Animal behavior

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Anybody notice how disinterested the University of Georgia’s mascot appeared during Monday night’s national championship football game? Georgia and Alabama were going at each other hammer and tongs, with 67,000 spectators shaking the rafters and the game’s caffeinated commentators at full volume.

But a quick TV shot of Uga, the bulldog who represents Georgia’s athletic teams, revealed one spectator who wasn’t even pretending to care about developments on the field. Looking half-asleep, grumpy, wish I-were-somewhere-sniffing-fire-hydrants, Uga’s demeanor convinced me that real-life mascots aren’t the answer.

A mascot should embrace its cartoon aspect. It should be a little silly and certainly lively—a bit of dancing, some gymnastics, a few eye-catching stunts, possibly a feigned duel with the opposing team’s mascot. (To a point, anyway. I once covered a Georgia Tech-Maryland basketball game that featured what was dangerously close to a real fight between two students dressed as the Tech yellow jacket and Maryland turtle during a timeout. Could have called a technical foul on those people inside the wacky critter suits.)

Anyway, it turns out that there is a Mascot Hall of Fame (founded in 2005 and based just outside Chicago) and, among the 25 inductees, not one is live—though Blue, Butler University’s bulldog, was a finalist in last year’s voting. There are indeed a few interesting live mascots extant in college sports—among them, Ralphie, the University of Colorado buffalo, and Bevo, the University of Texas longhorn steer.

But the argument here is that those live beasts are not willing participants in the proceedings. Georgia’s Uga is a perfect example, thoroughly out of his element on a football sideline, requiring an air-conditioned dog house and the presence of bags of ice at home games because bulldogs are susceptible to heat stroke in the humid conditions of the Southeast. The Arkansas Razorback, Tusk, obviously wouldn’t know a fumble from an audible—and, furthermore, Tusk isn’t even a razorback, since those exist only in Australia. He’s a Russian boar (sort of in a razorback costume).

So why not leave the work to humans operating inside goofy outfits of anthropomorphically depicted wildcats and ducks and shocks of wheat? Such a tradition is how this topic showed up on my radar shortly before the Georgia-Alabama game.

There was an obituary about a New York Mets’ former ticket-office employee named Dan Reilly, whose place in mascot history came 58 years ago when he slipped into an unventilated, oversize papier-mache head with simulated stitches—to resemble a baseball—and became the original Mr. Met mascot.

Mr. Met was inducted into the Mascot Hall of Fame in 2007, described as “a humanoid with a baseball head.” He—Mr. Met, not Dan Reilly—thus is immortalized alongside, among others, the Hall’s first member, the Phillie Phanatic—whose human inside-job man, David Raymond, happens to be the founder of the Mascot Hall of Fame.

The Hall, which bills itself as essentially a children’s museum, describes its mission as “celebrating the unsung heroes of sports and communities.” Something we grown-ups can appreciate as well.

Of course the 1970s madcap San Diego Chicken—later recast as The Famous Chicken—is in the Hall, recognized by the New York Times as “perhaps the most influential mascot in sports history.” The Chicken pioneered the widespread creation of mascots in professional sports, though colleges have been cranking out less sophisticated ones for decades.

In my half-century as a sports journalist, I naturally have crossed paths with mascots tied to high schools, colleges, pros and Olympic sports, including one favorite at the former grass-roots domestic competition known as the U.S. Olympic Festival. That was in 1989 in Oklahoma City, when a lad named Ken Evans dressed himself in a furry critter suit and wandered among the 38 sports being contested over two weeks.

He found that “the big question” among Festival attendees “was, ‘What am I?’ Am I a bear or a gopher or what?’” He was a prairie dog, christened Boomer. And my recollection is that he lamented there being neither ventilation nor some sort of fan inside the big prairie-dog head, which became an enormous problem when he got sick to his stomach in the Oklahoma heat.

But, see: Even the people in the cheap seats could tell that was a mascot fully involved in the moment. One who knew the score.

Don’t worry. Be happy.

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STONEHAVEN, Scotland—The longest queues outside the local shops have been at the butcher’s and the sweets’ store. There are signs in most windows that only three persons are allowed inside simultaneously. Masking is prevalent.

A reader can go pages into the local newspapers without seeing a story on anything unrelated to the coronavirus—the Queen’s cancelled Christmas plans, warnings to the hoi polloi against large gatherings, shifting official restrictions from 10 Downing Street, ominous Omicron variant statistics, postponements of soccer’s Premier League games. We almost truncated this two-week Holiday visit to the United Kingdom when I was “pinged”—alerted by the National Health Service that I was “a contact of someone with COVID-19.”

That was just two days after arrival from the Across the Pond. “You do not have to self-isolate,” the email said. “You should take rapid lateral flow tests for 7 days….You may become infectious even if you’re fully vaccinated or do not have symptoms.”

We had just tested ourselves with the home kits widely available in the U.K. but it took four days before we got an email confirmation that I was negative. (We would not have been allowed to fly here in the first place without being fully vaccinated and providing negative tests two days before departure.)

Our daughter, her husband and their 19-month-old live in London and her husband’s mother is in this village on Scotland’s East coast. They convinced us to stick to our original itinerary, so after five days in London we took a sleeper train to Scotland.

We’re here, still healthy. Or, anyway, asymptomatic. Amid the bracing chill, wind and rain, far enough North that the sun doesn’t rise until quarter to 9 and sets at 3:30, it’s a fine adventure. At least when varying waves of anxiety subside a bit.

On the sleeper train segment, some malfunction—very likely a staff shortage precipitated by COVID positives or contact-tracing protocols—had forced our transfer to a standard commuter train still two hours short of Stonehaven. No worries; the trip was completed without further incident. But the fear of widespread cancellations of train and air travel theoretically could get us stuck here past our Dec. 30 return date.

Already, Stonehaven officials have cancelled their annual Hogmanay festival, a fireballs ceremony in the town square to ring in the new year. Worse—to me, anyway—COVID’s impact on employees has temporarily closed The Bay, twice named Scotland’s best fish-and-chips shop.

What to do? Have some giggles with the grandson. Marvel at the hardiness of the locals—my son-in-law’s mother swims in the North Sea, even this time of year when the air temperature barely reaches 40 and the wind howls incessantly, taking the chill factor down below freezing. My morning runs are slowed and shortened not only by the slanting rain but by the hilly landscape. We Yanks, frankly, are comparative wimps (although my wife has matched the locals’ sturdiness with her typically long daily walks).

And we’re working on a stiff upper lip.

Using the Olympic soapbox

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

Will anybody really notice when President Biden and other high-ranking U.S. officials don’t show up for February’s Winter Olympics in Beijing? The Biden Administration’s declaration of a diplomatic boycott of the Games expressly allows athletes to compete in China, so the quadrennial shushing, sliding and skating among the world’s sportswomen and sportsmen will proceed with great fanfare and with NBC’s typically melodramatic presentation. Curling fans will not be robbed of their exotic brand of entertainment.

So: Does such a high-level snub accomplish anything?

The White House has declared its action as an objection to the Chinese government’s “ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity” and other abuses, including a crackdown of freedoms in Hong Kong and Tibet and the recent disappearance of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai after she accused a high-ranking Communist official of sexual assault.

It’s clear that China doesn’t much worry about criticism from the West. And Olympic boycotts historically have not been an effective tool in reforming nefarious behavior. The 1980 U.S.-led boycott of the Moscow Summer Games, called by President Jimmy Carter and joined by 64 other nations protesting the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, outraged the athletes who felt they were pawns, and it had no impact on the Soviet occupation, which lasted another nine years. About all it accomplished was the Soviets’ revenge boycott of the Los Angeles Games four years later which again was foisted upon non-voting athletes.

The argument here is that, while the President’s declaration is essentially a symbolic one, it nevertheless is generating an abundance of commentary and likely some discomfort for the corporate giants helping to bolster Beijing and the International Olympic Committee. And, in doing so, it is highlighting the feeble stance on human rights by the International Olympic Committee, which promotes a mission of global goodwill through a sort of United Nations in Sneakers.

The IOC awarded the 2008 Summer Olympics to Beijing, in spite of China being one of the world’s most repressive governments, amid global protests that included pleas at the time for a full boycott. When that threat passed and the competition began, all the focus went to the athletes and China’s spectacularly run events. Then the IOC favored Russia with the 2014 Winter Games in the face of complaints about Moscow’s anti-gay legislation. And Beijing was chosen again for 2022.

Each instance violated language in Provision 6 of the IOC charter requiring Olympic hosts to insure that “rights and freedoms….shall be secured without discrimination of any kind, such as race, color, sex, sexual orientation, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, birth or other status.”

Called out again for ignoring such policies, both Beijing and the IOC predictably are bemoaning the United States’ proposed diplomatic action by invoking the old sports-and-politics-shouldn’t-mix cliché—when, in fact, sports and politics always are mixed. Especially with the Olympics, which has become the world’s biggest soapbox, playing to the grievances of dissidents and the self-interest of image-makers every bit as much as the guardians of carefree sport.

Every Olympics site has served as a political statement by the host, whether it was Nazi Germany’s 1936 Games as propaganda for Hitler’s criminal agenda, Japan’s 1964 Olympics to demonstrate its post-World War II revival, South Korea’s 1988 Games to showcase a turn to democracy, even L.A.’s 1984 celebration of capitalist might. China wants to telegraph its technological and economic power and, not least, an athletic prowess in the familiar, if illogical, assumption that gold medals suggest a nation’s moral superiority.

Naturally, since the core of the Olympics is sport, the athletes prioritize competition but, increasingly, they may not just shut and play. Several U.S. Olympians, including figure skaters Evan Bates and Nathan Chen, have confirmed their participation while condemning China’s human rights violations as “abysmal,” and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee declared last year that it would not punish its jocks for reasonable demonstrations during the Games. (The IOC, citing its old rule limiting “athlete expression,” said it will.)

So neither Biden nor vice president Kamala Harris nor any department secretaries will join the hullabaloo in February. And China won’t change its spots. But we’ve been forced to think about the issue now.

Pre-game show

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Army is playing Navy in football for the 122nd time this week and whatever mayhem will ensue on the gridiron can’t possibly top the kind of unruly behavior traditionally practiced at the two military academies leading up to the game. Already there have been published reports of one failed “spirit mission” by Army cadets to kidnap Navy’s goat mascot, prompting a righteous declaration that the schools’ superintendents “are disappointed by the trust that was broken recently between our brothers and sisters in arms.”

The dual statement by Lt. Gen Darryl Williams and Vice Adm. Sean Buck said the goat snatchers—who wound up with the wrong animal—“do not reflect either academy’s core values of dignity and respect.”

But days later, a second cadet operation successfully absconded with two Navy mascots. And anyone who has been to West Point and Annapolis during Army-Navy week would be left with the strong impression that the various pranks—which occasionally border or vandalism and bullying—are unofficially condoned by military leaders as boisterous boys-will-be-boys fun.

On a newspaper assignment to chronicle Army-Navy week several years ago, I met Army cadets who recounted how they had tarred and feathered a Navy exchange student with shoe polish and the contents of pillows; how they “changed the landscape a bit” by putting a Mickey Mouse watch face on the campus clock tower and erected a basketball backboard and hoop five stories high on one of the barracks.

They told stories of putting the superintendent’s car in the mess hall, stacking all the plates from the mess kitchen on the parade ground to spell out Beat Navy and tying another Naval Academy exchange student to a chair and bombing him with water balloons and shaving cream.

The same week in Annapolis, Midshipmen wrapped an officer’s car in tissue paper and stuffed it with Styrofoam chips, relocated printers and chairs and desks from various offices to the football practice field, sprayed classmates’ navy-blue uniforms with white baby powder, waxed photographs onto floors, tossed mattresses out of windows.

One raucous lunch-hour food fight featured Midshipmen climbing atop tables, others hoisting their tables—ladled with chicken cutlets, bread, salad, water, iced tea, soup and utensils—over their heads. A pitcher of soup was dumped on one upperclassman’s head, a pitcher of water and catsup on others’. Perpetrators then ran for the exits, slipping on water-, soup- and iced tea-slickened aisles, careening into chairs.

“You think the Navy is all discipline and order?” one Midshipman shouted in glee. “Not during Army Week!”

At West Point, where cadets switched from dress gray uniforms to camouflage during Army-Navy week, one instructor told his class how, when he had been a cadet at the academy, he was part of a “spirit mission” that took a boat from a nearby Hudson River dock and put it on the superintendent’s lawn—surely an invitation for his students to attempt topping that. Such ritual hijinks have been passed along for more than a century, including the one by 1903 West Point grad Douglas MacArthur, the celebrated World War II general, in which the cannon fired each morning for wake-up call was somehow relocated to the top of the clock tower during Army-Navy week.

This sort of “primarily unauthorized” activity, according to one cadet speaking confidentially (on the grounds he might incriminate himself), “may actually have happened.” With a wink and a nod, the only rules applicable to the mischief appear to be unwritten ones: Cleverness counts. Whatever is done has to be cleaned up. Don’t cost too much money. Don’t get seriously hurt.

“The whole thing is tension release,” assured one Midshipman. “It’s great.”

Then, at week’s end, the two academies’ football teams engage one another. Passionately. But with the expectation that they mind all rules, respectfully and with dignity.

Enough

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

There was this high school B-team quarterback of middling talent, a sophomore, promoted to the undefeated junior varsity for its season finale. Summoned from the bench in the fourth quarter, with his new mates safely ahead, 37-0, he promptly led two touchdown drives against the clearly overmatched opponent.

The last score came on a trick maneuver when no such thing was necessary, when the lad called for a halfback pass disguised as a run. 51-0. It was too easy.

That quarterback was me. Guilty, you might say, of the unsportsmanlike deed of running up the score. At the time, I certainly didn’t consider how the other team felt about the situation, or whether I should be more embarrassed by my actions than the victims were by the score.

That was 59 years ago, but the ethics of that sort of piling on are an old and recurring topic that goes beyond playing fields, the dehumanizing of the Other Side in all matters—socially, culturally, politically.

I’m thinking of the scraps at school board meetings, the name-calling and profanity hurled at anyone considered a “loser” for their beliefs, the inconsiderate blasting of music by neighbors at all hours, the aggressive parkway speeders and drivers who won’t give way to ambulances, the knuckleheads who can’t extricate themselves from their phones to acknowledge other human beings, the anger on social media. In general, me-first posturing.

What triggered this rumination was the local high school coach who dodged disciplinary action after his team’s recent 47-0 rout that activated Nassau County’s lopsided-score policy. Any coach whose team wins by more than 42 points is required to submit a written report on the lengths he went to avoid running up the score. Or face possible suspension.

The quandary in these matters, though, is whether respect for opponents can be legislated. And exactly how to define respect.

The great basketball star Bill Russell once was asked about the merciless beatings he and his U.S. teammates administered during the 1956 Olympic tournament, in the era before basketball was widely played beyond these shores and American opponents were predictably helpless. The Yanks won their eight games that year by an average of 53.5 points—the most emphatic being a 101-29 beat-down of Thailand—but Russell argued that it honored every opponent to always play his hardest.

In sports, a zero-sum endeavor, somebody has to lose. But so what? Being on the short end of a score hardly reflects on one’s moral character. Besides, real competitors don’t consider themselves charity cases in the face of superior talent, don’t ask for leniency and aren’t expecting it. In that sense, I’ll argue that it is possible to win big and remain humble. Besides, as long as there is fair play, isn’t there an obligation—no matter one’s skill—to do one’s best at all times?

It’s just that there are limits, the difference between a spontaneous, organic rout and a bully rout. In 1980, when Portland State defeated Delaware State, 105-0, in college football, Portland State led, 63-0, at halftime and continued to use its first-stringers. “The question is: ‘How much did they need?’” the Delaware State athletic director, Nelson Townsend, asked. “We were beaten. When it was 63-0, did they still think we could catch up?”

It didn’t help that Portland State’s coach, Mouse Davis, groused, “Don’t blame me if that team is [excrement].”

Is it necessary to invoke a mercy rule in life? Is it the duty of a dominant team to call off the dogs at some point? Clear the bench? And, in the latter case, is it appropriate for the coach to instruct his seldom-used subs to rein in their eagerness to perform? (In the long-ago days of this quarterback, the coach didn’t call the plays; the quarterback did, which would shift some degree of accountability.)

I can’t say I was sorry for that 51-0 thrashing. I’ve been on the other end of those things and, rather than humiliated, was frustrated by my—and my team’s—failures. But it’s too easy not to consider the other side. And it would have been more polite to run the ball.

Musical crescendo

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

As a child of the ’50s — the 1950s — my exposure to Classical music, those hit-parade tunes from the 16th and 17th centuries, mostly came from “Bugs Bunny” cartoons or radio’s “Lone Ranger” theme. (Who knew the latter was Rossini’s “William Tell Overture”? Who knew Rossini?)

I am from the first generation gifted with rock ’n’ roll and matured in the time of The Beach Boys and Dylan. My musical taste — if “taste” is the right word — could be described as having evolved over time into something fairly eclectic, but more likely to feature fiddles than violins. And heavily reliant on guitars and drums. With lyrics!

Fats Domino. Jimmy Buffet. Linda Ronstadt. John Prine. Aretha Franklin. Arlo Guthrie. Willie Nelson. Maybe not the definition of highbrow.

But lately, the morning shave is accompanied by stuff that needs a conductor, material that used to be known as long-haired music (the original iteration, before the adjective was applied — ironically, I suspect — to the emergence of the Fab Four and through the Age Of Aquarius).

It is not entirely clear what’s going on here. Or why. Does this new habit have anything to do with advanced maturity and a trend toward a calmer phase of life? Evidence of finally acquiring a light dusting of sophistication? Might the pandemic have contributed to seeking an aural escape from the latest noise on booster shots, climate change, anti-vax demonstrations, political wrangling?

This hardly is a claim of aficionado status. I couldn’t pick a rhapsody out of a crowd of sonatas and fugues and concertos, or differentiate a Dvorak opus from a Bach symphony. (Any symphony, by any Bach.) I do have old CDs of Vivaldi and Handel compositions but, compared with my typical leanings — The Eagles, Clapton, Delbert McClinton, Grateful Dead — Classical music remains mostly uncharted territory.

A two-minute Buddy Holly ditty, these are not. Radio DJ introductions alone are mysterious: Mozart’s Symphony No. 31 in D, Kochel 297. Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Minor, Op. 21. Haydn’s Symphony No. 79 in F Major. I certainly didn’t grow up being informed that I was about to hear The Beatles’ “Rocky Raccoon” in C Major. Or Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” in B Flat Major.

There was a delightful New Yorker essay not long ago by Kirk J. Rudell that aptly characterized Classical music ignoramuses like me. Written in the voice of a fellow dragged to a concert by his date who clearly would have preferred being at a Mets game, Rudell’s character struggled with how Classical pieces continue for great lengths and include dramatic changes in tempo and volume. With full-stop pauses.

“Are they done?” he kept fretting. “Do we clap now?” Only to hear the music swell again.

While he mulled, “Is it relaxing? Or boring?”

In my half-century working as a sports journalist, I had the occasion to cover a number of major figure-skating competitions, in which Classical music — though the pieces are cut-and-pasted into small bits to fit two- and four-minute routines — is a common ingredient. Good listening, for sure, yet basically background music. Subliminal. Like those “Bugs Bunny” cartoons.

But here I am, having survived disco and acknowledging a reluctance to rap, still entertained by old rock, folk and country favorites, yet wondering if I might at last have evolved into a borderline egghead, or someone with grandiloquent inclinations. More civilized. More open-minded to Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Brahms, Schubert. Finally devoted to the arts.

Here is the late-in-life revelation: It’s not boring.

Questionable

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As a Jeopardy! fan, I now see the wisdom in that franchise’s decision not to hire Aaron Rodgers as permanent host. It is “the spirit of Jeopardy!,” the New York Times’ James Poniewozik wrote in an appreciation of the departed Alex Trebek, “to care about getting things right…a place to go where it is OK to know things.”

In the past week Rodgers, the Green Bay Packers star quarterback, hardly came across as someone who has all the answers. Amid a stream of misinformation, he argued that he had done his own research about Covid vaccines and, as a “critical thinker,” had come to the conclusion that the shots are linked with infertility and that NFL protocols to fight the virus are “shame-based…not based in science” and don’t make sense to him.

His claim in August, when asked this summer if he was vaccinated, that he was “immunized” was a fabulist dodge, and now that he has tested positive for the virus, is insisting he was better protected by the veterinary de-worming drug ivermectin, which has been dismissed by the CDC as ineffective.

Critical thinking, indeed. Though Rodgers is an exceptionally gifted athlete, a 17th-year pro and the league’s reigning MVP, he is no epidemiologist schooled in medical science. In fact, he did not graduate from the University of California, where he majored in American Studies while he played football.

Rodgers does have an honorary degree, awarded him in 2018 by the Medical College of Wisconsin for helping raise money for cancer research. But his recent funhouse mirror distortions regarding Covid protection have severely dented any medical credentials he may have had, causing him to lose a nine-year health-care sponsorship deal with a Green Bay-based physicians group.

His assertion of having surpassing knowledge of Covid is no more coherent than that of basketball star Kylie Irving, suspended by the Brooklyn Nets for refusing vaccination. Irving, who once insisted that the Earth is flat, also has cited personal research for his decision.

To that, former New York Knicks coach and ESPN basketball commentator Jeff Van Gundy told Richard Dietsch on Dietsch’s Sports Media podcast, “If you choose not to get a vaccine, as crazy as it sounds to me, please don’t insult us all with, you know, that your research is going to turn up something that all these brilliant doctors, around the world, so heavily invested,” have learned. “It would be as absurd to me as asking a doctor how Kylie Irving should work on his crossover game and his handle. Like, that guy thinks that he knows more about that than a basketball guy?”

(Irving, like Rodgers, also is operating without a college degree. He attended Duke University for one year and did not study medicine.)

Whether it is Covid fever settling in, or just how Rodgers has felt all along about his superior knowledge of all things, he is calling himself a victim of “cancel culture,” “woke mobs” and media “witch hunts;” maintaining that the NFL denied his appeal to be exempted from protocols, agreed upon by the players’ union that included mask-wearing in press conferences and player meetings, because league officials “thought I was a quack” for his immunization alternative.

So, regarding Rodgers’ Jeopardy! tryout: Poniewozik’s Times evaluation was that, on the show, “there were not alternative facts, only actual ones. They did not change depending on how you felt about them or the person revealing them.” Trebek, the man Rodgers hoped to replace, was seen as perfect for the role by all-time Jeopardy! champ Ken Jennings because he was “the voice of fact in a post-fact world.”

Here’s the question, Jeopardy! style: Who is Aaron Rodgers?

Ten-hut!

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Tempus may fugit but, in the sports world, there is increasing concern that time is dragging for younger audiences; they aren’t having enough fun and a tedium over the length of games is highlighting a preference for…highlights. Only highlights.

That’s a problem for leagues paying enormous television rights fees to broadcast live events.

At a recent two-day New York City conference for professional sports league CEOs, billionaire team owners and high-profile media moguls, NBA commissioner Adam Silver echoed some worried executives working with the National Football League by noting an estimated 70-percent drop in game viewership among the 18-to-34-year-old demographic.

“People,” Silver lamented, “are living on their phones.” And that leads to what Daniel Cohen, a vice president for the Octagon sports and entertainment agency, called the “double-edged sword” of leagues’ social-media deals.

“At what point,” Cohen asked at the conference, “does putting up all these highlights on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and your own websites cannibalize your audience? There has to be a shift back toward capping the abundance of highlights that are accessible there if you want to maintain exclusivity and a premium price on your rights.”

For years, sports leagues’ control-tower responsibilities have included struggling with spectators’ shorter attention spans. Baseball, especially, has brain-stormed rule changes in attempts to pick up the pace and generate excitement, to somehow present something closer to exploding car-chase scenes than Masterpiece Theatre. Given the trends, though, the prognosis is not particularly bright.

Consider a Penn State University course study that cited social medial and technology for reducing teenagers’ ability to stay focused on anything for more than eight seconds. A report by the National Center for Biotechnology Information came up with the same statistic, concluding that the average human’s attention span dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to those eight seconds in 2013. One second less than that of a goldfish!

That kind of wandering concentration has been exacerbated in sports by the onset of legalized betting and the whole fantasy landscape. The result is making outlets such as the NFL’s Red Zone cable channel, which flits around the league to zero in exclusively on scoring chances, ideal for goldfish.

But by sticking to just game highlights, the Red Zone and similar fare are unmoored from the big picture, lacking context. Highlights are Cliff Notes to novels, Twitter posts to robust storytelling. Is that a smart way to cultivate the next generation of fans?

As long ago as 2013, Forbes magazine reported that the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars had considered displaying the Red Zone on their stadium video board during games, and ultimately created a “Fan Cave”—a 7,000-square-foot lounge atop one end zone with WiFi and 18 flat-screen televisions providing Red Zone access. That assured that paying customers could turn their attention away from the game in front of them to seek more stimulating action around the league. (Cheaper to just stay home and turn on the tube, no?)

Highlights—though spectacular and climactic—exist in a vacuum, robbing viewers of plot development, a setting, themes, subplots, dilemmas and other details that flesh out the larger tale. As such, highlights can’t help contributing to the proliferation of restless, inattentive souls.

And possibly goldfish.

More than bad P.R.

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There is a guy out there who calls himself the Reputation Doctor and I can think of at least two prominent veterans of the football coaching trade who could use his services right now. A sort of surgeon specializing in character repair, his name is Mike Paul, who has been praised by BusinessWeek as “The Master of Disaster;” by Sports Illustrated as “Mr. Fixit;” by various political leaders as “The Crisis King.”

And if there ever were public figures in need of esteem convalescence, we could start with Jon Gruden and Urban Meyer, a couple of fellows who appear to consider themselves apart from polite society. Judging by recently revealed emails and videotapes, Gruden and Meyer seemed to assume the job bestowed unlimited access to power and privilege, a free pass to belittle and badger whomever they pleased.

I once spoke to the Reputation Doctor while reporting on an embarrassing transgression by some accomplished sports star or other. Of course he spoke only in general terms, since he was not working with that athlete, but a central tidbit he did offer was that “if they were my clients, I’d say, ‘You don’t want people to doubt your word.’”

Which gets right to the problem with Gruden and Meyer. Gruden, after detailed revelations of racist, sexist and homophobic emails he had authored over several years, insisted he had “not a blade of racism in me” and claimed he “never meant to hurt anyone.” He resigned as Las Vegas Raiders coach under pressure—amid the high probability that not a soul believed his weak mea culpa.

Meyer called evidence of him canoodling with a young woman in a suburban Columbus, Ohio bar, after he had skipped his Jacksonville team’s flight home from its loss in Cincinnati, proof only of “a bad decision…stupid.” Jacksonville owner Shad Kahn called Meyer’s behavior “inexcusable” but kept him around for the Jaguars’ fifth consecutive loss the next weekend. Meyer’s questionable conduct aside, losing five straight games in his first NFL job is not a good career look.

Meanwhile, character witnesses have not exactly rushed to either man’s defense and subsequent reporting not only reinforced unsavory qualities in both coaches, but raised the question of whether they represented a decidedly low standard among their peers.

Writing for Slate, Alex Kirshner called Gruden “a spitting image of the worst stereotype you had in your head of a meathead, authoritarian football coach” and concluded that Gruden’s attitude toward Blacks, women and gays “wasn’t an affront to the NFL as much as an embodiment of it.”

New York Magazine’s Will Leitch contended that it is “becoming increasingly clear” that the Gruden’s emails were “about the entire culture of the NFL….You want to know what the NFL is really like? The Gruden emails—again, sent by one of the most powerful figures in the league, without the slightest worry of reproach, to top-ranking NFL officials at their corporate email addresses—are the opening pages of the entire story…”

William Rhoden of The Undefeated argued that the “reality is that the NFL, for all its attempts to move forward, has been revealed as a regressive organization populated by white men who hold views about race and power that are antithetical to progress and enlightenment. Trust me, Gruden is not the only person who holds these beliefs. He’s the only one stupid enough, or emboldened enough, to express them via email.” At The Atlantic, Jemele Hill declared that “the NFL is full of Jon Grudens.”

Urban Meyer has not been similarly cast as reflecting league-wide boorishness—not yet, anyway. But shortly after he took the Jacksonville job, there was a published reminder that one of his first hires was strength coach Chris Doyle, who had been forced out at the University of Iowa over allegations he had made racist statements and had bullied players. (Doyle resigned months ago but denied any wrongdoing.)

Sounds like the NFL needs more than a public relations medic.

Water break

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

Anyone here old enough to remember the song “Cool Water”? The tale of a parched man traveling a wasteland with his mule, tormented by mirages, it was written in 1936, first recorded in 1941 (still before my time), but revived occasionally, including during my youth in the 1950s.

The yearning refrain — “cool … clear … water” — pops into mind with what seems to be increasingly hot, humid weather, when I’m lucky enough to have plentiful access to transparent, tasteless, odorless H2O. The best liquid refreshment there is, really.

I was chatting by phone with my brother recently as he went about one of his typically physical labors amid the suffocating heat near his Texas home, when I recalled how my favorite part of the day — back when he and I worked in the West Texas oil fields during our high-school summers — was the water break.

“I kinda preferred quitting time,” he said.

Well, yes. It is certainly possible to overdo long hours of digging ditches, stringing pipeline, wrenching together various structures that — mysteriously to me — would deliver petroleum products to the public. My thoroughly informal title in that process was roustabout, defined as “an unskilled or semiskilled laborer, especially in an oil field or refinery.” I recently came across a survey by CareerCast, rating jobs based on environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress, that judged roustabout to be the absolute worst.

Still, that time is a pleasant recollection, for several reasons. First of all, that was before a climate-change awareness that the use of fossil fuels is wrecking the planet, so to have been a cog in that destruction is not something I had to struggle with.

The work was demanding enough — ever try to dig a trench in the sedimentary rock called caliche? — and hours in temperatures regularly near 100 degrees were long enough (10 a day, six days a week). There was, however, the favorable cost-benefit analysis that the gig would last a mere three months before high school classes resumed and the banked money would get me through college — thereby assuring a permanent farewell to oil field drudgery by the age of 18.

That’s the lesson, kiddos. Heavy toil isn’t so bad at that age; in fact, it reinforces a man-over-mouse self-worth so long as it solidifies the conviction that there are more fun ways to earn a living. In my case, a half century in journalism.

My boss then, the gang-pusher, was a 40-something gentleman of admirable work ethic, kindness and a sense of humor named Walter H. Cox. (“What’s the ‘H’ for?” we’d ask. “Hurry,” he always said, more a command than an answer.) Walter once told me how he had dropped out of high school to take an oil field job because of the good (comparatively) money available. He never expressly acknowledged regretting the decision, but all those years later the money hadn’t gotten much better and the work was just as physically demanding.

One summer, there were two older fellows on the crew — they seemed ancient; probably in their late 40s or early 50s — who occasionally wouldn’t show up Sunday mornings (our day off was Saturday). Walter guessed they might have relaxed from a long, sweaty week by spending too much of their pay on drinks (not water).

So, short on manpower one Sunday, Walter stopped the truck on the way to the oil patch and ducked into the local bar — this was at 5:30 in the morning — and fetched a young fellow lured by the promise of a quick single-day check. The lad lasted until about 1 p.m., then literally walked off the job, slowly disappearing over the flat horizon of barren mesquite and dust. I suppose he was able, after a mile or so to the nearest highway, to hitch a ride. Maybe right back to the bar.

The rest of us had just resumed duties after our usual half-hour lunch hour — which for me always included a quick 10-minute nap under the truck, the only place to find a little shade, after a hearty repast of four sandwiches and ice cream, kept cold in a small thermos. (God bless my mother.)

A few more chores and it was time for a break. And — no mirage — some cool, clear water.