Acadia and Maine: A road trip to our ancestors’ lands

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So here was the latest in my small-world experiences, and how everything and everybody seem somehow connected. We spent a few days at Acadia National Park in Maine, a 35,000-acre expanse of steep hills, surf-battered bluffs, endless hiking and walking trails, lakes, beaches and deep forest. Gripping place.

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It happens that my wife’s family, on her mother’s side, was from Maine, so her childhood was revisited in the pine scents, lilac aromas, approaching blueberry season and so on. And my ancestors, ‘way back, came from Acadia, the colony of New France in the 17th and 18th Century that included parts of eastern Quebec, the Maritime provinces and about half of modern-day Maine—until they were run out of town by the British and wound up in Louisiana. (More on that later.)

The trip was inspired, in part, by a travel book, “1,000 Places to See Before You Die.” (Why it needed the “before you die” deadline seems thoroughly unnecessary, as if every trek away from home is a reminder that we are on the road to extinction.) Anyway, in that book, I found 98 places I had been, mostly as an accidental tourist.

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As a child, I was afforded varied glimpses of America in the process of my father’s regular job transfers through the South, Southwest and West Coast. Then, in more than 40 years as a sports journalist, newspaper assignments often took me to exotic places. I buy the Kurt Vonnegut observation that “bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.”

The “1,000 Places” list reinforced the sense that wide-ranging travel is a blessing, and an education. From the English Cotswolds to London’s Tate Gallery and Hyde Park; canal rides through Bruges in Belgium (the “Venice of the North”) to Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate (and sections of the Berlin Wall months after its symbolic fall); Barcelona’s still unfinished 100-year-old Sagrada Familia cathedral; Athens’ Parthenon; Rome’s Colosseum and Spanish Steps; Vatican City and Florence’s Uffizi galleries of Renaissance art; Prague’s castle district; the Danube Bend in Budapest; the Sydney Opera House in Australia; The Great Wall of China; Hemingway’s hangouts in Cuba; Acapulco Bay (for us honeymooners)….all delightful stops.

What a treat to realize a been-there, done-that encounter with those, as well as so many iconic American hot spots: Niagara Falls, Grand Canyon, Yosemite Park, Yellowstone Park, D.C.’s Smithsonian, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, Florida’s Amelia Island, Joe’s Stone Crab restaurant in Miami Beach (key-lime pie for dessert), New Orleans’ French Quarter, San Antonio’s River Walk and Alamo. (“I’d like to hear the Mexicans’ side of this story,” my friend Jay muttered as we listened to the Daughters’ of the Texas Republic cast James Bowie, William Travis, Davy Crockett and the overmatched Texans as something close to saints.)

There are, however, a couple of locations I might have edited out of the 1,000 must-see places. The Las Vegas Strip, perhaps—unless one’s cup of tea is garishness and the windowless monuments to uncertain outcomes of committing vast amounts of money. Also, Roswell, New Mexico.

Roswell, New Mexico? The travel book suggests that the conspiracy theory over a 1947 crash of an unidentified flying object near Roswell, in which four aliens were said to die and be taken secretly to a military base, sustains Roswell as a major attraction.

I don’t know. When I was a high school student in Hobbs, N.M., all we thought of Roswell was as home to the hated rival of our basketball team. (Two consecutive years, Roswell defeated Hobbs, the favorite, by a single point in the state championship game.) I last set foot in Roswell in November of 1964, riding the bench for the final football game of my senior season. It was cold. My feet were blocks of ice. I never got into the game. And we lost. Not such a memorable burg.

But about my forebears, who were among the French settlers in an area first christened Arcadia (with an ‘r’) by the Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano. (Another flimsy link: As a 46-year resident of the New York City area, I regularly have traveled over the bridge named for Verrazzano, though it has been misspelled by local officials from the start: Verrazano, with one ‘z.’)

“Arcadia” morphed into “Acadia,” and its French Catholic settlers transformed from “Acadien” to “Cajun” after they were banished from the area during hostilities of the Seven Years’ War in the mid-1700s by the English, in what was known as the Great Expulsion. Most of them wound up in Louisiana, where my parents were raised and I was born.

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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, “Evangeline,” is set in Acadia during the Great Expulsion. (One more small association in this circle of coincidences: Longfellow attended Maine’s Bowdoin College, which was along the route we took to Acadia National Park.)

“This is the forest primeval,” the poem begins, in what could serve as a description of Acadia National Park. “The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,

“Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight….”

My sister has a genealogy chart of my mother’s side of the family that goes back some seven generations, to their lives in Acadia. There is no information on any of our predecessors’ specific occupations, and she and I guessed there is the possibility that the clan included a few thieves and bad guys. Who knows?

Certainly, no potentates such as the Rockefellers, Astors, Fords and Vanderbilts, who established Acadia National Park as a summer colony in the early 20th Century. So I have no illusions that I was wandering the specific stomping grounds of my long-gone relatives.

But it’s a small world after all.

 

Walter Byers and college sport’s “amateur” model

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(NCAA)

(NCAA)

By all accounts, Walter Byers eventually came to a more realistic understanding of college sport’s hypocrisy than he espoused during his 36 years as NCAA’s original executive director, when Byers himself promoted the pretense of the “student-athlete.”

Byers, who died Tuesday at 93, published a memoir in 1995—seven years after his retirement from the NCAA—decrying the exploitation of college athletes. At that point, he bemoaned what he called the organization’s arrogant, autocratic and self-righteous attitudes and lobbied for an athletes’ bill of rights. “Whereas the NCAA defends its policies in the name of amateurism and level playing fields,” he wrote then, “they actually are a device to divert the money elsewhere.”

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But he was singing a different tune most of his time in office as NCAA chief, from 1951 to 1988, when he was widely considered the most powerful man in what was branded (with his encouragement) non-professional sports.

In 1974, when Byers granted me a rare interview at what was then the burgeoning new NCAA headquarters in the Kansas City suburb of Mission, Kan., he argued that television money was not wagging the dog; that football was not consuming other sports in college athletic departments; that big-time college football and basketball players were students first and “not hired gladiators;” that Title IX’s mandate to offer equal opportunity for female athletes would be the “possible doom of intercollegiate athletics.”

To re-read Byers’ stated convictions from that session is depressingly like listening to the NCAA’s current state of denial. Byers insisted that imbalances between high-profile and low-profile college powers, and between high-profile and low-profile sports, were not cause for concern. And his justifications for accepting “compromises,” as he put it, easily could be cited as proof that things already were out of control, four decades ago, in terms of the athletic-academic equilibrium.

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In 1974, the NCAA was getting $32 million from ABC television for the rights to televise a college football game-of-the-week—with superpowers such as Notre Dame or Ohio State having to be technically limited to two appearances a season (though there were early- and late-season exceptions), which Byers somehow considered a check on inequality.

Now, and still running with that golden TV ball, the NCAA is in the midst of a seven-year ESPN contract for $12.3 billion just for the three-bowl championship playoff. With no end to the big money in sight.

Byers, furthermore, was a primary architect in marketing the NCAA basketball tournament—March Madness—a franchise that has evolved into economic insanity, with a current 14-year television, Internet and wireless rights deal that will bring in $10.8 billion. That, even as NCAA officials continue to insist theirs is an amateur operation populated solely by “student-athletes.”

It is only in the face of major legal challenges that the NCAA recently voted to give the five most powerful conferences an ability to offer some financial aid to athletes. And that decision, in effect, merely will assure that the rich get richer.

In the meantime, in between time, consider some of Byers’ 1974 defenses of the system:

“The big dollar is available,” he said then, “so the emphasis of college athletics is accepted by the students and the public in general. How can you argue it?”

“You might as well whistle in a wind tunnel,” he said, as try to turn back the clock to college sports as an extracurricular student activity, minus recruiting and large, fabulously paid coaching staffs. “It won’t fly. I suppose it’s the quest for excellence that makes that impossible. You beat a guy down the road and get the feeling he wasn’t so tough to handle, so you go looking for better competition.”

And with competition, fans—and, especially television, with its lucrative payouts—will get what they want. “Yes,” Byers said then. “It’s a compromise, and maybe all compromises are bad, although I don’t believe that. You have to have something that will sell. But, remember, we could do more things if we were interested only in the ratings….”

He was asked: Why not acknowledge the reality that the NFL was using NCAA schools as de facto farm teams and declare big-time college football professional?

“I don’t think a university could justify that,” he said. “I guess that’s a compromise, too. It’s a fact that those playing for NCAA colleges have to be students at their schools. They aren’t hired gladiators. Nor, I must admit, are all of them pure oceanography students, to use [an] example, who just want to play football as part of the college experience. It’s a compromise between pure amateurism and having the highest degree of competition.”

Late in his reign as the first NCAA executive director, Byers began to reverse field, to worry that higher education likely could not “stand the strain of big-time intercollegiate athletics and maintain its integrity,” as he told Sports Illustrated, and even proposed a form of compensation for athletes.

But his change of heart—the realization that too many college players indeed were hired gladiators; that TV riches were perverting the enterprise; that the “quest for excellence” was turning the highest levels of college football and men’s basketball into something of a swamp—somehow hasn’t been passed on to the modern-day NCAA.

He might as well have been whistling in a wind tunnel.

Sports fascism: Wear the team colors

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Two New York Times reports this week, on how professional teams expect fans to mindlessly align themselves with their local jocks, are the latest evidence that the sports world is as intolerant of personal allegiance, and personal preference, as any other segment in our culture-wars society.

Following a dispatch on how NBA teams provide T-shirts for all spectators to don, in support of the home team—and often badger non-wearers on in-game video screens—came the news that the Tampa Bay Lightning freezes out non-Florida residents from buying tickets to its hockey games, and prohibits opposing teams’ fans from wearing their team’s apparel in certain sections of the Lightning’s arena.

This partisan ploy is just more incitement for the most passionate sports fans—who already are, by definition, zealots to the point of demonizing opponents as lesser forms of life. To lend institutional license to this narrow one-sided mentality is spectacularly bad policy.

There already is enough us-against-them venom among team loyalists, and it has been something like 30 years since a Miami sociologist named Irving Goldaber explained to me that fans “dressed with team colors….feel a part of the team” to the extent of believing their behavior can affect the game’s outcome.

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I long ago came to the conclusion that the bygone days, when spectators wore neckties and other neutral clothing to sports events, allowed everyone to better appreciate the beauty and drama of sports, minus hate of The Other. There was a clear demarcation then: Those in uniform then were players, and fans were just fans.

Now, it is thoroughly reasonable for franchises to want to use team-shirt giveaways as a marketing tool and a means to find favor with customers. (And as a monochromatic TV visual.) But there is something dictatorial—sports fascism—in insisting that everyone dress alike for games. Worse, to bar the door against visiting-team fans, as if they are dangerous insurgents, is depressing. These are just games.

Among the comments about the Times article, on the Lightning’s decree against opposing ticket-buyers and attire, were laments of a “complete embarrassment to the city” of Tampa, a casting  of the practice as “lame, petty, anti-fan” and “un-American,” and wonder at whether there might be “violations of federal law.”

There also, of course, were arguments cheering the Lightning edict, because “fans wearing foreign jerseys”—foreign! as is they were Mongolian invaders—would make the Lightning’s parking lot “like Waco;” that accommodating fans from other teams would “create a hostile environment;” and that a private organization such as the Lightning could set any rules it pleased.

Apparently, it can. But that, like so much about present day “sports,” misses the spirit of fun and games.

 

The NBA’s dopey, mystical first draft lottery

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To accurately portray the first-ever NBA draft lottery 30 years ago, when the New York Knicks hit the Patrick Ewing jackpot and the rest of the league was tempted to cry, “Fix!”, it is necessary to recall one of Johnny Carson’s dopey Tonight Show skits of that era.

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In the recurring routine, Carson would wear a goofy feathered turban and cape, introduced by sidekick Ed McMahon as “the great seer, soothsayer and sage, Carnac the Magnificent.” McMahon would hand Carnac an envelope, “hermetically sealed, kept in a No. 2 mayonnaise jar on Funk and Wagnalls back porch since noon today” so that “no one,” McMahon emphasized, could possibly know the questions contained in the envelopes.

Carnac, in his “divine and borderline mystical way,” would then hold a sealed envelope to his head, intuit an answer, dramatically open the envelope, extract its contents and reveal the question. Always a groan-inducing play on words.

So, here we were in the beautiful Starlight Room of the world-famous Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Mother’s Day, 1985, not entirely sure if anything about the NBA production should be taken seriously. There were Wells Fargo guards at the door. There were representatives of the NBA’s seven worse teams—those that had failed to make that year’s playoffs—seated as a panel behind a podium, like wax figures seeming to melt under TV klieg lights. (The event was being staged during halftime of a nationally televised CBS playoff game.)

NBA commissioner David Stern was functioning as a sort of game-show host, assuring that the seven one-foot-square envelopes—each containing the logo of one of the eligible teams—had been loaded and sealed a half-hour earlier by a man from the international accounting firm Ernst & Whinney. Privately. In a back room. And were not out of his possession since.

The place was packed with cameras, reporters and members of the Knicks organization. Everyone knew that Ewing, the seven-foot all-American from Georgetown University, was the top prize, and that the team that drew the No. 1 pick would draft him without hesitation, thereby becoming an instant playoff contender.

(Sports Illustrated)

(Sports Illustrated)

A Knicks publicity man, Carl Martin, was walking around holding lucky horseshoes said to be from the feet of a pacing champion named On the Road Again. And Stern began to pull envelopes, one at a time, from a large clear tumbler, determining the draft order in reverse, from seventh to first.

The first drawn was Golden State, for the No. 7 pick. That team’s general manager, Al Attles, shook his head sadly as Atlanta GM Stan Kasten, seated next to him, patted Attles’ arm in sympathy. Then Sacramento, No. 6. Atlanta, No. 5. Seattle, No. 4….

Whistling and clapping began to intensify in the room. Los Angeles Clippers, No. 3…

The sense was that Stern, any minute, would don a turban and cape, press one of the envelopes to his head and give some variation of a Carnac gag: “The answer is, ‘A palm reader, a psychic and Patrick Ewing.’”

Then Stern surely would rip open the envelope, blow noisily into the thing, fish out the answer and broadcast, “Name two mediums and an extra-large.”

Which, in a way, is what happened. It was like a parody. A lampoon.

When Stern opened the next-to-last envelope and announced that the No. 2 draft choice went to Indiana, and that left No. 1—and Ewing—for the Knicks, the room immediately was up for grabs. Martin, the Knicks P.R. fellow, was waving the horseshoes and shouting, “It worked! It worked!” Knicks general manager Dave DeBusschere, after clenching his fists, hammering the table and leaping up, began taking deep breaths.

Any second, it looked as if DeBusschere would weep tears of joy, like some Miss America winner, while somebody put a crown on his head and a bouquet of flowers in his hands.

Then, in what appeared a divine and borderline mystical way, DeBusschere whipped out a white Knicks jersey with the number “33” on the back, below the name “Ewing.” He had had the shirt made earlier in the week but “kept it really quiet,” he said. “I figured, ‘What’s it going to cost, even if we do have to throw it away?”

(Getty Images)

(Getty Images)

In the chaos, I was compelled to ask Herb Simon, who co-owned the runner-up Indiana Pacers with his brother Mel, what he thought about the process.

“I told Mel, ‘Keep an eye on the drum to make sure it’s on the up-and-up,’” Simon said, then called over the Mel, a few feet away, “Mel, was it on the up-and-up?”

Mel Simon called back, “I think Stern had a magnet on his ring.”

It was all about the punch line that day. Not that everyone laughed.

 

Tom Brady’s guilt? Probable enough (if you aren’t a Patriots fan).

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On good legal advice, it can be stated here that that rascally Tom Brady is in a bind. Because, beyond Brady getting beat up by (non-New England Patriots) fans on the jury in the court of public opinion, the term “more probable than not”—used to cite Brady’s culpability in the case of the squishy NFL footballs—is a valid one in establishing proof.

Furthermore, as Northeastern University law professor Roger Abrams explained in a telephone tutorial, “When the NFL wrote its own rules, unilateral rules, they were not negotiated with the union, because [the league] wanted it as easy as possible to sustain discipline.

“The NFL has its own housekeeping rules,” Abrams said. “If the question is whether the NFL has the power [to suspend Brady for four games], the answer is, ‘Sure.’”

Brady can appeal, and his agent has said he will. And the players’ union can appeal on Brady’s behalf. But either appeal, Abrams said, “does not go to an independent, neutral arbitrator. It’s to a person designated by the commissioner. The NFL has the edge, absolutely.”

It should be noted that Abrams, who has written extensively on law and sports and served as arbitrator in hundreds of legal disputes, was “floored” by the Brady suspension. “The NFL,” he said, “seems unable to get it correct,” citing how the league’s original suspensions in the matters of Ray Rice’s domestic violence, New Orleans Saints bounty practices and Adrian Peterson’s child abuse charges—each of those involving physical harm as opposed to fudging competitive rules by decreasing the air pressure in footballs—all were overturned.

But this is what happens when cloak-and-dagger activity is unearthed in sports, a universe founded on the ideal of the Level Playing Field and so closely scrutinized by passionate, partisan devotees. However stark, raving mad Patriots fans are about having Brady convicted of behavior they insist is neither conclusive nor outside the bounds of common practice around the league, those anti-Patriots loyalists have been just as nuts over Brady’s perceived arrogance and apparent treachery.

This opinion divide was evident in a sampling of New York Times’ reader reactions published Sunday. To both sides of the argument, then, the NFL penalties announced on Monday, including a hefty fine and loss or draft choices for the Patriots, were predictably gasoline on the flames.

The better part of valor in this fight could be humor, as when Columbia University physics and mathematics professor Brian Greene wrote in the Times—soon after the scandal surfaced—that the league’s attempt to obtain expert scientific analysis of pigskin inflation occasioned “one of the rare times when the jocks turn to the nerds….

“So fellow fans of molecules and momentum—climb out of that gym locker you were stuffed into—this is our moment.”

Greene, alluding to “gas physics” and a formula considering volume, pressure and air temperature, slyly concluded that NFL lawyers may “just want to increase their billable hours.” And, taking the meteorological elements into account, “It looks to me that mother nature at least provides a reasonable doubt” about any skullduggery. “So, based on what I know now, your honor, I cannot convict,” Greene wrote.

My friend Charlie Pierce, whose wickedly snarky style is to be envied in these situations, similarly advised that we all calm down. In a piece for the Web site Grantland just prior to the suspension order, Pierce wrote,

“1. I think [Brady] knew damned well what was going on with those footballs. I think his categorical denial at the January press conference was what my old journalism school dean would have called a “barefaced non-fact.” I think he should be suspended two games. And then, good god, people, we should all get on with our lives.

“2. I think anyone who advocates a more serious punishment than that, and anyone who equates Brady with Lance Armstrong or Barry Bonds, is a dangerous child who should be kept away from the public for the same reason we keep toddlers out of the cutlery….”

Meanwhile, back to the “more probable than not” guilt assigned to Brady, the face of the Patriots and—to some extent—the face of the NFL: “What it means in real life,” Abrams said, “is, ‘It could be, maybe it’s not, I’m not too sure.’ It’s 51-percent sure. Which means it’s 49 percent not sure.

“But ‘more probable than not’ is used in civil actions, not criminal actions, for damages in car accidents or breach-of-contract or actions involving real property. Does the evidence [against Brady] meet that standard? Ted Wells [the lawyer who authored the report on the deflation investigation] is a wonderful attorney. Known him for 30 years. I value his work.

“On the other hand, people are picking that report apart.”

In the end, Abrams said, this was “not a legal decision but a policy decision: What’s best for the business?” So what the NFL had to decide was whether it wanted to open the 2015 season on national television—New England vs. Pittsburgh—without the sport’s biggest star? Or wanted to risk, by some relatively meek penalty, reinforcing the notion that rules are not quite the same for superstars?

Either way, what has been aired out, with those footballs, is some of the game’s dirty laundry.

 

The Maneater will still chew you up

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These are my people: Fellow staffers from the mid- to late-1960s on The Maneater, the University of Missouri’s independent student newspaper. I wanted to be a newspaper person, and these colleagues of long ago gave me my first glimpse of terminally curious, certifiably passionate journalists.

We all were the same age, mostly freshmen and sophomores. But, compared to me, with my narrow focus on sportswriting, these folks seemed like grownups. They knew stuff. And how to find out what they didn’t know. They informed and entertained, spoke truth to power, revealed the inadequacies of school officials and the racism around town.

They were, as current Maneater staffers remain, descendants of the paper’s 1955 founder, Brooklyn-raised Joel Gold, who spelled out his editorial policy this way:

“If you want to keep us out, better bar the door. And don’t try getting rough or screaming ‘libel’ when a Maneater reporter crashes your meetings. When the Maneater gets mad, all hell is going to break loose. You’ve been warned.”

Gold died last October at 82. But The Maneater lives on. And in celebrating its 60th anniversary last week, when roughly 150 former and current staffers gathered for an on-campus reunion, we were given T-shirts bearing Gold’s defiant manifesto.

Likely, all of us originally were drawn to Mizzou by its reputation. Its journalism school, opened in 1908, was first in the world. Regularly—and still, according some sources, including NewsPro Magazine—Missouri’s School of Journalism has been ranked first in the nation.

Officially, none of us were in J-School until our junior year, when most of us began working for the university-run city newspaper, The Columbia Missourian. There, professors and graduate assistants made the big decisions; students were the copy editors and reporters, competing head-to-head in the real world—against the local Columbia Tribune, regional and even big-city publications in St. Louis and Kansas City.

This was the so-called “Missouri Method” of journalism instruction, learning by doing, something like the Delbert McClinton lyric: “I learned to swim when Daddy threw me in the river.”

It’s a good system. But for so many of us, before we got to J-School, we needed The Maneater for instant gratification as we went through the two years of arts-and-science boot camp. Plus, The Maneater allowed us to be mugwumps, journalistic sovereigns—completely independent from any student government or student organization, as well as the School of Journalism itself.

A first-semester freshman such as myself could wangle his way onto The Maneater with the submission of a football-related cartoon, a foot-in-the-door toward becoming sports editor. Once there, I was surrounded by the very definition of college: Students trafficking in insight and critical thought. Also, through many intense, late-night sessions, we had a lot of yukks.

By the time we entered J-School, we had enough experience, confidence and swagger that there were some professors reportedly a bit annoyed that involvement in The Maneater had encroached upon their territory of teaching the profession.

Whatever. The machinery of reporting, writing and editing had been oiled.

Things aren’t the way they were 50 years ago, and there was something appropriate about us posing last week for a picture in front of Read Hall, where our newsroom was situated on the top floor back then. The Maneater office long ago relocated to fancier digs on campus, so that these days, Read houses the department of history. Which basically is what me and my peers are now.

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Naturally, we veterans spent time during our little homecoming fretting about the future of journalism—and of newsprint in particular—as the digital, social-media revolution plays out. But, judging by a couple of speeches given by this generation of staffers, Joel Gold’s Maneater label still applies—a newspaper that sounds “dangerous—bold, fearsome, watch-your-step-in-my-jungle tough.”

You’ve been warned.

 

Things that rhyme with “sports”

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To send National Poetry Month on its way after its annual visit, let us consider a couple of apparently strange bedfellows: sports and verses. Because these visibly divergent, adversarial activities—physical exertion in contrast to imagery and emotion (sports versus verses)—in fact have real and metaphysical links.

How do I demonstrate? Let me count the ways.

Onomatopoeia can tackle jocks, can swish a basketball. Athletes do perform rhythmically, lyrically at times. Not only is there a substantial body of poetry about sports—and several cases of athletes turned poets—there also is this uncanny connection:

Matt Harvey (bbc.co.uk)

Matt Harvey (bbc.co.uk)

Matt Harvey (newsday.com)

Matt Harvey (newsday.com)

Five years ago, Wimbledon tennis officials designated, as their tournament’s first poet laureate, one Matt Harvey. Baseball fans certainly know the name, if not that Matt Harvey’s work, which includes a concise piece about Andy Murray, the Scotland-born United Kingdom favorite who often disappointed his national following before finally winning Wimbledon in 2013:

If ever he’s brattish/or brutish or skittish

He’s Scottish.

But when he looks fittish/and his form is hottish

He’s British.

One of the best known poems in American literature is a baseball piece, Ernest Thayer’s 1888 “Casey at the Bat,” such a standard that it has spawned countless takeoffs, including then-New York City major John Lindsay’s “Ode to the New York Mets” on the occasion of the 1969 World Series:

Oh, the outlook isn’t pretty for the Orioles today/They may have won the pennant, but the Mets are on the way…..

A member of that championship Mets team, third baseman Ed Charles, has written numerous poems, including “Jackie Robinson, Superstar,” penned on Oct. 24, 1972, the day Robinson died:

He accepted the challenge and played the game/with a passion that few men possessed.

He stood tall in the face of society’s shame/with a talent that God had blessed….

At the 2012 London Olympics, the poet laureate of South Dakota, David Allan Evans—a former pole vaulter—presented his verse, “Pole Vaulter:”

Unless I have counted my steps/hit my markers/feel up to it

I refuse to follow through/I am committed to beginnings/or to nothing….

Plus, of course, there were Mohammad Ali’s little rhymes, often crafted to predict when and how he would win specific bouts, and sometimes merely to broadcast his own greatness:

I dance and I have a fast hook/I take the people’s money like I’m a crook.

In a recent airing of NPR’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me,” Boston Red Sox public address announcer and team poet laureate Dick Flavin recited his rhyming tribute to Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski, which concludes:

There just is no rhyme to go with Yastrzemski/And take that from one who had made the attemptski.  

Which is reminiscent of a 1968 ditty about Baltimore Colts lineman Dick Szymanski by the wonderfully sly Ogden Nash:

The life of an offensive center/is one that few could wish to enter.

You’ll note that that of Dick Szymanski/Is not all roses and romanski….

I have an old book of sports poems, edited by R.R. Knudson and P.K. Ebert, with compositions covering all the major athletic endeavors, and even some of the lesser ones, such as parachuting and polo.  It concludes with a list of the sports about which the editors “were unable to locate poems.” And an invitation for the reader to “try writing your own.”

Uh, oh…

Limerick, quatrain, doggerel, sonnet/How to describe a sport? Dog-gone it…

Maybe something like this for the Winter Olympic sport of biathlon?

Guns and violence/Snot dripping from my nose.

Sweating’ in wintertime/Can’t feel my toes.

As much as I try, can’t deny/I’m a bi

Athlete.

To make Charlton happy/I’m totin’ a rifle.

Wax you with my skis/With me, don’t trifle.

White beard, white hair/Struggle with blank stare.

Rickety stride, pain in my side/I’m a bi

Athlete.

OK, then. Perhaps figure skating?

I can’t figure skating/And I can’t figure her

Slipping around with guys in sequins

Falling on their wallets with a certain frequen

Cy.

That one goes on a couple more stanzas. And I have others. But the good news is that National Poetry Month is over.

NFL draft: Razzle dazzle and “95 percent chance”

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(si.com)

(si.com)

Those partners in prime time, the NFL and ESPN, are about to elbow their way into the sports spotlight with a sports event that isn’t really a sports event—the NFL draft.

There is no actual competition involved in this big orchestrated fuss. No winner or loser. No consequence of any sort for months—perhaps years—down the road. Yet the NFL draft is the most scrutinized, monetized, oversized affair on the sports calendar this side of the Super Bowl.

Newspapers, magazines and Web sites—not to the mention the self-promoters on ESPN’s many platforms—already are flooded with mock drafts, endless speculation and overwrought analyses by battalions of experts considering the possibilities of the first few dozen picks.

It’s all just educated guessing, infused with an air of sophistication, though certainly far removed from the league’s first draft in 1936. Then, no team had a scouting department and Wellington Mara, son of New York Giants’ original owner Tim Mara, took on the aura of a drafting genius simply by subscribing to magazines and out-of-town papers to build dossiers of college players across the country.

The first NFL scout wasn’t hired until the Los Angeles Rams paid a fellow named Eddie Kotal in 1946. And, until ESPN president Chet Simmons, in 1980, convinced a wary Pete Rozelle, then the NFL commissioner, that fans actually would watch a televised draft, team representatives simply gathered in a hotel ballroom—usually in Chicago, Philadelphia or New York—and relayed their picks via telephone. Mostly to be reported in the small print of the following day’s papers.

(cleveland.com)

(cleveland.com)

I first covered the draft in 1977. Neither the Giants head coach, John McVay, nor their No. 1 pick, USC defensive lineman Gary Jeter, were anywhere near the New York hotel draft headquarters. Both—McVay from the Giants’ New Jersey base and Jeter from his home in Los Angeles—spoke briefly by phone to a handful of reporters.

There was no “No. 1” jersey unfurled in front of Jeter for the cameras, no smiling commissioner high-fiving and hugging Jeter, no perfectly coiffed Mel Kiper breathlessly updating which team was “on the clock” and which college players still were “on the board.”

Now, teams undeniably put an enormous amount of time and money into the effort. But what the draft show ultimately pedals to the public is the process of general managers being hoisted on their own petard of having Too Much Information.

Last year, a 538.com analysis found GMs to be “victims of their own obsessive pre-draft preparations—their skill level has increased so much that only the effects of chance remain….[and] much of what each team gets from its draft picks….is determined by pure chance.”

Since 2008, academics Cade Massey, now a Wharton economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago’s Richard Thalen have been updating “The Loser’s Curse” study, which paints NFL general managers as regular victims of their own overconfidence.

Massey and Thalen have documented that the best value in the draft comes somewhere between a late first-round and early- to mid-second-round choice, because teams—-so convinced they know more than the next guy—-routinely pay too much money for the highest picks. In reality, there is virtually equal knowledge of player talent throughout the league, Massey and Thalen found, with “no observable differences in [draft] skills across teams” and therefore outcomes that are “95-plus percent chance.”

So the aggregate effect of the whole exercise is fairly trivial, just another version of a televised Survivor or The Voice. Decidedly not a sports event. No matter; the most significant impact of the draft is to assure there is no off-season in pro football, that aggressively marketing another aspect of the NFL operation is a way to steal the thunder from the NBA and NHL playoffs and push ever-present baseball into the shadows at will.

According to sports economist Roger Noll, NFL teams in fact use the draft to collectively “eliminate competition for the best rookies, thereby reducing salaries” to the highest picks. My friend Jay Weiner, for years a chronicler of sports business, called the draft “as much a sporting event as the slave trade was a job fair.”

Give the NFL this, though: Its draft is very 21st Century. It is audience empowerment. Interactive. Real fantasy football. Like the Super Bowl, it is profoundly exaggerated, all razzle dazzle and hyperbole.

But, at least with the Super Bowl, there is a final score.

 

 

Jackie Robinson, the only real No. 42

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42

To have every Major League player wearing No. 42 for games on April 15 these past eight years, as they did again Wednesday, is poignantly contrary to Brooklyn Dodger outfielder Gene Hermanski’s dark humor on a 1947 evening in Atlanta.

The Dodgers were about to play an exhibition game that night with Jackie Robinson in uniform No. 42. As the first black man on a big-league roster, in the days of Jim Crow, Robinson couldn’t be missed among his all-white teammates, no matter his raiment, and there had been a telephone call promising that if Robinson stepped onto the field, he would be shot. In the pre-game clubhouse, Hermanski offered, “Why don’t we all wear No. 42? They won’t know who to hit.”

42e

So we have continuity with an encouraging twist. From Robinson’s solitary mission to personally integrate baseball, which was legitimately the “national pastime” when the populace was barely aware of the NFL or the brand-new NBA, we now have solidarity. Everyone, for one night, dresses up like Jackie Robinson on the anniversary of his first big-league game.

Jackie Robinson Day Baseball

It is a nice gesture to an historic figure.  Although, by and large, it doesn’t go much beyond a passing reference to a man—and a time—that current players and citizens born after 1947 can barely fathom. “Babe Ruth changed baseball,” Long Island University history professor Joe Dorinson said. “Jackie Robinson changed America, which in the long run is more important.”

When we spoke briefly by phone on Thursday, Dorinson was on his way to teaching his “History of Sports: A search for heroes” class. “I am wearing,” he said, “my Brooklyn Dodgers No. 42 uniform shirt.” Dorinson happens to be among the prominent Jackie Robinson scholars and in 1997, the 50th anniversary of Robinson breaking baseball’s color line, Dorinson was co-coordinator of a massive Jackie Robinson symposium at LIU.

Dorinson preaches that sports “is not only a mirror on society but also a catalyst to produce social change,” and that three-day 1997 LIU academic conference demonstrated by gathering historians, baseball experts, old ballplayers, psychologists and just plain fans to sort out Robinson and his consequential legacy.

Recent events beyond athletic fields continue to confirm that a post-racial America hardly is a settled issue. But Dorinson has quoted the late historian Jules Tygiel (who had participated in the Robinson symposium) that “Jackie Robinson’s story, like the story of Passover, has to be retold each year. As the Jews were once slaves in Egypt, blacks were slaves in America, and the Jackie Robinson story brings renewal and hope.”

So, while there is consternation in some circles that the percentage of American blacks in Major League baseball actually has fallen in recent years—from a high of 17 percent in 1997 to 8.2 percent now—the Robinson inheritance lives on as one of diversity, of increased opportunity in American sports for Latinos, women, Asians. From being 100-percent white in 1946, the Majors’ current rosters are roughly 60 percent white. A real meritocracy.

George Vecsey, a giant in sports journalism, recently shared a poem on his Web site from Charles Barasch’s 2008 book, “Dreams of the Presidents,” in which Barasch imagined William Taft’s reverie of pitching in relief of Taft-era Hall of Famer Walter Johnson. Taft, the first President to throw out a ceremonial first pitch at a major league game (in 1910), fancies himself—in the Barasch verse—being beckoned from the stands, removing his tie and cuff links, rolling up his sleeves and striking out Ty Cobb.

And then retiring both Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. Black men. In the big leagues.

In reality, in those decades before Jackie Robinson, what seems normal now—to have a prominent sports league’s workforce mostly reflecting the population in general—didn’t exist. Only with the appearance of Robinson, essayist Roger Rosenblatt told the 1997 LIU symposium attendees, was there “a victory over absurdity. Victory over the ludicrous….When Robinson played, he turned an upside-down nation right-side up. Life created by white America for black America is nuts. Enter Jackie Robinson, to show us the nonsense in his bright, aristocratic way.”

Robinson, of course, was a baseball superstar. A .311 hitter over 10 seasons, the leader on six league championship teams, Rookie of the Year in 1947 and league MVP two seasons later, holder of the ungodly statistic of stealing home 20 times, inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1972.

Much more than all that, he was a poke in the eye of an unjust world, an elbow in the ribs on an unfair society not living up to its ideal of all men being created equal. Yet a fellow who tempered his on-field aggressiveness with years of turning the other cheek to outrageous insults. Yeshiva University English professor Manfred Weidhorn called Robinson “a rare case of applied Christianity.”

Another April 15 is a reminder: Even if we all don No. 42, there’s no mistaking which of us is Jackie Robinson.

(Illustration by Bob Newman)

Golf, the Masters and rule of law. Amen.

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(NOT the Masters--but there is a par)

(NOT the Masters–but there is a par)

Golf is a fine sport. But the uninitiated should be forewarned this week about much of the media’s worshipful, sappy treatment of the annual Masters tournament. Paeans to golf as “a game of honor and honesty” and the reverential homage to golf’s sacrosanct rules—said to guarantee more fairness than other athletic endeavors—tend to skip over the fact that golf long turned a blind eye to diversity and, at times, to common sense.

Not until 1975 was a black man, Lee Elder, allowed to play the Masters, and only 15 years later did the Masters’ home, the Augusta National, admit a black member. Still another 22 years passed before Augusta accepted women.

Rules, rules. At the 1968 Masters, an overzealous letter-of-the-law decree prevented Argentina’s Roberto De Vicenzo from advancing to a playoff after De Vicenzo’s playing partner, Tommy Aaron, entered a 4 on De Vicenzo’s scorecard—instead of the 3 De Vicenzo earned, fair and square—on the 71st of the tournament’s 72 holes. It was Aaron’s mistake, yet it was De Vicenzo who was held responsible for the error, thereby losing the tournament by one stroke because he signed the inaccurate card.

Such imperfections bring to mind celebrated golf writer Herbert Warren Wind’s famous description, “Amen Corner,” which Wind used to label the Masters’ difficult section at holes 11, 12 and 13. Wind, who died in 2005 at 88, wrote that he lifted the phrase from a 1930s jazz tune, without religious implications.

(USAToday)

(USAToday)

In fact, though, that old recording—“Shouting in the Amen Corner”—directly referred to a church environment. And, just for additional irony, given the Masters’—and golf’s—decades of segregation, the term specifically cited a tradition with Black Protestant congregations, in which church members continually exclaim “amen” during the sermon in response to the pastor’s words.

Furthermore, it could be that lyrics from “Shouting in the Amen Corner” apply to the Masters’ stuffy old exclusionary policies:

Brothers and sisters, we got hypocrites in this crowd

Brothers and sisters, some of you are shoutin’ too loud.

You’ll find out on judgment day, you can’t fool the Lord that way.

Brothers and sisters, hear all I’ve got to say.

And…

You can shout with all your might, but if you ain’t livin’ right

There’s no use shoutin’ in that amen corner….

In 1954, there was a James Baldwin play, “Amen Corner,” with the protagonist’s conclusion that she should not have used religion as an escape from the struggles of life and love. Four years after that production’s brief run, Wind, in his report on the 1958 Masters for Sports Illustrated, first conjured his “Amen Corner” term to dramatize Arnold Palmer’s final-round eagle on No. 13, which secured the first of Palmer’s four Masters’ titles.

My one encounter with the erudite Mr. Wind was during the 1986 U.S. Open at Long Island’s Shinnecock Hills course, when a first round played in a downpour and shifting winds rendered the world’s best golfers helpless to approach the par of 70.

Many of the pros that day declared a more accurate par would have been as high as 77. So I approached Wind, the most experienced golf observer on the premises, with the proposal that par be adjusted, as warranted, in response to conditions beyond just the length of the hole.

Wind regarded my two heads and dismissed the idea out of hand, after he had filled me in on some of the history. That is, that the British invented an imaginary Colonel Bogey, against whom their scores were measured, and Americans later devised par as a more specific, rigid norm. My clearly wacky theory of some par-ometer, that could slide up and down to reflect whether a hole was playing long or short, whether greens were slick or slow, whether a monsoon or hurricane figured in the mix, was in no way acceptable to Wind.

Because the rules are the rules in golf, that most ethical and moral of sports. And, as a skeptical journalist, I qualified as a target of this line in the song….

If your name ain’t on that roll, all that noise won’t save your soul

So stop your shoutin’ in that amen corner.