For many folks, spring training and baseball is part of their rite of spring transition from America’s game (football) to America’s past-time. Or, as I like to say, to a sport whose time has long past, regardless of how many people come out to watch. I’m an ex-baseball fan for many reasons, a fair number of which I’ve discussed in my postings at the end of ’07 and in February ’08.

Much of my disdain for the sport is because of its contradictory history around race. It’s not just what happened before Jackie Robinson and the ’47 Dodgers or with Hank Aaron in chasing down Babe Ruth or with Al Campanis’ horrible comments about Blacks as managers or in the front office on Nightline in ’87. No, it’s about the everyday nature of how many Americans see baseball that reshaped my thinking around the game between high school and graduate school.

It all started with my own experience trying out for Mount Vernon High School’s varsity baseball team my junior year, in March of ’86. As much as I loved football and liked basketball, I really loved America’s favorite pastime. Having worked out with the baseball team in the fall had given me the confidence to pursue the week-long process of elimination. One of my student-athlete classmates spent some time encouraging me, although I didn’t doubt that she had doubts about me making the team. She was on MVHS’ swim team and was an excellent swimmer. This was in addition to the school newspaper, Meltzer’s mock trial team, the National Honors Society and a thousand other things she was into. Out of all of my classmates, there were few I knew who were busier — at least in school. Her day started around 5 am, with swimming at 5:30 or 6. As much as I thought that I couldn’t do what she was doing, I was often up at 5:30 or 6 am myself, ready to start the day.

Despite her ambivalent encouragements, I went for baseball as hard as I could for the most part. The second week of March was to be four days of constant competition followed by frustration. The tryouts were all after school, from three to five o’clock, in the indoor practice facility for the baseball and track teams. We did calisthenics and stretching, followed my more calisthenics and stretching, followed by defensive practice. Beyond the competition, the first thing I noticed was that out of the thirty-two of us, including the team, only four Blacks were a part of this entire process. All four of us were trying out. The team itself was all-White and virtually all-Italian. The coach was a fat Italian man in his late-thirties and not exactly the nicest guy in the world. If you made an error, even if you managed to work it out, he called you off the field immediately and tried someone else in that spot. None of us had much margin for error.

But I made two errors that week that stuck out for me. One was on Tuesday. The coaches took us outside to practice catching fly balls. I’d never practiced catching anything in the outfield, whether to run up on a ball or to back up, or even how to hold my glove. There was one hit directly to me, a line drive of a fly ball. It hit my glove fine, and then I allowed it to drop. As soon as I dropped the ball, the coach took me off the field. My second error was on Wednesday, but it did more damage to me. We were doing infield drills, and they had me at shortshop. I must’ve fielded eight or ten balls while I was out there, backhanding balls, spinning and throwing to first pretty good. One ball hit to me took a hop right off my balls. I caught it in my glove and threw it to first before I fell down and grabbed myself. It took about forty-five seconds before I felt the full force of the pain, which went away just as quickly. There was certainly a lot of laughter around that, drowning out the fact that I still made the play. The coach just shook his head.

The last day of tryouts was spent in the batting cage. Each of us were supposed to take whacks at an eighty mile-an-hour ball coming from the ball machine. When my turn came up, I had a total of four balls to swing at in the simulator. I was already over-thinking the scenario before I got in the cage. My mind went to a situation in gym last year, to softball on a humid upper-80s day. Before we started the game, I took some practice swings with a gym mate throwing the softball overhand as hard as he could. I swung as hard as I could and hit the pitch just about a hundred yards. My arms and hands, though, were numb, and my crooked left fingers in a lot of pain. I’d conjured up my own downfall. I was scared to make full contact with the baseball. And, for the first three swings, I swung and missed, swung and barely tipped the ball, and swung and missed again. I thought to myself, “This is ridiculous. If I want any chance to make this team, I have to make contact.” I slowed down the last pitch, swung and made contact, and it didn’t hurt. I wished that I’d done that sooner.

There was only one other Black guy trying out by the fourth day, someone I didn’t know, but was really athletic. He got in the cage and tore up the baseballs, making crisp, clean consistent contact with the balls. I knew he was a shoo-in after that. There was another kid, a kid I recognized from the neighborhood. It was the son of the pizza shop owner, the one whose pizzeria was just down the street from 616. This guy had missed all three days of tryouts, but was invited to batting practice on the fourth day. He too went in the batting cage and clobbered the baseball. At that point my heart sunk. I knew I wasn’t going to make the team. Sure enough, the coach posted the names of the guys who made the team the following week, with my name not on the list. I was disappointed. “[The coach] says that you’re pretty good, but you’re also a danger to yourself,” my student-athlete classmate said with a bit of a giggle. I smiled, but I wasn’t in a joking mood.

Of the thirteen people who were on the team, twelve were White, and eleven of those twelve were Italian. The one token Black guy was easily the best athlete on the team, head and shoulders over most of last year’s starters. And the kid, the one whose father owned the pizza shop near 616, the one who only showed up for tryouts on the fourth day, was among the guys on this year’s team. I may or may not have been good enough to make the team. I just felt that the Italian coaches had rigged the process, tainted it in some way to favor kids who were one of their own or played Little League with their nephew or second cousin. The experience left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. “How is this even fair?,” I thought to myself as I looked at the list. “Mom really is right. You do have to be ten times better to be equal in this society.” I knew that there was a track coach and a basketball coach still interested in me, but the racial thing stuck out to me. To recognize that baseball was an Italian’s club while only Blacks played basketball and ran track, Whites did almost all the swimming and football was the only sport where the spirit of integration lived on really bothered me. I guessed that the “content of character,” or in this case, talent or potential meant little to these coaches.

That experience did not end my love affair with baseball. It did start me on the road to becoming an ex-baseball fan, though. Ironically, it was the Mets winning the World Series in October ’86 that accelerated the process. They were my ultimate team of underdogs, a team that most New Yorkers only cared about when they were winning, which wasn’t very often. Now that they had the best record in baseball and were officially world champs, all kinds of things started coming out about Darryl Strawberry’s alcohol and drug use and Dwight Gooden’s first positive drug test. That was bad enough. Hearing what folks would say about these guys on talk radio was even worse. They were “animals,” I heard many more than a few callers into the sports talk shows say. They make “way too much money,” or they “don’t deserve a second chance,” I heard others say. Mind you, this was the era of Steve Howe, a seven-time violator of the major league baseball drug policy.

In a league full of coke heads and beer bingers, the two star Black athletes were being beat up, not by talk show hosts, but by blue-collar White callers who longed for the good ol’ days of Ruth, DiMaggio, and Mantle, or the happy-go-lucky Willie Mays. At least two of those guys regularly medicated themselves with alcohol, but I guessed that was okay, because they looked more like the people who were calling into the New York area talk shows wanting Strawberry’s and Gooden’s heads.

Moving to Pittsburgh and going to college gave me a better perspective on major league sports, especially baseball and football. Outside of baseball crazy New York, most folks I met were crazy about football, basketball or soccer, whether as grade schoolers or grad students. Baseball was boring, plain and simple. It really was. I watched enough Pittsburgh Pirates games to understand that. Even when the Bucs — as they’re called in the ‘Burgh — were good, the games were about as exciting as a Champions Tour golf tournament in the middle of August. Even with them making the playoffs three out of four years in one stretch, the media and the fans hated Barry Bonds. Now, Barry Bonds has always made himself hard to like, or to put it another way, is a surly jerk. But so are so many other professional athletes that actually have superior talent. Like Strawberry and Gooden, Bonds was vilified on the talk radio shows by folks who wanted him to be more like his grinning godfather Willie Mays.

The next and final set of turning points came in the four years before the ’94 strike and lockout. When conservative columnist George Will published his book about baseball and its wonderfully timeless symmetry and treating the game as a science, it killed my interest in the sport. I knew as a spectator and as someone who actually spent some time playing the game how simple it really is. Reading defenses in football is hard. Figuring out which club to use on a windy day at Pebble Beach is difficult. Catching a baseball is pretty basic by comparison. Waiting forever for someone to hit a ball in your direction, that’s boring and excruciating. After reading the first ten pages, I wanted to burn the book.

By this time, I had started playing basketball to relieve the stresses of graduate school. I found myself gaining confidence in my jump shot and in playing pickup games with average Joe’s and with former Pitt basketball players. I found the follies of Greg Norman and golf more exciting than watching a great pitchers’ duel between Greg Maddox and Orel Hershiser. I always enjoyed football, playing and watching. By the time Joe Carter hit his World Series ending home run against the Atlanta Braves in ’93, I no longer had a real interest in baseball. I still knew its history, or rather, its mythology around its statistics, records and glory days. But I also knew way too much about its ugly history and its seedy underbelly to continue to follow the sport.

That was why when Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary came out in the fall of ’94 — right in the middle of the baseball lockout that would cancel that year’s World Series — I declared myself an ex-baseball fan. Watching sportscaster Bob Costas drone on and on about how he cried when he walked by Babe Ruth’s statue when he was seven years old made me gag. Hearing old and crusty White guys talk about their White greats when Blacks especially were shut out from playing major league baseball pissed me off. But most importantly, the complete whitewash of continuing to call baseball America’s pastime when the sport had been in decline since the late ’50s was just too much to swallow.

Today, I see it as an American sport supported mostly by White guys between the ages of thirty-five and seventy-five, mostly living in the Northeast corridor between Washington, DC and Boston, and mostly waxing nostalgic about the heroes they barely know or knew. It was baseball that taught me one of my more bitter lessons about talent versus collusion and ethnic identification. I hope, for my son’s sake, that he never falls in love with this sport.

“Romance without finance is a nuis-ance,” I remember older generations of men saying to me in reference to courting women when I was growing up. By the time I was old enough to understand, it was a statement that had me cracking up when I heard it. The men who said it sounded somewhere between surly and downright mean, even as dapper as some of them dressed. Even CNN political commentator Roland Martin has had it with St. Valentine’s Day, the ultimate symbol of romantic love, saying that it is “nothing more than a commercial holiday created by rabid retailers who needed a major shopping day between Christmas and Easter in order to give people a reason to spend money.” I don’t quite feel that way. But I do think that we place too much emphasis on finance and not true romance when it come to expressing the kind of passion and love that comes with courtship.

If that weren’t the case, then I guess I could’ve started dating when I was in middle school or at least by the middle of high school. But it takes money to buy flowers that don’t wilt the moment they’re exposed to air, or chocolates that aren’t sold at the nearest Rite Aid, CVS or Genovese. It takes money and time to treat someone in a material way as if they’re valuable, to do more than just express love in voice or on paper. It takes money to make someone like myself to look presentable enough to say something about romance, or at least wanting to be in a romantic relationship.

I’ve listened to woman after woman complain over the years about their boyfriends, husbands, exs, and on occasion, about me, in reference to this romance and finance stuff. Women who won’t date a guy because he doesn’t own a car, or a recent model car, or because he’s only a security guard, or because he only has a bachelor’s degree. Or because his clothes come off the rack at Sears and shoes from Florsheim. To say the least, I could go on and on about women complaining about men because their wallets may not be as big as their hearts, or anything else for that matter. I could talk about how often I’ve from women complaining about their other heterosexual halves because they seem to lack passion, or are too aggressive, or don’t seem to strike the proper balance between romantic love and lust.

What I’ve learned from years of listening sessions could end up being a book one day, hopefully the opposite of Michael Eric Dyson’s drivel about Black women from a few years ago. But what I noticed throughout was how much outer appearances, including material wealth, mattered. By my life story and their definition, I probably shouldn’t have gone on my first date until I was twenty-nine or thirty-four. I still wouldn’t have been far enough along to get married or have a kid. And as things stand in my life right now, I’d have some explaining to do about my writing and pursuit of an agent and a book contract, as struggle isn’t exactly a part of romance.

Heck, as far as my female classmates from middle and high school were concerned — and some from my Pitt years as well — I didn’t have a romantic bone in my body. I was “asexual,” according to one acquaintance of mine, until my senior year at Pitt. Because I didn’t spent time developing my “game” or “talk,” I wasn’t romantic. In my defense, it’s hard to exude romance when most of your life’s been spent walking a fine line between high-brow intellectualism and grinding poverty. Both shape how one interacts with people, including women. It wasn’t as if I had any good examples of romance around me. Lust, yes. Sadness, definitely. Out-of-control anger, without a doubt. But obvious romance, I never saw.

As reported in about a dozen or so previous postings, I had three (3) crushes between the spring of ’82 and the summer of ’91 that lasted longer than a couple of days. That’s it. One in seventh grade, an off-and-on one in my junior and senior year of high school and the summer before college, and one my senior year at Pitt. Given my background, it’s amazing there weren’t more or that there weren’t more from afar. In all three cases, it mattered not whether I revealed my crush or not. It didn’t mattered if I expressed myself well enough or quietly walked around like someone struck by lightning. None of the young women in question saw me the same way I saw myself or them, or myself with them.

It’s interesting to think about this romantic love thing, because for a long time, I didn’t see myself as romantic either. This despite the fact that romantic music was always in my mental repertoire. From the slow jams of Earth, Wind and Fire, The Commodores, and Luther to more recent stuff by Anita Baker, Brenda Russell, and New Edition at the time. It’s interesting because when I thought of my crushes, I thought about things like chocolates and flowers, rose petals and perfumes, hanging out and talking for hours, going to goofy movies where we both would cry. But money for me was always a major limitation on my ability to execute romance.

Romance because significantly easier for me once I went on to grad school and had a little bit of money to work with. Still, I never forgot about the lessons I learned about romance and money. So I avoided women who were into status as much as humanly possible. I dated, but fairly rarely, preferring to exercise lust and one-night stands over love, and tended to shut down anything in between. Luckily, the last two women I dated — including my wife Angelia — were just as quirkily romantic as I was, making my practice of romance both easier and more consistent over time. It was easier and more consistent because they both recognized that little things, small gestures, acts that aren’t materially based, matter. For that at least, I thank my wife and my ex for.

But I also must recognize something important about my emotion chip. As romantic as I can be, I’ve found that controlled, channeled anger has acted as more of a catalyst in my life than falling head over heels over someone. My first crush in seventh grade is really the only exception, but even then, the abuse that I suffered at home was just as important as that crush in motivating me academically and otherwise. With the crash and burn I suffered from crush #2 came a semester where guys were “assholes” and women were “bitches,” and that pushed me all the way to the Dean’s List. The end of crush #3 freed me up to have a straight A first semester of grad school, not to mention my first publication. Sometimes the end of romance is as important as the romantic feeling itself.

So what kind of person stimulates romantic flutters in my mind and stomach? Someone who is confident, witty, has a great voice, someone whose sense of humor can be as weird as my own. Someone who isn’t afraid to laugh at themselves, someone who’s turned pain into laughter or motivation. Someone who’s sense of independence has yielded to a sense of interdependence. Someone whose ability to be romantic and intellectual could almost, but not quite, overpower my own. Few people in my life have approached this, and only one of my three formative crushes had all of this in spades. My wife of nearly nine years has a good portion of this, which may well explain why we’ve been together for so long. This is what romance is all about. Money can buy a lot of things, but romance isn’t one of them.

This week, and tomorrow especially, marks the coming together of several anniversaries. Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln turn 200, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People — the NAACP — turns 100 tomorrow. That these anniversaries are coming together, it seems to me, is no accident of the calendar. There are important issues of organizational and ideological evolution to discuss, especially when it comes to the NAACP. Especially since much of the world — begrudgingly mind you — accepts the reality of evolution.

I’ve said this to my students and to my friends (and some not-friends) over the years. The NAACP has been an organization in search of a vision or cause since Monday, May 17, 1954. That was the day the Supreme Court voted 9-0 in favor of Brown in Brown v. Board of Education (as well as the Bolling v. Sharpe decision for Washington, DC — a federal territory), overturning the Plessy v. Ferguson decision and the “separate but equal” doctrine of legal segregation. Since then, the NAACP has been behind the times. It lacked a coherent set of strategies around enforcement of the Brown decision and tactics for supporting the fledgling Civil Rights Movement of the ’50s and ’60. It didn’t retool to deal with the changing racial landscape of the post-Civil Rights era in the ’70s and ’80s. It made very superficial attempts to draw in new blood in the ’90s. And its new leadership created scandals involving misuse of funds and sexual escapades in the office, not helping with its declining and aging membership.

One thing that Lincoln and the NAACP’s founders had in common was their sense of history and adaptability. Both Lincoln and folks like W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells and James Weldon Johnson understood the need for a grand vision, for a mission that would lead to a more perfect union. But they also understood that they operated within a specific context, with a need to address the needs of the people they served, elite and everyday folks alike. That’s what the NAACP of today lacks. Most of the legal legacy of the NAACP is contained in its separate NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which in turn is limited in its ability to take on cases. A lot of what they used to do in the good ol‘ days of Jim Crow has been supplanted by the work of the ACLU and the Office of Civil Rights in the US Department of Justice — even as weak as the latter has been over the years. Its social and community work is limited in scope, often overlapping with the work of local community organizations, Boys and Girls Clubs, the Urban League, and others.

The NAACP has failed to evolve. It hasn’t set as a new vision one that is multicultural, multiracial, or even — dare I say — post-racial (ugh, not that word again). The organization still has yet to figure out a coherent message for folks under the age of forty about what privileges come with membership. The NAACP still remains exclusionary and provincial, all but limited in its partnerships with similar organizations like the National Council of La Raza, Women of Color Resource Center, the Asian American Justice Center, and so on. In recent years, most of what we’ve heard about the organization has been its searches for a new CEO or its whining about some VIP or politician not attending their annual get-together.

The decline of this historic organization is a small example of a larger problem for the civil rights generation. How to remain relevant when the heady days of your ideas and activism has long passed. This isn’t an easy thing to address. We’ve been talking about this for years. For the civil rights generation the answer is life itself. Either one puts themselves in a position to pass on the torch, or life will simply pass one by, making one’s portfolio less relevant over time. Since many from the civil rights generation have refused to pass the torch, many have had to pry it from their hands in the form of new ideas, new activities, new small “m” movements in line with our multicultural and multiracial times.

For an organization like the NAACP, it may be time to say what many only discuss privately, for fear of being blasted in public. Sometimes when a movement evolves or ends, the purpose or mission of an organization has two choices. Either morph or adapt somehow to meet the needs of its potential members for the long term. Or wither on the vine. Social justice and nonprofit advocates have been writing for years about the need for some organizations to either merge in order to address the same issue or to fold — not every issue requires a brick-and-mortar institution to address it. This may well be true for the NAACP at a century old.

For those of you ready to rip me a new one, I’m hardly advocating that the NAACP should close its doors. If the NAACP cannot come up with a vision that embraces both where its potential members and where those potential members would like to go, then it really doesn’t have a purpose. Unlike historically Black colleges and universities, which still provide an education to twenty percent of all African American college students — and a growing number of White students — the NAACP has not made any serious attempts to adapt from its elitist beginnings to reach new generations. Without evolution, I’m afraid that the NAACP’s 100th anniversary celebration is a Pyrrhic one, as its future as a leading civil rights organization will continue to be bleak.

Today, my only sister Sarai turns twenty-six years old. That might not sound so significant. Except that my sister has sickle cell anemia. It’s a disease that can often claim one’s life before they reach adulthood. Even with our advanced medicine, the average life expectancy of someone with sickle cell anemia is forty-five years. Not to mention the pain involved in having such a body-draining disease.

As much as I love her, the fact is that Sarai probably shouldn’t be here. Between the disease and what we were going through as a family in ’82, it’s hard to believe that Sarai managed to survive in the worst of our worst times. I had just gone through my summer of abuse at the hands of her father, my mother had struggled through picket lines because she didn’t want to lose her job (only to get her hours cut in half anyway), and we were eating as if there was a global famine crisis. By October ’82, with my mother working part-time, I knew we were up crap’s creek without a lifeline. What would come next left me both more cold and adult-like and more in search of escape than I had been.

A couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, I noticed something about my mother. At a time when we all looked starved, my mother looked round. Her stomach and cheeks were telltale signs. So I asked her, my tweener voice cracking all the while.

“Mom, are you pregnant?!?”

“Yeah, Donald, I’m pregnant,” she sighed.

“What! You got to be kidding! You mean you’re still having sex with him?”

“Watch ya mouth, boy!”

“Mom, what are we going to do? You can’t have a baby, not now, not with all these mouths to feed!”

“Donald, what I’m supposed to do?”

“You need to get an abortion, that’s what!”

“I don’t believe in abortion. It’s against God’s will.”

“Well, we can’t feed the kids that are here now, so how can you feed it? Get an abortion Mom, before it’s too late!”

Before my mother could say anything else, I stormed out for yet another store errand for milk, diapers, and all the things I couldn’t eat. I wanted to cut Maurice’s balls off and shove them down his throat. I wanted to shake Mom until her eyes rolled back in her head. Most of all, I wanted to get her to an abortion clinic yesterday.

It was time to do something desperate. We needed money just to eat the most basic of food. We hadn’t done a full wash of our clothes since the beginning of September. Me and Darren both needed a new pair of sneakers about every other month. The ones I had were forming holes on the sides and bottoms.

So I turned to Jimme. Mom was always complaining that he didn’t pay child support anyway. And I knew where he lived now. It was 120 South Tenth, not far from the East 241st Street station in the Bronx, the end of the line on the Subway’s 2 and 5 lines running from Brooklyn and Manhattan. There were a bunch of watering holes nearby, making Jimme pretty easy to find.

Darren would usually come with me on what gradually became our weekly hike from the land of 616 to the near Bronx and the city. Jimme being Jimme, he would grab me by one hand while giving me the money and put his left arm around my shoulder, whispering in my right ear, “Don’ give Darren nothin’,” or “You keep fitty for yo’self an’ give Darren ten.” “You a Collins, don’ be sharin’ nothin’ wit’ them Gills.” I almost always broke with Jimme around this.

Yes, Darren often was a selfish goofball and my 616 family was just a step or two above total chaos. Yet I couldn’t go to eat at a good pizza shop with Jimme and Darren and let my mother and my younger siblings subsist on bread, water and milk. I couldn’t watch them run around in graying underwear and just wash my own clothes. Not as hard as my mother worked, not as long as I lived there. I wanted to help as much as I could and still take care of my needs.

Jimme knew I was helping out at 616 too. So he would say things like “Don’ be givin’ your motha my money. Those ain’t my kids. Dis jus’ for you and Darren.” Or “Don’ give them muthafuckas nothin’,” which would start a brief argument between me and him about the needs of innocent children. Even with that and his drunken ups and downs, Jimme helped save the day for us and me as we plunged into the watery abyss of welfare poverty.

—————————————————————-

For some reason my mother didn’t listen to me, giving birth to my only sister, Sarai Adar Washington on the ninth of February ’83, born in the middle of a snowstorm. I refused to visit my mother in the hospital in New Rochelle. I didn’t want Sarai, and was tired of watching my mother make incredibly bad decisions. Maurice tried to force me and Darren to go. Since I refused, it was my job to clean our increasingly sparse space. This would’ve normally been a hard task, but with so little furniture, it was mostly a matter of sweeping up dust and garbage. It was the way I hoped our problems would disappear.

Sarai came home a couple of days later, obviously stricken with the disease, as she looked like she was in pain then. I was so mad whenever I was home in Sarai’s first days. Not mad at her. Mad with my mother. Even at part-time, she could’ve seen a doctor about her sickle-cell trait, and screened to see if her idiot husband had the trait also. Even in ’82, even without his participation, through my brothers Maurice and Yiscoc, my mother could’ve learned early on whether both her and my then stepfather Maurice had the sickle cell trait. She long knew that she had it, and I’d known about my trait since I was seven. I’d learn about a year later, in ninth grade Biology with Mr. Graviano, that with two parents, there was a one-in-four-chance with every pregnancy that full-blown sickle cell anemia would be passed to a child. For the first time in my life, I saw my mother as an idiot.

By the middle of the summer of ’83, Sarai was obviously in trouble. She hardly gained any weight, all of her food had to be fortified with iron, and she only had “three strands of hair,”as my mother put it. It was more like a few dozen in three spots on Sarai’s scalp. She always needed help. Sarai even then was in and out of the hospital, in need of the occasional blood transfusion, and at time in excruciating pain.

With all of this, my mother would say to me, “See, that why you shouldn’t wish for an abortion,” as if I was supposed to feel guilty about what I said to her the year before because Sarai was sick. As if I had anything to do with her being here. I just gave my mother a weak smile whenever she’d say something like that.

Despite all of this, I grew to love my sister, if only because there was nothing else to do. It wasn’t her fault that her parents had about as much common sense as a wino on South Fulton Avenue in Mount Vernon on a hot day in August. Sarai wasn’t to blame for her own condition. And me suggesting that my mother get an abortion — it was obviously too late to get one by the time I yelled the idea at my mother — didn’t make Sarai one sickle cell sicker than she already was.

Over the years, Sarai did get better, then worse, then better again. I stopped babying her by the time she was a teenager, but my mother didn’t know how to stop treating her like she was a toddler. By the time of the family intervention in ’02, Sarai was obviously ready to leave 616. She moved to Alabama five years ago, to live with her high school friends and to live a slower life away from my mother and the rest of us. Even though she still has many days with pain, and more in the hospital, Sarai’s living her life her way. I’m happy for her for that. I only hope that someone somewhere finds a cure or at least a way to help people like my sister experience less pain because of this disease. Happy birthday, sister Sarai! I hope that it’s as good as you want it to be.

putz (pŭts) n.
Slang: A fool; an idiot.
Vulgar Slang: A penis.
intr.v.: putzed, putz·ing, putz·es Slang To behave in an idle manner; putter.
[Yiddish pots, penis, fool.]
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2006 by Houghton Mifflin Company.Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

I can’t take full credit for this. My wife coined this phrase more than twelve years ago, as Marv Albert was arrested and put on trial for forcible sodomy of his then mistress of ten years. It was a trial known more for DNA evidence that Albert had bit his girlfriend more than fifteen times in their last encounter, the one that led to his arrest. Albert didn’t serve any jail time, and was fired from NBC for a short time before resuming his duties as the play-by-play voice for NBA games for them and TNT in ’99. As to why Albert was only temporarily hurt by his biting trial, my wife Angelia said, “It’s the putz factor.”

As soon as she said that, I knew she was right, not only about Marv Albert, but about other putzes out there. I recognize that this is a Yiddish word, but it has universal human applications. After all, some of us are better able to get away with public missteps and criminal behavior than others. In our pop culture, so many famous folks screw up, ethically, legally, and otherwise. When accounting for age, gender, race, orientation and money, it often comes down to the putz factor as the difference between a short-term disgrace or permanent ostracism.

This blog space is likely not enough to fully explore “the putz factor” in pop culture. But we can start with a few basic axioms.

1. Hair, or lack thereof, can make or break “the putz factor.”

Not to make too much fun of a serious situation, but most people know that Marv Albert has been wearing a full toupee for at least three decades. His various attempts at wearing ones that didn’t fit his age prior to his sodomy trial in Virginia in ’97 were perfect examples of his putziness. That alone would and did make many of us, unconsciously of course, feel sorry for him as his trial progressed, at least until he pleaded out with an assault charge for the bites on his girlfriend’s back.

Contrast this with the recently ousted Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. His hair is as toupee-ish as Albert’s, but it’s all his hair. And the former governor has seemed vain about it, at least throughout his three months in the national spotlight. He may have many of the characteristics of a putz — including the habit of inserting foot in mouth — but his outwardly narcissistic behavior, combined with all of that hair, puts him several locks past putz. “Schmuck” is more appropriate here.

2. Dress does make the putz.

This is somewhat easy one. For many, the most obvious putz in the pop culture glow over the past thirty years would be film icon Woody Allen. Besides some of his films, the most controversial issue he’s faced was his relationship with and marriage to his former girlfriend’s (Mia Farrow) adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, in the ’90s. While he was never legally Previn’s stepfather, their relationship certainly raised many moral and ethical eyebrows. To be sure, Allen has been the recipient of significant venom as a result of this entangled relationship. But, he’s a putz, and he acts and dresses the part of one every day. Allen hasn’t suffered any long-term damage to his glorious reputation as a film maker, and still makes regular appearances to Knicks games at MSG, often with his wife. All without a single boo or hiss.

At the other end of the spectrum is former Senator John Edwards. That he looks a decade younger than his age, wears well-tailored suits, and is on record for spending $400 for a haircut all make him the anti-putz. All of which made it almost impossible for the press and public to feel sorry for Edwards when it came to light that he had a one-time relationship with a media consultant at the start of the ’08 presidential campaign cycle in the fall of ’06. That this came out after his wife had battled cancer was bad enough. That this was revealed just as now President Barack Obama was making his pick for VP — and that Edwards’ wife had known about the affair for well over a year — ruled out any possibility that “the putz factor” would save him. Edwards isn’t a putz, but he’s a lot of other things, none of them good.

3. One’s occupation can often negate “the putz factor.”

There are certain positions in the work force that lend themselves to the term “putz.” A car salesman, an accountant, a professor (including myself, sort of). There are some occupations, though, where someone’s hair, dress, or affect, putzy or not, doesn’t matter one iota. What fourteen-time Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps is going through right now is a good example of this. It really shouldn’t be a big deal, him toking up and all. If one’s reputation is built on a sense of good values, hard work, and athletic excellence, then drawing in weed smoke through a bong is a putzy move. But, Phelps has more gold medals than Mark Spitz and Jesse Owens combined. Though Phelps may have all of the characteristics of a putz, his out-of-this-world achievements in swimming make it much harder for him to be treated as one in the public eye.

4. Mean-spiritedness, no matter the person, cancels out the putz factor.

This is a simple but seldom followed point by folks in the public limelight. One’s mean-spirited personality, once unleashed in public, can’t be overlooked or excused. It completely contradicts the entire notion of being a putz, a fool that is unknowingly so. As Michael Douglas’ character says in The American President about a rival, “Bob’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t get it. Bob’s problem is that he can’t sell it!” Like the character played by Richard Dreyfuss, many in the public eye and in pop culture are simply too calloused to be putzes.

Take former New York governor Eliot Spitzer. This is a man who built his entire political career as a prosecutor throwing white-collar criminals in jail and attempting to throw away the key. A man who verbally bludgeoned his rivals on his way to Albany in ’06. Only to get caught up in his own hypocrisy as part of a federal investigation of a DC madam and a interstate prostitution ring. Or take former Senator Larry Craig of Idaho, who was forced to resign from his seat in ’07 because of his arrest for “homosexual lewd conduct” in the men’s bathroom at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. While not as eloquently mean-spirited as Spitzer, his actions should give us more than enough pause to ever declare him a putz. Craig, obviously in the closet based on reports since he left the US Senate, had supported a Federal Marriage Amendment that would ban gay marriage in ’06, and voted against extending the federal definition of hate crimes to include sexual orientation in ’02. If Spitzer and Craig are putzes, then so is Michael Vick.

5. Can a male of color or women regardless of race be a putz?

Speaking of Vick, up until now all of the examples I’ve used have been of White males. Can “the putz factor” be an inclusive tag? That depends. It doesn’t really work for Vick, who, while seemingly not as mean-spirited as Spitzer or Craig, certainly helped finance and participate in maiming and killing dogs on his properties. Plus, Michael Vick’s previous occupation was NFL starting quarterback, rarely a putz job even when occupied by Eli or Peyton Manning. Even once forgiven in pop culture, Vick will never likely have his earlier money, reputation or integrity, not through professional sports, anyway.

There are males of color who could qualify as a putz. Certainly actor Clarence Gilyard, Jr.’s character Theo from the movie Die Hard could be a possible candidate. Between the nerdy glasses and dress, not to mention his occupation as a computer geek, the character’s putziness might have helped in if he had gone on trial for attempted robbery, terrorism, and murder. Somehow, though, I seriously doubt it.

The closest thing we’ve seen in recent years to “the putz factor” for males of color is NBA star Kobe Bryant’s arrest and aborted trial for allegedly raping a White woman in ’03. Though Bryant was vilified in the media and his endorsements came to a screeching halt in ’03 and ’04, by ’06, Bryant’s career and pop culture status had all but recovered. It was Bryant’s reputation as a nerd, polyglot and his immature affect as someone too foolish to “get it” that made him a borderline putz, and therefore, less vulnerable to a long-term downfall in the public eye.

As for women, no, there aren’t any good examples of women as putzes. Not that women can’t be unknowingly foolish, dress weirdly or wear bad wigs in public. Examples of that include Cher, Joan Rivers, Mary J. Blige, Lil’ Kim and Aretha Franklin. But the term putz, based on the the definition above, is a gender-specific term, and as such, women can’t be putzes. And, women can do one thing in our double-standard pop culture that men can’t when they get into trouble. They can always cry.

This semester, I’m teaching World History I (from Genesis 1:1 to 1500 CE or AD 🙂 ), something I haven’t taught since grad school at Carnegie Mellon. Except that the Carnegie Mellon version was from Plato to NATO, or from “men becoming farmers because they discovered beer” to Western Europe becoming masters of the university — what I derisively called “World Stereotypes.” The judgement of the powers that are at University of Maryland University College for this standard course was such that we didn’t order Peter Stearns’ textbook (the standardbearer for this subject for nearly three decades). Instead, we have a nice textbook titled Traditions & Encounters.

It really is a nice textbook. It’s also a bit too politically correct. “Traditions” sounds pretty benign, except that many traditions end up so because they’re rammed down people’s throats by those in power. Particularly religious or economic or ethnic ones. And “encounters”? I guess that’s a good word to describe things like the consolidation of China into an empire under Qin Shi Huang Di by 221 BCE, or Caesar’s conquest of Gaul (modern-day France) by 50 BCE. Or not. I’m usually a fan of being politically correct, when the task is to speak plainly or eloquently without insulting other people or spinning the truth about others’ lives and experiences. Traditions & Encounters is too PC, even for a progressive like me.

Speaking of traditions and encounters, the Steelers — my second-favorite football team and my wife’s first, of course — are Super Bowl champions again! I should be happy, but I’m not. Maybe it’s because of the way the Steelers won. Not likely. This time last year, I was celebrating the Giants sticking it to the Patriots on a last-minute touchdown after the throw of all throws and the catch of all catches. Or maybe it was because I’ve seen Ben take the Steelers down field for a game-winning score twenty times in his young career already. No, don’t think so. Or I felt bad for the Cardinals because if it weren’t for all of their penalties and the Harrison 100-yard run-back of a Warner interception for a touchdown, the Cardinals would’ve won, and I would’ve felt some pain in Steeler Nation today.

It’s none of those. By rooting for the Steelers and watching them win at the last minute, I found myself rooting for a frontrunner, a team that most people expected to win. As much as I love the Steelers, I do feel bad for the Cardinals, a team that hasn’t won anything since my mother was a year old and Truman was president. I feel bad for Warner and Fitzgerald and Boldin and James and others, if only because an underdog coming so close to winning to only lose is heartbreaking. Sure, they’ll make their millions, but making money is hardly the same as leaving a mark on your career or profession. That’s a real sense of accomplishment, of immortality, even of happiness.

By rooting for the Steelers, I broke one of my all-time cardinal traditions (no pun intended there). I always, always, always cheer for the underdog, openly or in my heart, even if it sometimes means that the team I grew up with or have adopted loses. Just like I don’t like any team to lose the Super Bowl 55-10, I don’t like seeing an underdog give their all only to fall short at the end. Maybe that’s because I see myself in underdog teams or in the midst of underdog circumstances. I don’t enjoy it as much when a great team wins a championship. It’s like cheering on Bill Gates to break the $100-billion net-worth mark — $83 billion is still more than millions of us will make in a lifetime.

The Steelers did nothing wrong. They deserved to win, and the way they did it is something to celebrate. I’m glad that they have their sixth trophy and ring for the other thumb. Still, there’s this part of me that is a little sad today, knowing that few outside of Arizona care about this group of underdogs. Sadder even to know that most people don’t care about any underdogs, regardless of what they face and who they are. It’s a shame, really, to think that any of us with any underdog leanings at all slug it out in this world every day, all while being told that whatever we’re attempting to achieve is nearly impossible or might well not be worth the effort. We far too easily cheer for the folks on top, as if life is a script that we should all follow, that the tradition of the frontrunner winning is something to cherish.

It is easier, I think, to do so, to go with the flow of traditional fanship. To expect that things will only work out for folks in the most advantaged positions in life. That money or beauty or power is more worth admiring than someone with none of those advantages, metaphorically, as in sports, or in our real lives. So while I remain a Steeler fan, I still love the underdog. Here’s my a shoutout to the Cardinals, a symbol of my lingering hope that underdogs everywhere can break tradition and encounter success in their lives and efforts.