As it happens, rain and snow, sleet and hail will sometimes keep postmen from their appointed rounds but the game must go on. The joint African Union-United Nations peacekeeping mission in Darfur (UNAMID) has handed football equipment to leaders from three camps in Darfur for internally displaced persons (IDPs) for an inter-community youth tournament.

Hassan Gibril, head of UNAMID’s North Darfur office, praised the leaders of the IDP camps for being “ambassadors of peace in (their) communities,” as well as for working with the mission “in the search for lasting peace and enduring security in Darfur.”

In a related development, the mission reported that 221 people lost their lives in the war-torn Sudanese region due to armed conflict and criminality in June, the vast majority of deaths being attributed to inter-tribal fighting.

In another part of this splendid community, clashes between the Rizeigat and Misseriya tribes claimed nearly 140 lives. Soccer balls were spared and are reusable for other days.

CLICK HERE and don’t believe all those tales of misery you here.

The above witticism is attributed to Mark Twain. I happen to disagree with it but the professionals and those who lay down the rules of the game do their very best to spoil it. Consider what happened in last week’s PGA Championship. ["PGA" equals "Professional Golf Association Championship."] One player who likely would have won received a stupid penalty on the last hole for “grounding” his club in the sand while addressing the ball. For reasons I won’t bother with, he did not even know his ball rested in the sand. No one watching seemed to know either but for the officials. The rule is stupid in any case. Many other rules are also stupid. (1) A golfer is disqualified if he unintentionally carries 15 clubs in his golf bag. The limit is 14. (2) A golfer once lost a major championship when he signed his card that said he took 4 strokes on a hole. He wasn’t cheating; he actually took 3 strokes. (3) If a ball lies in an unplayable position, the golfer is allowed to pick it up, place it in his outstretched hand and drop it. If, after two tries, it still lies in an unplayable position, he simply places it gently on the ground. Why bother with the foolishness of the “outstretched hand” nonsense? There are dozens of other inanities.

Among the dozen other ways in which the game is spoiled, beside its incredibly dumb rules, is this: If a player is “distracted” by an onlooker’s sneeze or hears a camera clicking, he stops, looks angrily at the villain, and when order is restored takes his shot. This is an absurd need for concentration. In basketball, it often happens that a crowd is screaming madly, waving towels and doing all its power to annoy the shooter. This usually occurs when there is one second left in the game and the player needs to make a foul shot to send the game into overtime. Is his need to concentrate less than that of a golfer?

The worst thing of all is that the professional game has turned into an affair for wimps. Once upon the time, the PGA championship was a grueling affair that consumed a full week of play and the last round came down to two finalists who had to play two rounds in one day. The rules were changed because players complained the format was exhausting. A few years ago, a player named Casey Martin asked to be allowed to use a golf cart because he had a medically certified disability that made it impossible for him to walk around a course. The players, led by a certain Tiger Woods, howled loudly that endurance was a critical aspect of the game. Yet, no player ever carries his own clubs! Their whining is doubly ridiculous in the light of the fact that they changed the rules of the PGA Championship so that they shouldn’t tire themselves. As played by professional crybabies, the game is a degenerate affair. As played by casual amateurs it is a good unspoiled walk.

Mr. Roger Clemens may go to jail. If so, probably for 15 months but his crime is deemed so serious that the statutes permit him to be carried away for 30 years. His crime is that he perjured himself before a congressional committee investigating the use of performance enhancing drugs.

In fact, his crime is no crime at all. Imagine a silly law that made eating Chinese food on Thursdays a crime. Quite plainly, despite the law, if you eat Chinese food on Thursdays you have done no wrong. The only wrong was making this behavior a crime. Suppose, too, there is a ridiculous, ill-thought out prejudice on the part of the American people against eating Chinese food on Thursdays – it has been brainwashed into thinking this sort of eating is disgusting and shameful. Suppose your career, whatever it is, will be ruined if the American people find out about your eating habits. Suppose, now, the U.S Congress decides to conduct a “war” on those who break this law and you are called to testify. For convening an investigation, the Congress has heaped one stupidity upon another. Accordingly, you perjure yourself. What wrong have you committed? Nowhere in heaven’s statutes is it written that you have an obligation to obey bad laws. Nowhere in heaven’s statutes is it written that you should never lie, no matter what the circumstances.

Even to spare yourself embarrassment is a good reason to lie if an inquiry into your conduct is unjustified. Thus, Mr. Clinton lied to the arch inquisitor, Ken Starr, about his sexual conduct. Mr. Starr’s initial investigation had nothing to do with Clinton’s sexual behavior but, being the agent of Mephistopheles that he is, Starr probed where had no business probing. Any man with common sense, if he thought he could get away with it, would have perjured himself in the embarrassing circumstances the president was in. This is just as true in the case of Roger Clemens.

What this country needs to do is demand that our congressmen get on with the serious business for which they were elected and not worry about why Roger Clemens was the best pitcher of his generation. What each of us should do is find out which of our representatives is participating in this madness and threaten not to support him ever again if he doesn’t quit his Salem-like witch hunt. These witch hunts are disgraceful.

I never met the legendary runners Arthur Newton of England or Wally Hayward of South Africa but remarkable as they were, I think they were dabblers. They only specialized in double marathons. On the other hand, I was good friends with Ted Corbitt, the champion runner who lived in Manhattan. Even when he was in his 50s, Ted would enter races of over 100 miles and briefly held the American record.

But the most remarkable performer I ever met was Park Bonner, and I tried him out.

SG: Park, don’t you ever get good and tired of it all?
PB: What do you mean?
SG: Don’t you ever feel like quitting in the middle of a run?

Park looked at me incredulously and said he had no idea what I was talking about. At the time of this conversation, Park held the world record for the 24 hour run, which for accuracy’s sake must be run on a standard 400 meters track. His record of 159+ miles has long ago been bashed and it it now stands at over 180 miles. Still, it was quite an achievement in his day.

I tried not to think about Park whenever I went for a long training run. I recall an incident in 1975. Natalie, I, and our two kids were in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. For them it was a vacation; for me it was an opportunity to get in some manly training. One morning, I decided on a 60 mile run. I knew a good turn-around point at 30 miles. I said to myself, “Easy out and then I’ll blast it home 30 minutes faster on the way back.”

At around 19 miles, I thought, “Wouldn’t 50 miles be a nice day’s work?” I knew a good turn-around spot. At 19 and 3/4 miles, I thought, “What’s wrong with a round 40? After all, that’s more than a marathon and a half.”

A quarter mile further down the road, I spotted a diner. I stopped, went inside for a cup of coffee and after about 10 minutes rest, walked outside and hitched a ride home. I gave myself credit for 40 miles because the road was bumpy and the driver was bouncing me around. I tried to persuade myself that this pseudo-40 mile effort was nothing to sneer at, and I drove thoughts of Park Bonner out of my mind. In these last 35 years, I have had little reason to wonder, “Whatever became of Park Bonner?” Since the late 1970s, I have been done with it all. Good riddance.

Alex Rodriguez – you know who he is – was limping along as a Texas Ranger on a salary of  $252 million designed to be paid out over a 10 year period.    Barely able to make do, Alex left for greener pastures.   He renegotiated a salary with the NY Yankees that will bring him $275 million also over 10 years.    Do not for one moment think Alex is happy.  Consider that nearly all of Alex’s income is via salary and you can understand his miseries.   Larry Ellison, head honcho of Oracle Industries “earns” a salary of $180 million per year, and keep in mind that salary is just a very small part of what Larry collects each year.   Surely Alex knows this and it is eating his heart out.

Now that Alex has become the youngest baseball player ever to reach the magic mark of 600 home runs for a career, he will certainly demand that the Yankee management reconsider his true worth.   After all, one day Alex will hold the home run record for a career.  That is worth something.  Among his bargaining chips will be that such nobodies as Joe Mauer of the Minnesota Twins and Johann Santana of the NY Mets make $23 million per year.   Do you even know who they are?    That they are so close in salary to Alex must strike him as intolerable.    In fact, it is killing me.

Who is more valuable to mankind than Alex?   I can’t think of anyone.   It is good that Ellison has announced he is leaving 95% of his money to charities because he couldn’t get a base hit if his life depended on it.   Although Alex hasn’t said what he will do with all his money, it is a very good bet that he plans to one-up Larry and leave 98% of his money to charities.   That’s the kind of guy he is.

The game of tiddlywinks requires good hand-eye coordination and is much more fun than any of the games and sports you watch on TV. If you haven’t ever played it, you should. If you don’t know what it is, look it up. After you do, you will probably say, “Oh, sure, I know that game. Used to play it in my high school cafeteria.”

Compare it with football and basketball. People take up those sports because they expect something good to come of it – a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. On the other hand, people pay tiddlywinks for fun. Just what is the probability of a high school footballer or basketball player striking it rich? Here are some statistics.

452, 929 young women played high basketball. Percentage of them who went on to play in the NCAA – 3.3% Percentage of NCAA college athletes to the professional ranks – 1.0%. Percentage of high school athletes who ended up playing professionally – 0.02%. Men did better 3.0%, 1.2% and 0.03%. That’s out of 546,336 starters. As for football, 1.071,775 stalwarts took to the field in high school. 5.7% of them went on to the college ranks. 1.8% graduated from college to the pros. Final disposition: of 1,071,775 dreamers, 0.08% ended up as professionals.

But the pot of gold is there. Darko Milicic, a player without a shred of talent, has played 4 years in the NBA and for every point he has scored he has made $18,251. Loving club owners have given him $37.8 million and untrusting coaches have kept his playing time down to the minimum. Even Lebron James does not do as well as Darko. In fact, dollars per point and dollars per minute, James is a cream puff. He plays too much and scores too little. Over the course of his six year career, King James has made only $4,067 per point. He is nowhere near the top 25 moneymakers..

Poor guy and nobody loves him. On the other hand, for 5 consecutive years, Tiger W has ranked as America’s #1 loveboat, not withstanding (and perhaps due to) his peccadillos. Another king of the bedroom, Kobe Bryant is in a virtual dead heat with Tiger.

And how would they do if they took up tiddlywinks? My guess is that they would transform the game into a major revenue producer, and if they pop those winks as well I would expect them to, there would be a rush on to play the game with as many as 1/2 of 1% of high school potters going on to make $millions. Nothing is more colorful than a good blitz shot unless, of course, it is a carnovsky.

I’d wager a sawbuck or even a tenner and give 4-1 odds that if you were a baseball fan growing up in NY during the years between 1935 and 1957, you were either a Yankees fan or a Dodgers fan. The Giants? The Lost Tribe. People love a perennial winner – ergo, the Yankees. The decided preference for the Dodgers over the Giants is not so easy to explain.

The Giants appeared in 15 World Series, winning 5, whereas the Dodgers played in 9 Series and won only in 1955. In short, the Giants were nearly always better. Still, the Giants do not command the nostalgia the Dodgers do. Nor did they ever win the hearts and minds of fans in the glory days. Manhattan, unlike the Bronx and Brooklyn, is not a community. Players for the Dodgers actually made their homes in Brooklyn and fans rode the trolleys to get to the games. (The Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, as they used to be.) In the 30s, the Dodgers were the good-natured butts of jokes. Babe Herman caught balls on his head instead of in his glove. (In truth, it may have happened once but it is the stuff of legends.) Everyone laughed with and at the Dodgers. Hilda Chester showed up for all the games and rang a cowbell and the Brooklyn Sym-Phony pep band played on. It was an age of “peanuts and crackerjacks and take me out to the ballgame.” 60 cents got you in and, if you had the cash, $1.25 got you a damn good seat.

In truth, there was nothing wrong with the Giants. But who were these guys? We knew where Gil Hodges lived but does anybody know where Willie Mays lived in the off-season? Jackie Robinson and Duke Snider made their careers in Brooklyn but Willie Mays played twice as long in San Francisco than in the Polo Grounds. Love him, if you want, but he is first and foremost a San Francisco Giant.

The Giants had one supreme moment, I will grant you – the celebrated shot heard round the world – that brought them from the brink of disaster to the most incredible rally in baseball history. That was the home run Bobby Thomson hit off Ralph Branca in 1953 that permitted the Dodgers to do what they so often did – snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. The Giants won the pennant and prepared the Dodgers for their exit to Los Angeles.

You can make that moment one of the legendary incidents in baseball history but it is not enough to make legends out of the NY Giants. Where did they play anyway? Where was the Polo Grounds? My guess is that not one in ten NY baseball fans could have found his way to that stadium without stopping to get traffic instructions three times.

The Giants were the Odd Man Out. I know Brooklyn Dodgers fans who regard Walter O’Malley, the evil architect of the Dodgers relocation to the west coast, as worse than Hitler. They mean it. But who among Giants fans feels that the Giants betrayed them by going westward? Go! Good riddance.

BROOKLYN!

Let it ring out loud and clear. When Susan Hayward toured with the USO during World War II, she would begin her act with a scream: Is anybody here from Brooklyn? Thousands of soldiers would go wild with delight, including many who never came close to the spot. What kind of greeting would Susan have gotten had she screamed out, “Is anybody here from the Amsterdam Avenue neighborhood in Manhattan”?

So, it’s the good times we will remember whenever we remember the way it was.

For a wonderful trip down Memory Lane, CLICK HERE,

When I began my career as a runner, I was mediocre and never did rise above that. I ran only in track meets and each race typically had a field of six or so runners. I usually finished 3rd or 4th. In these races, I ran only against able-bodied men. As the years went by, I got slower, so I did what many runners did – switched to road racing. Road racing became a “people’s sport” in about 1972. Just as chess experienced a surge of popularity at that same time thanks to the successes of Bobby Fischer, road racing became popular thanks to the Olympic marathon victory of America’s Frank Shorter. When I entered road races in about 1962 (at age 28), only serious runners competed. We wanted to beat the hell out of one another. A marathon race attracted 300-400 runners at the most. If you ran a marathon in 3 hours (a bit under 7 minutes per mile, you finished at the back of the pack. Those guys were good. Soon after Shorter’s triumph, distance running swelled in popularity. By 1974, you could count on a field of 10,000 runners. It was fun and games, no longer a sport. Now, a marathon run in 3 and a half hours placed you in the top half of the field. This encouraged me in my madness to continue. By 1995, distance runs on the road from 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) to full-blown marathons (26.2 miles) attracted upward of 30,000 entrants. Entry fees rose, too. They went from $5 in in the 1950s to about $50. This was a bonanza for the stars because it meant purses for them of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Race sponsors walked off with $millions. The incompetent were encouraged to continue in their insanity.

In California, competitors dress in the most outlandish ways. The wear batman suits, they push their 80-year old blind grandmothers in baby carriages, they juggle wine glasses as they go along. They do all these things so as NOT to call attention to themselves. So-called serious runners make spectacles of themselves by showing up in old-fashioned track suits and somberly eschew any semblance of fun.

In NY City, I witnessed a man without any legs taking part in a marathon. He swung himself along on well-padded gloves. It took him 3 days to finish. His arrogance disgusted me. The race officials had set a limit of 4 hours and then they would go home. But this man, thanks to political correctness, commanded a squadron of officials who took turns, showing up through all hours of the night, to mark his progress. For days, they surrendered their own lives for his. He had something to prove, I guess, but I never learned what it was. When terrible joggers in Michigan tell me they plan to run in the Boston Marathon, I always ask why. “Do you expect to get under 5 hours?” Usually, they don’t. Then why drag yourself to Boston, paying heavily for airline tickets, a hotel room and then, to rub it in your face, fork over $50 for the dubious privilege of doing nothing that deserves our respect? No one cares about you but your friends and family. Why not get together with some friends on the day of the Boston race and run your personal marathon around your own city? What do you lose by that? The answer is always, “I want to be part of that great 100-year tradition.” The trouble is that they are not part of that tradition. No one notices, and their friends would be just as impressed by a nice, long, neighborhood run. As for the tradition, there is no such thing in the abstract. You have always to ask, “Tradition of what?” The Boston tradition is a tradition of treating the incompetent with disdain. They are not given facilities in which to place their clothes. They throw them down in the street or have a friend put it all in a shopping bag. They have no toilet facilities but pull over to gas stations when they feel the need. They do not have the tables on which the superior athletes place their marked water bottles. If lucky, friends are stationed at certain points with bottles. Most do without. It is a tradition that took root in the forced long death march the Japanese made the Chinese endure in Bataan. Still they come, cluttering the streets of Boston, NY and 40 other metropolises with hundreds of thousands of paper cups, lacking only Japanese whips hovering above them.

In 1975, I ran my last marathon, barely squeezing under 3 hours but good enough to finish 2nd in the over-40 set. I always kept track of my victims, never forgetting to count the blind grandmothers and the men who swung along on crutches. In that way, in this last race, I managed to beat about 80% of the field. At last, I realized, after 25 years of competitive running, I was ridiculous and came to a halt. I have continued, with the same hostility, to watch the disabled drag themselves along to the chagrin of kind-hearted race officials who would rather go home. Shortly before my swansong marathon, I ran a 5 KM race on a road course. At least half my competitors were women as old as I was but 50 pounds heavier. Their physicians had told them exercise is good for them. But their exercise was not good for me and I found seeing them distasteful. I ran extremely slowly, somewhat over 19 minutes so I was about 30th overall in a field of 200. I can’t swear to the fact that all the women who began the race have now finished. After all, only 35 years have gone by. Some may yet be out on the course. But they were happy because they “compete only against themselves.” I hope they win once in awhile.

I wonder why fat women with broken arms and legs don’t have a 5-minutes game during halftime of a professional basketball game. Would we cheer them on or scream, “Get off the court, you ridiculous creatures. You make our eyes sore.”?

I don’t want to deprive that man without legs of running opportunities. I just don’t want him to inflict himself on me. Let him go to a large field where he will be safe from wolves and swing himself along to his heart’s content. He deserves a fair shake, but not at my expense.

For the year 2009, just in Nevada, the leading gambling state of the U.S.A, people wagered $1billion on football and $802 million on basketball. Adding all other sports to the grand total, it equals $2.4 billion. Slots and tables (Twenty-one, Baccarat, Craps, Roulette and eleven other games accounted for $111 billion that swelled the pot. Not considered were smalltime machines in locations having 15 or fewer slot machines. Many other states also have giant gambling centers. New Jersey is no slouch. Throw in the money bet on horse racing (At Churchill Downs, one particular race, which needs no introduction from me, all by itself, has tens of millions of dollars thrown into the mix) Lotteries probably make all this seem bush league stuff. Away from the places that contribute to state revenues – private wagering with illegal bookmakers – and the grand total can only be guessed at. I’ll take a guess and say it all tops $3 trillion. So much for the history of the anti-gambling crusade.

The first wave of anti-gambling was from 1600 to the mid 19th century and was led by Puritans and their descendants. The pro-gambling forces argued that gambling was innocent recreation and none of God’s business. God’s team fought back with righteousness: apart from being offensive to God, gambling endangered the streets, committing numerous crimes, and debased the morality of the society. The revenue take that states took off the top was not worth the evils.

Efforts to end all gambling were doomed from the start because prohibition was selective in terms of type of gambling and location. The frontier areas, California included, saw a great deal of gambling after the end of the first wave. Because of the wholesale fraud in government regulation, lotteries were targeted for prohibition, but gambling in posh clubs were still legal in New York. Horse racing survived the end of the first wave relatively unscathed. As such it is more difficult to draw a clear distinction between the end of the first wave and the beginning of the second. Government fraud, as popular as gambling itself, blurred the distinction between the legal and the illegal.

After the stock market crash of 1929. legalized gambling was looked upon as a way to stimulate the economy. Massachusetts decriminalized bingo in 1931 in an attempt to help churches and charitable organizations raise money. Bingo was legal in 11 states by the 1950s, usually only for charity purposes. In New York, God’s team mounted a new campaign. Fiorella La Guardia replaced Jimmy Walker as mayor, and, in Chicago, Anton Cermak pushed out “Big” Bill Thompson. Theater-goers were treated to newsreels of Mayor La Guardia taking a sledge hammer to slot machines and pushing them off the barge into the city’s ocean dump. District Attorney Thomas Dewey ran an aggressive campaign against mobsters who were involved in gambling. New York mobsters, including the infamous Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, finally heeded Horace Greeley’s 1851 advice to “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.”

From 1894 to 1964, there were no legal government-sponsored lotteries operating in the United States. Still, lotteries were widely played, but always illegal. One of the most well known was the Irish sweepstakes which began in 1930 for the purpose of raising money for hospitals in Ireland. Although it was not legal to sell tickets in the U.S. or to ship them here, they were smuggled into the country. Participation was high with about 13 percent of the country having at one time or another, bought a ticket. Call this the luck of the Irish and the power of gremlins. In 1978, New Jersey became the second state to legalize casino gambling in an attempt to revitalize the rundown resort area of Atlantic City. Discounting murder, rape and other inconveniences, it has worked well.

It is tough to gamble without cheating, and cheating offers titillation. In about 1948, small-time Brooklyn College ushered in the area of dumping points in basketball games so that teams could win games but not by too many points. Bill Rosenblatt was dubbed “Honest Bill” because he alone refused to shave points. A dozen years later, when last I saw or heard about him, he still wore that sobriquet. Apres Bill, lé deluge. Superstar basketball players of major league basketball industries (a.k.a. colleges) by the dozens threw away promising professional careers when they were caught in the act. America’s very best college player of the early 50s, Sherman White of Long Island University, brought his life to a standstill and was shoved into prison for additional injury added to injury. So talented was he that he dumped points in one game in which he seemed to be on a wild scoring spree – ending with 65 points. Today, this 80-year old man says there is a hole in his heart. In NY circles, he remains the legendary Greatest Basketball Player You Never Heard Of.

The fixing of games in basketball and football which was epidemic in the 50s is pretty much a thing of the past. Prize fight fixing, mainly run by dangerous mobsters such as Frankie Carbo, began decades before cheating hit team sports. Fighters who tried to double-cross mobsters sometimes paid with their lives. We should be grateful to someone or other that that, too, has run its course. Paradoxically, or perhaps not paradoxically, sports gambling flourishes as never before.

What would America be like if the $trillions wasted on gambling were put to better purposes? Where would the money go? Since no legitimate industry such as oil or autos has revenues that match wagering, we may speculate that a certain part of the savings would end up being used for housing, charities, and various kinds of infrastructure. Perhaps that is only a pipe dream. Perhaps we would find new ways to squander our wealth. Gambling is here to stay and we will never know what this country might be like without it.

Of all my memories of my sporting days, this is the one that still haunts me. My team is playing for the Brooklyn borough championship. The winner gets to join the other borough champions in a round robin on the hallowed floors of Madison Square Garden. The winner of this tournament that has attracted at least 1000 teams will be crowned as Kings of all 16-year old basketball fiends in this, the mecca of the game, NY, NY. MSG is famous for its glass backboards in an era when all other venues still use wood. My dream of MSG never comes true. We jump out to a 16-0 lead and I am ecstatic. We can’t lose! But then the other team goes to work and slowly but surely the lead is dissipated and we go down to defeat. Beginning in about 2008, I stopped having nightmares over it.

So Barbra was wrong when she sang,
Mem’ries, may be beautiful and yet
What’s too painful to remember
We simply choose to forget
So it’s the laughter
We will remember
Whenever we remember…
The way we were…
The way we were…

Still, the glorious young voice of Barbra never ceases to astound me. Let’s forgive her for getting it all wrong. Here she is.
************************************
May you rest in peace, Mr. Nurlin Tarrant, (d. December, 2007), despite being the chief despoiler of my dream.