From Nail-biting Addict to Football Enabler

Last week I confessed I was an addict, someone who bit his fingernails. Well, I think I’m over that nasty habit, at least for now. Thanks to some paper medical tape I found in our first aid kit I managed to cover my left pinkie long enough for the nail to grow back without awakening my desire to chew it off.

Today I’m admitting to an even more serious shortcoming—I’m an enabler. Like hundreds of millions of other Americans, and an increasing number of foreigners, I enjoy watching football. In other words, I condone and enable violence that I know will destroy an athlete’s health and the lives of his family because of repetitive brain trauma.

I’m like so many of the wives and girlfriends of football players keeping my mouth shut so I can enjoy Sunday afternoons, and now Sunday nights, and Monday nights, and Thursday nights. It’s a good thing I’m not into high school or college football or else I’d have no respite from sanctioned violence and have almost unlimited tutelage in how to behave badly toward women.

Did anyone else notice that during the halftime report of the New York Giants-Arizona Cardinals game on the Fox Network, the segue from each segment was a simulated stiff arm blasted into one’s face? How inappropriate given Ray Rice’s left hook to his then fiancée’s, now wife’s, face in that New Jersey casino elevator.

It’s our real-life version of The Hunger Games, or maybe a recreation of Roman gladiators, though the deaths of the participants are not as immediate.

Perhaps you’re thinking I’m being a bit too melodramatic, that football players voluntarily assume the risk. Of course, it wasn’t until last week, according to The New York Times, “that the National Football League, which for years disputed evidence that its players had a high rate of severe brain damage, has stated in federal court documents that it expects nearly a third of retired players to develop long-term cognitive problems and that the conditions are likely to emerge at ‘notably younger ages’ than in the general population.”

In The Daily News, Steve Almond, the author of “Against Football,” wrote, “Yes, of course these players are grown men (in most cases). And of course they choose to incur the risk of playing a violent game; the pros get paid a lot of money to do so. They also wear helmets and uniforms that help insulate them from damage, and that insulate us, the viewers, from the bone-rattling reality of collisions.

“That’s why we don’t view these acts as crimes. They are what sociologists call “sanctioned violence.” Fans consume these collisions without feeling that they are watching something barbaric. Indeed, they are regarded as necessary and even heroic in the context of the game, which is why television networks place parabolic microphones on the sidelines, and why they replay the most violent hits over and over again.

“But to the human brain—which is what’s at issue for football players—the context is irrelevant. At the neurological level, violence is violence. Trauma is trauma.

“Whether or not Roger Goodell can weather the storm and cling to his tenure as commissioner—and he has at least 44 million reasons to try (a reference to his $44 million paycheck last year)—the larger moral question that looms over him and the NFL and us fans is whether we should be consuming as a form of entertainment a sport whose end result is, in too many cases, permanent brain damage.”

Sadly, even though I question the morality of parents who invest their children in football programs given our current knowledge of the consequences, I still devote time to watching football, mostly my favorite team, the Giants, but other games as well when I have nothing better to watch. So, the bottom line is, I’m an enabler. 

Giant Bust: Am I a disloyal fan or just a realistic one? At this point in the season, two games in, it is obvious the Giants are not a good football team. The offensive line can’t open holes for the running backs. They don’t pass protect well, either. The quarterback is too prone to forcing his throws and incurring interceptions. The receivers are mediocre. The defense is okay on the run and pass but gives up too many big plays, especially on third down. Special teams are a liability. In short, rooting for the Giants is an exercise in hope and futility.

Last year I stayed loyal to the Giants and it cost me in my football pools. This year I am listening to my head, not my heart. Last week, for example, I picked Arizona to beat the Giants even with a backup quarterback starting for the Cardinals. The Giants didn’t disappoint: They fumbled twice in critical situations, once on a kick return near their goal line and another time near the Cardinal goal on what could have been a game-tying scoring drive; The defense gave up at least five first downs on penalties, resulting in at least seven points for Arizona. The special teams allowed a touchdown on a punt return. Receivers, including the normally sure-handed Victor Cruz, dropped numerous passes.

The only joy I had from watching the game was knowing I didn’t lose any money on the Giants. Though as a fan I would have preferred that outcome to seeing them go bust again.

Marvin Traub, Beach Bums, Sex, Norman Sas and Obama

Hail and Farewell to the Prince: I met the indefatigable Marvin Traub several times, while he was head of Bloomingdale’s and during the last 20 years when he was thought to be too old to run the trendsetting Upper East Side emporium and started his own international consulting company. He was a paragon of the “retailing is theater” school, perhaps its greatest practitioner, a merchant prince who captivated a generation of shoppers and thereby transformed a sleepy, discount-oriented department store propped between Lexington and Third Avenues in Manhattan into an essential stop by every New York visitor including royalty, show biz luminaries, and everyday gawkers from around the United States and the world.

Traub died Wednesday. He was 87. The obituary in The NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/business/marvin-s-traub-who-made-bloomingdales-a-home-of-style-dies-at-87.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all) did not come close to revealing the magnetic personality and command Traub had on retailing and pop culture, especially on New York City. When the city teetered on the brink of bankruptcy in the mid 1970s, when the city dangled perilously close to lawlessness in the 1980s, Bloomingdale’s shone as a beacon of cache and refinement. There were many New Yorkers, including one of my staff writers, who made Bloomie’s a daily must-visit. 

There are comparatively few retail geniuses at work today, men and women with ideas and visions that transformed the buying and selling of goods. Eugene Ferkauf, who founded E.J. Korvettes and modern discounting, died a few weeks ago. Traub was among that pantheon of leaders. 

Passing The Times: Our daughter Ellie and her husband-to-be Donny are trendsetters. At least as far as knowing which beach to sun and surf at. They discovered Fort Tilden beach in Queens a good four years before The Times named it “one of New York’s great hidden beaches” a few weeks ago. Kinda disappointing The Times didn’t include them in any of the 14 photos that accompanied the article, though I might have been a little taken aback if Ellie showed up as one of those beachgoers who “go topless.”

You never know where or when your past will intrude on your present. Reading through the Letters to the Editor of last Saturday’s Times I came upon a short note from Ira Sohn reacting to an opinion piece from Bill Keller advocating a national ID card. I’ll pass on the desirability of such a card. I was more interested in Ira Sohn. If he’s the Ira Sohn I think he is, we attended high school together in Brooklyn, Yeshivah of Flatbush, graduating in 1966. Our senior class secretary, Ira Sohn is a professor in the economics and finance department of Montclair State University. 

Sleepy Head: Whenever I would yawn in front of my mother she’d call me “sleepy head” and suggest, “You’d be less tired if you didn’t fool around at night, but then you wouldn’t have as much fun.” 

She must have been onto something, if a survey published in the NY Daily News is a true indicator of national behavior. Seems an online study of 1,000 people commissioned by Trojans, the condom maker, has found New Yorkers have five times as much sex as the average in 10 major cities across the nation (http://www.nydailynews.com/whoopee-city-tops-sex-survey-article-1.1113403). 

For what it’s worth, while I could believe there’s more action in the Big Apple, I don’t believe the rest of the country lags so far behind. 

Speaking of Action and having fun, one of the best games of my 1950s-early 1960s childhood was electric football, a precursor to today’s video game versions of mayhem on the gridiron. The inventor of electric football, Norman Sas, died last month. He, too, was 87. Younger readers might not know about electric football, but those of us of a certain age remember it fondly and with some degree of exasperation when your felt-bottomed players failed to go in the direction you wanted them to. Here’s the obit on Norman Sas: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/13/business/norman-sas-inventor-of-electric-football-dies-at-87.html

Communicator-in-Chief: Teasers for a Charlie Rose interview of Barack and Michelle Obama airing Sunday night on 60 Minutes have the president saying, "The mistake of my first term—couple of years—was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. And that's important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times."

Wrong. We did not need another Reagan in the White House. We needed another LBJ, someone who could whip recalcitrant Democrats into line and even pull some Republicans into the fold to pass legislation this country needed. Instead, we got a hands-off chief executive who naively believed Republicans were joking when they said their main task during his presidency would be to make sure it lasted just four years. He naively believed they would put country first, would work with him. So he wound up squandering Democratic majorities in the House and Senate during his first two years in office. 

He’s too laid back for the fight he is in. He needs to be more Harry S. Truman, less Jimmy Carter. He needs to show he wants to be our leader. Tell us stories if you want to Mr. President, but don’t forget to tell us what you will do in the next four years and ram home what benefits and programs Mitt Romney would remove if he gets to sit behind that desk in the Oval Office. 

  

Murdoch Most Vile

Let’s put my biases out front right away—I’m not a fan of Rupert Murdoch. If the investigations of Hacker-gate on both sides of the Atlantic bring down his media empire, I would not shed a tear.

My antipathy toward Murdoch is both professional and personal. It precedes his creation of the vile news outlet known as Fox News (can we really call it a legitimate news outlet?). It began with his 1976 purchase of the NY Post.

I grew up reading The Post. In the 1950s and 1960s, The Post was an afternoon tabloid, liberal and progressive in editorial slant, yet a sensational police- and fire-chasing paper. My parents would buy The Post on their way home from their factory in Manhattan, usually stopping at a newsstand on the southbound side of Flatbush Avenue just before Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn.

At first I’d devour the comics—Nancy, Mutt & Jeff, Dennis the Menace. As I grew older I matriculated to the sports pages where Maury Allen, Vic Ziegel, Milton Gross, Paul Zimmerman and Leonard Schecter romanced my interests in baseball, football and the occasional boxing story centered around Floyd Patterson or Sugar Ray Robinson. Next I delved into the social columnists: Leonard Lyons, Earl Wilson, Sidney Skolsky. Finally, with more maturity, I absorbed the political mavens: James Wechsler, Max Lerner, Mary McGrory, Art Buchwald, William Buckley, Drew Pearson, Jack Anderson, Murray Kempton, and a newcomer, Pete Hamill, hired to counter Jimmy Breslin’s man-of-the-street prose in The Daily News. It was a column by Wechsler, a review of a revival of the play The Front Page, that triggered my interest in being a reporter.

When Dorothy Schiff sold The Post to Murdoch, I was crushed by the changes he wrought. I stopped reading as the paper became more sensational in its reportage and more conservative in its editorial leaning. Even after Dave Banks became my best friend back in 1979, I continued to boycott The Post. Dave, you see, was one of Murdoch’s British imports. He succeeded in helping spice up The Post, but then Murdoch dealt me and Gilda, who had befriended Dave’s wife, Gemma, a fateful blow.

Casually asking Dave if he missed his family back in England, Murdoch became wary he’d lose him to a rival back home when Dave replied in the affirmative. So he shipped the Bankses back to merry ol’ England, Dave to work on The Sun, leaving Gilda and me far from merry. He later sent Dave, Gemma and their children Tasha and Tim, to Australia for seven years, giving Dave the ability to say he worked for Murdoch on three continents and making him one of the most sought after commentators in Britain on the trials and tribulations of the News Corp. publishing empire, its chief executive, Rupert Murdoch, and the assorted so-called journalists who have befouled the pact that should exist between news organizations and the public. Indeed, during our recent vacation together in Israel, though he’s semi-retired, Dave’s Blackberry beeped continually with requests for interviews, a few of which he granted to BBC Radio.

Naturally we talked about Hacker-gate. No one loves a scoop more than Dave, or an article that tweaks the high and mighty, be they politicos, royals, or celebrities. But violating a person’s privacy, when not in the national interest, as seems to have repeatedly happened at Murdoch’s News of the World and possibly other properties under his domain, was activity beyond the pale, Dave asserted.

For several days in Israel the four of us discussed the similarities between Watergate and Hacker-gate, Gilda noting both scandals came to light with seemingly small incidents, a sort of rabbit hole that widened into an elaborate warren of nefarious and illegal activity.

Follow the money.

Just as Deep Throat exhorted Bob Woodward and his colleague Carl Bernstein to pursue the money trail in their Watergate investigation nearly 40 years ago, money is a key, in my mind.

Reporters and editors of the News of the World tapped into the cell phones of thousands of public and private individuals in a frantic chase for scoops in the cutthroat media circus of Great Britain. The News of the World reportedly paid a private investigator as much as 100,000 pounds sterling a year to hack phones. The editor of the paper during part of that time, Rebekah Brooks, claims she did not know about the hacking.

My question is, who approved the expense accounts authorizing payments for the hacking? When the first bill was submitted, didn’t anyone question what it was for? Assuming a lower level editor signed off on it, didn’t senior management, including Brooks and the paper’s controller and auditor, question how and why £100,000 was spent? What, they might have asked, did we get for our £100,000?

It is inconceivable they did not know. It is intolerable they condoned this breach of journalistic ethics. Brooks has resigned as head of Murdoch’s publishing interests; she was arrested today.

As is so often the case in today’s media world, a scoop of cash is the only way to get a scoop of news. But, as Dave pointed out to us, his reporting background instilled in him an understanding of journalism principles lacking in many of today’s media elite. Too often, he believes, chief editors of British papers have been named whose only pedigree has been experience on the entertainment beat. These young editors cared more about packaging than content, about splashy headlines than accuracy, about beating the competition than integrity.

Several of the principal characters in the Hacker-gate scandal are entertainment and public relations firm alumni, including Brooks, current British prime minister David Cameron and his former press aide, Andrew Coulson. Coulson. Sounds a lot like Charles “Chuck” Colson, the convicted Watergate conspirator who counseled Richard Nixon. Let’s not forget that among Nixon’s key advisors were chief of staff H.R. Haldeman and press secretary Ron Ziegler, both former advertising executives. Ah, the Watergate links abound.

I haven’t even touched on Fox News as a reason to put a lid on the poison Murdoch has spread throughout journalism and politics in America and Great Britain. Let’s save that for another day.