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Chris Christie’s Cowboy love

January 11, 2015

The reemergence of the Dallas Cowboys – who play the Green Bay Packers today for the right to move on to the NFC Championship game next weekend – created some unforeseen levity once viewers spied Gov. Chris Christie hugging Cowboys’ owner Jerry Jones after the team’s victory over the Detroit Lions.

“Spied” might be the wrong word. Gov. Krispy Kreme was sporting an orange sweater for the occasion, and let’s just say that orange isn’t always the new black. Indeed, though Christie described himself as a high school athlete at the time of Bridge-gate – to distinguish himself, I guess, from those “loser” henchmen who took the fall for the George Washington traffic scandal – his moment with Jones resembled nothing so much as the chubby kid trying to hang with the cool jocks. Altogether now singsong “Awk-ward.”

Christie – who has taken a lot of heat for his Cowboys’ allegiance – has been characteristically unbowed, leading the puckish New York Times columnist Gail Collins to remark that it’s “certainly the tough-talking, self-assured Chris Christie that all of us have come to know and, um, know.”

The real problem here is not that a New Jersey governor likes a Dallas team – that would hardly matter in a national election – but that the Cowboys own a company that was recently awarded a contract at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, overseen by Christie and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. ...

Stand and deliver

January 8, 2015

The big news for us Colin Kaepernick fans is that he’s spending the off-season in Phoenix, Ariz. – working on his quarterbacking skills with Kurt Warner, two-time NFL MVP and Super Bowl champ for the St. Louis Rams and Arizona Cardinals.

So it’s all good, right? Someone who’s talented wants to improve on that. We should be cheering him on, no?

No: Let the hating begin.

“Warner should teach him how to bag groceries” is among the milder thoughts in the blogosphere. The rap is that Colin is a running quarterback who will never be a traditional pocket passer. And that may – or may not – be true.

For the uninitiated, and I must confess that Yours Truly counts herself among them, a pocket passer, like the Broncos’ Peyton Manning or the Patriots’ Tom Brady, stands and delivers, that is he stands in the “pocket” – presumably protected by his great offensive line, or O-line – to throw the ball to various teammates whose locations on the field he quickly “reads” under great pressure.

Then there is the new breed of running quarterback – led by Colin, the Redskins’ Robert Griffin III (known as RG III) and the Panthers’ Cam Newton – all of whom have struggled this season. The exception is their contemporary, the Seahawks’ Russell Wilson, who, though a running quarterback, can deliver from the pocket and read the field. He is considered more of a hybrid like the Colts’ Andrew Luck, another contemporary, and the Packers’ Aaron Rodgers, an established superstar. The thinking is that though it’s fine to be able to scramble, you have to be able first and foremost to stand and deliver in the NFL, unlike in college ball.

All this is fascinating and serves as a great subtext in my novel “The Penalty for Holding,” about a gay, biracial quarterback’s search for acceptance in the NFL. My protagonist, Quinn Novak, is more of a hybrid like a Wilson, Rodgers or Luck – what former Niners’ star Steve Young, a great running quarterback who became a great pocket passer – would call a multi-threat.

Sports as spice

January 7, 2015

I had to laugh when I saw the title of Richard Sandomir’s essay in the Jan. 4 edition of The New York Times: “The Best Sports Films Often Are Not.”

One of the things people ask about my upcoming novel “The Penalty for Holding” – once they absorb that it’s about a gay, biracial quarterback’s search for identity, acceptance, success and love amid the brutal beauty of the NFL – is, How much football is there? Trust me, they’re not hoping that the answer is “a whole lot.”

And that’s as it should be. For a sports story to succeed, sports have to secondary to the story. There’s a practical reason for this. No specialty tale – which is what any sports story is – can rely on sports fans alone. It must also engage those who are mildly intrigued, those who’d enjoy any good story but don’t necessarily know a lot about sports. And to do that the story can’t be too much inside baseball. Sports are the spice. The narrative is the meat. ...

Just say “No More”

January 5, 2015

The NFL, deep into playoffs after a regular season of scandal, is also deep into its commitment to public service announcements against domestic violence and sexual assault.

The P.S.A.s feature current and former stars like the New York Football Giants’ quarterback and good guy Eli Manning saying “No More” – to such dangerous platitudes as “But he’s such a nice guy,” “She was asking for it,” “He just has a temper” or “We don’t talk about that.”

You may remember similar spots featuring actors Amy Poehler and Courtney Cox and fashion guru Tim Gunn. They’re the brainchild of No More, a five-year-old coalition against domestic violence and sexual assault working with actor Mariska Hargitay’s Joyful Heart organization. ...

Rafael Nadal – a man for all seasons?

January 4, 2015

Rafa’s back – at the Mubadala World Championship in Abu Dhabi, where he promptly lost to Andy Murray 6-2, 6-0 in the semifinals. It was the first time Andy – who also knows a thing or two about coming back from an injury – beat a top-four player since he defeated Novak Djokovic in the 2013 Wimbledon final. Andy won the exhibition tourney after Nole withdrew with a fever from the unofficial season opener. Nole had beaten Stan Wawrinka 6-1, 6-2 in the other semifnal.

Rafa – who’s on the comeback trail from an appendectomy after missing the U.S. Open with a wrist injury and suffering a back injury in last year’s Australian Open – is unfazed by the poor showing against Andy. And I don’t think at this point there’s any reason for concern. Entered in next week’s Qatar Open, Rafa is using these tournaments as tune-ups for the Australian Open, which begins Jan. 19.

Still, there is something troubling about the pattern that has emerged from Rafa’s intense style of play. He goes great guns through his favorite, clay-court season, then collapses at Wimbledon or US Open time. It’s a balancing act...

The beast in the NFL jungle

January 1, 2015

Well, we’ve heard more from San Francisco 49ers’ owner Jed York and general manager Trent Baalke about why they parted ways with coach Jim Harbaugh. Which is not the same as saying we’ve learned more about what happened.

There was talk at the Dec. 29 press conference about “philosophical discussions,” which usually refer to differences on the field. Here, however, those differences seemed to have centered on what happened off it.

The Niners had six men who were arrested 10 times – six men, 10 times. Here’s York on that – sort of:

“The NFL is made up of players that have mixtures of personality. We need to find a way to get to the guys that are potentially on the edge, that have the ability to really be good guys . . . And that's when you get to the teacher to make sure that you find a way to reach those guys instead of going to the other side, keeping them on the side of the road that fits with our core values."

Uh-huh. What does this mean? ...

New Year’s wisdom from RFK – and ‘the awful grace of God’

December 31, 2014

Spent a magical few days with my family – always too short of a good time – in suburban D.C. for Christmas and had the pleasure and privilege of visiting Arlington National Cemetery.

I hadn’t been there since I was a girl but as with anything that is ingrained, I found it washing over me, moving me as it did in the old days – the rows of crystalline marble headstones; the deep-veined names etched on them; the commanding views of the city that crown the serpentine climb to the Federal-style Arlington House, a.k.a. The Robert E. Lee Memorial, once the home of the gallant Confederate general and President George Washington’s descendants.

As I made the climb, I was struck by the grave markers, some containing a brief record of the departed’s military and civilian achievements, others containing nothing but a last name, the bearer’s deeds lost in time.

Along the way, I paused at the eternal flame that lights the graves of President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, flanked by the graves of their first and last children, an unnamed baby daughter and son Patrick.

On the path to the left are the graves of JFK brothers Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., a World War II bomber pilot, and Sen. Edward Moore Kennedy, marked by simple white crosses – as is perhaps the most moving of the brothers’ graves, that of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

His faces a low gray wall that contains some of the words he spoke extemporaneously in Indianapolis the night of April 4, 1968 amid his presidential bid after he learned the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Kennedy had been cautioned by police and aides against addressing those who had gathered, many of whom would be hearing about King’s death for the first time. But he decided to persevere, in one of the great, from-the-heart speeches – acknowledging the black crowd’s understandable anger toward King’s white assassin, James Earl Ray, and his own toward his brother John’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.

That was vintage Bobby, and the reason you either loved or hated him but couldn’t sit on the sidelines and be dispassionate. He wasn’t afraid of raw emotions, afraid to say what everyone was thinking.

Nor did he deem it imprudent to quote Aeschylus to the throng. The ancient Greek poet-playwright of “The Oresteia” – recommended by his bookish sister-in-law, Jackie – became a favorite in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination. ...