The appointment of Stephen K. Bannon, Chairman of the Breitbart News website represents a disturbing decision by Donald Trump, who has “advisors” but whose campaign is all about him, as all his efforts are.  Bannon and Breitbart send a strong signal, to the Republican Party and to Trump’s faithful.

No more Mr. Mainstream.

A Breitbart Trump is a Trump thrusting a middle finger to the Party functionaries who have begged him to moderate, modulate, seek support from the center.  This Trump is kicking over the last barrier ordinary political strategy that might have restrained him.  Pundits wish there was more obvious strategic impact in the choices the Trump team has made; this campaign just doesn’t make sense to them.

Because they have their eyes on the electoral count in November.

It’s not about that for Trump anymore.

Donald Trump is narcissistic but he isn’t stupid; he knows what the numbers portend.  He is going to lose this election; he knows it, and he is not going to lose gracefully.  Every decision since the foot-in-mouth disaster of the weeks following the Democratic National Convention is about building the “I was robbed” narrative.  The campaigns were rigged, the conventions were rigged, the election is rigged.”

Where does a man such as Donald Trump go after the votes have been cast?  He’s had the full attention of the nation  and the world for a year, and he is not likely to step aside and allow Hillary Rodham Clinton get the attention she actually deserves.

To use an unlovely image, someone is going to piss in the punchbowl; in fact, there may be a whole lot of people lining up to add their own measure of contempt to the exercise of voting in a representative Republic.  Trump advisor, Roger Stone, has used the word “bloodbath” to describe the response of an outraged public if Trump is cheated of his victory, but the Breitbart folks have language of their own that it would be wise to consider.

We have weeks of campaign reporting ahead, poll watches and predictions regarding electoral vote; we will be stunned if Hillary Rodham Clinton is not elected President of the United States, but none of that has anything to do with the climate of free-form ugliness of spirit and provocation to violence that Trump’s campaign will unleash.

Unleash is the right term.  He has created a beast, hungry for vindication and unwilling to return to a polite resumption of business as usual.  We have reason to fear that the outcry will not simply be frustrated rhetoric, but a call to violence.  This losing candidate just may cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war!

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 1912, King Gustav of Sweden handed a prize to Jim Thorpe, winner of the decathlon, declaring,  “You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world”,  to which Thorpe is reputed to have said, “Thanks, King.

Thorpe was an extraordinary athlete.  In the Olympic Games Thorpe competed in the high jump, the long jump, the pentathlon in which he also won the gold, and the decathlon.  He ran the 100 yard dash in 10 seconds flat, and the mile in 4:35.  His long jump record was 23 feet, six inches; his best in the high jump, six feet, five inches.

And those were perhaps the least of his attributes.  Thorpe had emerged as a prodigy upon entering Carlisle Indian Industrial School in  Pennsylvania as a sixteen year old Sac and Fox Indian from Oklahoma.  Legend has it that in 1907, Thorpe walked by the school’s track, saw students practicing the high jump, and cleared five feet, nine inches in his street clothes.  By 1912, he had became Carlisle’s best track athlete, played lacrosse and baseball, and competitive ballroom dancing, winning the intercollegiate ballroom dancing championship.

He was also pretty good at football, starring as a running back, defensive back, and kicker; by pretty good, I mean the best player of his time, stunning a powerful nationally ranked Harvard team in a  major upset, and devastating Army by reeling off a 92 yard run that was called back and following it up on the next carry with a 97 yard touchdown romp.   Carlisle won the national championship and Thorpe was named an All-American in his junior and senior years.

Football was his first love, but his coach, Pop Warner, was also his  track coach, and it was Warner who convinced Thorpe to begin training for the Olympics.  Competing in several events with shoes he had found in a trash bin after his own shoes had been stolen, Thorpe commanded the attention of the world and returned to the U.S. honored by a ticker tape parade down Broadway.

Within months, however, the International Olympic Committee discovered that Thorpe had been paid to play baseball during the previous summer.  They stripped him of his medals, declaring that he had lost his amateur status.  Now branded a professional, Thorpe accepted a contract with the New York Giants, playing major league baseball within months of having won the decathlon.  Thorpe would continue to play baseball until 1922, but he jumped at the chance to play football once again, eventually playing for the Canton Bulldogs , one of the strongest professional teams in the pre-NFL era.

Jim Thorpe won a place in the Football Hall of Fame, the College Football Hall of Fame, the Olympic Hall of Fame, and the National Track and Field Hall of Fame; his Olympic medals were eventually returned to him.  It hasn’t been easy to follow Thorpe; he was named one of the top three athletes in the 20th Century (Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan make pretty good company).

The  winner of the 2016 Olympic decathlon, Ashton Eaton, is a double gold decathelete, sunny, generous, and entirely representative of the spirit of the Olympics.  Does he climb into the pantheon after his second Olympic victory?  Probably not, although he has found a place on my shelf of athletes I respect.

Part of the issue, I think, is in the way the decathlon is televised, or in this case, not televised.  We checked in with Eaton at a few points along the way, kept track of his Canadian wife, also an Olympian athlete, winner of the bronze medal in the heptathlon,  and watched the entirety of the 1500, the final test of the decathletes, but we did not have the opportunity to see one of the rarest of all athletic undertaking with anything like the attention the drama deserved.  Commentators seemed assured that Eaton would win again, gave us about eight minutes of mild uncertainty, and went back to Eaton, his mom, and his wife, Brianne Theisen Eaton.

What makes a decathlete so extraordinary?  Why do we assign them the tag of greatest athlete in the world?

Imagine a race horse, maybe not the fastest in the world, but among the top hundred fastest, who climbs trees, tosses boulders, plays darts, and skis.  Over the course of two days.  Against other equally able equines.

The events that make up the decathlon starts with a sprint, the 100 meter dash, then moves to the sand pit for the long jump, to the field for the shot put, back to the high jump, and finishes the day with a 400 meter race.

Day Two  The decathletes warm up with the 110 meter hurdles.  Hurdlers at this level have a fairly specific skill set, combining a sprint with the clearing of hurdles that are about 42 inches high.  Hurdlers do not generally sprint or run distance races; I’m just about a thousand percent sure that they don’t put the shot or sail into the high jump.

OK, hurdles hurdled.  Next up is the flipping, hurling, throwing, spinning of the discus.  Again, not for everyone.  In the first place, the discus is described as a lenticular disc weighing about four and a half pounds; in the second place, the thrower has to spin anti-clockwise in order to get this lenticular disc up and away.    Think about that for a few moments; try an anti-clockwise spin and see in which direction you end up.

Same day, few minutes later they jog to the pole vault where the decathlete runs with a pole that can be as long as seventeen feet.  I say run, because the key to vaulting is in the speed of the approach (well, and the sheer guts it takes to hang on while a bending pole carries you the the height of a second story building).  I’m no physicist, but I have been assured that the trick of the pole vault is to translate energy (1/2 x mass x speed) to vertical propulsion (mass x height x gravity ) or something.  In any case, pole vaulters, too, are a special breed.

Surely, you say, that is enough.  Let them go, for God’s sake, let them go.

Ah, no.  Having vaulted several stories, the athletes then repair to the tossing of the javelin.  There’s no way around it; a javelin is a spear.  This spear, however, is about eight feet long.  Eaton, who is not a javelin specialist, chucked the eight foot long spear a distance of roughly 200 feet, about what I hit with my driver on a very good day.

As has been the case in every interesting Olympic decathlon, victory depended on performance in the 1500 meter run, and it was in that race that Eaton pulled ahead for good and secured his second gold medal.  It’s just a race, slightly less than a mile.  Decathletes, however, describe it as torture, not because the stakes are high, but because they have spent about 36 hours in athletic competition at the highest level, and things are starting to cramp and fall off.

So, as I say, there is more than enough drama in any decathlon to absorb the attention of the world.  Ashton Eaton, who is both handsome and fashioned with the physiognomy of a real mortal, will smile at us from a box of Wheaties, and I will be happy to see him.

When it comes to heroes, I’m embarrassed to admit, my clock stopped in 1952.  I was six, and Bob Mathias won the decathlon for the second time, at the age of 21.  He had won the decathlon at the 1948 games in London, taking time off from high school to start training in ten events, eight of which he had never seen performed until his track coach suggested that he might want to give it a try.  He said goodbye to his pals, gave up his job loading sacks of sulfur into crop dusting planes in Visalia, and at the age of 17, took a flight to London, where his lack of expertise in the shot put was so unfortunate that he nearly fouled out of the event; he had learned how to pole vault out of a manual.   A quick study, Mathias plugged along, staying in contention until the discus toss, an event he knew very well.  Rain pelted London on the second day of the decathlon, pushing the events so far into the early evening that cars had to be brought in so as to provide illumination for the javelin area.  Rain continued, darkness was thick by the time the athletes set off on the 1500 meter race.  Mathias finished not knowing how he had done, but by the next morning he was crowned the winner of the 1948 Olympic decathlon.  Reporters asked Matthias what he intended to do to celebrate the victory.  “I guess I’ll start shaving,” he said.

Pretty good story, but it doesn’t stop there.

My favorite chapter happens in the fall of 1948.  Bob Mathias, decathlon champion, decides he wants to go to Stanford.  He had attended Tulare High School, and his preparation had not been up to Stanford’s standards, so Mathias enrolled at Kiskimentas Springs Prep in Saltsburg, Pennsylvania.  Now known simply as Kiski, the school provided Mathias with a good academic foundation and allowed him to continue to participate in the sports he loved.

In a prominent place on my bookshelves is the Kiski yearbook for the year 1949.  Bob gets the sort of senior write up any nice kid from California might earn in a goofy yearbook – good guy, played football, helped the track team.

Helped the track team?  He’d just won the Sullivan Award as the best athlete in the country, beating out some pretty good college athletes.  Among the runners-up were Norm van Brocklin of Oregon, Doak Walker of SMU, and Jackie Jensen who played both football and baseball at Cal.

I like to imagine what it felt like for the kid from Hill, or Peddie, or Mercersburg  who lined up next to the Olympic gold  medal winner on a frosty April day in central Pennsylvania.  Once again, Mathias is mentioned among the members of the track team.  “In the first meet of the year, Kiski was edged out by a good Central Catholic High School team, 60 -65. ..Mathias was first in high hurdles… took the shot put …won the discus …”  I sense some real restraint by the Kiski coach; the winning vault in that meet was 10 feet, 6 inches, and Mathias had already cleared 12 feet.

It’s hard to remember that there had not been an Olympic Game since the Third Reich had welcomed Jesse Owens to Germany.  As the first Olympic champion in more than a decade, Mathias stayed out of the limelight, quickly shedding the mantle of celebrity to slog through math and chemistry in Saltsburg, PA.  Upon entering Stanford, he decided to concentrate on track and field, giving up football and basketball.  Pigskin fever at Stanford was building, but Mathias held out for two years, directing his efforts toward setting the world record in the decathlon in 1950.  In his last two years, Mathias played fullback, returning a 97 yard punt by Frank Gifford of USC and taking Stanford to the Rose Bowl in January of 1952.

Then, he was off to Helsinki, another set of Olympic Games, another gold, another world record.  Once again  returning as a global hero, Mathias quietly finished up at Stanford, turned down a bid from the Washington Redskins to play in the NFL, and served as a captain in the U.S. Marines before taking up a life as an actor, the director of the U.S. Olympic Training Center, and from 1967, serving four terms as a member of the House of Representatives, a congressman representing the San Joaquin Valley District in California.

The U.S. has produced remarkable athletes, including twelve gold medal winners of the decathlon, from Jim Thorpe to Ashton Eaton.  My hope is that the Tokyo Olympic Games will allow us to see the struggle, event by event, as the greatest athletes in the world contend for the gold in 2020.

 

 

 

 

 

I have a friend who uses the word schadenfreude fairly regularly in ordinary conversation.  He is something of a word-smith, likely to pitch a new metaphor my way at the least provocation, but I find myself surprised each time he so evocatively describes the pleasure that people take in the misfortune of others.  It got me thinking about other words that communicate states of being that English cannot so effectively describe.

I started with sangfroid, primarily because it is so egregiously mispronounced by folks who think the word is sounded as if Freud sang.  OK, we have phrases such as “cool as a cucumber” (?!?) and “cool, calm, and collected”, but the closest analog in terms of translation might be “cold blooded”.  Sangfroid, however, carries a sense of self-possessed calm surprising in the moment described, not so much heartless, or even cool, but unflapped and competent.

Sticking with phrases taken from the French, double entendre has no real competition among lame English substitutes.  “Double meaning”?  Hah!  “Suggestive”?  Nah.

De rigueur for example.  Necessary obligation?  Set of expectations?  Uncompromising etiquette?

But consider this contemporary critical piece.  I cannot acknowledge the author of this quotation found on Quotes Codex, but it does pull our attention away from affairs of state and dinner at the embassy

“I don’t watch reality TV much, but sometimes I’ll be on the E! channel and see that show “Total Divas” about female wrestlers.  It’s like fake t___s are de rigueur.  Nose jobs are de rigueur.  Exaggerated a___s are de rigueur.  Twerking is de rigueur.”

Point taken.  And, in an unexpected insight, “twerking” may well be a word that communicates much more than any translated single word might attempt.

The list of French phrases that animate our conversations is rich with equally powerful locutions, but the remaining untranslatable, I think, is roman-a-clef, literally, “novel with a key”.  Exactly.

So, here’s a purposefully clumsy description of the genre:

Say everyone knows that the novel, The Election of Ronald Frump is fictitious, but also knows that the fiction overlays accounts of real people and real settings.

Yeah.

The novel is a novel, but the people and events are real … but not.

Doesn’t help, does it?

In any case, try getting through any serious discussion without making use of:

Tete-a-tete, au courant, raison d’être, nouveau riche, laissez-faire, joie de vivre, femme fatale.

As a reader of mannered British mysteries, many of which involve bright young men just down from Oxford, most of whom could not dress themselves without the assistant of a valet, I encountered a phrase that seemed to indicate an unwillingness to engage, or an inability to enter into a fray, or something.  Inexplicable but happily, the phrase turned up in a novel by Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling.

“With the alarm hors de combat, I turned my attention to the thick oak door, an hors of a different color.”

So, terrible pun aside, hors de combat is not simply broken or unavailable, but “out of the fight” with a suggestion that there is no question of cowardice or unwillingness on the part of the non-combatant. Unfortunately it also brings to mind – “Do you like Kipling?”  “I don’t know.  I’ve never Kippled.”

My schadenfreude pal presses me to find phrases in German with equal impact.  Quite a challenge for a number of reasons.  WWI and WWII spring to mind, but the greater impediment, Ich denke, is that many of us have difficulty with uvulars and pharyngeals, sounds made by jamming the tongue against the back of the throat.  Schadenfreude isn’t bad, but take a shot at schilttsschuhlaufen, ice skating or streichholzschachtelchen, small match box.

I lived near Zürich for three years, attempting to learn both hochdeutche (high German as spoken in universities in Germany) and Schweizerdeutsch (Swiss German, which, by the way, varies from canton to canton).

In hochdeutsche, a cheesecake (simple enough) is kasekuchen (I have no umlauts available, so take a guess).  Again, simple enough,really.  Kase – cheese / kuchen – cake.

In Schweizerdeutsch, the same object is eins chas-chuechli, and every single syllable is way back there by the uvula, I promise.

Ja, naturlich/ Yo natuurlich.  Time to trot out at least a few standby words or phrases in German.

Let’s take food off the table; no surprise to Wiener Schnitzel, obviously schnitzel (cutlet) as it is prepared in Vienna (Wien).  The one curious mix-up for travelers, however, is that a doughnut (without a hole) is a Berliner, as is a person who lives in Berlin.   Kennedy’s speech in 1963, “Ich bin ein Berliner” was directed toward the city, not the pastry.

Schmaltz, a word used in English to convey sentimentality, is the German word for lard.  So, there’s that.

Doppelganger works beautifully to express not simply a double, but the presence of one life form precisely identical to another.

Gesundheit (a state of healthiness) speaks for itself.

Dollar, from the German thaler, silver coin mined in Bohemia.

Hinterland, blitz, wunderkind, kaffeklatch, Gestalt, dachshund, Volkswagon, kindergarten, kaput, nix – all obvious.

But there are at least four words that are irreplaceable in any language.

When affected by ennui or a malaise (SO FRENCH), we may be subject to weltschmertz, literally, “world pain”, occasionally described as the painful state of knowing that much that exists in the mind cannot exist in the real world.

Or, being bummed.

As a teacher, I often brought books to the classroom that described the coming-of-age of an adolescent on the brink of adulthood.  In German, elegantly, that is a bildungsroman, a novel of formation.  Really no substitute.

I first met the phrase, realpolitik, when studying the machinations of Otto von Bismarck, a cunning and dangerously pragmatic manipulator of contending forces.  The word came up again, surprisingly, during Richard Nixon’s presidency, when the United States established a détente (SO FRENCH) with China.  Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, was eminently pragmatic and determined to grab advantage in the great game of diplomacy.   Again, the terms pragmatically political or realistically political don’t come close.

Caught in a perplexing maelstrom (a famous whirlpool off Norway), you may feel the effect of sturm und  drang, which is used to mean, “storm and stress”, but more evocatively translates as “storm and urge”.  It’s hard to think of a more devastating state of being than being simultaneously tossed by storms of emotion and urges that cannot be satisfied.  Ach du lieber! (Oh! My dear!)

Enough.  Genug. Assez.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I live in southern Oregon.  You know, Oregon – liberal state on the liberal west coast?

Even better, I live near Ashland, site of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Southern Oregon University, a notably tolerant, relatively diverse town (for Oregon), more inclined to active progressivism than sleepy liberalism.

And yet … this spring one of the Shakespeare Festival’s most accomplished actors, Christiana Clark,  a superbly talented Black woman,was accosted by an angry racist on the street in Ashland’s “Railroad District”, a leafy area sprinkled with upscale boutiques and an ambitious coffee emporium.  Clark is appearing as Horatio in Hamlet this season, has had leads in Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream among other main stage productions, accomplishments that meant nothing to the white supremacist who stopped her on the street and screamed, “It’s still an Oregon law, I could kill a black person and be out of jail in a day and a half. Look it up. The KKK is alive and well here.”

Well, his legal expertise is deficient, but the Klan and other white supremacist groups  are alive and well, in Oregon and across the nation.  Portland may have had a socialist mayor in recent years and hipsters may abound, but the state and the city were founded as a white homeland; exclusion laws passed in 1849 were intended to keep Black Americans out of the territory.  Oregon was the only territory in the union to be admitted as a state with an exclusion law, but Klansman have had their way in many other states that pride themselves on their distinguished history.

Founded in 1971, The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded by lawyers Morris Dees and Joseph Levin, offering pro bono legal representation in civil rights cases intended to destroy institutions funding the KKK.  Dees was the son of a sharecropper who worked his way through the University of Alabama Law School and established a marketing firm with Millard Fuller who went on to establish Habitat for Humanity.  The sale of the firm provided Dees with the seed money needed to establish the Law Center.  Julian Bond was President of the Board from 1971 to 1979, during which time, Dees and Levin went after the Ku Klux Klan by representing the families of victims of hate crimes.  Records of those years were destroyed when the center was firebombed in 1981.   In  those troubled times, Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center established Project Klanwatch, an attempt to identify Klan organizations across the country.  In the course of the next decade, the SPLC broadened its scope, creating Hatewatch which monitors the activity of extremist right-wing groups, presenting their findings in The Intelligence Report.

Starting at the top in the courtroom, Dees took on the United Klans of America.

The United Klans of America operated out of their headquarters in the Anglo-Saxon Club outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama.  Led by Imperial Wizard, Robert Shelton, the United Klans of America was tied to the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, the murder of Viola Liuzzo in Selma, and the lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile.  Representing Donald’s mother, Dees won a seven million dollar settlement against the United Klans, bankrupting the organization; all funds collected in their settlement went to Donald’s family..  The SPLC then went after Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance, winning a twelve million dollar suit and after the Aryan Nations, winning a six-and-a-half million dollar suit, bankrupting both organizations.

A brief survey of the SPLC’s signature court cases gives some idea of the scope of racist, supremacist  violence in the United States.  They represented Vietnamese fishermen working in Galveston Bay who had been terrorized by sniper fire and boat burnings initiated by the Texas Emergency Reserve, an offshoot of the Klan.  The SPLC won an injunction against the group and shut their para-military training camp.   The next case was in North Carolina where the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were prevented from terrorising Black neighborhoods.  Grand Dragon, Frazier Glenn Miller, Jr. then morphed his followers into the White Patriot Party, which broadened its aim to include undertaking a war against Jews.

The twelve million dollar victory over Tom Metzger and his East Side White Pride and White Aryan Resistance  followed the beating and killing of an Ethiopian student in Portland.  In Florida, the SPLC took on “The Church of the Creator”, an Aryan group preaching RAHOWA, racial holy war, after the murder of a Black veteran of the Gulf War.

Moving to South Carolina, the SPLC won a thirty million dollar settlement against the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the Invisible Empire, Inc.  In 2000, death threats against Dees multiplied as he and the SPLC took on the Aryan Nation, dismantling their training compound now donated to North Idaho College as a “peace park”.

Although suits have been brought against supremacist groups in Texas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, and Idaho, extremist hate groups can be found in almost every corner of the country.  The SPLC began a program called Teaching Tolerance which offers workshops, classes, films, and teaching kits and followed up with the establishment of Hatewatch, which reports hate crimes and organizations planning hate crimes.  One aspect of Hatewatch is the Hate Map, now following eight hundred and ninety-two groups, including one in Ashland, Oregon.

Much was made of David Duke’s endorsement of Donald Trump and Trump’s seeming unwillingness to disavow the supremacist, but the campaign has done much more to agitate extremists on the right, many of whom have become vocal in their hatred of laws protecting the rights of LGBT citizens, Muslims, immigrants, Mexicans, Hispanics, Asians, and Jews.

Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, one of the men considered for the office of Vice President and an ardent Trump supporter responded to the allegation that Russia was the source of leaked DNC emails in a re-tweet that he quickly removed.

“The corrupt Democratic machine will do and say anything to get #NeverHillary into power. This is a new low,” he tweeted, sharing a link to a tweet from a user named Saint Bibiana (@30PiecesofAG_) who wrote “>Cnn implicated. ‘The USSR is to blame!’ … Not anymore, Jews. Not anymore.”

I hope to God that the results in the general election in November do not set off what Trump advisor, Roger Stone, has called a “bloodbath”, but I do expect that reconciliation this time may be a difficult task.  In times such as these we need to work together to support organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center.

 

Let’s just start with Stanford.

Stanford has had an Olympian in the games since the 4th Olympiad, the 1908 Olympics in London, and a Stanford graduate on the medal stand in every Olympics since first winning a medal in 1914.  Up to the start of this Olympic cycle in Rio, Stanford athletes had won a total of 280 medals.  Kaitie Ledecky will add another four gold medals by herself.  In the 1996 Atlanta games, Stanford won more medals than all but three nations, more than China, France, and Great Britain.

That’s impressive.  More than impressive.  Stunning.

At the start of this year’s games, however, Stanford ranked 2nd in medal tally behind USC (288).  UCLA (230) had been in the second spot, but now lags behind Trojans and the Cardinal.  Stanford has now added another 17 medals (9 gold), bringing their medal total to 297 while USC has added another 7 medals to push their total to 295, leaving Stanford in the lead, at least until competition in track and field is in the count.

Cal Berkeley was 4th with 185 medals, but their dominant swimming program sent a number of Berkeley Golden Bears to Rio, where they have racked up 12 gold, 4 silver, 4 bronze a full week before the end of the games.

In the fifth spot, the University of Michigan with 134 and counting, remembering that Michael Phelps was a swimming Wolverine in preparation for the 2008 Olympics.

The University of Texas, Harvard, Florida, Yale, and Ohio State round out the top ten.  Texas, Florida, and Ohio State are far more likely than Yale and Harvard to pump out current Olympians, but Harvard still has 9 Olympians competing this year and Yale 8.

Texas sends 22 athletes to the games, one of whom, Kevin Durant, is likely to add to the Texas medal count, while Florida packed 30 competitors off to Rio.   Ohio State is not likely to jump too dramatically in medal count, as they are sending twelve Buckeyes to the Rio games.

Harvard’s 10 and Yale’s 8, however, do reveal a particular slice of Olympic competition.  The Harvard contingent includes 6 rowers, men and women, a fencer, a shot putter, and a wrestler.  The rowers represent the U.S., South Africa, and Bermuda.  The shot putter is Nigerian, and the wrestler hails from Uzbekistan.  Yale’s athletes provide a similar profile.  Three Elis row, two for the U.S.and one for Canada.  Three more are sailors, joined by a fencer (Brazil) and one lone track athlete.

Other significant entries?  The University of Georgia is sending 11 athletes, but so is Princeton.  Tigers will be competing in rowing, field hockey, and steeplechase.  Dartmouth is represented by 9 athletes, in track, cycling, rowing, javelin, rugby, and dressage.  The Big Green represent the U.S, Korea, Greece, and Canada.

It’s not surprising that the University of Washington is sending 11 athletes, many of whom will row as they have for the Huskies’ championship program in crew.  The University of Oregon in Eugene is a haven for runners, and the 12 Ducks will take the track in a number of events.

Equally unsurprising are the number of women who played soccer for the University of North Carolina and now have a place on the national team; UNC has 13 Tar Heels in Rio.

Less widely known but widely respected, the volleyball program for men and women at Penn State has dominated national competition and sends many of its best to the Olympics as 13 Nittany Lions land in Brazil.  The University of Connecticut’s absolute dominance of women’s basketball is clear in the selection of the women’s coach, Geno Auriemma, and stars Sue Bird, Maya Moore, Breanna Stewart, Diana Taurasi, and Tina Charles.  Other Huskies will compete in field hockey, track, and soccer.

Small colleges also add diversity to the mix.  Williams’ swimmer Faye Sultan will compete under the Olympic flag rather than the Kuwaiti flag as she did in 2012.  Amherst’s Michael Hixon won a silver medal in synchronized diving in Rio, and Middlebury sends three panthers to Brazil, two cyclists and a marathon runner.

I have never had occasion to stick up for Alex Rodriguez.  He’s been the highest paid player in the game,  suspended for the use of PEDs, set records that can’t count, engaged in constant cat fights with Yankee brass, took awful advice from mega-agent and shark, Scott Borus, shanked in post-season play after gigantic contracts were inked, and loudly removed himself from the Derek Jeter fan club.

On the other hand, he had been in the major leagues for 22 years, 12 of those with the Yankees.  He’s not only 4th on the all-time career home run list  (696) behind Bonds(762*), Aaron (755), and Ruth(714), he was the youngest to reach 500.  He holds the record for the most grand slams in a career (25), had 2086 runs batted in, and piled up 3115 hits.

When word came down from the front office over the past weekend that A-Rod was done as a Yankee as of Friday night, Coach Joe Girardi said he would find a way to give a slumping Rodriguez a few at bats and maybe a turn in the field.

Then didn’t.

Slumping Mark Teixeira kept the clean-up spot (he’s hitting .196 this season),  and Aaron Hicks (.192) trotted out to right field.  “My job description does not entail a farewell tour,” Girardi tweeted, defending his decision to sit Rodriguez as the Yankees battle to hang on to their spot, eighteen games ahead of Tampa Bay, six games behind the Orioles, seventh on the list of AL Wild Card prospects behind Houston, Seattle, Boston, Detroit, and Toronto.

Hey, every game counts.  No room for sentiment in a dog eat dog pennant race.

Rodriguez asked to play in his last tilt against the Red Sox at Fenway Park.  Not much of a farewell tour, but enough to give him a sense of closure.  As he sat on the bench, Sox fans chanted, “We Want A-Rod, We Want A-Rod” until he came to the plate as a pinch hitter in the seventh inning on Wednesday night.  As he walked to the plate, the booing began; the fans had been aching to roast Rodriguez one last time.  I remember the sounds of displeasure when Barry Bonds came to the plate at the end of his career, when he had altered his physiology with pharmaceutical, head-expanding voodoo; he was still the most feared hitter in the game, walked more often than pitched to.  Rodriguez hasn’t been fearsome for a while, and the reception he got at Fenway was contemptuous with barely a whiff of respect.

But … Last night, Number 13 suited up as a Yankee for the last time, came to the plate after a hard rain softened, not knowing what he would hear as his name was announced, shoulders slightly lowered, claiming the batter’s box as he has from the start, ready for whatever came his way. Like the event itself, the skies over Yankee Stadium had been clouded, charged.  Rodriguez himself joked, “It’s perfect.  I’m a lightening rod!”

The pre-game “celebration” had all the earmarks of a grudging Yankee farewell coupled with ominous cracks of lightning, thunder, and torrential rain.  Mariano Rivera and Reggie Jackson were on hand, representing the Yankee pantheon; Derek Jeter was not.  Hal and Jennifer Steinbrenner offered lackluster congratulations.  Ducking for cover with his daughters in tow, carrying the base signed by teammates, A-Rod scurried off the field with little fanfare; his career ending in darkness.

I don’t believe in fairy tales, heavy-handed sentiment or saccharine Hallmark moments, but I have been moved to tears again and again by acts of grace and courage in sports.  When it comes to hockey, I do believe in miracles; when it comes to baseball, I believe in fans.

For all the ugly and confusing episodes in the Alex Rodriguez story, despite his very human flaws, A-Rod has been the best player in baseball at times, the best player on the Yankees for much of that time.  When he came to the plate in his last game as a Yankee, we saw him as he has been all along, a gifted ballplayer who loved the game.

He expected jeering cat calls at the very least, deafening booing at worst.  Almost as one, however, the crowd stood for Alex Rodriguez.

Fans cheered him with true affection.  They went wild when he stroked a sharp double in his first at-bat, driving in a run.  One more hit, one more double, one more run batted in.  The fans showered him with all the love they had withheld for years.  Against all odds, in that moment, Alex Rodriguez was what he had hoped to be – a beloved Yankee.

Sports are funny.

Joe Girardi had grouched his way through the week, resisting pressure to give Rodriguez something like recognition as his career ended.  Then, on Friday, the game allowed him to toss Rodriguez a glove and send him out to play third base, A-Rod’s first game in the field this season.  After the game, a sports commentator watching Rodriguez ground out in his last at-bat said something like, “Now you see what a forty-one year old ballplayer looks like.”

That’s not what I saw.

I saw A-Rod grab his glove and run from the dugout to third base like a kid getting a break in late innings in a Double A game for the Trenton Thunder.  His grin ran from ear to ear.  That’s the Alex Rodriguez I want to remember.

 

I don’t gamble.  Not at all.  Never.  On anything.  The house always wins, my judgment is awful, I let emotion rule, I love a good story more than good odds, on any given day … and so on.

So, here I am about to put another twenty-five bucks in my Draft King account.

This comes up, of course, because the NFL football season is coming soon to a brain near me, and while hockey and baseball were my first true loves, I can’t not watch football.  Since I’m going to watch anyway, doesn’t it make sense that I ought to invest a little extra prep time so that I can see the game on a whole new level?  There’s research to be done and rosters to explore.  No more just grabbing a sandwich and a diet soda, plumping up the pillows on the couch and leaving family and the petty exigencies of life behind for a few (eight) hours.

No, my viewing now demands daily review of players moving to and from the trainer’s table and whirlpool, scanning scouting reports, keeping track of vets and rookies, new coaches, new schemes, suspensions, rivalries, contract extensions, and that’s just the start.

Let’s say I’m looking at a rookie.  Is he a high motor guy, a natural waist bender, does he have a bubble butt, is he quicker than fast, does he have oily hips, is he a dancing bear, is he a space player, can he click and close, can he throw an effective jam?

Full disclosure.  I have never asked any of those questions, but I do scan the opinions of those in the know, each contradicting the other, the result of which is that I’m lucky if I can make my twenty-five bucks last through the entire season.  Last year?  Ended up with one dollar in my account.

So I start this season with twenty-six dollars to plunk down, three bucks at a time.

I do understand that there is some dislocation of fan attachment when I’m less interested in the outcome of the game than the number of yards my tight end has put together or the number of sacks my defense has recorded.  Some would call it rationalization, but I consider myself now a fan of football rather than hanging on to a provincial attachment to one team over all others.

I might also be a Detroit Lions fan, so there’s that.

Look, I have principles.  I don’t goof around with college football, the last bastion of amateur sport; however, with no money on the table, this might be a good time to predict a top five finish for the University of Michigan.  My allegiances in hockey and baseball are so misguided and absolute that I’d be through my small stake after three games.

I like to think of myself as a student of the game of football, an earnest aficionado, but there are moments when I think of Romans roaring encouragement to that week’s favorite gladiator, urging a final act of mutilation so profound that no opponent could crawl from the arena.  Surely, hoping for a blitz so effective that the quarterback has to be scraped from the field with a spatula is nothing like that?

Well, as Julius Caesar is reputed to have said, “Alia iacra est” (The die is cast!).  My twenty five bucks are in; might as well cross the Rubicon and check out the stats on Jimmy Garoppolo.

 

 

 

 

 

“Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the 2nd Amendment,” Trump told the crowd in Wilmington, N.C. “By the way, and if she gets to pick if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks. Although the 2nd Amendment people, maybe there is. I don’t know.”  LA Times/ August 10/ 2016

As his poll numbers drop (and Trump feeds on polls), the candidate is speaking recklessly and provocatively.  And the more dangerous Trump becomes, the more dangerous his more unhinged supporters become.

Trump and his spokespeople have bristled at the injustice the media has shown in suggesting that Trump’s remarks were anything more than a call to gun advocates to get out the vote.  Jason Miller, a senior advisor in the Trump campaign, called the media “dishonest”, and Trump himself happily told Sean Hannity that the flap is actually good for him, as it further identifies him as a champion of the Second Amendment.

Too easily lost in the (terrifying) reality of a presidential candidate playing fast and loose in prodding gun advocates to “action” is the further threat accompanying Trump’s familiar charge that the election is rigged.  The primaries, we recall were rigged, the convention was rigged and now, should the Trump candidacy not prevail, the entire electoral process is rigged.

In the face of devastating polling predicting the election of Hillary Rodham Clinton by a huge margin, after a week of grotesque blunders, and after the defection of many notable Republicans from Trump’s candidacy, Donald Trump has begun telling his audiences that he “hears” more and more that the election will be rigged and the Presidency stolen from the people and the Republican Party.  It will come as no surprise to any who have watched Donald Trump that he might seek to play the martyr and agent provocateur.  Equally unsurprising that he his team is even more willing to jettison the Constitution (except the Second Amendment).

What’s left to say as the poll numbers continue to slide, and the reality of imminent defeat become increasingly likely?  How about asserting that the only proper response to an election Trump factions consider illegitimate is civil disobedience and the recognition that the government no longer has the ability to maintain the rule of law?

 “The election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.”

That remark and some of the nastiest suggestions are coming from Roger Stone, a professional disrupter of political civility and increasingly a voice Trump hears clearly.

Roger Stone is one scary guy.  Even before he attached himself to the Trump campaign, Stone was known in political circles as a “seasoned practitioner of hard-edged politics.”  Stone has used a less restrained moniker in describing himself as a hit man for the G.O.P.  Faced with the overwhelmingly critical reaction to Trump’s petulant rant following the televised speech of Khirz Kahn, it was Stone who tweeted the outrageous assertion that Kahn was an agent of the Muslim Brotherhood working in league with Hillary Clinton, and directed attention to a website purporting to prove that his son, decorated captain, Humayan Kahn, may have been a terrorist.

Roger Stone @RogerJStoneJr

 

Stone’s involvement with Trump goes back well before the campaign began; he had been behind a series of ads smearing a competitor in the casino business, ads and has been a Trump advisor for years.  Stone’s first political hatchet jobs were in aid of the committee to reelect Richard Nixon; he’s been playing political hardball since.  How far is Stone willing to go?

“If you can’t have an honest election, nothing else counts,” Stone said. “I think he’s gotta put them on notice that their inauguration will be a rhetorical, and when I mean civil disobedience, not violence, but it will be a bloodbath… We will not stand for it.”

Stone’s rhetoric is more than enough to worry the casual observer; his personal attacks on opponents have been so vile that he has been banned from CNN and MSNBC.  Stone admits that his tweet identifying journalist Roland Martin as “a fat negro” was a two martini tweet; he has been less apologetic to others he has defamed.  Recent reports have surfaced that Stone is in contact with Julian Assange, hoping to coordinate the next leak damaging to the Clinton campaign.  Whatever Assange leaks, it is believed, will be delivered by hackers operating in Russia, perhaps with the knowledge of Vladimir Putin.

Stone is also a partner in a powerful lobbying and consulting firm, Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly.  Paul Manafort, the founding partner of that firm, is the chairman of Donald Trump’s campaign committee.  The group has advised Republican presidential candidates; Manafort has personally advised Jonas Savimbi, Ferdinand Marcos, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Victor Yanukovych.

Yanukovych, former President of Ukraine, was ousted after rejecting  an agreement with regard to membership in the European Union in favor of a bailout loan from Russia and closer ties with Russia.  Popular protests against Yanukovych were met with force which quickly escalated to a virtual civil war.  Accused of murdering civilians, Yanukovych fled to Russia where it is believed he was granted  emergency citizenship by Vladimir Putin.

Keeping track of Donald Trump is tough enough; add the powers behind the throne and the campaign’s early abandonment of political probity, and the stakes just keep getting higher.

 

 

 

I happened on a broadcast of Kingsman: The Secret Service last week, watched it to the end, and enjoyed some of it quite a bit. As one might expect, the French have a word for this sort of amiable bloodbath, a Grand Guignol, a sort of celebratory horror tale with a twist of humor, and, as I had seen the film some months ago, the choreographed exploding of heads, languid eviscerations, and widespread arterial spraying was only mildly distracting from Colin Firth’s turn as an aristocratic spy with a penchant for mayhem.

Really?  Mayhem?  Colin Firth?

It’s not likely that Firth will follow Liam Neeson into making a string of hyper-violent vigilante/revenge/action thrillers (Taken, Taken 2, The Next Three Days, The Unknown, The Grey, Nonstop, A Walk Among the Tombstones, Run All Night, Taken 3, and the upcoming The Commuter).  The fun of Kingsman was in the contrast between the polished club man and the highly effective assassin, but, even in this incarnation, Colin Firth’s stony stoicism belied goodhearted generosity.  That peculiar ability, to project icy distance while suggesting hidden capacity for friendship, loyalty, and love, made Firth an ideal Fitzwilliam Darcy in the BBC’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

Moving from cool, almost caddish disdain to absolute devotion, Firth’s Darcy reached the pinnacle of fan frenzy in episode IV, in a scene not in the novel.  Darcy has literally jumped into a lake on his estate in order to cool his turbulent emotions with regard to Elizabeth Bennet, climbing out of the water only to find Elizabeth walking the estate’s grounds and approaching the lake.  Darcy is shaken and embarrassed, in a state of undress, charmingly awkward.  Many viewers, however, were impressed with Firth’s manly form in what a survey of British critics called, “the most memorable moment in British television history.” I will venture to say that there was considerably more buzz about “the shirt” than about Austen’s use of irony in Pride and Prejudice.

The final episode of the BBC series claimed 40% of the viewing public, and the first run of the double-video set sold out within the first two hours of its release.  The shirt was later placed on display in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. as part of an exhibition entitled, “Shakespeare, Austen, and the Cult of Celebrity”.

I’m going to go out on a limb here; I credit Colin Firth with reanimating interest in Pride and Prejudice, the Austen novels, and English literature as a whole.

Too much?

I think not.  My colleagues at several  ambitious independent schools had given up on teaching Austen, finding that their students simply could not connect with a novel of manners set in the early 18th Century.  Teach Austen?  Not possible.  No Way.  Better off hacking away at Hawthorne, or connecting Thoreau with contemporary mindfulness and environmental awareness.  Teachers devoted to Austen longed to wallow in the pleasure of reading Pride and Prejudice aloud, but feared a cold response from students steeped in flashier, more contemporary, novels.

There are a host of reasons that an Austen novel succeeds where others of her generation have sunk into obscurity. She writes with wit, clarity, and an unerring ability to lampoon the entirely lampoonable.  She creates character with dimension, some to be reviled and some admired, and she writes dialogue that continues to ring true, as in this understated comic exchange between the narcissistic and tedious Mrs. Bennet and her husband.

“Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion for my poor nerves.”

“You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these last twenty years at least.”

All of those qualities were present in her work all along, but it took what some besotted partisans called Firth’s” smoldering passion” to pull viewers into fascination with all things Austen.   Readers rediscovered Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and Northanger Abbey.   Book clubs devoted to Jane Austen began to spring up across the globe.  In 1996, the best selling new novel. The Runaway Jury by John Grisham sold 73,337 copies; in that year, Pride and Prejudice sold 110,000 copies in the U.S. alone.  To date, the book has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. Just as the (continuing) Harry Potter fever brought readers back to books, the 1995 Pride and Prejudice pulled readers further into Austen, and then to the Brontes.  Sales of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights also experienced rediscovery as readers exhausted their store of Austen novels.

Versions of P and P soon appeared in theaters and on television.  The Diary of Bridget Jones took the structure of the novel, pulled Firth back into the role of clumsy suitor (Mark Darcy), brought the story into the 21st Century and added Hugh Grant as designated rotter, Daniel Cleaver, the George Wickham analog.The first Bridget Jones featured a lovely self-referential moment in which Bridget watches the Colin Firth Darcy emerge from the lake.  In 2005 a well designed theatrical release brought Keira Knightley to the role of Lizzie Bennett, . The Bollywood version, Bride and Prejudice, still has a loyal following, and scores of far flung fantasies attached to the novel continue to appear.  Hank Green, brother of John Green and co-developer of the Vlogbrothers, created the Lizzie Bennet Diaries with Bernie Su, a video blog which became the first digital series to win an Emmy.

Not convinced that all of this is related to the most memorable moment in British television?

A twelve foot statue of Darcy (clearly resembling Firth) emerging with wet shirt (more prominent nipplage this time) was commissioned to be placed in Serpentine lake in Hyde Park, then to be transported to its home in the lake at Lyme Place, the estate used as Pemberely .  In a surprise acquisition, however, Australia’s National Trust bought the statue to be placed in a watery site in Melbourne.  Divers dismantled the mooring, the statue was packaged with great care, and viewers in Melbourne assert that fiberglass Darcy still looks “pretty good”.

 

 

 

 

I’m writing before Ichiro Suzuki, now largely a pinch hitter, reaches the 3000 hit mark.  If the stars are aligned and the baseball gods awake, his 3000th will be a ground ball up the middle, a ball an acrobatic shortstop could spear and peg to first.  The play should be close, but, as he has on most of the 3000, Ichiro beats the throw, hitting the bag just before the ball slaps the first baseman’s mitt.

I hear a lot about baseball having slipped out of the public’s attention, about the NFL and the NBA, maybe even MLS Soccer winning the hearts and minds of sports fans today, about baseball joining boxing, horse racing, and yachting as sports few people care to see.  I’m not going to rhapsodize about the clean geometry of the game, or of the legacy of fathers playing catch with sons, although I start to tear up when I remember my own pilgrimage to the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa (midway between Luxemburg and Worthington), standing on the first base line when my son said, “Want to play catch, Dad?”  No, I’ll put the drama in baseball up against any other sport, especially in this era, when we see pitchers routinely throwing strikes at a 100 miles an hour and offering up curve balls that seem to drop off the edge of the table, facing batters whose reflexes are incalculably quick.  Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, Giancarlo Stanton, and a dozen others combine power and grace at the plate, and the current batch of daredevil fielders put on a display of acrobatic gymnastics in grabbing sure hits out of the air, catches that the barrel-chested shortstops of the Golden Age would have watched screaming past their outstretched gloves.

This is a golden age, and Ichiro will play his final games , stretch out his final hits, as the next generation of athletes come to plate.  Others hit the ball farther (Stanton owns 20 of the 21 longest home runs in the history of the Home Run Derby), but none combine the craft with which Ichiro approaches hitting and the reverence with which he approaches the sport.

I’ve never been a Marlins fan, or a Mariners fan, or a fan of the contemporary celebrity warehouse known as the New York Yankees, but I consider myself fortunate to have seen Ichiro play in person and on tv.

I’m not a bandwagon fan (sorry Cubs/ Nats/ Sox).  I was lucky in growing up in a small town in Connecticut that happened to get WPIX, Channel 11, from New York City, the station that broadcast the Yankees’ and Giants’ home games, and so got to see Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays in their prime.  Hard not to be a Yankee fan during those glory years.  The Yankee-Red Sox duels were not as heated back in the 1950’s, so it was possible for a Yankee fan to appreciate Ted Williams and to enjoy the spectacle that was Jimmy Piersall.  Piersall and Yankee second baseman, Billy Martin, were a matched set, both combustible with a very short fuse. They saved their best battles for after the game, fighting to a bloody draw in the tunnel under the stands. Good times.

I do admit to falling away from the Yankees as an adult, not in reaction to their lean years, but in response to what I saw as lapses in character.  Look, Mantle, Ford, Martin and Bauer were bad boys; I know that now, but I did not then.  The Bronx Zoo was too much to take, Steinbrenner was too much to take, and I’d spent years in Michigan by that point and had become grotesquely fond of Michigan football.  Moving back to Michigan in 1980, I decided to get behind the Detroit Tigers.

Again, I got lucky.  Sparky Anderson had just left the Reds to join the Tigers, and a roster that would take the team to a championship in 1984 began to coalesce, and the Tigers picked up  Willie Hernandez, one of three pitchers to win the Cy Young Award, MVP, and a World Series Title in the same year, joining Sandy Koufax and Denny McLain in that select company.  Great days for Tiger baseball.  Then in 2003, the Detroit Tigers lost the most games in a single season in the history of the American League, but even in that year, the seeds of a contending team were starting to emerge, waiting for Rookie of the Year, Justin Verlander, and centerfielder, Curtis Granderson, to pull Los Tigres back to the top of the league in 2006.  Hard times as they lost to the Royals at the end of the season to give up what looked like a certain Divisional title (don’t talk to me about the Royals), good times as they played their way as they beat the Yankees as the wild card team, and familiar times as they lost in the World Series to a Cardinal team they should have slaughtered.

So where does Ichiro Suziki fit into this narrative?  My son and I got our first look at Ichiro in person during Spring Training in 2002, Ichiro’s second season with the Mariners. The Padres and Mariners shared a ballpark close to our home base, and as we tried to get in two games a day, we’d get seats for the first game and sit on the lawn behind center field for the evening game.  Ordinarily, the best thing about seeing the game from the lawn was in being able to watch pitchers warm up in the bullpens, but on our first night in Arizona, we sat directly behind Ichiro, who played deep, almost to the center field wall.

I explained to my son that Ichiro was out of position, that he’d have no chance for balls hit just beyond the infield and would have a tough time trying to get off a satisfactory throw to any base but second.  As I spoke,  the leadoff batter for the Angels cracked a line drive over second base.  Ichiro somehow got to the ball on the first hop and rifled a throw to first in time to nail the runner.  I had seen Roberto Clemente’s arm on television, but I had never seen a throw such as that in person.  A frozen rope.

Ichiro played a stunningly effective defensive game from center field that night.  We had come to see the AL Rookie of the Year hit, and he was a spectacular hitter, but it was the completeness of his game that most impressed me.

A few words about Ichiro as a hitter.  Everything about his stance and batting ritual is distinctive.  Most fans are aware of his stretching and squatting before he steps into the box; he takes sweeping practice swings as he steps in and then out of the batter’s box.  As he assumes his stance in the box, he twirls the bat in a giant arc, stopping the bat at the top of its second circle, tugging at his sleeve as his bat is effectively pointing at the pitcher.  When he first came into the American League, after having been a superstar in Japan, that batting ritual seemed an affront to the pitchers he faced, and they tried to brush him back with what old timers call, “chin music”.

But this is where the Ichiro story takes on a different dimension.

The frenzy with which Japanese  photographers flooded the sidelines as Ichiro became the first position player from Japan to hit the big leagues was compared to the pandemonium meeting the Beatles at Shea Stadium.  The temptation was to write the guy off as a publicity hound, but Ichiro’s gravity and seriousness of purpose quickly convinced real baseball fans that they were watching something special.  He went on to earn a place as an All Star seventeen times, also winning seventeen Golden Gloves.  He was Rookie of the Year and American League MVP in his first year, added four batting titles and three more selections as MVP, and holds the single season record for most hits (262 hits in 2004 while a Mariner).

Stunning.  And yet, what sets Ichiro apart in my mind is the ethos with which he approaches the game.  It’s hard to remember just how spectacular Ichiro was in that first season; 242 hits, 56 stolen bases, batting average of .350, Gold Glove, and the best arm in the game.  He was given the number 51 by the Mariners, and on learning that the number had belonged to Randy Johnson, a player Ichiro respected greatly, the rookie wrote a note to Johnson promising not to “bring shame” to the uniform.  Ichiro’s fielding was so effective that his corner of Safeco Field was called “Area 51”.  No shame in that.

Before facing the Red Sox’ s Daisuke Matsuzaka, Ichiro famously announced, “I hope he arouses the fire that’s dormant in the innermost recesses of my soul.  I plan to face him with the zeal of a challenger.”  I think I knew he was an uncommon ballplayer when he refused to give the press the name of his pet dog, explaining that he didn’t have the dog’s permission to make the name public.

I’ve watched a lot of baseball over the years, but aside from the moment on the Field of Dreams with my son, the memory that lingers is of Ichiro, moving fluidly and with deceptive speed, snaking a ball from the turf and releasing a strike to first base without seeming to have moved at all.