This business will self-destruct in…..

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So the suicide watch for newspapers goes on. The New York Times is shutting down its sports section and the Los Angeles Times essentially is doing the same, transitioning away from game stories and team beat coverage to a so-called “magazine” format.

It’s just sports, yes. But as Mark McDonald, one of the countless accomplished ink-stained wretches I have known during a half-century of sportswriting, asked in a Facebook post, “How can you credibly call yourself a first-rate newspaper if you have no Sports section, no baseball standings, no NFL schedule, no Final Four bracket?”

So it’s only sports, and many a condescending newsside reporter has dismissed those of us on the fun-and-games beat as futzing around in the “toy department.” But, to paraphrase the French-born American historian Jacques Barzun, who in the 1950s specifically cited baseball, “whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn” its sports. Because everything in our culture is there in the sports pages: Fair play, competitiveness, illegal drugs, big business, gender equity, race, obsessive attention to celebrity, entertainment, escape.

Yet somehow the New York Times, though sticking with its famous “All The News That’s Fit to Print” slogan, won’t include a sports section anymore, off-loading sports coverage to The Athletic website it purchased last year. George Vecsey, among the most eloquent in a long line of former Times columnists, wrote on his website that the paper’s readers “feel there is a hole in their lives.”

Former sports columnist Mark Whicker, in a post on The Morning After, noted that “once those connections [to the sports section] are severed, fans just walk away. They don’t tell newspapers they are leaving. They’re just gone.

“It’s just another chapter,” he wrote, “in the way newspapers have innovated their way into obsolescence and irrelevance.”

This is a program that was already in progress, of course. Between 2019 and mid-2022, an average of two U.S. newspapers disappeared every week, and a Northwestern University study has estimated that, over the next two years, a third of the nation’s papers will cease to exist.

At Long Island’s Newsday, where I enjoyed full-time employment as a sports reporter for 44 years and continue to do some freelance work, circulation has plummeted from around 600,000 at the start of the century to roughly 97,000 now. Newsday still prints a sports section, but it no longer staffs the Olympics, World Cup soccer, major golf tournaments, Wimbledon tennis, college bowl games or far-flung NCAA basketball tournament games.

The drastic loss of advertising in the digital age has hollowed out budgets that used to support reporters’ travel to teams’ away games. And impossibly early deadlines—so many papers have dispensed with their own printing presses and outsourced that job—leave the likes of Newsday always a full day behind  with final scores and other sports-related information. Radio, television and on-line bulletins—if not nearly as in-depth, analytical or evocative as on-site print reporting has been—is immediate.

And the less a sports staff gives readers, the fewer readers they have.

As a business decision, Tom Jones of the media research organization Poynter reminded that the Times is a union shop and The Athletic is not; so, while the 40 or so members of the Times sports staff reportedly are to be moved to other departments, the shuttering of sports could be a workaround: No need to fire anybody in anticipation that some will leave voluntarily.

Which sounds like another nail in the newspaper coffin. “Media news,” Bruce Arthur wrote in the Toronto Star, “has long been like climate-change news in that there is a lot of it, but very little that doesn’t feel like the first or second reel of a disaster movie.”

From here, it just feels like there won’t be any more sportswriting heroes—from such celebrated names as Frank Deford or Dan Jenkins, Roy Blount Jr. or Robert Lipsyte, Dave Anderson or Roger Angell, to the parade of committed, talented colleagues and fellow travelers who inspired and challenged me.

As Deford put it in his 2012 memoir, “Over Time,” in 50 years “no one will appreciate what sportswriting was really like at its apogee. I fear all you’d know would be blogs and/or statistics—the pole dancing of sports journalism.”

Sure, there’ll be ESPN. But that doesn’t give you elaborate storytelling, the kind of crafted writing that makes you feel you were at the game and had insight into the participants. As Deford wrote, with ESPN “there’s no poetry in its soul.”

I wish I were as optimistic as Dave Kindred, another giant in the business, who responded to the Times news with: “We shall Quixote on, always have, putting words in print, wherever we can, however we can, from cave walls to Substack to whatever’s next.”

Cave walls. There’s an image of how modern newspaper executives think of sports reporting.

Nearer the end

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

It was reported that the late British novelist Martin Amis, when the first of his four grandchildren was born, dryly noted that “being a grandfather is like getting a telegraph from the mortuary.” He was in his 50s at the time.

That’s not a telegraph from the mortuary. This is: One of my best college pals died last month. This, too: Days earlier, the wife of a second close college buddy (and former roommate) called to inform me that her husband has dementia.

Yes, both of them virtually the same age I am—mid 70s, the kind of statistic I almost never think about. Plenty of people are older than that and still functioning quite well. As long as I continue plodding through a morning run, working parttime, attending to such minor domestic duties of mowing the lawn and enjoying the countless benefits of an ideal 50-year marriage, it’s difficult even to think of myself as a grownup—much less an advertisement for “the end is near” premonitions.

I just had an appointment with my doctor to deal with the relatively insignificant issue of an upper-respiratory infection and it occurred to me that he technically has twice saved my life. First, for diagnosing that my asymmetrical hearing loss 20 years ago indicated a brain tumor. (It did; a specialist surgically removed the benign tumor without further incident.) Second, for spotting a heart murmur. (Valve-replacement surgery fixed that.)

I thanked him and we riffed on the unpredictability of human frailty. There are no answers. Though there are some obvious recommendations to increase lifespan—get exercise (physically and mentally), eat a healthy diet, watch your weight, don’t smoke, drink moderately, don’t skip medical checkups—I’ll bet you can think of people who practiced all of that and still were bushwacked by a fatal disease.

And fame doesn’t make anyone immune to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, either. Arthur Ashe, the impeccably fit tennis champion, suffered a heart attack at the peak of his playing career and a second coronary led to quadruple bypass surgery, during which he contracted the HIV virus through a blood transfusion. And died at 49.

It’s possible that he was doomed by the fact that both his father and mother had heart disease. So choose your parents well. And don’t discount luck.

COVID-19 has been a reminder of that. Roughly seven million deaths and no obvious fix on just who was vulnerable and who wasn’t. When the bubonic plague ravaged Europe’s population in the 14th Century, the idea of a Grim Reaper was hatched: A skeletal specter shrouded in a hooded robe, carrying a scythe, indiscriminately collecting souls. The 1918 influenza epidemic made the same point, as graphically illustrated by Katherine Anne Porter’s tale “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” in which the protagonist was an unlikely survivor but her lover died.

Somebody once said that comparative happiness is immoral, so not only does news of the demise of a friend, family member or colleague hit closer to home, but it also stirs some discomfort in the relative knowledge that I’m feeling fine. The “why me/why not me” dichotomy.

Late in his life, the enduring baseball character Casey Stengel noticed that “most of the people my age are dead at the present time.” That happens, but I contend that becoming a grandfather, which didn’t transpire until I was in my 70s, was the opposite of some doomsday-prophesy telegraph; rather, a real red-letter day.

Global hoops

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With increasing frequency, the NBA is helping U.S. sports fans learn world geography. And reminding us that a long-held provincial belief of American basketball exceptionalism is a bit outdated.

The latest examples are the league’s recent draft, in which a young lad from France was chosen No. 1, and the masterful work of the Denver Nuggets’ Serbian headliner in the championship finals.

On the elite level, the game—invented in Massachusetts, yes; but by a Canadian—still is overwhelmingly dominated by Yanks. But two of the first seven players drafted this spring are from Europe. And though it took 31 years of NBA drafts before a non-American was picked No. 1, there now have been 14 players from outside the United States so honored—10 in this century.

In recent years, NBA teams have thrived with a wave of international stars: Greece’s Giannis Antetokounmpo, Cameroon’s Joel Embid, Slovenia’s Luka Doncic, Germany’s Dirk Nowitzki, Argentina’s Manu Ginobili, Latvia’s Kristaps Porzingis, France’s Rudy Gobert. Rosters have included top-notch Spaniards, Australians, Dominicans, Canadians, Chinese.

Really, anyone who has been paying attention to the sport could not have been shocked by Denver being led to its first title by the MVP performance of Serbian Nikola Jokic. In the peripatetic hoops cosmos, non-American efficiency began to become clear at least 30 years ago, back when former collegiate coach Fran Fraschilla, now a TV commentator, noticed that Europeans “took our game and made it more interesting. I fell in love with the way they played the game.”

Before Jokic was born—before, in fact, his native Serbia emerged as an independent nation during the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia in the ethnic wars of the early 1990s—those stomping grounds had become a pipeline of NBA talent.

Five members of the 1990 Yugoslavia team that won the world championship—most notably Vlade Divac, Drazen Petrovic and Tony Kukoc—excelled in the NBA. Four other Yugoslav stalwarts from that era—Dino Rada, Predrag Danilovic, Zarko Paspalj and Jure Zdovc—also were productive NBA regulars. That was about that time that basketball watchers quipped, “The Americans invented it; the Yugoslavs perfected it.”

Yugoslavia won an Olympic basketball gold in 1980 (when the U.S. boycotted Moscow) and silvers in 1968, ’76 and ’88, plus a bronze in ’84. Then, during the 1990 Seattle-based Goodwill Games, a now defunct Ted Turned event aimed at cutting through some of the Olympic politics of East-West boycotts, the U.S. team was humbled in back-to-back games by both the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, mystifying the American players by eschewing a power, slam-dunk approach for passing, moving without the ball and deadeye shooting.

And though American basketball partisans, after the Yanks’ worst Olympic finish of third place at the 1988 Seoul Games, argued that they were being handicapped by international basketball federation rules banning NBA players, in fact U.S. hoops pooh-bahs had been blocking pros’ participation. Those Yankee officials figured our collegiate guys were good enough to win all the time and, more to the point, understood that the entrance of NBA talent also would bring NBA front-office types in to take their jobs.

So it was left to a Yugoslav from the Serbian region, international basketball federation secretary general and International Olympic Committee member Borislav Stankovic, to push for welcoming NBA players into the Games. That happened in 1992, just as the Balkans War was splintering Yugoslavia (and its national team) into what are now seven countries—Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro and North Macedonia.

In the confusion, Croatia competed as an independent nation in the ’92 Olympics, winning the basketball silver medal with former Yugo team members Petrovic and Kukoc. And Yugoslavia, allowed one more Olympic turn with athletes from Serbia and Montenegro, won the basketball silver in ’96. Divac and Paspalj were that team. In 2016, independent Serbia, with a 21-year-old Nikola Jokic aboard, took the Olympic silver—beating Croatia along the way before losing to the United States in the gold-medal final.

Before this month, the only time the Denver Nuggets played for a championship was in 1976, in their final season of the American Basketball Association before merging into the NBA, when their roster—like virtually all teams in the two rival leagues then—featured only fellows from American colleges: Kansas, North Carolina, UConn, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina State, Colorado, Stanford, Michigan State.

Not anymore. Now, along with the always improving, entertaining NBA show, our horizons and geographical knowledge are expanding.

There is traveling in basketball. (Swallow the whistle, ref.)

Par for the course?

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Just what Saudi Arabia expects from buying into the global sports market, and whether its intentions are honorable, isn’t entirely clear. One prominent theory amounts to a sinister take on the 1990s Animaniacs cartoon that featured the whacky characters Pinky and The Brain, whose unwavering purpose was “to take over the world.”

That fun bit of television escape, appropriate for all ages, featured a couple of genetically enhanced laboratory mice: The Brain was the relentless schemer, Pinky his dullard sidekick, and their goal of universal domination—all Brain’s doing, really—never got off the ground.

But what about Saudi Arabia and the Persian Golf War? (“Golf,” not “Gulf,” but more on the latter later.) When the oil-rich kingdom, through its sovereign wealth fund, began luring top pros from the established Western-based PGA in 2021 with obscene amounts of money, the accusation of “sportswashing” immediately was raised. In creating the rival LIV golf tour and populating it with some of the sport’s biggest names, the Saudis were accused of purchasing celebrity spokesmen to fumigate a dismal human-rights record, the crown prince’s apparent role in the 2018 murder and dismemberment of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the kingdom’s funding of terrorism leading up to 9/11.

For almost two years, the PGA mightily and noisily resisted the Saudi’s involvement, ostensibly on moral grounds, precipitating dueling lawsuits. Then, shockingly, they buried the hatchet and negotiated a chumocracy this month—a deal prompted, Slate’s Alex Kirshner wrote, by the unsettling reality that the PGA now “gets to be friends instead of adversaries with an investor who has more cash and lawyers than God.”

That the PGA now appears to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Saudi Arabia coincides with the Saudis’ recent, aggressive push to use sports to gain international prestige. Seemingly inexhaustible Saudi money has been thrown at the World Wrestling Entertainment operation, boxing purses, horse and Formula I racing and the English Premier League team Newcastle United, not to mention a project to poach several of world’s bold-face soccer names for Saudi Arabia’s professional league. Already Cristiano Renaldo of Portugal and France’s Karim Benzema, most recent recipient of the Ballon d’Or as the sport’s best player, have been signed.

Amid significant outrage that the Saudis are using good-old fun-and-games as an odious tradeoff to turn attention from the grisly Khashoggi event, the kingdom’s officials are contending instead that sports is a vehicle to promote diversity in its economy—because oil will not be there forever. Could this just be another step toward a more modern society that in recent years has at last allowed women to drive their own cars and join the workforce?

Of course the whole deal is tangled in geopolitics and the shifting evaluations of U.S. alliances.

Historically—though soccer, cricket and basketball have a place in Saudi Arabian culture—the kingdom hardly has been a sports power. It did not participate in the Olympics until 1972 and would have been tossed out of the organization in 2012 had it not lifted its ban on female athletes. It has yet to win a gold medal.

The Saudis’ first soccer World Cup was the 1994 U.S.-based tournament, four years after the kingdom had provided billions of dollars and a launching place for the American-led coalition in the Persian Gulf War precipitated by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

When the Saudi team arrived that May for the pre-Cup training near Atlantic City, N.J., there was talk that it would be greeted by U.S. general Norman Schwarzkopf, who had been commander of the Gulf War coalition. That didn’t happen, but all was tranquil between the allies at the time..

Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar was living parttime in Vail, Colo., and Saudi King Fahd had contributed to several U.S. colleges. It was King Fahd, in another example of his kingdom’s international relations, who had arranged with Argentine president Carlos Menem to hire Argentine brothers Jorge and Eduardo Solari to coach the Saudi’s ’94 Cup team.

Neither of the brothers spoke Arabic, but a trio of multi-lingual assistants—a Lebanese-born Brazilian, a Palestinian based in Spain and a Saudi sports-medicine official who was schooled in America—fixed that. And the Saudis, then considered the worst of the Cup’s 24 participating nations, conjured upset victories over Morocco and Belgium for a surprising advance into the knockout round—an advance the kingdom has not equaled in five successive tournaments. The Solari brothers had schooled the Saudi players in a sort of Argentine/Brazilian style—short touch passes with an emphasis on creativity.

Demonstrating that sometimes soccer is just soccer. Sports is just sports.

But there is plenty of chin-stroking now over the Saudis swallowing up sporting real estate and, especially, the LIV/PGA partnership, about which The Athletic’s Brody Miller declaration that “Money won. It always has. Maybe it always will….stripping away the norms of professional sports and laying it bare as a money-making enterprise above all else.”

Might that purchasing power remind of those goofy Animaniacs episodes that always ended the same way?

Pinky: “What are we going to do tomorrow, Brain?”

The Brain: “The same thing we do every day, Pinky. Try to take over the world.”

London Bridge is…

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This is about London Bridge. And the traditional children’s nursery rhyme regarding that structure. And Lake Havasu City, Ariz.

It’s about a pair of landmarks I’ve been passing on my morning runs during visits to England since my daughter settled with her husband and young son in East London a couple of years ago.

I’ll start there.

Roughly a quarter mile from my daughter’s place, in expansive Victoria Park—with its crisscrossing paths peopled by runners, bicyclists, walkers, dogs and children—are two stone alcoves that stood on London Bridge from the 12th Century until 1831.

Then that London Bridge fell down. (You know the tune.)

An historic marker near those alcoves—there had been 14 on the bridge—cited their utility as a place for pedestrians to rest from dodging traffic, and that they also “might have served as places of ambush for robbers and cutthroats” until the establishment of night watchmen.

According to Peter Ackroyd’s exhaustive 2000 book, “London: The Biography,” that bridge was “the grandest work” in the city’s massive rebuilding surge during the 1100s; it “rose in stone and became the great highway of commerce and communication,” built on the same site where different iterations of London Bridge have existed for at least 1,500 years.

Isn’t history cool? After that grand stone London Bridge came down, its successor stood from 1831 to 1962, when it no longer could handle an increased load of traffic. At which point the city of London took it apart and sold massive fragments to an Arizona real estate developer who envisioned an odd way to attract tourists and retirement-home buyers.

Granite blocks from the famous span were transported to the Arizona outpost of Lake Havasu City and patched into a crossing over a channel canal that splits off from the Colorado River at the California border.

And in a 1973 country song, “London Homesick Blues,” Jerry Jeff Walker sang:

Well when you’re down on your luck                                                                                                         and you ain’t got a buck                                                                                                                               In London you’re a goner.                                                                                                                          Even London Bridge has fallen down                                                                                                        and moved to Arizona.

I’ve never been to Lake Havasu City, but they still call it London Bridge there, and you can take that reconstructed overpass to one side of the canal and be at Papa Leone’s Pizza; the other way, Barley Brothers Brewery. Not exactly like trekking across the River Thames from the vicinity of the 17th Century St. Paul’s Cathedral, designed by Christopher Wren, to within walking distance of the modern version of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in the London borough of Southwark.

Ackroyd wrote that “the exact date cannot be known” when the original London Bridge was constructed of wood by the Romans, “but it would have seemed a majestic and even miraculous construction.

“Half the legends of London arose upon its foundations; miracles were performed and visions seen upon the wooden thoroughfare. Since its sole purpose was to tame the river, it may then have harnessed the power of a god. Yet the god may have been enraged at the stripping of its riverine authority; thus, all the intimations of vengeance and destruction invoked by the famous rhyme ‘London Bridge is broken down.’”

That enduring ditty may initially have referenced the 1014 Viking attack by Olaf of Norway, who “had his men maneuver their ships close to the bridge,” Ackroyd wrote, “tied them to its wooden piles with ropes and cables, then, assisted by the tide, strained at the wooden supports until they were dislodged and the bridge fell into the Thames.”

But a series of London Bridges, providing the only land transport across the river, endured. By the 14th Century London Bridge, long covered with houses and shops, lent a distinctive “sight of the city” described by Ackroyd: “Above the main gateway of the London Bridge rose iron spikes upon which the remnants of condemned men were fixed…the impaled heads of traitors.”

Not until the late 1890s did the more spectacular Tower Bridge appear (which modern visitors often confuse with the present London Bridge). Now of course there are a number of Thames crossings for cars and trains and, since 2000, the pedestrians-only Centennial Bridge.

And all the knaves and invaders and rascals and architectural geniuses and scallywags later, those alcoves sitting in Victoria Park can take a soul back to a childhood verse’s allusion to a world far away.

Also a football star

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Maybe the best summation of Jim Brown, on the occasion of his death this week at 87, came from Brown himself during a brief 2010 interview.

“I am a born activist,” he said then. “I have an opinion about most things.” He was sitting in a make-up chair that day, preparing to offer his judgements on a number of topics on the cable show CenterStage, which featured mostly reverential sessions with sports stars and other celebrities.

Of course Brown was a football wizard, still considered—now almost six decades after the end of his professional career with the Cleveland Browns—among the sport’s handful of greatest performers. He was a movie star, the first Black action hero on the silver screen. He was an outspoken advocate for civil rights, founder of programs to support Black businesses and ex-convicts attempting to restart their lives. But, too, he was arrested a half-dozen times for assault charges against women, including his second wife.

He was an intimidating presence, 6-foot-2 and 230 pounds during his playing days, and acknowledged having issues with anger management. Of the Martin Luther King Jr./Mahatma Gandi philosophy of non-violent resistance, he told Esquire magazine in 2008, “I don’t know what they’re talking about. Spit on me and I’ll knock you out. I ain’t going to sing and march, man. But I’m fair.”

He never hesitated to speak his mind, regularly challenging expectations. At 29, at the peak of his football powers, having just led the NFL in rushing for an eighth time in his ninth season, Brown abruptly retired to go into movies full time. “People asked me, ‘Why would you want to quit?’ I said, ‘I make more money [as an actor], have Raquel Welch as a leading lady. I don’t get hit. They call me Mr. Brown.’”

He was born off the southern coast of Georgia on St. Simons Island, which at the time was an all-Black region with a slave-trade history but later was transformed into a resort community. He father abandoned the family six weeks after Brown’s birth and his mother relocated to the New York City suburbs to work as a domestic, leaving young Jim with a grandmother until he moved north to Manhasset, Long Island, at 8.

He excelled in football, track, basketball and especially lacrosse in high school and “pitched a couple of no-hitters,” he said, “but I wasn’t good at baseball.” Reports that the Yankees offered him $150,000 were “an exaggeration,” he said, “but I did get a letter from [Yankees manager] Casey Stengel.”

He always claimed that he experienced “no racism” during school and a Manhasset attorney named Ken Molloy organized fund-raisers in the local community to pay for Brown’s first year at Syracuse University, where he competed in basketball, track and lacrosse but was the only Black on the freshman football team and wasn’t offered an athletic scholarship until he demonstrated an ability to make the varsity.

That accomplished, he once scored 43 points in a single game (via touchdowns and placekicking) against Colgate.

“Sports,” Brown said during that 2010 chat, “always make people react a certain way. People are impressed by athletes. Overly so. I get a lot of things coming my way because I’m an athlete, and sometimes it isn’t fair.”

But it was his football ability that removed so many complications. He found less racism in football than in lacrosse, which he always said was his better sport. Paul Brown, his first coach with the Browns, “didn’t like my attitude of independence,” he said, “but he loved the way I played.”

A decade after Brown retired, in October 1975, when I was covering the New York Giants’ preparations to face the Buffalo Bills and Buffalo’s superstar running back O.J. Simpson, Giants coaches compared their challenge to what every NFL team had known about defending Jim Brown.

“When I was with Detroit,” then Giants assistant Floyd Peters said, “every time we’d play the Browns we’d try everything to stop Jimmy. He’d still get his 125 yards. Same thing when I went to Philadelphia.…Our linebacker would go stand right next to him; the old joke about going with the guy when he goes to the peanut stand.

“Once, we thought we’d figured him out,” Peters said. “Studied him on film and began to notice that on every play, he’d cut back after he went through the hole. So one of our dumb tackles made sure he was ready for the cutback, and sure enough, here came Jimmy. The tackle gets him down, and his eyes get great big and he yells—for everyone to hear, including Jimmy—‘Hey, he DOES cut back!’ On the next play Jimmy went right past the guy, all the way for a touchdown.”

Likewise, Brown lulled opponents into believing they were wearing him down by dragging himself weakly off the ground following each tackle, trudging slowly back to the huddle. Only to materialize—faster and stronger—on the next play.

“For mercurial speed, airy nimbleness and explosive violence in one package of undistilled evil,” celebrated sports columnist Red Smith once wrote, “there is no other like Mr. Brown.”

There now are 12 men who have surpassed Brown’s 1963 NFL single-season rushing record of 1,862 yards. But all of their careers bled into the league’s expansion from 14 to 16 games per season (Brown had four seasons with 12 games, five with 14). And none have matched Brown’s one-season mark of 6.4 yards per carry.

That’s one definition of activism.

What are the odds?

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A math problem: If a thoroughbred racehorse weighs roughly 1,500 pounds, is supported by ankles the size of a homo sapien’s and runs at speeds approaching 45 miles per hour while carrying a human on his back who weighs up to 126 pounds, how long would it take for that horse to break a leg?

Extra credit: If that steed has been administered a drug to mask pain from some previous discomfort, a common practice in the sport, to what extent would that increase the likelihood of serious injury? Could it be calculated that racing on a dirt track, as opposed to grass, further shortens the animal’s life expectancy?

As a lesson on reacting professionally to unexpected distress at an otherwise entertaining event, I show my Hofstra University sportswriting students the 1949 New York Sun newspaper column “Death of a Racehorse.”

“They were going into the turn, and now Air Lift was starting to go,” W.C. Heinz wrote that July day, “when suddenly he slowed, a horse stopping, and below in the stands you could hear a sudden cry, as the rest left him, still trying to run but limping, his jockey—Dave Gorman—half falling, half sliding off.

“‘He broke a leg!’ somebody, holding binoculars to his eyes, shouted at the press box. ‘He broke a leg!’”

Heinz so effectively informed his readers—setting the scene, portraying the various characters’ reactions, describing the predictable result of putting the horse out of his misery—that Ernest Hemingway called the piece “a classic of American literature.”

“Gilman had the halter and Catlett had the gun, shaped like a bell with the handle at the top,” Heinz wrote. “The bell he placed, the crowd silent, on the colt’s forehead, just between the eyes. The colt stood still, and then Catlett, with the hammer in his other hand, struck the handle of the bell. There was a short, sharp sound and the colt toppled onto his left side, his eyes staring, his legs straight out, the free legs quivering.”

They don’t shoot horses at the racetrack any more. But then as now, if a horse breaks a leg, recovery from surgery is virtually impossible. Horses are heavy animals who spend most of their time on their feet, even sleeping, and the lack of movement during potential healing only leads to infection and pain. The only change these days, compared to what H.C. Heinz chronicled 74 years ago, is that thoroughbreds who suffer broken legs in action are put down by a veterinarian’s lethal injection, right there trackside, after an ambulance arrives and a large screen is placed around the proceedings.

And here comes the 2023 Preakness, the second leg of the Triple Crown series, after seven horses died during Kentucky Derby week, two of them on race day, and the Derby’s morning-line favorite, Forte, was scratched hours before post time after veterinarians declared him unfit to run.

Those dark acts recalled 2008—coincidentally, the year that W.C. Heinz died of natural causes at 93—when a filly named Eight Belles, steps after finishing second in the Derby, broke down and was humanely destroyed. Two weeks later, when Big Brown added the Preakness title to his Derby win, the worst fears of casual horse racing fans—and, indeed, the racing industry—were not realized as all 12 thoroughbreds got safely through the event.

Just two years earlier, Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro had shattered his leg in 27 places during the Preakness and, despite surgery and massive efforts to rehabilitate him, was euthanized eight months later.

About that math problem, then: Horseracing experts acknowledge that what makes thoroughbreds so formidable is what makes them so flimsy. Engineered to run fast on spindly little legs by the breeding process, they have been described as a genetic mistake—running too fast with a frame that is too large on legs far too small.

According to The Jockey Club’s Equine Injury Database, between 700 and 800 racehorses are injured and die every year, averaging just under two breakdowns per 1,000 starts. That fact flies under the radar for most people—that is, those of the non-wagering persuasion—who tend to believe that a horse is just a horse. Except during the Triple Crown season, when far more of the public pay attention to the sport.

The Triple Crown format itself has been called into question for three high-stakes races within five weeks even though horse trainers admit that at least 30 days between competitions is preferable. Then again, the sport’s insiders argue that the “tradition” of two weeks between the Derby and Preakness and three between the Preakness and Belmont Stakes is a great part of the charm, separating mere racehorses from super horses—and ought to be maintained as a lifeblood for the sport’s popularity. (Nobody has asked the horses what they think.)

I don’t (as the saying goes) have a horse in this race. But W.C. Heinz summed up some unavoidable feelings, both inside and outside the sport, with his sentence following a description of Air Lift’s euthanization in that 1949 column:

“‘Aw —-‘ someone said.”

But thanks for asking…

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

Deflecting robocalls is simple enough, if aggravating and time consuming. (My wife likes to mess with the callers, telling those who claim to have great life insurance offers that she isn’t interested because she’s 100 years old, or shutting down home insurance pitches by declaring she lives in her car.) But now the scammers have invaded my dinky little website, flooding the comments page with overtures to find magical success in business and health without my extending any effort whatsoever.

“Make money in your sleep with these INCREDIBLE A.I. Bots,” one promised. “Artificial Intelligence is taking over and helping ordinary people make money in their sleep. Literally!”

And: “Are you tired of the dull, straightforward approach to SEO? Fear not! ChatGPT has got you covered with these hilarious prompts that will have you laughing your way to the top of the SERPs.”

Ha. Ha.

There is this one fellow (“Hi, Eric here” — I assume he’s a real person and, if true, he’s a tireless so-and-so) who makes contact two, three, four times a day, telling me what a terrific website I have but how I need to take advantage of his masterful skills (and A.I. tools) to get more attention.

Others are less personal, addressing me as “dear business owner [who is] working hard on your business … but can use technology to help you supplement and, over time, even replace your income. ChatGPT and AI are here.”

Yeah, yeah.

My website isn’t a business at all, merely a bit of self-indulgent entertainment mulling such heavy topics as sports, hobbies and life experiences. But here comes another: “Having a hard time coming up with all the social media content for your business? If I told you that you can eliminate the stress today would you beleive [sic] me?”

Well, no, if you can’t spell “believe.”

I have been told that my business doesn’t have a proper Google map citation. I have been informed that somebody named Glynn “has revealed how he makes 30k a month” and “now YOU can ‘clone’ his exact online business … and it’s powered by A-I.”

I have been provided unsolicited advice in Spanish: “Resena sobre la importancia de sin Seguro conductor cobertura …” — something about the importance of auto insurance, says Google Translate — etc., etc. Also in what could be Serbian, Bulgarian or Russian; it’s written in the Cyrillic alphabet.

Da.

No reason to translate them because there hardly is time to get through the endless stream of the ones in English — often fractured English — that “guarantee the production of blog articles, social media posts, GoogleAd copy, FacebookAd copy, LinkedIn sales pitches, all your promotional materials, all your emails and so so so much more.”

Which comes, by the way, with “no strings attached.”

And how did this one get in here? “Hi there! I understand that you are looking for ways to improve your posture and contribute to a healthy lifestyle … Looking for a healthy and effective way to shed those extra pounds?”

There’s also the flattery angle. “I do not even know how I ended up here, but I thought this post was great,” a recent message started, purporting to comment on my treatise on England’s King Charles or global warming or unwise wagers at the horse track. “I don’t know who you are but certainly you are going to be a famous blogger if you are not already.”

As dubious as that sounded, at least it wasn’t threatening.

“We have hacked your website johnjeansonne.com and extracted your databases,” an ominous new item warned, which “would be detrimental to your personal image …. Now you can put a stop to this by paying a $3000 fee (0.11 BTC) in bitcoin to the following address [provided with a link]….We will be notified of payment which we will then delete the information we have obtained. You have 72 hours to do so….”

Eric? Is that you?

Boston runs on

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Anyone who has witnessed the Boston Marathon even once knows what it means to that city as a rite of spring and affirmation of life. What may seem a foolhardy endeavor, running more than 26 miles for no apparent reason (since less than one percent of the participants are professional athletes with a reasonable expectation of winning prize money), in fact is a feel-good statement applied to Boston runners and spectators alike for more than 100 years.

A decade ago, the bombings at the finish line of Boston’s race devastated more than 100 lives, and has impacted race organizers’ and participants’ safety awareness ever since. But the two-way affection that exists between runners and spectators is hard-wired into Marathon Day. And that not only has been preserved but enhanced, as will be evident again on this significant anniversary of the 2013 attack.

A musician named Sal Nastasi, who was the fastest Long Island finisher at that disrupted 2013 event, spoke days afterwards of “giving high-fives [to spectators] the whole way until I was too tired to stretch my arm out. You can’t do that to A-Rod at a Yankee game. That’s the coolest thing about a marathon.”

There is no sports event, apart from the major big-city marathons, in which rank amateurs partake in the same competition on the same playing field as the world’s elite, and Boston has been doing it since 1897, longer than any other such race.

Some non-running citizens have been known to grumble about how the marathon causes traffic snafus and other temporary inconveniences every Patriots Day in Boston, but just as many have called the event a physical muse, motivating them to take up a jogging regimen and, sometimes, the commitment to try a future marathon.

This was my experience in 1973, when I covered the first of 14 or 15 Bostons for Newsday and met Johnny Kelley. He was 65 at the time, running his 42nd of what eventually would be a record 61 Bostons—the kind of streak that can’t help but serve as a dare to onlookers.

Kelley had won the Boston Marathon in 1935 and 1945 and continued running the entire distance until 1992, when he was 84. He became such a celebrity, waving to the cheering crowds along the route with a white handkerchief, that race officials encouraged him to jump into the race for its last seven miles until he was 86. (He died in 2004, at 97.)

He didn’t recommend marathoning for everyone, “but for those who are in shape and can run the thing,” he said, “I think it’s the greatest race in the world. I hope it goes on forever.”

Boston’s race has grown exponentially in the last 50 years, with more than 25 times the number of runners this year than in 1973. It could be argued that the enormous crowds—and the carefree, festival atmosphere—are what made it more attractive for evil terrorist theatrics. A soft target.

But you can’t have Patriots Day, the third Monday of April celebrating the first battles of the American Revolution, without crowds filling the village of Hopkinton and kids dangling from trees to get a better view of the marathon start; without the college women at Wellesley shrieking encouragement to passing runners halfway through the race; without lawns filled with beer-drinkers and kids with water hoses to cool passing runners at Heartbreak Hill, on the doorstep of Boston College 22 miles into the run; without the great crowds forming a corridor of noise for hours and hours as the runners reach the Boylston Street finish line.

No one will likely forget how two bombs shattered that finish-line scene 10 years ago. But the spirit of Johnny Kelley will live on. It’s the coolest thing about the Boston Marathon.

Another puckish poll

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(Stan Isaacs)

It is now 10 years since star Newsday columnist Stan Isaacs died at 83, much too long to go without his annual Isaacs Ratings of Esoteric Distinction. Included in Isaacs’ lengthy and distinguished career as a serious journalist was an awareness of when to find a giggle, and that’s where IRED came in, a whimsical ranking of decidedly inconspicuous topics—“an appraisal of areas that are generally ignored by raters,” he proclaimed—such as bowling pins, Fred Astaire’s dancing partners, TV remote buttons, “People Who Are Neither on the Way Up or Down.”

Each April, something to fit “fools’ day,” Isaacs would publish his self-described “loving spoof of the Ring Magazine boxing ratings…a rush to respond to the unrecognized need for evaluation of quantities like the Bridges Across the River Seine.” He would commence with a grading of the best chocolate ice creams, then move on to such matters as evaluating “Things That Aren’t as Good as They Used to Be.”

A keen observer with a twinkle in his eye, Isaacs declared that there was “no category too arcane” to grade. Bryan Curtis of the website Grantland’s noted shortly after Isaacs’ death that he had been “a fierce opponent of whatever he was ‘supposed’ to be writing, an insurrectionist with a smile.”

To me and, I suspect, to veteran Newsday readers, he was a journalism hero. And so, herewith, a feeble attempt at resurrecting IRED with 2023 topics:

Balloons: 1, Animal; 2, Latex; 3, Weather; 4, Mylar; 5, Hot Air; 6, Chinese Spy.

Climates: 1, Tropical; 2, Dry; 3, Temperate; 4, Continental; 5, Polar; 6, Change.

George Santos claims (actual and otherwise): 1, Baruch College volleyball star; 2, Baruch College student; 3, Goldman Sachs superstar; 4, Jew-ish; 5, Broadway producer of “Spiderman” musical; 6, Super Bowl champion; 7, four-time Olympic taekwondo gold medalist; 8, CPA, DDS, MBA; 9, local dog catcher; 10, U.S. Congressman.

Persona non grata: 1, Russia; 2, George Santos; 3, Harry and Meghan.

Elvis impersonators outside of Las Vegas: 1, Austin Butler.

Bunnies and rabbits: 1, Easter; 2, Velveteen; 3, Pat The; 4, Br’er; 5, Energizer; 6. White; 7. Bad.

Not ready for prime-time spectator sports: 1, Quidditch; 2, Hot-dog eating; 3, Korfball (ask your Dutch friends); 4, Pickleball.

Technological breakthroughs: 1, Light bulb; 2, Telephone; 3, Internal combustion engine; 3, Internet; 4, iPhones; 6, chips (not potato); 7, A-I (TBD).

Artificial Intelligence: 1, Alexa; 2, Siri; 3, ChatGPT; 4, Bard; 5, Something called Flippy (if you’re hungry for fried food).

Baseball rules (old and new): 1, Infield fly; 2, Ground; 3, Pitch clock; 4, Pizza-box bases; 5, Universal DH; 6, Three strikes you’re out.

Fashion plate eligible for a Mr. Blackwell list: 1, LSU women’s basketball coach Kim Mulkey.

Comedy: 1, Sketch; 2, Stand-up; 3, Dark; 4, Topical; 5, Slapstick; 6, Endless, non-stop “news” of the New York Jets obtaining quarterback Aaron Rodgers.

Roadside signage too regularly ignored: 1, Speed limit 55; 2, Speed limit 20; No turn on red; 3, No U-turn; 4, No Parking; 5, Slow; 6, Stop.

Longest days: 1, First day of summer; 2, When daylight savings time ends (changed clocks add an hour to total 25); 3, Any day in a doctor’s office waiting room.

Major comebacks: 1, NASA shooting for the Moon after 50 years; 2, Inflation.

U.S. Presidents arrested: 1, Ulysses S. Grant (speeding in his horse-drawn carriage); 2, Donald Trump (34 counts).

Whatever happened to… 1, Snow; 2, Reading stuff in newspapers and books (as opposed to iPhones); 3, Facemask mandates.

Bulbs: 1, Halogen; 2, Fluorescent; 3, Incandescent; 4, LED; 5, dim.

The old college try: 1, NCAA women’s tournament runner-up Iowa; 2, NCAA men’s tournament runner-up San Diego State; 3, 30,000 runners in this year’s Boston Marathon (wherever they finish).

Channels: 1, PBS; 2, ABC; 3, CBS; 4, CNN; 5, ESPN; 6, Fox; 7, English.