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Gay marriage v. states’ rights

April 29, 2015

Gay marriage is once again before the U.S. Supreme Court, and depending on what the Court decides, it could become the law of the land.

Opponents have taken a new tactic. It’s not about whether or not gays should marry but whether the Court or the states should decide this.

Trust me: It’s about whether or not gays should marry, and invoking states’ rights in this situation here smacks of the Dred Scott Decision of 1857, in which the Court ruled 7-2 that just because you’re a slave living in a free state doesn’t make you free.

Right now, you might be gay and married in New York but you sure as hell ain’t gay and married, in, say, Tennessee.

And that’s absurd. There are certain things in which there must be uniformity of the law, otherwise what’s to stop a heterosexual couple’s marriage from being ignored by a state? ...

Nature teams with nurture in ‘The Professor in the Cage’

April 26, 2015

“The Professor in the Cage,” Jonathan Gottschall’s provocative new book, locates itself at the gridlocked intersection of biology and culture.

The subtitle “Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch” suggests another question, Why are women the nicer sex? and its corollary, Are they really?

The answers are fascinating and complex, though perhaps not as complex as his book makes them out to be.

Part of “The Professor in the Cage” is about how Gottschall, an out-of-shape, disenchanted academic, got involved in the brutal world of mixed martial arts (MMA). His personal story is less interesting, however, than his personal observations. He hits the mark, for instance, when he says that MMA is like gay porn – all those rippling, sweaty physiques grappling with one another in clutches that are at once amusing and arousing. It’s the reason I love wrestling. And I suspect – as the nude wrestling scene in “Women in Love” suggests – it gives men a license to touch one another in a way that conforms to traditional heterosexual society, as do all sports.

But why must male athletic competition be so violent – or at least carry the threat of violence? And why do we secretly – or not so secretly – find it thrilling? ...

Andy Murray’s big, fat celeb-less wedding

April 8, 2015

You got to hand it to the press when it comes to making a mountain out of the proverbial molehill. Andy Murray’s getting married Saturday, April 11 – congrats again to him and Kim Sears – and there will be no Feddy, Rafa or Nole. (Thank God for Andy’s lack of famous guests. For a while there, I thought we were going to have to live with Nole’s Miami meltdown until the start of the Monte Carlo Open.)

So Andy didn’t invite the rest of the so-called “Big Four.” What a surprise. Well, it is to the press. Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic have been “banned,” “shunned” and “uninvited.” (Let us pause for a vocabulary lesson, here, shall we? In order to be uninvited, you would have to be invited to begin with.)

Look, when you play for the kind of stakes these guys play for, you’re not going to pal around. It messes with your head and your game. That’s precisely why I made the tennis players and swimmers in my debut novel “Water Music” rivals, friends and lovers: It’s delicious conflict, which is the meat of fiction. In my follow-up, “The Penalty for Holding,” the football players, too, find their personal relationships tangling their professional rivalries, although there it’s somewhat different, because football is a team sport.

Can rivals be friends in the real world? ...

For Nole, love means having to say you’re sorry

April 6, 2015

Tennis, Andre Agassi once observed, is a lonely sport. A singles player is out there by his or her self, and has no one to blamed but his or her self when the match heads south. It can be particularly frustrating.

I was reminded of this after reading about Novak Djokovic’s triumph over Andy Murray 7-6 (3), 4-6, 6-0 at the Miami Open Easter Sunday. It was the third time that Nole’s pulled off the difficult double of wins at Indian Wells and Miami. He’s 25-2, a start that echoes the fantastic beginning to 2011, when he first became No. 1.

But what some will remember about the April 5 final in Miami is the way Nole shouted at his entourage after losing the second set to Andy and grabbed a towel from the startled ball boy. This was uncharacteristic of Nole, who’s tender with children. He knew it and he apologized. ...

Men – the fairer sex?

October 11, 2014

Boy, nothing gets women piqued faster than telling them that men are the better-looking sex.

I had this conversation with two female friends recently, one of whom skeptically said to me, “Do you really believe that?”

Yes, I do, though perhaps not in the way they might think. Of course, the average woman – with her makeup and her Spanx – might be more gussied up than the average guy. But what I mean is that aesthetically, the best-looking man is better-looking than the best-looking woman, that I would take the Apollo Belvedere over the Venus de Milo any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Blame it on hormones. Male hormones give them bigger, hotter, lusher, more dangerous looks that read easily across a crowded room. Consider Colin Kaepernick, photographed by Bruce Weber on the cover of the new V Man magazine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, he has a nose like a toucan, closely cropped hair and lots of tattoos, which displease some of the fashion police.

And yet – wow – those eyes, like Cognac in firelight; those long, thick lashes; that cut jawline (to go with that cut body). Ladies, ladies, do you think a woman could carry those off? ...

Under fire, the NFL thinks pink

October 6, 2014

A shout-out to two former colleagues covering the NFL’s domestic abuse crisis.

Jane McManus of ESPN continues her fine reporting with a piece on the NFL’s addition of more women to the team that will ultimately help clean up this mess. A revelation: Off the Field, the NFL wives organization, is just being included in the discussion now. (Apparently, a first letter from the wives to the league was lost. What a surprise.)

If you’ve been reading this blog, then you know that Jane and I worked together at The Journal News, a Gannett publication. One of our estimable colleagues was longtime religion reporter Gary Stern, who contributed a piece on the entwined lives of NFL commish Roger Goodell and suspended player Ray Rice in the paper’s Oct. 5 edition. ...

Hope to end domestic violence

September 12, 2014

The story of Ray Rice coldcocking then-fiancée Janay Rice and a possible NFL cover-up of the act is not going away. The National Organization of Women has called for NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to step down, this as former FBI director Robert Mueller is appointed to lead an investigation into what the NFL knew and when it knew it.

There has been much written about the subject and much of that misguided. People think with their hearts, their loins and their wallets. They see what they want to see. But in this case – in most cases – we need to think with our minds. Here are the incontrovertible facts, as I posted them on ESPN: Ray Rice assaulted the woman who became his wife, the former Janay Palmer, and Goodell exercised abysmal leadership in responding to that act. Both men should be gone from the NFL – permanently.

It does not matter if what happens between a husband and wife is private. (The assault took place in the elevator of an Atlantic City casino, a public place.) It doesn’t matter that the Atlantic City district attorney chose not to prosecute, although I’m sure that is being investigated, too. And most important, it really doesn’t matter if Mrs. Rice confronted her husband on the elevator or why she dated, married and stayed with him. Nor is it in anyway material that she is pleading for privacy as her world unravels, thanks to her husband.

All that matters here is that Rice assaulted his future wife, and the league chose to slap him on the wrist with a two-game suspension at first while possibly sweeping under the rug any knowledge of the video capturing the act. ...