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The NFL’s new conduct policy: You’ll need a scorecard

December 11, 2014

The NFL has announced its new conduct policy, and frankly, I’d rather study nuclear physics or the tax code.

The penalties will be tougher for violations, of course, including domestic violence. But they won’t be implemented by commish Roger Goodell, even though the NFL will rely more on policing itself. No, there will be a special counsel to implement the conduct code, which goes into effect immediately even though the special counsel has yet to be appointed.

And there’s a new conduct committee as well, made up of owners, among others. I guess the committee will help implement the policy, which the players’ union didn’t see before the announcement. The union was a little miffed about that, as unions are wont to be.

Does anyone else’s head ache? What a load of hooey: The NFL is taking on more policing of its own organization, which it should’ve done in the first place, but Goodell – who is in effect the NFL’s CEO, as in chief executive officer, as in the person who chiefly executes – can’t implement the policy. You need three more layers of bureaucracy. Geez Louise, this makes Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner who immediately canned the bigoted misanthrope Donald Sterling, look like Eliot Ness. ...

The swimmer

December 10, 2014

Question: Who is the greatest short-course swimmer to date?

Hint: It isn’t Michael Phelps or Mark Spitz or Johnny Weissmuller.

It’s Ryan Lochte, whose 21st gold medal came in the 800-meter free relay at the FINA World Short Course Championships Thursday in Doha. It was the event that launched him on the road to short-course history in 2004.

Lochte doesn’t always get the respect he deserves. For one thing, he has swum in the shadow of Michael Phelps – much as Novak Djokovic has played in the shadow of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. And it’s never easy to be “merely” excellent in the face of immortality.

For another, Lochte did himself no favors at the London Olympics, at which he was supposed to emerge from Phelps’ shadow, by underperforming – if you can call five medals underperforming – and allowing himself to be packaged as a frat-boy airhead.

The real Ryan Lochte is a superb swimmer with a big heart who gives away medals to youngsters at meets, signs every autograph, opens his home to fellow swimmers when they need a place to stay and even drove hundreds of miles to attend the funeral of a swimmer he didn’t even know. And while he may not be intellectual, he’s smarter and more articulate in interviews than our TMZ culture would have you believe.

Tennis goes Bollywood for a new league of its own

December 9, 2014

“Team tennis” would seem to be an oxymoron but not these days. Witness the new International Premier Tennis League, which features former and current stars in four cities – Dubai, Manila, New Delhi and Singapore. The league, founded by Indian doubles champ Mahesh Bhupathi and modeled after cricket’s Indian Premier League, just finished the third leg of its tour, in Delhi. The season concludes Sunday, Dec. 14 in Dubai.

Already there’s been a lot of criticism – players are always complaining about the length of the season so why would they want to play in early December; tennis is an individual sport so what’s the point of a team approach; the scoring makes no sense (whoever wins the most games, wins) and you need a scorecard to tell the players.

Is that Novak Djokovic in for Marin Cilic? What team is Andre Agassi on again?

A seat of our own

December 8, 2014

With all of the talk about race in the aftermath of two high-profiled cases – one in Ferguson, Mo.; one in New York City – in which grand juries declined to indict police whose actions resulted in the deaths of two black men, few have considered that this may be as much a problem of gender as it is of race.

Looking at the leaders and experts who sat with President Barack Obama recently during a discussion of the explosive events in Ferguson, you saw white faces and black faces. What you didn’t see – or at least what I didn’t see – were many female faces.

Why is that? Studies have shown that female cops are better at diffusing difficult situations without resorting to violence or even one-upmanship. I hate to reduce the world to hormones, but I do think testosterone and the “mine is bigger than yours” mentality it fosters play a crucial role in male police officers’ responses to male suspects. Sure, education, racism, poverty, media stereotypes – these are all factors. But at the end of the day, women are generally – emphasis on the word “generally” – better at dealing with volatile moments.

That doesn’t mean that every incident can be handled with kid gloves. Nor does it suggest that it’s always easy to discern the situation in which force is necessary or the one in which discretion is truly the better part of valor.

But it does point to the need for women to add their voices to the decision-making process, as Ali Torre observed when I talked to her recently about the Safe at Home Foundation that she and husband, former Yankee manager Joe Torre, founded to end domestic violence.

We need more women. We need more women in the NFL, not only to help the league sort out its domestic violence issues but also to tell young players like Colin Kaepernick, going through a bad stretch, that you don’t shove a cameraman out of the way because you’re having a lousy day at the office. That’s not going to improve your circumstances. Indeed, culling ill will is one way to cloud them.

A guy named Joe: Torre goes to bat for victims of domestic abuse

December 6, 2014

When representatives of the four major sports – football, baseball, basketball and hockey – testified on domestic violence before the Senate Commerce Committee Dec. 2, not one commissioner appeared. It was a snub that wasn’t lost on committee members.

"They were all asked to be here, and leadership does start at the top. And I do think that it's pretty convenient that none of them were able to appear today," said Sen. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican from New Hampshire. "That does say something about: How big a commitment is there going to be on this?"

One prominent sports figure has never shirked that commitment. Joe Torre, who managed the New York Yankees through their magical championship run in the late 1990s, was on hand for the hearing. His interested isn’t casual. Joe is the founding chairman of the Joe Torre Safe at Home Foundation, which seeks to end the cycle of domestic abuse through intervention and prevention programs for youngsters.These are offered in safe rooms in 10 schools and community centers on both coasts, each of which is called Margaret’s Place, after Joe’s mother, who was abused by his policeman father. Since the organization’s founding in 2002, close to 50,000 children have been helped.

“If we’re going to end the cycle of domestic violence, kids are going to have to be part of the solution,” he told fans and shoppers at a special Bloomingdale’s White Plains event Dec. 3. (The store donated 10 percent of sales from the event to the foundation.) “Whether they have the same name as ours or not, they all belong to us. Kids are our future.”

Colin Kaepernick, Roger Goodell and a lack of leadership

December 1, 2014

Am I going to have to hop on a plane for San Fran to straighten out my Niners? Because I gotta tell you, I’m ready, willing and able to do it. They are foundering. Their 19-3 loss to their arch-nemesis, the Seattle Seahawks, on Thanksgiving night proved that the biggest turkey wasn’t the one on the table. Geez, Louise. Although Thanksgiving football is its own curse. Remember the Jets’ game against the Patriots, in which then- Jets’ quarterback Mark Sanchez had his head up some player’s butt?

Sanchez is now part of the winning Philadelphia Eagles. So there’s hope, Colin Kaepernick. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, then you know that I’m a huge fan of the 49ers’ QB. But I love my favorites with a view. Colin failed to score a touchdown Thanksgiving night after scoring at least one in each of the previous 18 games. He was intercepted twice. Worse, he cemented the notion that he can’t win against his archrivals, can’t close the big game, with the Hawks looming again on the schedule.

The wrap here is that he’s making too slow a transition from being a galvanizing running QB to a traditional pocket passer. Transitions take time. But in the meantime, he needs to become more of a traditional team leader. Don’t wait to be told to address the team before the game. Speak up. Lead by word as well as deed.

This isn’t a hopeless situation. It’s a work in progress and I believe progress and success will be the end result. ...

Alexander the Great’s world (still)

November 29, 2014

My family, friends and colleagues often tease me about my fascination for Alexander the Great. I get it. Who cares about someone – a single-minded Greco-Macedonian conqueror, no less – who lived some 300 years before Jesus?

But you see, the fact that we call Jesus Christ “Jesus Christ:” – and not Joshua bar Joseph, his historical Hebrew name – is because of Alexander and the spread of Hellenistic culture. Before Alexander, culture flowed east to west. After his conquest of the Persian Empire (331 B.C.), it would tend west to east. And the resulting tension between the two has reverberated down through the ages, particularly in the Middle East, the heart of his empire.

Our soldiers have been following in his footfall since the start of the Iraq War in 2003, as I wrote then for the Gannett newspapers. We’re still living in Alexander’s world. We just don’t know it.