Good pitching, baseball fans always say, stops good hitting. A good defense stops a good offense.
And so the Denver Broncos’ vaunted defense stopped Cam Newton and the Carolina Panthers’ electric running game, 24-10 in Super Bowl 50.
It was perhaps the last hurrah for Broncos’ quarterback Peyton Manning, who at 39 became the oldest quarterback to pilot a Super Bowl team and may join his boss John Elway as the only quarterback to retire after winning a Super Bowl. ...
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“The NFL Honors,” host Conan O’Brien said, would be like the Academy Awards if the Academy Awards honored black people.
Ouch.
Actually, Commissioner Roger Goodell should broadcast “The NFL Honors” every day, for it shows men of grace, humility and compassion – the qualities too often eclipsed by the tabloid headlines. On the program Saturday, Feb. 6, we heard a lot about family and living your dream and exhorting others to do the same.
Eric Berry, a Kansas City Chief safety who overcame Hodgkins’ disease to become the Comeback Player of the Year, didn’t mince words when he described the lonely nights, his father shaving his head in solidarity with his hair loss, his mother comforting him through the vomiting. He must’ve used the word “love” about 25 times in telling people to follow their passions. No one has the right to say that more than a man who has looked death in the face. ...
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On this Super Bowl weekend, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell told Robin Roberts of “Good Morning America” that people around the world will be watching Super Bowl 50 Sunday, implying that the game is the center of the universe.
People may be watching the Super Bowl around the globe, but that doesn’t make it a global sport the way soccer or tennis is. Few people in Indonesia beyond some ex-pats care about the NFL – a subject I address in my forthcoming novel “The Penalty for Holding.” But there seems to be a disconnect between public and internal perceptions of the game.
For Goodell the game is one he’d be happy having a son play; arrests are down 40 percent among NFL players, with the players more upstanding than non-players in their demographic group; and, as for concussions, he actually said there’s a risk in sitting on the couch. Really.
Meanwhile, Johnny Manziel – aka Johnny Football, the soon-to-be-former Cleveland Browns quarterback – has imploded. It’s the usual – trouble with drugs, alcohol and women. ...
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A few days before Super Bowl 50 this Sunday comes sobering news: Onetime Oakland Raiders quarterback and Super Bowl MVP Ken Stabler had CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a kind of dementia related to concussions and sub-concussive hits.
Stabler, who died in July of cancer at age 69, left his brain to be studied by researchers in Massachusetts.
Of the 91 brains of ex-players that have been tested – you can’t test for this except after death – 87 had brain trauma. ...
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Aaron Hamburger, the short story writer and novelist, begins his laudatory review of Garth Greenwell’s “rich, important” debut novel “What Belongs To You” in the Jan. 31 edition of The New York Times Book Review by indulging in a remembrance of a review past.
He recalls John Updike’s 1999 New Yorker piece on Alan Hollinghurst’s novel “The Spell,” in which Updike – who wrote many sexy novels – complained that Hollinghurst’s “relentlessly gay” fiction bored him because “nothing is at stake but self-gratification.” “What Belongs To You,” Hamburger writes, provides the “ringing” retort to Updike’s complaint.
I suspect that Updike may have been not only bored, though, but frightened and even repulsed. For gay fiction, like gay sex, presupposes the male as love object. And that might’ve been an uncomfortable exploration for the alpha male who wrote the “Rabbit” series and “The Witches of Eastwick.” ...
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As a woman of a certain, ahem, vintage, I owned the original Barbie doll.
She was a brunette with a ponytail and bangs that looked like an awning and improbable blue eye shadow, given that she was wearing a zebra-striped strapless bathing suit that showed off big boobs, a wasp waist and deer legs that seemed permanently molded for high heels.
I hated her on sight.
The years haven’t improved that perception. The unending wardrobe, the pink dream house and convertible, the bland boyfriend Ken – Barbie was designed to invite envy even as she had nothing really to offer. The funniest thing was her array of occupations, including astronaut and, in the Clinton years, presidential candidate. It was much like the Bond girls always being astrophysicists. ...
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I didn’t want another day to elapse without acknowledging the passing of skier Bill Johnson, who died Jan. 21 in an assisted living facility in Gresham, Ore. at age 55. Johnson was in deteriorating health for a number of years following a stroke. But I think that many would say that life killed Bill Johnson.
If you are of a certain vintage, then you remember the moment – the Olympics, Bjelašnica, Sarajevo, 1984 – when brash Bill, in Joe Namath/Muhammed Ali fashion, announced that the gold in the men’s downhill was his and everyone else was skiing for silver. No American man had won the gold in the downhill. But on that day, Johnson was better than gold. He was as good as his word. ...
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