Some light on the subject

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“Strong winds and rain today and tomorrow,” the local energy company texted this week. “We’re ready. Report an outage.”

This brought a shrug, mostly. Until I went to fire up the coffee maker and realized that having electricity may not be a basic need in life, but is most certainly a luxury. Then reached into the refrigerator for cold milk to go with the breakfast Cheerios. And plugged in the toaster.

The morning shower, a good hot one to counter the nine-degree wind-chill outside, was just completed. Hearing aids extracted, full strength, from their overnight charger. Clean plates, utensils, glasses and pots retrieved from the dishwasher’s hands-free chore.

A person can have only glancing familiarity with the science of energy—currents, power, amperes, coulombs, farads, ohms—to be confronted, upon having the lights go out and so many other indispensable devices inoperative, with a sudden reminder of electricity’s place in one’s routine.

I remember being smote by a total blackout when Super Storm Sandy hit these environs in 2012, rendering 11 days of cold and darkness to our homestead. Quite a shock, if I can use that term for a voltage-free jolt. A feeling of overwhelming powerlessness.

In such a situation the smite-ee finds himself without juice for the bedside lamp, laptop, cellphone, landline, oven, TV, radio, washing machine, dryer, paper shredder, dehumidifier, microwave, laptop printer, wall clocks, garage-door opener, water-pump system….(In the summertime, there is the additional denial of a sprinkler system, power trimmer, ceiling fans and air conditioner.)

For a few days, it is relatively easy to survive a power outage, which is usually all that most of us must endure. So the general advice is to keep flashlights handy. Avoid opening the refrigerator and freezer to keep things cold. Use a battery-powered radio. Cook on an outdoor grill. It’s just camping out, really.

On a small scale, I learned via the Internet, enough electricity to power small LED lights can be generated by employing a hamster running on its little wheel attached to a generator. (If you have a hamster. Anyway, for the existence that most of us have become accustomed to, it would demand a lot of hamsters.) A person’s own vigorous exercise reportedly can produce up to 30 watts with a half-hour of continual pedaling on a generator, though that would require maintaining a heart rate up to 120 beats or so; better be in reasonable shape.

Then, of course, venturing away from home means dealing with stoplights and other conveniences—necessities, really—that have blown a figurative fuse. A real glimpse of 19th Century existence, before Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla got figurative lightbulbs over their heads—bright ideas which eventually led to the grid becoming a dear friend.

You like movies? Concerts? Broadway shows? Commuter train and subway transportation around the Big City? Shopping in clean, well-lighted places with check-out computers that are operative? In 2024, U.S. electric consumption totaled roughly four trillion kilowatt hours, about 14 times greater than the figure from 70 years earlier.

To be from the generation whose parents had gotten through the Depression is to have heard constant reminders to “turn out the lights when you leave a room.” There’s a joke about the old fellow who was dying and looked around his bed, wanting to be assured that all his family members were in the room—each of his children, his wife, aunt and uncle and close cousins. Each query brought a reassuring “yes.”

“All here?” he confirmed. “Then why is the light on in the kitchen?”

In a way, that energy company text sent out during the recent high winds was saying: Take nothing for granted.

Bread and circuses

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Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. Especially if you are a Roman from, say, the 14th Century and therefore still favoring the system of counting that uses letters to represent values—as opposed to how everybody else does math. You know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5….

This is not to bury the National Football League for its self-important employment of Roman numerals; it obviously is a blatant strategy to add grandeur to its annual Super Bowl, and no other organization does exaggeration better. But it is a reminder not to accept the league’s early arguments that Roman numerals were meant to avoid confusion over staging the championship game in the year following its regular season. The contention is that the title decided in February 2025 was the culmination of competition that commenced in the early September of 2024, so instead of “Super Bowl 2024,” it was “Super Bowl LIX.”

Note that the NBA, NHL and college basketball are among the major sports whose seasons overlap calendar years, without the need to gussy up their championship games with ancient lettering normally limited to showy landmarks such as Britain’s Big Ben clock. (And to World Wars.)

Anyway, what is the clarity in reporting that Denver defeated Atlanta in Super Bowl XXXIII? When was that? (Hint, there was partying later that year like it was MCMXCIX.)

If the purpose, as once suggested, is to liken the Super Bowl to virile do-or-die contests featuring Roman gladiators—some modern version of the old Christians vs. Lions battles in the Roman Colosseum—then might the NFL stick to its bilingual form and have calculated Sunday’s final score as XL-XXII?

The use of Roman numerals in fact is directly connected to Fox network having paraded Tom Brady into its Super Bowl broadcast booth. Not because Brady’s rookie season in that role could guarantee much to offer in terms of analysis or insight—“As Game Analyst,” a New York Times headline declared, “Brady’s Performance Is a Lot Like Kansas City’s” 18-point loss. Brady, who quarterbacked more Super Bowl winners (seven) than anyone else, instead “was brought in,” the article noted, “to make everything feel bigger….”

Yes, Major League Baseball went around claiming its post-season championship game was the “World Series” for 66 years before the league at last included a non-U.S. team (Montreal in 1969), and still has had only one team from outside the States (Toronto in 1992 and ’93) that could come close to claiming itself “world champion.” (More accurately, North American champion.)

So NFL marketers felt—and this was stated clearly in the past—that it deserved to righteously put the Super Bowl above all other sports extravaganzas, and one way to so brand it was with something as exotic as those Roman numerals—which weren’t in fact adopted until Super Bowl V (5).

It happens that the generally indecipherable use of a system at least 700 years old has run into translation issues along the way. In 2016—MMXVI, on your Roman calendar—the NFL chose to avoid presenting a “Super Bowl L.” There reportedly were 73 versions of an “L” logo to be attached to that game, until someone among the league tub-thumpers realized that an “L” in football was shorthand for “loss.” So that game was presented as “Super Bowl 50.” Pronounced “fifty.”

Close attention to the just-concluded title game revealed that English-speaking commentators repeatedly referred to it clearly as “Super Bowl 59.” As opposed to the grandiose NFL graphics relentlessly labelling it “Super Bowl LIX.” (Pronounced, one would assume, as “El-Eye-Ex”? Or “Licks”?)

In the end, the event remains America’s most popular form of escapist entertainment, the Great American Spectacle. It is the Great American Conversation Piece. The Great American Timeout (maybe even more so now, in the midst of political division).

The Super Bowl’s exalted position in our national culture can be explained, at least partially, by the phenomenon that hot air rises; this Great American Sideshow is inflated. Its scale is exaggerated; the Great American Fish Story.

And really not Roman at all.

It’s only geography

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Does it say anything about a person’s character or beliefs if that person happens to hail from the same home state as the individual who ascends to the Oval Office? People love to generalize about regions and ethnicities, but if a President comes from the same neck of the woods as you do, does that somehow imply anything about you?

In 1977, the humorist Roy Blount Jr. wrote an amusing book whose premise, essentially, suggested that fellow Georgian Jimmy Carter’s Presidential victory could provide Blount a sense of vindication, an antidote to the cliché of Deep South racism and Confederacy.

“I come from people who have been blithely called rednecks, Crackers, white trash, Snopeses, and peckerwoods, people who have been put down from without and within,” Blount wrote in “Crackers.”

“You may not realize,” he wrote, “what a rousing moment it was for me, ethnically, when Daddy King stood up there in Madison Square Garden in 1976 at the behest of a by-God-country white Southerner and led all the states in singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ A Southern Baptist simple-talking peanut-warehousing grit-eating ‘Eyetalian’-saying Cracker had gotten the strongest and most nearly leftward party to nominate him for President. Of the United States…”

The book is typical Blount, occasionally absurd, with plenty of puns, silly country song lyrics and signature Blount wisecracks. There’s a whole chapter on Jimmy’s smile, another on “Being From Georgia” and “Trash No More,” with repeated, sly rejections of the rest of the nation’s perception of Blount’s people based on their accents and occupations. Comedic stuff that really is serious.

So now, applying this non-relationship in reverse, we have this fellow from New York assuming (and relishing) power over the less advantaged. A by-golly born-to-money, the-rules-don’t-apply-to-me, anti-intellectual, morally suspect nefarious prevaricator who wants everybody off his lawn. Is this (borderline) human being a New York prototype? Could his behavior, in any way, be considered standard in the nation’s largest and widest-known city?

I am, sort of, a New Yorker. Not a native, but a resident of The Big Town—and mostly its suburban environs—for more than a half century. And I will not countenance any hint that there is a Trump gene dominant in the local populace.

This hardly dismisses conventional depictions of New Yorkers. Pushy, blunt, impatient. New York has its imperfections—New Yorkers themselves are quick to confirm that—but, come on. New York is the very realization of diversity, equity and inclusion. You can’t walk a block without bumping into someone completely unlike yourself—and, more often than not, not the least bit contrary.

New Yorkers—surrounded by dozens of immigrant sub-communities, coming face-to-face with all kinds of people from all kinds of places on a daily basis—generally are open-minded, live-and-let-live citizens. Busy, yes; and quite demanding. You got a problem with that?

I’m in the camp of former New York Times superstar journalist George Vecsey, who grew up blocks from the family of one Donald J. Trump in the New York borough of Queens and, a couple of years ago, posted an essay on his website headlined “Please Don’t Blame Queens for Trump.”

Vecsey cited the vast ethnic and professional variety of his neighbors and friends while reminding that, “in the big picture, nobody is typical of Queens”—a truism, really, for any city or state. Or country. He marvelled that “somehow the lumpen masses of Queens County…are still being connected with the disturbed, amoral thug who has terrorized the U.S. and the world since 2016.”

That self-styled emperor doesn’t want to exist among the hoi polloi, wherever he finds himself. He wants to exist in an exclusive golf club, a gated community, a gilded mansion. And give orders.

Of the Presidents during my lifetime, who were closely identified with the home states of my youth—California and Texas—none especially embodied the presumed lifestyle of his state’s citizens—and certainly not mine. George W. Bush, born in Connecticut but raised in the Texas, did embrace the he-man cowboy thing, and I once bought one of those jokey Republic of Texas passports sold at the Dallas airport that reinforced such an archetype. Two bits of personal data on that (worthless) document already were filled in. Height: 6-foot-2. Sex: Yes.

Lyndon Johnson was in most ways very Texan but, like Carter, his stance on civil rights put him at odds with many white Southerners. The other Texas President, George H.W. Bush, always came across as a New England elite—hardly a Texas trait—and neither of California’s Presidents brought to mind a beach boy or hippie model (Nixon!?!?). Though Reagan was, well, an actor who demonstrated an ability to remember his lines.

What’s the validity, though, of painting folks with the same brush of as their home-grown President, or vice versa? “The thing is,” Blount wrote in “Crackers” of his fellow Georgians, “we’re very strong in the field of condescension-avoidance when we’ve got a Georgia President, because a Georgian hasn’t got any real business condescending to anybody.”

News flash!

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For a while now—OK, for years—the bimonthly magazine AARP has been arriving in my mailbox. But surely it was meant for my father. (I’m a Junior, after all; same name.) And, since opening another person’s mail is a federal crime, that periodical—it targets old people, no?—went right into the circular file. Never looked inside.

Until just now (and I’ll get to that).

Humorist Bill Geist, I read somewhere, described his original post-marked greeting from AARP—at 50, everyone becomes eligible for membership—as receiving the most feared piece of mail that a person can get since the end of the Vietnam War draft and the arrest of the Unabomber. (Ask your grandmother.)

Not that there aren’t plenty of other hints when one is inexorably approaching geezerhood. Being addressed as “sir.” Having to ask one’s wife to identify those people winning movie and music awards on television. Checking the calendar for this month’s doctor’s appointments (plural).

It’s just that hearing from AARP seems an announcement that you’ve really turned the corner. You’re a fossil. A museum piece. Possibly in need of a phone call from the governor.

To look on the bright side, though, I have now lived a couple of years longer than both Albert Einstein and John Updike did; 11 years longer than George Washington; 17 more than Hemingway and 36 more than Elvis. If I hang on, I could pass Mahatma Gandhi later this year (not that I have a vote on that). With life expectancy in the United States having crept above 78, I’m beginning to play with house money.

Well, then. Let’s have a look at that magazine.

The cover story for the December/January issue is on actress Michelle Yeoh. (Have to admit the name didn’t ring a bell, though my wife provided an ID on Yeoh and her key roles.) There is a related piece on “Movies for Grownups,” and that too was informative because the films cited were mostly news to me. I have heard about one of the pics noted, about Bob Dylan—”A Complete Unknown.” It’s on my to-do list.

And I lately have become aware of movies and books featuring what might be defined as “elderly” protagonists, including the entertaining Netflix series, “A Man on the Inside,” with Ted Danson playing a retired professor hired by a private investigator to go under cover in a San Francisco retirement home.

Coming soon to Netflix is a show based on British author Richard Osman’s 2020 novel “The Thursday Murder Club,” about a group of pensioners who set about solving a case at their luxurious retirement village. That’s the first of three Murder Club books and, in a rare instance of Keeping Up, I’ve read all three. (Again, tipped by my wife.)

The latest AARP mag, by the way, quotes a D.C. neurologist’s recommendation for –ahem, “mature” folks—to read a novel, because he says fiction “is a challenge to your working memory,” requiring one to follow a plot and keep track of characters. Nonfiction, he said, isn’t so helpful, allowing the reader to skip around and skim.

Some more of my AARP current-issue discoveries: There is a fun interview of Danny DeVito; health tips on keeping limber in icy weather; money-saver ideas that financial ignoramuses like me could use (if I could pay attention to the subject for the first time in my life); an article on aging survivors of mass shootings; suggested travel destinations “for older Americans;” and the predictable ads—for hearing aids, cruises, life insurance. And one for a “safe walk-in tub.” (There’s a new trick for an old dog.)

All in all, it’s a publication I shouldn’t have been ignoring all this time. As someone who made a living as a journalist, I appreciate AARP’s tailored reporting and fact-checking, the bits of revelatory insight.

Also, its endurance: It’s 67 years old.

Clairvoyance

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Know the unknown, hear the unheard, see the unseen.

Does such an authoritative forecast on the little paper tag of my tea bag qualify as wisdom? Philosophical guidance? Or something between a fortune-cookie proclamation and the daily horoscope?

Here’s another one: The brightness of your being is generated from within. A light-bulb moment? Or a vision that gives a vague (and uneasy) sense of being radioactive? Are these bits meant to be taken seriously?

Let’s think about this. It is pretty clear that humans have an inclination toward prognostication, welcoming any hint about what’s around the next corner. People want to know the future, to feel a sense of control, prepare for coming events, reduce anxiety. In my small world—a career in sports journalism—there exists a relentless hunger to prophesy winners, much of that motivated by the betting culture. And mostly doomed to failure.

As that grand baseball character Yogi Berra once said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Back to those little tea bags, produced by the Yogi Tea company (no relation), which was established 41 years ago by a yoga instructor. In Oregon. Not in China, as is so often assumed. Fortune cookies—though certainly a staple of Chinese restaurants—also originated elsewhere, reportedly in Japan, and were first popularized by Japanese immigrants in the United States, likely first served in 1908 at the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

As with tea-bag quotes, standard fortune-cookie perception is something like “Do not be afraid of competition.” Or “An exciting opportunity lies ahead of you.” “You love peace.” “You always will be surrounded by true friends.” Goofy humor is a rarity, though there was a case citing this declaration inside a fortune cookie: “Help I’m being held prisoner in a Chinese bakery.”

And then we have horoscopes, similarly purporting to provide insight, to some extent, into one’s destiny. There are prophesies of love, career and more—supposedly based on an individual’s character and philosophical traits—via a system which reaches ‘way back to the Babylonians’ deciphering astrological signs.

(Full disclosure: This rumination is being rendered in Babylon. Not that one, though; this on Long Island, N.Y., where airplanes and drones muddle any nighttime attempts to study the planets and stars.)

The thing about horoscopes, it says here, is how much they hedge their bets: Some examples from a recent day fudged their predictions thusly: “Someone close to you could change their mind, or your feelings might shift.” And “You might be able to show off your star power where you can mingle with people from diverse professional backgrounds.” And “Gatherings of friends could fulfill your desire for social contact.” And “Becoming a success could require you to exert more effort. Daydreaming might help you pinpoint exactly what you want.”

Could. Might. Hard to know in advance, no?

Anyway, there could be various shades of dedication to these things. An essayist on the website masslive.com, professes a “dislike for the usual horoscope,” yet acknowledges a “tender loving relationship with the fortune cookie and other random words of wisdom found on the tabs of tea bags….”

From thisibelieve.org, meanwhile, there is an absolute conviction that “fortune cookies speak the truth….contain some of the most profound messages to strike your brain since they told you bread could be sliced and the sky was blue. [Fortune cookies] hold the secrets of the world.”

Hocus pocus? It shouldn’t require an out-and-out cynic to at least apply an ample dose of skepticism to these forms of counsel. (From a tea bag tag: “The heart sees deeper than the eye.” Hmmm?) Consider the late John Prine’s song regarding the typical newspaper advice-to-the-lovelorn columns—just variations on tea bags and fortune cookies and horoscopes, really. Prine put to music how he imagined Dear Abby responding to an anxious soul:

You have no complaint/You are what you are and you ain’t what you ain’t.                                           So listen up, Buster/And listen up good.                                                                                                      Stop wishing for bad luck and knocking on wood.

Words to live by?

R.I.P. Student-athlete

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The student-athlete, an oxymoronic term in big-time college football employed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association to justify its thoroughly professional operation as “amateur” sport, has died under the weight of hypocrisy. It was 70 years old.

The concept had been suffering mightily for years, its impeding demise hastened by the 2021 Supreme Court decision against the NCAA that opened the door for star players to regularly bank massive payouts via “name/image/likeness” contracts. A notable nail in the coffin was the April decision by the Heisman Trust to return former USC running back Reggie Bush’s 2005 Heisman Trophy, based on the belated conclusion that “student-athlete compensation” had become “an accepted practice and appears here to stay.”

Bush’s award had been rescinded based on his family having received gifts in violation of NCAA “amateur” policies, but the current realities include the six-year-old “transfer portals” that transformed top players into free agents who are allowed to move from school-to-school in search of those six-figure NIL deals and as many as six years of college eligibility.

Just in the month of December, more than 3,000 football players had entered the transfer portal, aware that NIL compensation for quarterbacks ranges from $500,000 to $800,000; for offensive and defensive linemen up to $500,000; for running backs and wide receivers up to $300,000.

Colleges—rather, their athletic departments—now establish so-called “collectives” that pool resources to secure lucrative deals to entice players. (The University of Texas set a standard there, disclosing $20.8 million in agreements to compensate its athletes from July 2021 to July 2024.)

Not a healthy thing for the NCAA branding that was meant to maintain the organization’s hold on free labor to generate its riches. For the just-expanded football playoffs, those riches include $7.8 billion in exclusive rights purchased by ESPN through 2031.

Sick? Nick Saban—who as the University of Alabama coach, benefitted mightily at the rate of more than $10 million a year in the NCAA’s lucrative football system—recently pronounced (ironically) “the student-athlete is dead. The school is not important anymore because [players are] going to get paid….Nobody talks about the college experience anymore. Nobody talks about graduation.”

The student-athlete appears to have been birthed—or, at least, formally adopted—by Walter Byers, the NCAA’s first executive director, in office from 1951 to 1988, who promoted the jargon by insisting that “those playing for NCAA colleges have to be students at their schools. They aren’t hired gladiators.”

History would take issue with that statement. As former Notre Dame and Kansas City Chiefs gridder Michael Oriard wrote in his 2001 book, “King Football,” college football was haunted since the 1890s by “the need to recruit top athletes, irrespective of their academic soundness, all the while maintaining a fundamental fiction that college football players where student amateurs despite their participation in a multimillion-dollar business…. ‘Ringers’ and ‘tramp athletes’ began appearing on college campuses in the 1880s, often staying only through the football season before returning to whatever employment occupied them the rest of the year.”

George Gipp, the early college football legend—Notre Dame’s first All-American who was portrayed in a schmaltzy film by Ronald Reagan that recounted coach Knute Rockne’s “Win one for the Gipper” speech—was suspended in 1920 for missing too many classes and frequenting off-limits establishments. He was reinstated only after other schools bid for his football services. In two of his five years at Notre Dame, he did not receive any grades.

By 1998, the stability of the student-athlete label was in rapid decline, when Ithaca College sports media professor Ellen Staurowsky co-authored “College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA Amateur Myth.” By then, even Byers had reversed field a bit, telling Sports Illustrated that higher education likely could not “stand the strain of big-time intercollegiate athletics and maintain its integrity.”

Staurowsky suggested splitting revenue-generating sports from the educational process, saying that football players still could go to classes if they chose to, but university athletic departments should lose the role of promoters and brokers of athletic talent and mass sports entertainment.

“Maybe it makes sense,” New York City law professor Marc Edelman wondered a decade ago—still before NIL and transfer portals appeared—“if schools have to sell off their sports programs” to create a firewall between sports and academics. “Maybe there should be a football program that wears blue and maize and plays out of Ann Arbor and is separate from the University of Michigan.”

Might that be a solution for those hired gladiators who could dabble in a college education on the side—if they had the energy and the time? As former Notre Dame quarterback Brady Quinn recently told ESPN, “between practice and then NIL responsibilities for marketing [and] so forth; where does school even come into it? Like, where does it come into play?”

With no logical means of resuscitation, the student-athlete’s only survivors appear to be at the Division III level. Or playing women’s water polo.

The Truth

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Pete Seeger

Check out this little ditty from 1992—words by Calvin Trillin, put to music by Pete Seeger. (It says here that it may not feel overdue, or even especially outdated, 32 years later.) Listen:

When something in my history is found
Which contradicts the views that I propound
Or shows that I perhaps am not the guy I claim to be,
Here’s what I usually do.

I lie.
I simply, boldly falsify.
I look the other feller in the eye
And just deny, deny, deny.
I lie.

Seeger, whose decades of folk singing and songwriting trafficked in social activism—agitating for international disarmament, civil rights, workers’ rights and environmental causes—latched onto that pithy poem by Trillin, the celebrated journalist and humorist who for years has served as The Nation’s “Deadline Poet,” regularly penning rhymes on current issues.

The piece cited here was titled “The Ross Perot Guide to Answering Embarrassing Questions,” sizing up the Texas billionaire who twice ran for President (in 1992 and ’96) and who reportedly used such tactics as forcing his campaign’s volunteers to sign loyalty oaths.

Hmmm.

Trillin, now 89, still contributes relevant analyses to such prestigious publications as The New Yorker and The Nation. Seeger died in 2014 at 94. Second verse:

I don t apologize. Not me. Instead
I say I never said the things I said
Nor did the things some people saw me do
When confronted by some things they know are true.

I lie.
I simply, boldly falsify.
I look the other feller in the eye
And just deny, deny, deny.
I lie.

A 1992 Newsweek story had described Perot as “a supersalesman for whom the beauty of the deal is more important than the accuracy of the words used to close it. “

Another echo there, no? The beauty of the deal (the art of the deal).

At the time, Perot didn’t exactly release a firehose of constant and public prevarications, which seems to have been a winning strategy of 2024, but there are some commonalities that can’t be avoided. Newsweek declared then that what “protects and enhances Perot…is TV. In the talk-show format he favors, nailing a candidate for lying is next to impossible….On the ABC News town meeting, for instance, Perot, denying much involvement in a Fort Worth airport project, told Peter Jennings: ‘I never once came to Fort Worth to lobby. Rest my case. Call the mayor tomorrow and check it out.’

“When ABC News called the mayor the next day to check it out, the mayor said that Perot (as well as his son) had indeed lobbied him in Fort Worth. For months, Newsweek and others have reported that Perot hadn’t been candid about his role in this project.”

Here’s more from that old Newsweek report which now seems so familiar: “That’s one of the paradoxes of television: appearing honest is more important on TV than actually being honest.”

This sort of thing, journalism vs. A Prominent Public Figure, recalls the Thomas Jefferson quote that, if he had to choose between “a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Back to you, Calvin and Pete:

I hate those weasel words some slickies use
To blur their past or muddy up their views
Not me. I’m blunt. One thing that makes me great
Is that I’ll never dodge nor obfuscate.

I lie.
I simply boldly falsify.
I look the other feller in the eye
And just deny, deny, deny.
I lie.

Just happened to hear a recording of Seeger warbling that tune the other day. Sung in the same key as…well, I think you know.

Mentor? Svengali?

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Yes, I knew Bela Karolyi. For 25 years the Olympics, which was grand central to Karolyi’s gymnastics kingdom, were among my beats at Newsday. No, I wasn’t aware then of the odious sexual predator Larry Nassar, found to have molested female athletes while working as a team physician at Karolyi’s training center in Texas and at Michigan State University.

Did Karolyi and his wife (and coaching partner) Martha know what Nassar was up to? And, though not as damnable, did Bela’s open endorsement of the Darwinian model—pushing his young charges, almost all of them still in their teens, to their physical and psychological limits—border on abuse?

“They cannot slow down,” he insisted, “or the little ones coming behind them will swallow them up like they’ve never been there.”

There were mothers of his gymnasts who considered his system to be cruel, other parents (and most of his star students) who praised his “caring” approach even as he demanded perfection.

So it’s complicated. When he died last week at 82, all the plusses and minuses naturally made it into his obituary. But here’s the first thing that came to mind with the news of his passing: Puppies.

Leading up to the 1988 Seoul Olympics, I was assigned to spend time at Karolyi’s Houston gym and his ranch/training center in the East Texas forest an hour-and-a-half away. Having coached the previous two all-around champions in the most visible Olympic sport—Nadia Comaneci from his native Romania and Mary Lou Retton upon his defection to the United States—Karolyi had become People Magazine material, a bold-faced name.

He was 6-foot-2, an imposing, stern middle-aged figure with a gruff Eastern European accent and bad-guy mustache who dispensed bear hugs as well as strict orders. A sort of dictator who trained little girls, these wee critters conditioned to obey his every command. Puppies.

Which conjured up this story he told on himself in ‘88: Upon defecting from Communist Romania in 1981, he spoke Romanian, Hungarian, German, Russian, “a little French and sign language,” but no English. He and Martha had landed at a cheap Long Beach, Calif., hotel where he was cleaning the hotel restaurant by night to pay for his room and working the docks of the Long Beach harbor by day. At the harbor, he regularly heard fellow laborers exclaim, “Son of a bitch.”

“I am wondering,” he said, “what is this ‘son of a bitch?’ After a week is over, my wife is getting a little pocket dictionary and we are looking in there for it, but I couldn’t find ‘son of a bitch.’ So I find ‘son:’ Son of somebody. Okay, that’s good. And then ‘bitch.’ Female dog. Good, okay. So ‘son of a bitch,’ that’s a puppy. That’s not bad. That’s nice.”

Six months later, working in Norman, Okla., as a camp gymnastics instructor—he had been hired by Paul Ziert, a gymnastics coach he had befriended during international competitions—“the only thing I’m thinking nice to say to the kids is ‘good little son of a bitch,’” Karolyi said. “’That’s a nice little son of a bitch.’ And I’m patting them and being nice to them trying to encourage them and the kids eyes are big. And some are laughing, looking at me, and some are just staring.

“One day Paul heard me and explained to me: ‘It’s not a puppy.’”

And that immigrant’s tale of awkward assimilation was just one aspect of Karolyi’s embodiment of American clichés.

Raised in a Communist country, he became a prototypical capitalist. On the 53 acres he came to own in the Texas forest, he built 11 log cabins to accommodate 140 young gymnasts. There was a basketball court, tennis court, swimming pool, running track and a lake stocked with catfish, bass and sunfish; he had 12 horses, 30 head of cattle, a turkey, a peacock, a Watusi bull named Gorbachev “because he’s ugly;’’ a Texas longhorn steer, goats, pet deer, sheep, chickens and 18 hunting dogs.

He had pulled himself up by the bootstraps. Just out of high school in Romania, he had taken a job at a slaughterhouse, lived in the dorm at the local stadium, trained as a hammer thrower, rugby player and team handball player and took up boxing because his slaughterhouse boss was the national boxing coach, and the fellow who convinced Karolyi that “life is a fight. You make your life, you make your chances.”

Team handball was Karolyi’s ticket to a college scholarship, which led to a job teaching physical education to elementary students. He set up a gymnastics school for children in the town of Onesti, where a local girl—4 at the time—happened to join. That was Comaneci.

He was an advocate of rugged individualism. “It’s not the system,” he said of arguments that the old Soviet and East German sports operations were superior to democratic ones. “I’m not a political person. When people tell me these American kids won’t work hard, they’re lazy, all that; that’s a lousy lie. They’s not lazy. They’re just as excited and willing as the Romanian kids. It’s always, ‘You’re a athlete! It’s a challenge! It’s a great challenge!’ You should be able to say, ‘I’m a proud American but the athletic achievement is mine.’

“An athlete, she is the one who owns it because she put up the sacrifice, fighting like a lion. Some say, ‘Copy the Soviet system.’ That would be the ultimate disaster. That would kill the athletic achievement [in America]. All these guys saying, ‘I did it for the Communist system, the Communist system made me what I am’…Then you go throw up in the bathroom.” He dismissed sports administrators as “all these barking dogs. These people who only bark but don’t have the results.”

In that thick Transylvanian accent, he spoke Texan. (“Gol-LEE!”) He listened to country music constantly. He went to livestock auctions. He had a photo of John Wayne on the wall of his ranch house. “For me,” he said, “somebody without a country, to identify myself—‘I’m from Texas’—it’s good . You can say ‘Texas’ and that’s enough. It’s my country.”

Revolting fans

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OK, so the attempt by two New York Yankees fans to rip a baseball from the glove of Dodgers’ outfielder Mookie Betts during recent World Series action wouldn’t qualify as a rackable offense. Betts wasn’t injured in the process, the umpire immediately ruled Betts had secured an out and the two miscreants were summarily thrown out the stadium.

But it did feel like the latest example of anarchy in America. An almost proud dismissal of law-and-order. One of those fans—both were dressed to the nines in Yankee attire, apparently convinced they belonged on the team roster—bragged to an ESPN reporter that their actions were premeditated: “If it’s in our area, we’re going to ‘D’ up. Someone defends, someone knocks the ball. We talk about it. We’re willing to do this.”

The incident unfolded along the outfield wall in foul territory. Betts made a leaping catch on his side of the wall; he stayed in his lane. The fans, from their front-row seats, reached into the field of play, a clear case of “fan interference,” as described by Major League Baseball. One grabbed Betts’ wrist as the other pried the ball loose—two unlicensed practitioners of professional sport.

An obvious violation of spectator etiquette, no? But this sort of thing seems to be going around in the land: You do what you can get away with. Ignore red lights. Cheat on a school assignment. Cook the books and plead not guilty.

The occasion was just baseball (though sports prides itself on fairness, the ideal of a level playing field). And there were reminders of similar spectator entanglements during post-season games.

In 1996 at Yankee Stadium, a 12-year-old boy named Jeffrey Maier reached over the outfield wall to catch a ball headed his way and deflected it into the stands, which was ruled a home run for Yankee Derek Jeter. Baltimore outfielder Tony Tarasco, standing under Maier at the wall, appeared capable of catching the ball for an out, but the Yanks went on to a victory and ultimately the championship.

More famously, in 2003, Chicago Cubs fan Steve Bartman reached above the Wrigley Field outfield wall in foul ground and deflected a ball that Cubs outfielder Moises Alou seemed poised to catch. Maier inadvertently had benefited the home team; Bartman helped doom the Cubs’ title hopes.

But both of those were spur-of-the-exciting-moment reactions, hopes of corralling a souvenir, neither calculated to molest a player’s effort to record an out or to influence the game’s result. Neither Maier nor Bartman came anywhere close to grabbing a player’s arm or glove.

So here’s the thing. Though there was no injury to Betts, and therefore no case for assault charges against the Yankee blockheads, a New York criminal defense attorney named Martin D. Kane posted on his website that those fans nevertheless may have been in violation of New York penal code section 240.26: “A person is guilty of harassment in the second degree when, with intent to harass, annoy or alarm another person: 1. He or she strikes, shoves, kicks or otherwise subjects such other person to physical contact, or attempts or threatens to do the same….”

A conviction for harassment in the second degree, Kane wrote, “is a violation, not a crime, so it would not ultimately appear on a criminal record. However, it can result in up to 15 days in jail and the requirement to perform community service.”

Furthermore, Kane wrote, since the fans acknowledged that they had gamed out how they “would ‘D’ up” in such a situation, an injury to Betts “would have opened them both up to the greater charge of assault in the second degree, which carries a minimum sentence of two years in prison, and potentially up to seven.”

As an interesting P.S. to an informal poll taken by The Athletic—which found 62 percent of respondents suggesting a lifetime ban for the two fans, 18.2 percent for 1-5 years; 17.4 for one year and only 2.4 percent for no further punishment—a majority of students in my Hofstra University sports journalism class endorsed throwing the bums out for an extended period.

Fan behavior studies have indicated that, since the marketing of replica team jerseys to fans was cranked up in the 1980s, there has been a decided increase in spectators convinced they can affect the outcome of their heroes’ games. Too many fans think they literally are part of the team and act upon that.

But maybe those Yankee-attired knuckleheads reminded that we need to keep the jokes separate from the jocks; that all the action ought to be on the field, and the fans ought to play by the most admirable trait in sports. Which is poise—to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs.

Ole!

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Tennis might not realize what it will miss most about Rafael Nadal now that he has announced his retirement following the November Davis Cup finals. Beyond his barely comprehensible success—22 major tournament titles (second all-time among men) in spite of chronic injury; beyond his delightful rivalry with Roger Federer that somehow never included a head-to-head match at the U.S. Open; beyond the early quirky beachcomber pants and sleeveless shirts and ongoing OCD attention to assuring his refreshment bottles were precisely placed courtside, there was a Nadal humility and respect rare among elite champions.

After a shocking early upset loss at the 2015 U.S. Open to journeyman Italian Fabio Fognini, Nadal’s analysis was typical, simply acknowledging that Fognini “played great. It was not a match that I lost, even if I had opportunities. It’s a match that he wins. So, accept. Not happy that he played better than me, but that’s what happened. That’s it.”

As his career began to wind down and he stalked Federer’s then-record 20 Grand Slam tournaments championships, Nadal was both philosophical and reasonable. “As I always say to you and is true: I would love to be the one to have more, yes. But you cannot be all day frustrated, or all day thinking about what’s your neighbor have better than you. You have to be happy with yourself. You have to do your way. If you are the one to achieve more, fantastic. If not, at least I give my best during all of my career. That’s all.”

Head-to-head, he eventually came out ahead of Federer, 24-16, though Novak Djokovic—the third of the 21st Century’s Big Three in men’s tennis—has passed them both with 24 major titles. But what made Nadal so appealing was his commitment to the moment, rather than history. He always was a one-point-at-a-time, one stroke-at-a-time player, and his disposition never changed.

He surpassed $60 million in career earnings, yet old champion Jimmy Connors once noted how “Nadal plays like he’s broke.”

There was a menace in his tennis, a dastardly persistence enhanced by a forehand groundstroke that could make your top spin. John Yandell, who for years used high-speed cameras to study tennis-ball rotation, pinpointed how it took “about a second for Rafa’s ball to get to [his opponent’s] strings. From .85 to 1.2 seconds. In that time, the ball turns over 50 to 60 times”—which worked out to between 3,000 and 3,600 revolutions per minute.

“It’s hard to believe that could actually be true,” But the topspin it produced was so severe that the ball “surged up from Nadal’s toes, more of an arc,” Yandell analyzed, “heavier but just as fast….If you look at his big bolo swing…my hypothesis is he’s increasing the sidespin as well” so that opponents were forced to strike the ball “at shoulder level or higher at times, and they may be a foot off the ground when they hit it….The full effect of the spin destroys your contact point.”

And still the fascinating dichotomy was how Nadal’s charging-bull-at-Pamplona playing style—goring opponents competitively and psychologically—didn’t jive with his declaration that he was having such a great time. “I love the sport like a spectator,” he often said. “So to have a chance to go on court in big stadiums that I saw on the TV when I was a kid always is really special for me.”

Each match, each point, Nadal said, was “not about experience, not about pressure or any of that stuff. It’s always about playing well. That’s it.”

There was a lot to appreciate about Nadal, who turned pro as a teen and played the tour for 23 years. (In 2017, South African veteran Kevin Anderson, then 31, made it to the U.S. Open final only to be thrashed by Nadal and said to him, “I know we’re the same age, but I fell I’ve been watching you my whole life.”)

Nadal had hip surgery, tendinitis in both knees; wrist, back, forearm, elbow, ankle and foot maladies as well as an abdominal tear that forced him out of a Wimbledon semifinal—and still made it to 38 with a high-intensity physical style. If his body hadn’t reached the moment where, as he put it, “raises a white flag,” he said he would have carried on. “Even though your head wants to keep going, your body says this is as far as it goes.”

It’s what has been described as the “little death” that awaits all athletes, long before they will shuffle off this mortal coil. But, boy, it was fun while it lasted. And not just for Nadal. That’s it.