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.

Seeds on rocky ground

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Today’s discussion considers whether March college basketball might have just as much madness if the seeding of teams were eliminated entirely. Might some results—such as Fairleigh Dickenson lowering the boom on Purdue or Princeton ambushing Arizona in the first round this year—have been just as compelling without the numbers in front of their names?

Fairleigh Dickenson came to the Dance as runner-up in the Northeast Conference, against the likes of Merrimack and Stonehill, while Purdue was the Big Ten champ. Those facts may have established FDU as the underdog and reinforced a pecking order in the sport, just as Ivy League Princeton was lower on the food chain than the Pac 12’s Arizona. But did the process of attaching seeds to the combatants—essentially guesswork performed by an NCAA tournament selection committee—add any suspense?

This annual hoops ruckus is based on unexpected outcomes, and it could be said that Fairleigh Dickenson (a No. 16 against a No. 1) and Princeton (a No. 15 vs. a No. 2) certainly met the challenge of reaping what the selection committee had sowed. The 2023 tournament has demonstrated, over and over, that the old power conference/mid-major gap, which figures mightily into seeding, is closing.

Florida Atlantic, tagged with a No. 9, is in the Final Four after knocking off No. 4 Tennessee and No. 3 Kansas State. More to the point, Florida Atlantic, the Conference USA champion, this season has won 35 games (against three losses), the most of any men’s team in the country.

The other Final Four participants are Connecticut (No. 4), Miami (No. 5) and San Diego State (No. 5), after the farthest any of the four No. 1 seeds progressed was the third round (both Alabama and Houston). No No. 2 or 3 seed got past the fourth round.

According to the fivethirtyeight.com site, which deals in polls and probabilities regarding everything from Joe Biden’s popularity to who might win racing’s Triple Crown, the pre-tournament likelihood of a San Diego State-Florida Atlantic semifinal was a mere 0.05 percent. The chance of a UConn-Miami semi was 0.3 percent. Fivethirtyeight—its stated mission statement is to “use data and evidence to advance public knowledge, adding certainty where we can and uncertainty where we must”—now gives UConn the best chance (43 percent) of winning the title. Hmm. Another nod to the highest seed remaining.

It’s all a big stab in the dark.

Way back in 2012, then-Georgetown coach John Thompson III declared that “you are foolish if you go into the tournament and look at the numbers (seeds) behind the name and assume that, just because of that number, one team is significantly better than the other.” These days, with the infamous “transfer portal” that makes players free agents, traditional powerhouse schools no longer call all the shots.

More and more, carrying a low seed has become something of a talent camouflage. Much easier for a Fairleigh Dickenson to pooh-pooh Purdue.

The tournament debuted in 1939 with eight teams and not until 1979, with 40 participants, did the NCAA seed teams. But even after such attempts at predictive outcomes, in the 44 years since then, one of the four No. 1 regional seeds has won the title just 24 times. That’s 176 No. 1 seeds over that span, with a championship success rate of just over 7 percent.

A modest proposal: Skip the seeding. Put the 68 tournament teams in a hat and execute a blind draw to fill the brackets. Stop reinforcing the fallacy of a never-changing hoops hierarchy. Encourage all comers to consider themselves an equal part of this basketball propulsion lab. Dare all the teams to respect everybody, fear nobody.

True madness, no?

Do this. Do that.

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

Need directions? Not the GPS, geographical type. No. This kind of thing:

“Shave immediately after showering or gently rub shave area with warm water for 30 seconds. Massage an almond-sized dollop [of the product] onto wet skin until a light lather forms. Add water as needed.”

Maybe it is the circumstance of being semiretired, with extra time on my hands, that has made me notice the abundance of guidance offered on various merchandise and gizmos, much of it gratuitous. Been shaving for roughly 60 years, and it never occurred to seek that sort of instruction.

I am a male person, and therefore fully aware of the cliché that men don’t ask directions; that, if we are lost, asking for directions is like admitting defeat. But sweeping generalizations — in general — are not absolute truths. Besides, is it really necessary to read on the bottle of windshield washer fluid, “Pour directly into car’s windshield washer reservoir”?

Here’s one for liquid hand soap: “Pump into hands, wet as needed. Lather vigorously for at least 30 seconds. Wash skin, rinse thoroughly and dry.”

Pretty obvious, no? And how about pill bottles that order, “Take one tablet by mouth daily.” By mouth? What would be the other options?

And how about the detail on putting laundry stain remover to use? “1, turn to ON. 2, cover the stain with [the product] and rub in. To refill, unscrew cap and pour liquid into bottle.”

That certainly is specific. As opposed this kind of thing: “Apply as needed.” Or: “Season to taste.”

Should we suspect that, in many cases, the manufacturer is endeavoring to avert future accusations of policy error or wrongdoing (and possibly legal action) by deflecting responsibility in advance? Something between due diligence and plausible deniability?

Given our litigious culture, posting alerts of potential danger might be understandable. “Keep out of reach of children and pets.” And: “Avoid breathing vapors” on a can of fire extinguisher. On a container of paint stripper: “Wear chemical-resistant gloves and chemical splash goggles.”

The more mature among us can remember, in the days when too many people smoked cigarettes and a popular advertising giveaway was the matchbook, there was the thoroughly predictable alert, “Close cover before striking.”

In terms of words-to-the-wise warnings, my favorite is the sly paragraph on the first page of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn”: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. By order of the author, per G.G., Chief of Ordinance.”

So. Here I will admit I did not read any of the 358 pages in my car owner’s manual until I had to figure out how to input the correct tire pressure into the car’s computer, or how to set the clock to daylight saving time. (Took a while to zero in on the right pages of the manual.) The car came with an additional 30-page booklet of tips about the “infotainment” system and the phone interface. I just pushed various buttons until things worked out.

So, yes, I’m a guy. And the maker of my hair shampoo understands. On the bottle, under “Directions,” is: “It is presumed you don’t need directions to use this product.”

I leave you with this: Shake well.

Press box apartheid

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In 1977, Sports Illustrated reporter Melissa Ludtke was being told that the only real sportswriters were men, and those men were not to bring a “girlfriend” or “secretary” into the inner sanctum of baseball clubhouses. That was 35 years after the Katherine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy movie “Woman of the Year” appeared, in which Tracy (playing a sportswriter) brought the highly-educated, well-traveled political affairs columnist (Hepburn) into Yankee Stadium’s pressbox and was emphatically reminded it was no place for “ladies.”

“Indeed, change takes longer than we ever imagine it will,” Ludtke emailed after I noted the persistence of such beliefs. “As I found out, it is easier to change the law than it is to change attitudes.”

This was just after Ludtke spoke via Zoom to my Hofstra University sportswriting class about events surrounding the 1978 court order that at last permitted female reporters access to major league baseball players in their team bunkers. At the time, Ludtke was a fully-credentialled baseball writer alongside fellow journalists covering the Yankees—all of them male—but barred from joining the men for pre- and post-game interviews in the team’s lockerroom.

She was exiled to a tunnel outside the Yanks’ clubhouse, at the mercy of a male official who would attempt to fetch players for Ludtke to obtain a quote or two. And in the case of the Yankees’ 1977 World Series-clinching victory, Ludtke waited an hour and 45 minutes in that tunnel, among a raucous crowd of fans and hangers-on, before Reggie Jackson, whose three home runs were the story of the night, appeared.

“Melissa,” Jackson brusquely informed her, “I’ve said all I have to say tonight” [to the men who had quizzed him inside]. I’m going downtown.” And he left.

“What Commissioner [Bowie] Kuhn was saying to me basically was, ‘We’re going to give you separate accommodations and we’ll call it equal, because you’re going to have access to the players. It’s just not going to be in the lockerroom with the men,’” Ludtke said.

So Time, Inc., Sports Illustrated’s parent company, sued. And the federal court judge who ruled in the case, Constance Baker Motley of the Southern District of New York, applied the same reasoning that went into the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision: That separate cannot be equal.

So Ludtke (and all women sportswriters) won. Technically. Motley “did not say that I was allowed in lockerrooms,” Ludtke said. “The decision about where interviews took place was not a decision a federal judge could make because baseball was a private business.

“The only thing she could say was: ‘Whatever your media policy is, it needs to be non-discriminatory between men and women.’” So if Kuhn continued to require that interviews take place within the clubhouse, then Ludtke and other women also could be in that space.

All of this will be in Ludtke’s book, “Locker Room Talk,” to be released next year. As well as her reminder that, while she won in the court of law, “I lost big time in the court of public opinion.”

There were television skits and newspaper cartoons implying that female sports reporters were looking for more than quotes from male athletes. That they were using their feminine wiles to elicit information from the ballplayers, or were looking for dates. In a sense, Ludtke went from Dante’s first circle of hell, limbo, to the ninth circle, treachery.

“This was about equal rights. Equal access,” she said. “But there was always that notion that this was about nudity and sex.”

All these years later, there is a growing number of women in sports journalism, in press boxes and lockerrooms, doing their jobs, though still decidedly in the minority. But, too: In 1999, the Library of Congress selected that 1942 film, “Woman of the Year,” for preservation in the National Film Registry based on it being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” Which might mean that the no-ladies-in-the-press-box conviction is not especially dated.

Arthur Ashe

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I had not yet heard of Barack Obama at the time, and certainly had not considered the kind of leap forward in American race relations that could lead to voting a black man into the White House. But in late August of 1992, during a lengthy interview with Arthur Ashe, it suddenly didn’t seem the least bit unreasonable when Ashe said, “I really want to be president. I think I can be a good president.”

Here in Black History Month, and now 30 years since Ashe’s death at 49 from complications of AIDS, is an ideal time to be reminded that Arthur Ashe is not just a stadium in New York City. Not just some departed tennis pioneer.

Ashe called himself a “political nut.” He was the rare athletic champion who actually connected with the real world. He was an activist against South African apartheid, a public face in the fight against HIV (which he had contracted through a blood transfusion after a second heart attack), an advocate for children’s education, a published historian.

When he found research material on past black athletes frustratingly lacking, he spent six years finishing his own three-volume work, “A Hard Road to Glory.” He was disappointed to learn that three-time Olympic track and field champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee had never heard of Alice Coachman, the first black woman to win Olympic gold (in the 1948 high jump). He called a dismissive quote by baseball’s Vince Coleman (“I don’t know nothing about no Jackie Robinson”) “one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard.”

Ashe was a worldly, well-educated black man of enormous calm and grace who shattered stereotypes: An athlete with a sense of history, a jock interested in schooling, an elite sportsman who played in horn-rimmed glasses. He was a black star in what had been (and mostly remains) a white man’s sport—winner of three of tennis’ four Grand Slam tournaments.

And to celebrated sportswriter Frank Deford, who knew Ashe well, Ashe had offered a glimpse of the 2008 presidential campaign, in that Obama “reminds me more of Arthur Ashe than anyone in his own business,” Deford wrote.

After his death on Feb. 6, 1993, Ashe’s coffin was put on public view in the state capitol building in Richmond, Va.—Ashe’s hometown, but also the capital of the Confederacy and the heart of the not-so-long-ago segregated South. A local Baptist preacher named Larry Nobles was among some 5,500 people who paid their respects over four hours, marveling at the setting (Robert E. Lee’s father originally had lived on the site). “This is history, isn’t it?” Nobles asked then. “Look at this. This is history.”

In the crowd that day was LaVerne Buckner, who said she sat in front of Ashe in sophomore history class at segregated Maggie Walker High School more than 30 years before. “I was talking with friends before,” she said, “and we mentioned that Stonewall Jackson and Lee must be rumbling in their graves today.”

At Ashe’s funeral the next day, then-New York mayor David Dinkins called Ashe a “freedom fighter” and “one of the most decent human beings I have ever known. Let me say it as plainly as I can: Arthur Ashe was just plain better than most of us.”

The story was told about Ashe’s younger brother once sarcastically asking him, “If the world breaks down, are you going to fix it with a tennis racket?” Followed by testimonials that, in effect, Ashe did.

There now is a statue of Ashe in Richmond, at one end of Monument Avenue—which also had sculptures of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and Confederate general Robert E. Lee—depicting Ashe with books in one hand and a tennis racket in the other, and surrounded by children. Symbolically fixing the world through a new generation.

“He said he did not wish to be remembered just as a tennis player,” then-Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown told mourners at the funeral, “and I’m sure that we all will honor that wish. But I will surely remember his victory in the U.S. Open [in 1968—the first year of open tennis], and I surely will remember his victory at Wimbledon [in 1975]. He was a beautiful black man in beautiful white clothes, playing a beautiful white game. And winning.”

Jesse Jackson called Ashe “a moment in the conscience of mankind.” A champion, Jackson said, “when he wins, rides on the people’s shoulders. But a hero lifts the people. When Arthur won, we were on his shoulders.”

Ashe had been introduced to tennis when he was 5 years old, as the result of his father being named caretaker of the second-largest tennis club in Richmond, a job that came with a house located on the club’s grounds. Tutored by Lynchburg physician Walter Johnson, who had aided Althea Gibson’s entry into the national championships at Forest Hills—the forerunner to the U.S. Open—Ashe earned a tennis scholarship to UCLA, graduated with a business degree, learned 16 variations of the backhand stroke and became the first tennis pro to earn over $100,000. He looked out for his colleagues, founding the ATP, the players’ union for the men’s tour, at a tumultuous time when major tournaments were moving past an amateur model.

“Athletes,” he noted during that 1992 interview, “are focused on the here and now. Most of our premier athletes are between 18 and 34 years old. In that range, you’re at your best in a physical and emotional sense. You think you’re immortal. We all think of ourselves as invincible, indestructible.”

Yet he always was thinking beyond the game. Being able to sit down with national and global shakers and movers and decision-makers, he said, was “one of the joys of being a professional tennis player for 10 years.” When Nelson Mandela was released from his South African prison after 27 years, the first person he asked to visit was Ashe.

At a New York City memorial two days after Ashe’s funeral, tennis champ Billie Jean King said, “Arthur had the cutest, tiniest, sweetest ears I’ve ever seen on a human being. I used to ask him, ‘How do your glasses ever stay on those sweet little ears?’ But those tiny ears listened to so much. Because it didn’t matter to Arthur what gender you were, or what race, or what country you came from….”

Former basketball pro Bill Bradley who, like Ashe, was a world-class athlete who wanted to do more with his life than just be an athlete, declared at the memorial service that Ashe “made a difference. Arthur, you will be remembered.”

If he is not, it would be one of the saddest things a soul could hear. I, too, think he could have been a good president.

Beyond Jackie Robinson

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Faster than you can say “Jackie Robinson,” the first sports topic always cited during Black History Month is that Brooklyn Dodger Hall of Famer breaking baseball’s color line in 1947.

Naturally. At the time, baseball’s prominence in American society was uncontested—the NBA had been formed only the previous year; the NFL was small peanuts; only college football had any sort of national awareness—so Robinson’s breakthrough represented a vast public advance in civil rights.

But an evening listening to one of Evan Weiner’s wide-ranging excavations of historic nuggets regarding Black sports history adds crucial layers to the subject.  Weiner—who describes his career as “radio, a lot of radio, some TV, some pundit work”—lays out the numbskullery and scullduggery in the story of segregated sports.

Such as the dumb “belief”—based on ignorance—by Los Angeles Dodgers general manager Al Campanis, in 1987, that Blacks “may not have some of the necessities to be, let’s say, a field manager or perhaps a general manager.” (Campanis was summarily fired.) And the 1950s NFL edict that its teams could have “up to four Negro players [but] none could be quarterbacks, centers or middle linebackers”—theoretically “cerebral” positions.

Then there was the thoroughly undisguised racism that for years prevented the few Black players on white professional teams from service at whites-only restaurants and hotels. And the kind of double-dealing of George Preston Marshall, who owned the NFL’s Washington Redskins from 1932 to 1969 while barring all Blacks from his team and his Washington baseball counterpart, Clark Griffith, refusing to sign Blacks even as he profited from renting out his D.C. ballpark for Negro League games.

Weiner covered all this and provided other relevant tidbits during a recent 90-minute presentation beamed on Zoom to my Hofstra University sports journalism students—one of countless talks Weiner gives on radio, TV documentaries, libraries and others public forums. He also produces books and podcasts on varied human affairs from rock-n-roll, censorship and World War II.

Here’s one detail I hadn’t realized before Weiner’s talk: When Cleveland Rams owner Dan Reeves maneuvered the transfer of his team to Los Angeles in 1946, making the NFL the first professional coast-to-coast sports entertainment industry, a pre-condition to play at the publicly funded Los Angeles Coliseum was that the team be integrated.

Reeves therefore signed Kenny Washington and Woody Strode, two former UCLA football teammates of Jackie Robinson—the year before Robinson became baseball’s first Black player. In Cleveland, meanwhile, the new franchise in an upstart league, the Browns of the All-American Football Conference, also signed two Black players for the 1946 season, Bill Willis and Marion Motley.

Weiner noted how Baltimore manager John McGraw in 1901 had attempted—unsuccessfully—to sneak a light-skinned Black infielder, Charlie Grant, into the newly formed American League by identifying Grant as a Cherokee Indian named “Tokohama.” Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey objected and McGraw left Grant off his roster. And the so-called “Gentleman’s agreement,” in which baseball owners conspired not to offer contracts to Blacks, prevailed for almost a half-century.

Then there were tales from Weiner of resistance. By Lakers star Elgin Baylor who, in 1959, refused to play an NBA exhibition game in Charleston, W.Va., after Black players couldn’t get equal accommodations with their white teammates. (That led to a league rule against playing in states with such practices.)

And the refusal of Walter Beach, a Boston Patriots defensive back, to stay by himself in segregated living conditions during the team’s 1961 exhibition game in New Orleans. And the Black players joining Hall of Fame center Bill Russell of the Celtics in boycotting a game in Lexington, Ky., after being declined restaurant service in that city. And Black members of the Oakland Raiders protesting segregated seating at their scheduled Mobile, Ala., exhibition game against the Jets, forcing the game to be moved to Oakland.

Weiner’s interactions with key figures spiced his talk, particularly first-person recollections from the late Wally Triplett, who had been Penn State’s first Black player and in 1949 was the first Black drafted by an NFL team (the Detroit Lions). Triplett, Weiner reported, had befriended Jackie Robinson early in Robinson’s career and served as Robinson’s chauffeur, confidant and card-playing buddy, making a point of bringing Robinson to Triplett’s mother’s house for a home-cooked meal whenever the Dodgers were in town to play the Phillies.

One of Triplett’s former Penn State teammates, a fellow named Joe Tepsic, had been a Dodger rookie in 1946, when he played only 15 games and was hitless in five at-bats. The story was that the struggling Tepsic’s Dodgers’ mates wanted Tepsic demoted to the minors and replaced by a veteran pinch-hitter.

Jackie Robinson that season was spending his first season under Dodger contract with their top minor-league team in Montreal, “and while there was no indication that Brooklyn would have brought up Robinson if Tepsic had gone down to the minors,” Weiner said, “Triplett, who was a close friend of Tepsic, believed that Dodger manager Leo Durocher wanted that to happen.”

It didn’t. Until the next season. How’s that for a Black History Month morsel?

Leaves of grass (not the poetry)

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Grass is back. No, no; not that. Not cannabis, Mary Jane, weed, pot, dope. This is not an update on the 1960s counterculture, Woodstock or the hippie revolution. (Although amended laws in fact have recently given marijuana a new life.) Rather, this is a consideration of how football playing surfaces, after almost a half century of experimentation with synthetic flooring, have reversed field a bit. Or, in some cases, stuck with what the late sports commentator Bud Collins referred to as “God’s own greensward.”

This comes to mind with the annual razzmatazz that surrounds the Super Bowl, which has now been played 57 times with the same fellow overseeing the landscaping at each host stadium. That person is George Toma, now 94 years old, a superstar groundskeeper who has ably dealt with his corner of earth being trod upon by behemoth athletes and all manner of elaborate halftime productions.

In some ways, the just-completed 2023 championship game illustrated the imperfection of what often is referred to, redundantly, as “natural grass.” (Grass is grass; it’s natural.) Sports Illustrated huffed that the game was “completely marred by horrible field conditions”—with players at times unsteady on the Bermuda-grass lawn in Arizona’s Glendale stadium.

It should be noted that exactly half of the NFL’s 32 teams employ grass on their fields, including both of this year’s Super Bowl participants, so neither the Kansas City Chiefs nor Philadelphia Eagles should have had an edge in the big game. Furthermore, several of the losing Eagles refused to moan about the surface flaws, reminding that the Chiefs had to navigate the same ground.

But given modern technology and science, there has come to be an overwhelming expectation of flawlessness in major sporting events—in playing conditions, refereeing, athletic performance—which can get a little silly at times. Lost is the idea that the beauty of competition can be enhanced by what coaches call “things beyond our control.” Why not see how fabulously paid jocks can handle some rain, snow, wind, dirt?

Since we’re on the topic, then: Artificial playing surfaces originated with AstroTurf in 1965 after Houston’s baseball team, housed in the world’s first multi-purpose domed stadium, found that grass didn’t grow well indoors. It was assumed, correctly to some extent, that artificial turf would require less maintenance and be less susceptible to unpredictable weather, and both pro and college teams rushed to join the fake grass movement.

Early reviews were glowing. Dan Jenkins, covering the University of Tennessee’s 1968 season-opener in Knoxville, declared in his Sports Illustrated game story, “The question of whether a good football game can be played on your living room carpet has been answered pretty much to everyone’s satisfaction down on a rim of the Smokies in the Old South. The University of Tennessee has won the sport’s interior decorating award with its new synthetic turf….”

Jenkins wrote that, at the conclusion of a 17-17 tie with Georgia, “everything sagged mercifully except the gleaming nylon playing field….still as rich green and spotless as it had been three hours earlier. And this was after a truckload of Tennessee cheerleaders had driven on it, after a Tennessee walking horse had pranced around it, after a Georgia bulldog had gnawed at it and after a Georgia coach had flicked ashes on it.”

Alas, artificial turf did not grow back.

Return with me to the 1976 Super Bowl at Miami’s since-demolished Orange Bowl Stadium, which was an early convert to fake grass using something called Poly-Turf. In its seventh season, the Poly-Turf had come to resemble a 100-yard banana peel, with rips and bumps. Toma—the God of Sod, the Sodfather, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Man who is on record as preferring grass—was working the 10th of his 57 Super Bowls in ‘76, putting in 12-hour days alongside his crew in the week leading up to the game.

“We crawl every seam on our hands and knees,” Toma said then, “and anywhere that even a fingernail would go under, we glue, using a contact glue, which will hold for a couple of weeks. It’s like the glue you might use on Formica table tops at home.

“Then we take a tractor over it to press it down good. We sewed up a couple of rips. The way the surface has matted unevenly, we can’t do much about that. There will be some slick spots….Where there’s a few bumps, like you might get in your rug in your house, we’ve taken scissors and shaved off the top.”

After that game, the Orange Bowl returned to grass and stayed with the real stuff until it closed in 2008. Hard Rock Stadium, which replaced the Orange Bowl as Miami’s big-time football stadium in 1987, always has featured grass. Tennessee’s Neyland Stadium, cite of that 1968 artificial turf debut chronicled by Dan Jenkins, has been back to grass since 1994.

This year’s Super Bowl runner-up Eagles, by the way, were the first NFL team to use artificial turf in their home stadium—in 1969 when they played at Franklin Field on the University of Pennsylvania campus. From 1971 to 2002, their place of business was Philadelphia’s multipurpose Veteran’s Stadium, so infamous for the gaps and uneven patches in its synthetic floor that it because known as the “Field of Seams.” Since 2003, the Eagles have been settled in Lincoln Financial Field, which is equipped with grass. So maybe there isn’t a better mousetrap after all.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

None the wiser

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

The goal is not to be that old man sitting on a mountaintop, reading something like “Wisdom for Dummies” and expecting young whippersnappers to come seeking enlightenment. It seems a bit arrogant to assume that advanced age automatically provides all the answers.

Go ahead, hit me with a knock-knock joke. I still have to ask, “Who’s there?”

That said, can we consider the possible devolution of the elderly’s status in our society? A friend — like me, classified as a senior — wondered if there might be less respect these days for us geezers. We have decades of vocational participation, have had a front-row seat to remarkable advances and challenges and interactions with all manner of people. We’ve done stuff, seen things. Do young people need to hear about that? Should they want to?

Roughly a half-century into working in the newspaper business, I set about moonlighting by attempting to teach journalism to college students. The theory was that I might be able to pass along a bit of insight — about the trapdoors to be avoided, the expectations to deal with, various tricks of the trade. But the light-speed changes in technology, and of life in general, have rendered my experiences, compared with those of 19- and 20-year-old undergrads, as relatable as if I were from Saturn.

Honestly, does it do the Millennials and Gen-Z people any good to know about dial telephones, typewriters and the old-timey information-delivery systems such as Western Union? (Carrier pigeons were before my time.)

Furthermore, there appears to be ample evidence that the basic process of accumulating birthdays is no special skill. Longevity doesn’t translate into being talented, well-regarded, morally upright, kind and beneficent. Which prevents me from supposing that, just because such vastly accomplished souls as Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, John Updike and Satchel Paige didn’t make it past my current age, I somehow am in that ballpark of masterly sagacity.

And when I ponder having learned the newspaper trade, I must allow that I likely processed as much pertinent information from colleagues as from the grandfatherly set, from others who were in the moment with me. Role models.

Either way, though, knowledge was not coming from within, and it slowly began to sink in that the secret to good journalism — and, frankly, to competence in virtually any profession — is curiosity. And that curiosity leads directly to contemplating history. Which, you could say, is another word for “geriatric.” We old buzzards can accurately be described as “history.”

Here’s the thing: Today’s youth doesn’t need a wrinkled old oracle to set them on the path of becoming overachievers. Sage advice — so much of it blindingly obvious — is readily available from multiple sources without having to chase up a mountain in search of some venerable guru: Be prepared. Keep an open mind. Value information. Whistle while you work. Don’t take yourself too seriously (because no one else does.) I can’t offer anything more profound than “always have a pencil and pad with you.”

There is never any harm, though, in having a little guidance to agitate intellect and logic, to demonstrate the familiar maxim that one should learn something new every day.

Certainly the issues that confronted the more mature among us are barely recognizable now.

We didn’t have Google or cellphones or the internet and, yes, we from the Pleistocene era now need to worry about keeping up. But since the past really is prologue, it is not esteem, per se, that the youngsters owe old-timers; rather, the opportunity of having ancients among them to stir some critical thinking.

There is an unattributed quote that goes, “Listen to your elders’ advice. Not because they are always right but because they have more experience of being wrong.” (I found that on the internet!)

Baruch’s illusive star

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In 2013, during a reporting assignment that took me to Baruch College’s Manhattan campus, I did not happen to bump into George Santos. Which was not unusual at a school with almost 20,000 students. And anyway Santos, the recently elected Republican Congressman from a district near mine, has said he graduated three years earlier from Baruch. Summa cum laude and in the top one percent of his class.

Santos has said he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and finance there, an area of study with only a glancing relationship to the presentation I was attending on the occasion. The topic that day, addressed by Baruch law professor Marc Edelman, was the legal and ethical issues surrounding the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s adamant, ongoing stance against sharing its enormous profits with its athletes.

“Not every criticism of big business is right,” Edelman, whose writing on sports and law included The Sports Judge column for Forbes, argued then. “But, in the context of the NCAA, it is very difficult to sympathize with the association.”

Of course Baruch, then and now, hardly was in the class of colleges Edelman cited for funding quasi-professional sports operations in which the workers were not compensated and which therefore encouraged the unseemly practice of loyal alums at big-time athletic factories helping to recruit prominent jocks with under-the-table money. “Maybe,” Edelman proposed, “it makes sense if schools have to sell off their sports programs” to create a firewall between sports and academics. “Maybe there should be a football program that wears blue and maize and plays out of Ann Arbor and is separate from the University of Michigan.”

Not an issue at Baruch, existing at it always has in the NCAA’s lowest rung of Division III, without access to massive TV rights deals or even the benefit of income from ticket sales. So there logically is no record that George Santos had  been lured to the school by a volleyball scholarship, as he claimed, because Division III schools do not grant athletic scholarships to anyone. Or that Santos, as he described himself in a 2020 radio interview, was a star on the 2010 Baruch men’s volleyball team that really did win 33 of 39 matches.

But, then, there is no evidence that Santos was even a member of that team. Or that he attended Baruch that year. Or any year.

Though George Santos regularly has noted his Brazilian roots, it also would be dangerous to assume that he might be the same Santos who was a member of the 2012 Brazilian Olympic volleyball team that won the silver medal in London. Fact check: That was Sidnei Santos, known as Sidao, with whom I also did not cross paths since the last of 11 Olympics I covered was the 2006 Turin Winter Games.

I can attest that George Santos did not compete in any of the Super Bowls, NBA Finals, World Series, NHL Finals, soccer World Cups, Grand Slam tennis tournaments, Indianapolis 500s, college football bowl games or thoroughbred Triple Crown races I chronicled in my half-century of sportswriting.

I must acknowledge that the first time I was aware of Baruch fielding athletic teams, however humble the circumstances, came years into reporting local, national and international sports for Newsday—and only then because Roy Chernock, whom I knew while he was building a track and field power at Long Island’s C.W. Post College (now LIU-Post), was hired in the mid-1970s to coach Baruch’s track team.

OK. Back to that early Fall day in 2013 when I was on the Baruch campus. I recall enjoying a cup of coffee on the school’s recently opened pedestrian plaza—the block of 25th Street between Lexington and 3rd Avenues—surrounded by young Baruch scholars and, surely, several true Baruch student-athletes. As I said, it was not unreasonable that I didn’t come across George Santos then, beyond the fact that he never had been a Baruch student nor an athlete.

That day, Professor Edelman was predicting that increasing litigation against the NCAA was “lurking very, very closely on the horizon.” And, sure enough, a decade later, the NCAA indeed is faced with its former sins, trying to get a handle on the recent NIL policy that allows its athletes to bank on the “name, image and likeness” established by their athletic accomplishments. Technically, even at the Division III level, George Santos would have been allowed to leverage his Baruch volleyball stardom to be paid for hawking beer or crew neck sweaters or horn-rimmed glasses. If he had been a Baruch volleyball star. Which he wasn’t.

Play on?

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Since Buffalo Bills defensive back Damar Hamlin went into cardiac arrest early in his team’s Jan. 2 game in Cincinnati, there has been a steady stream of thoughtful essays considering the appropriate response to that unsettling incident.

Are we—fans, reporters, the game’s marketers and promoters—all “complicit in the NFL’s violence” by contributing to the sport’s massive popularity?—New York Times.

Is football “designed to be deadly”?—Salon.

Is it “the ethos of football…to play on” no matter the players’ risk?—The New Yorker.

“Should a civilized culture really be sanctioning” football’s “most inescapable reality show”?—The Atlantic.

All reasonable questions, and there will be no good answers here, though I have dealt with a handful of incidents in a half-century of working as a sports journalist that could have triggered similar contemplations.

I happened to be covering a 2010 college game in which a player was paralyzed by a kickoff collision. I was asked to interview the father, brother and associates of Darryl Stingley one year after Stingley famously was left a paraplegic during a 1978 NFL exhibition game. I have reported on the increasingly common evidence of the degenerative brain disease CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, found in deceased former players, and have spoken to forensic neuropathologist Bennet Omalu who, in a 2002 autopsy of former Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster, first recognized CTE in a football player.

What made the Hamlin episode different, and instantly more terrifying, was that it appeared after a typical play-ending tackle, didn’t result from one of those crippling head blows, yet brought medical personnel racing onto the field to administer CPR. Everything—fellow players, officials, spectators—stood eerily still even after Hamlin was carted away in an ambulance 10 minutes later. Almost as hour passed before the game was postponed, with Hamlin said to be in critical condition at a local hospital.

So, about those earlier questions: New York Magazine’s Will Leitch found “progress” in the league’s decision to stop play, citing the opposite decision minutes after Chuck Hughes of the Detroit Lions, the only NFL player to die on the field, collapsed with a heart attack during a 1971 game.

Such standard procedure to play on applied in ’78, when a vicious blow from Oakland’s Jack Tatum levelled New England star receiver Stingley, putting him in a wheelchair for life (he died on 2007), but didn’t stop the game. And, in 2010 at the New Jersey Meadowlands, as soon as Rutgers University lineman Eric LeGrand was carried off the field on a stretcher—he attempted to give a thumbs-up but had no feeling below the neck—action against Army resumed.

And somehow these sobering moments didn’t put a dint in attraction to the sport—for fans, officials, teammates and the gravely injured players themselves. In Rutgers’ victorious but glum locker room after that 2010 Army game, LeGrand’s teammates acknowledged, in the words of linebacker Antonio Lowery, how it was “hard going back out there after [seeing LeGrand motionless on the field]. Everybody had watered eyes. It’s hard. Violent game.”

Yet he added, “It’s what I do. I love it to death. [Such an injury] is one of those things you have to deal with.”

In my 1979 interview with Stingley’s father and brother, both of whom were former football players at a lower level, there was happy reminiscing recalled from a recent Father’s Day gathering. No regrets, his brother Wayne recalled, only that “Darryl said, ‘Hey, I gave it my all and it took something from me.’ That’s what he said. ‘I gave it my all and it took something from me.’”

Chris Nowinski, a former Harvard player who is a behavioral neuroscientist and founding CEO of the nonprofit Concussion Legacy Foundation that studies CTE, cautioned in a New York Times essay that as alarming as Hamlin’s injury was, it was “focusing attention on a single, dramatic outlier rather than the chronic medical conditions that pose by far the greatest danger to players.”

Nowinski cited chronic heart disease and the long-term effects of traumatic brain injuries for robbing “countless players of their health, their happiness and even their lives but do not receive the same medical or cultural attention because they happen away from the cameras.” He ticked off the names and ages of nine former players who died of heart disease between 26 and 46 years old since 2015.

Of course, the good news is that Hamlin, who is only 24, is in the midst of a remarkable recovery and there even has been speculation whether he might ever play football again. But here’s another question with no answer: Should he?