Tennis’ working-class hero

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If winning Grand Slam tennis tournaments was easy, anybody could do it. Andy Murray has contributed mightily to the public’s understanding of just how much work play can be at the elite level.

Murray won three major titles during a career, apparently ended now because of a chronic hip injury, that has been enormously successful by any standard. More to the point: His hardly was a primrose path.

He spent the first eight years of his professional career, and his first 27 major-tournament appearances, gnawing at the chains of great expectations. After immediately establishing himself as a member of the sport’s Fab Four—consistently ranked alongside Federer, Nadal and Djokovic—Murray repeatedly faced the insistent question (especially from the clamorous British press) of “When?”

When would he at last win the Big One? His early promise—the 2004 U.S. Open junior title at 17—had raised the likelihood that he would be the first British man to win a major since 1936, and his repeated close-but-no-cigar finishes somehow were seen as a dereliction of duty.

He had arrived on the scene not long after a cartoon in the London press highlighted the irony of Great Britain’s distinction as the sport’s birthplace and host of the game’s oldest and most famous tournament, even as it continually failed to produce championship contenders. Wimbledon, the lampoon went, had become “a fortnight of glorious self-delusion about Britain’s status as a serious tennis nation.”

Britons’ mixed feelings about the Scottish-born Murray were summed up in a ditty by a fellow named Matt Harvey in 2010, when Harvey was hired as Wimbledon’s official poet laureate:

If he’s ever brattish/Or brutish or skittish

He’s Scottish.

But when he looks fittish/And his form is hottish

He’s British. 

Later that summer, Murray entered the U.S. Open as the fittest, hottest player on tour, only to be upset in the third round. Under the usual post-match interrogation of how soon and how he intended to fulfill his enormous potential, he might have responded with a thoroughly reasonable snarl. Something along the lines of: “This isn’t easy, you know.”

But instead of telling the media vultures to go jump in a lake, Murray clarified what should have been obvious. “I have no idea whether I’ll win a Grand Slam or not,” he said. “You know, I want to. But if I never win one, then what? If I give a hundred percent, try my best, physically work as hard as I can, practice as much as I can, then that’s all I can do.

“It’s something I would love to do. I’ll give it my best shot.”

In such settings, Murray speaks in a flat monotone, almost mumbling, sounding a bit detached even when he is anything but. It’s a startling contrast to his on-court voice, fiery shouts of self-deprecation and a body language at maximum volume of annoyance in times of frustration.

Two years after that soul-baring, after four runner-up finishes in majors, he at last had a Slam trophy at the Open and was just as straightforward about his feelings. He admitted that mid-match of his four-hour, five-set victory over Djokovic, “You’re still questioning yourself and doubting yourself.”

He eventually won Wimbledon twice and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, but last week’s description of Murray by the U.K.’s Independent as “a human in the land of gods” was a fitting recognition that his successes were hardly pre-ordained. That, to get paid, he had punched the clock. And that he indeed is not immortal.

At 31—young in the population at large but pushing the expiration date for his physically demanding enterprise—Murray now is “meeting the little death,” as novelist John Updike once wrote, “that awaits all athletes.”

But how about this for a nice legacy? The occasional “love” in tennis need not mean one’s labors are lost.

The other skating crimes in Detroit that week

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Early January 1994—25 years ago this week—brought big, big news in figure skating. Nancy Kerrigan, widely considered a gold-medal candidate for that winter’s Olympic Games, was physically assaulted the day before she was to compete during the U.S. National Championships, which were serving as the Olympic trials, in Detroit.

It turned out, as anyone paying any attention has known for the last quarter century, that associates of Tonya Harding, Kerrigan’s skating rival, were responsible for the attack. The fiendish episode, and its shadow over the ’94 Lillehammer Olympics, was so bizarre that it refuses to grow smaller in the rearview mirror.

And now that the skating nationals are returning to the Motor City for the first time since ’94, veteran Olympic reporter Phil Hersh has marked the Nancy-Tonya anniversary with a terrific in-depth retrospective for nbcsports.com.

That same week in Detroit, by the way, another highly unusual skating event transpired: The first—and, as far as I know, last—National Media Figure Skating Championships. Not so memorable that Hersh should have mentioned it. But, still.

It was organized by Michelle Kaufman, the Olympic beat writer for the Detroit Free Press at the time. She arranged for use of a skating rink, for rental skates, even for music to accompany our…ahem…routines. (We were on our own for skating outfits, which I recall ran toward sweatshirts and jeans.)

Kaufman invited a handful of figure skating officials to the morning gathering, and that informal mingling with the likes of U.S. Figure Skating Association president Claire Ferguson paid enormous dividends at the Olympics. Unlike the hordes of journalists who parachuted into the Games at the last minute, in anticipation of more Tonya-Nancy mayhem, those of us from the small knot of…er…competitors in the Media Figure Skating Championships were immediately recognizable to Ferguson.

About those championships, though. There were a couple of folks who actually knew what they were doing. I recall a woman who wrote for a skating magazine who was doing spins and jumps, some real dipsy-doodling. But, as Randy Harvey of the Los Angeles Times noted, “We can see that at a figure skating event anytime.” He preferred the Larry-Curley-Moe bits, such as the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s Jay Weiner shuffling around as half of a pairs team—the other half being a chair. I suspect it was not so much a prop as a device to prop him up. And the New York Times’ Jere Longman finishing his slow-motion bit by pretending to drink from a champagne bottle.

My favorite—and I believe it resulted in the winning scores—was the vision of the Boston Globe’s John Powers, a bear of a man, building steam as he powered across the ice with what appeared to be dead aim at the judges’ table. I contend there was real fear in the arbiters’ faces, a dread that he may not be able to stop or turn in time.

Could it be that Powers was awarded good marks for having spared the judges injury?

As for my own performance: Having grown up in warm-weather locales, with scant experience on blades, I decided to play it safe. Since the judges were at one end of the rink, I chose to glide—shamble? totter? lumber?—to the opposite end, whereupon I did a few back-and-forth repeats before making a quiet exit.

Unlike Tonya Harding, I did not attempt a triple axel. Also unlike Harding, I did not fall. And I was abundantly rewarded. One of the appointed judges, Linda Leaver, who coached 1988 gold medalist Brian Boitano and therefore was eminently knowledgeable of all things figure skating, presented me with a perfect 6.0—the highest possible score in the sport at the time.

“I don’t know what you did,” she said. “You were too far away. I just figured it must have been okay.”

Anyway, then we all adjourned to cover the real skating. And actual crimes.

Sports betting: Feel-bad entertainment

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Nostradamus I am not. For this, and many other reasons, I am not rubbing my hands together in anticipation of nationwide legal sports betting.

That puts me somewhere in fuddy-duddy territory. A recent poll found that the majority of Americans—55 percent—now support such activity, a reversal of attitudes from just 25 years ago. And that shift in mood coincides with the Supreme Court ruling in May that struck down a 1992 federal law prohibiting most states from authorizing gambling on sports.

Teams and leagues, so opposed for so long to betting as a risk to “the integrity of competition,” suddenly are rushing to arrange partnerships with casinos. Calvin Ayre, a Canadian-Antiguan entrepreneur and founder of an online gambling company, has cited an analysis that sports betting can be “the cure to declining TV sports viewership.”

Having money on the line, the reasoning goes, will draw gamblers to tune in and monitor the progress of their investments. Those self-proclaimed oracles and clairvoyants out there, convinced they can see around the corner, will want to track their potential windfalls.

But I tend to subscribe to the argument that gambling is a sure way to get nothing for something. I confess to an aversion to barrel apparel. At this writing, my one annual attempt at sports prognostication—joining 35 others in a $1 college football bowl pool—reminds again of the financial ruin I would face as a serious gambler.

Of the 21 games played so far, I have correctly foreseen the winner of nine. (A losing percentage of .428.) Over the pool’s 20-year existence, I never have finished in first place, while my friend’s daughter won the whole thing when she was 3 years old! She did so by prophesying results based on which opposing teams’ mascots would be natural predators of the opponent’s mascot. As reliable as any betting system available, I suspect.

Furthermore, I cling to the outdated belief that the unscripted theater of sports—the sheer unpredictability—provides quite enough action. And to apply such an outlook precludes involvement with the soul of the betting industry—point spreads. Since the purpose of sporting contests is to determine a winner and loser, the exercise of divining—guessing?—by how much a team will win or lose strikes me as (sorry) pointless.

And don’t get me started on fantasy sports, in which wagering on the statistics of individual players takes precedence over team performance—a clear devaluation of the very idea of sports competition.

One final thought, after struggling to compose these thoughts on the vacuous—and fiscally perilous—racket that is sports betting: The English author and critic M. John Harrison has judged that “writing is like gambling. Unpredictable and sporadic successes make you more addicted. Not less.”

Hmmm. But I haven’t lost my shirt.

 

Brexit and soccer: A political football

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The best thing about Brexit is that it offers an occasion to summon the delightful noun “portmanteau,” a word that blends the sounds and combines the meanings of two other words.

Mostly, though, “Brexit”—for “British exit,” the United Kingdom’s pending withdrawal from the European Union—feels thoroughly unpleasant. It has been characterized by some experts as the worst step backward for Europe and Western civilization since the end of World War II. Economically. Socially. Ethnically. Even—and this caught my attention as a veteran of sports journalism—athletically.

A major aspect to Brexit is its proponents’ expectations of British control over immigration. And that translates to the likely loss of foreign superstars who have been so essential to the English Premier League’s status as the world’s best in soccer. The subsequent retreat in the game’s quality, and the resulting dent in its commercial appeal, are why all 20 Premier League clubs were against the Brexit referendum passed in 2016.

In a Forbes listing of the Premier League’s best 10 players last season, only two were Englishmen. According to the BBC, a Brexit-imposed work permit requirement for non-UK workers would eliminate almost 60 percent of the league’s current roster players.

That could take English soccer back more than two decades, to when a quota system limited UK teams to three foreign players. Back then, many of the sport’s cognoscenti were becoming convinced that the increasingly insular nature of the English game made it boring. It was mostly hopeful long balls launched downfield—“pigeon racing,” it was dismissively labeled—and not much else.

Such an approach, by-passing the midfield as defenders send balls over the top toward a clinical, physically imposing striker, still is particularly associated with the English. It does have its adherents, though they are in danger of being accused of being old school. I recall this argument from Jack Charlton, a member of England’s last World Cup champion in 1966, when he used the strategy to coach the first Irish team to qualify for the World Cup in 1990.

“Play in [the opponents’] half of the field,” Charlton said. “Endeavor every time to get the ball behind people. Get the buggers turning, turning, turning on defense. It drives them crazy. All the fanciest, classiest, ‘possession football’ in the world is no substitute for getting the ball behind the defense and playing merry hell with them when they’re facing the wrong way.”

But, since that ’66 English world title, Germany has won the Cup three times with a relentless efficiency emphasizing shifting player roles; Italy has won twice with its defensively oriented, counter-attacking catenaccio; Brazil three times with its creative, fast-flowing brand sometimes equated to dance; Argentina twice with individual skills and speed; Spain once with grounded, quick-touch passing—the fancy, classy, possession football Charlton believed to be no substitute for long ball.

These “national styles” are generalizations, of course, and generalizations are dangerously unreliable. What is difficult to argue against is that a broader talent pool will make a sport, and every team, better. Though there were grumbles from the xenophobic French fringe last summer that the country’s 2018 World Cup team was more African than European, stocked with sons of immigrants from the Congo, Senegal, Morocco, Mali and Cameroon, the bottom line was that France won the title. Viva la difference, n’est-ce pas?

Soccer teams, posited a 2014 Washington Post series, “may accrue additional benefits when their players differ in the way they interpret problems and use their skills to solve them,” and that “this variation likely stems from their exposure to different training methods and styles of play” that undeniably differ from country to country.

An opinion piece in the New York Times by a political journalist based in London argued that Brexit is “the most boring important story in the world” right now. Sticking strictly to the less significant aspect of soccer, I am rooting for unrestricted travel of players that assures a continued diversity in the game—an antidote to boredom. Some fancy, classy, possession football mixed in with the pigeon racing. Describing such a soccer style would necessitate a portmanteau: Spanglish.

Pardon these Presidential moments

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A prominent person dies and all manner of folks come out of the woodwork to lay claim to personal interactions with the recently departed, however tenuous. So, not to be left too far behind in this matter….

I did not actually know George H.W. Bush, or any United States President. But I was in near proximity to him once, and to some other Commanders in Chief as well. Some First Ladies, too.

(I also was once in the same room as Fidel Castro. But that’s another story, another country and another system of government. So, never mind.)

About the Bush memory. It was in the mid-‘80s. He was still Vice President, filling in for Ronald Reagan at a U.S. Olympic Committee function meant to honor American athletes. The event was supposed to have been at the White House but was moved to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street. A disappointment—because of the lesser venue, not because I necessarily yearned to see Reagan in person.

I was among a small group of Olympic reporters underwhelmed by Bush’s brief rote speech from a prepared statement. Still, there was this quintessential Washington, D.C. moment, when Chris Wallace—then the chief White House correspondent for NBC News—shouted a question, thoroughly unrelated to the proceedings, at Bush as he left. Just like you’d see on the evening news. A query about the Iran-Contra scandal, I think. Bush ignored him. Just like you’d see on the evening news.

Presidents are celebrities, of course, and like celebrities they tend to appear at major happenings. That meant it was almost inevitable that, as I went about a half century of sports journalism, a President and I would occupy the same relative space at some point.

With some ruffles and flourishes, then, I will proceed.

At a U.S.Open tennis match in the mid-1990s, Jimmy Carter and First Lady Rosalynn were in the crowd, about three rows in front of the seats reserved for us reporters. Very inconspicuous except for the fellow accompanying them in a suit and dark glasses, with the little gizmo in his ear. The secret service profile giveaway.

Reagan attended the Opening Ceremonies of the 1984 L.A. Olympics, though I won’t count that as a close encounter because he stayed completely out of sight—behind bullet-proof glass high above the field—as he officially declared the start of those Games. By contrast, Bill Clinton brazenly marched onto the floor of the Atlanta Olympic stadium for the 1996 Ceremonies, only two days after the fatal crash of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island had put everyone of high alert for possible terrorism. More on Clinton in a minute.

Richard Nixon was at a Mets game not long after his 1974 resignation, but I won’t count that, either, except to say that the police security presence inconvenienced all of us in attendance. Donald Trump, still just a boastful real estate guy who liked to get his name and picture in the paper, regularly made himself obvious in his personal suite at U.S. Open tennis matches through the 1980s and into the 21st Century. (I noticed that his suite was empty at this year’s tournament.)

I did speak with Trump at length by phone in 1984, because he had just purchased the New York/New Jersey franchise in the short-lived U.S. Football League. (What I learned was that almost none of his assertions that day proved to be accurate.)

First Ladies? Aside from that Rosalynn Carter cameo at the tennis championships, Laura Bush literally brushed shoulders with me and fellow Olympic reporter Jay Weiner in a scrum of spectators during the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics Opening Ceremonies. Jay said hello.

Hillary Clinton, between her roles of First Ladyship and Secretary of State, spoke to a handful of us ink-stained wretches in Singapore in July 2005. We were there to cover the International Olympic Committee meeting to name the 2012 Olympic host city and Clinton, then a New York senator, was there to pitch New York City’s bid. (New York lost to London.)

Not surprisingly, it was Clinton’s husband who most often appeared on my—and countless others’—personal radar. Aside from that Atlanta Olympic sighting, he showed up in Chicago for the first match of the 1994 World Cup soccer tournament hosted by the U.S. He was the principal dignitary at the Mets game on April 15,1997 to celebrate 50 years since Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier. (More secret service headaches, but a memorable event.)

At the 1996 Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia, I was meandering around the press box at halftime when Clinton popped in, gabbing—hoarsely—with folks from the two academies and anyone else in his path. He could barely be heard because of a case of laryngitis. Standing five feet from him, I was tempted to ask if his doctor was aware that, in his condition, he nevertheless was spending the day in the freezing cold.

Didn’t happen. Wouldn’t have been polite. Plus, I hardly knew the guy.

Proper attire in college football

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yes

no

There are far more worrisome matters these days than the mutiny by sports apparel companies over traditional college football colors. But, really: Dressing Notre Dame’s gridders in pinstriped Yankee baseball pants and navy blue helmets?! This may be another potentially touchy topic that probably should he avoided on Thanksgiving weekend. But won’t be here.

I quote Paul Lukas, who runs the web site Uni-Watch (“The obsessive study of athletic aesthetics”), in judging that Notre Dame fashion statement “about as silly as you’d expect.” More idiotic is how such unnatural apparel trends have become so common.

I acknowledge a curmudgeonly mien regarding this subject. And a personal one. To see the lads representing my alma mater, the University of Missouri, tromping around this season in white helmets one week, yellow the next, is an abomination. The school colors are black and gold and, for something like 50 years, the conventional garb was black helmet (with three distinctive stripes), black shirt (white on the road), gold pants.

Not only stylish, but appropriate. An immutable look that was instantly identifiable to the Mizzou tribe of alumni and fans—and to college football observers in general. Then Nike got its grubby capitalistic hands on the operation and replaced historical hues with shades of mediocrity. Once Nike co-founder Phil Knight initiated a garish rotation of togs for players at his school, the University of Oregon, a few seasons ago, we have been doomed to counterintuitive attire that, in effect, creates mystery teams. Not to mention candidates for those old Mr. Blackwell worst-dressed lists.

This cross-pollination of pigments is gripping all sports, and Nike isn’t the only perpetrator among the outfitters. There is a frenzy over “alternate uniforms” in which teams change clothes from week-to-week, game-to-game, resulting in moving targets of sartorial insignificance.

One major trend is that, while black is being erased from teams that traditionally have worn black, there simultaneously is a preoccupation of dressing those whose school colors are not black in black—at least part of the time: Northwestern (purple and white) in black. Florida State (garnet and gold) in black. Nebraska (scarlet and cream) in black. Iowa State (cardinal and gold) in black. Tulane (green and blue) in black. Temple (cherry and white) in black. North Carolina State (red and white) in black. Baylor (green and gold) in black. And on and on.

The nonsensical reasoning for this misapplication of colors—the excuse, constructed out of whole cloth by Missouri, among others—is a “branding” supposedly meant to establish a team’s widespread identity among spectators and potential recruits. When, in fact, it does the opposite.

My Missouri guys—Who are those fellows and where are they from?—have worn a different uniform in each of their 12 games this season, such a dizzying search for a hallmark that the Columbia Missourian, the city newspaper operated by the university’s elite Journalism School, sought out a professor from New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology for insight.

Tim Scott, the FIT academic and consultant to such high-tone clothing giants as Ralph Lauren, found some of the uniforms “well-coordinated,” some “a bit ordinary,” some “not so traditional,” and the black pants used in one combination to “look almost like women’s workout pants…”

That’s branding? Since college rosters turn over quickly—with no player around for more than four years—the uniform is what customarily served as the constant for spectators. Ever since we moved past the ancient Olympians competing in their birthday suits, there has been a real visual aspect to sports duds, as evidenced by the many listings—however subjective—of the most attractive and ugliest. Notice: Among the regularly cited favorites are those essentially unchanged over the decades: Alabama’s threads. Michigan’s. Penn State’s. USC’s. UCLA’s.

Just last week, Uni-Watch’s Lukas referenced the annual USC-UCLA game, “which once again found the Bruins and Trojans going color vs. color, to spectacular effect,” UCLA in its powder blue and gold and USC in cardinal and gold, an eye-catching (and familiar) corrective to the weird Notre Dame/Yankee laundry.

Spare us the chromophobia of gaudy, illogical raiment. (They wear their welcome thin. Instantly.) Stick with the hand-me-down styles and official colors of past generations. Custom over costume.

 

Applauding the story: David Price

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It is a cardinal rule of sports journalism: No cheering in the press box. Don’t take sides. Check your partiality at the door. Let the fans be fans and just report.

It’s not that hard, really. We Knights of the Keyboard, as Hall of Fame Red Sox slugger Ted Williams sarcastically called the sporting press, most often are too busy juggling game developments, deadlines, statistics and the English language to have time or energy for rooting. Plus, it doesn’t take long in the business to understand there is no direct line between a jock’s admirable athletic skill and moral virtue. That tends to dull favoritism.

What we cheer for is the story. So now, from a distance—officially retired, and only catching glimpses of the World Series on television—I might have given in to my pre-teen fandom for the Dodgers against the Red Sox. I certainly retain a clear bias regarding the Dodgers’ classic uniforms. (Love the red numbers.)

But the way the narrative played out, with an especially nice ending for Red Sox pitcher David Price, I found it easy to muster a quiet hoorah for a fellow who years ago made a good impression in what, for him, was a decidedly uncomfortable situation.

That was July 9, 2011. I was one of a handful of Newsday scribes assigned to Yankee Stadium in anticipation of Yankee favorite Derek Jeter’s pursuit of a 3,000th career base hit. A big deal. My job, specifically—if Jeter were to produce that hit—was to talk to Jeter’s victim, whichever Tampa Bay Rays pitcher surrendered the hit.

That turned out to be Price.

“I’d rather not be the answer to this trivia question,” he said hours after the fact. “But I am. It’s tough, but he’s one of the best hitters who ever played baseball, so he was going to do it to somebody, and it just happened to be me.”

All the fuss that day was about Jeter, of course, but there always is another side to the tale. In covering sports, I often am reminded of an old Peanuts cartoon, in which Linus excitedly reports to Charlie Brown about watching a televised football game in which the home team conjures an improbable last-second victory.

Linus details how the home team is behind, 6-0, stuck on its own one-yard line with three seconds to play, when the quarterback throws a perfect pass and the receiver avoids four tacklers and somehow scores.

With the decisive extra point, “The fans went wild,” Linus reports. “You should’ve seen them. Thousands of people ran onto the field, laughing and screaming. The players and the fans were so happy they were rolling on the ground and hugging each other and dancing and everything. It was fantastic!”

Charlie Brown says, “How did the other team feel?”

So I was one in a small clutch of reporters who approached David Price that July day to ask how he felt to be the defeated antagonist in a stadium full of laughing, hugging, dancing Yankees and their fans.

Price noted how unavoidable the Jeter commotion was. “It was everywhere,” he said. “I mean, walking out of the tunnel and looking at all the signs saying, ‘Congratulations, Jeter.’”

Jeter had singled off Price in the first inning for his 2,999th hit, and when he stepped to the plate in the third inning, “You’ve got 50,000 people screaming for Jeter to get a hit,” Price said. On top of that, Price was supplied a baseball marked with a “J-3” in the event Jeter would strike his 3,000th hit in that at-bat.

Sure enough, Jeter made a 3-and-2 Price curveball disappear over the leftfield fence to lift the Yanks into a 1-1 tie. “I really didn’t care,” Price said, “if the guy got [No. 3,000] off me, as long as he didn’t drive in a run or score a run. And he did all those things.”

His response was to “tip his cap” to Jeter. He reminded that, in his major league debut three years earlier, he had given up a home run to Jeter, who hardly was known for hitting homers. The thing was, Price certainly didn’t ask for sympathy; rather, he described pitching before a full house in what he called “the grandest stage in baseball” was what “any player could ask for.”

In his 11 big-league seasons, Price twice led the league in earned run average and once in strikeouts and has complied an envious won-lost record of 143-75. But because, in sports, coming up short in the highest-visibility occasions is too casually equated with deficient character, he has had to endure years of public scorn for a 2-10 post-season record prior to this fall.

Now, he’s the answer to another trivia question: Who twice beat the Dodgers in the 2018 World Series, including in the title-clinching game? That’s worthy of a good cheer from a long-ago Dodgers fan.

Respect for Tiffeny Milbrett

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In the summer of 2001, it was possible to argue that the most accomplished player on any New York professional sports team was 5-foot-2, 130 pounds and female. That was Tiffeny Milbrett, who has just been inducted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame.

Milbrett was playing for the Long Island-based New York Power in 2001, the inaugural season of the short-lived Women’s United Soccer Association. A feisty attacker, hiccup-quick, she seemed to persistently materialize at the goalmouth, poised to strike. She constantly called for the ball, not in any discernible language but with what her coach and teammates described as a series of squeaks and shrieks and shouts. “The higher the pitch,” Power teammate Christie Pearce said then, “the more she wants the ball.”

Milbrett was the WUSA’s first MVP, its first author of a hat trick and the first season’s scoring leader, yet spent her career—16 years on the U.S. National team; still sixth on the all-time goal scoring list—yearning for the kind of recognition mostly withheld from her while being lavished on so many of her peers. The Mia Hamms. Julie Foudys. Brandy Chastains.

Which didn’t sit especially well with Milbrett, who had picked up the nickname “No Tact Tiff” during her time at the University of Portland, when her 103 goals equaled Hamm’s then-college record. “I earned that,” she said of the handle. “Because of many, many times having foot in mouth. But a lot of times tact is B.S. The truth hurts.”

With Milbrett, there was no beating around the bush, no sugar-coating, just look-you-in-the-eye talk. “Here I was,” she said, “coming onto the national team and going above and beyond those guys and not getting the respect from my coaches and teammates. It took me way too long to get that respect.”

That was the era when the American women shouldered their way into the public sports consciousness with Olympic and World Cup titles. They stirred the passion of countless young girls—the Ponytail Hooligans—and demanded the attention of Nike’s marketing might.

It was Milbrett who produced the gold-medal winning goal at the ’96 Olympics and who led the team in scoring in the 1999 U.S.-based World Cup—the one more widely remembered for Chastain’s off-with-her-shirt penalty-kick celebration. Milbrett still shares the national team record for most goals in a match—five.

There was a 2000 Olympics first-round match in Melbourne, Australia—a 2-0 victory over Norway—that illustrated the relentless threat of a Milbrett score, even as she went about what amounted to a negative hat trick. Dead-eye shooter that she was, it didn’t seem possible she could hit the goal’s woodwork three times in a game if she tried. But she wasn’t trying, and she did.

After giving the U.S. an early 1-0 lead, Milbrett rattled one shot off the right post, one off the crossbar and one off the left post, then rifled another just wide and nearly knocked over the Norwegian keeper with yet another heavy blow. She had come within inches of a six-goal game.

Still, she noticed back then, “the endorsement world looks for this one spitting image, this person next door, this All-American image. This one. This type.”

Not her. But endorsements come and go. The Hall of Fame is a little piece of immortality. There’s no hurt in that truth.

The Gagliardi Doctrine: Football sanity

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John Gagliardi began his letter—neatly produced by playing the Olivetti or the Underwood, one of those manual pre-laptop writing machines—“See. I can type.”

I had interviewed him a couple of weeks earlier at St. John’s Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minn., where Gagliardi was in the 34th of his eventual 60 seasons coaching the school’s football team. He already was wildly successful at collecting championships in the NCAA’s non-scholarship Division III, but that wasn’t the news. The real story was how Gagliardi had an approach to his sport that was so foreign as to be a football non sequitur.

That was 1987, and it simply did not follow then—any more than there might seem a logical progression now—that Gagliardi’s rejection of tackling in practice, of playbooks and agility drills, of calisthenics and war terminology, of clipboards and whistles and blocking dummies, could set such an enviable example of gridiron might.

Anyway, Gagliardi was recalling back then how his coaching career began as a 16-year-old high school junior. And how, “meanwhile, there was a junior college in town”—Trinidad, Col.—“and I was also playing basketball in high school and the coach at the junior college asked me if I’d like to play for him after the high school season was over.

“He told me,” Gagliardi said, “to go to night school and take typing” to be eligible for the college team. “I wound up lettering four years in junior college in basketball—two years while I was still in high school. I got to be a hell of a typist.”

When Gagliardi died this week at 91, six years after retirement, he took with him a humanity and a wonderfully sly sense of humor. More than his 489-138-11 coaching record—by far the most accomplished mark in college football history—was his outrageously sane approach.

A football team that didn’t practice tackling? “That came to me,” he said, “as a young guy who was getting killed in practice” during his high school playing days at Trinidad Catholic.

No calisthenics? No drills? No laps? “When I was in high school,” he said, “we had a coach I learned a lot from. All negative. He was a fanatic on calisthenics and drills. Torturous stuff. And laps, laps, laps. We were worn out before we started. My memory of it was that Hell must be like this. Those damn duck walks. I hated them. Years later, everybody was told how bad those duck walks are for your knees. Anyway, then we’d scrimmage. We’d kill each other in practice. I came within a hair of not hanging in there.”

What saved his playing career, and launched his coaching vocation, was when that negative coach was called to military service during Gagliardi’s junior year. The school principal intended to disband the football team but Gaglilardi, the team captain, saved the day by volunteering to coach.

“We just wanted to play,” he said. “First thing I did was throw out all the calisthenics. See, I had noticed all the kids who would go play intramurals never did all the drills and that stuff, and I never saw any ambulances going over to their fields. The ambulances always were coming over to us.”

And another thing: “Our coach used to say, ‘Hit somebody! Kill somebody!’ But I noticed that I was the guy getting killed,” Gagliardi said. “The only tragic flaw in his system was that, when we lined up, we didn’t know what the hell we were doing. I was the tailback—you know, the old single-wing, Notre Dame Box and all that—and I noticed that when I’d call a play, there would be panic in the linemen’s eyes. ‘Who do I block?’ I thought the first thing we ought to do is figure out who to block.”

When Trinidad Catholic proceeded to win the state championship that year, Gagliardi had found his calling—and the conviction that a football coach need not stand on ceremony. At St. John’s, he did without staff meetings, grading of game film, the existence of a training table. No player was considered too small. No player ever was cut from the team, with in excess of 150 on the roster some years and as many as 120 sometimes used in the same game.

His players employed The Beautiful Day Drill, in which they would lie on their backs, gazing up at the foliage and Minnesota sky, observing to one another, “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” The team had an informal Canadian Award, no more than a verbal prize, given to players who made it through the chilly Midwestern autumns practicing only in shorts. There was an inordinate amount of fun.

To those incoming freshmen, intent on proving they were worthy footballers, who asked Gagliardi, “Who do I hit or kill?” Gagliardi’s answer was, “That’s not the way to make a tackle. First, you’ve got to line up in the right spot. You’ve got to go to the right spot. You’ve got to figure out where the ball is. You’ve got to not get blocked. You’ve got to pressure the ball.

“You do all that, eventually you’ll make the tackle. Besides, if you’re in the hospital, you won’t make the tackle. And I hate visiting hospitals. If we tackle in practice, who do we hurt? Our own quarterback and running back. They’re human. They’ve got knees and mothers.”

In 2010, when the National Football League at last acknowledged the risk of brain damage inherent in the sport, I called Gagliardi, who often noted that “we haven’t made a tackle on the practice field since 1958.” Might such a system save the pros from further head trauma and long-range health and legal issues?

Gagliardi, who once declined to take an assistant coaching position with Bud Grant’s Minnesota Vikings, insisted that NFL coaches “certainly don’t need my advice. I’m not looking for converts. Certain things—religion, politics—you’ll never change.

“But I think we led the world in fewest injuries. It isn’t rocket science to me. I’ll never forget the first time we won the national championship and, at a clinic afterwards, a fellow says to me, ‘Don’t you think, if you’d have hit more in practice, you’d have done better?’

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t know. We played 12 games and won them all. I don’t know how we could’ve won 13.’”

My type of coach.

Jay Horwitz: A PR man who measured up

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News to me: There is a Museum of Public Relations in New York City, which boasts hundreds of rare artifacts, oral histories, letters, photos and film to “bring PR history to life.”

It happens that, in a half-century as a sports journalist, I have dealt with countless PR practitioners, what we used to call—not unkindly—tub-thumpers. And it happens that one of the best of them, Jay Horwitz, has lately been the topic of heartfelt appreciations after 39 years as PR chief for the New York Mets.

Horwitz has been assigned a new position as “team historian” and tasked with gathering alumni and tidbits for next year’s 50th anniversary of the Mets’ first World Series championship. But as he moves on, I propose including a symbol of quintessentially quirky Horwitz salesmanship in that carnival-barker hall-of-fame: Specifically, what I would call a 1978 “game-used” tape measure from Horwitz’ pre-Mets days.

The relic in question was employed 40 years ago at Mama Leone’s Midtown Manhattan restaurant, where a small group of New York track and field writers had gathered for their weekly luncheon to hear college and club coaches pitch potential news about their athletes’ latest running, jumping and throwing feats. To some extent, those were exercises in being numbed by numbers—mostly dry statistics like split times, personal bests and local meet records.

At the time, Horwitz was the sports information director for New Jersey’s Fairleigh Dickinson University. And his chore was to somehow sell the local media, already inundated by the Big Town’s myriad sports happenings, on some reason to pay attention to FDU’s decidedly humble athletic operation. Which he did brilliantly with an ear for the novel, dispensing odd morsels—beyond the cold stats—that were both revealing and entertaining.

FDU had a sprinter then named Ephraim Serrette who kept a list of the various misspellings of his name, 13 in all, from meet results—Abraham Seit, Eram Sert, Earl Serrette, Ephrimim Sirreti and so on—so Horwitz playfully passed that along. FDU had a baseball player whose summer job at a munitions factory was putting pins in hand grenades. Horwitz let the news hounds know. FDU had a hurdler who asked to leave practice early to go to his ballet class and “before he knew it,” Horwitz giggled in retelling the tale years ago, “I was at the ballet class with a guy from the wire service.”

FDU had another hurdler whose hobby was collecting snakes and Horwitz, naturally, requested the athlete bring the aforementioned reptiles in cages to a track workout, where a local photographer was waiting to document another deliciously idiosyncratic sports moment.

The story got even better because, as Horwitz later reported, “the damn snakes got loose. Four boa constrictors running around the damn track, slinking along. They bolted, and guys were running every which way, and this hurdler running after his snakes, grabbing them….”

Only a crack PR person could orchestrate that kind of breaking news.

Anyway, for that luncheon at Mama Leone’s (which then was a theatre-district landmark but has been closed since 1994), Horwitz brought along FDU’s star high jumper, Franklin Jacobs. Jacobs already was plenty newsworthy, having recently defeated the world’s top-ranked jumper, Dwight Stones, by clearing 7-feet-6 inches, lifting Jacobs to No. 1 in the United States and No. 3 in the world in his event.

Horwitz raised the bar by pushing an additional nugget, precipitated by his earlier telephone query to the Amateur Athletic Union. “I’ve got a kid here who’s 5-foot-8 and he’s jumping over 7 feet,” he informed the AAU. “Is that unusual?”

He was told that the average high jumper stood 6-1 ¾, almost half a foot taller than Jacobs. He went to the Guinness Book of World Records and learned that, at the time, a 5-foot-9 San Jose State jumper named Ron Livers had cleared 7-4 ¼ for the existing record—19 ¼ inches—of jumping above one’s own head.

By the time Jacobs arrived at that luncheon, he already had gone 22 inches above his height. Horwitz had a major scoop to advance.

“I’ll never forget the track luncheon when we measured him,” Horwitz recalled soon after the event. “Franklin kept saying to let me measure him to see if he grew taller. And I kept saying, ‘Franklin, don’t do that. You don’t want to be taller. You want to be 5-8.'”

Jacobs was beckoned to stand as a flexible retractable tape was produced and unfurled from the floor to the top of his noggin, the way track officials check the high jump crossbar for accuracy after a significant leap. “I was sitting in my seat saying, ‘Please, God, let him be 5-8,’” Horwitz said. “I mean, I knew he was 5-8, but….”

Four days later, in the Millrose Games at Madison Square Garden, Jacobs upped his best to 7-7 ¼, which remained his career optimum and, at 23 ¼ inches over his head, still stands as the record these four decades later. (It was equaled in 2005 by the 2004 Olympic champion Stefan Holm of Sweden, who was 5-11 ¼ and jumped 7-10 ½.)

The Museum of Public Relations should find that tape measure, put it on display and have Jay Horwitz sign it, a manifestation of the man’s golden (and fun) promotional touch.