Golf: Acting one’s age?

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Is it required that an older white man take up golf? I ask because I fit the demographic. And have for some time.

I’m retired (semi). Not unpleasantly. But I’m starting to worry that I’m not good at being, uh, elderly. Never have I taken a metal detector on a beach stroll. I do not own white shoes, and certainly not a white belt. Moving to Florida, replacing dinner with the midafternoon Early Bird Special, is out of the question.

Shuffleboard? Nah. Gardening? I mow; that’s enough. Crafts? Don’t think so.

Maybe golf could be part of acting my age. And — full disclosure — I did putter briefly with an easier version of the sport a few years ago, going a handful of rounds at the local Par 3 course, deploying three decidedly low-tech clubs. It hardly was torture. Fresh air. A little solitary time. The challenge of (relatively safe) target practice.

But it didn’t take. Maybe too many reminders of Mark Twain’s contention that golf “is a good walk spoiled.” Slices, hooks, balls lost in the water or woods.

It is entirely possible that I have tended to dismiss the activity based on clichés: That it is a rich person’s enterprise. That it so often has been associated with the exclusivity of country clubs — no blacks, no women and so on. There is an old story of how Groucho Marx, when he was advised that a club did not accept Jews and therefore could not allow his daughter into its swimming pool, responded, “She’s only half-Jewish. Can she wade in up to her knees?”

Just as unfair, probably, is my skepticism of the oft-voiced claim that golfers somehow are more morally upright than other sportsmen; that, whatever their failures on the links, they are absolutely faithful to the pickiest of rules, incapable of violating golf’s “honor code.”

But what to make of golf’s customary use of the Mulligan, that handy do-over that wipes a poor shot off the score card? What was it the late Paul Harvey, conservative radio commentator famous for his “rest of the story” postscripts, said? “You yell ‘fore,’ shoot ‘six’ and write down ‘five.’ ”

OK. Numbers. Statistics clearly insist that golf is a pastime for mature male folks such as me. Much is made of the fact that the sport provides exercise, but nothing too strenuous for us graybeards. (Especially when touring the course in an electric cart.) According to the golf demographics from Americangolf.com, of the 29 million golfers in the United States, 77.5 percent are male and 61 percent are more than 50 years old. I’m 100 percent both. Author Malcolm Gladwell seemed to have those figures in mind when he declared the game to be “crack cocaine for old white guys.”

There are, of course, good arguments for the benign addiction of mental relaxation. The way humorist Will Rogers put it, “There is nothing that will get your mind off everything like golf. I have never been depressed enough to take up the game, but they say you get so sore at yourself you forget to hate your enemies.”

An interesting concept, that. If a sport can precipitate better human relationships, if it can compel enhanced character traits such as personal humility and empathy for fellow duffers, what’s to disparage?

Still, I worry about metaphorical traps. In a 2010 book, “Golf, the Game of Lessening Failures,” Bob Glanville wrote, “An amateur golfer is one who plays golf for pleasure. A golf analyst is a psychiatric specialist who treats individuals suffering from the delusion that playing golf is a form of pleasure.”

Also, just when I was wondering if I ought to give the sport another try, I read comedian Joe Zimmerman’s recent lament that a certain (part-time) resident of Washington, D.C., is giving golf — and golfers — a bad name. Golf had been “so close,” Zimmerman wrote, to shaking off the “image of a rich, old, unathletic white guy making sexist jokes and trading real estate tips.” And then that fellow began dominating the news between incessant rounds on the links.

I know plenty of thoroughly decent citizens who are fervent devotees to golf. So that one poor example shouldn’t be the deciding factor here.

But maybe I’ll wait till I’m older.

 

Flush with hockey history

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Here’s what I remember most about the last time a National Hockey League expansion team advanced to the Stanley Cup finals in its debut season: Interviewing Montreal Canadiens goalie Gump Worsley while he sat on the commode.

The background: In 1968, a half-century before the Vegas Golden Knights rolled into this week’s Cup finals in their inaugural campaign, the first-year St. Louis Blues made it to the championship round against the Canadiens, seven times the Cup winners in the previous 12 years.

The 1967-68 Blues had a far less challenging path than 500-to-1 shot Vegas to get that far, because Vegas is the only first-year member of the league’s current 31 teams. In 1967, the NHL had doubled in size from its “Original Six” franchises to 12 and, by placing the six new teams in a separate division with a playoff format that kept the divisions apart until the finals, guaranteed an expansion team would play for the title.

The Blues had finished third among the six newbies during the regular season. But after loitering near last place for more than three months, they began to defy their melancholy nickname. And that’s when I came into the picture.

In 1968, I was a junior in the University of Missouri’s Journalism School, where the curriculum included working on the staff of the Columbia Missourian, the J-School-operated city newspaper. My editor, future ESPN luminary John A. Walsh, somehow began assigning me—or letting me—cover the occasional Blues home game as the team evolved into a major sports story in the state.

The drive from campus to St. Louis took two hours each way. But whatever terms and conditions were required to fit such a commitment into my schedule were readily accepted and, frankly, I have no recollection of prioritizing other activities. I don’t remember missing any classes, yet in exhuming old Missourian clippings from my personal archives, I find there was a surprising number of treks to the Gateway City that semester.

There were my dispatches of a late-January Blues victory over the Minnesota North Stars—only the second hockey game I had seen in my life; of an early February loss to reigning Cup champion Boston in which St. Louis fans delayed the game 20 minutes by throwing debris on the ice after a Blues’ goal was overruled; of a late February tie against Montreal.

In April, I covered four games through the first two rounds of the playoffs, a delightful glimpse at big-time sports journalism. The Blues featured a collection of interesting characters: Hall of Fame coach Scotty Bowman, his chin thrust defiantly forward at all times. The rough-and-tumble Plager brothers, Barclay and Bob, always ready for some fisticuffs. Defenseman Al Arbour, unique for playing while wearing glasses (and soon to coach the Islanders to four consecutive Stanley Cup titles). Balding 14th-year NHL goalie Glenn Hall who, like virtually all those manning his position in that antediluvian age, did so minus a protective facemask. And star forward Gordon (Red) Berenson.

At the time, a Florida-based pop group called the Royal Guardsmen had a novelty hit song, “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron,” inspired by the recurring storyline in Charles Schulz’ “Peanuts” comic strip of Snoopy the dog imagining himself as a World War I airman fighting Germany’s Red Baron ace. Of course Berenson, the 1967-68 expansion division’s Player of the Year, immediately was dubbed The Red Baron.

(Columbia Missourian, May 8, 1968)

Anyway, there I was at the St. Louis Arena on May 5, 1968, for the first game of the Cup finals—upstart Blues vs. the storied Canadiens—a 3-2 overtime victory for Montreal. And again on May 7 for Game 2: Canadiens 1, Blues 0. Naturally, the two grizzled old goalies—Hall was 36 then, Worsley days short of his 39th birthday—were to be sought for post-game remarks.

Hall had saved 35 of 36 Canadiens’ shots, beaten only by Serge Savard early in the third period. Worsley had turned back all 19 Blues attempts.

In the cramped Montreal lockerroom, steamy from showering players, a handful of us reporters were searching for Worsley when he called from a toilet stall, “In here, fellas,” and urged the brief questioning to begin. An interesting introduction to Sportswriting 101.

He assured that he and his mates would go back to Montreal and wrap up the series in the next two games. “What’s the use of winning two here and going home and lose two on our own ice?” he said.

Sure enough, two games later the Canadiens were again kings of their universe. Sitting on hockey’s figurative throne.

The royal treatment

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So Serena Williams was at the royal wedding—wearing sneakers to the reception—and, according to USA Today, has offered Meghan, the new Duchess of Sussex, advice on how to handle some of the more extreme aspects of fame, such as being chased by paparazzi.

This is proof, as Mark Twain supposedly said, that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

That’s because there is more to this than the old connection between tennis and the British royal family. The less-than-six-degrees-of-separation includes the morsel that, in 1926, the future King of England—then known as Prince Albert or “Bertie” before he became George VI 10 years later—competed in doubles at Wimbledon, the sport’s premier event. George VI, of course, was father to the current queen, Elizabeth II, whose daughter-in-law Diana came to regard elite tennis players with the same sort of awe that commoners had for her and other royals.

In the 1990s, Diana recruited Steffi Graf, whose record for most Grand Slam singles titles in the open era finally was surpassed by Williams last year, to give tennis lessons to Diana’s two sons. And now the younger son, Harry, has married Meghan Markel and made her a duchess.

It was Graf and other high-profile tennis champs, Monica Seles and Virginia Wade among them, who compared with Diana the difficulties of being so much in the limelight, how “the royalty had that sort of glare all the time,” Wade said.

When Diana was killed in the 1997 automobile accident precipitated by pursuing tabloid photographers, Seles recalled having been spooked by a similar incident seven years earlier: In Paris (where Diana died). With Seles’ chauffeured car struck by stalking paparazzi (just as happened to Diana).

Diana had met so many tennis stars by attending each summer’s Wimbledon tournament, where she regularly was seated in the royal box and, according to Wade, was “the life and light of the royal box…not just there because she had to be there, but really interested.” (I took the photo below in 1986, when the press seating was located just to the right and above the royal box.)

Diana reportedly played tennis at least twice a week and, months before her death, revived her occasional friendly competitions with Graf in a semi-public match to inaugurate a new women’s tennis headquarters in London. Local media had been invited to the event but, according to veteran English tennis writer John Parsons, the press’ vantage point allowed only a glimpse of the ball moving back and forth. Neither player could be seen, so Parsons’ estimation that Diana produced some impressively long rallies may very well have been aided by Graf.

When Diana died, during the 1997 U.S. Open in New York, Seles reported that television sets in the players’ lockerroom all were tuned to the latest news of the fatal accident, “instead of the usual tennis.” Current and former players stopped to recall their interactions with the princess.

Christ Evert said she had had tea with Diana more than once. John McEnroe remembered that she had spoken to him about a common hardship: Divorce. Wade reminisced about the time she bumped into Diana while Diana was trying on shoes on London’s fashionable Sloane Street. “She leaps out of her seat to say hello,” Wade marveled.

An example of how celebrity rhymes.

Now, whatever Duchess Meghan’s relationship to Serena Williams, it is logical that each can identify with the other’s place at the other end of prying cameras.

The Hokey Pokey for jocks

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We long ago passed the tipping point between sports and celebrity. So probably the looming all-athlete season of TV’s “Dancing With The Stars” was inevitable, the most recent nexus of a competitive dare and of jocks’ apparent addiction to applause.

What once might have seemed paradoxical—like having ventriloquists battling it out in a mime competition—now fits right into prime-time programming. You take folks who are famous for a specific skill and are convinced they can demonstrate a limitless diversity of corporeal talent, and market their not-my-job venture to a public drawn irresistibly to boldface names.

That’s entertainment. Allegedly.

It just doesn’t sound like a slam dunk: basketball Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—post-career activist, cultural ambassador, outspoken figure on race and religion—now 71 years old and paired with a partner more than a foot-and-a-half shorter than his 7-foot-2. Perhaps part of the anticipated viewer appeal is similar to race car crowds counting on a spectacular crash. One of the DWTS season headliners, after all, is Tonya Harding, a person of interest in one of sport’s memorable crackups.

On a limited basis, this arrangement has been attempted for more than a decade. Football’s Emmitt Smith and Jerry Rice, basketball’s Clyde Drexler and short-track speedskating’s Apolo Ohno were among the first jocks who waltzed—or tangoed or rumbaed—onto the DWTS set.

It should be noted that the artistry of professional athletes, basketball players in particular, has been compared favorably to ballet by some principals in that discipline. And there have been plenty of reports of football pros employing bits of dance in workouts, including the ballet bars installed at the Dallas Cowboys training center to facilitate creative stretching routines. So there certainly is the possibility of cross-over aptitude.

A consumer anthropology research executive, Robbie Blinkoff, called the acceptance of “jocks in a dance competition…an enlightenment, in a way. A few years ago, it would have seemed ironic. But the old rules don’t apply.”

Furthermore, traditional expectations of what qualifies as a sport—Must there be a defense? Is choreography allowed? What about subjective judging?—have been evolving for some time. In my three decades of covering the Olympics, one constant was the negotiation over which activities were worthy of inclusion under the Games’ big tent. Candidates included Frisbee, Lifesaving (rescue dolls are used, rather than real drowning victims), artistic roller skating, dog-sled racing, water skiing, tug-of-war, aerobics. Among stranger things.

And, yes, also knocking on the Olympic door have been variations of rug-cutting and foxes trotting. Especially ballroom dancing and, most recently, break dancing. Perhaps, then, it is a logical short sock-hop to the upcoming televised dance-offs featuring Kareem; figure skating’s Harding, Mirai Nagasu and Adam Rippon; baseball’s Johnny Damon; football’s Josh Norman; luge’s Chris Mazdzer; college basketball’s Arike Ogunbowale; snowboarding’s Jamie Anderson and softball’s Jennie Finch.

Still, and not to step on any toes here, the sports-centric DWTS format really is the blurring of performance types. Acting is not singing and tightrope walking is not playing the tuba. Maybe that’s the intended charm in this show, to mix physical metaphors and dispense with a black-and-white delineation of performance expectations.

But what about old radio comic Ed Gardner’s compartmentalizing of show biz—that “an opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, sings”?

Ranking sports journalists: 1, Stan. 2, Isaacs.

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(Stan Isaacs)

This is what Stan Isaacs gets for having been a terrific mentor—my lame attempt to revive his grand contributions to polling.

Isaacs, a premier Newsday sportswriter and columnist from 1954 to 1992 and among my more inspirational colleagues during his last 22 years there, died in 2013, at 83. He died on April 2, the day after his annual April Fool’s parody, the Isaacs Ratings of Esoteric Distinction, would have appeared. It’s high time those carefully judged rankings of apparent triviality be reinstated.

The IRED was pure Isaacs, goofy and worldly and creative. It was originally conceived, he explained to readers, “as a loving spoof of the Ring Magazine boxing ratings, a rush to respond to the unrecognized need for evaluations of quantities like The Bridges Across the River Seine.” He declared that “no category is too arcane” and that “the IRED never glittered more than when it evaluated People Who Were Neither On the Way Up or Down.”

He once ranked towns along the route of the Boston Marathon. And Bowling pins. And his Least Favorite States (he had Nevada No. 1). And Fred Astaire’s Dancing Partners. And Things That Aren’t As Good as They Used to Be.

He once ranked TV remote buttons: 1, Off. 2, Mute. 3, Return. 4, Exit. 5, Power. 6, Volume. 7, Channels. 8, Closed Caption. 9, Menu. 10, Pause.

He once ranked Lewis & Clark: 1, Clark. 2, Lewis.

On a couple of occasions, Isaacs gave me the extraordinary honor of serving as a guest contributor to the IRED, rating high school nicknames (The Polo Marcos of Illinois and Custer Indians of Milwaukee led my list) and United States Football League silver helmets (since nine of the 12 original teams in that short-lived league all wore silver helmets).

The idea of compiling such standings, Isaacs said, was to offer an “appraisal in areas that are generally ignored by raters.” A daunting task, given the high bar he set. But here goes:

Potatoes: 1, Mashed. 2, Baked. 3, French Fried. 4, Couch.

Obsolete golf clubs: 1, Niblick. 2, Spoon. 3, Brassie. 4, Cleek. 5, Mashie.

Most distinctive state flags: 1, New Mexico. 2, Louisiana. 3, Arizona. 4, California. 5, Colorado. 6, Texas.

English pairs: 1, Lennon and McCartney. 2, Fish and Chips. 3, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. 4, Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. 5, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. 6, Henry VIII and Jane Seymour. 7, Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves. 8, Henry VIII and Catherine Howard. 9, Henry VIII and Catherine Parr.

Mail: 1, e-. 2, Amazon. 3, Fed Ex. 4, UPS. 5. U.S. Postal Service.

Muppets: 1, Fozzie the Bear. 2, Statler & Waldorf. 3, Kermit. 4, Bert & Ernie. 5, Miss Piggy. 6, Beeker. 7, Animal. 8, Janice. 9, The Swedish Chef.

Twins: 1, Astronauts Mark and Scott Kelly. 2, NFL players Ronde and Tiki Barber. 3, BeeGees Robin and Maurice Gibb. 4, Advice columnist authors Dear Abby and Ann Landers. 5, Romulus and Remus. 6, Rod Carew.

Sports Scandals: 1. Chicago Black Sox throwing the 1919 World Series. 2 (tie) Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis Tour de France doping. 3, Rosie Ruiz Boston Marathon “victory” by running only the last half-mile. 4. Tonya and Nancy. 5, 1950s point-shaving in college basketball involving CCNY, NYU, LIU, Manhattan College, Bradley University, the University of Kentucky and the University of Toledo. 6, Ben Johnson’s steroid-powered 1988 Olympic sprint victory. 7, The 1983 George Brett Pine Tar Incident (ask a Yankee fan). 8, This month’s Australian cricket ball-scuffing incident.

Tigers: 1, Bengal. 2, Caspian. 3, Siberian. 4, Malayan. 5, University of Missouri.

Clouds: 1, Cirrus. 2, Stratus. 3, Cumulus. 4, Cumulonimbus.

Characters from TV’s Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle: 1, Moose. 2, Squirrel. 3, Boris. 4, Natasha. 5, Sherman. 6, Mr. Peabody. 7, Dudley Do-right. 8, Nell. 9, Snidely Whiplash.

Landscape implements: 1, Mower. 2, Trimmer. 3, Rake. 4, Hired Help.

Favorite currencies made obsolete by the adoption of the Euro: 1, Lira (Italy). 2, Forint (Hungary). 3, Peseta (Spain). 4, Deutsche Mark (Germany).

Favorite pollsters (in reverse order): 6, Nielsen. 5, Pew Research. 4, Gallup. 3, AP college football. 2, Quinnipiac. 1. Stan Isaacs.

Martin Luther King and sports in society

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Let’s imagine, in marking a half century since his assassination, that Martin Luther King Jr. were still alive today. He’d be 89 now, not impossibly old.

What he might say about 2018 issues has been the subject, in the past few days, of all sorts of public ruminations and speculations. My own curiosity, as a sports journalist, relates to how the business of fun-and-games has become so ingrained in society as to be inseparable from our politics, sexism, racism and culture wars.

How might King respond to the president suggesting that NFL players be fired for protesting against police treatment of minorities? What might he say about Fox News host Laura Ingraham rebuking basketball star Lebron James for “talking politics” by telling James to “shut up and dribble”? To what extent might King see sports as a primary arena in the fight for civil rights and justice?

Twenty-five years ago, for the 25th anniversary of King’s death, my editors at Newsday allowed me to ask some of those questions of former King associates and King scholars. There were no definitive answers, of course. But the basics of what they told me then ring a lot of bells now.

Harry Edwards, University of California sociology professor emeritus and longtime activist, noted then how society had “compartmentalized” blacks right out of the civil rights discussion. “By that, I mean the black athlete—who is on TV, day in and day out, making millions of dollars, driving a hundred-thousand-dollar automobile, with his pick of women and vacation sports, with his pick of the good rewards of society—becomes totally out of sync with the masses of black people. Those athletes are neutralized, made safe, neatly bounded off.

“And then it becomes very easy, once that process is established, to say: ‘Hey, you are an athlete. What are you doing talking about the lack of blacks in high-prestige occupations? You just play ball.’”

Which sounds like “Shut up and dribble.” Or claiming that Colin Kaepernick, as a $19-million-a-year backup quarterback, was in no position to speak for the oppressed in 2016.

At the time of King’s murder—April 4, 1968—sports had not yet pushed from the fringes to the center of social events. The Super Bowl was a two-year-old curiosity. The World Series was years from going to prime time. The NCAA basketball tournament was nowhere near its current March Madness.

Muhammed Ali had refused induction into the army two years earlier, which certainly caused a stir, but Ali lost that fight—banned from boxing for five years. King, meanwhile, was busy enough dealing with institutional segregation, with the Vietnam War, even a divided black community.

“To be frank about it, we had not gotten around to sports in 1968,” the Rev. Joseph Lowrey, a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with King, told me 25 years ago. But, by 1993, Lowrey argued that there was “hardly anything, except maybe Michael Jackson or Oprah Winfrey, that can match the Super Bowl for getting into American homes—not only as entertainment, but also a something with an educational value that helps form opinions.”

Months after King was slain, Tommie Smith and John Carlos used their platform as star athletes at the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics as a call for social awareness and a plea for the disenfranchised. By raising black-gloved fists during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner, they were a Kaepernick moment decades before Kaepernick.

But Harry Edwards had failed to engineer a black boycott of those Games. His argument was that “sports inevitably reflects, reproduces society and social environment. It’s the tip of the iceberg. I think Dr. King would look at that and understand that. Sports not only has greater importance because of the increasing number of blacks involved, as a direct consequence of the atmosphere brought about by Dr. King, but because it is so magnified by the media. And this is exactly the same conversation I had with Dr. King in 1968.”

King’s oldest son, Martin Luther III, told me during those 1993 interviews that he didn’t remember his father ever attending a sports event, though “I know he admired Jackie Robinson…” and, during SCLC retreats, “he’d always play softball. He could jump high, to be so short. Daddy was 5-7, maybe 5-8, but he could leap. And he was an excellent swimmer.”

In the spring of 2014, on one of my last assignments before official retirement from Newsday, I was sent to Memphis to cover a weekend of March Madness action. With a little time to spare, I took the ¾-mile walk from my hotel to the Lorraine Motel, site of King’s murder.

It was like time-traveling back to 1968, and surprisingly sad. As part of what now is the National Civil Rights Museum, the motel’s exterior has been preserved to look exactly as it appeared in newspaper photos the night King was shot 50 years ago. Two vintage cars, a 1959 Dodge Royal and 1968 Cadillac, are parked in the motel lot.

So we can only imagine. The consensus among those who knew King was that, while impossible to divine his exact reactions to 2018 doings in sports, he would be “vocal.” Whether through protest or negotiation, his voice would be heard.

 

 

 

God’s team, or just a good team?

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This is a wish that the Loyola-Chicago University basketball team charges right through the NCAA tournament’s Final Four weekend and wins the national title. It is a keep-the-fingers-crossed hope that the decided underdog has its day. A belief, in fact, that such an unlikely result might come to pass.

It is not, however, a prayer. It is not—and this is a bit tricky for someone who spent eight years in Catholic school—an endorsement of tournament superstar Sister Jean’s plea for divine intervention on behalf of Loyola. For all the charm in the country’s discovery of Sister Jean Dolores-Schmidt, the 98-year-old team chaplain and sometime scout, I confess to a discomfort in hearing her admission on one of many TV appearances that she prays for a win, and that “we have God on our side.”

My first participation in organized sports was as a sixth-grade Little Leaguer, and one of the first admonitions from our gangly, soft-spoken coach, Mr. Buck, was that there would be no supplications that the Almighty come to the aid of our team. (And, by extension, work against our opponent.)

Victory and personal stardom hardly are against my religion. But I am reminded of a CNN essay a few years ago which asked, “When did God become a sports fan?” It cited the increasing number of baseball players pointing to the heavens after hitting home runs, NFL players praying in the end zone after scoring, victorious jocks in various sports thanking The Lord for helping them make winning plays.

The article quoted William J. Baker, author of “Playing with God,” making the point that such gestures amounted to “an athlete using a moment to sell a product, like soap.” By publicly thanking God for victory it was, in effect, calling more attention to the athlete than to his faith. Such conflating of godliness with athletic success brought, at one point, a letter to the editor in a British newspaper with the headline, “Leave me out of your petty games.—Love, God.”

A couple of years ago, the Public Religion Research Institute did a study that found 53 percent of Americans and 56 of sports fans believed God rewards faithful athletes with “good health and success.” And that more than a quarter of Americans and sports fans say God determines the outcomes of specific games. Which seems to equate defeat with somehow already being on the road to hell.

The Sister Jean story, with all its sidebars and spinoffs flooding the televised, digital and print coverage of the tournament, is lovely for the way it has emphasized community—she’s hearing from former students, former players, nuns from her order. The fuss reminds of how we identify with our school or associates, and it reflects the fairly unavoidable presence of big sports events in our society. In a visit to the retirement home of Sister Jean’s order in Dubuque, Iowa, New York Times columnist Juliet Macur was told by one of the nuns how she was encouraged to think, “How many young people would usually be interacting with a 98-year-old like this?”

But, too, another nun noted the “irony in this [that] we often like to talk about peace and justice and living in the margins and helping other people. And, of course, Jean Dolores did all of that earlier in her career. But now the camera isn’t on peace and justice. It’s on Jean Dolores.”

It’s on winning basketball games, and a tournament that will bring the NCAA $8.8 billion in television-rights money over eight years. It’s on how Loyola is cashing in on Sister Jean’s sudden celebrity by marketing Sister Jean T-shirts, socks and bobblehead dolls.

“At the end of the game,” Sister Jean said, “we want to be sure that when the buzzer goes off that the numbers indicate that we get the big W.”

Perhaps that’s just a variation of hope—from her lips to God’s ears. But, as a prayer, it could be seen as trivializing faith and religion. It could be hinting that God will confer success on the more moral team, and that may not be staying in one’s lane when it comes to sports.

How about this: Root for Loyola if you prefer. I will. But if those lads don’t win, it’s a shame. Not a damn shame.

The endurance of 3:59.4

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In effect, Roger Bannister’s immortality was reinforced by his death last week at 88. Moreover, his international claim to fame, the first sub-four-minute mile, remains timeless in spite of having existed as the world record for a mere 46 days.

What Bannister accomplished a lifetime ago—64 years this May—was simultaneously incapable of reproduction even as it set up its quick demise. No one ever can replace Bannister’s Original Win against the four-minute barrier. Yet the moment he finished track’s classic race in 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds, he assured the benchmark’s vulnerability.

That is because Bannister’s feat was as psychological as it was physical. Before his breakthrough, there had been building, for at least a decade, myths and old-wives’ tales that attempting such a speed at that distance might result in heart failure. That human lung and muscle capacity already had reached the maximum.

So, with that nonsense dismissed, Bannister’s record, earthshaking as it was on May 6, 1954, was put to rest by Australian John Landy’s 3:58.0 on June 21 of that year.

Within three years, 12 runners had turned in a combined 18 sub-four races. In Bannister’s wake, it now has become almost routine for elite runners to break four minutes, with nearly 1,500 now in that club. At an indoor meet in Boston the week before Bannister died, four men in the same race finished under four minutes. There are high school lads these days running as fast as Bannister’s old standard, with the world mile record now lowered to 3:43:13 by Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj in 1999.

In the long view, that sort of human progress isn’t so shocking, with all manner of advancements, beyond individual talent, having greased the skids for modern runners. Bannister’s fellow Englishman Sebastian Coe, who rewrote the world mile record three times in the late 1970s and early ‘80s (with a best of 3:47.33), once noted that Bannister clocked his 3:59.4 “on limited scientific knowledge, in leather shoes in which the spikes weighed more than the tissue-thin shoes today, on tracks at which speedway riders would turn up their noses. So as far as I’m concerned, that was one of the great runs of all time.”

Indeed, in 1954, even full nutrition was an issue, with vestiges of the United Kingdom’s World War II-era food rationing still in place. The era’s cinder running tracks were closer to the consistency of sand than present-day synthetic surfaces that put a little bounce in the runner’s step. In Bannister’s time, the science of training was in its relative infancy, with his workouts reported to consist of fewer than 30 miles per week. Compare that to El Guerrouj’s 100 to 120 weekly mileage during his peak seasons in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Bannister even confessed to the occasional cigarette.

Also, the dawn of full professionalism in track during the 1980s began to afford athletes access to the best coaching and the freedom to concentrate all of their time on their sport.

Still, with Bannister’s death, the obituaries and appreciations of the man and his historic moment have exhumed the impact of that first sub-four race from the boneyard of old news. It came a year after the first ascent of Mount Everest and was widely compared to the latter. (Bannister’s Sherpas, his version of mountaineering guide Tenzing Norgay to Edmund Hillary, were track teammates Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway, who functioned as pace-setters through three of the mile’s four laps.)

And here are a couple of fascinating details from Bannister’s big day:

It happens that one of the men timing the race at Oxford University’s Iffley Road track was Harold Abrahamson, the former British sprinter whose 100-meter victory at the 1924 Paris Olympics was the inspiration for the 1981 Academy Award-winning film “Chariots of Fire.”

It happens, too, that the Iffley Road public address announcer was another former sprinter named Norris McWhirter, who at the time was a sports journalist and track statistician. One year later, McWhirter co-founded the Guinness Book of World Records and commenced compiling factoids of less enduring extremes such as owner of the earth’s longest fingernails, most rapid yodel or longest continuing attack of hiccupping.

McWhirter is said to have telephoned a London reporter to advise that he should be at Iffley Road for the possibility of a big story. And, sure enough, at the race’s conclusion, McWhirter declared to the 1,000 spectators—in a drawn-out, dramatic cadence—that Bannister had won the meet’s fourth event “in a time which, subject to ratification, is a new track record, British native record, British all-comers record, European record, Commonwealth record and world record: Three minutes.…”

The rest was drowned out by cheers from the crowd. Somehow still echoing.

I, skeptical

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Actor Margot Robbie (left); Not an actor (right).

“I, Tonya” is filmed in the original profanity. Not something for delicate ears. Nor is it fare for the gullible. Though the Tonya Harding character’s final words are, “That’s the [unprintable] truth,” it’s best to note the film’s opening alert that it is based on “irony-free” and “wildly contradictory” interviews. A word to the wise of the narrator’s possible inclination toward mendacity.

For those among us ink-stained wretches who covered the seriously bizarre 1994 Harding-Nancy Kerrigan Olympic uproar, “I, Tonya” offers Harding’s thoroughly familiar bunker mentality—but to the point that some scenes are complete fiction.

Even before her skating rival Kerrigan was clubbed on the knee during practice for the ’94 Olympic Trials and the FBI quickly fingered Harding’s associates, we knew of Harding’s defensiveness over a troubled past: That her abusive mother had been married six times, her absent father often was between jobs, her marriage to Jeff Gilloly was brief and occasionally violent. We knew that Harding suffered wracking asthma attacks but continued to smoke (though she repeatedly denied that) and that she was forever convinced of unfair treatment by skating judges.

All of that is in the movie. But so are events that appear to have happened only in Harding’s head. There is no evidence, for instance, that she ever marched up to a judging panel during a competition and cursed out the arbiters of success, or that she confronted one judge in a parking garage and was told that she simply didn’t “present the image we want to portray.”

Nor did the real Harding ever deliver a tearful plea when she was sentenced for her role in the attack on Kerrigan—another of the movie’s sympathetic takes on Harding.

As a dramatic device, it works to depict a moment when Harding’s coach supposedly informed her—after Harding’s disappointing fourth-place finish at the 1992 Olympics—that the International Olympic Committee “announced today” it was moving the next Winter Games up by two years, to ’94. In fact, that IOC decision had been made seven years earlier.

Also, to hammer home Harding’s conviction that the entire world doubted her skating, the celluloid Tonya is faced with a male fan harassing her just prior to a competition. Anyone who has spent time around the sport knows there never is any heckling in the prim world of figure skating.

Even the film’s depiction of incessant reproach by Harding’s mother—so well played by Allison Janney that she has been awarded an Oscar—appears to be taken out of the real-life time line. Though theirs unquestionably was a difficult relationship, Harding’s mother was essentially out of her life years before Harding’s peak skating years.

In truth, Harding was not a victim of judging favoritism. The subjective scoring, arcane as it can be, made her the 1991 national champion and ’91 world silver medalist and qualified her for two Olympic teams despite a steady deterioration in her skating power. Having made her mark as the first American woman to land the monster 3 ½-rotation triple axel in competition, at the ’91 nationals, she struggled mightily with her jumps thereafter, repeatedly falling at the marquee competitions. Harding’s complaints about under-financing also were at odds with the skating federation’s records of significant economic support, as well as accounts by her then-agent Michael Rosenberg.

But it’s a movie, no? Some things are exaggerated. There are reviews out there that have described “I, Tonya” as a mockumentary, a satire. The cinematography is top-notch and the acting terrific and, in the end, the details may not be as important as the overall impression left on the popcorn crowd.

Perhaps we should consider the Chinese model. I’m told that, instead of translations faithful to the original English, the Chinese often create their interpretation of a movie with their own title and that, in this case, have re-branded “I, Tonya” to “Obnoxious Woman.”

And I think of the chaotic Harding press conference in Lillehammer, Norway, days before Harding’s 1994 Olympic skate (when she crashed into eighth place while Kerrigan finished second). Even after her ex-husband had ratted on her and the FBI closed in, Harding still was denying any role in the Kerrigan mugging.

Twenty-two years later, after seeing “I, Tonya,” let me paraphrase the New York Times’ Jere Longman’s question to Harding that day: “You have lied to us so many times, why should we believe you now?”

Words flowing like …..

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I had a glass of wine the other night that, according to the description on the bottle, was “warm and mellow like the sun embracing its branches at summer ending….” (The sun has branches?) That vintage promised to “enchant…with its peppery, chocolate and red fruit hints” and to “astonish with the strength of its structure and satisfy with the length of its taste.”

It was red wine, which may explain the purple prose.

Not that I can afford sanctimony. I have been a sportswriter for more than a half-century and, by definition, have been as guilty as any of my brethren of occasionally waxing rhapsodic over some jock’s two-out single or one-handed touchdown catch.

Say you have an athlete, hobbling on a bad leg in the game’s waning moments but, somehow, he or she produces the come-from-behind winning score. It really isn’t equivalent to Teddy Roosevelt leading the charge up San Juan Hill. Or John Kennedy rescuing a mate from the sinking PT-109. It hardly makes America safe for democracy. Still, you may be tempted to cast it in similarly vivid terms.

So I accept that the urge toward high-octane verbosity, to paint an extravagant picture with fussy words, is a mighty one—even while acknowledging the need for discipline and the Hemingway ideal of simple, declarative sentences. (Papa also advised to write with a pencil, but that isn’t happening anymore.)

Anyway, I’m not convinced that wine-label rhetoric is meant to be taken seriously. (Apart, that is, from the surgeon general warnings that “women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects” and that alcohol “impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery.”)

As a professional wordsmith, I can enjoy a soupcon of elegant gibberish. I may even be a little jealous of those back-of-the-bottle authors, turning pitches for their product into anthropomorphic characterizations of potables. Or crafting relaxing scenes of rolling hillsides, warm breezes and weathered old vintners.

Given the cavalcade of mixed metaphors and literary schmaltz, I envision a creative process in which a handful of wine company employees sit, feet up on their desks, a glass of their product in hand—possibly sailing the occasional paper airplane across the room—while they float trial balloons…

How about: “This wine, bareback, gallops on aromas of blackberries, cherries and spice toward an unforgettable gustatory sensation…”

Maybe: “Others are a poor ghost of this broad-shouldered red, wan and tired; ours will cut trouble down to size with its wood tannins and hints of mocha…”

Or this: “If this wine can’t fill the bill then, forget it, it can’t be done.”

I stumbled onto a “Reading, Writing & Wine” website in which the author, Isaac James Baker, contended that “wine is emotive, and sipping a glass of wine encourages us to analyze it, and enjoy it, through language.” He gave examples of references to “spice and pickle notes,” “red velvet,” “wild mushrooms,” “deep affection.”

My own totally unscientific survey, conducted over recent months, found that one wine purported to be “the perfect symbol of freedom” with “uninhibited spirit.” Another had a “larger than life personality…long on fruit and short on attitude.” Another was “sure to leave an impression on all.” Another was “immense and complex.” Another boasted of “dramatic style.” Another—and I’m not quite sure how to interpret this—advised that it was “best drunk when not wearing light-colored clothes.”

Enchanting. Astonishing. Something like Teddy Roosevelt leading the charge of San Juan Hill.

In the meantime, though, this might work just as well for connoisseurs of straightforwardness:

“This is pretty good wine.”