Nothing good rhymes with “pandemic”

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It’s that challenging time of year again. National Poetry Month. And this April also is the 14th month of the pandemic. So…..

Back before this Covid-19 thing

We were just as free as birds,

With no longing to participate in

The immunity of a herd.

 …

People weren’t yet made of cardboard,

Weren’t dressing up like Jesse James.

There was no such thing as quarantine

Or looking for whom to blame.

… 

So we’re locked up in our houses

Preoccupied with getting the shot.

At least that’s those who aren’t suspicious

That this is all a government plot.

 …

Now there’s warning from the doctors

There might be another surge.

Just as we are all reminded

Some folks aren’t known for fighting the urge.

… 

Here’s where optimism is needed.

Send the word out on the Zoom.

There must be a call for patience

Or corona will lower the boom.

 Again.

April Fool!

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(Stan Isaacs)

Among the countless, brilliant concepts in newspapering worthy of my jealousy was Stan Isaacs’ annual ranking of decidedly inconspicuous topics. Each April Fool’s Day, Isaacs—a Newsday colleague and mentor who died in 2013 at 83—published his whimsical list, which he called IRED: The Isaacs Ratings of Esoteric Distinction.

I wish I had thought of something like that. Goofy, worldly and creative, Isaacs’ long and distinguished career as a serious journalist included an awareness of when and where to find a giggle. His IRED spoofed Ring Magazine’s boxing ratings because, Isaacs wrote, there was “an unrecognized need for evaluations of quantities” like The Bridges Across the River Seine; of People Who Were Neither On the Way Up or Down; of Fred Astaire’s Dancing Partners; of Bowling Pins. Just to cite a few of the categories he presented for judgment over the years.

Anyway, since Stan is gone, I have endeavored to make it my yearly duty to honor his memory on April Fool’s Day with my ersatz version of his ratings. Not in his league, admittedly. Still, herewith the 2021 listings:

Vaccines: 1 (tie), Moderna, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson.

Pandemic accouterments: 1, (see above); 2, mask; 3, hand wipes; 4, quarantining; 5, 10-foot pole.

Doctors I have known and appreciated: 1, family physician; 2, cardiologist; 3, neurosurgeon; 4, dermatologist; 5, allergist; 6, podiatrist; 7, dentist; 8, optometrist; 9, audiologist. (And still counting.)

Famous doctors: 1, Livingston; 2, Spock; 3, Jill Biden; 4, Holliday; 5, Severinsen; 6, Martin; 7, J.

British police procedurals: 1, Poirot, 2, Vera; 3, Endeavour; 4, Inspector Lewis; 5, Grantchester; 6, Father Brown; 7, Bletchley Circle.

Zoom buttons: 1, Share screen; 2, Breakout Rooms; 3, Chat; 4, Mute; 5, Gallery View; 6, End Meeting.

Swiss Army Knife tools: 1, hoof cleaner; 2, corkscrew; 3, USB stick; 4, can opener; 5, pliers; 6, scissors; 7, fish scaler; 8, nail file; 9, toothpick.

Floating vessels (until they didn’t): 1, Ever Given (unstuck from the Suez Canal); 2, Exxon Valdez; 3, Deepwater Horizon; 4, Costa Concordia.

March madness: 1, daylight savings time; 2, dandelions; 3, spring break; 4, taxes; 5, college basketball.

Favorite M&M colors (tie): 1, blue, green, brown, yellow, red, orange.

Words that don’t begin with Z: 1, xenops; 2, xylophone; 3, xenophobia; 4, Xerox; 5, Xenia, Ohio; 6, antidisestablishmentarianism.

Impeding the swift completion of postal workers’ appointed rounds: 1, gloom of night; 2, snow; 3, heat; 4, sleet; 5, rain; 6, Louis DeJoy.

Pies: 1, apple; 2, blueberry; 3, pumpkin; 4, chicken pot; 5, shepherd’s; 6, 3-point-14159….

Baseball action rarely seen anymore: 1, pickle; 2, stealing home; 3, bunting; 4, basket catches; 5, two-hour nine-inning game.

Cars I have owned: 1, MGB; 2, Saab; 3, VW; 4, Toyota; 5, Chevy.

Newspaper sections: 1, sports; 2, news; 3, op-ed; 4, obituaries (as long as they aren’t about me); 5, arts; 6, business.

Original favorite newspaper section: 1, funnies.

Just to drop a name….

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Celebrity is a peculiar thing. It bestows a sort of mythic aura on its subject and engenders public reverence.

I’m thinking of Tiger Woods, lately in the news because, mostly, he’s a celebrity whose recent single-car accident landed him in the hospital with multiple injuries that have jeopardized his singular talent. Long ago, his ungodly and thoroughly chronicled skill at golf established him as a star. And, as Duke University anthropologist Orin Starn wrote in his 2011 book, “The Passion of Tiger Woods,” “ours is a starstruck culture.”

What’s interesting is how Woods’ celebrity took on the form of manifest destiny, claiming special virtues, as if he had some redemptive mission, an irresistible bent for grand accomplishments far beyond his craft.

Woods was only 21 in 1997 when Charlie Pierce’s lengthy Esquire profile revealed Woods’ sense of entitlement, a habit of telling dirty jokes and an apparent susceptibility to his father Earl’s belief, proclaimed to Sports Illustrated, that “Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity.”

That was long before the series of scandalous reports that included a 2007 DUI arrest, 2009 SUV crash and marital infidelities, though Pierce was already—and reasonably—skeptical of the jock-to-savior leap. “This is what I believe about Tiger Woods,” he wrote, “…that he is the best golfer under the age of 30 there has ever been….He is going to be rich and famous and I believe he’s going to bring great joy to a huge number of people because of his enormous talent on the golf course…the most charismatic athlete alive today…”

But: “I do not believe that a higher power is working through Tiger Woods,” Pierce continued. “I don’t believe—right now, this day—that Tiger Woods will change humanity any more than Chuck Berry did.”

Pierce was following the perceptive old journalistic advice, dispensed by long-ago sports editor Stanley Woodward to celebrated columnist Red Smith, to “Stop godding up the players;” to recognize that the ability to reach astonishing athletic heights does not automatically translate to being a sainted person.

Still, Woods transmitted the strong pull of celebrity. Starn wrote that, while witnessing the 2004 U.S. Open tournament, “I was struck by the nervousness, even fear, among the spectators about coughing or moving during his swing and being singled out for his withering displeasure. Tiger was like Apollo, a glorious yet frightening god.”

In the spring of 2004, officials at North Carolina’s Fort Bragg sent out a “hear ye, hear ye, hear ye” press release announcing that Woods would join the camp’s professional soldiers for a week of bootcamp-type activity. Newsday assigned me to be there, and it turned out there was no real access to more than second-hand tales of Woods being outfitted in BDUs (the battle dress uniforms that most citizens call camouflage); of Woods’ participation in sun-up four-mile runs; of Woods firing a variety of weapons and taking two parachute jumps tethered to another jumper.

If the real soldiers were offended by Woods’ play-acting at being in the military, they did not say so. Because, one 20-year-old explained, “It’s like when Kid Rock came to Iraq while we were there and gave a concert. We know they’re there to keep the morale up.” Bob Hope entertaining the troops. A celebrity.

Rather than sharing a barracks with the enlisted men then, Woods was bivouacked in a VIP housing unit described by one G.I. as “like a bed and breakfast”—where such luminaries as vice president Dick Cheney and an Uzbekistan general stayed previously.

Some 3,000 spectators had been invited to the base for a brief trick-shot exhibition by Woods, to which he came riding up the 13th fairway of the base’s course, amid red smoke, in an awkward Michael Dukakis moment (ask your grandparents). His upper body was visible through the sunroof of an army-green Humvee as he perched behind a 50-caliber automatic machine gun. Wearing golf clothes and a smile.

Everyone was on Tiger Standard Time, just as they were the next time I—seldom dispatched to golf-related events—was sent to report on another Woods command performance. That was June of 2014. Woods was in Bethesda, Md., to play competitively for the first time since back surgery 3 ½ months before. He was 38 and had been stuck at 14 major titles for six years, but he remained, according to his fellow golfers, “the lifeline of our tour.”

He did not play well. “Rough” did not adequately describe the places he found his ball—among trees, clinging to a downhill slope above a small creek, on the wrong side of a cart path. He failed to make the cut for the final two days of the tournament—only the 10th time that had happened in 18 years on the tour, and the first time in 27 events.

Yet, while a mere handful of spectators watched the tournament’s leaders, crowds at least 40 times larger shadowed Woods around the course. On a mid-week workday. The extra attention to Woods wasn’t necessarily about the golf, but the golfer.

Celebrity is a magnetic thing. And it boosts a fan’s self-importance.

Quarantined, still

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

Going on a year now, they have been strictly quarantined. Distanced from the rest of society. Haven’t been out in public at all.

I speak of my neckties.

Wait. Don’t assume the standard coronavirus cliché. I get fully dressed every day. Haven’t worn sweatpants since about 1992, and only then to referee beginners’ basketball games for young grade-school kids. Shirts-with-collars have remained standard equipment.

But given the COVID reality, that my semi-retirement duties teaching a college journalism course are restricted to Zoom sessions, my neckwear continues to shelter in its place. Arrayed there on a downsized version of the dry-cleaners’ rotating racks.

There are scores of ties. Stripes, paisleys, polka dots, plaids, knits, solids. Novelty specials with miniature paper airplanes, license plates, animals. I have ties with stars, flowers, Peanuts characters, images of Beatles lyrics, a much-favored “marathon” tie featuring literally hundreds of little cartoon runners.

All hanging around in three separate closets. Frankly, the majority of them have been there since pre-pandemic days, waiting to become fashionable again—the far-too-wide ones and really skinny ones. The Fatty Arbuckle kinds and Blues Brothers versions. But thanks to my wife’s good taste, keen eye for style and commitment to keep me presentable, I have plenty of ties that—just to stick with the raiment metaphor—will knock your socks off.

To be perfectly clear: In a half-century as a newspaper reporter, I’d guess I wore a tie maybe 50 percent of the time, which hardly qualifies me as a Beau Brummel. Typically, in that line of work, to include a tie in one’s wardrobe is something of a default position, as with my boxing-beat colleague who told me he did own a single necktie, but kept it in his car in case of emergency. To show up in the newsroom with a tie could bring a sarcastic, “D’ya get the job?”

A friend who spent several years in the reporting business—always better dressed than the rest of us—wound up going to law school and now, as an attorney, not only wears a tie all the time but told me he has a different suit for every day of the week. Which only reminds me that, despite the Oscar Wilde observation that “a well-tied tie is the first serious step in life,” I still wouldn’t know a Windsor knot from a Gordian Knot.

Anyway, academics always seemed more formal—more grown-up—than us ink-stained wretches, so when I began teaching parttime a decade ago, I committed to wearing a tie whenever on campus. And it wasn’t as if that was totally unfamiliar territory. As a child of the ‘50s and ‘60s, before T-shirts with writing on them somehow became chic, I was surrounded by tie-wearing as a daily routine. My father would transition from his day at the office to after-work play with his wood-working tools without bothering to ditch the dress shirt and tie; he merely added a pair of overalls to his look.

I must have been about 10 when, expected to don a tie for dress-up occasions, I opted for a Dick Tracy red-with-small-black-stripes model. (I skipped the yellow Tracy fedora.) When members of our high school basketball team were required to wear ties to away games, I briefly undertook the renegade photo-negative gangster look—black shirt, white tie—probably inspired by some forgettable movie about Prohibition.

Fresh out of college, with a job in Manhattan and determined to look professional, I discovered a hole-in-the-wall place next to a Midtown newspaper stand, Tie City, where one could purchase ties for $1 apiece—and splurged on two or three. Hardly fashionista stuff. Nor were later attempts—chintzy clip-ons, psychedelic tie-dyed cloth ties, a pre-tied bowtie—particularly successful at substantiating an especially jaunty appearance.

There is a quote by one John T. Molloy, author of the book “Dress for Success,” that proclaims, “Show me a man’s ties and I’ll tell you who he is trying to be.”

Actually, if I show you my ties—still in the closets where they have been since last March—they mostly tell you about my wife’s good judgment regarding apparel. And their location reminds everyone that the pestilence—the monster under our beds—is still lurking.

Favor Curry

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This week seemed like a good time to check out a Stephen Curry performance at Madison Square Garden. He recently had produced career-high scoring games of 62 and 57 points. And it was at this very stage of the NBA season in 2013—late February—that his 54-point outburst at the Garden prompted Wall Street Journal sports reporter Ben Cohen to conclude that Curry became “singularly responsible for a fundamental shift in basketball strategy that filtered down to every level of the sport.”

Curry’s audacious utilization of the three-point shot that night was featured prominently in Cohen’s 2020 book, “The Hot Hand; the Mystery and the Science of Streaks.” Curry’s Golden State Warriors lost that game to the New York Knicks. But so riveting was the Curry show that the partisan Knicks crowd increasingly threw its emotional and vocal support his way.

Double-teamed, hounded off the dribble, cornered in far reaches beyond the three-point arc, Curry kept hurling his long-range thunderbolts, a lesson in the physics of the perfect parabola. Flawless arches, launched with a sudden flick of his wrists through considerable space, right to the bottom of the net.

I was working that evening as Newsday’s second-banana, tasked with coming up with some pertinent sidebar to go with our beat reporter’s game story and, by halftime, Curry obviously was my topic. He ultimately converted 18 of 28 field-goal attempts, including an impossible 11 of 13 three-pointers, some of those on which Knicks players swore Curry “couldn’t even see the basket.”

And it wasn’t just those sublime rainbows that were redefining an event as Garden-variety, the very antithesis of “commonplace.” Curry’s game was displaying all colors to the Knicks, lacking no imagination whatsoever. Deft passing, whirligig circumnavigation of defenders, soft floating layups.

The complete procedure resembled a basketball version of triple bypass surgery on the Knicks, giving them whiplash with his darting crossover dribbles. Only his height—6-3—was not outsized. He played all 48 minutes, had team highs in rebounds (six) and assists (seven.)

Afterwards, Curry compared the escalating perfection to a pitcher finishing a no-hitter, aware that “my teammates were jiving,” that there “was a lot of energy in that arena….Once I started to get some numbers, you could hear the crowd a little bit. It was electric. So I was kind of running off adrenaline down the stretch.

“When I get good looks and see the ball go in a couple of times, I was going to take it, no matter where I was on the floor.”

At the time, Curry was a fourth-year pro. His two league MVP honors, seven All-Star designations and three championship seasons still were in the future. But he had been a breakout college star for Davidson, and his Warriors coach in 2013, Mark Jackson, made it clear that the 54 points were not so surprising.

“To the viewing audience, that’s getting hot,” Jackson said. “To us, that’s Steph Curry. That’s who he is. He’s a knockdown shooter as good as anybody who’s played.”

Jackson had spent 11 years playing for St. John’s University and the Knicks at the Garden, the so-called basketball Mecca, and pointed out that “I’ve seen a lot of great performances in this building. But this goes up there. That shooting performance was a thing of beauty.”

And within four years of that night, Cohen wrote in “The Hot Hand,” Curry “was the most influential basketball player alive….the best shooter on the planet.”

So this week, seven years since Curry lowered the boom on his sport, he and the Warriors were back at the Garden after a fruitless pandemic-infested season—the Warriors finished in last place and Curry played only five games. And the Hot Hand sense was reviving, with Curry’s 62-point game on Jan 3 and 57 on Feb. 6.

For the first time since March, the Garden allowed some spectators to attend—2,500 rattling around the 19,000-capacity joint—and I was drawn to the small screen. It wasn’t the same as that rollicking 2013 affair, of course, but Curry was Curry, playing with the same deceiving nonchalance—no-look passes, sneaky steals, casually dispatched attempts from great distances.

He led all scorers with 37 points, 26 in the second half, including the go-ahead three-pointer with 3:38 to play. A lesser meteor strike, yes. But another pretty hot hand. Another first-chair virtuoso presentation. Bravo.

Not just another game

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A few things have changed since I was last directly involved in Super Bowl coverage for Newsday 20 years ago. There was no pandemic then, of course. At the time, Tom Brady was nothing more than a low-round draft choice who had just finished his rookie season, during which he appeared in one game, tried three passes and completed one. He was David; he would become Goliath later.

At the 2001 Super Bowl, in fact, the perceived impact of the opposing quarterbacks was the very antithesis to this year’s ballyhooed star-power Brady-Patrick Mahomes expectation: Which of them, Baltimore’s Trent Dilfer or the New York Giants’ Kerry Collins, would avoid fouling up the situation? (Collins threw four interceptions, so Dilfer was the default winner.)

For that game, the Giants’ second-string quarterback, not afforded the opportunity to bail out Collins, was Jason Garrett, who these days is the team’s offensive coordinator and, in some minds, has underdelivered in that role. Garrett’s current job belonged in 2001 to Sean Payton, now head coach of the New Orleans Saints, who were just denied a spot in this Super Bowl by Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

The world turns. Things evolve, things disappear altogether. The venues for four of my first five Super Bowl adventures have been demolished—Houston’s Rice University Stadium (1974), New Orleans’ Tulane Stadium (1975), Miami’s Orange Bowl (1976 and ’79).

But this year’s championship game returns, for a third time, to Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium, which first hosted the event in 2001, when I witnessed Baltimore’s 34-7 walloping of the Giants. That big pirate ship—made of concrete, eminently sinkable—remains behind one Raymond James Stadium end zone.

Tampa, furthermore, is still a town where you can get a really good victory cigar—and therefore seems an ideal place for the Big Game. Tampa’s historic Latin quarter, Ybor City, endures as a Cigar Capital, and it was there that I found “master roller” Roberto Ramirez, considered No. 1 in his craft in his native Cuba before he defected in 1996. He was cigar maker to U.S. celebrities and politicians, had been invited to the White House, and was still at his job in his mid-70s, according to the most updated internet information I could find on him from 10 years ago.

The other Super Bowl constant, as true now as when I was immersed in the hullabaloo for the first of seven times in January 1974, is the event’s status as the Great American Conversation Piece. The Great American Timeout (maybe even more so now, in the midst of the plague and political division). The Great American Spectacle.

The Super Bowl’s exalted position in our national culture can be explained, at least partially, by the phenomenon that hot air rises. This Great American Sideshow is inflated, like the blimp overhead. Its scale is exaggerated; the Great American Fish Story. It is undeniably hard-wired into the circuitry of our American lifestyle. Citizens avoid planning weddings and other major happenings on Super Bowl dates.

And the NFL’s manifest destiny marches on. Super Bowl sites already are set for 2022 (at the Rams/Chargers new home in Inglewood, Calif.), 2023 (Glendale, Ariz.), 2025 (New Orleans.) The only reason the 2024 location isn’t set is because the league’s upcoming regular-season expansion to 17 games would set up a conflict with that year’s Mardi Gras festivities in New Orleans, which had been the designated host. Speculation is that the 2024 game will end up in Las Vegas, emblematic of Great American Overindulgence.

The Super Bowl’s place, as something akin to a national religion, is such that in 1990 a Columbia, S.C., Presbyterian pastor named Brad Smith conceived the “Souper Bowl of Caring,” asking churches to organize the collection of $1 contributions after services on Super Bowl Sunday for soup kitchens and charities.

At the 2001 Tampa Super Bowl, Smith was permitted by the NFL to stage a press conference for his project—“Enjoy the game but think of the less fortunate,” was his pitch. Only a single reporter and two TV cameras showed up, while thousands or other journalists were busy reporting on Baltimore star linebacker Ray Lewis’ year-old murder case and Tampa’s reputation for strip clubs. Smith was not deterred. “Why not use the power of sports?” he said then. “Nothing transcends divisions in our culture like the Super Bowl game.”

So the annual frivolity is upon us again. This time, many of the spectators in Tampa will be of the cardboard variety. This time, Covid-19, the monster under our beds, is lurking, and among the consequences is exacerbating food insecurity across the country. But Smith’s organization, tapping into the power of the Super Bowl, now reports having raised $163 million. Which sounds worthy of a good victory cigar.

Really?

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A good Latin phrase always is handy for extraordinary Olympic moments. (The Games official motto is in Latin: citius, altius, fortius—faster, higher, stronger.) So, in regard to the Florida official who has volunteered his state as alternative host of this summer’s coronavirus-threatened Tokyo Games, I suggest non compos mentis.

The translation is “Not in control of the mind” or, less formally, “insane; mentally incompetent.” Though etymologists aren’t in full agreement about the exact origin, one theory is that non compos mentis evolved into “nincompoop.”

That seems about right for the classically blockheaded offer, sent to the International Olympic Committee in a letter by Jimmy Patronis, who is Florida’s chief financial officer. In what must be described as nothing more than a publicity stunt, Patronis announced that, since Tokyo’s nabobs appear to be hesitating about going ahead with the Olympics in the face of the pandemic, the Sunshine State is ready to step in.

The headlines produced by that cockeyed suggestion, Dave Zirin and Jules Boykoff wrote in The Nation, “looked like something out of The Onion.”

Patronis, oblivious to reality on several levels, argued that, while Tokyo organizers had chosen to postpone last summer’s originally scheduled Games for one year, Florida went about staging the NBA playoffs in the Disney World Covid-19 bubble. And Tampa is about to pull off the pandemic Super Bowl. And there have been several Jacksonville-based UFC events during the plague. (UFC events!)

Patronis is a finance guy; I got a C in my college economics course, so what do I know? Except that, in the process of covering 11 Olympics, I became aware that the Summer Games consist of 33 sports, requiring such diverse facilities as a swimming hall, track and field stadium, equestrian venue, cycling velodrome, rowing site, shooting and archery ranges, multiple soccer fields, separate arenas for fencing, gymnastics and badminton. And much more.

There are 206 Olympic nations eligible to compete in the Games; compare that to the measly 193 countries in the United Nations. Roughly 11,000 athletes—as well as coaches, game officials and physicians—must be fed and housed and transported to both competition and training locations during the Games. Logistics and details are such that cities are designated Olympic hosts seven full years in advance of the 2 ½-week international festival. One decision-maker at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics said the task amounted to “putting on a Super Bowl every day for 17 days.” In fact, it’s more complicated than that.

Another minor detail, spelled out in the Olympic Charter, is that the IOC “shall have no financial responsibility in respect to the organization, financing and staging of the Olympic Games other than the contribution determined in the Olympic Host Contract, unless otherwise agreed in writing.”

So, while recent polls have found that 80 percent of Japan’s population favors cancelling the Games altogether, Tokyo has sunk about $25 billion into its operation, a major factor in opting to (fingers crossed) soldier on. That Florida would have the resources, the time or the ability to waltz in as Olympic savior—let alone to get the IOC’s backing—is “bonkers,” Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist told the Huffington Post. “This is an idiotic, delusional, uninformed, ignorant Florida politician trying to put his name out there. It’s got no chance. It’s just stupid.”

Humor columnist Dave Barry’s sly take in the Miami Herald was that “chief financial officer Jimmy has already done the hard part, writing the letter. All we need now is a detailed plan and thousands of workers and $25 billion.”

Money issues and crushing deadlines aside—July 23 is designated as the Games’ opening day—there remains the primary problem of the still-spreading, mutating virus. Patronis portrayed Disney World as “an incredible model for how to run a complex organization in the midst of Covid-19.” (Hmmm: A Mickey Mouse Olympics?) He apparently is ignoring the fact that Florida has had more virus cases (1.7 million to 99,000) and deaths (26,000 to 880) than Tokyo.

Daytona Beach News-Journal columnist Mark Lane dismissed Patronis’ Fantasy Land proposal as  a “cheesy bit of hype” that “also demonstrates a more depressing truth—that the state continues to do everything in its power to minimize the seriousness of [the deadly] illness…”

The Patronis angle does sound familiar, in a way. Quid me anxius sum?

Which is Latin for “What, me worry?”

Home runs weren’t all that happened

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Let’s say you are the target of senseless hate and that, having survived, you are advised to simply forget about it. Let it go. Move on.

Think of Henry Aaron, the baseball Hall of Famer who died this week at 86. In 1974, when Aaron—a Black man—was about to surpass baseball folk hero Babe Ruth as the sport’s home run king, insults and death threats rained down on Aaron and his family. Racism, pure and simple.

And, once the whole troubled affair was over—once Aaron had his record 715th homer and reasonable people gave him the acclaim he deserved—there was a widely held expectation that he simply should get over what he described as “a living hell” during his pursuit of the revered Ruth standard.

Except there was the reality of the situation, months of what essentially amounted to arguments for Ruth’s white privilege.

“All those letters I received,” Aaron said during a telephone conversation 20 years after the fact. “People have said to me. ‘Why don’t you destroy them? Get rid of them?’

“I said, ‘Why should I? This is for real.’ People need to realize it could happen again. I keep those letters so that my children, my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren, will know what I went through.”

And now it’s 2021 and some arguments persist that an emphasis on healing pre-empts accountability.

During that 1994 phone interview, arranged to mark the 20th anniversary of No. 715, Aaron reminded of what was painfully obvious, that he merely had been “out there playing baseball in 1974.” Just going about his business. Not leading some insurrection, not attempting to cancel hallowed sports history. Yet he routinely was subjected to bigoted outrage.

“I need to keep those letters,” he said, “to let people know: This happened.”

Five years later, Aaron at last was feeling more appreciated and a bit immortal when his old team, the Atlanta Braves, staged a small pre-game celebration on the 25th anniversary of No. 715. I happened to be in Atlanta that April 8, assigned to cover a New York Knicks basketball game the next night, and was able to finagle a press credential to the event.

A quarter century before, Aaron had felt slighted when then-baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn skipped Aaron’s momentous game in favor of addressing some booster group in Ohio. But for the 1999 remembrance, commissioner Bud Selig was there. He had known Aaron since both were 20 years old, Aaron as a rookie for the then-Milwaukee Braves at a time when Selig’s father provided cars for Braves’ players.

Selig unveiled a new “Hank Aaron Award” to be annually presented to the best hitter in each league and Aaron declared, “This tops it all.”

Aaron was 65 then. “My grandchildren, my great-grandchildren, will forever be able to say their father had an award named in his honor,” he said. He told the large Atlanta crowd that night, “I know some of you weren’t born when I hit that home run, but I thank you all from the bottom of my heart.”

Still, he kept those letters from the early ‘70s. “Was baseball ready to accept what I did 25 years ago?” he asked during a brief chat before that ceremony. “I don’t know, but I did it. All those things were happening so quickly then. I don’t think America was ready to accept what was happening in baseball.”

His wife, Billye, compared the “overwhelming” 1999 tribute to the unsettling atmosphere around his ’74 homer. “This is joyous,” she said. “We were a little out of sorts 25 years ago. We didn’t know what would happen. It was an odd kind of feeling: What will be? This makes up for it. Yes.”

Aaron was such a dangerous hitter during his 23 Major League seasons that opposing pitchers, respecting his ability to cause them trouble, called him “Bad Henry.” (Aaron preferred being called “Henry” to “Hank,” but once admitted late in life that it was quicker to sign autographs with the shorter version.) One rival pitcher, Curt Simmons, famously said that “trying to throw a fastball past Henry Aaron is like trying to sneak the sunrise past a rooster.”

In the end, he was more Ruthian than Ruth. But…

“If I were white,” Aaron once said of setting the home run record, “all America would be proud of me. But I’m Black.”

Now, at his death, the tributes are rolling in. But don’t forget any of the history. As he said, this happened.

Still here

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(This just appeared in Newsday’s Act2, the Geezer section.)

A former colleague telephoned recently—first time we’d spoken in years—to ask if I was dead.

I was not. But it was mighty thoughtful of him.

The fact is that both he and I are what some people would consider “elderly:” Closing in on the life-expectancy-for-males-in-the-U.S. statistic, which now is just beyond 76 years. In the high-risk group for Covid-19. Plenty of water under the bridge. We’re almost to that point when Casey Stengel, late in a career as an enduring baseball character, had noticed, “Most of the people my age are dead at the present time.”

So it was a legitimate question, even though the caller and I both remain in the workforce. He’s in television; I attempt to teach college students about what was my primary profession, journalism, for 50-odd years.

But the truth is a lot of folks in our demographic indeed have shuffled off this mortal coil. You lose touch with somebody and, before you know it, he or she shows up in an obituary. Especially these days, not just because of the coronavirus pestilence but because our contemporaries tend to be, well, old.

The result is that to still be going strong when near or beyond the three-quarter century mark can be something of a surprise. Willie Nelson—he’s 87—recently released a song to that effect:

I woke up still not dead again today/The internet said I had passed away/But if I died I wasn’t dead to stay/And I woke up still not dead again today.

Roger Angell—he’s 100 now but was only 93 when he wrote his “This Old Man” essay for the New Yorker—acknowledged then how extended human longevity can be as shocking as the news of someone’s demise.

“It must be this hovering knowledge, that two-ton safe swaying on a frayed rope just over my head,” he wrote, “that makes everyone so glad to see me again. ‘How great you’re looking! Wow, tell me your secret!’ they kindly cry when they happen upon me crossing the street or exiting a dinghy or departing an X-ray room, while the little balloon over their heads reads, ‘Holy —! He’s still vertical!’”

It happens. Some of us have all the luck. A few surgical procedures along the way, a drastically slowing pace on morning runs, expanding pill regimen, dimmed hearing, increased visual assistance—at this stage, the major function of ears evolves into holding spectacles in place—yet feeling spry. Relatively.

A friend, even more ancient than I, once mentioned that he first felt old when a younger man than him was elected U.S. president. In my case, that didn’t happen until 2008 with Barack Obama—though I barely had missed that milestone, by mere months—with Clinton, W., and the recent White House occupant. Now that Joe Biden is taking office, I’m back to being a comparative pup.

Anyway. When I got the call, inquiring whether I might no longer be extant, it wasn’t as if my life flashed before my eyes, though it did seem appropriate for the caller and I to reminisce briefly about some earlier good times. Both of us marveled at having spent decades getting paid for what never has felt like hard labor. I had wanted, as a child, to be in the newspapers as creator of a comic strip but wound up a sportswriter instead.

Nice work if you can get it, and I did. Traveled the world. Met fascinating people. Learned stuff. Couldn’t have married a better, smarter, more multitalented person. Lovely daughter and, as of this year, a grandboy. A few nice pets.

And I’m still entertaining the hope that I amount to something when I grow up.

That’s the thing. Even in what technically could be described as geezerhood, it seems thoroughly normal to continue seeking what’s around the next corner. As opposed to, say, propped in a rocking chair, drooling. Upon my official retirement as a full-time reporter, a neighbor suggested the importance of accomplishing “one thing” each day. The other day I wrote and mailed Christmas cards.

That was my one thing. And it sent forth the word to distant friends and relatives that I am not dead.

And it’s not a waltz, either….

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If the question should arise on a test or in a friendly game of trivia, could you name Australia’s national anthem? Sorry, it’s not “Waltzing Matilda.” At least not officially. Tricky follow-up: What does a dancing woman have to do with the “unofficial” Australian anthem?

First the news: On New Year’s Day, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the sanctioned alteration of one word in his nation’s actual anthem, “Advance Australia Fair.” In a long overdue move to recognize the country’s Indigenous history, the song now begins “Australians all let us rejoice, for we are one and free.” Previously, that sentence ended “young and free,” which suggested a narrative dating only to arrival of European settlers and the establishment of a British convict colony in the late 18th Century, thereby ignoring some 65,000 years that First Nations people inhabited the continent.

This is the kind of thing that encourages a little rummaging around in the historical attic. And tucked in there with the significant matter of how the new one-word anthem tweak signals an acknowledgment of inclusiveness—though not specifically addressing Australia’s shameful “stolen generations” policy through the first half of the 1900s, when Aboriginal children were relocated to white families to be “civilized”—there is the decidedly lesser matter of music minutiae.

It was not until 1984 that Australia discarded “God Save the Queen,” an incessant reminder of British imperialism, as its formal anthem. Based on a national plebiscite seven years earlier to choose a “national song,” the globally familiar and locally embraced “Waltzing Matilda” had been defeated—28% to 43%—by “Advance Australia Fair.”

But among the truths I learned while covering the 2000 Sydney Olympics was how “Waltzing Matilda” remained what Australians consider “fair dinkum”—unquestionably good and genuine. Furthermore, according to an information technology expert named Roger Clark, who has operated a Waltzing Matilda home page for 25 years, “Advance Australia Fair” is “a dreadful dirge with archaic expressions….”

During those Games, informal chats with the natives reinforced a widespread feeling that it was “sad to say” that Aussie gold-medal performances were celebrated with the playing of “Advance Australia Fair.” Because, I was informed, “Waltzing Matilda” was more quintessentially Australian.

The latter is sung rousingly at national team rugby matches and other public events. It routinely is introduced, along with bush dancing (heel, toe, heel, toe, slide, slide, slide) to all small children (“ankle-biters” in the local vernacular). It is such a part of Australia’s identity that many of the nation’s passports include the words to “Waltzing Matilda” hidden microscopically in the background pattern on the visa pages.

Ah, yes, the words.

Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong/Under the shade of a coolabah tree/And he sang as he watched and waited ‘til his billy boiled/“You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.”

Gibberish to us blow-ins (foreign visitors), the lyrics spin a yarn about a drifter or tramp (swagman) who steals a sheep because he is starving and, when the authorities come to arrest him, chooses suicide, throwing himself into a waterhole (billabong) to drown. The swagman had been lounging under a coolabah (eucalyptus) tree, waiting for his billy (tin cup for coffee or tea) to boil…

Written in 1895 by Banjo Paterson, the Bard of Australia, the song is considered evocative of virtually everything Australian—the bush country, traditional resistance to authority and elitism, and sprinkled with descriptions inherited from the Aborigines.

Down came a jumbuck [sheep] to drink at the billabong/Up jumped the swagman and grabbed him with glee/And he sang as he stowed that jumbuck in his tucker [food] bag/“You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.”

There is no woman in the tale. The slang “waltzing Matilda” may have dated to a German presence during the Australian gold rush of the mid-1800s, since “aud die Walz gehen” translates to taking to the road, and “Matilda” was a bedroll, the “girl” a traveling man slept with.

Paterson’s ballad proceeds to describe the arrival of a wealthy landowner—referenced as a “squatter” in that era’s newly upper-class “squattocracy’ in pastoral Australia, those who simply settled on land until they came to be seen as rightful owners—who summons the cops.

Up rode the squatter, mounted on his thoroughbred/Up rode the troopers, one, two, three/“Where’s that jolly jumbuck you’ve got in your tucker bag?/You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.”

Up jumped the swagman and sprang into the billabong/“You’ll never take me alive,” said he/And his ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabong/“You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.”

Paterson apparently based his Everyman hobo on a sheep shearer named Hoffmeister who had shot himself while mounted troops pursued him and fellow shearers for having set a woodshed full of sheep ablaze during unionization struggles for better wages and conditions.

One fellow I polled on the topic in 2000, a college lad, argued that “Waltzing Matilda” was “a story of the underdog, and Australians love the underdog, because Australia traditionally has been the underdog. It’s about democracy, in a sense. Democracy and the little guy going against the system.”

And set to a catchy tune.

Anyway, if this anthem matter should come up in casual conversation now that “Advance Australia Fair” has been updated, don’t forget the history of Aussie drifters and their distinctly christened sleeping bags.