Always a retiring fellow

Leave a reply

Only very briefly did I have a front-row seat to Tim Duncan’s masterful 19-year NBA career, and only in his earliest days with the San Antonio Spurs. Duncan was 22 years old at the time, in his second pro season. He was then, as he remained until his retirement this week at 40, the antithesis of the clamorous NBA culture. Amid the sport’s garish theatricality—raucous crowds, deafening music, enabling acoustics—Duncan’s game was one of muted perfection.

The occasion was the 1999 championship finals against the New York Knicks. Because a labor dispute had delayed the start of the 1998-99 season until January of ’99—and because my Newsday editors had failed to replace our departed Knicks beat writer during the NBA owners’ lockout—I became a last-second stand-in to chronicle that abbreviated Knicks campaign.

That the Knicks wound up in the finals against the Spurs and Duncan was a most unlikely development. Through 42 games of the truncated 50-game schedule, hurriedly pieced together with the labor cease-fire, the gyroscopically challenged Knicks barely were able to maintain any equilibrium, slogging along with a shaky 21-21 record.

But they evolved into a spunky outfit at just the right time, the first No. 8 seed to ascend to the finals by shocking top conference seed Miami, sweeping Atlanta and knocking off Indiana. Along the way, they lost perennial all-star Patrick Ewing with a torn Achilles and arrived in San Antonio—the two teams had not met during the season—with former all-star Larry Johnson hobbling on a sprained knee.

The Spurs, meanwhile, were at a full gallop, about to set an NBA record of 12 consecutive post-season victories during the Knicks series. Steve Kerr, the former Chicago Bulls sharpshooter who now coaches the 2015 champion Golden State Warriors, was a role player on that San Antonio team. Avery Johnson, who spent five years as an NBA coach and now coaches the University of Alabama, was a vital Spurs factor who scored the championship-clinching basket with 47 seconds to play in Game 5. Imposing 7-foot-1 all-star David Robinson, who was late in his 14-year-career, was the Spurs inside force.

But the primary motor for San Antonio was Duncan, the high tide who lifted all teammates’ boats. Against the Knicks, Duncan scored 33, 25, 20, 28 and 31 points in the series. He took 16, 15, 12, 18 and 9 rebounds. He blocked shots, delivered assists and was the obvious final-round MVP—the first of three such honors in the five championships he eventually won with the Spurs.

Seldom has one player made so much noise. Yet so quietly. Throughout his career, Duncan betrayed so little emotion, on and off the court, that The Onion, the satirical news source, once posted the farcical headline: “Tim Duncan Hams It Up for Crowd by Arching Left Eyebrow Slightly.”

His was not a false humility. Pressed during that Knicks series whether he could see himself as a 6-11 point guard, since he seemed to play every other position effortlessly, Duncan acknowledged that he would be happy to try. And that he believed he would have an impact in that little man’s role.

But he never indicated any desire whatsoever to seek the spotlight. Instead of narcissistic showboating and self-promotion, instead of angry slam dunks and demonstrative chest-beating, Duncan was restrained eloquence. Turn-around jump shots banked gently off the glass. Spinning layups. Rebounds. Shtick-less efficiency.

It was typical that Duncan skipped the kind of season-long farewell tour Kobe Bryant embarked upon this past season and left his retirement announcement (without comment) to a Spurs press release.

(San Antonio River Walk)

He came to be Old Man River Walk, as much a landmark in San Antonio as the network of restaurants, bars and shops along the city’s eponymous waterway. Yet, just as his basketball home was not the definition of glamour, his style was not the sort that spread his name beyond hard-core fandom. My own informal poll has concluded that, while casual sports observers easily can identify Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony, they struggle to place this Tim Duncan fellow.

All those years ago, during the 1999 finals in which Duncan put the Knicks on the road to extinction (their last NBA finals appearance, by the way), his opponents and teammates offered reviews that never needed revising….

Knicks head coach Jeff Van Gundy: “Nobody on the planet can guard Duncan. [And on defense], he is the long arm of the law, does a great job of turning us into a jump-shooting team.”

Knicks forward Latrell Sprewell: “He is long, excellent with the ball, has a great touch for a big guy. We have to go back to the drawing board.”

Spurs teammate Mario Elie: “He just does his job, doesn’t complain, doesn’t bring attention to himself.”

Iceland’s soccer referendum on England: Leave

Leave a reply

Dateline LONDON.

Now does not appear to be England’s finest hour. Apart from the obvious—the so-called Brexit vote to pull Great Britain out of the European Union, rattling the world’s financial markets and unleashing political chaos within the United Kingdom—there is the matter of football. (Soccer, to us Colonists.)

England is the Motherland of Soccer, the sport’s original superpower, and Monday’s staggering upset loss in the European Championships to historically insignificant Iceland has contributed to a sense of England’s fading global influence. The 2-1 loss to Iceland, just days after filing for divorce from the E.U., loosed a soul-searching anguish in a nation so long convinced, as Shakespeare wrote, that it was “the envy of less happier lands.”

“Less happy” would be an understatement for England’s general mood right now. Prime Minister David Cameron is resigning, his opposition party has declared an overwhelming lack of confidence in its own leader, European bigwigs are taking a good-riddance stance on the Brexit vote….and the soccer loss is being cast as a “disgrace” and “pathetic failure.” “Stiff upper lip” does not appear to apply.

It happened that I arrived here for a brief holiday just in time to read the supremely self-assured pre-match analyses of the Iceland duel, with English fans—and especially English bettors—certain there was “no way,” an one pundit put it, “that a major footballing force like England should be losing to a country you could make disappear with a hairdryer in about four hours.”

Normally, I could work up a reasonable passion for England’s endeavors. This is a polite, civilized nation of diversity and gumption, the land of Churchill, the home of the Beatles, the team of David Beckham. But Iceland’s rollicking advance into the Championships’ knockout round, against all odds—coinciding with My Fellow Americans’ semifinal loss in Copa America—had moved me to declare a week ago that Iceland is my new favorite team.

When the big game arrived Monday evening, we were strolling through Leicester Square in search of theatre tickets, while pubs overflowed with fans straining for a glimpse of TV sets inside. That included a pair of policemen, who informed my wife—not too long after kickoff—that Iceland had a one-goal lead.

Iceland! The tiny Nordic island with more volcanoes than professional soccer players! The smallest nation ever to qualify for a major soccer tournament! My new favorite team!

For the last 20 minutes of action, my daughter and I strained for a glimpse over jostling patrons, beers in hand, on the fringes of Philomena’s Irish Sports Bar and Kitchen in the Holborn district. The end left muttering fans dispersing into the night, and the next morning’s papers raged at the players’ bewildering lack of offensive pressure and English goalie Joe Hart’s “huge blunders” after he had gotten only his fingers on the decisive goal.

English manager Roy Hodgson immediately fell on his sword, quitting in shame even faster than David Cameron had over the Brexit vote. There was much angst over England’s training deficiencies and the poor investments of the national soccer federation. “English coaching is rotten to the core,” one headline declared.

Even some of the art at the Tate Britain gallery seemed to address England’s current misery. But, too, this is the home of Monty Python, and The Times of London showed the good humor to run a large feature headlined, “So we all want to be Icelandic now, ja?” Because, the piece pointed out (among other things):

—The men are beefcakes (citing “Game of Thrones” bad guy Gregor Clegane, who is played by Icelander Hafthor Bjornsson)…

—They have magnificent beards…

—Iceland is the third happiest country in the world, according to a U.N. survey (behind Switzerland and Denmark. (Take that, Bill Shakespeare.)

—Plus, the Times writer added, “Did I mention they’re good at football?”

Ja, and that’s my new favorite team. But I’m not worried about England. Churchill said, “If you are going through hell, keep going.”

My new favorite team

Leave a reply

Iceland has become my default position in this Summer of Soccer. Now that My Fellow Americans have been eliminated from Copa America, thrashed by world No. 1 Argentina in that major tournament’s semifinals, Iceland’s compelling—shocking—advance into the knockout round of the European championships has my full attention and rooting interest.

This hardly is a renunciation of citizenship. And certainly not a dismissal of the Yanks’ decided progress over the past generation, from Third World to Emerging Nation to legitimate international presence in the sport. While countless pundits in my chosen field of sports journalism continue to dismiss U.S. proficiency and—especially—U.S. fan interest in soccer, the Americans in fact are one of only seven nations to qualify for the past seven World Cups. (Only global powers Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Italy and Spain—plus Far East regional force South Korea—have equaled that.)

Furthermore, there hardly was shame in the Yanks’ 4-0 loss in the Copa semis to Argentina and its Messi-merizing superstar, five-time world player-of-the-year Lionel Messi. Despite the embarrassing admission recently by New York talk radio blowhard Mike Francesa—who claims to speak for mainstream U.S. fans—that he and his listeners never had heard of Messi or Copa America, a sizeable chunk of the populace long ago came to realize that there are few displays in sports to equal the cool, lyrical expertise of Messi and his mates.

Still, I must move on. And what better spectator value than a classic case of unexpected overachievement against great odds and established potentates? The Washington Post precisely summed up matters with a headline labeling Iceland “your new favorite team.”

More than the team, which never had qualified for a major soccer tournament in 23 previous tries and has levitated more than 100 spots in the sport’s world rankings over the last three years, is the appealing mash-up of Iceland’s distinct culture, geography, language and people.

Of course it is ironic, as a native of the land that celebrates Christopher Columbus, to be discovering Iceland at this late date. Icelandic explorer Leif Eriksson found us first, 500 years before Columbus. Iceland also beat the United States to the punch by (at least) 36 years with a female head-of-state. In 1980, Vigdis Finnbogadottir became the world’s first democratically elected woman to the presidency, and served for 16 years.

Now, with its soccer team threatening to pass the Yanks in the world rankings—Iceland began the month No. 34, the U.S. No. 31—the only reasonable thing to do is get aboard the bandwagon and embrace an appreciation of the tiny Nordic Island, where everybody literally is known as someone’s son or daughter.

The traditional Icelandic system of naming children discards surnames with each generation. If I were Icelandic, for instance, I would not be John Jeansonne, taking my father’s family name, but John Fredsson—because my father’s given name was Fred. And my daughter would not be Jordan Jeansonne, but Jordan Johnsdottir. “John’s daughter.”

(The full name of Bjork—the singer-songwriter who possibly is the most widely known Icelander in the world—is Bjork Guomundsdottir.)

Isolated up there at the juncture of the Norwegian Sea and Atlantic Ocean, just south of the Arctic Circle, and 1,000 times smaller than the United States in population, Iceland is easily (and logically) overlooked. At least until its national team pulls the rug out from under Hungary, Portugal and Austria with two ties and a win on the big stage of the European championships. Then, we begin to notice that roughly 10,000 of its folks, among a population of 330,000, are merrily chanting and wearing Viking helmets in the crowd in suburban Paris, while the players put on an a stirring show.

The country is so tiny—60 U.S. cities have larger populations than all of Iceland—that Iceland defender Karl Arnason considered the crowd in France and estimated that “I know probably 50 percent of them. Or at least recognize them. It’s like having your family at the game.”

The Iceland fans are “Tolfan,” which translates to “Twelve.” As in the “12^th man” moniker famously adopted by U.S. football fans of the Seattle Seahawks and Texas A&M Aggies. Johann Olafur Sigurdsson, blogging for the Euro2016 Web site, declared upon Iceland’s conquest of Austria that “June 22 should be a national holiday from here on.” Exhibit A of that day’s outrageously unlikely success can be found on the Internet in the shrieking, enraptured (and unintelligible) reaction to Iceland’s last-second winning goal by Iceland broadcaster Guomundur (Gummi Ben) Benediktsson.

Tolfan refer affectionately to their players as Strakarnir Okkar—“Our Boys”—and American-born, Iceland-raised soccer pro Aron Johannsson recently offered a translation of the compliment “duglegur” that is being lavished on those Iceland lads.

“You know how, in the United States, you say ‘good job’ or ‘good boy’?” Johannsson was quoted. “In Iceland, we say, ‘Hard work! That was some hard work you did there!’” Duglegur!

At 8 p.m. Monday, local time in France, Iceland will play England—the nation that merely invented soccer—in Nice, for a ticket to the Euro quarterfinals. I’ve got to get hold of a Viking helmet to show some solidarity.

Playing the ponies (or vice versa)

Leave a reply

There is an old horseplayer joke that goes something like this: I bet on a horse at 10-to-one. He didn’t come in until quarter past two.

I was reminded of this—and other wagering wisdom imparted over the years—during a recent day at the races. “You take a dart,” one veteran patron of the betting windows once counseled, “and you throw it at the board.”

You blindfold yourself and try to pin the tail on the donkey.

But who doesn’t like a challenge? About once every year or two, my friend Tony and I venture to lovely Belmont Park—the green, almost rustic arboretum covering 430 acres on the edge of New York City—for an afternoon of idle chatter and the dare of channeling Nostradamus, with the full understanding that we are unlikely to become hundredaires. At best.

There is no point in affecting a hard-bitten railbird’s disguise by, say, not shaving and purchasing a big cigar. Or buying a Daily Racing Form to pore over the lineage of the steeds and the successes of various trainers and jockeys. None of that will help.

Over the course of six races last week, the only four-leaf clover I found was a nag named Warriors Diva, who paid a measly $3.80 on a $2 bet. One other choice, Dot Matrix, finished second. (The official race chart said that Dot Matrix “stalked the winner from the two path and proved no match.”) Another, Mean Season, came in third.

At least those “almosts” were better than One Nice Pal, who finished 10^th in a 12-horse field. (Official chart: “Chased the pace along the inside, forwardly placed under encouragement from three furlongs out, swung just off the inside for home. Folded.”) Among my other $2-to-win bets, Kettles On was fourth, Graceful Gal sixth, Singsong ninth. (Singsong also “folded”).

In fact, even before the racetrack bugler had played his little “Assembly” ditty for the first time, calling the horses to the post, Tony lost $3 on Preferred Parking and I parted with $3 on General Admission.

On one of my occasional thoroughbred racing assignments for Newsday over the years, a Belmont regular recited to me the gambler’s prayer: “Dear God, let me break even. I need the money.” He also recommended that the first question to put to a handicapper is, “What kind of car do you drive?”

Another teaching moment, about how the track is not a consequence-free zone, came years ago during an interview for a story about former Giants running back Joe Morrison who, at the time, was in the midst of his NCAA coach-of-the-year season at the University of South Carolina.

Among the musings of Morrison, who was a horse owner and racing fan on the side, was a recollection of his first trip to the track during his playing career. He had been invited to look into some mutuel windows with a service station owner he had befriended, and “the first time I went to the races with him,” Morrison said, “he threw his pocket change on the floor of the car just before we got ready to walk into the track. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘We have to make sure we have toll fare home.’”

When I was a mere proverbial knee-high sports journalist, dispatched to help with coverage of the Belmont Stakes, I was appalled to learn that there was a betting window right there in the press box. Naivete is not a sin, but I had assumed that fellow ink-stained wretches were too busy with their unbiased reporting on the races to indulge in an activity that required all-out rooting (quietly, be assured) for a particular result.

It turns out that thoroughbred reporters aspire to be thoroughbred reporters because they are as drawn to those windows as to the sport’s characters and story lines. I’ve come to accept that reality as an innocent enough way of hedging their bets: Get paid to write about the ponies, while engaging in what the Brits and Australians refer to as “punting skills.”

Nevertheless. I am only able to rationalize my participation in the gambling aspect of thoroughbred racing by retaining a rank amateur’s dread. Handicapper Harvey Pack used to tell neophytes that a horseplayer must be “confident and resilient. “ I would suggest “fearful.”

My proposal: Instead of having a race-track official on the other side of that window to accept your down payment on the great riches that theoretically will result from your powers of prediction, why not just have a small toilet in there? You put in your money and flush.

All of this is not to say that I can’t justify forfeiting around $20—always just $2 bets on eight to 10 races—as the price of entertainment for a day of occasional adrenaline rushes and the fellowship of disappointment.

But I know how my trip would come out in the unique prose of racing charts: The Dilettante started sluggishly, rushed up momentarily, briefly threatened but quickly came under pressure, wandered and fell back steadily. Folded.

King (Clinton?) vs. Riggs (Trump?)

Leave a reply

Here’s the sports analogy for what already is a theatrical, historic Presidential campaign: Billie Jean King as Hillary Clinton, Bobby Riggs as Donald Trump. A woman of substance and accomplishment vs. an attention-craving egotist considered by many folks to be a con artist. A female pioneer against what used to be known as a male chauvinist pig. With bad hair.

In 1973, King and Riggs played a tennis match, won by King, that was more about the so-called glass ceiling than a racket-and-ball contest. Because it paired the 29-year-old King, at the height of her career as a 12-time major-tournament champion, against a 55-year-old geezer whose last of three major titles was 32 years in the past, physiological comparisons of innate female/male strength and speed hardly applied.

More to the point was King’s symbolic intrusion into the Old Boys’ Club. In the circus-like buildup to their match, Riggs had been bluntly dismissive of women’s role in society as well as women’s tennis—at a time when the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution had passed both houses of Congress and was awaiting ratification by state legislatures.

So, beyond the promotional excesses of the King-Riggs “Battle of the Sexes,” which felt at times like a public leg-pulling exercise, the match in fact became a prominent piece in the real national struggle that was playing out over gender rights. And Riggs had no interest in assuming what the current presumptive Republican Presidential candidate repeatedly disdains as political correctness.

Riggs was a showboating hustler and gambler, reportedly with large debts and ties to the mob. Months before the King showdown, he had challenged Margaret Court—whose 24 major-tournament championships remain more than those won by the likes of Steffi Graf and Serena Williams—and easily defeated her in a best-of-three-sets exhibition.

Against King, then, polls—that, is, the betting odds—overwhelmingly favored the blustering Riggs to repeat his proxy proof of apparent male superiority. The King-Riggs match employed the men’s more demanding major-tournament format of best-of-five sets, but King needed only three for her decisive sweep. A triumph of competitive chops over empty braggadocio.

In the following day’s New York Times front-page account, Neil Amdur wrote that King “attacked with a professional cool” while Riggs “hit marshmallow shots, some of which went in….Most important perhaps for women everywhere, she convinced skeptics that a female athlete can survive pressure-filled situations and that men are as susceptible to nerves as women.”

In Sports Illustrated, Frank Deford wrote that King “has prominently affected the way 50 percent of society thinks and feels about itself….”

There were stories of secretaries marching into offices the next day and demanding raises, or announcing that their coffee-making days were over. King immediately was seen as a unifying leader in the fight for gender equity—far beyond tennis and sports in general—and a fire under the new federal law, Title IX, that prohibited sex discrimination in public schools.

Likely, the pre-match carnival barking (mostly by the hectoring, boastful Riggs) had helped entice more than 30,000 spectators to pay their way into the Houston Astrodome and an estimated 50 million Americans (and 90 million worldwide) to watch on television. Beyond the hyperbole, the happening itself clearly produced a broad significance. (Momentous enough that, 44 years later, there will be a biographical movie based on the match released in 2017.)

“Everybody knew it was a gimmick,” Donna Lopiano, one of the most influential figures in women’s sports, noted years later. “But, up to that moment, the women’s movement had played the fringes, with things like bra-burning. Because that was sports and a woman proved her athleticism, it struck at the heart of male dominance.”

King herself said recently, “I hated the term ‘Battle of the Sexes.’ When I was younger, I’d lose to guys on purpose. But I knew playing Bobby had huge social significance. I knew, athletically, it meant nothing. But to the world it meant everything, because it was on guys’ terms. That’s why it worked.

“The only attention women get is when we get in their arena.”

(Donald Trump)

(Bill and Hillary Clinton)

Four decades later, with his wife in the arena, one William Jefferson Clinton has a front-row seat to the 2016 political analogy that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has called “the most stark X vs. Y battle since Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.”

P.S. When Bill Clinton said, in 2009, that “she has probably done more than anyone in the world to empower women and educate men,” he was talking about Billie Jean King.

Ali’s (unintentional) boxing lesson

Leave a reply

Perhaps Muhammad Ali’s foremost talent, we have been reminded by the deservedly warm tributes following his death last week, was his ability to make folks uncomfortable. It is accepted fact: In the ring, he dispensed downright pain. From his platform as a global celebrity, he caused the establishment to squirm—most notably over its foot-dragging on civil rights and the prosecution of the ill-advised Vietnam War.

Most right-minded people eventually took his strong hints. But there is another piece to the Ali legacy, plenty disquieting, that society doesn’t appear especially eager to confront. That is, the savage ramifications of his sport—how the estimated 29,000 blows Ali absorbed slowly dimmed his lights over his last 30 years. Possibly the most vigorous, eloquent champ in boxing history was rendered listless and mum long before the end.

As a career sports journalist, I am keenly aware of boxing’s inherent drama, its deep well of vivid characters and compelling examples of the human condition. The sport has been a favorite topic for the best wordsmiths—Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, H.L. Mencken, Richard Wright, George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, on and on—by offering its primal contest inside the ropes and crazy carnival world outside them.

By any civilized standard, though, it is a ticking time bomb of physical and mental impairment, of glorifying cruelty for entertainment’s sake.

In the days of Friday Night Fights on fuzzy black-and-white television sets, 50 and 60 years ago, boxing felt like something of the Sweet Science it was billed to be. A demanding test of strategy, style, persistence. But in July of 1979, in Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico, just outside San Juan, I was covering the boxing competition in the Pan American Games when a boxer appeared to separate his opponent’s soul from his body. The “knockee”—as Lardner described a knockout victim in his short story, “Champion”—was left lying on his back, his head dangling over the ring apron, tongue hanging out and unmoving, like some chicken who had just had his neck rung.

It occurred to me then why I preferred sportswriting over war correspondence. I wasn’t interested in witnessing death. The poor fellow—I can’t remember his name or country—was soon revived, but in the relatively few times I was assigned to cover boxing (both amateur and professional fights) over the years, I was reminded of the barbaric geometry of fitting roundhouse punches into a square ring. Accompanied, on almost every occasion, by fevered, howling spectators thrilled to see a man administer a lullaby to his opponent with his fists.

There always was a hint of ancient Rome, when the original gladiators entertained the public by engaging in mortal combat. Fight nights are a festival of adrenaline, a celebration of testosterone, with so many “manly-art” clichés. Bow-tied referees suggest a courtliness; women in underwear and high heels, prancing around the ring to announce the number of the upcoming round, communicate a stag party.

My last boxing assignment for Newsday was at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center in March 2013, during which a welterweight named Keith Thurman gave macho voice to his “love for putting people to sleep,” and the main event featured 46-year-old Bernard Hopkins as the poster boy of prizefighting persistence at a time of growing concern in all sports over traumatic head injury. (Pick your adjective for Hopkins: Maturation? Dotage? Seniority? Everlast? Senility?)

Hopkins retained his world light heavyweight title that night, his blows thudding off opponent Tavoris Cloud as loudly and forcefully as hockey pucks striking a goalie’s pads, and declared himself “an inspiration” to young kids.

There was much bleeding in all of the evening’s six bouts—and surely unseen internal damage inflicted—while the crowd called for more of the same. Public demand, after all, was what allowed organizers of the first Madison Square Garden fight, in 1882, to skirt laws at the time against prizefighting by calling their enterprise, featuring John L. Sullivan, “an illustrated lecture on pugilism.”

In 2014, the Health Research Funding web site released a murderers’ row of chilling statistics: That 90 percent of boxers will experience at least one brain injury during their career; that the force of a professional boxer’s fist is equivalent to being hit with a 13-pound bowling ball traveling 20 miles per hour; that studies found, at any given time, as many as 40 percent of ex-boxers had symptoms of chronic brain injury.

During Ali’s heyday, an appealing aspect to his fighting, though brutal by definition, was that it somehow seemed civilized. Athletic. Flamboyant. More like a magic show than an alley brawl. But his long, slow decline with Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder believed to have some relation to head trauma, should insist that we face some inconvenient truths.

The singular goal of boxing is to leave an opponent with little imaginary birds twirling over his head. There is, unmistakably, fortitude required of the sport’s one-on-one dual—and Ali’s mettle in the ring has been justifiably hailed—but wasn’t his real impact on society his moral courage? And wasn’t his brain a terrible thing to waste?

Low down hockey

1 Reply

The generally accepted belief is that John Brophy, who died last week at 83, was the personification of hockey’s roughhousing minor-league culture. And that the Brophy experience was faithfully depicted in the zany 1977 movie Slap Shot by modeling its aging career bush-leaguer Reggie Dunlop (played by Paul Newman) on Brophy.

No argument here. Especially since I had gotten a pretty good picture of the unfashionable, hardscrabble, traveling-circus low-minor leagues during a week-long, 1,500-mile bus trip with the Long Island Ducks in 1971. Our poor man’s magic carpet was a rickety old conveyance, retrofitted with bunks in the rear half. The players existed on fast-food stops, beer, Tums and cheap motels.

It happens that the irascible Brophy spent 18 years in that setting, half of that time with the Ducks, though he had just been traded—at 37—to the Eastern Hockey League’s Jersey franchise before I was assigned by Newsday to chronicle the team’s slog to EHL outposts in Charlotte, Greensboro and Johnstown, Pa.

That was the season before the NHL’s expansion Islanders materialized, so that East of Manhattan’s Rangers, the Ducks were the only professional (sort of) hockey outfit. They took their name from one of the Island’s oldest and most prominent industries; though now gone mostly bust, the production of Long Island ducks was an abundant blessing to restaurant chefs for decades.

What better fit those teams—and their rag-tag, underdog league—is the image of actual ducks, however calm they appear above the surface, working furiously underwater, out of sight.

My ’71 adventure, right from the start, took on the feel of a John Steinbeck short story, with a theme of fate and oppression, of downtrodden protagonists. It began in the parking lot of the Ducks’ home arena, a long-since demolished old barn, dark and drafty, in Commack, N.Y., on an early November Sunday morning at 10:30. (An hour late, because the bus wouldn’t start.)

The bus had been painted by a 16-year-old Ducks fan in the team colors of red, white and black, suggestive of a carnival wagon to Lorne Rombough, a 23-year-old Ducks forward, who recommended, “It should have pipes with music and balloons coming out of the top.”

Once in Charlotte, the team was departing its motel for practice, with players hanging out of the windows, when the back door of the bus swung open, scattering hockey sticks and other equipment in the road. Ducks publicist John O’Reilly, who also served as radio play-by-play man, was reminded of a TV sitcom about blundering U.S. soldiers in the Wild West. “We look like F Troop,” he said.

Rombough, whose half-season with the Greensboro team the year before theoretically qualified him to give bus driver Bill Smith directions to the two Carolina arenas, twice got the Ducks lost. On both occasions, there was a call from within the bus to team captain Butch Morris, a ninth-year league veteran: “Yeh, Butch. Get up here by the driver. We’re lost.”

Morris came to the rescue, while Rombough’s more accurate contributions were related to the spectator behavior the Ducks could expect. When he and his former Greensboro mates played at Charlotte, Rombough said, “The players on both teams used to stand back and watch the fans fight.”

During a game in Commack two weeks earlier, Charlotte’s Mike Rouleau had bashed Ducks goalie Guy DeNoncourt over the head with his stick, knocking out DeNoncourt and sidelining Rouleau with a three-game suspension. According to Morris, “Once Rouleau was suspended, he was just sitting in the stands throwing hockey pucks at the players.” And days after the incident, O’Reilly received a Halloween card signed by a Charlotte fan: “We are anxiously awaiting your arrival with chairs in hand.”

Still, the Ducks, in a league embodied by the fiery, bombastic Brophy, soldiered on. “You can’t make a career of this league,” said Morris, who was 28 at the time and said he was able to keep playing because he made more money as a steel worker in the off season (just as Brophy had sustained himself).

“Sometimes you get really low, after a couple of losses or a bad road trip,” Morris said. “But you snap out of it. Everybody in this league plays because he likes it. Because, let’s face it, the league doesn’t have much to offer. It’s a chance to move up. But how many players move up?

“It’s more of a hobby, really. If I were traded away from Long Island, where my other job is, I probably would quit hockey. I don’t’ know for sure, but I’d have to think seriously….”

Among the more introspective of those Ducks was Cornell (Corky) DeGraauw, a 20-year-old Dutch-born forward who had settled in the Toronto area and, just graduated from the Canadian Junior League, was married with an 18-month-old daughter.

“I can put up with this because I want to play hockey,” DeGraauw said one morning over breakfast. “I think most of the guys are disappointed to be here. They have been kept from higher leagues and they think they should be playing somewhere better than this.”

Nevertheless, DeGraauw decided, “On the bottom of the contract, it says, ‘P.S. The owner may void this with 48 hours’ notice.’ Let’s see. We have lost two straight games and that figures out to just about 48 hours. I’m glad to be here.”

DeGraauw’s quirky take on the travel situation was that “flying is OK, because it’s nice to look down at the ground that you’ve always seen before on maps, and see that there really isn’t a big red line which separates Canada and the U.S. But the bus…well, I like the card games, anyway.”

On the bus, beyond the handful of card players, team comedian Jean-Marie Nicol amused himself by tying the shoestrings of napping teammates to the seat chair legs, or threatening to sing when coach Ed Stankiewicz sought relief from general racket by turning off the radio. Michel Letourneau, a diminutive 20-year-old French Canadian who did not speak English, spent the entire trip quietly observing his surroundings, wide-eyed. “The guy is from the North Pole, where all the bears are white,” DeGraauw teased Letourneau, who in fact hailed from a small Quebec town at roughly the same latitude as Minnesota’s northern border.

Some veterans chose to pass the time by giving free haircuts to rookies, an act of hazing not exactly welcomed by the haze-ees. In the Charlotte game, Rombough lost a tooth and forward Bill Morris (no relation to Butch) needed three stitches near his right eye. Defenseman Phil Persia, proud of his prowess at fisticuffs, badly bruised a knee.

There were regional difficulties, too, for all those Canadian lads crossing the Mason-Dixon Line (on-sides?) for the first time. DeNoncourt, attempting to order a Coca Cola, was presented with a Mountain Dew. DeGraauw insisted he “knew better than to order Today’s Special.” Dan Tremblay, a 20-year-old from Manitoba, declared the mild weather unfit. “It has to be 10 below to play hockey,” he said.

Butch Morris, meanwhile, not only attended to on-ice duties, dealing with hockey’s curious version of Roberts Rules or Order—the eye-for-and-eye, punch-and-counterpunch aggressiveness—but also was something of a shepherd to teammates. When there was poor service at a restaurant along the interstate, Morris assumed the role of waiter, serving coffee to fellow players. When team trainer Bill Lumley fell ill at the end of the trip, Morris was the fellow who added the duty of skate-sharpener.

He was no John Brophy, the white-haired menace whose 3,840 career penalty minutes were 3,663 more than Morris’ total. “The best thing that ever happened to that guy,” Morris said of Brophy, “was that he was prematurely gray.” Morris’ rather crooked smile and slightly scarred face hardly were unique in the EHL, nothing nearly as dramatic as Brophy’s scraps with players, opposing fans and security guards.

But maybe I should have taken better notes on that trip, which was a metaphor for the sport’s penalty box if there ever was one, and thought in terms of a movie script. Sin Bin?

Name that horse

Leave a reply

What’s more challenging in thoroughbred racing? Winning the Triple Crown?—which will not happen for the 37^th time in 38 years after Exaggerator upset previously unbeaten Nyquist in last week’s Preakness. Or coming up with a good name for your horse?—one already not among the roughly 450,000 registered with the Jockey Club.

There are all sorts of rules in this game. No using names currently on the Jockey Club’s “permanent” list, which not only covers winners of races in the Triple Crown series but also famous horses in popular culture. There will never be another Secretariat or American Pharoah. Or Black Beauty. Or Silver. Or Trigger.

Names of living persons are allowed only with written permission from that person. (Nyquist owner J. Paul Reddam, a Detroit Red Wings hockey fan, had to work that out with the two-legged Wings’ forward Gustav Nyquist.) There can be no names with clear commercial significance, and the name must be limited to 18 characters—including spaces between words. (In the case of a horse named Twitter, the thoroughbred’s christening in 1992 preceded the creation of the social networking service by 14 years.)

Also verboten are names that are suggestive or vulgar, in poor taste or offensive to specific groups. (It must be noted that a few risqué monikers have slipped by the name police, the less racy among them being Boxers or Briefs and Hoochiecoochiemama.)

The man currently in charge of monitoring, approving and recording thoroughbred handles is Jockey Club registrar Rick Bailey, who has come to appreciate the creativity involved in using sly puns, nutty combinations, references to the horse’s pedigree or to present-day doings.

The 1990s sit-com “Seinfeld,” proclaimed by TV Guide to be the greatest television series of all time—and still in reruns—has inspired racing steeds to be dubbed Serenity Now, Yada Yada Yada, No Soup for You, Hello Newman and Low Talker, among others. The controversial presidential election of 2000 brought a flood of names such as Dangling Chad, Electoral College and Florida Recount. When news broke in 2008 that New York governor Eliot Spitzer had been a customer of a high-priced prostitution ring, a colt was named Luv Gov.

Not surprisingly, the wider world of sports regularly is mined, so there are thoroughbreds called Three Pointer and Slam Dunk, Hat Trick, Home Run, Touchdown. Also, playing on marquee athletes without appropriating their full names, there is an A Rod, an Eli and a Peyton. And a Le Brown James.

So let’s say you have $110,000 to spare, the amount it cost to buy Exaggerator at the yearling sale, and you’re looking for a good name. Something catchy and memorable, perhaps with an inside joke attached. (The story is that Exaggerator’s trainer, Keith Desormeaux, described his girlfriend and assistant, Julie Clark, as someone who stretches the truth a bit. And followed through on informing her, “Julie, I’m going to name a horse after you.”)

Maybe you could go for a name that speaks to the racehorse’s lot in life, along the lines of the 27 names in use that start with the word Galloping or Gallopin’ or Gallop’n. So: Trotsky? (Sorry, taken in 2006). Meal ticket? (Already on reserve with the Jockey Club.) Don’t Look Back? (Gone in 2010). Long Shot? (On the permanent list.) Wishful Thinking? (Claimed in 2009.)

OK. Another source of potential names could be songs dealing with the Sport of Kings.

I’ve got the horse right here

His name is Paul Revere

….from the tune Fugue for Tinhorns in the 1955 Broadway Show “Guys and Dolls.” Alas, Paul Revere is on the Jockey Club’s permanent list. Two other horses are mentioned in the ditty, but Valentine was taken in 2013 and Epitaph scooped up in 2009.

The Race Is On, a 1964 country hit by George Jones, presents possibilities in mimicking a track announcer’s race call to detail romantic relationships….

Now the race is on

And here comes Pride down the backstretch,

Heartache’s goin’ to the inside,

My Tears are holdin’ back,

They’re tryin’ not to fall.

My Heart’s out of the runnin’

True Love’s scratched for another’s sake.

The race is on and it looks like Heartache

And the winner loses all.

Sure enough, though, Pride was accepted by the Jockey Club in 2006, Heartache in 2014, True Love in 1993. That does leave My Tears and My Heart.

Meanwhile, It occurs that, given the big money at stake in the sport, Cash Cow would be a blue-ribbon name for a thoroughbred. (Such a winner, in fact, that it was taken in 2010.) Well, then, Go To Guy. (Claimed the same year.) Or Money in the Bank. (2000).

What about sobriquets that address racing’s tendency toward excitement and surprise? Zoot Alors. (On the books since 1975). Perhaps the Anglicized version of that expression: Holy Smoke. (Gone in 2008).

The Jockey Club is allowed to “release” a name for re-use after a horse reaches the age of 11 and has not raced or not been bred during the previous five years. In 2009, for instance, the name President Hillary was released. (And is still available as the 2016 campaign heats up.)

A less political approach seems safer. Something like Magic Carpet Ride. Dog and Pony Show. Eat My Dust.

Let’s say I have $110,000 to spare—now that’s Wishful Thinking—and am inclined to name my imaginary horse friend with a nod to my almost half-century in the journalism business. Since Suddenbreakingnews (fourth in this year’s Derby and signed up for the Belmont Stakes) already is on the Jockey Club registry, along with Headliner, Wordsmith and Rewrite, even Laptop Computer, I might have to settle for Inkstained Wretch.

Olympic wear and tear

Leave a reply

In cataloguing past Olympic experiences, I am now willing to air my dirty laundry.

I simply ask the reader to concede that circumstances can provoke transgressions. To cover the Games, as I did for Newsday on 11 occasions, requires a stay in the Olympic host city of roughly three weeks while the international pageant plays out. That demands a considerable supply of raiment. Unless, of course, one avails oneself of the resident cleaning service.

Which I decided to do halfway through the 1984 Los Angeles Games, primarily because I was running short on clean undergarments. And here’s the vulgar denouement: The articles of clothing returned to my room a day later clearly were not mine. Wrong size, wrong color and, frankly, not perceptively clean.

Given my low threshold of revulsion, I abandoned the box of skeevy skivvies and settled on recycling what I had. And never again entrusted the locals with any of my wearables. It is the better part of valor to tote an extra suitcase to distant Olympic venues, packing enough clothes to last the duration.

In every sense, the trick to surviving these long-running shows is preparation. Beyond the specifics of the job—being armed with prior reporting to compensate for limited access to the Games’ principals, plotting adjustments to the Globe’s time zones—there is the matter of appropriate attire.

Jere Longman of the New York Times was among the few who used to go about his business at the Winter Olympics (impressively) in suit and tie. But his chores were conducted almost exclusively indoors—figure skating and so on. For those of us who had to mix in a turn on the ski slope, the bobsled run or the opening and closing ceremonies, a less formal—and more reasonable—answer to possible hypothermia necessitated an array of layered paraphernalia. Long johns, jeans, ski pants, sweater, ski jacket, wool hat, gloves.

During the bus ride to one event during the 1994 Lillehammer Games, played out in the snowy, 10-degree elements, I was topping off my bundling exercise by sneaking hand-warmers into my boots and gloves when a native Norwegian, working as an Olympic volunteer, sussed me out as a wimpy foreigner. “That’s cheating,” he said. Not in an unkind way.

The only thing to do is swallow one’s pride and carry on in as much comfort as possible. My friend Jay Weiner, who covered multiple Olympics for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, always was a model of sober pragmatism—and to hell with fashion.

For the Winter Games, he had this Elmer Fudd hat, with big flaps to cover the ears. During the typical confusion of bus rides and long days, carting around laptops, reference guides and other necessities, Jay’s hat went missing at the 1998 Nagano Olympics. Until he got a call on his cell phone from a Games volunteer: “Mr. Weiner. We have your hat.”

The Japanese were so vigilant to their service culture that there were regular communications to harried, distracted visiting reporters regarding the retrieval of credit cards and other misplaced articles, large and small. In the cafeteria of the main press center, there were little lost-and-found boxes by the cash registers, containing coins as insignificant as one-yen pieces (worth about 8/10^th of an American penny) waiting to be claimed.

A second time, Jay misplaced his hat, and a second time Japanese volunteers rescued it.

Weiner, by the way, was so meticulous in his comprehensive strategizing for international sports competitions that, prior to the 1991 Pan American Games in Cuba, he ordered “special tropical shirts” he was convinced would keep him cool in the Caribbean heat of August. L.L. Bean still sells those shirts, claiming they are “top rated for breezy comfort and colorful patterns…in extra-soft and breathable cotton [that] keeps you cool on the hottest days.”

The afternoon of opening ceremonies in Havana, reporters were herded into a large, airless room—stifling hot, with bludgeoning humidity—for the better part of an hour for some sort of security clearance. Eventually all exited, thoroughly soaked in perspiration. Weiner and his tropical shirt included.

Nothing to hyperventilate over, though. There are some Olympic attire anecdotes to lift the spirits, such as during the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul, when word spread that visitors could find grand bargains in the city’s Itaewon district, known for tailors producing custom-made suits. One brief fitting session and a return days later for the finished product, and a Mr. Sol had sold me a fine garment for approximately one-third the cost I would have paid at home. That suit lasted 20 years.

But, too, I have a clothes tale hinting at dastardly gamesmanship. During the 2006 Turin Winter Games, I was availed of what trash talk sounds like in the sport of curling, the apparently civilized competition resembling shuffleboard on ice.

American curler Maureen Brunt revealed that a curler might attempt to unsettle an opponent by casting aspersions, sotto voce, during the mostly quiet action. According to Brunt, “You might say, ‘Hey, she has lint on her pants.’ Or, ‘Her mittens are shedding.’ It throws her off from concentrating.”

Now, that is airing dirty laundry.

He outlived Hofstra football

Leave a reply

It was just last week that one of my Hofstra University journalism students, for his final paper of the semester, wrote a lament of the school’s 2009 decision to disband its football team. “A Lost Program Gone But Not Forgotten,” he called it.

And now comes the news that a central figure in both Hofstra and Hofstra football history is gone as well: James Shuart, dead at 85.

By the time Shuart retired after 25 years as University president in 2001, he had come to be a sort of Father Hofstra. He had Dutch roots, like the school itself. He had earned both his undergraduate and master’s degrees at Hofstra. He had been one of the first 12 football players to receive a Hofstra athletic scholarship and was a member of the original Hofstra lacrosse team.

He had returned to his alma mater to work as admissions officer, faculty member, dean and vice president before assuming the presidency in 1976, at a time when the university was struggling financially. During his tenure, Hofstra increased enrollment, expanded academic offerings and library holdings, initiated presidential conferences, became the first private university campus in the nation to be fully accessible to the physically challenged, moved its athletic department into top-tier Division I and founded the school of communications—where I now work after 44 years as a reporter for Long Island’s Newsday.

The year after Shuart retired, the football stadium was renamed in his honor. James M. Shuart Stadium still stands, but in 2004, the school’s athletic nickname was changed, from Flying Dutchmen to Pride, and in 2009 Shuart’s successor, Stuart Rabinowitz, did away with intercollegiate football for fiscal reasons.

I am the first to acknowledge that, in the reality-based world of 21^st Century college sports, it is difficult to rationalize the expense of fielding a football team at a small private school. Enormous costs for insurance, equipment and staff are virtually impossible to offset when there is none of the rabid spectator following or the massive television-fueled revenues of thoroughly professional powers such as Alabama or Ohio State.

Furthermore, it is not impossible to be a top-flight institution of higher education without a football team.

But it was sad to see the Dutch label ditched. Hofstra takes its name from William Hofstra, an early 1900s Long Island lumber magnate of Dutch heritage upon whose land the university is built. And Shuart told me, during a long interview shortly before he retired, how his surname “really is from the Dutch ‘Sjoerd,’ which means ‘George’ and was used as a last name when Napoleon insisted that people had to have last names. I’m one-quarter Dutch; one of my grandparents allegedly was Dutch.”

When the teams were called the Dutchmen, Hofstra dressed a coed in a Dutch-girl costume as a mascot, complete with wooden shoes, and called her Katie Hofstra—after William’s wife. (Hofstra still holds an annual spring Dutch Festival to showcase a campus flooded with tulips—another Shuart initiative.)

More to the point, Shuart epitomized the sound mind, sound body ideal in college, a “student-athlete” before the term was coined by the NCAA as a brand to rationalize the recruitment of jocks whose primary purpose was to win games and boost the salaries and resumes of coaches and athletic directors.

Shuart, a history major, was captain of the 1952 Hofstra football team his senior year, when Hofstra lost only one of nine games. That loss was to Alfred, when an Alfred punt took an odd bounce, glanced off a Hofstra blocker and afforded Alfred the fumble recovery that set up the winning score.

“We were so upset,” Shuart recalled. “Young men—20, 21 years old—tears streaming down our faces.” Hofstra’s coach then was Howdy Myers, who in 1950—Shuart’s sophomore year—had started the school’s lacrosse operation.

“He called his first meeting of the football players that February,” Shuart said, “and handed us gloves, a helmet with wires and sticks. He said, ‘Gentlemen, this is lacrosse.’ That was his spring training.”

As president and after his retirement, Shuart remained a passionate Hofstra football fan until the sport was dropped, a fixture at the team’s home games long before the stadium assumed his name. For years, a Jim Shuart Football Scholarship went to one of the school’s players.

In 1999, when Hofstra advanced to the Division 1-AA football playoffs before losing to Illinois State, a star of the team was Long Island native Kahmal Roy, a sophomore wide receiver who had been granted one of those Jim Shuart scholarships.

“They never threw the ball to me when I played,” said Shuart, who had been an interior lineman. “But when Kahmal scores a touchdown….oh, man!”