the first place, “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”

But that appraisal had been done. By John Adams.