Can the Broncos stop Cam Newton, er, the Panthers?

January 25, 2016

A good defense stops a good offense like good pitching stops good hitting – or so running quarterback Quinn Novak wonders in my forthcoming novel, “The Penalty for Holding.”

Anyone who thinks that, he reasons, has never considered Alexander the Great taking it to the Persians in 331 B.C.

And indeed, while the Denver Broncos’ defense surely stopped Tom Brady and the New England Patriots in the American Football Conference Championship, that defense is going to be hard-pressed to stop the Carolina Panthers’ electrifying running game as encapsulated by their QB Cam Newton in Super Bowl 50 Feb. 7. ...

New York, New York

January 18, 2016

As a lifelong New Yorker, I love going to the city and I love leaving it.

My happiest journey was always riding the Madison Avenue bus up to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in spring with my Aunt Mary for work. I still love riding the bus there for work.

But I always exhale when the train hits the ’burbs. Something about seeing a greater ratio of greenery to concrete eases me.

New York is a tough, tough place. Come to it with a chip on your shoulder, someone once told me, and it will crush you. Approach it humbly and it will open like a flower. ...

The Magnus effect

January 17, 2016

Among the teams vying for the American and National Football Conference Championships next week, you won’t find the name of the Minnesota Vikings. That’s because the Vikes’ placekicker Blair Walsh missed a crucial field goal – in part because the football wasn’t lined up properly – against the Seattle Seahawks, who know a thing or two about how the ball bounces. (Last year’s Super Bowl. Marshawn Lynch on the one-yard line. Russell Wilson is told not to hand him the ball. New England Patriots win. Just saying.)

In the Vikings-Hawks game, Walsh kicked the ball – something he’s done successfully probably 98 or 99 percent of the time. Although instead of it veering one way, it went the other.

The Magnus effect: You expect the ball to curve one way, but it heads in another direction. It’s a common phenomenon in ball sports like football and tennis and a common metaphor as well. ...

‘A dangerous gift’: ‘Concussion’ and the NFL

January 3, 2016

“Concussion” – the new movie about football and head trauma – is a beautiful film beautifully rendered. That may be an odd choice of words for a story about two of the sometimes uglier games men play – power and violence – but then, football, like humanity, is a multifaceted subject, at once mindless and Shakespearean, as one character notes.

This football tale is told from the viewpoint of an outsider who longs to be an insider, a Nigerian immigrant who has grown up thinking of America as God’s country. Armed with a slew of degrees from Nigeria, New York and London, Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith) is a proud, accomplished but obscure forensics pathologist working for Dr. Cyril Wecht (Albert Brooks), the chief medical examiner in Allegheny County, Pa., in 2002 when he is given what he describes as “a dangerous gift” – a gift for knowing. ...

The athlete’s dance with the devil

December 30, 2015

The latest performance-enhancing drug scandal involves a star so big, so golden that to utter his name in the same breath as performance enhancement is to breathe sacrilege.

And yet here we are: The NFL and Major League Baseball are investigating an Al Jazeera report that implicates several of their players in the illegal use of human growth hormone, according to secretly taped – and couldn’t-be-more-appropriately-named-if-he-were-christened-by-Central Casting – pharmacy student Charlie Sly, who promptly recanted his claims.

There is really only one name anyone is interested in here – Peyton Manning, as in the superstar quarterback of the Denver Broncos, formerly of the Indianapolis Colts; Sports Illustrated’s 2013 Sportsman of the Year; scion of the Mannings of New Orleans, “football royalty,” as the press is want to note; and pitchman par excellence. ...

Concussed

December 21, 2015

“Concussion” – starring Will Smith as Dr. Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist who blew the whistle on NFL head injuries and their relationship to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a form of dementia – opens on Christmas Day and is already stirring the pot.

Some say it’s too easy on the NFL.

Others that the movie plays fast and loose with the events and exaggerates the relationship between football and poor health.

“Are we actually watching players kill themselves before our eyes?” Daniel Engber writes for Slate. ...

Brain freeze: The NFL and concussions

November 25, 2015

Every time I despair of the psychological truth and realism of “The Penalty for Holding” – the second novel in my series “The Games Men Play” – I’m given a sign from the universe.

There’s a crucial moment in the story in which Quinn Novak, star quarterback of the New York Templars, chooses to play on despite sustaining a sub-concussion. I agonized over this plot point because of the new protocols in place that pull players who’ve sustained such injuries immediately from the game. It didn’t seem authentic not to reflect this in my book.

But truth really is stranger than fiction. In the St. Louis Rams’ 16-13 loss to the Baltimore Ravens Sunday, Rams’ QB Case Keenum sustained a concussion and continued to play. ...