NHL’s Olympic disappearing act

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By banning their players from next year’s Winter Olympics in South Korea, NHL owners basically are going to spite their noses right off of their faces. They will not participate on international sport’s biggest stage, bypassing the added bonus of furthering the league’s desire to spread the NHL gospel to Asia, because—commissioner Gary Bettman somehow reasoned—the Olympics will cause the NHL to “disappear” for more than two weeks.

In fact, the Olympics has been a boon to NHL visibility since the league first signed onto the Winter Games 19 years ago, even in the face of shameful conduct by U.S. players at the 1998 Nagano Olympics. (More on that in a minute.)

The 2010 Olympic gold-medal final was the most-watched hockey game in North American television history—the NHL’s primary turf—seen by 27.6 million Americans and 22 million Canadians. Compare that to the measly 7.9 million who tuned in for Game Seven of the previous season’s Stanley Cup final on U.S. TV, or even the all-time largest Stanley Cup single-game TV audience of 13-plus million in 1972.

Prior to the 2010 Games, the highest rated hockey game featuring NHL players also was at the Olympics, in the 2002 gold-medal final. Donnie Kwak, writing for The Ringer web site, sensibly argued last week that “even the worst Olympic hockey game is more compelling than a regular-season NHL matchup in February.”

Especially, I contend, because the skating and puck-handling skills of he NHL’s best are magnified by Olympic rules that do not tolerate the NHL’s counterproductive acceptance of fighting. No other major professional sport puts up with—in fact, markets—such side-shows.

Yet Bettman brings an odd logic to that as well, accepting fighting as a pre-existing condition in his league. “It’s been there from the start,” he has said, “and what is done at other levels isn’t necessarily what’s appropriate at the professional level.”

Bettman has concluded that fighting “is part of the game” because NHL hockey is “intense and emotional.” A similarly timid reluctance to enforce good behavior is what gave the NHL a figurative black eye in its 1998 Olympic debut, when some (still unidentified) members of the U.S. team destroyed $3,000 worth of property in their rooms at the Nagano Games athletes’ village, then made matters worse by dismissing the incident as “blown out of proportion.”

Supposedly there were only three troublemakers who caused that damage, spitting in the face of overwhelming Japanese courtesy to the world’s visiting athletes, yet all 23 members of the team banded together to steadfastly refuse cooperation in the U.S. Olympic Committee’s subsequent investigation. The excuse was “team solidarity”—not ratting on the perpetrators of embarrassment to them and the entire U.S. Olympic delegation.

Not until a month later, under pressure from the U.S. Hockey Federation and the NHL Players Association, did the 1988 U.S. team captain, Chris Chelios, at last write a letter of apology to the Japanese people and the Olympic organizers, with a check of $3,000 included.

Somehow, Chelios and 13 of the disgraced Nagano veterans were allowed to represent the United States again at the 2002 Winter Games, possibly because a repeat of the Yanks’ roguish actions wouldn’t cause a similar international incident for Salt Lake City’s hosts. “We kept [the 1998 culprits] to ourselves for a reason,” Chelios claimed, without giving a reason. “People who needed to know what happened, they knew what happened.” He included Bettman among those people.

So the NHL establishment simply moved on with a boys-will-be-boys shrug, just as Bettman and league owners justify occasional, though persistent, goonery on the ice. But if a tradition of fisticuffs is OK in NHL games, what’s the common-sense argument by Bettman and the league owners that player injury is a major reason for skipping the 2018 Olympics?

With NHL rosters becoming more and more geographically diversified—more than one quarter of active NHL players come from outside North America—there is overwhelming sentiment among players to participate in the South Korea Games. Russians, Finns, Swedes, Czechs not only like the idea of wearing their national colors but also understand that their past presence in the Olympics has cultivated new fans for the NHL.

Even the American players, unlike those few ingrates in Nagano, have come to appreciate that the global exposure and competitive buzz of the Olympics far outpace the mucking in the corners of NHL rinks in mid-February. Without them in South Korea, the TV-ratings winners will be figure skating and snowboarding. And the NHL indeed will disappear for a couple of weeks.

 

Another Raiders’ road trip

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Time to trot out the old Gertrude Stein quote that in Oakland, “there’s no there there.” With news that the NFL Raiders will be running off to Las Vegas comes the sense of a lost place. And, just to further disorient football fans and civic leaders, the team crassly intends to squat at the Oakland Coliseum for at least two more seasons while its palatial new playground is being built in Sin City.

“Home” games are looking like there might be no “here” there. Plenty of Raiders’ fans, often described as among the league’s most passionate and loyal, essentially are reacting to the Raiders’ good-bye by offering to make them sandwiches. You know: Here’s your hat; what’s your hurry?

That includes Scott McKibben, the man who heads the authority that controls the Oakland Coliseum. McKibben told USA Today that it is “actually financially to our benefit” if the Raiders don’t exercise their option to honor their lease through 2018—a clear suggestion that the Raiders pack up and leave immediately. The Coliseum generates $7 million a year from the team but spends $8 million.

There doesn’t appear to be a real danger that the Raiders will wind up like the imaginary Port Ruppert Mundys in Philip Roth’s “Great American Novel”—a baseball team in the World War II era forced to play its entire schedule on the road because its stadium was used as a soldier’s embarkation point.

But this promises to be a mighty awkward divorce. And not so different from the last time the Raiders said “See you, suckers” to Oakland citizens. That was in 1982, when the Raiders’ founder and original owner, Al Davis—father to current majority owner Mark, who inherited Al’s tendency toward itchy feet—went looking for greener grass in Los Angeles.

The weird logistics that year included having the Raiders continue to live and train in Oakland—practicing all week within view of the Oakland Coliseum—then flying the 365 miles to L.A. for Sunday “home” games. It was a bit like having the New York Jets play home games in Pittsburgh, or the New England Patriots play home games in Buffalo.

Players reported sometimes crossing paths with Oakland residents who marveled, “I didn’t know y’all were still around here.” The local newspaper, which had recorded the Raiders’ every move for the previous 22 seasons, quit covering the team. The Raiders’ fan club disbanded, though some members went on insisting, according to that season’s Raiders’ running back Kenny King, “You’re not the L.A. Raiders. You’re the Oakland Raiders.”

King’s response: “If they want to call us that, fine. I’m a Raider. A Whatever Raider.”

So, here we are again. The Whatever Raiders, expecting to play at least one more season 500 miles from their future digs, are somehow expecting Oakland folks to go on supporting them. Mark Davis, having lived up to his father’s allegiance to the team’s pirate logo by attempting to plunder taxpayers for a better stadium deal, nevertheless went on local radio and claimed, “I still have a feeling for the fans in the Bay Area. And I’ve met with a number of them. And anything I say to them isn’t going to soothe them, and it makes this whole thing bittersweet.”

Not that such emotions stopped him from merrily abandoning those fans, the same way the original Raiders left Oakland for Los Angeles in 1982, then walked out 13 years later on the spectator following they had built in L.A. to return to Oakland.

And now Davis has insisted that the Raiders will carry the “Oakland” name until settling in Vegas in 2019 or 2020.

But why should Bay Area citizens still contribute to Davis’ bank account with the Oakland Coliseum again becoming the Park of the Lost Raiders? With speculation that the team might seek a temporary home at the San Francisco 49ers’ stadium in Santa Clara—or even in San Antonio, Tex.—before its Vegas stadium is available, why should any fans buy into a one-way, short-term relationship?

Davis insisted that he really wanted to stay in Oakland, but had no choice.

Whatever, Raiders.

Far worse than Darwinism

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We have known for some time that elite women’s gymnastics—really, little girl gymnastics—somehow is even more Darwinian than other sports. It truly is survival of the fittest. No room for fear. No time for procrastination, no place to stand still. Puberty is coming. Weight gain is coming. Younger tumbling, flying daredevils are coming.

Those children train so hard in pursuit of Olympic glory that it is impossible for them to gain enough weight to reach puberty. The competition is so fierce that they dare not surrender to pain.

In 1995, San Francisco Chronicle sportswriter Joan Ryan published a book, “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes,” that touched on the frightening extremes to which so many gymnasts (and figure skaters) went to succeed. Based on interviews with more than 100 former athletes—as well as trainers, sports psychologists, physiologists and other experts—Ryan documented the physical and emotional hardships endured, the eating disorders, weakened bones, stunted growth, debilitating injuries and psychological problems. In 1996, the New England Journal of Medicine issued a report describing emotional and physical harm suffered by elite female gymnasts.

And the question now is whether that harsh, no-questions-asked environment facilitated far more disturbing damage to those kids. Over the past year, reports have surfaced of 360 cases of female gymnasts accusing coaches of sexual transgressions since the mid-1990s, and more than 80 gymnasts have alleged sexual abuse during that time by former Michigan State University and national team physician Larry Nassar, who in November was arrested on child pornography charges.

Were those ghastly crimes enabled by the gymnasts’ insecurity about their Olympic possibilities? About their athletic survival? Nassar’s abuse reportedly was perpetrated under the guise of medical treatment for injuries, and young gymnasts learn as mere toddlers that injuries are to be expected and must be dealt with.

Leading up to the 2004 Athens Olympics, I asked candidates for the women’s U.S. gymnastics team for a listing of their afflictions and found them to be a sawbones’ workshop. One 16-year-old had been through two fractures and a damaged ligament in her elbow. A 17-year-old, just off major Achilles surgery, remembered a stress fracture in her back at 5, a broken arm, a fractured wrist. Another teenager was coming off knee surgery and another returning from elbow reconstruction. Taken as a whole, elite gymnasts are either injured, were injured or about to be injured.

Was the celebrated husband/wife coaching team of Bela and Martha Karolyi, whose Texas ranch has served as the national team’s training center for decades, somehow complicit in creating an unreasonable cut-throat atmosphere? And could that have provided cover for Nassar, whom the Michigan attorney general branded a “monster” in announcing the most recent sexual assault charges against Nassar.

Bela Karolyi, who coached Olympic superstars Nadia Comaneci (in his native Romania) and Mary Lou Retton (after he set up shop in the United States), seemed to me a caring if demanding taskmaster, but he did always openly endorse the Darwinian model.

“They cannot slow down,” he insisted, “or the little ones coming behind them will swallow them up like they’ve never been there.” After two mothers of former Karolyi gymnasts told the Baltimore Sun in 1992 that his system was physically and mentally abusive—one blaming him for her daughter’s bulimia—Karolyi insisted, “I never interfere with their diet. I’m teaching gymnastics. The other things are for people around them—parents, teachers in school.”

I covered Olympic-level gymnastics for 25 years and found that, while the compelling performances and athletes’ dedication to excellence were to be much appreciated, I would not have wanted my daughter to be faced with that sort of survival test. And that was when I thought the worst thing for those kids was to avoid being swallowed up by the little ones coming behind them.

Another good Johann Koss deed

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Once again, Johann Olav Koss has reassured me that a career in sports journalism is not an entirely trivial exercise. Once again, Koss’ commitment to the ideal of a level playing field, of respect for rules and opponents, of the universality of games has affirmed the worth of having toiled in what hard-news reporters often dismiss as the “toy department.”

At 48, Koss, the former Olympic speedskating champion, has created Fair Sport, a nonprofit foundation offering financial and legal assistance to whistle-blowers with information about cheating in international competition. As the New York Times reported, Fair Sport will draw on private donations and commitments from global law firms to provide housing, criminal defense, immigration applications and psychological counseling to whistle-blowers.

This is just the latest good deed of a sportsman whose path I happily crossed a few times, beginning at the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympics. He was 25 then, when he won three gold medals and set three world records in his native Norway and immediately donated his $100,000 bonus check to Olympic Aid, which had been formed the previous year to raise funds for children in war-torn nations.

Koss signed on as an Olympic Aid ambassador and recruited fellow athletes to donate 12 tons of sports equipment—which he personally delivered to children amid civil strife in Eastern Africa. Over lunch in New York City shortly after the Lillehammer Games, he told me about seeing “with my own eyes” how “the martyrs of their wars are the ideal of children in places like that. I don’t think that’s good for children to have people who die in wars as their ideals. If they could have sport, to be healthy, to have a social connection, that would be good.”

So, yes, it’s just sports. But to Koss, it not only was a vehicle of self-fulfillment but also something valuable enough to be shared with those disadvantaged kids, something to be protected from the skullduggery of doping. In 2000, he reshaped Olympic Aid into Right to Play, zeroing in on sports as a tool for the development of children in more than 20 countries. He joined the International Olympic Committee’s athletes advisory commission and worked against the use of performance-enhancing substances.

Over and over, Koss demonstrated that just because sports events themselves don’t mean a lot in the greater scheme of things, that hardly disqualifies them from deserving our attention on several levels. He was proud of his speedskating accomplishments and insistent, as he told a couple of us ink-stained wretches while working for Olympic Aid at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, that athletes “are very good role models. When you’ve dedicated yourself to play fair—that is very important—then it’s totally enough to be a hero in sport.”

President Obama struck a similar tone during his White House reception for the World Series champion Chicago Cubs last year, declaring it to be “worth remembering—because sometimes people wonder, ‘Well, why are you spending time on sports? There’s other stuff going on’—that throughout our history, sports has had this power to bring us together….Sports has changed attitudes and cultures in ways that seem subtle but that ultimately make us think differently about ourselves and who we were.

“Sports has a way, sometimes, of changing hearts in a way that politics or business doesn’t. And sometimes it’s just a matter of us being able to escape and relax from the difficulties of our days, but sometimes it also speaks to something better in us.”

This latest Koss project, Fair Sport, is the result of a recently exposed Russian doping scandal so pervasive that some of us sports patriots could feel ourselves sliding into cynicism. But, once again, Koss’ focus on our right to play, and play fairly, has spoken to something better in us. Sports, he said during a chat at the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics, “is for peace. It’s for education. It’s for health. It’s to reach absolutely everybody in the world, to understand how to win, but also how to lose, and how to respect everyone.”

He has convinced me, again, that it is totally enough to be here in the toy department, where I write this missive while wearing my 1994 Lillehammer Olympics sweater.

Jim Boeheim’s values and college sport’s big bucks

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Syracuse basketball coach Jim Boeheim’s recent putdown of Greensboro, N.C., for having “no value” as a conference tournament site really was just the latest episode in college sports hypocrisy. Boeheim was reminding that his sport, on the Division I level, has nothing to do with proximity to campus life. Nothing to do with education. Nothing to do with the NCAA’s claim to be an amateur operation.

His typically prickly demeanor aside, Boeheim merely was verbalizing the state of affairs in his chosen racket. Just as conference realignments have severed schools’ geographical connections to chase bigger and better paydays, so do post-season tournaments increasingly gravitate toward the largest cities.

Because, as Willie Sutton supposedly said when asked why he robbed banks, “that’s where the money is.”

So the Atlantic Coast Conference, founded as a Carolina-centric league in the early 1950s, abandoned its traditional home in the burg that calls itself “Tournament Town” to play in New York’s Brooklyn borough this year. With Jim Boeheim’s hardy approval.

“Why do you think the Big Ten is coming to New York City?” Boeheim said of next year’s deal to bring that conference tournament from its Midwestern roots to Madison Square Garden. “It’s a good business decision. Everyone says this is all about business. The media centers, the recruiting centers, are Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and New York. How many players do their have in Greensboro?”

Boeheim, of course, is the crotchety fellow being paid roughly $2 million a year who has dismissed as “idiotic” any thought of sharing the wealth with college athletes. He is the guy who was suspended for nine games a year ago for failing to promote compliance of NCAA rules within his team for nearly a decade. He—and Syracuse basketball—are the embodiment of a gold-digging approach.

He noted that “Madison Square Garden made the Big East Conference” in the early 1980s, when Syracuse was a charter member of the league formed primarily to tap into the largest East Coast TV markets—$$$$: New York (St. John’s), D.C. (Georgetown), Boston (Boston College), Philadelphia (Villanova). The conference, in fact, mandated that its teams play the majority of their games in large public arenas, away from their campuses, to maximize ticket sales.

Long ago and in a galaxy far, far away, it was the ACC which concocted a post-season tournament to determine its league champion—and sole NCAA tournament participant. That was 1954, when only 22 teams made up the NCAA field. Between 1978 and 1980, the Big Dance grew from 32 to 48 teams, just when the Big East embraced the idea of a post-season tournament as a significant revenue stream. With as many as four of its original seven teams already guaranteed NCAA berths, its tournament essentially amounted to a series of exhibition games. But with large crowds paying top dollar at the self-proclaimed “World’s Most Famous Arena.”

As long ago as 1985, St. John’s Hall of Fame coach Lou Carnesecca admitted that the Big East tournament “means nothing. It’s nice for the league, to put a little money in the sack, to get the alumni together to discuss who’s better. It’s good because it makes a lot of noise…”

So isn’t it a bit ironic that none other than Jim Boeheim was grumbling back then that “any coach who feels he’s [already] qualified for the NCAA would rather not play a postseason tournament”?

Soon enough, he came around to the comforts of greed, until the Big East’s pursuit of further riches through a disorienting expansion of adding schools with a football emphasis led to its virtual demise. The conference eventually was forced to retreat to its old basketball model and Syracuse, meanwhile, ran away to the ACC’s greenbacks.

In Greensboro, many see justice in the fact that Boeheim and his Syracuse lads were immediately ousted by Miami from the ACC’s new Brooklyn stage in the first round, ending any hope of an NCAA bid. And that Syracuse subsequently was matched, in the consolation NIT’s first round, against the team from the University of North Carolina’s campus in Greensboro.

Surely there’s some value in that.

A fellow (and lesson) to remember

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A recent Facebook posting was linked to a North Texas State University student newspaper’s article about the school’s associate head basketball coach, Rob Evans. And that set off my free-association memory of a scales-falling-from the-eyes-moment.

He was Robert Evans to us Hobbs (N.M.) High School classmates in the mid 1960s. Quiet, with a 100-watt smile. A stylish fellow, he always seemed to be wearing a pressed white shirt. He was a starting forward on the 1964 basketball varsity that lost only once—in the state championship game, by one measly point, to a team (hated Roswell) that Hobbs had beaten three times earlier in the season. Robert had silken offensive moves and played suffocating defense in Hobbs’ relentless all-game full-court press.

He was a grade ahead of me, so our acquaintance didn’t go much beyond friendly hallway greetings and the fact that, as sports editor/photographer for the school newspaper, I witnessed—and recorded—much of Robert’s significant contribution to the basketball team’s heroics. I also took pictures for the school yearbook, and I’m pretty sure that’s my staged photo, among the collection of individual players’ shots, of Robert throwing a behind-the-back pass. (I was slow on the trigger: The ball already is out of the frame.)

Anyway, in my sheltered, privileged existence, I unconsciously assumed that Robert, along with all my fellow teenagers, lived essentially the same life I did. Nice house, leafy neighborhood, no real cares beyond typical 16-year-old angst over matters of popularity and acne. A guy like Robert, furthermore, was something of a celebrity; I certainly didn’t have the jump shot he put on display for the varsity crowds in excess of 3,000 people.

So here came the moment of revelation. During my first two weeks each summer, before I commenced three months of relatively lucrative (for a high school kid) work as an oil-field roustabout, I was the vacation replacement for a man who delivered Western Union telegrams around town. As if my own means of daily transportation—a hand-me-down, putt-putt Cushman scooter from my brother—weren’t dorky enough, the Western Union job required I wear a little yellow helmet in public. But it was my first paying job and, unlike the oil-field gig, which was purposed to earn college tuition, I had my parents’ permission to spend my Western Union earnings right away.

I bought a better camera.

Anyway, it quickly became apparent that in those days in Hobbs, an oil-patch town hard against the West Texas border, telegrams went either to local businesses or to residences without the benefit of a telephone. And the latter locations were in a part of town I previously was unaware existed. Unpaved streets. Sad wooden shacks. The folks who answered the doors there always were black.

Robert Evans is black. Yet I somehow was stunned to see him walking down one of those dusty roads one day, exchanging a smile and a wave, as I went about my Western Union rounds. My first thought—a dumb, naïve reaction—was something along the lines of, “What is he doing here?”

Or maybe: What is this run-down district doing in my seemingly comfortable little town? The one substantial brick house in that neighborhood, I later learned, belonged to the mother of Bill Bridges, a former Hobbs High basketball star who was playing for the NBA’s St. Louis Hawks at the time.

This was an overdue bit of education. All my interactions with other students had been on the sprawling, well-appointed high school campus. I had arrived in Hobbs from southern California for my sophomore year in 1962, and was surprised to hear, one morning from Mrs. Hill in our American History class, how relieved she had been over the Hobbs schools’ trouble-free response to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling eight years earlier. Another numbskull reaction from me: Hadn’t everybody just gotten on with integration?

Because my parents died shortly after my high school graduation, I was taken permanently away from Hobbs by college and work and fell out of touch with virtually everyone from those days. My loss. But I did bump into Robert after my freshman year of college at the big pond north of town—we called it Lake Inferior—where a friend of my brother’s had invited us to visit and partake in some water skiing. And I later read of Robert’s basketball career at New Mexico State, in particular his role in New Mexico State’s close loss to eventual NCAA champion UCLA and its superstar Lew Alcindor (soon to be Kareem Adbul Jabbar and a Los Angeles Lakers Hall of Famer).

The pages flew off the calendar until, in 1998, another Robert Evans update came to me via the national sports story of a dramatic, last-second NCAA tournament upset by Valparaiso over Ole Miss. Robert was then head coach at Ole Miss, the first black head coach in that deep-South school’s history and the architect of that team’s hoops revival. And, in 1999, when I was on a brief assignment in Phoenix, I heard that Robert had just taken the head coaching job at Arizona State. I asked an acquaintance at the school to pass on my good wishes, though I’m not sure he ever did.

Anyway, now it’s good to read the headline in that North Texas State student paper: “Half a century in the making, Rob Evans continues touching lives….”

Touched mine, way back when.

UConn basketball and credit where it’s due

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Allow yourself a rubbernecking moment. It’s a rare thing for any team to go 100 games without losing, so this is a good time to tap the brakes and eyeball various aspects at play in the extraordinary UConn women’s basketball streak.

There is, of course, the victory total itself, something no other college or professional team—men or women—has compiled. The numbers nuts out there recognize how forcefully UConn’s record—up to 101 games by Feb. 18—blows away the 88 straight won by UCLA’s men from 1970 to ’74, the 33 in-a-row by the NBA’s Lakers in 1972, the 47 consecutive college football victories by Oklahoma from 1953 to ’57; the 35-game unbeaten run (with 10 ties) by the NHL’s 1979-’80 Philadelphia Flyers.

Still, there somehow have been so-what reactions. Even, in the case of a Boston sportscaster named Tony Massarotti, a sneering, total dismissal of UConn’s feat, based—counterintuitively—on the argument that too many of the UConn victories were too lopsided. “It doesn’t count,” Massarotti blustered. “Please. What a crock.”

Wait. Might such a take have anything to do with gender?

In 1994, I was dispatched by Newsday to Chapel Hill, N.C., to seek metaphysical and cultural explanations for a situation similar to the current UConn basketball reign. The University of North Carolina women’s soccer team had just lost for the first time in 102 games (with one tie). And lost for only the second time in 204 games over eight years (with another seven ties mixed in).

My clear impression was that Carolina’s players approached their sport in the same way that Hall of Famer Bill Russell tackled his in a 13-year pro career during which he played for 11 NBA champions. Because there is a scoreboard, Russell once said, every athlete obviously plays to win.

The star of that ’94 Carolina soccer team was Tisha Venturini, and what she noticed about her teammates’ reactions, when their 102-game unbeaten streak was ended, didn’t reflect the individuals’ competitive will so much as their distinct personalities. “The ones who usually are emotional were crying hysterically,” Venturini said, “and the ones who never get emotional were just stone-faced.”

The team’s coach then—and now, going into his 39th season—was Anson Dorrance, and it was he who wondered at both the meaning of victory and what he called “the guy thing.”

“In our society,” Dorrance said, “we put too much stock in athletic success and failure. That’s men. Men lose sight of what’s critically important, your reason in life and the quality of your relationships. I think men measure their lives in these kinds of successes and failures. Numbers. Streaks. I think that’s why you see movies of the old high school quarterback pumping gas somewhere, to say: He just had a great arm; it didn’t make him a great man.”

That’s like the Bruce Springsteen lyric about ephemeral eminence…

    I had a friend was a big baseball player back in high school.

    He could throw that speedball by you

    Make you look like a fool, boy.

    Saw him the other night at this roadside bar

    I was walking in, he was walking out.

    We went back inside sat down had a few drinks

    But all he kept talking about was

    Glory days, well they’ll pass you by

    Glory days, in the wink of a young girl’s eye…

Dorrance believed that he was “not a bad loser. One of the things I’ve never been able to accept about sports is that one team has to lose. And yet, I’m best at arranging for other teams to lose. I mean, there’s something wrong with that, philosophically, don’t you think?”

He admitted to being “teed off” by the losses, as astoundingly infrequent as they were, “yet, why does this irritate me that’s I’m teed off? And if it irritates me that I’m teed off, why don’t I sever that part of my personality? Because I don’t want to? Is it just winning that I’m after?”

And is that really just a male trait?

Dorrance claimed that his female players “have taught me their ability to relate…they’ve taught me to be more human.” Yet that didn’t stop them from maintaining an athletic dominance. Since the team materialized in 1979, Carolina has won 22 national championships. “It’s not world peace or cancer research,” Dorrance readily conceded. But there was no getting around the fact that his players’ accomplishments were “impressive. Heck, I’m impressed,” he said.

Just as Carolina occasionally lost in soccer, UConn, at some point, will lose a basketball game. Because there are scoreboards and two teams trying to win. But when a team—any team—wins more than 100 consecutive games, it counts.

 

 

“Oak” and the nutty Knicks

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The first time the New York Knicks exiled Charles Oakley from Madison Square Garden, it was done with a large measure of regret. That was after the 1997-98 NBA season, when the wildly popular and ruggedly efficient Oakley was traded to Toronto for a younger, more athletic Marcus Camby. The situation was nothing like this week’s banishment, ordered by autocratic owner James Dolan after Oakley’s altercation with some Garden security personnel and Dolan’s unsubstantiated allegation that Oakley “may have a problem with alcohol; we don’t know.”

Then again, in both cases, Oakley lingers as something of a specter, a haunting image of haywire happenings weighing on Gotham’s basketball franchise. To see Oakley, at 53, escorted from his courtside seat in handcuffs provided the metaphor of shackled competence, while the Knicks bumble toward their fourth consecutive non-playoff season. During Oakley’s 10-year stay in New York, the Knicks never failed to reach the post season.

And that’s why, a couple of decades ago, the Oakley apparition was hanging over the Knicks’ preparation for their first season without him. It already was a bizarre time, with the league emerging from a three-and-a-half-month labor dispute. The 1998-99 season didn’t commence until February of ’99, shrunk from 82 to 50 regular-season games.

It so happened that 1999 was my one turn as an NBA beat writer (because Newsday was desperate after failing to replace Judy Battista, who had gone on to bigger things at the New York Times). So I stepped into the roiling Knicks narrative, in which general manager Ernie Grunfeld already was catching grief for trading fan favorites John Starks and Oakley.

That Starks was exchanged for Golden State’s Latrell Sprewell, who had been suspended most of the previous season for having put his coach, P.J. Carlesimo, in a chokehold, was unsettling enough on the behavioral level. But it was the loss of Oakley for the unproven Camby that created the greater angst in pure basketball terms.

Throughout the abbreviated two-week pre-season training camp, and right into the season, Knicks players spoke of “the ghost of Charles Oakley.” Sprewell was among those who acknowledged that head coach Jeff Van Gundy “mentions Oak’s name at times. We all know what Oak brought to the table.”

Van Gundy wasn’t about to deny that. “When the ball’s driven into the paint,” he said, “when there’s a loose ball on the court, we have to make up for what was lost. So that’s the reason we bring up [Oakley’s] name. Charles would take charges. Charles would take loose balls, get the offensive rebound.

“As a coach, you start right away [to get over such a loss]. But, as a person, a little bit of me left when Charles left, just as a little bit of me left with John Starks.  Personally, it is very difficult for me to say goodbye to those two guys because of what they did for me and my career for all the time there were here.”

Camby, whom Van Gundy said “needed to be pushed and prodded” to approximate Oakley’s work rate, defended himself by praising Oakley while arguing that “I bring something else, moving up and down the court.” Van Gundy was moved to predict that center Patrick Ewing would have to compensate for Oakley’s bullying, hulking spirit by having “a career rebounding year.”

As it turned out, and this somehow magnifies the greater dysfunction surrounding the Knicks’ recent expulsion of Oakley, the ’99 Knicks persevered to the championship finals in that microwaved season. They were 21-21 with eight games to play, whereupon Grunfeld was fired, but somehow found last-minute magic in spite of crucial injuries. Sprewell became a model teammate, Camby developed into something of a star and Van Gundy combined a touch for exploiting matchups with an ability to convince all the players to buy into his system.

During the rousing playoff run—the Knicks’ last trip to the finals—there was what could now be interpreted as a spooky glimpse of things to come. Then-Garden president David Checketts denied rumors, then admitted, that he was angling to replace Van Gundy with a marquee name. Phil Jackson.

Eighteen years later: Jackson is in his third year as James Dolan’s personal choice to be team president. The Knicks are in the midst of another lost season. And Charles Oakley’s ghost has come back to torment the Knicks’ house.

 

Closing the door on an L.A. Olympics

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This is just a guess, but I’d say that any prospect Los Angeles had of staging the 2024 Olympics already has been stopped at the border by Donald Trump’s blindly intolerant (and thoroughly un-American) attempt at a Muslim travel ban. I base this, to some extent, on New York City’s failed bid for the 2012 Games, rolled out during the Bush administration’s war in Iraq when at least some International Olympic Committee voters couldn’t get past the idea of “giving the festival of peace to a nation of pre-emptive strikes.”

Post 9/11 and leading up to the 2005 vote to award the 2012 Olympics, President Bush—unlike Trump now—had declared that he was imposing no religious test with his foreign policy. But there already was an anti-diversity elephant in the room. And this time, it is much worse.

So, while there is no divining some IOC members’ allegiances and prejudices, others’ downright partisan governmental considerations and even others’ well-meaning conviction that they are the United Nations in Sneakers, it’s a safe bet that smuggling this grand embodiment of international respect and goodwill past Trump’s wall of xenophobic scorn simply does not compute.

On Feb. 3, L.A. officials met the International Olympic Committee’s formal bid deadline, throwing their hat into the ring with Paris and Budapest. The vote to determine the 2024 host city won’t come until the IOC’s September meeting in Lima, Peru. But already, in response to Trump targeting of seven Muslim-majority countries, Iran has uninvited American athletes to a world wrestling competition it is hosting this month. That is a dramatic reversal in U.S.-Iran relations in that sport, which have been exceptionally warm for years in spite of the lack of diplomatic ties between the countries. The U.S. Olympic Committee, furthermore, is bracing for disruptions in other international competitions as a result of Trump’s executive order.

Naturally, LA2024 bid chairman Casey Wasserman is trotting out the old argument that sports and politics don’t mix, that the “power of the [Olympic] movement…[is]…to unite the world through sport, not politics,” and that his group will be “judged on the merits of our bid, not on politics” by the IOC.

The L.A. proposal makes a point of highlighting that it is “a city full of creative energy and extraordinarily united—not separated—by its breathtaking cultural diversity.” But neither that, nor Trump’s recent radio appearance claiming he “would love to see the Olympics go to Los Angeles,” plays nearly as well as French prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve’s words, during a Paris bid press conference shortly after a man was caught wielding machetes at the Louvre, that his country prefers to “build bridges, not walls.”

L.A. mayor Eric Garcetti had warned last summer that if Trump were elected president, it could have a disastrous effect on his city’s Olympic chances. And, in a statement issued after Trump’s Jan. 27 announcement of his travel ban, Garcetti said such an action “only fans the flames of hatred that those who wish us harm seek to spread.”

Having covered the Games 11 times, I consider myself an Olympic patriot, with a belief in the possibilities of fellowship through global sport. The Games really do (at least temporarily) put small dents into nationalistic and cultural differences, even though so much about the event is thoroughly political, with all the flags and medal counts.

So I side with Olympic poohbahs who balk at rewarding the politics of exclusion. In the 2005 IOC vote for the 2012 Games, when New York City was one in a murderer’s row of seductive candidates alongside London, Paris, Madrid and Moscow, one of the boosts for eventual winner London was the support it had gotten from the Muslim Council of Britain, representing 400 Muslim organizations.

When that vote was taken in Singapore, British prime minister Tony Blair, French president Jacques Chirac and Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero all attended to schmooze with the IOC, but George W. Bush stayed away. Wisely, I’d say.

Now, the USOC is attempting to dance around the Trump us-against-everybody mindset by proclaiming that, “Like the United States, the Olympic Movement was founded based upon principles of diversity and inclusion, on opportunity and overcoming adversity. As the steward of the Olympic Movement in the United States, we embrace those values. We also acknowledge the difficult task of providing for safety and security of a nation. It is our sincere hope that the executive order as implemented will appropriately recognize the values on which our nation, as well as the Olympic Movement, were founded.”

Fat chance.

Or….

?

R.I.P. New York City Marathon’s Truman

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Might a person be more inclined to read the obituaries as he ages? If memory serves, comedian George Burns, not so long before he died at 100, said that when he got up every morning, he would check the newspaper’s obit page—and if his name wasn’t there, he’d have a cup of coffee and go about his day.

I’m not quite at that stage. But, more and more, I find the perusal of obituaries to be somehow uplifting—not because they report a death but because they celebrate a life.

That said, the exception to finding pleasure in reading such biographical material on the recently departed is when the obit is about someone I have known—especially if that someone was an admirable contemporary.

Allan Steinfeld died last week. Only 70, he was the victim of multiple systems atrophy, a neurological disease. His was not a bold-face name, which surely is why my former editors at Newsday took a pass on marking his death at all. But, in more than 30 years as the technical whiz behind staging the annual New York City Marathon, Steinfeld was heroic in directly serving more than a million of the event’s participants.

And good for the New York Times for recognizing Steinfeld with a 700-word eulogy in Wednesday’s paper.

Originally the right-hand man to flamboyant road-racing carnival barker Fred Lebow, who made marathoning irresistible street theater and sold running as a legitimate lifestyle, Steinfeld inherited Lebow’s title of race director when the latter died of brain cancer in 1994.

According to George Hirsch, chairman of the New York City Road Runners Club, which operates the marathon, the official transition to Steinfeld’s leadership was blessed by a dramatic scene shortly before Lebow’s death in which Lebow symbolically cast himself as marathoning’s FDR. “I was in Fred’s apartment,” Hirsch said. “By then, his voice was just a whisper. He was talking about Allan, and there were a lot of questions as to whether Allan was the right guy. I remember Fred pulled me close to him and said….. ‘Truman.’”

(fred lebow statue)

I last saw the event’s Truman in October of 2014, eight years after he retired and handed the race director’s job to Mary Wittenberg. Steinfeld was being inducted into the marathon’s hall of fame, without much fuss but with heartfelt praise from those who worked with him. “Allan was just the classic unsung hero,” Wittenberg told me. “He’s a behind-the-scenes person who likes it that way.”

He had been a high school math and physics teacher and already had been finding all the right pieces in the massive marathon jigsaw puzzle before Lebow gave him a fulltime assistant’s job in 1978 for $12,500. That was half of Steinfeld’s teaching salary, but he decided that operating road races was more fun, with the added bonus of not being required to wear a tie to work every day.

His mastery of timing, scoring, course management, finish-line design and tying together loose ends with computers brought countless, wild Lebow ideas to fruition. And calmly. “I tell the staff,” Steinfeld said, “that the marathon is enough to scare the hell out of you, so handle each detail as it comes, and don’t think about the big picture.”

He called the New York Marathon, which went from 2,000 entrants in 1976 to just under 40,000 by the time he left his post in 2006, the equivalent “a herd of elephants moving along. They’re not stampeding. But you can’t stop or turn them. You can only nudge them.”

He insisted that he was “the farthest thing from a jock. I was fast but I couldn’t catch. In baseball, as a kid, I was the last one chosen, if chosen at all. ‘Who wants Steinfeld?’ I couldn’t play stickball because I couldn’t catch.”

In fact, he was a varsity sprinter for New York’s City College and finished one of the two marathons he attempted in the 1970s. Born and raised in the Bronx, he claimed to have been “kicked out of two colleges”—Hunter College and Bronx Community College—“because I failed French, then failed Spanish.”

But he wound up with an electrical engineering degree from City and a master’s in radio astronomy from Cornell of the prestigious Ivy League. He was working on a doctorate at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, where he went to study the Northern Lights, when he was blinded in his left eye.

He had been wrapping an antenna wire on an Alaskan rooftop when struck by the antenna and suffered a detached retina. A series of operations failed to save the vision in that eye and, shortly after he succeeded Lebow as NYC Marathon director, Steinfeld was encouraged by a major race sponsor to wear an eye patch—“like the Hathaway Man”—as a way to give himself an identity apart from the colorful Lebow.

That didn’t last long. It wasn’t his style, either in terms of fashion or drawing attention to himself. But he deserved his due, even if his obituary came much too soon.