When I was a child, I raced home one day from school to turn on the TV to see a 20-year-old pitcher who would soon become a favorite, Jim Palmer of the Baltimore Orioles, outduel Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 2 of the 1966 World Series. It wasn’t even close. Dodger centerfielder Willie Davis lost two fly balls in the October sun and the Dodgers, defending Series’ champ, went down 6-0, losing the series in four straight.
It was the last game Koufax ever pitched for afterward he announced his retirement from baseball, having battled traumatic arthritis along with the drugs that kept it at bay for a number of years. He was just 30 years old. ...
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Read MoreThere’s a lot of sports stuff we could talk about this week – including Andy Murray reuniting with former coach Ivan Lendl in an attempt to stop Novak Djokovic’s bid for the Grand/Golden Slam. (Nole fan though I am, I’m all for the “It’s the eye of the tiger,; it’s the dream of the fight, rising up to the challenge of a rival” attitude Murray has adopted. Nothing worthwhile comes easily. There’s no point in lying down for an opponent. And no champ worthy of the name would want a competitor to roll over. I think Nole knows the Grand/Golden Slam will mean nothing if he doesn’t earn it.
But there are two ways to think about sports. Like the arts, they can take us outside ourselves. And there are moments when they simply pale in the wake of tragic events. ...
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Read MoreWhen tragedy occurs, it’s always best to think before acting or speaking. (Right, Donald Trump?)
And yet, you knew what the profile of Omar Mateen would turn out to be, and I’m not talking about his religious and ethnic profile. He was a man. He was a young man. He had anger management issues. He demonized others – particularly women. And despite all the conspiracy theories, he appears to have acted alone.
In other words, he was a loner and a loser. Sound familiar? Plug in the names of the Charleston/Newtown/Columbine/Boston shooters/bombers, throw in Lee Harvey Oswald, Timothy McVeigh and John Wilkes Booth, now add Osama bin Laden and Adolf Hitler and it’s always the same narrative – someone with a disproportionate rage at rejection who focuses it on some group or groups in a lethal way. Whether they act alone or in groups or even as the heads of nations, they have an aggrandized sense of themselves that they see as aggrieved. They are so profoundly disturbed that they must explode else they’ll implode. ...
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Read MoreOnce again, there is nothing to say and too much to.
A lone gunman, a massacre among people going about their everyday lives and the usual hand-ringing and finger-pointing.
Although I must say Donald Trump deserves our heartiest “congratulations” for putting a new spin on opportunism – or should that be a new low.
“Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism,” he tweeted. “I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!”
And just how is he “right”? In a PBS town hall recently, President Barack Obama responded to an edgy question about refugees by observing that the real terrorist threat to the United States is not from refugees – who are vetted extensively – but from “tourists” and American citizens who are radicalized, like Omar Mateen, who murdered 50 people and injured 53 in an Orlando nightclub – the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. ...
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Read MoreRecently, Ken Valenti – a colleague from our days at the Gannett newspapers – graciously asked me if I would read at a gathering of his group For the Love of Words at R Patisserie Café & Tea Boutique in New Rochelle, N.Y., a most collegial coffeehouse. Naturally, I said yes. What writer doesn’t love the sound of her own words, her own voice?
As usual, I practiced my go-to selection from “Water Music,” the first novel in my series “The Games Men Play,” in which tennis player Alí Iskandar becomes involved in an international incident that draws him into the circle of his soon-to-be lover, tennis star Alex Vyranos. (Given the R-rated nature of the novel, there are not many easily available go-to sections.)
But something happened as I prepared to leave for the reading: I turned on the TV to learn of the Brussels bombing. ...
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Read MoreIt’s been a great week for news – sporting and otherwise – of the games men play.
First, it’s ba-aaack – Deflategate that is. You will recall that last September, federal court Judge Richard M. Berman ruled that the NFL had overstepped its bounds in its arbitration of Tom Brady’s four-game suspension for allegedly masterminding the deflation of footballs in the New England Patriots’ 2015 A.F.C. Championship win over the Indianapolis Colts.
Now a three-judge panel for the United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, has said, Not so fast. Taking a view similar to my own from the start of this delicious story, the panel seems less interested in the NFL’s triple role as judge, enforcer of punishments and arbitrator of appeals – a strange trifecta that would automatically make the league vulnerable to the charge of overstepping by the Players’ Union – than it is in the cover-up that always trips you up. To wit: What of Brady’s destroyed cell phone that might’ve contained incriminating information about his altered balls? ...
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Read MoreOn this Super Bowl weekend, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell told Robin Roberts of “Good Morning America” that people around the world will be watching Super Bowl 50 Sunday, implying that the game is the center of the universe.
People may be watching the Super Bowl around the globe, but that doesn’t make it a global sport the way soccer or tennis is. Few people in Indonesia beyond some ex-pats care about the NFL – a subject I address in my forthcoming novel “The Penalty for Holding.” But there seems to be a disconnect between public and internal perceptions of the game.
For Goodell the game is one he’d be happy having a son play; arrests are down 40 percent among NFL players, with the players more upstanding than non-players in their demographic group; and, as for concussions, he actually said there’s a risk in sitting on the couch. Really.
Meanwhile, Johnny Manziel – aka Johnny Football, the soon-to-be-former Cleveland Browns quarterback – has imploded. It’s the usual – trouble with drugs, alcohol and women. ...
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