April 1st

(Stan Isaacs)

In memory of the late Stan Isaacs, who enjoyed a long and distinguished career as Newsday’s star columnist before his death in 2013 at 83, herewith is another (pale) revival of his annual April Fool’s Day spoof, a whimsical ranking of decidedly inconspicuous topics. Each April 1, Stan published what he described as “an appraisal in areas that are generally ignored by raters”—such as bowling pins, Fred Astaire’s dancing partners, TV remote buttons, “Things that Aren’t as Good as They Used to Be.”

He called his polls IRED, the Isaacs Ratings of Esoteric Distinction, what he said was a “loving spoof of the Ring Magazine boxing ratings….a rush to respond to the unrecognized need for evaluation of quantities like the Bridges Across the River Seine.”

His delightful lampoon can’t reasonably be duplicated. But I keep trying the past few years. As he put it, “no category is too arcane to grade,” so here goes the 2022 J-Faux lists, on similarly (and seriously) judged objects that normally might seem trivial, and beginning with London-related categories, since I have spent a fair amount of time there visiting daughter, son-in-law and grandboy the last couple of years….

London Underground stops: 1, Elephant & Castle; 2, Barking; 3, Tooting Broadway; 4, Cockfosters; 5, Shepherd’s Bush; 6, Shoreditch High Street; 7, Hammersmith.

London Pub Names: 1, Laughing Gravy; 2, Boot and Flogger; 3, The Widow’s Son; 4, George and Vulture; 5, Mad Bishop and Bear; 6, The Fat Walrus.

London parks for morning runs: 1, London Fields; 2, Victoria; 3, Hampstead Heath; 4, Battersea; 5, Kensington Gardens; 6. Hyde Park.

He’s back!

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It’s as if Tom Brady has risen from the dead. At 44, and amid enormous fuss and a great deal of celebration, he has un-retired from football—just six weeks after his elaborate good-bye. In a sense, a resurrection is what’s going on.

In John Updike’s insightful 1960 New Yorker report on baseball superstar Ted Williams’ last game—often described as the most celebrated baseball essay ever—Updike concluded the piece with how the 41-year-old Williams, having homered in his last at-bat in Boston, decided to skip his team’s final three-game series in New York. Williams, Updike wrote, “had met the little death that awaits all athletes. He had quit.”

It is a profound truth that athletes “die twice;” ultimately from old age, but first by losing the existence that has defined them. Knicks’ Hall of Famer Bill Bradley, who had a second act as a U.S. senator, wrote in his 1976 book, Life on the Run, that “for the athlete who retires at 35, something in him dies; not a peripheral activity but a fundamental passion. It necessarily dies. The athlete rarely recuperates. He approaches the end of his playing days the way old people approach death….”

Maybe Brady determined that retiring from football was retiring from life. Certainly, from life as he has known it.

The late Bruce Oglivie, whose decades of work with retired athletes caused him to be labeled the Father of North American Applied Sport Psychology, long ago identified as a major factor that professional athletes “have enormous egos. Enormous egos. How do you step down comfortably from that pedestal? Very few areas of life have the ego stroking you get in sports—the charge of 65,000 people rewarding your effort with applause. There’s nothing more addictive in the world than hand-clapping.”

From baseball great Willie Mays, a shadow of himself in his 23^rd and final big-league season at 42, came the admission that he “might have played one year too long. But I found that the people just wanted to see me on the field playing some, rather than quit altogether, you know. They wouldn’t let me quit.”

Similarly, Brady seems to have deduced, just 40 days after his public farewell, that the curtain call signaled there ought to be a revival. “In other words,” Late Night host Jimmy Fallon wisecracked, “he pretty much gave up football for Lent.” Boston Globe sports columnist Dan O’Shaughnessy, while praising Brady’s enormous playing accomplishments, wrote that the entire episode revealed Brady to be “an insatiable, passive-aggressive attention hog.”

Brady certainly generated blaring headlines when he said he was hanging up his shoulder pads—and even more when he quickly reversed field. Also, note that it was just last year that Brady told Sports Illustrated, “What I say versus what I think are two totally different things. I would say 90 percent of what I say is not what I’m thinking.”

What he couldn’t help thinking is that there is big money involved to be a modern-day professional star. Bigger than ever. Sixty years ago, Ted Williams made $90,000 in his last season; in 2022, the highest paid baseball player will be the Mets’ Max Scherzer at more than $43 million. (Adjusted for inflation, that’s still 80 times more than Williams’.) Brady is under contract to bank $10.4 million in 2022, not quite 20 times what the 1960s star gridder Jim Brown made.

But Ogilvie’s studies found gravitational pulls even stronger than the Benjamins—competitive need, locker-room fellowship and, of course, fan adulation.

“So with this move,” comedian Trevor Noah said, “Tom Brady has officially, officially confirmed himself as the greatest of all time, because you see, this move right here is what all the greatest do—they retire, and they come right back. Yeh, Michael Jordan did it. Jay-Z did it. And the greatest of all time, Jesus. Yeh. That guy retired from life for three days before he was, like, ‘Nah, the game needs me.’”

And there will be addictive hand-clapping.

Once teammates

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Try finding the land of The Unified Team on an old map, circa 1992. Or the Commonwealth of Independent States. It’s a challenge that relates to the sudden discovery by many people of just where Ukraine is.

Here’s a big hint: Thirty years ago, the UT and the CIS represented an ad-hoc “nation” that had just evolved from what Ronald Reagan previously labeled “the evil empire” and that the soulless despot Vladimir Putin now wants to revive—the Soviet Union.

As the USSR fell apart in the early ‘90s, though, there came to be an apparently benign one-for-all and all-for-one arrangement, with all former Soviets staying temporarily on the same team. Just the opposite of how Putin is acting on his claim that “Russians and Ukrainians are one people” by having his Russian military murder Ukrainians.

This is a sports story, of sorts. But one which reminds how sports—like the arts and business worlds—are tangled up in government actions. Russia’s unprovoked invasion of its neighbor already has gotten athletes from Russia (and Belarus, because of that nation’s aid in the Russian attack) banned from the Paralympic Games, the upcoming World Games and events in international figure skating, ice hockey, swimming, skiing, badminton, canoeing, equestrian, gymnastics, rowing, rugby, shooting—even chess. Russia has been thrown out of soccer’s World Cup qualifying tournament while tennis has declared that Russian and Belarussian athletes only are welcome as “neutral” participants, minus their national affiliations.

But about the comparison from three decades ago. Following closely on the declaration of independence by the three Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuanian—the USSR’s dissolution in late 1991 meant that the globe’s biggest sports stage, the Olympics, was scrambling to accommodate Russia and 12 former Soviet republics for the 1992 Albertville Winter Games.

The solution was to have athletes from those republics continue to participate on the Russian side (which didn’t stray far from an old and widespread assumption that all Soviets were Russian). Thus the one-time-only Olympic squad known as The Unified Team, representing the Commonwealth of Independent States. (Some of us wise-guy Westerners, having come from the other side in the Cold War, referred to them in shorthand as “The Commies.”)

The revealing aspect was how non-Russian Unified Teamers expressed a feeling of lost identity. All marched and received medals under the Olympic flag and with the Olympic anthem, and among the gold medalists who found the situation wanting was pairs skating champion Natalia Mishkutienok, a Belarussian who teamed with Ukrainian Artur Dmitriev.

The situation was “not good,” she said. “I like the Russian anthem and I like the Russian flag.” (Of course she meant the Soviet song and the red hammer-and-sickle USSR flag.) Viktor Petrenko, a Ukrainian who won the ’92 men’s skating title, said after his victory ceremony, “I want to see some flag. The Ukraine flag or Russian flag, that would be better.”

There were bad jokes about The Unidentified Team and how it had no fight song, no team pennant.

Petrenko wore warmups emblazoned with CCCP, the Cyrillic abbreviation for USSR. His official Olympic “identity record” listed his age as 22, his birth date as 6/17/69, his town of birth as “Odessa,” his country of birth as “Unified Team” and his nationality as “Unified Team.”

“We are still a team,” Petrenko said then. “We are still teammates. Everything’s the same like that. We just represent different republics. I really don’t know what’s going on in my country. But we’re still a team.”

All Unified Teamers had held aloft tiny flags representing their respective republics in the Opening Ceremonies and wore their individual country’s flag patches during the Games. Outside the Olympic skating hall, a sign soon appeared offering “for sale: Soviet training suits. All stock must go.” CCCP warmups were selling for $150 apiece.

Some Unifieds meanwhile found humor in the no-longer applicable words to the Soviet anthem…

Unbreakable Union of freeborn Republics

Great Russia has welded forever to stand.

Created in struggle by will of the people.

United and mighty, our Soviet land!

The “unbreakable union” was broken. And Putin’s attempts to put it back together by force after 30 years don’t appear to be going so well, in the one-team sense. A recent report noted that, among the Ukrainian citizens trapped in their native land by the Russian bombardment is Viktor Petrenko, the old skating champion from The Unified Team.

He was said to be in Kyiv, the capital. It’s on the map. And it was Mark Twain’s unsettling observation that “God created war so Americans would learn geography.”

Torched!

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As an Olympic postscript, consider IOC president Thomas Bach’s wacky offer of holdover gifts for victims of the fathomless ruling that allowed Russian teenager Kamila Valieva’s continued eligibility despite a failed drug test.

Bach wound up acknowledging the dystopian conclusion to the figure-skating circus after Valieva fell apart, was berated by her coach and left one of her medal-winning teammates enraged and the other virtually ignored. That the heavily favored Valieva crashed to fourth place in the individual final at least spared Bach’s IOC the embarrassment of having to cancel that discipline’s awards ceremony.

But an official verdict—and the inevitable appeals—on the legitimacy of Russia’s earlier Valieva-led first place in team skating could take months. And with all medals in that team event meanwhile held in escrow, Bach suggested giving each athlete for second-place U.S. and third-place Japan an Olympic torch.

Goofy, no? There was no word regarding torches for the Canadians, who were fourth but, if the Russians ultimately are disqualified, would become bronze medalists, with the Japanese upgraded to silver and the Americans to gold. (There was confirmation that the U.S. skaters’ request for the temporary possession of silver medals was denied.)

Of course, no Russians should have been on the scene in the first place. The IOC’s clumsy wrist slap for Russia’s state-sponsored doping program in the 2014 Sochi Games somehow has resulted only in a ban of Russia’s flag and anthem in the four subsequent Olympics. Yet Russian athletes again were everywhere in Beijing, totaling the second-highest accumulation of hardware.

And most visible was Valieva, with a Court of Arbitration for Sport panel making matters worse by illogically reasoning that “irreparable harm” would be done to her if she couldn’t proceed in the free skate. That led to Valieva’s messy, distracted routine and the shunning by her entourage, which Slate’s Chris Schleicher wrote was “not only irreparable harm to Valieva but also to the sport of figure skating.” And, by extension, to the Olympics, since women’s figure skating is the Winter Games’ biggest show.

She’s only 15. There’s a good chance Valieva’s handlers had responsibility in the scandal, though there also was her weird claim of having been contaminated unintentionally by her grandfather’s heart medicine.

Whatever. Former anti-doping expert Don Catlin used to note that a positive drug test doesn’t profess to determine culpability—“We can’t know what’s in athletes’ heart or mind, only what’s in their bodies.” A failed test is a failed test and, according to the rules, requires a suspension.

But about those torches. Bach was referring to the cone-shaped objects, designed and produced each Olympic cycle, in which the Olympic flame is ceremoniously carried by thousands of runners from the site of the ancient Games in Olympia, Greece, to the host city. Typically, the torch relay covers more than 100 days through multiple nations leading up to the competition; it took 138 days for Beijing’s 2008 Summer Games. But, this year, because of the pandemic, a late decision drastically restricted the relay to just three days, confined to the Beijing area.

That means there probably are a lot of torches just lying around unused. (For the 2008 Beijing Summer Games, 26,440 torches were produced; there is no information on the total this time.) And that tends to reduce torch ownership to something akin to a widely-available souvenir—on the order of Olympic trading pins.

Even I have an Olympic torch. (I was among the handful of foreign journalists asked to run in the 1988 Seoul Olympics torch relay, when organizers wanted a mix of international participants and media folks could be counted on to be in the country before the Games.) Somehow, it’s hard to image that trinket as a replacement for an Olympic medal.

Thomas Bach is himself the possessor of an Olympic medal for being part on a winning team—West Germany’s fencers in the foil discipline—at the 1976 Montreal Games. Surely he knows what that prize is worth to an athlete. Maybe he ought to agitate for hanging a badge of guilt around the necks of all scoundrels involved in Russia’s state-run doping system. To keep them—not just their flags and anthems—outside the Olympic gates.

Pay dirt (sort of)

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

Eureka! Just by chance, stumbling onto the contents of a souvenir college mug that has long resided on my office bookshelf, I hit a mother lode—a forgotten stash of legal tender. Banknotes. Coins.

In another mug—those knick-knacks make excellent bookends—more moolah. We’re not talking about a little loose change in the couch cushions. There were big piles of money. A gold rush. A win-the-lottery moment. A Fort Knox find. And just as inflation is putting the squeeze on personal finances.

I could hear Zero Mostel singing “If I were a rich man…” I thought of another old song lyric: “I feel like ol’ Pancho Villa … I got the pesos to spend.”

Or maybe not.

First of all, virtually none of the currency was U.S.-issued. And a goodly amount of it, leftovers from bygone business trips abroad, is now thoroughly worthless. A few Greek drachmas, French francs, Dutch guilders, Belgian francs, German marks, Spanish pesetas, Italian lira—all out of fashion since those nations converted to euros 20 years ago.

The small handful of British shillings in there haven’t been redeemable in the United Kingdom—or anywhere else—since 1990, and therefore have precisely the same value as the two New York City subway tokens I also unearthed; about as useful for bartering as pieces of eight. Or plugged nickels. Same for the East German marks, out of circulation since East Germany ceased to exist three decades ago. Any numismatists out there would be more interested in old baseball cards.

But, OK, just out of curiosity, I set about doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations to determine the magnitude of my capital among the still-live morsels of what we used to call dough. Bread. Lettuce. Might as well figure whether I should bother seeking financial advice, make the trip to a foreign exchange office, or just sit on my assets. Because—hey—a 10,000-won bill from South Korea! A total of 10,000 bolivars from Venezuela! And 50 forints from Hungary!

Alas, those moneys amount, in order, to $8.52, 2 1/2 cents and 16 cents. Fool’s gold. (I seem to recall having a five-course meal in Caracas in 1983 at the hardly extravagant cost of a couple of bolivars, so I should have had known.) I also suspect that the 20 koruna from Czechoslovakia, a country that was dissolved 29 years ago, might not be accepted in what is now the Czech Republic. And, anyway, those 20 koruna would equal all of 90 cents.

I came across a Canadian Loonie—the one-dollar coin so called because of the image of a loon on one side—worth 80 cents U.S. But the 10-peso bill from Mexico? Only 50 cents. One Chinese renminbi? Fifteen cents. A Trinidad and Tobago dollar? Fourteen cents. That Hong Kong dollar? Thirteen cents. Ten Romanian lei? $2.35.

Chickenfeed. Chump change. Slim pickings.

Here’s another get-with-the-21st century thought that occurred during this mining process: In this age of credit cards, transactions via cellphone and cryptocurrencies, do people deal with cash anymore? Bits of coin and Bitcoin are not the same thing—although, as a candidate for any sort of “Money for Dummies” publication, I hesitate to make such an assumption.

Bottom line (financial discussions always conclude with one): This stockpile of now-rare holdings could be described as priceless. In the ironic sense. Not something to take to the bank.

But I’ll argue that they are interesting conversation pieces. Souvenirs of memorable adventures and, therefore, valuable trinkets. I’m holding on to them.

Not the Detroit Lions

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(A version of this appeared in Newsday’s Opinion pages)

Here comes another Super Bowl, our 21^st-Century version of Christians vs. lions. And I am wondering, in spite of its enormous popularity—more than 50,000 spectators attending gladiatorial games at the Colosseum back when everyone used Roman numerals—did the whole Christians-lions thing end because they ran out of Christians?

What if the National Football League, the bread and circuses of our modern culture, were to run out of players? Is there any chance that increased awareness of participants’ brain damage, something we’ve been reading about for more than a decade, will multiply the number of liability suits, gradually scare off insurance companies, advertisers, schools and colleges—not to mention parents of potential kiddie footballers—in a domino effect that eventually would dry up the NFL’s feeder system? Putting football (like democracy?) on a slow-motion decline into oblivion.

Silly, no?

The Super Bowl, and football in general, remain our most popular form of escapist entertainment. Of the 100 most-watched telecasts in 2021, 75 were NFL games. The NFL’s annual revenue, which has topped $15 billion a year, is roughly four times what it was at the beginning of the century. The league’s new 11-year deal with media partners is valued at $110 billion. We clearly love the spectacle.

Yet the sport’s barbaric nature is progressively more obvious with the accumulating reports of CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease associated with repeated blows to the head.

After the 2005 publication of forensic neuropathologist Bennet Omalu’s 2002 discovery of CTE in the brain of late Pittsburgh Steeler Hall of Fame center Mike Webster, there was a 37.8 percent drop in tackle football participation among all ages—from 8.4 million to 5.22 million—over the next 12 years.

In 2015, when a medical study revealed increased risk of memory problems for kids who played tackle football prior to age 12, the NFL took evasive action by backing nationwide Mom Clinics, meant to convince parents about the safety of having their tykes—as young as 5—cracking heads in youth leagues. To keep the supply of gridders coming.

But news of middle- and high-school teams being suspended has spread across the nation—sometimes due directly to heath concerns, often because there no longer were enough children willing to play.

The NFL, which initially dismissed Omalu’s findings, at last established a concussion protocol and instituted penalties for intentional head-to-head blows it calls “targeting.” But Omalu continued to argue that brain damage isn’t strictly from clinically diagnosed concussions and that safety measures such as improved helmets “don’t stop the brain from bumping around in the skull. We have to take the head out of the game.”

According to Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist and director of the CTE Center at Boston University, the disease now has been found in the brains of more than 315 former NFL players—including 24 who died in their 20s and 30s, several of whom committed suicide. The most recent was 32-year-old Phillip Adams, who last April shot and killed six people in a violent rampage in South Carolina before killing himself.

That’s a lot more unsettling than watching Giants quarterback Daniel Jones, earlier this season, emerging from a tackle rubber-legged, with little imaginary birds twirling around his helmet. Or Arizona defender Budda Baker being carted off the field on a stretcher after a violent collision during a recent playoff game.

Though CTE is detectable only in posthumous examinations, researchers are concerned about the cognitive fog and erratic and impulsive behavior in the disease’s potential victims. So when Tampa Bay receiver Antonio Brown bizarrely stripped off his equipment and walked off the field, mid-game, against the Jets last month, BU’s CTE Center co-founder Dr. Chris Nowinski acknowledged in an online post, “Like you, I wonder if Antonio Brown’s behavior is caused by CTE.”

We will only know if his brain is examined after he is dead. When it is too late.

The way it was

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Listen to your elders. They can tell you, as I’m about to tell you now, what things were like a half-century ago, before cell phones, emails, laptops, hybrid cars, GPS, global warming, social media and lots of other stuff that we all somehow managed without back then. Specifically, I’m going to describe the moment 50 years ago when big-time sports came to Long Island, this identity-challenged sprawl of suburbia forever in the shadow of the entertainment and cultural center that is New York City.

It wasn’t especially auspicious. But when the Nassau Coliseum opened its doors on Feb. 11, 1972 for a professional basketball game in the short-lived American Basketball Association, it indeed was the beginning of establishing Long Islanders’ sense of joining the in-crowd.

On the eve of that event, new Coliseum executives were promising future top-shelf events previously available only in Gotham—ice shows, boxing championships, major college basketball, roller derby, the Globetrotters, boat shows, ice shows, auto shows, dog shows. The mountain was going to come to us Mohammads.

Not all of that worked out so spectacularly. But the Coliseum, rather quickly, did come to represent a reasonable alternative to Manhattan’s elitism. And here’s how it started:

That Feb. 11 debut, which I covered for Newsday, officially was an “unofficial” opening, with only about half of the planned 15,000 seats installed. Furthermore, the available seats all were in the upper bowl, not quite binocular range but hardly courtside perches. Nineteen-seventy-two ticket prices beside the point—$5.50 to $7.50—all 7,892 spectators were in the cheap seats.

Given the unfinished state of the building, intrepid ushers were armed with mimeographed charts of the seating design, worried that the chalk marks numbering the sections might be accidentally erased. Shortly before halftime, a minor water leak developed in the hallway leading to the locker rooms.

But the game—a 129-121 New York Nets victory over the Pittsburgh Condors—was lively enough and so were the spectators. (Fittingly, one could argue, the venue’s first technical foul was assessed to Nets coach Lou Carnesecca, the now-97-year old New York sports institution known for his passionate involvement in the game, including his pointed assessments of referees’ work.)

Overall, the step up in atmosphere and amenities was a clear improvement over the Nets’ previous home at the generously named Island Garden. “Like going,” veteran Nets guard Bill Melchionni said that night, “from the outhouse to a bathroom with plumbing.”

Then and for the rest of the basketball season, the Coliseum made due with a portable floor, baskets and scoreboard all transported from the Nets previous home, prompting Pittsburgh coach Mark Binstein—who had been a Nets executive when the ABA materialized for 1967-68 season—to sarcastically express surprise “that they built a $28 million arena and still are using the same scoreboard I bought five years ago for $1,800.”

In fact the Coliseum, from the start, was a no-frills, affordable establishment, equivalent to the post-World War II Levitt housing that long defined Long Island. It was not state-of-the-art, hardly Big Town glitz, but it was the ideal counterweight to Madison Square Garden. It was analogous to the style of Al Arbour—humble and efficient—who cemented Long Island’s big-league identity by coaching the hockey Islanders to four Stanley Cup championships in the 1980s.

And it was a terrific place to watch a game. Anywhere in the building.

Of course the Nets left years ago, off to New Jersey in 1977 and resettled in Brooklyn in 2012, so the Coliseum became almost exclusively associated with the Islanders, who played there from 1972 to 2015 and split time between the Coliseum and Brooklyn from 2018 to 2021.

Then last Nov. 20, upon the Islanders’ move into their new $1.1 billion arena at Belmont Park, came gushing reports—rubbing-their-eyes-in-disbelief reactions by fans, players and officials over that venue’s stupendous architectural and technological marvels. For added emphasis, there were comparisons to the Coliseum cast as going from a dull black-and-white existence to full color, descriptions of the Coliseum as “that cramped, spare venue,” a “dingy old building,” a “dumpy….old barn.”

I have not been to the Belmont Park edifice and am confident it is nice. Its hefty price tag, after all, could buy a lot of bells, whistles and comfort for all involved. Even with inflation, that $1.1 billion amounts to six times what it cost to bring the Coliseum into being.

Okay, the Coliseum is undeniably from a previous era—a previous century! But having frequented the Coliseum with some regularity, going back to Feb. 11, 1972—fifty years ago!—as well as covering the Islanders’ initial appearance there in October of ’72, I am here to bear witness to the old joint’s functionality and ambience.

Time marches on. But, kids, you missed a good thing.

Olympic busking

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Sure, they’re Dylan and Springsteen. That they recently were paid multiple millions for their music catalogs, well, it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe. Those are songwriting giants, and you can’t start a fire without a spark.

But I’m thinking—humbly yet just out of curiosity now that the Winter Olympics again are upon us—whether the ditties I have written on Olympic topics might be worth something. To somebody.

Surely originality could get some play. The Boss, after all, never touched on the subject of ski-jumping, as I have…

On the wings of a pair of skis/These jocks show no weak knees.

They fly off with ease/On a couple of skis.

Yodel-ay-ee-hee

Yodel

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Or here’s a big-picture look at the Winter Games…

Icy rinks/Ice hills

I see some/Icy spills.

Icy nerves/Icy wills

I see great/Icy skills.

Snowy mounts/Snowy streets

‘s no easy/Snowy feats.

Snowy skies/Snowy ground

Snowy crash/Comin’ down.

Admittedly, with these ballads, I’ve never gotten around to the music part. These are only lyrics from a poor-man’s Hammerstein in need of a Rodgers, like Bernie Taupin counting on Elton John to do the composing. But you’re got to start somewhere. I’ve read where Mick Jagger originally stuck to creating the words and letting Keith Richards supply the music.

Also, just as Bob Dylan addressed topical issues, I have dealt with matters of consequence, such as the ongoing deliberations of whether the United States ought to have skipped this year’s Beijing Games in protest of China’s human-rights violations—and the history of such actions:

It sounds like we’re fixin’/To keep right on mixin’

The politics with the sports

Can’t say I’m surprised/But the previous tries

Left everyone tied up in knots

Our boycott of Moscow/Wound up a fiasco

‘Cause the Reds did the same thing to us

Just four years later/East bloc c’llaborators

Thought they’d turn LA to a bust.

A protest song? Sort of. As is this next one, calling to task the skullduggery inside the Olympic halls of power, and specifically the almost routine charges of bribery of IOC members to grant hosting rights:

Bet I can find your kid a job, if you get that guy from Guam

To cast a vote for my hometown. (Don’t say I greased your palm.)

I hear your wife likes sable coats, and I hear you like to ski.

But I could make y’alls dreams come true. (No need for thankin’ me.)

Just tell the guys on the I-O-C, I got the best hotels.

Got buds in bidness, gov’ment, TV. Know all the local swells.

And if you need some surgery done, I’m friendly with the docs;

Cars and women, song and wine. I’ll pull out all the stops.

What triggered this avocation was my assignment by Newsday to cover the 1997 U.S. national figure skating championships, which were staged in Nashville, Tenn.—Music City. The constant auditory sensations there, while casually passing live honky-tonks on the way to the ice rink each day, seemed to demand an attempt at some appropriate verses and choruses. The subject matter already was staring me in the face, since the sport had been shadowed at the previous Olympics by the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan contretemps and was in great anticipation of a less dangerous Michelle Kwan-Tara Lipinski Olympic showdown in ‘98.

So my debut went something like this….

I can’t figure skating, And I can’t figure her

Slipping around with guys in sequins, Falling on their wallets with certain Frequen-

‘Course I’ve heard of Tonya. Heard of Nancy, too.

But this ain’t exactly stock-car racing, Ain’t football and ain’t quail-chasing, I

Guarantee.

(Chorus)

No-knee-capping, no fist-fighting. No bad-mouthing in a bind

She’ll smile right onto that gold-medal stand, if she can just say off her behind.

(More verses)

Is Tara in the short program? Is Michelle in the long?

Does size have something to do with things? How come there’s music but nobody sings

The songs?

Some costumes’ll make you cry. Some’ll make you laugh.

Judges just setting there with poker faces, giving life sentences on the basis

Of a four ‘n’ a half.

(Repeat chorus)

Okay. I am aware how relationships are prevalently featured in song. And how matters of the heart can be dealt with metaphorically. Ready? A-one and a-two…

Schussh, my darlin’, dodgin’ gates like broke promises.

Schussh, my darlin’, Harrys, Dicks, cheatin’ Thomases.

Schussh, my darlin’, love’s somethin’ like a Super G.

Schussh, my darlin’, just stay warm and don’t hit a tree.

Maybe need a little help from some fellow buskers? Take two….

A Jeopardy! question

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The Jeopardy! twist on TV game shows is to supply the answers and challenge contestants to come up with the right question. But executive producer Michael Davies’ declaration this month that Jeopardy! is “a major league sport” invites an inquiry difficult to verify: Is it?

What is a sport?

In a post on the program’s website, Davies offered as proof of Jeopardy!’s sports bona fides the introduction of players’ statistics—box scores!; “lock-in” and “buzzer” data, the success rate for responses—that compares to top four champions in the show’s history. Coming next, he said, will be a “structured season and post-season every year.”

Predictably, when The Athletic website cited Davies’ we-are-a-sport claim and invited readers’ responses, the barstool argument was on. (Which may help establish that Jeopardy! indeed is a sport.)

“Is chess a sport?” one Athletic reader thundered. “What about poker? From there we can debate pool and darts, then perhaps bowling….If Jeopardy! is a sport, then….so is ‘Wheel of Fortune’ and myriad other game shows. What’s next, Monopoly?”

Another reader shot back: “Look at what ESPN says are sports. Hot dog eating, spelling bees. Jeopardy’ is a sport. There is a halftime, a two-minute warning, a play-by-play announcer. The only thing missing is uniforms.”

OK, my turn. And since the first Athletic reader brought up chess, let’s start with the 1972 world championship match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, when newspaper editors couldn’t agree where to place their coverage. Did chess belong on the front page? In the features section, next to the regular bridge column? In the sports section, alongside the Yankees and Mets? Was chess a sport?

Fischer and Spassky were dueling in Reykjavik, Iceland, and the thing went on forever—the impetuous, egocentric Fischer against the increasingly exasperated Spassky. The event sent office workers scurrying to chess boards to play during their free time. The contest received massive attention; an independent New York television station actually had continuous live coverage of absolute inaction while the contestants thought out their next moves. Maybe a half-hour would go by before the host of the show, Shelby Lyman, would be stirred by the sound of a little bell, causing him to announce, “We have a move!” as he went to the ticker tape. And then he would display the move on the huge chess board behind him.

And people watched, hanging on every development. There were accounts of bar patrons requesting the community TV be switched from baseball to the chess. Thus the impassioned discussions of the time, the call for guidelines, for definitions.

What is a sport? Is a sport merely a game? Or does it require a participant to sweat? Maybe bleed?

Should the Super Bowl yardstick be applied—enormous crowds and massive TV ratings? Do large audiences make a sport? Or is the number of spectators simply a function of popularity, which can be based on varying and sometimes regional public tastes.

As a society, we accept football as one of our primary sports, and it does fit casual parameters: It’s a game that requires physical effort. Back in the early 1980s, when the sudden boom in road-running was cresting and accomplished American marathoners like Bill Rodgers were yearning for the credibility and, frankly, the money lavished upon players in accepted sports, Rodgers proclaimed that “I will be running over Joe Namath’s grave.” It was his way of saying that marathoning required superior fitness to playing football. (Rodgers, who still participates in running events at 74, and Namath, 78, both are still with us.)

Still, does fitness make a sport? If so, baseball might have to do some fast talking, given the number of weighty souls—though far fewer than in the past—among Major Leaguers, as well as accounts of players smoking in the dugout and clubhouse.

It has been argued that a sport must have hand-eye coordination. But even that definition must be liberalized to include eye-foot coordination, or the world’s most popular sport, soccer, will be left out.

Another thing: If a game is subjectively scored, is it a sport—or just entertainment, like ballet? Such widely accepted sports as figure skating, gymnastics and diving are subjectively scored, not to mention boxing. (Although Marvelous Marvin Hagler’s solution to boxing subjectivity was once holding up his two fists and proclaiming: “These are my judges. K and O.”)

Boxing certainly has the sweat factor—and it does have a defense, two generally acknowledged elements of sport. But if a sport requires a defense, is high jumping a sport? An opponent in high jumping can impose a strategy on his rival, by skipping to a higher height, but it would be stretching matters to call that a defense. Without defense, is golf a sport? Bowling? Yachting? Archery? Horse racing?

How about this definition: Modern sport as the evolution of primal hunting. A sport is a sport if it is based on aiming and chasing. Baseball, football, basketball ice hockey, foot racing, tennis, auto racing, soccer—all our traditional sports would qualify. Even the high jumping example works: One aims for a certain height and chases others aiming higher. Golf may be more along the lines of aiming and stalking. But that’s close enough.

The theory of the hunting analogy assumes that, if something isn’t hunting, it’s farming. (Chess—planting certain seeds of entrapment and then waiting patiently for them to take root—does seem to lean a bit toward farming.) Hunting obviously goes back to the long-held thesis that all of modern sport is an outgrowth of warrior disciplines: Running, jumping, jousting, boxing, wrestling, climbing, riding, throwing and on and on.

So, then. What if we said that a sport is anything that is physical, competitive and has a set of rules?

Is aerobics a sport? (What are the rules?) Is ballroom dancing a sport? Is tiddlywinks? (There are serious tiddlywinks competitions; some years ago, the athletic department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sent a tiddlywinks team to London for the world championships. At the time, MIT did not field an intercollegiate football team, though it does now.)

For some reason, many sports get their feelings hurt if anyone dare dismiss them as a hobby or a game. Chess insiders, for instance, insisted that champions such as Bobby Fischer had to call upon great reserves of physical strength and endurance to emerge victorious. How, the chess mavens wanted to know, could anyone not call chess a sport?

Full disclosure: I am big Jeopardy! fan. But is it a sport?

No-vax Novak

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For a guy who has felt underappreciated and un-loved compared to his contemporary tennis superstars Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic hardly did himself any favors in getting himself thrown out of Australia on the eve of the year’s first major tournament. For a fellow who is such a magnificent athletic contortionist—able to bend and twist to counter any opponent’s offensive firepower—Djokovic nevertheless managed to tie himself in knots attempting to dance around the host nation’s pandemic protocols.

The whole bizarre episode, which has ended Djokovic’s legitimate shot to win a record 21^st Grand Slam singles title and thus pass both Federer and Nadal, was a public relations disaster. And something of an international incident, with the president of Djokovic’s native Serbia declaring that Australian officials had “humiliated” Djokovic and “actually humiliated themselves.”

Australian tennis officials took a hit, too, after apparently trying to give Djokovic special treatment. They were aware he was unvaccinated and that their government barred unvaccinated foreigners from entering the country, and that the Australian public was exhausted from two years of strict Covid-19 lockdown.

According to Australian journalist Van Badham, the rejection of Djokovic’s visa that followed the Open’s offer of a vaccine exemption was “undoubtedly proving popular” with the Australian public. “So, Novak. Mate. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, hey?” Badham offered in farewell.

It was reported that 83 percent of 60,000 local respondents favored Djokovic’s dismissal while the hashtag #DjokovicOut had been trending throughout the weeklong drama of Djokovic’s misleading statements and two court hearings. He became “Novax Djocovid” on Australian Twitter.

Far from Australia’s shores, ESPN’s Howard Bryant wrote that Djokovic “has cemented his membership within the pandemic’s most infamous group—the anti-vax multimillionaire athlete who behaves as if his fame, wealth and enormous platform to disseminate misinformation place him above the rest of us.”

The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill concluded that Djokovic “has made a spectacle of trying to bend the rules—thereby showing that, besides Covid, the other sickness the world is fighting is selfishness.” Hill also called Djokovic a hypocrite for having criticized women’s champion Naomi Osaka last year when she refused to attend French Open press conferences, recalling Djokovic’s quote that the press sessions are “part of the sport and part of your life on the tour. This is something we have to do; otherwise, we will get fined.”

With all those rotten tomatoes flying, even the nimble Djokovic couldn’t dodge the trouble he might easily have avoided by getting his Covid jab. And it’s not as if Djokovic is against medical science: In 2018 he revived his career by undergoing elbow surgery, ending a drought of eight straight majors without a title by winning eight of the next 13.

His fellow players, while universally praising Djokovic’s tennis talent, have expressed fatigue over his roguish stance and how it distracted from the tournament, while reminding that Australia’s vaccination requirement was clearly stated. And it’s hardly the first time colleagues found Djokovic’s actions annoying.

In 2008, he had just won his first Slam trophy at 20 when there were complaints that he too often called for trainers on court, took suspicious bathroom breaks and complained of various injuries. During that year’s U.S. Open, then-top-ranked American Andy Roddick sarcastically responded to a question about which ankle Djokovic reportedly had hurt with, “Isn’t it both of them? And a hip? And a cramp? Bird flu? Anthrax? SARS? Common cough and cold?”

At the time, Djokovic also had rankled some peers with his habit of bouncing the ball up to 20 times before serving, and by publicly mimicking the quirks of others on the tour—Roddick’s twitches under a pulled-down cap, Maria Sharapova’s pre-serve hopping and fiddling with her racket strings, Nadal’s long-shorts-and-sleeveless look, Federer’s tendency to flick at his hair while awaiting serve.

Djokovic insisted then that he preferred respect over flat-out popularity, that he wanted to be remembered as a tennis champion and not “a clown.” Much was made of the fact in last year’s U.S. Open final that fans had rallied to Djokovic’s side against Daniil Medvedev during Djokovic’s failed attempt to complete the first men’s Grand Slam sweep in 52 years. That crowd support left Djokovic in tears and proclaiming he “felt something I never felt in my life….The crowd made me feel special.”

Finally, appreciation and love. But it’s important to remind that Medvedev, who was marching to a straight-sets victory, himself was no New York crowd favorite, and that it is typical Open fans’ behavior to willingly switch allegiance, mid-match, if it means they get more tennis.

Whatever. Djokovic may have just sent himself back to Square One in his quest for widespread affection.

John Jeansonne

Newsday sportswriter emeritus/Hofstra University journalism adjunct

April 1st

He’s back!

Once teammates

Torched!

Pay dirt (sort of)

Not the Detroit Lions

The way it was

Olympic busking

A Jeopardy! question

No-vax Novak