The Real Fall Classic

We have heard a lot lately about what disasters our cities are, particularly the old industrial centers that were once the backbone of American manufacturing. Often the stories are told by people who don’t go near the places they describe, as if our inner cities were foreign and far away and easily forgotten. This discomfort with urban America isn’t new. “They use everything about the hog except the squeal,” wrote Upton Sinclair in The Jungle, his 1906 exposé of Chicago’s meatpacking industry and its impoverished immigrant work force. And Time magazine once wrote of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, so overloaded with industrial waste it used to regularly catch fire, that it “oozes rather than flows.”

The two cities are back in the news. At 8:08 this evening, the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians will open the 2016 World Series in Progressive Field in downtown Cleveland. As you undoubtedly know by now, this is an historic series. The Indians were last world champions in 1948, when Larry Doby and Satchel Paige became the first African American players to win series rings. The Cubs haven’t won in 108 years.

They are two of the original major league teams. Cleveland began in 1900, the Cubs two years later. They play in inner-city parks within walking distance of the neighborhoods, and Chicago’s Wrigley Field was built over a century ago.

I’m rooting for the Cubs because they have been cursed for so long, but in truth I’m more excited by the resurgence of two old teams and their two gritty cities, bright rays of hope in an often-gloomy fall.

Stumble of the Week

I had heard that members of the National Football League cheat (and knock out their fiancées on elevators and use drugs), but I had never known that each team’s quarterback plays only with his own balls. This is just one of the things I have learned in my prodigious research into “Deflategate,” the scandal that is riveting New England. If you don’t live near Boston or watch lots of ESPN, you may be unaware of the claims that the New England Patriots improperly manipulated the pressure in their footballs to the advantage of their quarterback, Tom Brady. But in Boston this is front-page news, the topic of excruciating analysis on sports radio and the subject of a 243-page, multi-million-dollar report, which charges the Patriots with intentionally lowering the pounds per square inch in their footballs. Yesterday the Patriots hit back with a 20,000-word rebuttal that includes a report from a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, cites the “ideal gas law,” and says that the minute and forty seconds their employee spent in the bathroom with two bags of footballs was not to deflate the balls, but “is consistent with the time that it takes a gentleman to enter a bathroom, relieve himself, wash his hands, and leave.” The gentleman in question is known as “the Deflator” because he is trying to lose weight.

There is much more to come in this story, but unlike, say, the Middle East, the solution seems obvious: Why not have both teams play with the same ball?

Patriots and Immigrants

On Monday, Patriots Day, a year after the terror bombings, an American won the Boston Marathon for the first time since 1983. His name is Meb Keflezighi. Meb Keflezghi? Was I the only person to do a double take? Does he sound American to you? So I did some digging: birth certificate (long form), called Ed Snowden in Moscow, Wikipedia. His full name is Mebrahtom Keflezighi, and it’s pronounced: mebrāhtōm kifl'igzī. Seriously. I’m surprised they let him within 26 miles of Boston, where they still call John A. Kelley, who ran 61 marathons, won two and has a statue on the course, an “Irishman.”

The last “Bostonian” I remember running Boston was my determined friend John Mason, Justice of the Massachusetts Appeals Court and a direct descendant of John Adams. When I couldn’t find his name in the next day’s Boston Globe, I accused him of not finishing. I should have known better. He just didn’t cross the line until after all the reporters had gone home. That’s Boston – and that was John, who fared less well in his race with cancer 10 years ago.

Meb Keflezghi was born in Asmara, Eritrea, from which his family fled in 1987. He was an All-American at UCLA and became an American citizen after graduation. In these times, when defining an American is so contentious, it’s inspiring that a man named Meb Keflezighi won America's oldest race. And I know no one is cheering more loudly than John Mason, who believed passionately in both America and the American Dream.

Gladiator U

It all began with the communists. The Soviets and East German women, with their bulging gym shorts and five-o’clock shadows, who won all those Olympic medals in the 1960s weren’t amateurs. They were full-time state employees. The Reds were cheaters. Meanwhile, in the free world, another secretive power was creating a sports empire the capitalist way, as the National Collegiate Athletic Association built a multi-billion-dollar business on the carefully cultivated image of the student-athlete. It seemed like a good deal: colleges got millions, and student-athletes got free educations for playing a game they loved, opportunities for lucrative professional careers, and adulation from fans.

But as the NCAA grew its business beyond expectations, cracks appeared. Management thrived – coaches are often their states’ highest-paid employees. But the laborers, ever bigger and faster, battling in the trenches below thousands of rabid fans, are getting shafted. After working 40-50-hour weeks, 2% of college football players make the NFL, where the average career is under six years and the prognosis is “a dramatically shortened life span.”

This may be changing, Last week, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Northwestern’s scholarship football players are university employees, eligible to form a union and negotiate for wages and benefits. The NLRB exposed the charade of big-time college athletic programs. But is the remedy to pay professional workers to provide entertainment in college stadiums? Does a university really fulfill its mission by paying its “players” minimum wage so it can cheat them out of a $200,000 education?

The Arc of a Career

We turn from the Super Bowl to other sports, such as the Sochi Olympics, which open today amid terrorism threats, euthanizing stray dogs and construction delays: “OK, so my hotel doesn’t have a lobby yet,” tweeted Mark MacKinnon of Toronto’s Globe and Mail. Next week pitchers and catchers report to spring training – and speaking of catchers, it turns out that Chris Christie, who aspired to become the heftiest president since William Howard Taft until a bothersome traffic jam in Fort Lee snarled his plans, played one in high school. Christie’s athleticism initially surfaced as the New Jersey governor was  distancing himself from his old friend, David Wildstein, whom he’d appointed to the Port Authority: “We didn’t travel in the same circles in high school. You know, I was the class president and an athlete. I don’t know what David was doing during that period of time.”

There is a touching backstory to Christie’s baseball career. Just before his senior year a better catcher transferred to his school. The Christie family considered suing to prevent him from playing, but ultimately decided not to, and Chris, a captain, buried his disappointment and cheered his team to the state championship from the bench.

My Republican friends insist that Christie manned up after Bridgegate, taking responsibility for the incident and firing those responsible. I read a different tale – of the aphrodisiac of power transforming a boy trying to throw out runners at second base into an ambitious politician throwing his friends under the bus.

McDynamo

I write in praise of a horse and of his owner. Michael Moran’s McDynamo was inducted into the Racing Hall of Fame on Friday, after a career that included winning the Breeder’s Cup Grand National five times and the Eclipse Award for Outstanding Steeplechase horse three times. He didn’t always look like a champion – he finished last in his first race and had such claustrophobia in a starting gate that he dumped his jockey, jumped the fence and ran wild for 20 minutes. That was McDynamo’s last race on the flat, and Michael asked Sanna Hendriks to train him as a steeplechaser. Most of horse racing is a shameful sport, in which the animals are routinely injected with performance drugs and painkillers, the races often fixed, and the horses run into the ground until, when they can no longer run at all, they are discarded as trash. They are, in short, treated the same way so many other professional athletes are treated, without the possibility of a big contract. Their role is to perform, and their bodies increasingly break down under the pressures of doing so.

But McDynamo loved to run and jump, and Michael and his wife, Anne, an Irish-born horse whisperer, treated him with something you don’t much see at the track: love. They admired his talent and honored his spirit; they never pushed him beyond his limits; and when his career was over, they brought him home to live out the rest of his life in peace.

Meat

This is no plea for Aaron Hernandez, the huge former tight end of the New England Patriots football team who has been charged with murdering Odin Lloyd, who dated Hernandez’s girlfriend's sister. The Patriots released Hernandez last week, 90 minutes after his arrest on then-unspecified charges. On Friday the team announced that fans could exchange his team jersey for another “of comparable value.” And that, as far as the Patriots are concerned, is the end of Aaron Hernandez. He had become “a distraction,” and the Patriots have become the league’s most successful franchise because they don’t brook distractions. The team was within its rights to dump Hernandez and had no obligation to offer him public support or mouth the usual pieties about “the presumption of innocence.” He seems an unsavory guy, but that isn’t the issue for the Patriots. To them, he is a piece of meat. Professional sports in America, and particularly football, should not be confused with the games we used to play. Nor should those who play them be confused with role models or heroes, however valuable their jerseys or their contracts. They are fodder for their egotistical owners, corporate profiteers and rabid fans. They are, like their forebears in ancient Rome, entertainment for the American empire’s masses.

In other NFL news, Jim Hudson, a hard-hitting defensive back for the 1969 New York Jets Super Bowl winner, died last week of “Parkinson’s dementia” likely caused by head traumas. He was 70, and his brain has been sent to researchers at Boston University.

Bully Boys

Kim Jong-un’s creepy behavior has now been traced to his brief stint on the Rutgers Basketball Team under Coach Mick Rice, who was fired yesterday, after a video showed him kicking his players, throwing balls in their faces, and screaming homophobic slurs. One of his regular targets, it turns out, was the 5-foot, ¼-inch dictator, whom Rice derisively dubbed “Little Queen.” Kim demanded to play power forward, but Rice told him to “get your G**ky ass over with the point guards,” suggesting he run through the forwards’ legs. Kim couldn’t dribble, and he only passed the ball to his bodyguard. But his threats to shoot were taken so seriously that the other point guards quit the team. Rice rode him mercilessly. “Kim,” he sneered. “That’s a girl’s name. Is it short for Kimberly?” And from then on, his name was “Kimberly,” even though he has a long list of official nicknames that include Outstanding Leader, Great Successor, Brilliant Comrade, Young General, Young Master and Lil Kim (!).

North Korean propaganda insists that Kim went to Rutgers, not to play basketball, but to “learn bullying at one of the best places for that,” and it’s no coincidence that he is threatening nuclear war on the eve of the Final Four, college basketball’s biggest weekend, nor that he has hired Denis Rodman to coach his 2016 Olympic team.

Breaking News: American rapper Lil’ Kim (“Hard Core,” “The Naked Truth”) is suing Kim Jong-un for identity theft.

Pretty Yende

The tragic death of Reeva Steenkamp, the model and law school graduate, has brought into focus a host of clichés about big time sports, the rise and fall of heroes, the link between domestic violence and the proliferation of guns, and the emergence of post-apartheid South Africa as one of the world’s most violent countries. Steenkamp was shot by her boyfriend, Oscar Pistorius, the sprinter who was born with no fibula and became the first double amputee in Olympic history. His inspiring story of rising above adversity to become a hero to millions has become the all-too-familiar sports story of those we lionize turning into clay. But this story has an extra dimension: the level of violent crime in South Africa and the image of white people barricaded in their houses at night, armed to the teeth. It is an image that sits uncomfortably with that of a country that overcame the most oppressive colonialism and racial apartheid to itself become an inspiration for a continent. Is this too in question?

No. Last month 27-year-old Pretty Yende made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera. That a young black woman could come from a South African township to one of the world’s largest stages would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Her triumph, though, is not only personal because her voice really is a gift to the world. Perhaps we look in the wrong places for hope and inspiration. It is in art that we find the beauty that expresses our common humanity.

The Game

Although the Super Bowl turned into a very good game, it couldn’t steal the show from Beyoncé, whose electric halftime performance apparently knocked the Superdome lights out. Clearly the best athlete on the field, her 12-minute gig exceeded the 11 minutes the football was in play. And she hardly looked winded. But the most telling game last week was not the Super Bowl but a high-school basketball game in Chicago between Simeon Career Academy and Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, two national powerhouses, each featuring one of the country’s best players. Never mind whether The New York Times should have given 27 column inches to a high-school game. Far more remarkable was that the reporter didn’t even get to the score until the fourth-to-last paragraph. The story focused on the massive police presence and security precautions in the wake of an earlier game, which had ended with an on-court brawl of players and coaches, followed by a fatal shooting outside the arena, one more pointless, violent death in a city that endures almost 10 murders a week. Appearing on national television in warm-up jerseys saying “Shoot Hoops, Not Guns,” the young players embodied the gladiator role that now defines spectator sports even at this level.

Big-time sports isn’t a game for the players anymore; it’s mass entertainment to keep the people tranquilized, to sell them stuff and to promote betting. And not only here: European football just uncovered a massive match-fixing ring run by organized criminals from Singapore

Oh, Simeon beat Whitney Young, 44-41.

Shoeless Joe

In the other election, Roger Clemens received 214 votes for baseball’s Hall of Fame; fellow first-ballot candidate Barry Bonds got 206. Both fell far short of the 427 votes needed for induction. Clemens ranks ninth in victories and third in strikeouts in the history of Major League pitching, while Bonds holds the season and career records for home runs. Until confronted with allegations of steroid use, which they vehemently deny but cannot shake, they were shoo-ins for the Hall. But their performances seemed to defy human limitations and, particularly in the case of Bonds, their bodies – at least those parts visible to the public eye – seemed weirdly changed. But they looked into the eyes of the press, the public, prosecutors and the United States Congress and flatly denied they had juiced – as Lance Armstrong had done, and as Pete Rose had denied he bet on baseball. Bonds, Clemens and Rose have joined Shoeless Joe Jackson as the greatest stars kept out of the Hall. Jackson is by far the most sympathetic figure. Born to sharecroppers, working by age six as a "lint head " in a textile mill, and illiterate, Jackson became one of the best players in history. He allegedly admitted – but subsequently denied – being part of the effort to throw the 1919 World Series. Acquitted by a jury, he was banned for life from the game he loved and swore he never betrayed. It was Jackson to whom a tearful young boy supposedly said, “Say it ain’t so, Joe?” What boy would say that now?

A Samoan Tragedy

I was, to put it mildly, a modest high-school football player on a team of which our coach noted, “We’re small, but we’re slow.” Junior Seau and I had nothing in common football-wise – except that I once had a concussion that knocked me loopy, sent me to the infirmary, and that I wore as a badge of honor until I started reading about chronic traumatic encephalopathy. CTE is a degenerative brain disease – a close relative of boxing’s “dementia pugilistica,” which is just “punch drunk” dressed in a toga – that can only be diagnosed in the brains of the dead. To the living it brings early-onset Alzheimer’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease, often in the prime of life. Seau was 43 last May when he went home and put a bullet through his chest, preserving for science the brain that had brought him to suicide. Yesterday, the National Institutes of Health confirmed that it was riddled with CTE.

The CTE story is much like the global-warming story. The scientific evidence is beyond dispute, but the culture refuses to accept it. Boston University researchers have studied 34 brains of former pro football players; 33 had CTE. So players, fans, coaches, owners insist the evidence remains insufficient.

Pro football is no longer a game. It is a “spectator sport” in the way the Roman games were. It involves enormous amounts of money, both legal and illegal, and a class of gladiators who do battle to bloodthirsty cheers. Unless that changes, the brains of the Junior Seaus will remain simply a cost of doing business.

Lance and Me

(If you get this twice, I apologize. Technical problems. JGB) “My name is Lance Armstrong, and I’m a doper.”

Recent news reports indicate that Armstrong may soon admit he used performance-enhancing drugs and illegal blood transfusions during a cycling career that included seven consecutive Tour de France victories after he had recovered from testicular cancer. The admission would come in the face of years of aggressive denial and in the wake of Armstrong having been stripped of his medals and banned for life last October for “the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen."

Armstrong had an extraordinary career. He was a national triathlon champion before taking up cycling, and his Lance Armstrong Foundation has raised hundreds of millions for cancer research. Not only does that career now appear built on a lie, but he has joined so many other public figures, from Barry Bonds to Bill Clinton, who have looked straight into a camera and unflinchingly denied the truth.

Their insistence is so pathological it’s hard not to believe them, even as the evidence mounts. Caught in a lie, they lie more. They believe themselves outside the rules for ordinary people and are too competitive to admit failure. While all these are undoubtedly true, I also think that all of us have parts of ourselves we want to shield from public scrutiny because they expose our conviction that we don’t live up to our own self-image. It is so human to be imperfect, but in a culture that insists on heroes it is so hard to admit it.

Olympic Moments

“Jake,” I asked my son recently, “do you think my titanium knees give me an unfair advantage in climbing mountains?” “No,” he said, and returned to his iPhone.

I had brought the matter up because one of the two Olympic stories that fascinated me was that of Oscar Pistorius, the South African sprinter whose legs were amputated just below his knees when he was 11 months old. Fitted with an unlikely-looking set of prostheses, Pistorius runs fast enough not only to qualify for the Olympics but to have his legged opponents complaining about his “unfair advantage.” Although he has been subjected to batteries of inconclusive tests, the true test seems simple: in a world in which people will go to almost any lengths to gain an advantage, I have yet to hear of anyone amputating his legs in pursuit of Olympic glory.

The other story is that the International Olympic Committee again refused a moment of silence for the 11 Israeli athletes who were taken hostage and murdered at the 1972 Munich games. Meanwhile, Sarah Attar, the first female Saudi track competitor, was cheered wildly for finishing last in the 800 meters, perhaps because her government required her to run covered from head to toe in traditional garb. No one complained about her handicap.

Attar represents a step toward equality in the Arab world, but the continuing refusal to acknowledge the barbaric tragedy that happened 40 years ago in Munich shames everyone who allows it to happen.

Irony

When Joe Paterno, the Penn State football coach, died on January 22^nd, his record of 409 wins was the most in the history of major college football. As of yesterday morning – after the NCAA vacated Paterno’s 111 victories between 1998 and 2011 in the wake of Jerry Sandusky’s conviction for child molestation – he had 298. Perhaps only in our culture would the forfeiture of games played long ago be considered “severe” punishment for enabling and then covering up the abuse of young boys. And it’s hard to see what difference it can make. Joe Paterno is beyond caring about his won-loss record. The players are not going to rewrite their memories of the games they played. Nor are the memories of the men who were victimized as boys going to change.

The college football powers had to do something in the wake of the report from former FBI Director Louis Freeh that “Four of the most powerful people at the Pennsylvania State University — President Graham B. Spanier, Senior Vice President-Finance and Business Gary C. Schultz, Athletic Director Timothy M. Curley and Head Football Coach Joseph V. Paterno — failed to protect against a child sex predator harming children for over a decade.”

So perhaps it’s fitting in a sordid kind of way that the punishment for pretending something wasn’t happening over all those years is to decree that games that were actually played were never played at all – to change the history of things that don’t matter because Penn State turned a blind eye to things that mattered desperately.

I am going off into the woods for a few days, so I probably won’t bother you again until next week.

Two Suspensions

There were two suspensions yesterday in two of America’s favorite pastimes: baseball and politics. The Miami Marlins suspended manager Ozzie Guillen for five games for praising Fidel Castro. The Venezuelan-born Guillen infuriated the Cuban-American community that his team had spent hundreds of millions trying to woo with a new $634-million stadium (built of course with taxpayers’ money), new uniforms and the most famous Latino manager in baseball.

Then Guillen said he “loves” Fidel Castro, continuing, "I respect Fidel Castro. . . .A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that (expletive) is still there." That didn’t sit well with the fan base, and ownership forced Guillen to publicly repudiate his comments, which he called “the biggest mistake I’ve made in my life so far.” His abject apology may not save his job.

Meanwhile, Rick Santorum, who has made comments far more egregious than those of Ozzie Guillen, “suspended” his presidential campaign. And while, mercifully, he will not be a candidate for president in 2012, he actually enhanced his standing in the party and his prospects for the future. Mitt Romney and the Republican establishment are grateful he is out of their way; his ultra-right-wing base is delighted to see him elevated to the status of national spokesperson; and he has been spared the need to submit his ideas to a national plebiscite.

So, a man involved in a boys’ game may lose his career for an offhand remark (which Joshua Keating pointed out was “as undeniably true as [it] was undeniably insensitive to Castro’s victims”), while a man seeking the presidency is being praised for the courage of his candor.

Food for Sport

This just in. MSG apologizes for name, considers change. In the wake of publicity surrounding recent gaffes over Jeremy Lin, the scrawny looking, Chinese-American, Harvard graduate who has become one of the greatest sensations in the history of the National Basketball Association, the board of MSG Sports, owners of the New York Knicks and Rangers, has called an emergency board meeting to address the company’s name.

Lin, who plays point guard for the Knicks, has unleashed an outburst of “Linsanity” across the land and a corresponding outbreak of apologies for insensitive names and boorish behaviors. Most recently, Ben & Jerry’s Boston Scoop Shops apologized for its "Taste the Lin-Sanity" flavored ice cream, whose recipe included pieces of fortune cookies (http://www.latimes.com/sports/sportsnow/la-sp-sn-jeremy-lin-yogurt-20120227,0,1130363.story). Earlier Jason Whitlock of Fox Sports had apologized for a stunningly offensive tweet, which for some reason did not get him fired, and ESPN has suspended one employee and fired another for verbal incidents.

The latest fireworks, according to an unidentified source, arose when the parent company appeared to be caught off guard when a reporter asked about its name. An anonymous spokes “person” later issued a statement: “We should have been more aware,” it said. “We were a big corporation before we realized we were an ingredient in Chinese food. We apologize for our insensitivity.”

In related news:

Several delicatessens in Brooklyn have stopped offering the “Reuben;” McDonald’s will no longer refer to the things on which it serves its “meat” as “buns;” and the Episcopal church has disassociated itself from white bread.

Gladiators

I was listening to the New York football Giants on the car radio on Sunday afternoon, when Hakeem Nicks caught a short pass from Eli Manning and jigged and hurdled his way to a 72-yeard touchdown run. It sounded like a pretty spectacular play, and here is how color analyst Carl Banks described Nicks’ run: “He made the routine look exceptional.” “Heck,” I said. “In my day, I could make the routine look impossible.”

At 6’2”, 165 pounds with unimpressive muscles, I am rarely mistaken for a football player. But I was once, albeit a long time ago in a very small high school. I weighed 30 pounds more then – about the same as “Night Train” Lane and Johnny Unitas, who are in the Hall of Fame.

Like most Hall of Famers, I also had a concussion. I told the coach that I couldn’t remember the play from the huddle to the line of scrimmage, which clearly made me a liability to myself and to my teammates. So the coach sent me to the infirmary, where the recommended treatment for almost any ailment was an enema . . . which almost killed poor Stephen Pierce when he went in later that fall with appendicitis.

Like all football players, we thought of ourselves as gladiators who played through pain. But football was a game, and it was supposed to be fun. It’s not a game anymore – it is a very big business. It is also a way to keep the people entertained. It’s an old trick. As millions of modern-day Romans watch gladiators try to kill each other in the coliseums below, Tiberius must somewhere be very proud.