When I was a young reporter, a columnist asked me casually about a recent holiday. The next day, I read all about it in her column, to my surprise – and chagrin.
I was reminded then of something that I had learned as a child but had momentarily forgotten: Never say anything to anyone that you wouldn’t want to see in print.
My indiscretion was pretty innocuous. I revealed nothing beyond a ham and a turkey (literally) – which is more than we can say for Los Angeles Clippers’ owner Donald Sterling. He’s accused of spewing the kind of racism and sexism that harks back to the 19th century. But then, I guess you can’t really expect discretion from a man who maintained a wife and a mistress simultaneously.
Let’s be clear: Harboring the kind of thoughts Sterling apparently does – admonishing former mistress V. Stiviano not to appear with black men at Clippers’ games – is morally wrong. But this is not a post about harboring such thoughts, which I think are a failure of our culture and our educational system. It’s about communicating such thoughts.
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Read MoreLos Angeles Clippers’ owner Donald Sterling is under fire for allegedly having a conversation – reported on TMZ.com – with a woman identified as V. Stiviano, in which he warned her about hanging out with black people and bringing them to the Clippers’ games. (Apparently, Stiviano, the defendant in an embezzlement suit brought by the Sterling family, released the tape to TMZ.)
This is not the first time Sterling’s name has been associated with prejudice. In 2009, he paid $2.7 million to settle a government claim that he refused to rent apartments to Hispanics, blacks and families in Los Angeles’ Koreatown neighborhood.
The revelation comes four days after New York Mets’ pitcher Matt Harvey deleted his Twitter account. Harvey’s last Tweet was a picture of himself giving the finger on the half-year anniversary of his Tommy John surgery.
I would agree with those who say that prejudice is far worse than crassness – though there’s no excuse for this deliberate kind of obscenity. (It’s not like a curse word uttered when you stub your toe.) Both prejudice and obscenity are a failure of culture, a failure of education. They say that we hold ourselves and others so cheaply that we think nothing of demeaning them, of demeaning ourselves. (Or perhaps we just don’t think, period.)
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Read MoreSending out love to former British tennis star Elena Baltacha as she battles liver cancer. The Ukrainian-born “Bally” rose to British No. 1, winning 11 singles titles and four doubles titles despite a knee injury and being diagnosed at age 19 with primary sclerosing cholangitis. This is an inflammatory, autoimmune disease of the bile duct that can lead to cirrhosis of the liver or cancer, as it has in Baltacha’s case.
This summer, Andy Murray and Martina Navratilova – a former world No 1 and breast cancer survivor – will lead a group of players in a “Rally for Bally” fundraiser to aid Elena, who is now a tennis coach in Ipswich, England.
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Read MoreCongrats to Nole, who beat Feddy Bear in the finals of the BNP Paribas Open March 16 in Indian Wells, Calif. 3-6, 6-3, 7-6 (3). (That was the tournament Nole was headed to after he played at Madison Square Garden on World Tennis Day, another BNP Paribas event.)
But apparently, the big news out of the California desert is that Roger Federer is back in the top five at age 32. A larger racket, a healed back and the hiring of Stefan Edberg – yet another 1980s star coaching players who were born in that decade – as adviser have all been credited with FedEx’s renewal. (They call them Fedberg. Cute.)
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Read MoreOne 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.
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Read MoreIt’s been a week since the Oscars, but Cate Blanchett’s Best Actress acceptance speech is still trending with me. Or rather, Maureen Dowd’s riff on it is.
Blanchett implied that her Oscar win for “Blue Jasmine” proved that films with women at the center aren’t “niche experiences.” Dowd’s March 5 column “Frozen in a Niche?” demonstrated otherwise:
“The percentage of women directing, writing, producing, editing and shooting films has declined since 1998, according to an analysis of the top 250 grossing films of 2013 by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. (The anticipated halo effect from Kathryn Bigelow becoming the first woman to win a directing Oscar for 2009’s “The Hurt Locker” never happened.)
“The center’s latest report had some stunning stats: Women accounted for 6 percent of directors, 10 percent of writers, 15 percent of executive producers, 17 percent of editors and 3 percent of cinematographers. And women are still more likely to be working on romantic comedies, dramas or documentaries than the top-grossing, teenage-boy-luring animated, sci-fi and horror movies.”
Sound like a niche to me. Mais pourquoi?
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Read MoreWorld Tennis Day – which was celebrated March 3 with marquee matchups of past and present stars around the globe – featured something that Andy Murray said we were not likely to see again. He and Novak Djokovic squared off in the “BNP Paribas Showdown,” an exhibition that reminded us what makes tennis and friendship so great.
A tennis exo – as exhibitions are sometimes called – is a bit like a rock concert mixed with a boxing match. There’s smoke (no mirrors). There are lighting effects and an irresistible beat. There’s an announcer who pronounces everyone’s name dramatically.
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