Lawn king

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(This appeared in Newsday’s  Act2 section)

This may explode a couple of myths about those of us in our advancing years. One is that, in retirement or semiretirement, with theoretically more time on our hands, we are delighted to putter around the estate as amateur horticulturists. The Beatles contributed to this cliché with a lyric in “When I’m 64” (“Doing the garden, digging the weeds / Who could ask for more?”).

Me. I could ask for less of such drudgery.

Around my house, there in fact are lovely gardens, with a variety of flowers, shrubs and vegetables, but that’s all the province of my wife. Too much labor and expertise involved for me. (Old proverb: Hard work may not hurt anyone, but I don’t want to take any chances.) I readily acknowledge a predilection for the kind of toil that involves a chair and a writing implement.

But here’s another bit of folklore, related but essentially contrary to the previous, with which I also disagree: That mowing the lawn is a chore to be outsourced.

I mow. Have for more than 40 years. And I enjoy it.

Because it’s therapeutic? (I guess so; mowing is not a time to think about death or taxes.) Because it’s a welcome outdoor activity, without overdoing it? (I never have believed in the no-pain, no-gain philosophy of exercise.) Because it offers a feeling of control? (Grass does not offer any resistance the way, say, unaligned wallpaper does.)

I know I’m outlier on this, in the 10th percentile at best. Apart from me and my next-door neighbor, who also cuts his own grass, it is blatantly obvious that landscaping crews rule in these precincts. (Ah, the thundering sound of ride-on mowers, trimmers and powerful, polluting leaf-blowers in the morning.) According to the state comptroller’s statistics, Long Island’s homeownership rate is above 70% for the roughly 3 million residents of Nassau and Suffolk counties, so that’s a lot of lawns being tended by hired hands.

I have no good explanation for my contrarian behavior in this matter. As a young lad, I despised the regular assignment of tending the lawn with a balky push mower and unwieldy hand clippers guaranteed to raise blisters within minutes. Especially since I might have been watching Bullwinkle on TV instead. The yard was for knocking a baseball around, not for honing one’s grounds-keeping chops.

Anyway, because high school graduation was followed by a span of nine years residing exclusively in dorms and apartments, all challenging maintenance duties became nonexistent. Lack of ownership has its upsides. Call the super.

But mowing, I discovered with the purchase of our first home, takes no skill whatsoever. No problem-solving. What could I possibly bollix in this enterprise? Just keep the mower blade sharp. Mow when the grass is dry. Alternate mowing patterns. (NorthSouth one week, East-West the next. Go for the Yankee Stadium outfield look.) Participate in grass-cycling; that is, leave the clippings on the lawn, not only saving the time and effort of emptying the bag but enhancing fertilization.

To be a competent mower of lawns, one need not understand the mystery of photosynthesis or know fescue from ryegrass, Bermuda grass from Zoysia grass.

Consider the visual satisfaction of your handiwork. “Mowing,” a kindred spirit, Anthony Sharwood, wrote in a Huffington Post essay, “is an artform. A sublime, beautiful, meditative act. You can mow stripes. You can mow circles. You can mow any way you choose.”

And you make money with do-it-yourself mowing! I’ve done a few calculations. According to the HomeAdvisor website, the average cost of lawnmowing services in these parts is, at minimum, around $30 a week. The mowing season runs roughly 32 weeks, so that would be $960 a year. To self-mow, I require approximately $50 worth of gasoline each year.

A small container of motor oil runs about $5 and lasts a couple of years. So that’s an additional $2.50 per annum. OK. The price of my new mower, purchased last year, was $400. But if it lasts 18 years, as did my previous machine, that would be an annual investment of $22. So, I’d still be way ahead of the game. And still the hero of the story.

The Covid rules

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LONDON—By 1 p.m. on the day after arrival here from across The Pond, the authorities had telephoned twice and texted once. We were reminded repeatedly that we faced a fine if we were not quarantined for 10 days and did not undergo a COVID-19 test twice in eight days.

Prior to our flight here, we had passed an original test—flying colors to go with the sparks in our heads from having that swab so far up our noses—and spent approximately five frustrating hours navigating question-and-answer forms to confirm our temporary London address and phone number, and to provide detailed travel specifics, as well as evidence of being fully vaccinated. Most unsettling was the lack of confirmation that any of this information had been received by either the airlines or the British government.

Once in the U.K., we were not to leave our rented flat, not to go for a morning run or walk (ooops), although the parks and paths were well populated with foot and bicycle traffic (minus face masks). We were not to go visiting, which was the purpose of the trip, since our daughter is a London resident and we came to finally meet the grandboy, born just a couple of months into the pandemic.

Understand that we believe in anti-pestilence protocols. Masks. Distancing. The kind of thing that most people had ignored during the 1 1/2-hour slog through the line to clear customs. Avoiding pubs, restaurants and humans in general is not a problem. Accepting the uncertainty of the plague is frustrating but understandable.

But the moving goalposts and changing signals in this venture have been more exhausting than the 15 months of Zooming and day-to-day activity detours wrought by the coronavirus. Two days before the flight here, our airline—no names, but it might have been American—emailed with the shocking revelation that it had moved our departure up a day.

It took my wife five hours on the phone, until 2 a.m.—most of that time waiting on hold—to correct that.

That and the flight successfully accomplished, the calls from health officials, with the same warnings and orders each day, came at various hours. We were able to report that we had self-administered a COVID test on Day 2 in the English capital, and put the testing kit in the mail. “You might get a visit to see you are quarantined,” was the added threat.

Email confirmation of the negative results arrived the next day. Meanwhile, we read that Health Services volunteers were contacting only 20 percent of visitors to monitor quarantine rules. Still, Big Brother kept calling, and our cell phone twice wouldn’t connect, and a callback from us produced only a recorded message that BB had missed us and would try later.

When the clocks strike thirteen? Were we busted? My wife’s telephone search for advice to confirm that we were conforming led to three half-hour delays on hold, then to a person apologizing that she was unable to offer help, and finally a nice fellow’s easier-said-than-done recommendation: “Don’t panic.”

We already had. Repeatedly.

News of the Delta variant was rampant. Britain’s health chief had just resigned after reports he had violated his own rule to mask up and not go around hugging unrelated people. Yet two major international sports events—Wimbledon tennis and soccer’s European championship tournament—are being contested in London this month. Before large crowds.

When the TV in our quarantine bunker failed on the first day, it magnified the isolation experience. (The television somehow recovered the next evening, in time to watch British champion Andy Murray’s first-round Wimbledon victory.) There remains a constant, nerve wracking feeling that misinterpretation of sheltering requirements will lead to unnecessary grief—multiplied by the helpless freakout when technology fails to complete the checkup process.

Here are the pluses: The flight here—masked throughout—was uneventful. There was no evidence of the passenger violence we had been reading about. Brief, long-awaited gatherings with immediate family are the extent of our activity, but worth it, as well as a general sense that muddling through this plague is possible.

Not instant replay

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A proposal to revive the USFL feels more like opening a time capsule than hitting on a promising idea. Pro football in the Spring? That was then, and it didn’t work so well.

The contemporary culture of the 1980s—the proliferation of cable television, a subsequent need for more programming, a bet on football’s endless attraction to gamblers, the urge to test sports’ saturation point—might have made the USFL idea worth a try in that distant past. Now? It’s possible to argue that as we emerge, blinking, from the coronavirus pestilence, we are finding there is too much sports to watch these days, and that there is a natural cycle of when people do not tune into certain athletic endeavors, a point reinforced by the pandemic’s skewing of scheduling routines.

With hockey and basketball playoffs last year delayed into August, baseball’s season opening put off until July and the Masters golf tournament moved to November, TV ratings were down across sports. That, in spite of the fact that TV most often was the only way to watch sports, since spectators were socially distanced right out of stadiums and arenas.

But here we are, looking at a blueprint that is four decades old.

Older, really. As far back as the 1970s Dave Dixon, an influential New Orleans businessman who helped create the Saints, the Louisiana Superdome and an early men’s pro tennis tour, tried to convince NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle that a supplemental Spring operation was a winning proposition.

Rozelle wasn’t buying. But by the ‘80s, Dixon made himself a key actor in bringing forth the USFL, convinced that the added variable of cable TV “changes the industry.” He partnered with ESPN, then a couple of years old, and cited consultants who hammered on the fact that, while the October/November/December quarter (traditional football season) indeed produced the best ratings, next in line was the April/May/June window.

The television promise was perceived to be so strong that Upton Bell, another of the original USFL founders, went so far as dismissing the need to sell tickets. He’d give them away, he said, and “guarantee a studio game.”

And now Brian Woods, working on the USFL’s reincarnation next Spring, appears to have bought into those 40-year-old presumptions. He is hyping a deal with Fox Sports for “giving fans everywhere the best football viewing product possible during what is typically a period devoid of professional football.”

OK. Here’s what happened in the Spring of 1983:

For its debut, the USFL placed 11 of its 12 franchises in NFL facilities and stirred significant attention, especially by signing a handful of Big Name college players. The most prominent of those was University of Georgia running back Herschel Walker, who had just won the Heisman Trophy in his junior season.

Several of us sports news hounds were in Orlando, Fla., when Walker was delivered to the training camp of the New Jersey Generals via private jet, helicopter and limo—all provided by team owner J. Walter Duncan, an Oklahoma oil tycoon—a week before the league’s first games.

That royal treatment was rewarded, to some extent, by Walker winning the league’s first rushing title. But the Generals, playing in the USFL’s primary market, won only six of 18 games and the leaguewide attendance average steadily declined to fewer than 25,000—a studio game!—by season’s end. The build-up to the first championship game that July in Denver—derided by some as the “Super-fluous Bowl,” “The Bowl to End All Bowls” and “Bowling for Dollars”—was overshadowed by the arrival at his NFL training camp, a few miles from Denver, by the NFL Broncos’ star rookie quarterback John Elway.

USFL officials, meanwhile, called the White House in an attempt to get President Ronald Reagan to telephone the winning lockerroom after the championship game—the Michigan Panthers defeated the Philadelphia Stars. But that fell on deaf ears of the man who fashioned himself “The Gipper” after the Notre Dame gridiron legend.

And things began to really unravel when Duncan, who had been talked into owning the Generals by Dixon, quickly sold the team to an attention-hog real estate developer named Donald Trump. Two seasons later, during which the USFL lost more than $120 million, Trump sealed the league’s demise by insisting it move its season to the Fall and go head-to-head with the NFL.

By then, the NFL had run the USFL out of stadiums in Boston, Detroit, New Orleans, Chicago, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and Pete Rozelle made it clear that the NFL “never had discussions with the USFL about merging or taking in any of their teams.” (Which is what Trump had been angling for.)

“You really think,” an NFL official said, “that NFL would stand still for Donald Trump?”

Some things don’t seem worth a do-over.

 

Sports workplaces

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Going to the office for roughly a half-century meant showing up at the Rose Bowl. Or Yankee Stadium. Wrigley Field in Chicago. Madison Square Garden. Boston’s Fenway Park. Green Bay’s Lambeau Field. The old Forum in Montreal.

Sometimes I spent my days and evenings in my Long Island newspaper’s sports department. But the real action was in arenas, stadiums and parks from here to Sydney, Australia (2000 Summer Olympics). And the recent flurry of reports sentimentalizing the New York Islanders’ final games at their original home, the Nassau Coliseum, has prompted some recollections of athletic venues I have known.

Plus, of course, a list.

Still counting, but the current total is 247, just in the U.S. and Canada. Wait. That doesn’t include various tennis sites—in Mason, Ohio; Washington, D.C.; Hilton Head, S.C.; Indianapolis; and the old West Side Tennis Club in Queens before the U.S. Open moved to the Billie Jean King Center (already on the list). So, at least 252.

I also haven’t gotten around to enumerating specific international sports settings—the eight soccer stadiums throughout Italy during the 1990 World Cup or the multiple venues at the Olympics in Seoul (1988); Albertville, France (1992); Barcelona (1992); Lillehammer, Norway (1994); Nagano, Japan (1998); Sydney and Melbourne (2000); Athens (2004); and Turin, Italy (2006). Or the various sites at the Pan American Games in Venezuela (1983) and Cuba (1991). Or Wimbledon’s hallowed tennis grounds.

And what about those Davis Cup matches in Prague in 1990 and World Cup tune-up games for the U.S. in Budapest and East Berlin, as well as a special German unification soccer match in Dresden that same year? All those amount to an additional 50, minimum. We’re past 300 now.

The fun of visiting all those locales, or course, was covering the events therein, the contested drama—though just as important was the atmosphere, the involvement of spectators. And the buildings themselves certainly were a fundamental part of the experience.

So, here goes:

Dodger Stadium was a favorite, set in L.A.’s surprisingly bucolic Chavez Ravine with a view of palm trees and the San Gabriel Mountains in the distance. Also Camden Yards, the first of the “retro” stadiums that opened in 1992, with a glimpse of downtown Baltimore beyond centerfield and the brick, eight-story 19th-century B&O Warehouse looming past right field. Fenway with its Green Monster. Wrigley with its ivy-covered outfield fences. Soccer’s Providence Park in Portland, Ore., more than a century old; cozy, charming.

At the Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati—a vast improvement over the old cookie-cutter Riverfront Stadium in that city—one could contemplate the possibility that a batter might duplicate Adam Dunn’s 2004 home run that technically traveled into neighboring Kentucky, bouncing onto a piece of driftwood and into the Ohio River beyond centerfield.

Naturally, ambiance and scenery have played significantly into these adventures. Along with the quirks. Georgetown University used to play its football games on a roof atop a mostly underground field house. At Minute Maid Park in Houston, there is a small locomotive high on the wall beyond left field, which took a brief 800-foot run when an Astros player hit a home run.

At mostly nondescript Candlestick Park in San Francisco, the howling winds that once blew a pitcher off the mound could make summer evenings there colder than the football dates in late autumn. Chicago’s Soldier Field once was a classic Romaneque structure until 2003 renovations changed it so much—hiding its stylish columns with a dull, unimaginative oval look—that the U.S. government took it off the National Register of Historic Places. Which brings up the L.A. Coliseum.

As a baseball stadium—I went to a few games as a young lad in 1958 and ’59—the  Coliseum’s peculiar dimensions were memorable if hardly logical, yet the old joint, opened in 1923, remains an architectural beauty that works wonderfully for football and track and field. The peristyle end, with its Olympic cauldron, is a particularly nice touch.

Other thoroughly pleasant venues were the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field, site of countless major track meets; New York’s Belmont Racetrack, home to the last leg of the Triple Crown; and the University of Missouri’s Faurot Field (well, because it was my school). Also, there were the places famous for being famous: Michigan Stadium, the University of North Carolina’s Dean Dome; the Yale Bowl; New Orleans’ Superdome; Notre Dame Stadium; the Indianapolis Speedway.

Indoor spaces typically have had less appeal, and too many of the newest parks and arenas give the sense that a spectator is inside a video game—surrounded by massive screens and scoreboards with special effects. And domes, by and large, are dismal buildings, none more so than the Houston Astrodome.

The Nassau Coliseum, which triggered this whole discussion, opened in 1972, a $28-million no-frills structure, and I covered its first event, a game in the long-defunct ABA with the then-New York Nets. Over the years, there also were tennis and track and field events to be chronicled there, as well as many Islanders games of great import that produced raucous, passionate spectating. So the joint’s disappearance as a destination for athletic fireworks—meant to happen as soon as the Islanders’ presence in the 2021 Stanley Cup playoffs is concluded—is a bit sad.

Nothing lasts forever, though. A rough estimate of my former sports journalism stomping grounds that no longer exist would number past 60. Places such as Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium, Omni arena and Georgia Dome; Boston’s Foxboro Stadium and old Boston Garden; Dallas’ Texas Stadium and Reunion Arena; Detroit’s Tiger Stadium and Joe Louis Arena; Houston’s Astrodome and Indianapolis’ Hoosier Dome; Miami’s Orange Bowl and Miami Arena; Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium and Spectrum; Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium and Civic Arena (the Igloo for Penguins games); two earlier Busch Stadiums, Kiel Auditorium and the Checkerdome in St. Louis.

Just here in the New York area, the once-familiar haunts that have met their demise are Giants Stadium, Shea Stadium, the original (and refurbished) Yankee Stadium, Columbia University’s Baker Field, the Nets’ old homes at the Island Garden and Commack Arena.

Oh, the places I have been. Is it fair to count the Colosseum in Rome, even though there was no game the day I was there?

 

Doubt?

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There is no seeing inside someone else’s head. If tennis champion Naomi Osaka feels her mental health has been threatened by being required to engage in post-match dialogue with reporters—if that is at the core of her “long bouts of depression” which she offered as a reason for boycotting French Open press sessions and then withdrawing suddenly from the tournament—who are we to doubt her?

But she does appear to be conflating her insecurities with the routine procedure of press conferences. And, while she said she has been haunted for nearly three years by “huge waves of anxiety before I speak to the world’s media,” and that tennis officials therefore “continue to ignore the mental health” of athletes by subjecting them to those question-and-answer periods, there is no evidence she had raised the complaint before.

In a statement, she said, “I’m not going to subject myself to people that doubt me,” implying that the media—these days so often cast as the enemy by a large segment of the population—had worked at discrediting or disrespecting her.

Immediately, all sides took a defensive stance: The media, which is there because elite professional tennis is newsworthy. Osaka, in response to the $15,000 fine for her press no-show, though it was an action taken many times against many players in the past. And tennis officials, who said Osaka had declined to discuss reasons for her media boycott and first hinted at further sanctions before expression concern for one of their primary meal tickets.

Then came the cacophony of rambunctious voices from that “other” media—social media—many taking Osaka’s side, but plenty willing to give her a flogging as well. For all the postings pleading for compassion regarding Osaka’s situation—exactly what that is, we can’t possibly know—there has been an awful lot of racket casting her as spoiled and simply not in the mood to do what is contractually required of all players.

As a veteran of sports journalism who has covered the New York-based Grand Slam, the U.S. Open, for more than 40 years, I can attest that the sort of nasty accusations in on-line comment sections are not a feature of post-match tete-a-tetes. Yes, some in my tribe can be guilty of harebrained inquiries. There is such a thing as journalistic malpractice.

In general, though, those press conferences run from boring to somewhat enlightening to occasionally humorous. And, in my experience, Osaka was open and thoughtful in that setting. In her return to the U.S. Open in 2019, as defending champion and already ranked No. 1, Osaka described her developing career “as a book. It’s not quite done yet. Currently being written. I don’t know how the ending is going to be. I only know what the chapters are. For me, it’s just reading it, you know. Plot twist. But the kind of plot twist that makes you want to keep reading it.”

Insightful, no? And when she was upset that year in the fourth round by the Swiss Belinda Bencic, Osaka sounded reasonably in control of sport’s ups-and-downs. “I have this feeling of sadness,” she said then, “but also that I have learned so much. I feel I’m more chill now. Like I grew. I don’t feel like I put so much weight on one single match. Of course, to a certain extent I do. But, lesson I’ve learned….I guess not to take myself so seriously. Just to know there’s always another tournament. I’m kind of still figuring it out, honestly, as I go along.”

My first reaction to Osaka’s surprising French drama was that if we ink-stained wretches somehow have sent her around the bend by seeking her thoughts after such upset losses, it’s thoroughly understandable that she do something about it. Preferably that she seek professional help.

Still, the purpose (and effect) of those verbal scrums is to get the players’ thoughts—not to cast aspersions. Reporters are a conduit to interested fans (who pay the freight) which results, to a great extent, in promoting the players and the sport. It was through the media’s public exposure that such pioneering advocates as Billie Jean King long ago were able to agitate for equal pay, and lots of it, for women.

In 2020, Osaka was paid more than any other female athlete in the world, more than $55 million, mostly through endorsement deals that hinge on her visibility. The New York Times recently published a story headlined “How Naomi Osaka Became Everyone’s Favorite Spokesmodel.”

In taking herself out of the French Open, Osaka issued a statement that she “never wanted to be a distraction” and that, by withdrawing, she would allow attention to settle on the other players and the competition. But, in effect, she has done what Serena Williams did to her when Williams’ duel with a chair umpire during the 2018 U.S. Open championship final took the shine off Osaka’s first of four major tournament titles.

It’s pretty obvious that, along with Williams, Osaka arrived in Paris as one of the sport’s two premier attractions, a star whom the tournament badly wanted to keep around as long as possible. Someone all concerned would want to accommodate.

Plot twist, indeed.

A racer. And race.

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Lee Evans’ death this month recalled the Black Lives Matter event that came a half-century before George Floyd, when two Black U.S. sprinters raised their gloved fists during the 1968 Olympics victory ceremony in a silent shout for racial justice. And got the world’s attention.

It was two days after that Black Power protest by Tommie Smith and John Carlos, which got them banished from the Mexico Games, that Lee Evans led a U.S. medal sweep in the 400-meter run. After which he, Larry James and Ron Freeman—all Black men—wore black berets and black socks on the victory podium in another plea for the disenfranchised.

The second demonstration wasn’t as dramatic. Unlike Smith and Carlos, the gold and bronze medalists in the 200 who held their provocative pose during the playing of the “Star Spangled Banner,” Evans, James and Freeman removed their berets and stood at attention for the anthem. And were allowed to compete—and win—the subsequent 4×400-meter relay.

But here’s the rest of the story on Evans, who died at 74 on May 19, and his lifelong investment in Black progress.

He, like Smith and Carlos, had been part of the San Jose State University “Speed City” track team, all three of them holding the world record in their events at one point. (Carlos’ mark in the 200, set at the 1968 Olympic Trials, was later disallowed because of special spikes he had worn.)

Smith, Evans said, was so fast it was “like he was on a motorcycle.” Evans himself was essentially uncatchable—his ’68 world record set in Mexico City lasted for 20 years—but with a helter-skelter running style that made him look like “a drunk on roller skates.”

His shoulders rolled when he ran. His head snapped from side to side. His hands clawed ahead. He did not tippy toe. He pounded. He strained and gritted his teeth and puffed his cheeks—all appropriate looks for a race that is the closest thing to violence in track and field. A model of dominance.

Still, as he stood to receive his gold medal in the tumultuous days after the Smith-Carlos incident, Evans later said he was “70 to 80 percent sure” he would be shot. He was 21 at the time.

Across America in 1968, some cities literally were in flames over civil rights unrest, the Vietnam War was raging months after both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. At San Jose State, sociology professor Harry Edwards had formed the Olympic Project for Human Rights, with an eye toward a Black boycott of the Mexico City Games, in part because the International Olympic Committee was waffling over whether to admit South Africa in spite of that nation’s apartheid policies.

The irony is that the defiant Smith-Carlos display likely had a far greater—and longer-lasting—impact than a boycott would have. Meanwhile, though, Evans, in a 1999 documentary, “Fists of Freedom,” laughed at Carlos having emerged as a Black spokesman.

Carlos “never went to the [Edwards] meetings,” Evans said in the film. “I asked Tommie, ‘How’d you get Carlos to do that [raised fist]?’ He said, ‘I just gave him my other glove and told him to do what I do.’” Evans shook his head in disbelief.

Except for the social elements afoot, Evans almost surely would have won another gold at the ’72 Munich Olympics in the 4×400 relay, and might well have coached another relay team to a medal at the ’76 Montreal Games. But in ’72, Evans’ relay teammates, Vince Matthews and Wayne Collett, were sent home before the relay after chatting and paying little attention during the National Anthem as they celebrated their 1-2 finish in the open 400. So Evans was left without a team. And, in ’76, when Evans was Nigeria’s national-team coach building an impressive relay quartet, Nigeria joined other African nations in boycotting Montreal as objections to apartheid South Africa’s inclusion continued.

Evans endorsed that boycott so “the Blacks of South Africa could know that the Blacks throughout the rest of Africa cared.”

He had taken the job in Nigeria because “I always wanted to go to Africa,” he said, “to sort of find my heritage.” He ultimately coached six national teams on the continent, became fluent in several of the native languages—and was living in Lagos when he died—but had found incongruities there as well.

One lesson was that, while he quickly built Nigeria into a worthy rival of Kenya as an African track power, he found that “once you get a kid running international times, he’s gone. He’d be in the U.S. with a college scholarship. I couldn’t keep my team together. But you couldn’t’ tell a kid not to go get a free education. A college degree from America meant moving immediately to the middle class, and there’s a difference between middle class and not middle class in Nigeria. A much bigger difference than [in the United States].”

The other revelation, which he decided should not have been a surprise, was that “in Africa, I was considered an American first. If you’re Black, brown, white, red or yellow, an American is still an American first. I was Black, but I was always ‘the American.’ Well, I am. I am the American.”

A memorable one.

“Part of the game”

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All you need to know is that Washington Capitals hockey ruffian Tom Wilson was fined $5,000 last week for sucker-punching one New York Ranger and pummeling another, while the Rangers were fined fifty times that amount for expressing outrage that Wilson wasn’t suspended.

“Terribly unfair,” National Hockey League commissioner Gary Bettman railed against the Rangers’ complaint. How dare the Rangers call league player safety chief George Parros “unfit to continue in his current role” just because he turned a blind eye to Wilson’s goonery?

Naturally, the incident led to the Rangers instigating eye-for-an-eye fisticuffs when the teams met again two nights later—the sort of vigilante justice forever endorsed by hockey tradition. The presence of so-called “policemen” or “enforcers”—OK, “thugs”—like Wilson has diminished in the sport over the years. But it hasn’t—and won’t—go away.

To realize that, all you need to know can be found in a 2006 book by Ross Bernstein, “The Code; the Unwritten Rules of Fighting and Retaliation in the NHL.” The code, Bernstein said, is “hockey’s sacred covenant, its unwritten rules of engagement that have been handed down from generation to generation….it forces players to be accountable, to respect one another. That’s the code: Do onto others.”

There remains a conviction—oops, inappropriate word, given the slap-on-the-wrist penalties lightly meted out—that fighting belongs in hockey, even though it takes away from the sport’s excruciatingly entertaining on-the-fly drama. There somehow persists the counterintuitive belief that fighting is a self-policing mechanism that controls dirty play; that it is essential to “let off steam;” that it is a legitimate tactical device to energize teammates and fire up fans.

The tired rationale is that hockey, like all sports, is inherently risky and athletes consent to possible danger whenever they step into the competitive arena; that hockey’s kid-gloves penalties—five whole minutes in the sin bin for fighting!—are sufficient to police such matters; that society as a whole licenses a measure of injuries in heat-of-the-battle chaos.

Commissioner Bettman certainly is sold on all that bunkum. Years ago, he declared on ESPN that an outright ban on fights “is not going to happen” because “there doesn’t seem to be any appetite by anyone who has any connection to the game, most especially our fans, to do that.” Fighting, he continues to insist, is “part of the game.”

The author Bernstein said he equates “hockey fighters to kickers and punters in football; you’re not going to win without them.” But, while there have been championship teams that employed headhunting tough guys, there also have been winners that stuck to skating, passing, shooting and goaltending.

It can be argued (as it is here) that fighting is an unnecessary danger; that it’s a sideshow, a silly macho contrivance that keeps hockey a niche sport. Fighting, it should be noted, decreases during the playoffs, when losing players to the penalty box is less affordable.

Still, all you need to know is that, as Deadspin reported in a 2010 post, there was a hockey fight camp for children operating in Michigan, preparing the next generation to believe that you can’t back down. At Puckmasters, according to Deadspin, “Fight camp was held twice a year, cost $50….Players as young as 11 were welcome to attend the one-day clinic, where they learned basic fighting theory, how to throw punches, grapple, defend oneself, and the code of ethics as it pertained to helmetless, bare-knuckle fighting among children in skates.”

Once, back in 1975, a player (Boston’s Dave Forbes) was prosecuted in a U.S. court for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon—his hockey stick—against Henry Boucha of the Minnesota North Stars. A hung jury got Forbes off the hook and prosecuting attorney Gary Flakne declared himself “the only attorney in history who had 20,000 witnesses to an assault and didn’t get a conviction.

“I had people saying to me, ‘God bless you, Mr. Flakne, for taking this on,’” he said. “But then I’d walk into a bar and it would be, ‘What’s the matter with you? You got nothing better to do than go after these guys?’ You get coaches and managers saying, ‘Next thing you’ll have the players wear lace panties and pink gloves.’ The macho mentality.”

For all those who considered Forbes—and, now, Wilson—a hockey Snidely Whiplash, a villain thoroughly disinterested in the spirit of fair play, there were thousands who saw him as a sainted “competitor,” willing to do absolutely anything to win. The latter, and Bettman, seem to be demanding, “You got a problem with that?”

Lost in translation

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

About old dogs, of which I am one:

If my wife and I were to relocate to the United Kingdom — something we have considered because our daughter lives in London and, more to the point, last year gave birth to a grandboy — what new tricks might be involved?

We haven’t seen the little bugger in person yet, since he arrived a couple of months into the pandemic. So the theory is that — because of layers of possible quarantining, testing, maybe even the near-future need to search out vaccine booster shots — a routine coming and going between jolly old England and this former colony might present enormous, expensive hassles.

Pack up and go for good, then? My wife and I are semiretired, which is one less reason to remain on Long Island, much as I like the place.

But a major concern is that I would have to learn to speak English.

I’d have to start walking on pavements instead of sidewalks, wearing a jumper instead of a sweater, going on holiday instead of vacation, spelling such words as flavor and color with a “u.”

Did you know that the English don’t wear underpants? No, really. Those things are pants over there, and the longer garments on top of them are trousers, essential because nobody is supposed to see their pants. They don’t wear vests, either (not that I do); they wear waistcoats. And soccer players — sorry, footballers — wear kits not uniforms.

The admission here is that I don’t have a particularly good ear for language. In a half-century as a journalist, fortunate to experience a fair amount of international travel, I never got much past bare-bones translations that could be mystifying. Czech for “yes” is “ano,” pronounced “ah-no.” No? Yes? In Japanese, “yes” is “hai,” which sounds like a friendly greeting: “Hi.”

Kind natives in far-off lands always helped with words for “please” and “thank you,” “good morning” and so on, so temporary foreign visits never were a problem. But there is this nagging feeling that, if I were to attempt full-time residency in Great Britain — try to really fit in — might I be expected to know something about Old English? Be able to recite a few lines of “Beowulf”?

   Hwaet. We Gardena in geardagum,

   Beodcyninga, brym gefrunon,

   Hu oa aebelingas ellen fremedon.

Or, at least some “Jabberwocky.”

   ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

   Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

   All mimsy were the borogoves,

   And the mome raths outgrabe.

My first car was British-made. An MGB. So way back in college days I became familiar with the fact that a trunk is a boot and a hood is a bonnet. Years ago, I even drove a rental in England and Wales — on the other side of the road! — though my familiarity with standard transmission wasn’t much help because I kept reaching for the stick shift with the wrong hand, putting myself in constant danger of opening the door instead of progressing from first to second gear.

I recall an essay by Sarah Lyall, an American who spent years as a newspaper correspondent based in London, asking why Brits “keep apologizing? Were they truly sorry?” And it’s a fact that the English, who certainly strike me as a polite lot, say “sorry” a lot. They also say “brilliant” all the time. Which, frankly, is a decided improvement on the overused American “awesome.”

Probably, the adjustments in communications would be no more daunting than during my youth, spent in five states because my father’s job included regular transfers. It turned out that dollar bills, “singles” in some places, are “ones” in others; that a “bag” sometimes is a “sack” and a “stoop” is a “porch.”

For a while there, if I asked for a “Coke” to drink, I got the question: “What kind?” Because a “coke” was any brand of “soda” in some climes. And though I never lived in a house with a “basement” then, I still don’t. Because, for my wife and her family’s New England roots, it’s a “cellar.”

You get the point. We could rent a flat, enjoy biscuits instead of cookies, mind how we go. Just have to work on being linguistically nimble. With a stiff upper lip.

New (NFL) math

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Though hardly a watershed moment in NFL history, the recent revision of rules related to uniform numbers nevertheless has stirred discussions of athletes’ traditional (almost spiritual) attachment to their numbers as well as the league’s long-perceived stodginess.

Nothing new there. In the 1970s, during my days covering the New York Giants, there was a wide receiver named Danny Buggs, drafted out of West Virginia, who requested jersey No. 8 when he showed up at rookie camp. Sorry, he was told; wrong number. Requirements at the time—just now changed—were that Buggs, as a wide receiver, had to pick something from 80 to 89.

Buggs was given 86 and later 88, but remained uncomfortable with both. “8 means a lot to me,” he said. “I wore it in college….It’s psychological or something. I don’t know. I feel lighter in 8.”

Bobby Hammond, a running back who was briefly Buggs’ teammate, also requested 8, which he had worn at Morgan State. He too was informed of that impossibility because, starting in 1972, NFL running backs had been restricted to digits from 20 to 49. Hammond was assigned 46, though he stubbornly wore 8 in practice.

A half-century later, we have a recount. For the upcoming 2021 season, NFL wide receivers and running backs will be allowed any number from 1 to 49 and 80 to 89.

With this new numbers racket, articles naturally have surfaced taking the league to task for its past sin of being too buttoned-up—The No Fun League—over all these years. Why, before this, couldn’t players wear any number they wanted?

The answer was that codifying numbers by position benefited officiating crews to instantly differentiate, for instance, interior linemen from eligible receivers (which the new system essentially continues). The NFL also believed it was “simpler for fans” to be able to associate numbers with players’ roles. So in 1972, the league decreed: 1-19 for quarterbacks and kickers; 20-49 for running backs and defensive backs; 50-59 for centers and linebackers; 60-79 for defensive linemen and interior offensive linemen (except centers); 80-89 for wide receivers and tight ends; 90-99 for exhibition game use only (when teams’ rosters are larger).

No exceptions! Except…The Giants had signed a celebrated linebacker out of Michigan State for the 1973 season named Brad Van Pelt, and Van Pelt had included a stipulation in his contract—shortly before the numbers rule passed—that he wear No. 10.

Which he did for 11 seasons. Until he was traded to the Raiders—who then were based in Los Angeles—and took advantage of a 1984 tweak in the numbers’ rule (allowing 90s for linebackers) by wearing No. 91.

Football observers even older than myself know that long, long ago, on a planet far, far away, no number was out of bounds on the gridiron. Red Grange, a superstar halfback of the 1920s and 30s (before that position was known as “running back”), wore 77. The University of Michigan back Tom Harmon, who twice led the nation in scoring in the 1940s and played briefly for the Rams, was widely referred to as “Old 98,” his unique uniform number.

These days, smaller numbers—and, specifically, single digits—are all the fashion, as a glance at any college roster demonstrates. What hasn’t changed is that players get attached to their numbers, often as early as high school, and acknowledge that they “feel like an 85” or “feel like a 7….” and prefer to take the number with them as long as they are playing.

Now, basically, they can, though there is a financial catch. Any NFL veteran wanting to switch numbers for the 2021 season will have to buy out the existing allotment of his personalized jerseys that are on the market featuring his old number. Still, this is a matter of identity, and the NFL Network analyst Andrew Hawkins, who had worn 2 as a college wide receiver and 0 in the Canadian League, expects, for instance, to see single-digit wide receiver numbers proliferate. Because, he said, “You look good, you feel good, you play good.”

And maybe, as Danny Buggs said long ago, you feel lighter.

Anybody have a problem with that?

“Good luck trying to block the right people now!” lamented old pro Tom Brady in a tweet. What if his linemen won’t know who to knock down if their opponents are wearing smaller jersey numbers? “DUMB,” Brady railed. “Why not let the Linemen wear whatever they want, too? Why have numbers? Just have colored jerseys…Why not wear the same number?…DUMB.”

It has been reported that Brady’s former coach, New England’s Bill Belichick, likewise is against the new number allowances. That guy across the line dressed in No. 3 might be either a cornerback or a linebacker—maybe a kicker—and then what?

In the end, the sum of all this doesn’t seem to amount to much.

Go figure.

Here’s the pitch…

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So baseball will reconnoiter its physical arrangement of pitcher-to-hitter. Big news. An experiment to be conducted in an independent minor league will extend the traditional 60-foot, six-inch separation of the game’s primary antagonists by one foot. This, under the scrutiny of the Majors’ mad scientists, apparently desperate for more action, more balls in play.

Will moving the pitcher’s mound back one foot curb the recent proliferation of strikeouts? Will it juice up a sport futzing around with various schemes to speed its pace and rope in a generation of younger fans drawn to the non-stop chaos of football and basketball?

Or will it be messing with a sacred balance, tilting a competitive edge away from pitchers and mollycoddling batsmen? (At a time, ironically, when there also are complaints of too many home runs.) Also: Might the change produce more runs and further lengthen already endless games?

Two fairly outrageous thoughts came to mind upon reading the move-the-mound plan:

The first was having come across an article, years ago, by someone named Eisenstein, who suggested that the home run is a dull play and that balls hit over outfield fences should be outs. It seemed sacrilegious enough that I should immediately poll some players about the idea.

One of them was Atlanta Braves outfielder Dale Murphy who, at the time, was walloping homers at a Ruthian pace. Murphy politely dismissed the home-runs-are-outs proposal as silly. On the other hand, the Braves’ dominant relief pitcher, Bruce Sutter, who that night had served up a grand slam to New York Mets catcher Gary Carter, suggested that “when they hit it out, it should be a double play.”

Then, as now, one man’s RBI is another man’s hanging curve.

The other reflection regarding this mound-relocation trial balloon had to do with my long-ago attendance at a 19th-Century re-enactment of a game of Base Ball (it was two words then) at one of those “living museum” restoration villages. On display was a reminder that there is nothing new about the sport’s moving targets on rules and specifications.

In 1859, shortly before the first professional league was formed, there was no sliding into bases permitted. No stealing. No bunting. No arguing with the umpire (in his top hat, white shirt, black vest and bowtie). No cursing (25-cent fine; roughly $800 in 2021 money). No popcorn and Cracker Jack.

The pitcher—then called the “bowler”—threw underhand and the batter—“striker”—was permitted to call for his preferred location of the pitch. Fly balls fielded on one bounce were outs.

Things change. It hasn’t been that long ago that basketball poobahs considered raising the basket to counter the increasing size of players. But soon settled instead on the three-point shot to open the court. It’s not exactly ancient history that the NFL literally moved the goalposts—from the front to the rear of the end zone—to offset the escalating length and accuracy of kickers. Then moved the scrimmage line back for extra-point attempts.

Long, long ago, pitchers were a mere 50 feet from home plate. Foul balls didn’t count as strikes. Batters were allowed four strikes and weren’t awarded a walk until the ninth ball. As recently as 1969, the strike zone was shrunk—from top-of-the-shoulder, bottom-of-the-knee to armpit and top-of-the-knee—and the pitcher’s mound was lowered by five inches.

All manner of inconsistencies forever persist in baseball—odd-shaped playing fields that turn long outs into homers; the thin air of parks at altitude that add distance to fly balls; “the wind blowing out” in Chicago’s Wrigley Field. With the pitcher’s mound an additional foot distant from home plate, will that tamper with the physics of when curveballs break on their way to the batter? Will it physically wear down pitchers attempting to get their fastballs through that extra foot before the batter can react?

In 2008, there was a rumpus over Japanese pitchers claiming to throw a revolutionary “gyroball,” which was said to change directions horizontally and therefore bring an entirely new challenge to hitters. But David Coburn, head of the research department at Popular Mechanics, whose editors had released a book explaining why a curveball curves, wrote that the gyroball was “The Bigfoot of baseball, an urban legend born in a Japanese lab and racing across the Internet…either the first new pitch in nearly four decades or a complete and total sham.”

The pitch hasn’t been heard of since.

Will the 61-foot, six-inch pitcher-to-hitter dynamic ruin careers? Save baseball? Mean anything at all? Will some sub-committee on analytics—part of a committee on velocity, rotation, launch angle and tobacco-chewing—be able to recommend parameters that are beyond reproach by any athlete, fan, manager, GM and owner?

Robert Adair, the Yale professor who authored “Physics and Baseball,” once gave me this definitive answer to these related matters: “Seeing as how I’m one of them, I would say that if you want something really stupid, get an intellectual to tell you about it.”

Because, what it all will boil down to is players—pitchers and hitters, within the prescribed rules—just doing what they do best.