Blog

Earning her stripes in the NFL

April 6, 2015

Kudos to Sarah Thomas, the first woman scheduled to become a full-time referee in the NFL. (Shannon Eastin worked as a replacement official in 2012 during the referee lockout.)

Thomas – a pharmaceutical executive and mother of three – has worked preseason games and the New Orleans Saints’ spring minicamp. Like most pioneers, she doesn’t see herself as one.

"I've always said as far as breaking the gender barrier, you never set out to do that,” she was quoted as saying in USA Today.

Does the hire smack of tokenism? Of course, it does. The NFL has a terrible rep where women are concerned so it floods the field with pink during October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month. And now it’s added a female official. Regardless of its motives, however, the league is still raising awareness.

And so will Thomas, who’ll have to earn those stripes she’ll wear. ...

Our bodies, theirselves

April 3, 2015

Freud said there are no accidents so maybe it’s no coincidence that the controversy over recently enacted (and hastily revived) RFRAs (Religious Freedom Reformation Acts) has occurred at the same moment that PBS has been airing “Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies.”

What do they have in common? An undertone of misogyny. I’m not suggested that the series – which was alternately informative, hopeful, horrifying and depressing – was misogynistic. But rather that the way in which female cancers used to be treated suggests a kind of savage disregard for the female body, and you have to wonder if a more enlightened approach – lumpectomy rather than radical mastectomy, which turns out to be ineffectual for early stage and metastatic breast cancers alike; a moratorium on hysterectomies, which used to be a dime a dozen – has to do with the rise in the number of female physicians and surgeons. ...

The ‘Pretty Woman’ theory of customer relations

April 1, 2015

The hullabaloo over the new crop of RFRAs (Religious Freedom Reformation Acts) raises an interesting question about what we owe ourselves and others in the workplace, a subject that figures prominently in “The Penalty for Holding,” the upcoming second novel in my series “The Games Men Play.”

Granted, the workplace there is the NFL, a far more specialized and glamorous environment than most of us will ever know. But whether you work at the local Starbucks or for an NFL team, the questions ignited by the RFRA debate in Indiana and Arkansas remain the same: To what extent may I impose my personal beliefs on others? To what extent may I find offense in theirs?

The answers are actually simpler than you would think if you keep one thing in mind: A business or a corporation is a public entity, emphasis on the word “public.” If someone plunks down a Ulysses S. Grant on the counter of my bake shop, I owe that person $50 worth of baked goods. Period.

Of course, I should present the baked goods with a smile and a good attitude. I might even offer more in the way of sample cookies on the counter. But I must in any event give value for value, regardless of what I perceived the person to be.

Otherwise, we would spend our days in knots about each person we encounter. Chances are very few people are going to share the same values you hold. ...

Russell Wilson ‘Passes the peace’

March 29, 2015

It’s been a quiet offseason thus far for the NFL – particularly given the fireworks of the regular season and playoffs (everything from Ray Rice to Deflategate).

But quiet isn’t necessarily a good thing. The NFL still has to decide what to do with Minnesota Viking Adrian Peterson, who pleaded no contest to taking a switch to his 4-year-old; and Carolina Panther Greg Hardy, who had his conviction for domestic abuse overturned; not to mention Deflategate.

Let me make a bold prediction: Peterson and Hardy will be back, and Deflategate will be swept under the rug, because basically the NFL prefers what Simon and Garfunkel would call “the sound of silence.”

One person who is not remaining silent is Seattle Seahawks’ quarterback Russell Wilson. On The Players’ Tribune site started by Derek Jeter, Wilson, who describes himself as “a recovering bully” despite his “Goody Two Shoes” image, wants to talk about domestic violence and then do something about it. ...

After Eden: The Met’s resurrection of Adam

March 29, 2015

For years, he graced The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Velez Blanco Patio, just off the Great Hall – a paean to the kind of youthful male beauty that stretches back to the Archaic Greeks. But all of that came to a crashing halt on the evening of Oct. 6, 2002 when Adam, a 15th-century funerary marble by Tullio Lombardo, fell off his pedestal and smashed into 28 pieces.

It turns out that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could put Adam back together again. A dozen years after the unsettling incident, The Met unveiled the 6-foot, 3 ½-inch statue, along with a video on its reconstruction, last fall in a new, temporary space. And yet, it seems fitting to talk about the work in this season that is dedicated to Adam’s fall from spiritual grace and the Resurrection of the new Adam in the person of Jesus Christ.

Part of what makes this sculpture’s reconstitution and thus the subsequent exhibit so incredibly moving is the subject’s stunning beauty to begin with. The thick curls framing a face characterized by large eyes, a straight nose and full lips and winding about a graceful neck. The high chest, taut abs, long, slim haunches and sinewy calves and arms. Adam’s gorgeous, and so we can say with Hamlet, “What a fall was there.” ...

The shadow king

March 24, 2015

History, they say – whoever “they” are – is written by the victors.

Well, not exactly. Our age of revisionism and conspiracy theories, coupled with the unending vacuum that is the Internet, encourages us to consider just how victorious – or at least good – the victors really were and, thus, just how wronged the losers might’ve been.

That’s the backdrop of Pierre Briant’s “Darius in the Shadow of Alexander” (Harvard University Press, 579 pages, $39.95), newly translated by Jane Marie Todd and published in the United States after first appearing in French 12 years ago. In this book, Briant – emeritus professor of the Achaemenid world and Alexander’s empire at the Collège de France in Paris – explores how and why Darius III, who lost an empire to Alexander the Great, came to “haunt the realm of historical oblivion.” It is not, for obvious reasons, a biography. But it is a fascinating, extensively researched study of how branding can be as important as any battle.

Briant’s book arrives at a time when Persia (modern-day Iran) is very much in the news due to the controversial yet productive nuclear disarmament talks and Iran’s role in fighting ISIS – which some see as a play for greater power in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Israel’s recent discovery of coins bearing the likeness of Alexander go a long way to explaining why the Greeks – who knew how to spin – won and the Persians lost.

But first a bit of background: Some 130 years before the birth of Alexander in neighboring Macedon in July of 356 B.C., the Persians invaded Greece and burnt the Acropolis atop Athens, destroying its temples and worshipers. It was Greece’s 9/11 moment.

Alexander’s father – Philip II, king of powerful, rough-hewn Macedon and hegemon, or protector, of the more refined, resentful Greek city-states – seized upon Persian atrocity in his plans to invade Persia, liberating Greek nationals along its Mediterranean coast. But Philip – who loved much but none-too-well – was assassinated by a former male lover undoubtedly at the instigation of his ex-wife (and Alexander’s mother), Olympias. At 20, Alexander found himself heir not only to Macedon and the hegemony of the Greek city-states but to his mother’s dynastic ambitions and his father’s Persian dreams. ...

Anne Boleyn and the games men play

March 16, 2015

One of the nuggets I gleaned from attending the Algonkian Writers’ Conference last December in Manhattan was that when it comes to historical romance, it’s the Tudors or bust.

It figures. Working backward, there was Elizabeth I, England’s greatest ruler; her sister, the pathetic, misguided “Bloody Mary”; their baby bro, Edward VI; and, of course, the daddy from Hell, Henry VIII, with those – count ’em – six wives. No dramatist could conjure such symmetrical marital disaster – Catherine of Aragon, annulled; Anne Boleyn, beheaded; Jane Seymour, dead in childbirth; Anne of Cleves, annulled; Katherine Howard, beheaded; and Catherine Parr, survived Henry, but wait, would remarry and, you guessed it, wind up dead in childbirth.

Historian David Starkey (“Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII”) once told me that of the half-dozen, Catherine of Aragon was the only one Henry ever really loved. But his quest for a son, for proof of his manhood and for liberation from papal Rome and the memory of his older brother, Arthur, who had been Catherine’s husband, drove him into the arms of the bewitching Anne Boleyn, linchpin of the six wives’ psychodrama. Did he use Anne to gain control of the Church in England or was he, as Starkey said, so in love with her that he was willing to renounce his role as Defender of the (Roman Catholic) Faith? Perhaps a bit of both?

Anne’s rise and fall is told through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell – the blacksmith’s son-turned-chancellor – in Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning novels “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies.” (She’s at work on the last book in the trilogy.) Naturally, PBS’ “Masterpiece” couldn’t resist. “Wolf Hall” (April 5 through May 10) dramatizes the first two books, with British theater star Mark Rylance as Cromwell, Damian Lewis (“Homeland”) as Henry and Claire Foy (“Little Dorrit”) as Anne. “Wolf Hall” – the title refers to rival Jane Seymour’s familial estate but suggests the den of wolves the Tudors were – is a daring conceit. For what makes men like Cromwell effective, their ability to manipulate and maneuver behind the scenes, is what can make them potentially boring front and center. (Imagine the story of Bill and Hillary Clinton told from the viewpoint of their accountant.) The beauty of the books and the miniseries is that we enter Cromwell’s mind to meet a man weary of and disgusted by the power games men play but unable to relinquish them. ...