Divine intervention: U.S. and Portugal play to a World Cup draw

June 23, 2014

So God dropped everything else Sunday, and the U.S. actually outplayed Portugal for a while. But in the end, we got sloppy and Portugal tied the game.

Look, the Portuguese may be old but the Americans aren’t very good, at least not Germany or The Netherlands good.

I watched the game on a Spanish channel, which is always fun as the sportscasters are excitable, yelling GOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL after every goal. It’s also great to hear a stream of Spanish punctuated by American names like Clint Dempsey – once the basis of a “Saturday Night Live” skit.

Cristiano Rinaldo – the Alex Rodriguez of soccer?

June 18, 2014

These are not the best of times for Cristiano Rinaldo, considered to be the world’s greatest soccer player (along with Leo Messi) and current holder of the Ballon d’Or as the No. 1-ranked player.

Playing for his native Portugal, he flamed out against Germany in early round action at the World Cup while Germany’s Thomas Müller – who isn’t considered to be as talented and certainly not as handsome or glamorous – led his team to a 4-0 victory.

Those who like to see Tall Poppies, as the Aussies call them, cut down to size were in their element. And indeed Rinaldo played right into the hands of his detractors by skipping the post-game press conference.

But the bigger question is why would someone who plays so well for Real Madrid play so poorly in the World Cup? (In the two previous Cups, Rinaldo has two goals in eight games.) Clearly, Portugal is not the team it once was. But that only explains why the Portuguese lost to the Germans. It doesn’t explain why they were shut out.

Is it simply possible that Rinaldo – like another handsome, seemingly self-centered athlete, one Alex Rodriguez – is a better regular season player than special occasion player?

Tony Gwynn, in memoriam (1960-2014)

June 17, 2014

Tony Gwynn dead June 16 at age 54 – what a shame. Think of Gwynn and you think of three things – tremendous hitter; lovely, smiling face; and class act.

I’ll never forget when Gwynn and his San Diego Padres played my beloved New York Yankees back in 1998 for the World Series. The ’98 Yanks were one of the greatest baseball teams ever assembled. Yankee aficionados put them up there with the 1927 Bombers (the so-called Murderers’ Row that included Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig) and the 1939 team that witnessed the passing of the torch from Gehrig to Joe DiMaggio.

So the poor Padres came up against a juggernaut in the 1998 fall classic and went down in four straight games. But Gwynn was stellar and stayed classy – gracious in victory and gracious in defeat.

The rose and the sword: Laurel Gouveia, an appreciation

June 17, 2014

The arrival in movie theaters of the film “Maleficent” marks the return of the archetype – cliché might be a better word – of the Wicked Stepmother but with a twist.

Post-feminist Hollywood is no dummy. It knows in the 21st-century that its filmmakers cannot afford to reinforce the sexist notion of the older woman out to get the Pretty Young Thing, which is the basis of “Cinderella,” “Snow White” and “Sleeping Beauty.” So there has to be a subplot about how the Pretty Young Thing’s daddy did Maleficent wrong when she was a pretty young thing.

You can revise a fairy tale to make the villain more of an antiheroine. You cannot, however, change history. The classic fairy tales, like much of culture, were created by men, who have feared the power of women, particularly the power of older women.

As they age, women develop a certain wisdom, a sophisticated, fluid sexuality – to say nothing of a disposable income. They’re no longer waiting to be rescued or impregnated by men, if indeed they ever were. They are free, and that’s powerful and frightening, particularly to the sex that has always held all the toys in the sandbox.

Because of their bodily cycles, women remain, though, the more visible reminder that we are all, if we’re lucky, going to get old. And we’re all going to die. Men don’t like that. With the Pretty Young Thing, they can pretend to be virile forever. With the powerful Crone archetype, eh, not so much.

I’ve been thinking a lot about stepmothers and female archetypes this past weekend with the passing of my own stepmother, Laurel Gouveia, after a long illness.

Rape culture and the games men (and women) play

June 13, 2014

OK, so he didn’t do it – which was apparent early on in the story.

But now its official: Colin Kaepernick, fellow San Francisco 49er Quinton Patton and Seattle Seahawk Richard Lockette won’t be charged with sexual assault in an April incident involving a woman who had had a brief affair with Colin.

She visited Lockette in Miami, where he, Patton and Colin were training together, in the hope that her “relationship” with Colin would be rekindled. Then things got “Exorcist”-style crazy in Lockette’s hotel room, Colin split and the woman wound up in the hospital claiming that she may have been sexually assaulted.

May have been, might’ve been – that didn’t stop TMZ from portraying Colin as one knife short of Jack the Ripper.

TMZ’s reporting – I use the term as loosely as possible – is just one problem in a culture that has such a cavalier attitude toward rape and in which men and women leave themselves vulnerable to “he said, she said.”

Why, for instance, would a young woman go to a hotel room where only men were present, men who were said to be drinking and smoking pot? Sounds like a 911 call waiting to happen. But then, she was apparently trying to turn a one-night stand into a meaningful relationship even though Colin had cut off contact with her last year when she claimed she was pregnant as an April Fool’s joke. Some joke. Then she tried to cry rape. It’s an insult to the men, women and children who have suffered such a heinous act and those who have been falsely imprisoned because of it.

Let’s be clear, however: Colin and company may be innocent of a crime but they are hardly blameless here.

Novak Djokovic, California Chrome and the quest for transcendence

June 11, 2014

Well, I’m officially 0 for 3, having thought the Rangers would at least split in LA, picked California Chrome for the Belmont and the Triple Crown and thought that Nole would finally dethrone Rafa at Roland Garros. So much for my prognosticating skills.

But I’m more interested in one of my favorite obsessions, which is Why do some transcend while others don’t? Why didn’t Chrome join the 11 who’ve won the Triple Crown instead of the 12 who came up short in the third leg? Why did Nole, who, after all, has beaten Rafa in every match they’ve played since last year’s US Open, come up short at the French?

Was it nerves? (Nole appeared to vomit before the start of the fourth set...

When home runs (and Shep Messing) were measured in meters

June 11, 2014

All this talk about corruption in the World Cup and Qatar, the 2022 host, having to give out luxury autos to pave the stands, reminds me that it would take a lot more than a giveaway to get Americans to watch soccer. OK, so maybe not a lot more but something.

Despite a large immigrant population that loves it, soccer remains child’s play in this country, watched over by disgruntled “soccer moms” and “soccer dads,” who act like they’re managing the New York Yankees, to mix my sports metaphors.

But I digress from my real purpose here, which is to recall those halcyon days of the 1970s when President Jimmy Carter decided we were all going to become internationalists.