Achilles in Sayreville

October 23, 2014

Sports are all about numbers, and the numbers in the “game” being played out in Sayreville, N.J. are particularly brutal.

Seven: That’s the number of students who’ve been suspended from Sayreville War Memorial High School and charged with hazing and sexual assault. Four: That’s the number of teammate-victims and the number of incidents. Five: That's the number of coaches with tenured teaching positions who’ve been suspended (with pay pending the outcome of the investigation) and have seen their coaching stipends cut in half.

Numbers, however, never tell a whole story, and they can’t tell this one – of a season lost, of football scholarships rescinded, of futures in jeopardy and of a football-proud town divided between the victims and their supporters, who are seeking justice and truth, and the alleged perpetrators and theirs, who wish the whole thing would just go away so they can get back to lives lived under the Friday night lights.

It’s interesting that the school is named after a World War II memorial and the team is called the Bombers.

“Every game resembles war,” Mark Edmundson writes in his sharply observed new “Why Football Matters: My Education in the Game” (The Penguin Press, $26.95). “Tennis, soccer lacrosse: You might say they all domesticate violence…. Of the games I know, football comes closest to war without falling over the border and becoming war pure and simple.”

There are those – including many who connect the dots between Sayreville and the NFL’s domestic abuse crisis – who say that football has crossed the line. The wives and children who’ve been beaten, along with freshman boys who were held down, kicked, punched and anally raped, are casualties of the gridiron wars. ...

15 millennia of fame

March 18, 2014

One of the great pleasures of reading the Weekend New York Times – apart from the opportunity it affords me to collapse with breakfast, lunch or a cup of coffee – is trolling for blog ideas. The March 16 edition of The New York Times magazine yielded a doozy – a map, as it were, of a new project from the Macro Connections group at M.I.T.’s Media Lab called Pantheon. The odd thing is that The Times’ article doesn’t give the website. But here it is.

This being from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pantheon has come up with a complex formula to measure historical cultural production. I won’t bore you with methodology – because I’m not smart enough to. But what’s fascinating to me is what piqued The Times’ interest: What does Pantheon say about fame and celebrity? Something I and others have long suspected and that should give our notice-me, selfie society pause: Fame and celebrity are not the same thing.

The second wife

January 6, 2014

Congrats to Colin Kaepernick and the San Francisco 49ers for taking it to Aaron

Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers Sunday in frigid Lambeau Field, 23-20. Give Aaron, who must still be smarting from that recently broken collarbone, credit for keeping the Packers in it. But once again, Colin was able to beat them with his head, arm and legs – a complete performance.

Maybe now we can stop hearing about how the Niners made a mistake getting rid of QB Alex Smith (whose Kansas City Chiefs lost, by the way, Saturday) and keeping Colin. It’s like the guy who’s been divorced and remarried for 20 years and all his family and friends can do is talk about what a great woman the first wife was.

Look, it’s over. As Hugh Grant would say, “That train has sailed.”

Right into Colin-land – a country in which I’m happy to dwell. Read more

WWPMD?

December 23, 2013

This past weekend, I found myself wondering: What Would Peyton Manning Do?

The question was actually posed by A., the administrator and editor of this blog. We were out to lunch, and I was explaining that I was torn between visiting my family for Christmas (and winding up hopelessly behind in my work) or foregoing the visit to fulfill my deadlines. Somehow we got on the subject of how I consider myself to be the Peyton Manning of women, not because I’m so great but because I’m an intense person who believes in Alexandrian leadership (that is, leading from the front) and in what Louis Pasteur said: “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

So WWPMD? To answer that question I read the cover story of the Dec. 23 issue of Sports Illustrated, which has proclaimed Peyton Manning “Sportsman of the Year.” (Talk about fortuitous: Sunday, the Denver Broncos won the AFC West as Manning broke Tom Brady’s record for most touchdowns in a season, 50.)

The article contains things I knew and many I didn’t. Read more

Achilles in Dallas

December 2, 2013

What kind of man walks away from $1 million?

Maybe the kind who knows that some things are more important than money.

Such a man is John Moffitt, a third-year guard with the Denver Broncos who recently retired from the NFL.

Moffitt had a so-called dream job protecting the glamorous, commanding Peyton Manning, the Broncos’ already legendary quarterback. But protecting quarterbacks is one aspect of football that has led an increasing number of players to develop CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a form of dementia resulting from the concussions and sub-concussive events that are part of the sport. Read more...