Social distancing

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There was a time when running spread like a communicable disease. In the 1970s, the bug was caught by hundreds, then thousands, of ordinary folks. Citizen road races and marathons sprang up, drawing increasing crowds, giving lie to the expression associated with a 1959 short story, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.”

In short order, runners weren’t lonely at all. The first few infected by Frank Shorter’s televised 1972 Olympic marathon victory began to pass on what Shorter has benignly called a “disease.” Underlying causes included the headline feats of high school mile phenom Jim Ryun, the dawning of cross country and track opportunities for women opened by the passage of Title IX, and a contagion of fitness. Over the next five decades, those contributed to such developments as the New York City Marathon’s more than 400-fold increase in participation.

So the new irony, now that we’re on Coronavirus Standard Time, is that running suddenly can represent a form of social distancing. It is, by nature, a solitary pursuit. Once described by Shorter as “selfish,” running in fact can be altogether altruistic, a handy way to stay away from other people and thus to avoid contributing to the problem. It is “the perfect sport,” according to a recent New York Times item, “for a pandemic.”

With New York City banning all contact sports in local parks and shuttering playgrounds as part of restrictions on gatherings of more than five people, running need not violate such decrees. It requires nothing more than a pair of shoes and open space, with the simple proviso of staying at least six feet from fellow runners. Runners World magazine is advising that “the best plan for running right now is to go out for a solo run and enjoy the outdoors, in non-crowded areas.”

Further, running serves as an antidote for cabin fever in these shelter-in-place times and has been touted—like all exercise—as a boost to the immune system and to mental health.

But, yes, there are more incongruities. Because running has become so mainstream—a reported 60 million Americans participate in running and jogging each year—vastly populated Spring races, including the 30,000-strong Boston Marathon, are among the rash of postponed events triggered by the current health crisis.

In “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” English author Alan Sillitoe used running as a metaphor for his protagonist, an impoverished teenager guilty of petty crime, to run away from society. But Texas-based historian James McWilliams, in a 2016 essay on the Boston Marathon for the Paris Review that referenced Sillitoe’s tale, nevertheless conflated contemporary society and running, community and individuality.

“When the Boston Marathon ends,” McWilliams wrote, “there will be tens of thousands of runners marked by a shared experience, even if each runner will ultimately be alone, a novella unto himself.”

There is no getting around the reality of having to share this coronavirus situation. Still, might a leisurely daily run—alone—be doing one’s part in slowing the galloping chain reaction?

Keep your hands to yourself

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The New York Times headline asked, “Is this the end of the high five?” Another timely question in the age of coronavirus.

With hand-to-hand contact identified as a primary culprit in spreading the contagion, the familiar palm-slap above the head is being seriously frowned upon. For more than 40 years, it has been a hallmark ritual of jockdom celebration, commiseration and congratulation. Yet—“out of an abundance of caution,” as the operative phrase goes—the high five act already had segued into fist bumps and elbow knocks in the days before the sports industry shut down completely. Who’s to say that, even upon a return to normal existence, it won’t be gone forever?

On the one hand (and keep washing it), old habits don’t die easily. The basic handshake, for instance, is said to have originated thousands of years ago, possibly to demonstrate that the offered shake indicated the lack of a weapon. Or was merely to suggest friendship, seal a deal or show respect.

One of the great civil traditions in sports is the hockey handshake at the conclusion of playoff series, when members of opposing teams—after having gone at each other, hammer and tongs—line up for polite individual greetings and let bygones be bygones. “That’s the kind of thing,” former Islanders goaltender Glenn Resch told me years ago, “that raises sport to being a sport. It raises us above being just animals.”

Sports being sports, though, there is plenty over-the-top exuberance, and elaborate variations of saluting colleagues’ accomplishments evolved. Pairing the ubiquitous presence of televised games with human nature’s bent toward mimicry, we arrived at the high five as everyday fashion.

The custom long ago spread far beyond the playing fields and has become something of a cliché. In 1981, “high five” was added to the Oxford Dictionary. In 2002, a group of University of Virginia students invented National High Five Day, to be celebrated on the third Thursday of April with a 24-hour period for giving as many high fives as possible to friends and strangers alike. (Might that annual rite also be in jeopardy now?)

So, if this is the end of the high five, what exactly was the beginning? Most accounts cite a 1977 baseball game in which Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Glenn Burke, greeting teammate Dusty Baker after the latter’s home run, spontaneously stretched an arm overhead and giddily whacked hands with Baker.

Others cite the 1978-79 University of Louisville’s basketball players as high five authors, and there also is a tale that late 1970s Murray State basketball player Lamont Sleets practiced the maneuver and attributed the name to his father’s Vietnam unit, “The Fives.”

Some claim that women’s volleyball players created the move in the 1960s, and in my half-century of working as a sports journalist, the first time I witnessed anything resembling the modern high five was at a grass-roots Olympic volleyball event sometime in the ‘70s. That routine was closer to a “high 10,” in which teammates simultaneously smacked both hands, shoulder high, patty-cake style.

Anyway, before that, high school basketball players had been executing an early form of the fist bump—one fellow’s balled-up hand tapping the top of another’s. And, before that, there was the display in which a lad offered an open palm, about waist high, and his colleague gave him a downward strike.

Before that was the widespread practice of patting a teammate on the rump. And, eventually, we arrived at such yahoo toasts as the flying chest bump and football’s counterintuitive bashing of teammates’ helmets. As if a little more skull-rattling were in order during a grid contest.

Given the concussion epidemic in modern sports, who’s to say that attaboy! gesture shouldn’t go the way of the coronavirus high five?

A silent killer in sports

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Upon his retirement after 67 seasons as baseball play-by-play man for the Dodgers, preeminent sportscaster Vin Scully said the thing he would miss was “the roar of the crowd.”

Think about that in this suddenly-gone-quiet time throughout the sports world. With the dramatic but thoroughly reasonable strategy of limiting large gatherings to mitigate the spread of coronavirus, one consequence is no March Madness to cheer. Or NBA or NHL games. Not even Spring Training baseball.

So, for a while at least, we will not be seeing buzzer-beating baskets or majestic home runs or overtime goals. But what is really passing strange will be the eerily silent arenas and stadiums across the land.

It’s just sports—an alternate universe, an escape from serious issues such as pandemics. But sports’ everyday presence has come to be something we take for granted. And in considering the effects of quarantining the fun-and-games industry, Jack Holmes asked in an Esquire essay, “How about the roar of the crowd?”

How about, he noted, the fact that “our human experience is borne up in gathering together for events and festivities….which remind us we are not alone in a vast and lonely world…”

Amid the lightning-fast developments of the spreading coronavirus, NBA, NHL and NCAA officials briefly considered carrying on without spectators—sort of a hazmat solution in the face of the contagion. A weird version of what we know as spectator sports, to say the least.

“We play games without the fans?” was LeBron James’ initial reaction. “Nah, that’s impossible. I ain’t playing if I ain’t got the fans in the crowd. That’s who I play for.”

On the extremely rare occasions when a big-time sports event was played “behind closed doors”—without an audience—it proved to be an empty experience for all involved. In 2015, civil unrest in Baltimore following the death of a black man named Freddie Gray while in police custody led to the Orioles barring fans for a single game against the Chicago White Sox—the only time that happened in Major League history.

Jeff Samardzija, the White Sox pitcher that day, said at the time that he “wouldn’t recommend” such a move again. “This is a game to be played in front of fans,” he said. “I understand a lot of people watch on TV nowadays, but it’s definitely a spectator sport.”

Broadway shows have shut down because of new limitations on large gatherings—that is, an audience—and you can’t have a Broadway show without an audience. Same for sports, really; without fans, sports merely become a pantomime.

“It’s astonishing,” Esquire’s Holmes wrote, “how much of a sporting product’s value is generated by the roar of the crowd….All of these tournaments and championships we have designed and built for our own entertainment—their value is rooted solely in the fact that large numbers of us have decided to agree they are valuable….A lot of people care, so you should care, and share it with other people who care. People pay money—lots of money—to be in the crowd and create some of that value.”

Eric Nusbaum put it this way on Slate: “There are a million bad things about sports, but there is one good thing that transcends all of them: community. [Sports] only matter because we collectively decide they do.”

When this coronavirus thing is over, which will deserve a good roar from the crowd, we are not going to miss social distancing.

The Astros’ purloined signals

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Country music has a weakness for cheating songs and Houston is smack dab in Honky Tonk territory. How long until someone comes up with a little ditty about the two-timing, double-dealing, mean mistreating ballclub there?

Maybe something like this…

The team that once wore rainbow clothes

Was named for a gun but changed to Astros;

Finally won the title as best of the pros

Until a guy blew a whistle on the con.

..

Old gamesmanship, a brand-new plan

Using video, a bat and a garbage can

To count the fingers on a catcher’s hand

And that ball, folks, is goin’, goin’, gone!

..

So now everybody is sighin’ and cryin’

All of a sudden, there’s purists not buyin’

“If you ain’t cheatin then you ain’t tryin’”;

What once got praise now gets a loud moan.

It’s safe to say that we’re all in agreement that the Astros were involved in hornswogglery on their way to the 2017 World Series title, and that they deserve condemnation. But I have a confession: I’m not sure I’m as shocked by the revelations of the Astros’ dastardly, elaborate scheme to steal signs as I am by how shocked the baseball world claims to be—from opposing players and league officials to Major League beat reporters.

As Brian Phillips noted in an essay for The Ringer, “Sports isolates competitive, driven, and obsessive human beings….attracts the people with the strongest desire to dominate…[and] tells them that their desire to dominate is a good, even a heroic, quality.

“It then places these phenomenally competitive and ambitious people inside an environment that’s largely free of true negative consequences while promising them immense rewards—money, fame, status—for defeating each other.”

Robert Prentice, writing for the University of Texas business school website Ethics Unwrapped, cited six plausible explanations for the Astros’ misbehavior—among them the “slippery slope” of baseball’s full acceptance of sign stealing as long it is accomplished without the aid of technology; and the rationalization that “stealing signs might have seemed mild when compared to the steroid scandal of a few years ago.”

The interesting P.S. to that sort of whataboutism was the recent advice—if that’s the right word—offered by former Yankee Alex Rodriguez, that the Astros should have expressed “remorse” for their digressions. Fans, he said, “want a real, authentic apology. And they have not received that thus far.”

Interesting guidance from a man not only guilty of his own bad manners, repeatedly violating doping rules, but also of putting forward public apologies for his steroid use that proved to be insincere. Twice. Not only did Rodriguez go back on his 2009 mea culpa but was continuing to juice even as he served as a spokesman for the Taylor Hooton Foundation’s campaign that cautioned young players against demon drugs.

In journalism—my profession—we are cautioned to stay this side of the sometimes-thin line between skepticism and cynicism, so I’ll resist the temptation to assume any of the Astros’ outraged opponents might also have engaged in some form of illicit corner-cutting at some point. Decades of covering Olympic sports confronted me with a widespread belief—though not the proof—that “everybody uses performance enhancers.”

As if that makes some instances of cheating acceptable.

Thomas Fox, a Houston attorney and self-proclaimed “compliance evangelist,” asked in an online post, “Why do we have ethics in sports?” and considered reasons both noble and self-serving.

“Is it to teach youngsters the importance of fair play as a social construct?” he wondered. “Is it to create a level playing field so those who compete do so based on hard work, ability and skills alone and not some nefarious ‘edge’? Is it to protect the billions made by baseball and will be made in the future? Or is it because it simply is the right thing to do? Do you play fairly so you will not be called ‘cheater’ the rest of your life?”

Forbes columnist Henry DeVries, in as essay related to the Astros case, suggested that one can “take a virtue (right or wrong) approach, a duty-based approach, or a utilitarian (consequence) approach,” and that, “if you are more worried about winning and making money than you are of being a benefit to society as a whole, that is utilitarian ethics at play.” To have chosen the last of those, stealing signs as a path to the World Series title, DeVries wrote, was to somehow justify that it “will benefit the Houston fans.”

Can’t say I’m astounded. But cheatin’ songs always are sad songs.

Olympic fever?

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Danger always is lurking at the Olympic door. Mexico’s government troops gunning down protesters days before the Opening Ceremonies in 1968. The Palestinian attack on the Israeli team compound in 1972. Massive debt for Montreal in 1976. Politically engineered boycotts in both 1980 and ’84. A deadly bomb during the Atlanta Games in 1996. Salt Lake City’s post-9/11 jitters in 2002. Fears of oppressive Chinese Communist censorship in 2008. Brazil’s mosquito-borne Zika virus in 2016.

The sky forever seems to be falling. With buttoned-up security, the Olympics go on—and with a remarkable ability to create a festive, peaceful island in an increasingly chaotic world. Not since 1940 and 1944, during World War II, have the Games been cancelled.

But what about this summer’s Tokyo Olympics as the coronavirus radiates from its outbreak in China, across Asia and now into Western nations? The Olympics not only is a hothouse for public dissent (because it is such a visible stage) but also for germs (because so many people, from everywhere, are packed together for three weeks with not enough rest and too much contact). Personal experience: Head colds and viral infections marched through the press facilities at all of the 11 Olympics I covered.

So far, Tokyo officials, who estimate welcoming 11,000 athletes and 600,000 overseas visitors, are insisting there is no Plan B—no thought of calling off, postponing or moving the Games. That, despite news that pre-Olympic qualifying events already have been moved out of China and other Asian venues, affecting athletes from several countries. Quarantines of potential Chinese Olympians have forced disruption of those athletes’ training or cancelled their pre-Olympic competitions. Schooling planned in Japan for 80,000 unpaid Olympic volunteers, hailing from around the world, has been delayed.

Japan already has the highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases outside of China, and the March 1 Tokyo Marathon, which normally has more than 30,000 mostly-amateur runners from home and abroad, will restrict its field to roughly 200 elite professionals. Possibly all wearing surgical masks.

The coronavirus reportedly is related to SARS, the deadly severe acute respiratory syndrome which broke out in China in late 2002. That contagion forced the relocation of the 2003 women’s soccer World Cup, a high-profile 16-nation tournament that had been scheduled for four sites in China, to six cities in the United States.

The move worked, in part because of the Americans’ experience in hosting the previous World Cup four years earlier. So now Shaun Bailey, a London mayoral candidate, has suggested the 2020 Olympics likewise be transferred to his city, which staged the 2012 Games.

Except there is a marked difference between transporting a one-sport championship tournament and the massive Olympic show, with its 33 sports and 30 times the number of participants. Organizing the Olympics, a 1996 Atlanta official said at the time, amounted to “putting on a Super Bowl every day for 17 consecutive days.”

In fact, it is bigger than that. And getting bigger all the time. For Tokyo, 7.8 million tickets have been sold. More than $3 billion in local sponsorship deals have been finalized. NBC has paid $1.4 billion just for U.S. broadcasting rights (with the significant expectation that the Games will fit into its summer programming window before American football and baseball playoffs take over). More than 80,000 hotel rooms are in the mix. Organizers have spent about $25 billion on their Olympic operation.

For obvious reasons, Tokyo wants—and needs—to stick to its schedule. And the history of Olympic perseverance, in the face of multiple challenges, is exceptional. But the 2020 prognosis is iffy.

Better shoes? Technology doping?

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Flubber!

Let us acknowledge the obvious. If an elite runner thought it would make him faster, he would compete wearing a beanie outfitted with a propeller. On his derriere.

More conventionally, if a shoe company were to design footwear which would guarantee its wearer would be 4% quicker….well, what part of evident don’t you understand?

But being guilty of seeking every tiny performance edge is not the tricky part. Rather, in this age of rapid scientific advances, there is the concern regarding potentially artificial assistance.

Ethicists and sports officials have been worried about this kind of thing for a while. And now wearers of the space-age Vaporfly running shoe, fashioned by the sportswear giant Nike, have produced history’s five fastest men’s marathon times and four of the 10 fastest women’s marathons in the last two years.

Is such equipment merely maximizing human capacity? Just helping fulfill the logically aspirational Olympic motto—citius, altius, fortius (“faster, higher, stronger” in Latin)? Or is it crossing the fuzzy line into technology doping, adding a furtivus (loosely translated, “sneakier,”) to the motto?

With the Vaporfly, an extra-thick mid-sole with a carbon fiber plate acts like a spring, compressing when the runner lands, storing energy from the foot strike and expanding again to return that stored energy into the ground to push the runner forward. Independent studies have confirmed a 4% efficiency boost.

Is this situation anything like when swimming officials were wrestling with the acceptability of full bodysuits 20 years ago, after those suits were found to provide buoyancy and muscle constriction that worked to reduce fatigue? (Eventually those suits were banned in international competition.)

Is it similar to the NBA’s prohibition in 2009 of Athletic Propulsion Labs sneakers, which featured a ballyhooed “Load ‘N Launch” technology to increase vertical leap and thus were judged to be supplying an undue advantage?

In the slapstick 1961 movie “The Absent-minded Professor,” the application of “flubber” (flying rubber) to the shoes of the school’s basketball players—allowing them to soar above the opposition like kangaroos against elephants—clearly was as unjust as it was comical.

But science in fact lurks as a possible threat to an even playing field. Golf (club technology), baseball (bat materials) and football (Stickum) all have implemented restrictions on paraphernalia. Thirteen years ago, track and field’s governing body barred such aids as springs and wheels in athletic shoes, though its basic rule is vague: Shoes may not confer “any unfair assistance or advantage” and must be “reasonably available” to all competitors.

Vaporfly is available for $250 a pair, though a runner under contract with Nike surely can get a break there. For now, the shoe remains an acceptable accoutrement, though track’s international federation has formed a working group of athletes, scientists and legal experts to review the Vaporfly and is expected to announce a “temporary suspension of any fresh shoe technology” until after this summer’s Tokyo Olympics.

Epilogue: In 1960, Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikila ran the 26-mile, 385-yard Olympic marathon barefoot. And won. In 1964, he won the Olympic marathon again. Wearing shoes. Technology? Or just time marching on?

 

A Super Bowl survey

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(not really)

And here’s another geographical fact about Kansas City. Not only is it decidedly in Missouri—apparently news to a New Yorker named Donald Trump—but there also is not really a corner to stand on at 12th Street and Vine (“with my Kansas City baby and a bottle of Kansas City wine”).

That specific intersection, referenced in Wilbert Harrison’s 1959 chart-topping hit, hasn’t existed since an urban renewal project wiped out a section of 12th Street 60 years ago. Also, though officially adopted in 2005 by Kansas City, the song was written by two California teenagers who never had been to Kansas City.

Which, again, is in Missouri.

Granted, though, it is a state that can seem to be all over the map.

There is, for instance, a California, Mo. A Washington, Mo. A Louisiana, Mo. An Oregon, Mo. A Nevada, Mo. (Named by a fellow who immigrated from Nevada City. Which, any cartographer worth his salt knows, is in California.)

There even, for the internationally aware, is a Cuba, Mo. A Mexico, Mo. A Lebanon, Mo.

And no surprise: There is a Missouri City, Mo. (Though it’s hardly a city; population 279). There most certainly is not a Missouri City, Kan.

But, anyway. As a former resident of Missouri (during my college years), I can report that the state has a lot of moving targets. The climate is one: “If you don’t like the Missouri weather,” the saying goes, “wait 10 minutes.” Dreadful humid heat, sleet, tornadoes, snow, rain. Sometimes all on Thursday.

Just as evasive is a set way to pronounce the state’s name. About half the natives—generally speaking, those is the urban centers and along the northeast side of a sort of diagonal Mason-Dixon line—say “Mizz-ur-ee.” To the west and southwest, and in more sparsely populated areas, it’s “Mizz-ur-uh.”

I had just graduated from the University of Missouri—hailing from out of state, I’ve always said Mizz-ur-ee—and had left the region when then-governor Warren Hearnes announced with some fanfare in 1970 that both pronunciations were correct. Still, Missouri politicians continue to get flack from the locals for switching to an “ee” or “uh” ending depending on where they are giving a speech.

Okay. There is a Kansas City, Kan, directly across the Missouri River and roughly a third the size of Kansas City, Mo. But it is not the home of the Super Bowl champion Chiefs. In the wake of Trump’s embarrassing faux pas, in which he Tweeted how the big game’s winners had “represented the Great State of Kansas,” some clarification is in order.

The Kansas Kansas City is the come-lately Kansas City, incorporated in 1872—two decades after the Missouri Kansas City officially materialized. And the story is that the Kansas Kansas City took its name to fool New York financiers—maybe they would think it was the booming, established Missouri Kansas City—into sending a monetary boost to their town.

Over time, the two states have become friendly enough neighbors, but they do have a tense history going back to open violence involving anti-slavery (Kansas) and pro-slavery (Missouri) factions leading up to and during the Civil War. And sports, mostly through a long-standing rivalry between the two state universities, indelicately played on that history for the next hundred years.

The schools’ football rivalry was called the Border War—taken literally from the bloody Civil War era skirmishes—for decades before it finally downgraded to the Border Showdown at the beginning of this Century. Less menacingly, Norm Stewart, who for 32 years coached Missouri basketball, delighted in getting under the skin of Kansas fans—partly by his claim that, for Missouri road games in Lawrence, Kan., he avoided spending a single dime in the state of Kansas by booking his team into hotels and restaurants (and gassing up the team bus) 40 miles away in Kansas City.

Stewart recently admitted that story was just a myth. But it demonstrated that he knew the lay of the land. And that Kansas City is in Missouri.

A brush with a basketball master

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(Ralph Tasker)

Another six-degrees-of-separation moment: The celebrated Maryland high school basketball coach Morgan Wootten has died at 88. Never met the man. But there is a decided connection here, in a “he knew a guy who knew a guy” kind of way, because Wootten for years could be found in the same laudatory sentence as Ralph Tasker.

Tasker coached at my high school in Hobbs, N.M. and, by the end of his career, had won more games than any other prep coach in America besides Wootten. (Three others have since passed him.) At one point before Tasker retired in 1997, at 79, he briefly led Wootten in total victories on the way to 1,122 over 51 seasons. Wootten coached four years beyond that and wound up with 1,274.

Legendary stuff. The two hoops masters once coached against each other in a special mini-tournament (covered by Sports Illustrated). The national basketball Hall of Fame’s Lifetime Achievement Award, named for Wootten, was presented posthumously to Tasker a decade ago. And there was this singular occasion when Coach Tasker, in a moment of kindness not to be confused with objective existence, informed me that I appeared to be material for his forever-dominant varsity.

Tasker’s teams were like nothing I’d ever seen before my family arrived for my sophomore year in Hobbs, an oil patch town minutes from the Texas border. Tasker had his lads operate in a constant frenzy—all-court press and fast-break offense at all times. They regularly scored 100 points per 32-minute game; in the 1969-70 season, they averaged a still-record 114.6 points—in the days before there was a three-point shot. Their trapping, suffocating defenses were a human version of swarming locusts. And every bit as destructive.

After facing Tasker’s Hobbs boys while still a high-school coach in El Paso, Hall of Famer Nolan Richardson was inspired to implement what he called the “Forty Minutes of Hell” defense he used to win the 1994 NCAA championship at Arkansas.

I was properly introduced to the Tasker approach months before ever meeting the man or enrolling in my new school. I had played freshman ball in suburban Los Angeles the previous season and figured I was fully capable of handling myself in Hobbs’ vigorous all-comers summer league. (Tasker, I learned years later, had taken the coaching job in 1949 on the condition that he have his own key to the gym—so it always was open.)

Seconds into my first pick-up game, I came face-to-face with Hobbs’ elevated basketball metabolism that rendered opponents as helpless as a leaf in a gale. Every kid in town seemed to surround me the instant I touched the ball. Stripped, embarrassed, left to watch an instant basket scored at the other end of the floor.

I subsequently played a year of B-team ball, mostly as a third-stringer, and never caught up. But my high school years afforded me a front-row seat to the Tasker phenomenon. Our 3,200-seat gym—always packed for a home game—had not yet been renamed Ralph Tasker Arena. But the man already was so central to the basketball operation that the school’s pep band, an essential piece to a night of hoops, was named Taskervitch. Still is.

The story regarding his commitment to up-tempo play was that, a half-dozen years into Tasker’s coaching run, a player named Kim Nash suggested expanding the occasional use of a full-court press—why not go from opening tap to final buzzer?—and Tasker responded that no team was in good enough shape to do that. “So,” Nash reportedly said, “get us in shape.”

That led to a week of the team practicing in the heavy, steel-toed boots worn by the region’s oil-field workers. (Six degrees again: I worked my high school summers in the oil fields. In those boots.) From then on, Tasker’s always pressing, always fast-breaking heat put rivals in the microwave.

Tasker himself was the antithesis of that wild and woolly playing style. He wore these thick coke-bottle lenses, spoke softly and seldom, seemed far older (at least to us teenagers) than he was then—mid ‘40s. His demeanor fit his other job, teaching government and economics, rather than a hard-charging coach. While the other fellows with whistles and clipboards barked instructions and oozed passion, Tasker quietly offered bits of praise.

Personal example: As an assistant coach of our JV football team, he once made a point of publicly commending my blocking success in front of the entire squad. I was a scrub and everybody knew it, but Tasker made a point of encouraging the least of us.

Okay: About that one-time evaluation of my hoop skills.

That came following a summer-league game shortly after my graduation. I had been recruited to join a rag-tag team of friends, some of us who were working days in the oil fields and seeking a little evening fun at the gym. I may have been averaging two points a game until, one night, against a collection of guys who would make up the next year’s varsity, I went for 22 points.

Highlight of my limited athletic life. By far. It included sinking one 20-footer after faking out Larnell Lipscomb, one of the members of the following season’s state championship team. Tasker, who always was around to watch those surprisingly formal informal tilts, sauntered up after the game and offered something like, “You could have made a good Hobbs Eagle.”

Doubt it. But what would Morgan Wootten have thought about that?

LSU champions. My people (sort of).

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This might be an ideal time to acknowledge my ethnicity (however borderline): Cajun. Same as the head coach of the newly crowned national collegiate football champion. Same as all those citizens of rural Louisiana who don’t mind interpreting LSU’s gridiron triumph as helping to mitigate longstanding portrayals of their tribe—my tribe?—as backward and ignorant.

We’re going to need a bigger bandwagon now, a rolling sort of Mardi Gras float overflowing with celebrants of Cajun revenge.

It’s just football. Since all the fuss is based on the transitory, illusory aspect of athletic success, it may not be wise to tie self-esteem too closely to the jock exploits of this—or any—team. After all, LSU’s star quarterback (a transfer from Ohio State) and so many of its players are decidedly not Cajun.

But somehow LSU’s perfect season argues for Cajun aptitude beyond a distinct cuisine, music and hospitality. The title victory is a psychological boost to the largely self-contained rural communities in the Louisiana bayous with a passionate generational allegiance to LSU football. And the coach, bayou-raised Ed Orgeron, is quintessentially Cajun, the face (and voice) of the whole operation.

So I’m going to take the occasion to mull some marginal roots.

My ancestors, ‘way back, came from Acadia, the colony of New France in the 17th and 18th Centuries that included parts of eastern Quebec, the Maritime provinces and about half of modern-day Maine. Run out of town by the British during what was called the Great Expulsion in the Seven Years War of the mid-1700s, most of those French Catholic settlers of Acadia—“Acadiens,” then “Cadiens,” then “Cajuns”—wound up in Louisiana, where my parents were raised and I was born. In Crowley, La., the heart of Cajun territory.

Full disclosure: I lived only the first two weeks of my life in Crowley, my mother’s hometown, and can’t say I knew what a Cajun was. Because my father was a mid-level oil field executive, regularly transferred every two or three years, I grew up in West Texas, southern California and New Mexico—geographically and culturally distant from a Cajun identity or lifestyle.

Only every other year did we spend vacation time in Louisiana—boy, I hated the humidity—visiting relatives and being exposed to the French-inflected, mysterious accents of cousins, aunts and uncles. Cajun accents. Like nothing to be heard anywhere else.

I remember being with my father when he bumped into old acquaintances in tiny Hessmer, La., decades after he had left his hometown and was seriously out of practice with the dialect of his youth, having great difficulty keeping up with their archaic form of French/English patois.

It wasn’t until around my 11th birthday, as a studious follower of college football and therefore cognizant of top-ranked LSU’s run toward its first national title in 1958, that I became aware that my father was an LSU grad. Reason enough for me to adopt the Bayou Bengals.

My connection to “LOOZ-ee-an” (Cajun pronunciation of the state) beyond that? A line from Mary Chapin Carpenter’s lively Cajun tune, “Down at the Twist and Shout,” applied well into my teen-aged years:

Never have wandered down to New Orleans

Never have drifted down a bayou stream….

Until one summer, later on, my cousins Bill and Paul took me in a canoe—a “pirogue,” as referenced in the old Hank Williams song “Jambalaya”—down one of those streams, spooking me by noting that cottonmouth snakes could be dangling from the canopy of live oak trees. (It was only Spanish moss. And that also was my last bayou experience.)

So I’ve never had alligator stew or participated in a “crawfish boil.” Don’t play the fiddle or accordion. Didn’t make a living farming or fishing. But I do have this decidedly Cajun surname, common in the southern regions of Louisiana but foreign everywhere else.

And I have my dad’s 1936 LSU yearbook, “The Gumbo.” On its cover is a line from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, “Evangeline,” set during the Great Expulsion and the Cajuns’ flight to the Gulf of Mexico: “They who dwell there have named it the Eden of Louisiana.”

I’m thinking now of an uncle who introduced me to the work of Justin Wilson, an old Cajun chef, humorist, author and all-around ambassador for Louisiana who died at 87 in 2001. Wilson was said to be half-Cajun, on his mother’s side, to which he responded, “If I’d been full-blood, I couldn’t have stood it.”

Whatever my purebred status, I can stand it. And to all my Cajun relatives, dressed in style, going hog wild, me oh my oh; I hope the LSU thing means you’re having good fun on the bayou.

R.I.P.: New York City’s Olympian

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In a half century as a sports journalist, I came across countless practitioners of performance dexterity. Jocks who could roll with the punches, professionals capable of conjuring last-minute heroics, coaches and trainers who could mold champions. Jay Kriegel was their equal, a bespectacled gent with an impressive gray mane who was the epitome of a shaker and mover.

When I got to know him a bit, Kriegel was in his mid-60s. I was reporting on New York City’s bid to stage the 2012 Olympic Games and Kriegel was executive director of the group pursuing that event as part of what he called his “love affair” with the city of his birth.

It didn’t work out. For reasons forever obscure—political or financial or even pragmatic—those Games were awarded to London by the International Olympic Committee poohbahs. But not because Kriegel, who died in December at 79, had not been on top of his game.

The appropriate sports cliché for him would be The Go-To Guy. He seemed to know every person—and every building—in Big Town. His resume was all benign power in the worlds of politics, real estate, broadcasting. He had been a wunderkind assistant to John Lindsay, both during Lindsay’s time as a Congressman and later as mayor.

Under Lindsay, Kriegel helped draft sections of what became the voting rights act of 1965. He co-founded the American Lawyer magazine, was a CBS-TV vice president.

So when Dan Doctoroff, then an equity investment manager, got the notion in the late ‘90s that New York City embodied everything about the Olympics—skyscraper dreams, subway-sharpened elbows, United Nations diversity—he sought out Kriegel to head his NYC2012 team.

“I wanted somebody who was passionate about New York,” Doctoroff said then, “who knew more people in New York than I did, with government and media experience, and was indefatigable.”

One of Kriegel’s previous roles was as part of CBS’ proposal to air the 1992 Albertville and 1994 Lillehammer Winter Games, so he knew that territory as well. Still, when Doctoroff contacted him about the Olympic vision, Kriegel’s first reaction was, “Crazy idea. Strange idea.”

“But I liked Dan,” Kriegel later related. “He was intelligent, thoughtful. The thing is, I had never thought of the city in that way. For a New Yorker, this got you to think about the city differently.”

Specifically, he considered “how the city had come through this astonishing renaissance in the ‘80s and ‘90s. You wouldn’t have thought the same way in the ‘80s. But there was this incredible vitality, the conviction that the city runs well and can run well. People have come to appreciate this as a great stage.

“And looking at the plan, there was this appreciation of what’s here that we all take for granted every day. This incredible infrastructure and capacity to absorb large events.”

Shortly after announcing his intention to seek the Olympics, Doctoroff was named deputy to mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2001, so he had government backing. He sought out former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke for his diplomatic connections; former U.S. Olympic Committee fund-raiser John Krimsky for his corporate relationships; former gymnast Wendy Hilliard for her deep ties to Olympic sports bodies; and urban planner Alex Garvin to design a Games blueprint.

It was Kriegel who employed the gears and levers of power to facilitate multiple development initiatives not only meant to execute the Olympics but also to improve the city. Sure enough, a study by New York University’s transportation policy center—completed six years after New York lost the vote to host the Games—concluded that “contrary to popular belief, the New York City Olympic Plan has largely been implemented even though the Games [were] held in London.”

The study cited the bid group’s initiative to re-zone the West Side Hudson Yards, extension of the No. 7 subway line, transformation of the High Line and Brooklyn Waterfront and realization of an expansive ferry service. Even the last-minute rejection of NYC2012’s proposed West Side Stadium, the NYU report said, had pushed the city toward quick agreements to construct new stadiums by both the Yankees and Mets.

“Right down that list, pretty damn good,” Kriegel said just days before the 2012 Olympics opened. In London. “The principle we stated was to have a bid to benefit the city, win or lose.”

Now, the only loss is Kriegel.