Baseball, hot dogs and American culture

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It would seem downright un-American not to note the opening of baseball season. Even in the face of evidence that the NFL has overtaken baseball as the nation’s favorite athletic theater; that the NBA and March Madness have (literally) soared to new heights; that soccer has shouldered its way solidly into our sports culture; that doping stars have revealed a contemptible underbelly in all competitive sports….baseball hangs in there.

It can be argued that baseball has become over-romanticized and soaked in nostalgia even as the modern game is burdened with maddening statistical over-analysis and Major League ballparks regularly bludgeon fans with artificial noise incompatible with the game’s pastoral roots.

As a barometer of where The American Pastime stands in the 21st Century, roughly half of the students in my Hofstra sportswriting class each semester typically confess to preferring other spectator sports.

And yet, baseball is unquestionably in our DNA. A strong magnet to some, possibly just white noise to most, but always there through the long season from late March into November. Throughout our lifetimes, really.

When I was 6, I pleaded with my reluctant older brother to attempt hitting my not-so fast ball, and when his subsequent line drive struck me flush in the mouth—requiring the early extraction of a couple of baby teeth—it was a harbinger of my inauspicious baseball career, essentially concluded after Little League days. But it was not the end of my attraction to the sport, somewhere between fandom and appreciation.

Maybe it’s the eloquence of professional observers such as recently retired Los Angeles Dodgers announcer Vince Scully, with gems of narrative detail such as his call of the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax’s 1965 perfect game, that demonstrate baseball’s hold on us. (Google “Vin Scully Sandy Koufax perfect game” and enjoy 11 minutes of vivid drama.)

Or maybe it’s recognizing the truth in New Yorker Magazine veteran Roger Angell’s description, upon accepting the Hall of Fame writers’ award in 2014, that baseball “has turned out to be so familiar and so startling, so spacious and so exacting, and so easy looking and so heartbreakingly difficult that if filled my notebooks in a rush.”

Consider that American slang is loaded with baseball language. A ballpark figure. Batting 1.000. Grand slam. Out of left field. Step up to the plate. Ruthian. And that American popular culture is littered with baseball references. When Philip Roth tweaked the ongoing search for the “great American novel,” that theoretically perfect crystallization of the country’s spirit and identity, by calling his 1973 book “The Great American Novel,” he made it about baseball.

In a 2012 essay in the New York Times, “What baseball does to the soul,” Irish-born writer Colum McCann related the experience of a Yankee home run in a pivotal playoff-game as “a moment unlike any other, when you sit with your son in the ballpark, and the ball is high in the air, you feel yourself aware of everything, the night, the neon, the very American-ness of the moment.”

Afghan-American writer Mir Tamim Ansary, born in Kabul but raised from his high school days in the U.S., wrote that it wasn’t until he was in his 60s that he finally came to understand baseball by seeing it in terms of “the classic American Western….waiting for something to happen” and realizing that “if you care” about the result of each pitch, “it’s the purest possible definition of suspense.”

Quite naturally, baseball was the backdrop for the 1950s Broadway hit, “Damn Yankees,” for a retelling of the Faustian bargain. In the 1968 song, “Mrs. Robinson,” Simon and Garfunkel ask, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.”

It was baseball’s prominence in society that amplified one of the great advances in civil rights: Jackie Robinson. Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?”—sometimes called the best comic routine of all time—of course is baseball shtick. And, through his creator Charles Schulz, the inimitable Charlie Brown once said, “A hot dog is better with a baseball game in front of it.”

So, play ball.

 

Chris Mullin, 30 years later

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(Newsday/Paul Bereswill)

Obituaries always come too late for their subject to enjoy, and that could be said of the college basketball eulogy given Chris Mullin after his final game at St. John’s University. Rival Georgetown buried Mullin in the 1985 NCAA tournament semifinal before the Hoyas unconditionally praised him.

Not that Mullin, a legitimate hoops luminary, was ever the least bit unappreciated for his basketball acumen and craft throughout his four St. John’s seasons and 13 subsequent years in the NBA. But the way Georgetown coach John Thompson—and specifically Georgetown defender David Wingate—demonstrated their ultimate respect was with a singular assault on Mullin’s considerable talents.

That March 30 night in Lexington, Ky., exactly 30 years before Mullin was hired this week as St. John’s new head coach, Thompson essentially ordered Wingate to pay no mind to anything or anyone in the building except Mullin. While the other four Hoyas played a help-each-other zone defense, Wingate played Mullin. And the direct result, besides wearing out both Mullin and Wingate, was a 77-59 Georgetown victory.

Mullin had averaged 19.8 points that season, and he made half his shots that night. But Wingate allowed him only eight attempts, and thus a measly eight points.

“Never looking at the ball,” Wingate said in his team’s victorious lockerroom, “created a little problem for me. But when you’re covering Chris Mullin, you can’t take your eyes off Chris to look for the ball or Chris will be gone. He’ll be open with the ball.”

From the very outset, Wingate chased Mullin. He chased him outside. He chased him down low. He chased him through screens and a few walls. He seemed to chase him down the interstate, off the cloveleafs, down dirt roads and back alleys.

Mullin didn’t touch the ball for the first 3 ½ minutes while Georgetown built an immediate eight-point lead. With six minutes left in the half, Mullin’s basket tied the game, whereupon Wingate wouldn’t let him near the ball again for almost nine minutes while Georgetown went ahead by 14.

“There are lots of kids who can shoot like Chris,” Thompson said after the game. “But what makes him great is his ability to get open, and when he’s open, it’s not just his shooting that hurts you. It’s his passing, too. David is very quick, but Chris is very shrewd.”

That night in Kentucky, Quick put Shrewd in jail and threw away the key. But it was just one game, and there may be no larger compliment than the post-game fear of Mullin that Georgetown acknowledged.

Now, shrewd is clearly a Mullin quality St. John’s officials are counting on, given that Mullin never has coached on any level, and there is widespread agreement that the old star’s cleverness will serve him well in this new role. What he really will need, though, is a player like the one who demanded every second of Georgetown’s attention 30 years ago.

Singapore: A civilized place to visit

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There is a guess-you-had-to-be-there tone to the dialogue considering the legacy of Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore who died this week at 91. From this side of the globe, reports generally cast Lee’s transformation of the tiny city-state into one of the wealthiest Asian nations as having been accomplished through a semi-authoritarian, one-party rule that muzzles political dissent.

Along with the acknowledged success of Lee’s “Singapore model”—rendering one of the world’s highest per-capita incomes, spotless public spaces, clean tap water, non-corrupt government officials—there also has been attention to harsh penalties for such crimes as failing to flush public toilets and buying or selling chewing gum, and questions of whether free speech is fully tolerated.

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As a person who spent a single week in Singapore for a 2005 assignment to cover a major International Olympic Committee meeting, I can only say there was nothing not to like about the place. On the surface, at least, Singapore appeared to follow the Walt Disney school of theme-park efficiency—a Tomorrow Land, Fantasy Land ideal. (You can chew gum, just don’t dare spit it out on the street.)

I even ran into the Statue of Liberty while I was there. (She was promoting the unsuccessful New York City bid for the 2012 Olympics.)

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Picture gleaming, modern skyscrapers side-by-side with classic, historic buildings in the British colonial style, such as the Raffles Hotel (partly famous as home to the Singapore Sling drink). Think of impeccably neat surroundings and a mix of normally distinct cultures, a place somehow simultaneously Asian and Western, which was a manifestation of Lee’s ability to get along both with China and the United States.

Of course, I had read about the high-profile case of American teenager Michael Fay, whose conviction for vandalism and subsequent sentence to be caned in Singapore triggered a minor diplomatic crisis in 1994. It certainly made Singapore sound like a menacing place.

But travel can do enlightening things for one’s worldview. Almost a half-century in the newspaper business afforded me just enough global rambling, mostly via of assignments to cover international sports, not only to deepen an appreciation for all the good stuff and openness we have in the United States—but also to come to the conclusion that we too often paint other lands with a brush of generalization.

So it is not so hard to understand some of the Singaporean annoyance over disapproving representations of Lee and his approach to social order. A column in the United Kingdom’s Independent, written by Singapore native Calvin Cheng, appeared under the headline, “The West Has It Totally Wrong on Lee Kuan Yew.”

“Much as I understand the West’s fundamental DNA to assert certain unalienable freedoms,” Cheng wrote, “as a Singaporean, I strenuously object that there has been any…trade-off” between Lee’s enormously successful economic template and fundamental civil liberties.

“In short,” Cheng wrote, “are you a civilized person who wants to live in a civilized society? Because the things you cannot do in Singapore are precisely the sort that civilized people should not do anyway. If you are, you have nothing to fear.”

Indian-born Washington Post reporter Sahana Singh, who lived in Singapore for 12 years, wrote that she “never felt more free” than when she was stationed in that city-state. “Westerners,” she wrote, “ridicule Singapore for restrictions on personal expression and protest, but overlook how the nation provides more freedom than some of the most-lauded democracies.

“The national government,” she said, “is highly transparent and virtually incorruptible, functioning better than some chaotic, so-called democracies. And yet the world asks why the average Singaporean, who had good schooling, a job, affordable housing, healthcare, child-care and elder-care, doesn’t protest from roof-tops.”

It turns out, by the way, that when Michael Fay—upon returning to the United States—also got in trouble with the American legal system. And that Bill Clinton, who as President during Fay’s Singaporean troubles called that nation’s punishment of the lad extreme and mistaken, is attending Lee’s funeral.

A very civilized thing to do.

 

Sports, recreation and dancing grannies

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Public dancing in China seems an improbable pursuit to come under the heading of “sport.” But that popular routine, having stirred up controversy among some of the populace, suddenly is targeted for regulation through the Chinese government’s General Administration of Sport, according to a Wednesday report in the New York Times.

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To an uninformed Westerner who observed such frolic during a 2011 trip to Shanghai, this is surprising on a couple of levels. First of all, the activity is more diversion or recreation than some competitive physical enterprise. And, beyond that, virtually all of the participants—just having an honest good time—appear more in line for some sort of senior discount than administrative sanction.

In fact, they are widely known as “dancing grannies.” Only a small percentage of the shuffling hoofers I witnessed were male and an even smaller percentage were not-yet-eligible for retirement. At serene Fuxing Park in the pleasant section of Shanghai known as the French Concession, there was a daily gathering of small crowds—seemingly impromptu, but always in the same section of the park—grouping themselves around boom boxes that played an eclectic blend of tunes.

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Sometimes the dancers’ styles even matched the music though, just as likely, some would be tangoing to soft rock, or waltzing to disco. There were passer-by dancers, who would join the group only briefly and then move on, and committed terpsichoreans, who continued to strut their stuff—finding different partners or not—as long as there was music.

Other pastimes were scattered through the park’s various stations, each apparently reserved on a regular basis for a specific hobby preferred by greying residents. Men playing cards here, a group of folks singing opera there, not far from a knot of people engaged in tai chi (that slow-motion exercise that involves deep breathing and flowing, martial-arts poses) and, just down a path, others huddled around a speaker to engage in a little karaoke. There also was a regular outpost for a sort of banner-waving choreography, similar to those flag corps that lead marching bands.

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In short, the park was alive with energy. And on walks around the city in the evening, it was impossible not to pass other knots of dancing grannies on lots and side streets.

The story from China now is that some residents object to the amplified music central to public dancing. (It was never clear, by the way, whether the music was supplied by a designated person, or a duty somehow rotated, or provided purely by chance.)

So the General Administration of Sport, through its mass-fitness department and in conjunction with the Ministry of Culture, is poised to do something—though it isn’t clear what. Reports that standards would be issued on what type of public dancing would be allowed appear to miss the point of the noise complaints.

In the end, shouldn’t the government be a sport about this? Those dancing grannies seemed a lot livelier, and smiley-er, than sedentary sorts all too common in so many societies (including ours). The English poet Lord Byron said, “On with the dance! Let joy be unconfined.”

Revolutionary, I know.

 

 

 

Curtain of gamesmanship

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(azcentral.com)

(azcentral.com)

There is something to be said for college students’ uninhibited ingenuity. A primary purpose of higher education, after all, is to stimulate the innovative gene, and college hijinks have a certain place of honor at sporting events, few of which can match the passionate, occasionally goofy scene at big-time basketball games.

But I’m not sure I’m impressed with the Arizona State students’ Curtain of Distraction. Its fevered, bizarre mini-productions—staged for the express purpose of impairing the free-throw proficiency of opposing teams—somehow has brought overwhelmingly positive publicity for its buffonish inspiration.

The perpetrators—essentially a small band of students but fully backed by the university, including associate athletic director Bill Kennedy—are proud of having devised an efficient “free-throw defense” behind the opponents’ basket, and the NCAA itself—that bastion of fair play—has given its blessing.

The NCAA.com Web site has posted a glowing video about the creation and operation of the curtain, and further approved the device’s continued use in the women’s championship tournament for Arizona State’s first-round home games. That, in spite of a New York Times analysis that cited a one- to two-point advantage per game for Arizona State resulting from the curtain’s deployment.

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In case you don’t know: With the Curtain of Distraction, Arizona State pranksters, stepping away from the role of spectating just as an opposing player readies to take a free throw, whip open a black curtain behind the basket to reveal some weird, frenzied skit. A student rowing a blow-up kayak. A mostly naked fellow playing a guitar. An Elvis impersonator. A fat guy in an undershirt and tutu. A clown jumping rope.

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The choreographed lunacy has been called “brilliant” and “the funniest weapon” against free-throw efficiency. The intent itself hardly is new. In the 1950s, when guide wires stabilized baskets at NBA games, there were tales of Syracuse Nationals fans grasping those wires and shaking the backboard during opponents’ tries.

Still, compared to the typical modern tricks, of fans waving their arms behind the basket or holding up silly posters—also not exactly respectful—the Curtain of Distraction is fan disruption on steroids. It is a show-stealing invasion of the athletic competition. And at what point is that tantamount to poor sportsmanship?

Ka’Nesheia Cobbins, a senior guard for the Arkansas-Little Rock team, preparing to face Arizona State’s women in the second round of NCAA play, was aware that “every time they open [the curtain], it’s a different character, and we’re, like, ‘How did they do that?’ The commentators were saying that they think that’s something good. It’s cool, I guess, but we’re just going to have to block it out….”

Why is it something good?

The man who wrote the Times piece on the Curtain of Distraction’s effect, University of Michigan economics professor and public policy scholar Justin Wolfers, is the same fellow who applied “forensic economics” to a 2007 study concluding there was point shaving in roughly one percent of Division I basketball games. Wolfers drew no conclusions that the Curtain of Distraction is a different form of cheating. But I will.

Isn’t the Curtain of Distraction also gaming the system? Shouldn’t players be players, officials be officials, coaches be coaches and fans just be fans? Arizona State has a drama department for the Curtain’s aspiring thespians, where there is no danger of visiting basketball players showing up and trying to mess with their focus.

(Arizona State University)

(Arizona State University)

Donald Trump for president? Ask the old USFL folks

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For anyone out there who thinks Donald Trump should not run for president, the good news is that Trump has announced he is forming an exploratory committee to consider running for president. Because, by now, the world surely understands that The Donald regularly deals in bunkum, far quicker to offer a bluff than produce a [small-T] trump.

“Americans,” Trump said in a statement threatening his White House campaign, “deserve better than what they get from their politicians—who are all talk and no action.”

Ho, boy. You could say it takes one to know one, and Trump has been road-testing his bluster for more than 30 years. Let me take you back to his most significant involvement in the sports world, when Trump, then 37, spent $9 million to buy the New York Generals in the short-lived United States Football League.

That was in 1984. The USFL, not quite bold enough to take on the established NFL, was organized as a springtime league. At the time Trump, son of a multimillionaire New York builder, already had the reputation as an attention hog. (His chief competitor in the high-powered real-estate world then, Sam Lefrak, said of him, “Kid only knows how to talk, not to build.”)

Still Trump, as the new owner of the Generals, whom he had purchased from Oklahoma oil tycoon J. Walter Duncan, commenced talking about all the things he would build in the USFL–which, it should be said, at least didn’t mind the free publicity.

Trump said he would hire Don Shula, who had just coached the fifth of his six Super Bowl teams in 1983, away from the Miami Dolphins. He said he was negotiating to bring all-NFL lineman Randy White from the Dallas Cowboys. He said he was close to a deal to spirit away all-pro linebacker Lawrence Taylor from the Giants.

None of that happened. When Shula announced his decision to withdraw from Generals consideration, Trump quickly claimed that he—Trump—had pulled back his offer rather than include a Shula apartment in the showy Trump Tower. Shula wryly countered, “I had my press conference first.”

Trump also maintained that, at a meeting of USFL owners shortly after joining their club, “the subject of moving our season to the fall didn’t come up until I brought it up. I brought it up and spoke for a half hour, and when I was finished, if a vote had been taken, I believe it would have been 12-6 or 13-5 in favor of switching to the fall.”

Fellow USFL officials strongly denied that. “I would suggest,” said Vince Lombardi Jr., then president and general manager of the Michigan franchise, “that Don is out there on his own on this. More than any other issue.”

Trump, who said his Manhattan tower had 68 stories when there really were only 59, said the Generals’ season-ticket sales in 1984 were at 40,000, when they actually were at 32,000. (The Generals played in the old Giants Stadium, with a capacity of 77,000.)

Trump had been among the original candidates for USFL ownership in 1983, “but it didn’t work out,” Tampa franchise owner John Bassett told me after Trump came aboard. “Why? That depends on who you talk to. If you talk to me, I tell everybody that he didn’t put up the $5,000 assessment, so we kicked him out. Which is true. If you talk to him, he tells everybody that he was busy with his real estate matters and wanted to play in the fall. Which is also true.”

So there are different angles of truth. But here is what actually happened in the USFL-Trump adventure. As the league dwindled to eight teams, there indeed was a decision to move USFL games to the fall, in direct competition with the NFL, for the 1986 season. Instead, the USFL folded.

And, just this past year, after Trump lost a bidding war to buy the NFL’s Buffalo Bills for $1.4 billion, Trump insisted via Twitter, “Even though I refused to pay a ridiculous price for the Buffalo Bills, I would have produced a winner. Now that won’t happen.”

For anyone out there who is a Bills fan, what did happen may be good news.

Academics and sports: Circular logic?

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Here’s a puzzler for Pi Day:

Since one of the earliest written approximations of pi was found in Babylon (on a clay tablet dated 1900-1600 B.C.), and I (a practitioner of sports journalism) live in Babylon (OK, not that Babylon); and since ancient Greek mathematician and physicist Archimedes, credited with devising the first recorded algorithm for calculating the value of pi, was from Syracuse (OK, not the Division I college sports power Syracuse); and since Pi Day (March 14) also is the birthday of genius poster boy Albert Einstein, who is said to have hated sports as a young man but befriended Paul Robeson, the pioneer black singer and actor who had been an all-American football player at Rutgers….might there be some empirical link between eggheads and jocks?

Is there some theory of relativity here?

The convergence of academia and athletics this time of year—that is, teams representing institutions of higher learning in the annual NCAA basketball tournament—in fact has increasingly taken the form of ships passing in the night. According to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics, 13 of the 68 teams involved in March Madness a couple of years ago would not have qualified if the new threshold being phased in by the NCAA had been applied—that teams must have 50 percent of their players on target for graduation.

More and more, the most serious forms of academic and athletic pursuits appear to exist in a transitory, incidental relationship without lasting significance. Like pi, the separation seems forever. Especially since the entertainment value of sports—dramatic, unscripted—increasingly generates a never-ending perception that, while games are fun, scholarship is a solitary, punishing grind unworthy of television coverage.

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The beauty to Pi Day—recognized by Congress in 2009 because the 3/14 date reflects the first three significant numbers in pi—is the way it stirs up a bit of geek goofiness, worth a good giggle. Grey Matter for Dummies. Pi Day even can serve as a reminder that sports and education are capable of co-existing quite well.

In 2008, a new sport called Pi Ball was invented in South Africa—supposedly on Pi Day—played on a circular court around a central circular ball strike area. Comparable to beach volleyball, with two players on a team separated by a net, it hasn’t caught on internationally. And certainly not here in the United States.

But here’s a better answer to what we may see as the sound mind, sound body conundrum: At MIT, where they really do do rocket science, boasting some of the world’s elite brainiacs among the student body, the football team has posted winning records in five of the last seven seasons.

(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Not only that, but MIT has a really fun/intelligent cheer. (With pi included.)

E to the U,  D-U, D-X

E to the X, D-X.

Cosine, secant, tangent, sine, 3-point-14159…..

Integral, radical, U, D-V,

Slipstick, slide rule, M-I-T.

There. Problem solved.

baked-piepizza

 

 

 

 

Gentrification and the Islanders’ identity

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For 43 years, the Islanders-Rangers story has been a hockey version of the old country mouse-city mouse fable. A practical dwelling of simple tastes and no frills (Nassau Coliseum) for one, big-city opulence and celebrity treatment (Madison Square Garden) for the other. But each eventually content with its own lot and the realization that tastes can differ.

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Let’s think about this, on the occasion of what may have been the last Islanders-Rangers game—the 126th, lively as ever, going back to 1972—at the country-mouse residence this week. (The rivals could reconvene there in the playoffs, though they haven’t done so in the post-season since 1994.) Next season, when the Islanders relocate to Brooklyn, within the New York City limits, do they—and perhaps more specifically, their fans—lose their very identity? Do the Islanders merely become Rangers Lite?

Much of any sports team’s connection to its home base is perception. Not a single player on the Islanders’ current roster—made up of Americans, Canadians, Slovaks, a Czech, Austrian, Dane, Russian and Belarussian—hails from Long Island. Nor do any of the Rangers—a collection of lads from the U.S., Canada, Sweden and Norway—come from New York City. For their original meeting lo those many years ago, every Islander and every Ranger had come from north of the border: It was our Canadians against your Canadians.

Another geographical paradox is they are called the “New York Islanders”—rather than the Long Island (Somethings)—because original owner Roy Boe believed the “New York” label was more spectacular. More big league. Also, there was a general feeling in the Islanders’ early days that much of their potential audience would be Rangers’ fans unable to obtain tickets to games at the sold-out Garden.

Soon enough, though, the Islanders were champions. And, with the bandwagon effect, something more emotional and tribe-like than general product loyalty, the Islanders were seen as representatives of the Island—a photo negative of Manhattan—to their large and passionate fan base. Born and raised there; not New York City ex-pats. Working class; not fancy-schmancy Big Town sophisticates.

It was the Islanders’ comparatively rustic setting which convinced Al Arbour (whose very surname suggested leafy, shady surroundings) to sign on as coach and led to a four-year reign as Stanley Cup champions. Arbour had made it clear that he didn’t want to live among skyscrapers and concrete, which had been his idea of a “New York” team.

And it was the Islanders’ 1975 elimination of the Rangers from the Stanley Cup playoffs, only two seasons after they materialized as an expansion team, that provided the Island—a suburban sprawl forever in the entertainment and psychological shadow of Gotham—its first Carnegie Hall, Broadway show parity.

At the time, the “bumpkin” Islanders—as then-general manager Bill Torrey sarcastically described them to Newsday’s Mark Herrmann recently—jealously resented how Madison Avenue and the city media fawned over the Rangers, even as the Islanders were quickly developing into a powerhouse team.

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But when the Islanders began their run of championships in 1980 and it was suggested that it was “New York’s” first Stanley Cup since the Rangers’ 1940 title, feisty Islanders goalie Billy Smith declared, “The Stanley Cup is not in New York. It’s on Long Island.” That was a country mouse who came to appreciate his circumstance.

What, then, is the parable of gentrification? With the Islanders running away to Brooklyn, team ownership is saying that it is too good for the humble old Coliseum? (Might it be that fans stayed away from home games the past few years not because of an inferior building but rather an inferior team? They have come back to regularly fill, and dramatically energize, the place this season now that the Islanders at last are contenders again.)

A further insult to Island hockey fans are published reports that the Islanders’ Bridgeport farm team will settle in at the Coliseum. (Subliminal message: The minor leagues are good enough for you rubes.) That news circulates even as the parent club is trying to convince season ticket holders to follow it to the Barclays Center, an arena designed for basketball that can’t match the Coliseum for having no bad seat in the house.

The players—like all professional athletes, their primary association and commitment is to teammates, coaches and staff—acknowledge the “breaking-in period,” as Islanders captain John Tavares put it, regarding the Brooklyn move. It is not his place to question such management decisions, but in his six seasons, Tavares has come to believe that “what makes the [Islanders-Rangers] rivalry so great is that you have two such passionate fan bases. I think people from Long Island are very proud. I’m sure people from the city are the same….”

At this week’s (possibly) final Coliseum match between the country and city teams, message boards repeatedly vowed to Islanders fans, “We Play for You!”

For a few more weeks, anyway. (Will they at least leave the championship banners and plaques behind?)

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And then, it sounds like: So long, suckers.

 

Fantasy and reality in college sports

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The thing about NYU’s 2015 baseball team—the school’s first in that intercollegiate sport since 1974, as the New York Times reported this week—is that it is real. I make this distinction because, 15 years ago, I found myself following (through the school’s student newspaper) an NYU football juggernaut that turned out to be the athletic version of a unicorn.

The Violet gridders of 2000, according to regular dispatches by sports reporter Ryse Dwillin in the Washington Square News, were romping (allegedly) past opponents from Brandeis, the University of Chicago, Vassar, Washington U. of St. Louis and Whitman College of Walla Walla, Wash.

Not that many people would have been expected to notice. NYU’s athletic operation—with the exception of a powerhouse fencing team—had dropped off the Division I sports radar a quarter-century before. And New Yorkers’ sporting passions long ago turned almost exclusively toward professional teams. Especially that fall, a Yankees-Mets World Series and the Giants’ run to the Super Bowl were taking up virtually all of fans’ oxygen.

At the time, though, I had a significant connection to NYU, in the form of tuition payments for my daughter, herself a Washington Square News staffer. So, late that autumn, as NYU appeared positioned for the Division III national playoffs, I could have generated some rooting fervor for the lads in purple and white.

at halftime

Then, on Dec. 7, the Washington Square News published a short note from the editor, beginning,

“We’d like to come clean: There is no football team at NYU.”

A shocking Brian Williams moment? A reckless squandering of journalistic credibility? Or just a good college giggle, in the honored tradition of sly sarcasm?

One WSN account of the rampaging mythological team had roguishly quoted made-up quarterback Joel Luber’s complaint—a cliché in the real world of successful athletes who somehow feel unappreciated—that “none of the critics thought we were for real.”

Of course, they weren’t. Neither was the team’s beat writer. (Ryse Dwillin was an anagram, with an extra “i,” of actual reporter Will Snyder). Nor did coach Jack Wizzenhunt nor star tailback Ahmed El Kahloul exist, nor a play called “the Rooster,” wherein El Kahloul would hide the ball between his legs.

Eventually, what most surprised the playful Frankensteins who created that football monster was that a few readers didn’t get what they considered an obvious joke. There were some calls asking where to buy football tickets and how to try out for the team.

The whole thing was meant to lampoon the decidedly low visibility of NYU sports, even among its student body. Then, as now, most of the school’s intercollegiate teams played their “home” games nowhere near the bustling Greenwich Village campus, at such distant venues as Bloomfield, N.J., up-state Suffern, Upper Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens. (The revived baseball team’s home field is on Brooklyn’s Coney Island.)

There certainly is some irony in the fact that NYU currently fields 21 intercollegiate sports teams—11 for men, 10 for women—and legitimately can argue that its athletic emphasis is on serving students interested in competition. As opposed to, say, the University of Alabama, which has seven men’s teams and 10 women’s. In such an environment as Alabama’s, where King Football rules, a multi-million dollar entertainment business—based as it is on the labor of quasi-students—serves first to please alumni, television executives, sponsors, fabulously paid coaches and gamblers.

So, in the end, which is the lie? The grand spoofs, or the thing that inspires them—thoroughly professional big-time college sports programs hiding behind a claim of student-athlete amateurism?

Long before the fictional NYU gridders, there was the 1941 Plainfield Teachers College football team, and the Maguire University basketball team of the 1960s.

Annoyed by the attention paid to major-college football at the expense of smaller institutions, a Wall Street broker named Morris Newburger fabricated Plainfield (and an entire 10-team conference) with a simple telephone call reporting a final score to a major New York City newspaper. When the paper’s staff at last realized that it has been hoodwinked, Newburger issued a press release saying 15 Plainfield players had been declared academically ineligible  and that the coach chose to cancel the remainder of the season.

Maguire materialized from regular gatherings of high school coaches and college scouts at a Chicago bar—Maguire’s—who tweaked the NCAA’s policing naivete. As a prank, those fellows simply submitted information about their “school” nickname (the Jollymen), colors (green and white), and college president (Dr. Mel Connolly, actually a truck driver—his real name, minus the “doctor” title—who regularly could be found in his “office” at Maguire’s). Maguire’s subsequently received tickets to two Final Four tournaments until a Chicago columnist spilled the beans.

What we seem to have with these hoaxes is not so much nefarious prevarications but something on the order of Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness”—characterizing a “truth” as something that, while not exactly based on fact, points to the absurdity of real events.

My former Newsday colleague Stan Isaacs—a man with a twinkle in his eye who was a giant among sports journalists—years ago became so convinced that only bettors scoured the college basketball scores that he added his own invented schools to the newspaper’s list of results.

His favorite was Chelm University, which he named for a town in Yiddish folklore inhabited by people who were good-natured but stupid. There is no record that Chelm ever lost a game.

 

 

 

 

 

The non-Cuban Cubans who made black baseball history

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It’s Spring-like somewhere. And, really, this is an ideal time to conflate the passing of Black History Month with the approaching baseball season—even here in cold, cold Babylon Village, on the South Shore of Long Island, N.Y.

Especially here. This is where—more than a century ago—a staff of waiters, bellhops and porters at a fading resort, the Argyle Hotel, formed America’s first black professional baseball team. That was the summer of 1885—62 years before Jackie Robinson’s Major League debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The Aug. 22, 1885 edition of Babylon’s South Side Signal reported that a game on the Argyle grounds, between the National Club of Farmingdale and the Athletics of Babylon, was won by “the employees at the Argyle Hotel,” 29-1.

Formed by Argyle headwaiter Frank Thompson, they became known as the Cuban Giants, so named by a white New Jersey promoter who soon bankrolled them for Harlem Globetrotter-style tours. The name may have been based on the racial realities of the day—that white crowds would sooner pay to see Latinos than blacks play ball. Or maybe the result of the sporting press, known at the time to euphemistically refer to blacks as Cuban, Spanish or Arabian. Or perhaps became the team’s manager, Stanislaus Kostka Govern, was a native of the Caribbean.

In his 1995 book, “Complete History of the Negro Leagues,” Mark Ribowsky wrote that, in spite of “reams of attention in the press….it takes a leap of the imagination to believe that anyone who came to see them perform was really conned” by the Cuban ploy.

Less clear is whether the players originally were paid (top salary: $18 a week) to provide entertainment for hotel guests or, in fact, had baseball as their primary jobs.

A 2005 book, “Out of the Shadows: African-American Baseball from the Cuban Giants to Jackie Robinson,” edited by Bill Kirwin, said Thompson recruited players from as far away as Washington and Philadelphia. And Jules Tygiel, the late historian of black baseball, wrote that the team toured the East in a private railroad car and consistently drew sellout crowds—and was such a success that there was a handful of imitators. The Cuban X Giants in New York, Page Fence Giants from Michigan, Lincoln Giants from Nebraska.

At the time, base ball (two words in the American vocabulary then) was becoming the nation’s No. 1 spectator sport, and the Cuban Giants were a powerhouse, winning all 10 games against white competition in 1885 and proclaimed the “world colored champions” of 1887 and 1888.

(Babylon Historical and Preservation Society)

A story in the black Indianapolis Freeman newspaper soon reported that the Cuban Giants had beaten “the New Yorks” two straight games and that “the St. Louis Browns, Detroits and Chicagos, afflicted with Negro phobia,” declined challenges to play the Cuban Giants—“unable to bear the odium of being beaten by colored men,” the paper said.

By the 1890s, the Cuban Giants periodically counted on their roster such widely acclaimed players as Frank Grant, considered by baseball historian Robert Peterson to be the best black player of his era; Sol White, called by black sports historian Art Rust, Jr. the best long-ball hitter of his time; and Bud Fowler, memorialized in Cooperstown as the first black man to be paid by a white baseball team (and there were several for the barnstorming Fowler).

At the time, Babylon was past its peak as a booming resort destination triggered by the arrival of the Long Island Rail Road in 1867, when New York city’s summer crowds and other tourists made their way to nearby Fire Island. The Argyle, funded by a syndicate headed by LIRR president Austin Corbin and built on the former estate of railroad magnate Electus B. Litchfield, was the last of a dozen hotels in the village. Among the Argyle’s investors was the son of the Duke of Argyll; thus its name.

(Babylon Historical and Preservation Society)

(Babylon Historical and Preservation Society)

But it never was more than one-third occupied, fell into disrepair by the 1890s—even as its employees began to rule the base ball world—and was razed in 1904. Some of its wood lives on in homes situated on the hotel’s old grounds, on the West bank of Argyle Lake—which had been a large mill pond during the resort’s existence.

In 2010, a plaque—remembering the Cuban Giants—was erected on the approximate site of the team’s playing field. There is a home plate next to the marker. That is covered by snow for now. But it’s Spring-like somewhere, just as sure as there is baseball history right here.

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