Blog

The vagaries of fame: For NFL commish, teen tennis star

August 30, 2014

In the Gee, Ya Think? Department, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has decided that perhaps he was a tad too lenient in the recent Ray Rice domestic abuse case.

Now those who commit assault of any kind, battery or an act of domestic violence will be suspended for six games without pay. A second offense will result in at least a year suspension.

Clearly, Goodell has seen the handwriting on the wall, and no, I don’t mean the evil of Baltimore Raven Ray Rice dragging his fiancée (now wife) Janay Palmer unconscious out of an Atlantic City elevator after beating her or the blame-the-victim farce of the Ravens’ press conference, in which Palmer also apologized for her role in the incident.

No, the penmanship Goodell has seen in his mind is on all those credit card receipts for season tickets. With fans up in arms over the assault, Goodell can’t afford a defection, no matter how popular football is. So let’s not hand the NFL any humanitarian awards just yet. ...

Skin deep: Colin Kaepernick, Michael Brown and the problem of profiling

August 18, 2014

At first glance, Colin Kaepernick and Michael Brown would seem to be as far apart as San Francisco and Ferguson, Mo. But in a week in which Brown became yet another unarmed young black man killed by a police officer, Kaepernick was telling Bleacher Report why he thinks he’s criticized as the 49ers quarterback:

"Stereotypes, prejudice," Kaepernick told Bleacher Report when asked about the criticism. “Whatever you want to call it. I think between the tattoos, the way I dress, the way I talk. People don't think it should go together with a franchise quarterback or someone that's leading the team or representing the organization. At the end of the day, you have to look at, 'Are they knowledgeable? Are they doing their job?' Not what their appearance is."

Appearances were on the mind of Sen. Rand Paul, who wrote a piece for Time magazine in which he talked about the fact that as a white kid mouthing off, he wouldn’t have expected to be shot.

Awesomely athletic August

August 7, 2014

Summertime and the livin’ is supposed to be easy. (Thank you, Ira Gerswhin.) But for athletes and sports fans, there is no rest for the weary.

First, Phelpte (as in the Michael Phelps-Ryan Lochte rivalry) is back in action at the USA Swimming national long-course championships in Irvine, Calif., which will determine next year’s team for the world championships. They were slated to face-off four times, including Wednesday night’s 100-meter freestyle event.

The story lines go something like this: Phelps was bored in retirement and is glad to be back. Lochte – who turned 30 Aug. 3, Happy Birthday, Ryan! – moved to Charlotte, N.C., where he’s acquired a new coach and a new maturity, which should be music to fans’ ears. We’ll see how his newfound maturity and Phelps’ newfound hunger for swimming pan out.

Tonight, Colin Kaepernick leads the San Francisco 49ers into M&T Bank Stadium to meet the Baltimore Ravens for a nationally televised game that’s a rematch of Super Bowl XLVII. I am so there (i.e., in front of the tube) for this.

I wish I could be there (as in Cleveland) Friday for the start of the Gay Games (through Aug. 16), which always take place the same year as the Winter Olympics. But at least “Water Music,” my new novel about four gay athletes and how their professional rivalries color their personal relationships, will be there...

Will soccer eclipse football?

August 6, 2014

Today’s thought comes from my editor-friend Bill and my Uncle Johnny. As they uttered the same thought to me within hours of and unbeknownst to each other, I took it as a sign from the sports gods that I should write about it. And the thought is this:

We have seen the future in America, and it is soccer.

This because Manchester United and Real Madrid – perhaps the two best-known “football” teams in the world – faced off this past Saturday, Aug. 2, in a match at Michigan Stadium that drew more than 100,000 fans.

This is a sport in which you can see the passion and excitement on the faces of the players, which communicates to the fans, Bill told me. Not like a certain other sport in which the players wear helmets and are bent over much of the time.

Still soccer has a long way to go to supplant that other football game. For one thing, as this article makes clear, Major League Soccer doesn’t have the $49 million that Real Madrid has to pay Cristiano Ronaldo, the No. 1 player in the world. The money’s not there – yet.

But it could be, someday sooner rather than later, particularly as America becomes a more multicultural nation.

The NFL’s female trouble

August 4, 2014

Hard to believe but it’s already football season, and God, it’s off to a dreadful start, isn’t it, what with former coach and analyst Tony Dunghy saying he wouldn’t want Michael Sam, foreseeing trouble ahead for the NFL’s first openly gay player, and then Baltimore Raven Ray Rice getting a slap on the wrist for allegedly beating his wife in an Atlantic City elevator when she was still his fiancée.

This has been compounded by ESPN analyst Stephen A. Smith saying that women should be careful not to provoke men, for which he received a week suspension. Now ESPN ombudsman Robert A. Lipsyte has weighed in, saying, “Smith’s attempts at coherency are often as exciting as Tim Tebow’s scrambling.”

OK, people, let’s start with the easiest of the problems here. Why drag Tim Tebow – a man who has never shown women anything but respect – into this? Here’s a guy who’s training hard, hoping to get back into the NFL, unwilling to give up on his dream. There’s something at once poignant and commendable about this. But the NFL culture – which rejected him – can’t stop making fun of him even as it uses him to draw eyeballs. Pathetic.

But there’s something more serious going on here.

Colin Kaepernick and the ambivalence of desire

July 21, 2014

San Francisco 49ers’ quarterback Colin Kaepernick has a huge, new tattoo of a snake coiled around a rising, Michelangelo-esque hand grasping at dollar bills that riffs on “the money is the root of all evil” biblical theme, Katie Dowd writes on the SF Gate blog.

But St. Paul didn’t write that “money is the root of all evil.” He wrote that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” That’s something quite different and in keeping with a fascinating piece in The New York Times’ Sunday Review by Arthur C. Brooks, “Love People, Not Pleasure.”

Brooks contends that the pursuit of pleasure – money, fame, sex – is the root of unhappiness, which is pretty much the tenet of every major religion but particularly Buddhism and Christianity. They hold that nonattachment – which is vastly different from detachment – alone brings peace. Or as Jesus says, “for whosoever will save his life shall lose it.” That nonattachment – not so much an absence of desire, but an understanding of it – is real power, not the kind that comes from a scepter or an army but from within.

Is new PBS series a ‘Vicious’ stereotype?

June 29, 2014

In the show “Vicious,” which bows on PBS Sunday, June 29, Sir Derek Jacobi and Sir Ian McKellen play two bitchy old queens, for want of a better description – indeed the Britcom was originally titled “Vicious Old Queens” – who’ve been lovers for 50 years.

Both are among the greatest actors of this or any century and long out of the closet. And the series was picked up in its native England for a second season. But some critics complained – and some here wonder – whether it plays into gay stereotypes, or whether we’re all too sensitive to political correctness.

“It’s actually a sign that we’ve all matured, and now it’s perfectly respectable to have an exaggerated, farcical representation of two people who are gay,” McKellen said in Dave Itzkoff’s piece for the June 29 New York Times’ Arts & Leisure section. “And for us to accept that they can be figures of fun, just in the same way as a farce about straight people would be.”

Maybe so, but I asked myself...