Rutgers Has Spotlight and Glare

By HARVEY ARATON

Published: September 14, 2007

Here comes another duck lined up for the shooting — and shouting — gallery known as Rutgers Stadium. Here comes another meal-on-wheels for a new college football carnivore, all the way to central New Jersey from Virginia, by bus.

Here come the Spartans of Norfolk State for what is certain to be a Big East pasting tomorrow afternoon in exchange for a $275,000 payday that will at least spare them an even more arduous journey later this season.

“The money we’ll make from this game will help us with a number of things, and one of them is to be able to fly down to Tallahassee when we play Florida A&M next month,” said Marty Miller, the Norfolk State athletic director. “We’ve always gone by bus — 14 hours.”

Whatever the chances, slim to none, of riding high from Rutgers back to Norfolk, Miller and his head coach, Pete Adrian, leapt at the chance to replace Howard — which, like Norfolk State, is out of the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference — on Rutgers’s 2007 schedule.

There are tangible benefits to a Saturday in Piscataway, N.J., as well as exposure and excitement for a team from the division formerly known as Division I-AA. “I was talking with the Rutgers people, and they told me it’s a sellout,” Miller said. “It’ll be the biggest crowd our kids have ever played in front of.”

Exactly what kind of reception awaits Norfolk State is another issue, raised last Friday night by an undetermined number of Rutgers fans in the student section, said to have profanely and drunkenly serenaded Navy’s players during a 41-24 Rutgers victory. The verbal assault — Imus in the evening — was first reported this week in The Star-Ledger of Newark, along with the Rutgers administration’s apologies to the Naval Academy. Writing in Wednesday’s edition of The Daily Targum, Rutgers’s student newspaper, the university’s athletic director, Robert E. Mulcahy III, called the vulgarity “undignified, disrespectful and unacceptable,” adding it had “embarrassed the university, the alumni and Rutgers fans across the state.”

•

It was bad enough that it came nearly six months after the Rutgers women’s basketball team was the victim in the infamous case of Don Imus, the subsequently defrocked shock jock. It was worse that the targets were representatives of a military academy. But beyond the characterization of the opponent — ascribed or imagined — is the macro-question of institutional accountability. How rabid is Rutgers? How will it deal with its newfound prominence as a college football power?

Will it pursue an agenda of academic legitimacy even in cases when it risks the possibility of losing the prize recruit and slipping a rung after a long, painful climb? Will it better prepare itself for the greater visibility that comes with an enhanced level of scrutiny?

With the Navy debacle presumably behind it, will Rutgers now realize that the many night games it plays for the sake of national television brings into high definition the fact that on campuses nationwide, sundown for many means the end of sobriety?

There is a very fine line between the raucous crowds and home-field advantages the high-minded sports powers from Duke on down have forever winked at, and the unruliness that can result when students and fans are allowed to do as they please. Just as deserving of an apology from Rutgers were the families now flocking to Rutgers games, many of whom, as Mulcahy wrote in the student newspaper, “were so upset” they “left the game with their children.”

Every player in an opposing uniform happens to be somebody’s child. Every opponent deserves a sporting welcome, and especially the Norfolk State Spartans, given the sacrificial nature of their visit.

They haven’t had a winning season in the 10 years since they joined what is now called the Division I Football Championship Subdivision. They lost to a Howard team last season that was beaten by Rutgers, 56-7. A historically black university, Norfolk State has in Adrian, a former defensive coordinator in the conference at Bethune-Cookman, its first white head football coach, the only current one in the country at a historically black university.

Miller said he had to ask the university president’s permission to make the controversial hire for the 2005 season, after a turbulent period for the program that included N.C.A.A. infractions. Adrian subsequently recruited a quarterback transfer, the 6-foot-5 Casey Hansen, who is also white and is now the starter.

•

“There’s been no issues, none whatsoever,” Adrian said when asked about racial complexities or complications. “When they hired me, they told me they just wanted to win. And I always thought that Norfolk State — looking at the area, at the stadium, which seats 30,000 — should be able to. Now we look at a school like Rutgers and say: Why can’t we be that in our conference?”

But what, exactly, is Rutgers after one season of flying? It’s going to take another season or two — and the university’s community at-large — to answer that question.

E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com

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A Spectacle the Knicks Don’t Need

By HARVEY ARATON

Published: September 11, 2007

As jury selection began yesterday in the sexual-harassment case against a longtime basketball superstar and his employer, often referred to as the world’s most famous arena, perhaps the essential question was who might be blinded or biased by the presence of Isiah Lord Thomas III and the power of his standing as president and coach of the Knicks.

Lucky for the judge, the Knicks have been lousy, their television ratings could be mistaken for Court TV’s and there are people all over New York who wouldn’t know David Lee from David Lee Roth.

“I’m not a sports fan at all,” said Gretchen Haury from Chappaqua, N.Y., a mother of three. That sounded good enough for the judge, plaintiff and defense.

“I’m a Yankee fan, don’t follow basketball,” said the 67-year-old Phillip Lief, a doctor from White Plains who was accepted without challenge from either side.

“I’m not a crazy sports fan, but I like to watch tennis, or golf,” said Michelle Zelekowitz, 50, of Pleasantville, N.Y.

Have a seat in the jury box, Ms. Zelekowitz, and prepare for some no-holds-barred Madison Square Garden mud-slinging, James Dolan style.

One after another, potential jurors were called to a single seat inside a small selection room through a door from room 23A yesterday in United States District Court in lower Manhattan. The judge, Gerard E. Lynch, sat across from them at a four-sided table with a space in the middle. On the left side, the plaintiff, a former Knicks senior vice president, Anucha Browne Sanders, was mostly expressionless as she watched the proceedings, flanked by lawyers.

Thomas, a defendant, sat with his all-female legal team (wink, wink), opposite Sanders, in a gray suit with a blue hankie folded above the breast pocket of his jacket. He held a blue pen over a yellow notepad, occasionally flashing the megawatt smile that could illuminate the Garden in the middle of a Midtown blackout.

Except here in the legal arena, where the Garden strongman Dolan is Thomas’s co-defendant and not his career enabler, it is a tossup whether the jury of civilians will be as willing as Dolan has been to smile upon the I-Lord.

This is the trial Thomas insisted on, or so he claimed, to defend his honor against Sanders, who charged she was fired for complaining about Thomas’s advances and mistreatment. This is the case that Dolan could have avoided but — true to character — is spending the millions he should have devoted to a quiet settlement by trying to nuke Anucha.

What if Thomas and Dolan lose a case likely to turn on interpretation? Will Dolan jettison Thomas for having to make up to a $10 million payoff? Will N.B.A. Commissioner David Stern, known to punish players for failing to hem their shorts, suspend Thomas and even Dolan for staging a public spectacle the league needs at this point like another crooked ref?

“No comment on pending litigation!” Stern wrote in an e-mail message yesterday. Who could blame him for wanting to drive that exclamation point through Dolan’s thick skull?

•

Not surprisingly, Dolan didn’t show up yesterday, and for one day at least set up Thomas, among others, for the collateral damage in what promises to be a two- to three-week trial of juicy headlines.

The judge also remarked that he grew up reading the New York City tabloids from the back, another way of calling himself a fan and apparently one familiar with the biggest, boldest print. But his mission yesterday was more subtle: the formation of a jury impervious to the premeditated persuasions of the celebrity civil trial.

“I don’t follow sports,” said Irene Ray, 58, a receptionist from the Bronx, though she noted on her printed questionnaire that she had heard of one of the players scheduled to testify.

“I know Stephon Marbury got those $15 sneakers out,” she said. “I think that’s great.”

What about when Thomas was great? Where were all the hoop-heads who remembered him in those tight little blue Detroit Pistons shorts, weaving through traffic, all the way to the Hall of Fame?

Edward Watts, 43, a court officer from the Bronx, called himself a “New York fan” who watches games on TV, but only to a point.

“I don’t rush home at 7 o’clock,” he said, turning to Thomas. “Sorry, Isiah.”

•

Watching Thomas in the jury selection room, one had to wonder if he wasn’t sorry it had come to this, media day one month too soon, his reputation and possibly his professional fate being placed in the hands of people promising to treat him and Sanders as full-fledged equals, everything in the open, on the table.

“I can speak freely?” Tommy Vasquez, 37, a Bronx maintenance man, said when asked about Thomas. “He’s a pretty good talent evaluator, but he’s not so good a G.M.”

He got a laugh from everyone but Thomas, whose lawyers objected to Vasquez as a juror. The judge overruled. Score the goal for the plaintiff.

E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com

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As Testing Continues, Cheating Endures

By HARVEY ARATON

Published: September 8, 2007

Rick Ankiel reportedly received
human growth hormone in 2004.

Perhaps there will come a time when baseball shakes free of these vexing and occasionally damning performance-enhancement headlines. Perhaps the sport will awaken some future morning with a drug-testing program that is as good as it can be, and the right to say there is nothing more the game can do except to punish the cheats when they get caught.

For now, no such claim can be made as the testing apparatus remains incomplete and the slimy residue of industry-wide and years-long neglect is thrown back at baseball like a pie to the face. Rick Ankiel and Troy Glaus are the latest cases, the former based in St. Louis, nine years and a couple of weeks after the first sighting of Mark McGwire’s little bottled helpers.

“It’s kind of amazing, isn’t it,” Tony La Russa, the Cardinals’ manager, said after Ankiel’s assault on National League pitching escalated with two home runs in a rout of the Pirates on Thursday, giving Ankiel, a converted pitcher, nine in 81 at-bats since his return to the majors Aug. 10.

The home runs, yes; and also the timing of the curveball spun into the dirt yesterday, at the feet of Ankiel, the feel-good slugger of the baseball summer.

La Russa’s succinct commentary had barely been heard when Ankiel — author of the greatest comeback story ever told — was added to the growing list of major leaguers suspected of, or who have admitted to, spiking their spinach. The Daily News reported that Ankiel, in 2004, received 12 months’ supply of human growth hormone from a Florida pharmacy that was part of a national, and illegal, prescription drug distribution ring.

•

Ankiel was a pitcher at the time, futilely struggling to overcome the mysterious condition that prevented him from throwing a baseball in the direction he aimed it and an elbow injury that in 2003 required what is known as Tommy John surgery.

Was he taking H.G.H. merely for rehabilitation purposes, as he told reporters in Phoenix last night, while breaking no baseball rules? Assuming as much, does he deserve the benefit of the doubt for what he is achieving now because he reportedly stopped receiving shipments before baseball banned the substance in 2005?

That depends on how one views the purpose of baseball’s own investigation into its so-called steroid era — to comprehend what caused it and take every possible step to dismantle it or to declare mission accomplished by shooting down a select number of easy targets for mounting on Commissioner Bud Selig’s wall.

I’ve said many times that the crusade to invalidate Barry Bonds’s career home run record set last month was always more distraction than solution, the selective pursuit of celebrity for the sake of protecting sacred statistics.

“They have fixated on home runs and records in baseball,” said Dr. Gary I. Wadler, an expert on performance-enhancing drugs and a World Anti-Doping Agency consultant. “But that was never the big picture.”

It was about the rooted culture, always the culture. And here we have more names — Sports Illustrated’s online report on Glaus receiving steroids in 2003 and 2004 followed yesterday — in what has become a steady, insidious drip, reminding us again of how widely infected baseball was with the belief that natural preparation, or recovery, was for suckers.

A player, any player, bought into that or he didn’t. You want to still let Ankiel be Roy Hobbs, the Natural, because his H.G.H. timeline suggests no current foul play and because his inspirational return is just too good to let loose-lipped investigators and nosy newspapermen ruin? Fine, but you forfeit your right to sneer at San Franciscans who long ago extended that courtesy to Bonds, who, after all, became the inflated wonder of the world before baseball had a collectively bargained testing program.

None of that addresses the H.G.H. factor, of course, the elephant in the enhancement arena, not just for Bonds, but an entire sport that lied so insistently to America and, worse, to itself, and now expects people to take it on faith that its players, by and large, would not cheat even if they couldn’t get caught.

•

Baseball, Wadler said, has conducted a “misinformation campaign” about the reliability of testing for H.G.H. used by the Olympics because it doesn’t want to confront the players’ union on the drawing of blood. Now, he added, the new formula for cheating is believed to be a combination of H.G.H. with small amounts of steroids that go undetected in urine samples.

As more names leak from the faucet, further illuminating the past, the culture of enhancement continues.

From Bonds to Ankiel, one end of baseball’s summer spectrum to the other, there can be no selective reasoning, no double standard, only a complete accounting of a cheating culture bigger than any one player, and using that historical perspective to move on, confront the future headlines being written right now.

E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com

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Hunger Is Lacking at the Top of the Food Chain

The former Michigan guard Matt Lentz (67) is on the Giants’
practice squad. Both teams could use some good news.
Photo: Tony Ding/Associated Press

By HARVEY ARATON

Published: September 4, 2007

East Rutherford, N.J.

Insults in jest and Appalachian State jokes buzzed in Matt Lentz’s ears yesterday in the Giants’ locker room, but at least he was around to hear them.

On Labor Day, with the returning Michael Strahan still setting his own schedule after his August-plus sabbatical, Lentz could boast of a playbook, a refreshing appreciation of employment and a reasoned perspective regarding the ambush in Ann Arbor of his humbled alma mater.

“Appalachian State, they came to play,” Lentz said of Michigan’s shocking home-field defeat Saturday at the hands of a program with roughly 90,000 fewer seats at its own stadium in Boone, N.C. “But it’s a football game, and all you can do is hunker down, come back next week.”

•

Easier for him to say, several states and a second season removed from the Michigan offensive line, having exchanged the Big House blue for Big Blue, all-Big Ten status for a position on the practice squad after failing to make the final roster cut.

“Nice to know I have a job,” said Lentz, a 6-foot-6, 320-pound guard who spent his rookie season on the Giants’ injured list.

On the far side of the room, at the upper end of the pro football food chain, reporters took up strategic positions around Strahan’s empty dressing stall. Soon word came that the Giants’ most tenured player and alleged leader had treated himself to a long holiday weekend after blowing off Albany training camp humidity for the cool ocean breezes of Southern California. He did arrive later in the day for a physical, after his teammates had left.

“He’s been to more training camps than most,” said the veteran receiver Amani Toomer, answering the question of what example had Strahan set for a team plagued with chemistry issues the last few years.

Most observers believed Strahan, under the guise of contemplating retirement, was holding out for a raise. Maybe he was hoping the Giants would release him so he could sign with a better team. As Coach Tom Coughlin embarks upon a season’s quest to save his job, all he can hope is that the others have too much team pride, the professional urgency of a Matt Lentz, to pay Strahan any mind.

How does a 24-year-old dealing with pending career derailment pass the time, ease the anxiety? The Bronx Zoo sounded good to Lentz and his wife. They spent Saturday afternoon there after the roster cuts and went out for dinner in a restaurant with televisions tuned to ESPN.

“They were showing the highlights, and I saw 34-32 and I’m thinking, Wow, and then I did a double-take — Oh my God, we lost!” he said.

He and the rest of the country had been smacked upside the helmet by the new college season. Far away, without a condolence call yet placed, Lentz said he could feel Ann Arbor’s pain. He could hear the disgruntled masses in the chat rooms calling for Coach Lloyd Carr’s head.

“It’s tradition-rich there, and you’ve got to uphold it,” he said. “If you don’t, you’re going to hear it.”

At least he didn’t have to listen to Josh Huston — the rookie kicker from Ohio State, who was released Saturday — gloat. At least he had a fellow Michigan alum, Toomer, to share with what he called “a lot of stuff in here” on a morning of hitting the weights and meetings, as the Giants, sans Strahan, began preparations for their opener Sunday night in Dallas.

Toomer was having lunch in San Francisco on Saturday when his cellphone rang — Plaxico Burress, a former Michigan State Spartan, calling to say, “Did your guys play today?”

“Appalachian State,” Toomer said.

“That’s right,” Burress said. “You just lost.”

Having played one season under Carr 12 years ago, Toomer has little remaining contact. Lentz, however, spent two years protecting quarterback Chad Henne and opening holes for running back Mike Hart. These are his people.

He grew up bleeding Michigan blue, on a farm in tiny Ortonville, north of Detroit, building muscle by pulling his father’s pickup trucks on back-country roads. He dreamed of playing for Carr.

•

Now Michigan’s national title hopes are turned upside down, along with the hourglass surely counting down on Carr’s tenure — a crying shame, in Lentz’s opinion, because, “He’s a lot more to his players than a football coach.”

But the college game is about bottom-line leverage, just like the pros, as evidenced by Strahan’s disregard for Coughlin — there’s a history there — and, worse, for Jerry Reese, the new general manager (and the Giants’ first African-American in that position).

At the top of the football food chain, it must be nice to know you can take off the sweatiest month of the season, and then a holiday weekend, and still have a job. But what an insult to everyone else.

E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com

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In Need of Relief, the Mets Find None

Paul Lo Duca walking off the field after
Tadahito Iguchi scored the winning run in the ninth.

By HARVEY ARATON

Published: August 31, 2007

Philadelphia

Billy Wagner’s 45th and final pitch yesterday, about 20 too many under normal circumstances, was smacked by Chase Utley past the outstretched glove of Carlos Delgado and into right field, taking with it the last vestige of the Mets’ firm control of the National League East.

They have a precarious two-game lead over the surging Phillies, is what they have, all they have, after being swept here in a four-game-series brew of bad performance and worse luck. Beyond that, they have three games in more hostile and typically, for them, unhappy territory, Atlanta, starting tonight, among other urgent issues.

Foremost among them: no reliable setup man for the closer, Wagner. No fireballing phenomenon to pitch by his own rules, like the one currently electrifying the Bronx every couple of days.

In the aftermath of a crushing 11-10 Mets defeat here yesterday, a game they should have won, needed to win, deserved to win, was the inescapable feeling that in the now likely event of a divisional race to the end of September, no Joba for the Mets equals mission improbable.

Hyperbole in the wake of calamity? Perhaps, but the sight of Wagner, alone in the middle of a largely vacant Mets clubhouse and also in accepting the blame for perhaps the worst regular-season defeat of the Omar Minaya-Willie Randolph regime, somehow made Manager Randolph’s decision to use Wagner for two innings simultaneously cautious and desperate.

Under the circumstances and given his alternatives, you could say it was the only choice he had.

“That’s what he gets paid to do,” Randolph said, noting that Wagner hadn’t pitched in the series. “He was ready for it.”

Mind you, not that he volunteered for it.

“Told,” Wagner said to the question of whether he had made a request to start the eighth with the Mets just having been gifted five runs on two hits by the Phillies’ bullpen for a 10-8 lead. But because Wagner, as much as anyone in the Mets’ clubhouse and more than most, is a standup guy, he also said: “I should be able to do that.”

The result, on the other hand, spoke for itself.

Due south from where Joba Chamberlain and the Yankees were tidying up in the Bronx, sweeping the Red Sox in a comparatively brisk 3 hours 1 minute, American League baseball came here in all its messy, excruciating glory, exactly four hours’ worth that saw the Mets spot the Phillies leads of 5-0 and 8-5 and still have a four-game divisional lead in their closer’s hand, albeit that one crucial inning earlier than usual.

In effect, Randolph was subscribing to the Bill Jamesian approach of going with his strength when the situation most demanded it. He could have used Aaron Heilman, but the Phillies had Utley, Pat Burrell and Ryan Howard due up and Heilman, after too many untimely home runs surrendered this season, inspires little confidence.

•

Pedro Feliciano, another candidate from the coalition of the willing but not entirely able, had already pitched two innings. Guillermo Mota was no doubt dismissed as detrimental to the condition of Randolph’s stomach after the roller coaster he’d ridden.

Much better last season while on performance-enhancing drugs, Mota has been Minaya’s least admirable maneuver during his three years as general manager. In fact, the bullpen Mota was re-signed to fortify now threatens all the fine work done by Minaya in putting the Mets on the postseason map.

He allowed the very useful Chad Bradford to slip away to Baltimore last winter and was unlucky with the health of Duaner Sánchez. He made a shaky call on Ambiorix Burgos at the expense of a useful pitcher, Brian Bannister. Scott Schoeneweis has been a certifiable bust.

When it all shook out yesterday, when Randolph considered the consequences of losing after the Mets had climbed out of a rare hole dug by Orlando Hernández, he called on Wagner and said, It’s all on you.

Wagner proceeded to give up Burrell’s second home run of the game with one out in the eighth and a two-out walk to Aaron Rowand, elevating his pitch count past 20. In the ninth, Jayson Werth dunked a single into left field, and stole second and third without a throw. Wagner needed a strikeout against Tadahito Iguchi but didn’t have enough left in the tank to get it. Iguchi singled to left and stole second too. Jimmy Rollins was walked intentionally. Here came Utley. There went two games in the standings, from four to two.

•

There, in all likelihood, went Wagner’s availability tonight in Atlanta, where the Mets will start a rookie call-up from New Orleans tomorrow and where Pedro Martínez will meet them today for a bullpen session that will determine the next step in his return from surgery last summer.

Unfortunately for the Mets, he won’t be staying — in the bullpen, that is. That’s not his job, and, worse, there is no Joba.

E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com

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For Davydenko, a New Kind of Grind

By HARVEY ARATON

Published: August 28, 2007

The last thing Nikolay Davydenko appears to be is the kind of tennis player likely to do something splashy, much less crazy. He is fair-haired but prematurely balding, athletic but unimposing, efficient but unspectacular.

You could call him the opposite of his fast-living countryman Marat Safin, a Russian well known for flaming on to Grand Slam championship heights and out of the top 10 at the drop of a hat, or serve.

Davydenko, No. 4 in the world, is the epitome of stolid consistency, a grind-it-out overachiever lacking that one trusty weapon to make him a serious threat to outlast the field at a two-week event. He lives to move his opponent around, set up the occasional two-fisted backhand winner.

For the likes of Davydenko, it is all about what the computer says, all about the points. A man like him, he insisted yesterday, does not have the motivation or time to take unnecessary risks, play with matches, fire or bookies.

“I need to defend points,” he said yesterday after dispatching an American, Jesse Levine, in the first round of the United States Open, 6-4, 6-0, 6-1.

“For me losing points, I losing my ranking.”

Forgive the fractured English of a 26-year-old who was born in Ukraine under Soviet rule, moved with his family to Germany at 15, was granted Russian citizenship at 18 and now lists the tax haven of Monte Carlo as home. Understand what life on the Tour has been like for him since gambling irregularities surfaced involving a match he played this month in Sopot, Poland, and put him in the middle of an investigation by the Association of Tennis Professionals.

“I’m top player, and like fans and everybody see I am like guy, bad guy, who gambling,” he said. “Difficult, really. It’s like mentally you’re tired.”

•

In the match under suspicion, Davydenko won the first set from 87th-ranked Martin Vassallo Arguello of Argentina. Through a British online gambling company, money on Arguello inexplicably poured in, raising the odds on Davydenko and the overall amount bet to 10 times the average amount.

The gambling company, Betfair, rang the alarm, alerted the tennis authorities. This fall, Davydenko will have to convince investigators that whatever happened with the online gamblers, it had nothing to do with him and the sore toe that he said forced him to retire from the Arguello match in the third set.

Maybe, he said, the betting had to do with three first-round defeats he suffered in previous weeks. Maybe he or his wife mentioned to someone somewhere that he was hurt. Whatever the case, it was difficult not to feel some compassion for Davydenko as he faced and cooperated with an inquisition of mostly American journalists, acknowledging the gravity of even the sniff of illegal gambling connected to sport.

That’s why the United States Tennis Association has hired a company to monitor on-site gambling at the Open. Nothing terrifies the people who run sports more — not steroids or cheating or domestic violence or even the sickening subject of tortured dogs.

Michael Vick may never win back public favor after admitting in federal court yesterday to being complicit to dogfighting and killing, but the N.F.L. had better find out all there is to know about the kind of gambling operation Vick was financing. His defenders, the N.A.A.C.P. included, need to understand that comparing Vick to hunters, the Elmer Fudds of America, does not address the scarier revelation of the overall lifestyle he was leading, those with whom he consorted.

This is what Davydenko can expect to be asked, most likely in mid-September. What does he know? Whom does he know? Nothing, he said. Nobody. No bad guys, and especially no Russian bad guys for those already making insinuations about links to organized crime.

He goes to Moscow a few weeks a year to play tennis and wouldn’t know where to look for trouble, except maybe for Brighton Beach.

“You know, like, maybe if you go now to Brooklyn, you find Russian mafia here in New York,” he said, smiling after showing off his New Yawk sense of humor.

•

Here at America’s Grand Slam event, Davydenko was relegated to the grandstand court for his morning match, in front of a small gathering of fans who didn’t heckle him, if they even knew him as the player connected to the gambling inquiry. Other years, he would have been a complete afterthought on a day when an African-American legend (Althea Gibson) was being honored, however belatedly and posthumously, and when two young American men (Donald Young and John Isner) won for the first time at the Open.

“How many weeks I get, how many months?” Davydenko said, referring to the character questions.

As long as it takes for the ATP to get satisfactory answers, unfortunately. And only then will Davydenko be allowed to resume grinding away in peace, week after lucrative week.

E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com

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Giants Await a Leader, but Also Need Followers

By HARVEY ARATON

Published: August 24, 2007

How playful the Eli Manning-Tiki Barber quarrel seems, relative to more vexing issues dogging the N.F.L. Compared with the Michael Vick case, it’s a food fight in the school cafeteria or one of those intramural training camp scuffles that real men like Coach Tom Coughlin believe will make their players’ pores ooze with orneriness.

But it’s August, devoid of meaningful competition, and Vick, barring an unforeseen audible, will officially plead guilty Monday to dogfighting charges that will put him in jail. He hasn’t served a redemptive day yet and already the Atlanta chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., among other sources, is clamoring for him to play again. Imagine the unpleasant decisions, inevitably fraught with racial repercussions, facing N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell.

For now, as Goodell tries to remake his league’s battered behavioral image, he needs volunteers to step up, speak out, change the subject. If I’m Goodell, I’m thinking, keep talking, Tiki. Get down on all fours and bark, if you’d like.

The broadcast game is about distinguishing one’s self from the rest of the ever-expanding pack, and Barber knew what he was doing when he announced himself in the studio Sunday night by describing Manning’s leadership qualities as “comical.” Manning (pictured, left) answered Barber, his teammate only eight months ago, with a salvo that looked and sounded more sheepish than furious.

Easily impressed, his Giants teammates reacted with a right-on, about-time gusto, which mostly underscored the belief that what Barber said, however self-serving, was essentially true.

People often miss the point when they say that it is not easy for Manning to be the little brother of Peyton, quarterback and pitchman extraordinaire. Performance issues aside, Eli’s problem, born of a personality that is seemingly guileless, transcends genealogy. Forget Peyton; in his three seasons with the Giants, Eli has been everyone’s little brother, alternately picked on and stood up for. In either case, not the most ideal leadership conditions.

“Well, I guess I’ve always been even keeled, never really responded back and tried to always make things smooth and easy,” Manning told reporters Wednesday. An admirable approach in most places except inside the football arena; it’s a sport not exactly given to attitudinal complexity and languid body language.

•

We will know that Manning, 26, has met the big-boy challenge when teammates do not have to defend him so vigorously in the locker room, when Coughlin doesn’t think he is too fragile to treat him as churlishly as he did, for example, Mathias Kiwanuka, a rookie, last season. And most of all, when Manning has finally had enough and shoves a football in the face of the next receiver to show him up on the field, as Jeremy Shockey and Plaxico Burress have become so accustomed to doing.

If the Giants had any real leaders last season, including Michael Strahan and Barber and, for that matter, Coughlin, those gestures of exasperation upon being underthrown or overlooked would not have been tolerated.

By season’s end, the network cameras were well trained on the Giants’ receivers after pass plays, anticipating overreaction and more embarrassment for Manning. Where were his supporters when he needed them most? Where was Strahan, the Giants’ most tenured and typically outspoken star?

Invisible, just as he is now, as he contemplates retirement or times his arrival to miss the most grueling part of training camp. Isn’t that just like a me-first Giants star in the years under Coughlin and his predecessor Jim Fassel?

There haven’t been many locker rooms as chatty as the Giants’ has become, where talk has been so cheap. Here, in fact, is Barber, on Manning two days before last season’s regular-season finale against the Redskins and 10 days before his retirement, when asked if he had any regrets of leaving a still-developing quarterback alone in the lurch.

“I care about Eli and it’s been fun playing with him for three years,” Barber said. “But he’s capable of handling it himself. I know he is.”

Barber then went out and carried the Giants into the playoffs with a franchise-record 234 yards rushing and 3 touchdowns. “Thank you, thank you,” Manning told him later that night when they passed in the interview room.

Payback, it appears, was Barber deciding to tell it like it is, Cosellian-style, to mark his network debut.

•

It wasn’t the most honorable act of Barber’s career, but, again, in the context of how we define aberrant N.F.L. behavior, it is hard to get more angry than Manning appeared to be — or not — when he tweaked Barber for last season’s long retirement melodrama in his unassuming, Andy of Mayberry way.

Bottom line: Barber, besides giving football fans something other than Vick to debate, did Manning a favor. He made himself a stationary target, handing Manning the motivation to allow teammates to see him, for once, stand up for himself.

Making them stand behind him, and making Barber admit he was wrong, we’ll just have to see about that.

E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com

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Former Punter Prosecutes a Sadly Fitting Case

Northern Colorado’s Rafael Mendoza was stabbed in the leg
after he won the punter’s job last fall.

By HARVEY ARATON

Published: August 20, 2007

Did you hear the one about the punter who prosecuted the punter who knifed the punter?

No joke. And in the context of a persistently disheartening summer in our tainted toy department, this may be the most warped example of bad sports, the furthest case of all from funny.

“I looked at this one and thought, What in the world is happening with sports in this country to make young people do some of the things they do?” said Ken Buck, the district attorney of Weld County, Colo., and an all-Ivy League punter at Princeton, class of 1981.

In addition to being mortified, how could Buck not be intrigued when the sorry saga of Rafael Mendoza and Mitch Cozad reached his desk in Greeley last September, a Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan remake substituting cleats for skates?

He knew he had to take an active role in prosecuting the case, he said, because not many fall into his hands like the perfect snap from center. And who else could explain to the jury what a three-step punter was, or that hang time had nothing to do with potential punishment?

“In an almost unfathomable way, the case was strange because of my background,” Buck said in a recent telephone interview.

In summary, he described it as follows:

Mendoza, a junior last season from Thornton, Colo., beat out Cozad, a walk-on transfer from Wheatland, Wyo., for the position of starting punter at the University of Northern Colorado. Teammates and others said Cozad was distressed by the result and determined to reverse it.

Early last season, Mendoza happened to spot Cozad, dressed in black, in the parking lot of Mendoza’s apartment complex. On the night of Sept. 11, Mendoza was attacked in the lot by a man dressed in black, his face hidden except for his eyes by a tightly drawn hood.

Mendoza, knocked on his back, testified that he fended off attempts by his attacker to thrust a five-inch knife into his chest only to be stabbed in his kicking leg, sustaining a gash that sidelined him for 10 days.

When another car entered the lot with its headlights shining, Mendoza’s assailant fled by car with taped-over plates. Cozad was spotted later by employees of a liquor store in the parking lot, pulling tape off Wyoming plates that contained the letters KIKR.

Found guilty by a jury of second-degree assault earlier this month, Cozad, to be sentenced Oct. 2, faces up to 16 years in prison. His family has promised to appeal, citing a polygraph test he passed that was not admissible evidence.

“For me, it was pretty clear what happened, except we didn’t get a conviction on a murder charge because there wasn’t a witness to say that Cozad had gone for Mendoza’s chest,” said Buck, who added: “What makes you so disgusted is that you realize what was done for something so stupid.”

For being the punter on a Big Sky Conference team that finished 1-9 last season and was outscored by 335-122? Are achievement levels and their corresponding realities so blurred now by the attendant pressures of a sports culture that has become pitifully imitative of the professional rat race?

As the Princeton punter, in a 1980 game against Harvard, Buck had one punt go a scant 30 yards, into a gale wind, from deep in his end zone with the Tigers leading, 7-3, late in the game. Lo and behold, there was a penalty against Princeton, Harvard made him punt again, the wind changed direction, and he crushed one downfield, about 75 yards.

He gratefully took this defining punter’s moment into the rest of his life and wishes young people could understand that for the overwhelming majority, sports is nothing more significant than an accumulation of cool memories.

Buck’s son, Cody, is a freshman linebacker at West Point. His daughter, Kaitlin, aspires to play college soccer. Based on the sum of his experiences, then and now, he says he believes specialization has made youth sports too serious and is devaluing the more important recreational and social benefits of competing.

“To be honest, I don’t think the kids playing football at Northern Colorado have it in perspective any better than the kids at Texas,” Buck said. “It’s ingrained in the culture, and especially in the parents.”

According to Buck, Cozad’s girlfriend revealed that he had often spoken of pressure from his mother to excel at sports, at punting. The case’s ending reinforced that point when, upon the whisking away of Mitch Cozad to jail, his mother, Suzanne, seemed to think this was one more event for which the overzealous sports parent creates a sideline scene before unpacking the snacks.

“The thing that got me is that as I was leaving the court, the Mendoza family was saying how they had prayed for Cozad while Cozad’s family was heckling me,” Buck said. “Then I found out that Cozad’s mother — believe it or not — had a pizza delivered to the jail.”

No joke. And the pizza’s hang time wasn’t too long.

“The guards ate it all,” Buck said.


E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com

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Sheffield Motivates Himself With Conflict and Criticism

By HARVEY ARATON

Published: August 17, 2007

Gary Sheffield prides himself on being an avowed truth-teller, a revealer of hypocrisy, a debunker of myth, but typically without ample explanation or factual support.

He fancies himself a slugger making grand social statements for the benefit of ballplayerkind but often via a personal agenda. If the chip on his shoulder had a face, it could pass for Barry Bonds’s inflated head.

When he is finished with his flurry of reverberating wails, he can also go acoustic, as he did briefly in the visitors’ clubhouse at Yankee Stadium yesterday, saying, “I don’t take myself too seriously.”

Which poses the question, why should we?

With the Tigers, the seventh team of his impressive 20-year major league career, Sheffield returned to the Bronx for the first time since making the stinging assessment that Joe Torre has a harsher managerial style for black players. In an interview last month on HBO’s “Real Sports,” Sheffield insisted he was not calling Torre a racist. Just saying, in effect, that he acts like one.

“I meant what I said, said what I said and I stand by what I said,” he said yesterday before being lustily booed throughout the Tigers’ 8-5 victory.

Based on his three-year experience here, which ended last fall, Sheffield claimed that black players were more likely to be “called out” by Torre. When asked about Derek Jeter, who has almost a father-son relationship with Torre, Sheffield said that Jeter is a Yankee icon and, as the son of a mixed-race couple, “ain’t all the way black.”

Insulting to Jeter as that may be, his racial makeup does raise an interesting and tangentially relevant point. If, as Sheffield suggests, Jeter counts as half-black, the Yankees right now have half the number of African-American players they did when Elston Howard integrated the franchise in 1955, or eight long years after Jackie Robinson crashed the major league color line.

Of course, they have many Hispanic players, a couple of whom helped win championships for Torre (in all likelihood the truest measure of the manager’s affection). Why African-American participation in baseball is dwindling while Latino players multiply is another subject for debate that Sheffield weighed in on contentiously this season. He told GQ magazine that baseball favors Hispanics because they are easier to control (big news, no doubt, to Manny Ramírez and Pedro Martínez).

But in the HBO interview, Sheffield made little distinction between players of color, and nor did he offer a clear summation of his reckless insinuation, except to say: “I think it’s a, a way of, the way they do things there, you know. They run their ship differently.”

•

Fascinating how, in that unscripted moment, it became “they,” the Yankees, not Torre. And here we do come upon a subject at least worth discussing, a nugget of truth uncovered inside Sheffield’s unfiltered doublespeak. He has been around baseball long enough to know that the Yankees, under George Steinbrenner’s ownership, have not been much more an agent for social change than they were in 1950.

Bob Watson, an African-American, came from outside the family for a two-year run as general manager that included the first of Torre’s four World Series victories in 1996. Reggie Jackson hangs around with the ambiguous title of special adviser. Beyond that, the Yankees’ front office has largely been a reflection of the past.

They have not had a manager of color. Until Torre, African-American players with deep organizational roots or others with post-playing aspirations watched a platoon of white colleagues play an ongoing game of musical managerial chairs.

When Torre was forced to the sideline in 1999 for prostate-cancer treatment, Steinbrenner begged a gimpy, cranky Don Zimmer to fill in rather than appoint Chris Chambliss, who had managed successfully in the minors, or Willie Randolph, whose qualifications at the time were at least as clear as those of the presumed manager-in-waiting, Don Mattingly.

If the Yankees’ social practices are not a symbolic representation of the game’s, whose are? So is it possible that Sheffield — an edgy but by most accounts likable teammate — has a deep-seated anger over the diminishing African-American influence after so many decades of struggle?

•

He has always seemed to motivate himself through conflict (like John McEnroe, as one Yankees insider sagely confided last night). In that sense, who was more likely to become a target of frustration after Sheffield’s injury-plagued 2006 season, and the handing of his job to Bobby Abreu?

The principal owner, Steinbrenner, who personally signed Sheffield in the hometown (Tampa) they share, or the manager, Torre, who reportedly (and understandably) preferred Vladimir Guerrero back in ancient times, 2004, and whom Sheffield had to deal with every day?

Sometimes, the price for outspokenness is being called out. Pride, in this case, would seem to be what’s keeping the avowed truth-teller from admitting what it is.

E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com

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Baseball’s Celebrity Witch Hunt Misses the Mark

By HARVEY ARATON

Published: August 12, 2007

Cleveland

Chipper Jones did not take nearly enough heat for putting Alex Rodriguez (pictured) into the conversation with Barry Bonds, and that was before Rodriguez gave Jones a pass here Friday night, insisting that Jones, his old friend from when they were Florida high school prodigies, “didn’t say anything out of order.”

Rodriguez’s manager, Joe Torre, said he read Jones’s comments about steroid questions and public trust last week in the New York newspapers and that it was, as Jones fumed afterward, simply another case of those evil tabloid people not synchronizing their headlines and articles.

“He said that anybody is going to come under scrutiny, get asked questions,” Torre said. “And that is true.”

Anybody, apparently, attempting something special, like chasing Bonds, as A-Rod is said to be in the process of doing. He was at 503 homers for his career and 39 for the season, after two two-run blasts in the scorching Yankees’ 11-2 lockdown of the Indians. But is that what the sanctioned and much-ballyhooed investigation, led by former Senator George J. Mitchell, is all about? Pursuing royalty? Protecting records?

If it is, then the pending report will not be an honest accounting of baseball’s implicit acceptance of performance enhancement while other sports were at least acknowledging and legislating against the scourge. It will be a celebrity witch hunt, a few famous heads for the commissioner, Bud Selig, to mount on his wall.

Why investigate that way at all when baseball has the exiled crusader Jose Canseco dropping a big name here, another there, as he shamelessly shops another book proposal, by way of the public?

My guess, my hope, is that Mitchell understands that the essence of his work has been to examine the core issues of a bastardized culture, explain how baseball as an industry injected itself with the belief that steroids — like peanuts and Cracker Jack — were staples of the sport. It should be apparent to everyone by now that the Popeyes who blew past Maris and Ruth and Aaron were far from the only major leaguers spiking their spinach. In the nontesting era, there was so much to be gained, nothing (it seemed) to be risked, from going on the juice even if you weren’t tracking history or the Hall of Fame.

“It’s just so far-fetched, the numbers that those guys are putting up,” Jones said during his Bonds-Rodriguez seminar. “And a lot of it comes from the era that they’re playing in.”

Yes, the home run chases and the subsequent revelations put the spotlight on the sluggers, but why is their enhancement, alleged or admitted, more morally reprehensible than anyone else’s?

•

One career year by an average player on the threshold of free agency could bring the contract of a lifetime. A few chemical boosts could mean the difference between major league perks and minor league misery. If cheating is cheating, the same at all institutional levels of productivity, then why would A-Rod, as Jones said, have to “answer the questions” more than others achieving the unexpected or the extraordinary?

Jorge Posada is hitting .338 this season — or 51 points higher than his career best — with his 36th birthday coming this week. Beyond baseball’s drug-testing program, should he have to “answer the questions” of the legitimacy police? Should Hideki Matsui have to explain his July power surge? Should Joba Chamberlain, 21, with a body type that Roger Clemens didn’t grow into until he was past 30, have to convince us that his 99-mile-an-hour fastball is au naturel?

Before serving a one-game suspension Friday night, Torre said he interpreted Jones’s comments to mean that “anybody is going to come under scrutiny.” But Jones didn’t talk about anybody. He connected A-Rod to Bonds and was shocked when headlines rolled off the presses. How naïve is that?

Jones cited suspicions about A-Rod that were raised self-servingly in a recent radio interview by Canseco, while adding that he was inclined to believe that A-Rod’s home run numbers were pure — which is akin to calling a news conference to announce that your so-called friend probably doesn’t beat his wife.

This isn’t to say Canseco’s first literary work wasn’t enlightening, on the money, with arguably greater impact than the journalistically brilliant “Game of Shadows.” Without Canseco, maybe there is no March 2005 Congressional hearing on steroids, and Mark McGwire winds up sitting between Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn last month in Cooperstown, N.Y.

But let’s not forget that Canseco has an agenda, and knows what he has to do to keep himself relevant: Drop names, big names; and feed the insatiable public appetite for celebrity news. Jones should not have played along. It wasn’t fair to A-Rod, and it didn’t raise the more important institutional questions the Mitchell investigation had better answer.

E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com

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Good Guy Is Forgotten in Bad Week for Sports

By HARVEY ARATON

Published: July 31, 2007

In a little-noticed variation on a widely examined theme, a well-known sports figure stalked the authorities last week as opposed to the other way around. This time, a government played defense while the voice of the people was heard through the mouth of the athlete.

More than 42,000 signatures were delivered to the Chinese Embassy in Washington on behalf of an organization called the Save Darfur Coalition. He went to the front door. Put his finger to the bell.

“Yes?” a voice from the other side said.

“My name is Joey Cheek,” he said. “I am on the U.S. Olympic team. And I am here to deliver petitions that we have collected over the last week imploring China to continue to act strongly to protect the civilians in Darfur.”

That was last Thursday, when Michael Vick was in a Virginia courtroom, beginning his most vital scramble, trying to elude stomach-churning charges brought by federal prosecutors of sponsoring a dogfighting operation that a co-defendant said yesterday was mostly financed by Vick.

Cheek, the American speed skater who won the gold medal in the 500 meters at the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy, was holding his ground that day with a message — stop the slaughter in Sudan — to the host country of the next summer’s Olympics in Beijing.

“Only you can come in,” the embassy gatekeeper told Cheek, instructing the coalition members with him, along with a Darfuri refugee named Daoud Hari, to retreat.

Clutching thick binders with signatures collected around the United States, Cheek waited as five minutes became 10, 10 became 20, 20 became 30. Just leave them, one of his colleagues suggested.

Not yet, Cheek said, and after more than a half-hour, the front door opened. Into the lobby, to a brief audience with embassy officials, he went to make his drop and propose leading a group of American and Chinese athletes on a trip to Darfur, the violence-racked region of Sudan, a country with which China wields considerable economic clout.

“They didn’t dismiss it,” Cheek said in a telephone interview. “They seemed interested.”

Granted, the timing of his embassy mission wasn’t good, if attention was the desired goal — not in a week when professional sport on so many levels was reeking of malfeasance, from one side of the Atlantic to the other. But shame on us if we can’t take a few moments to applaud Cheek’s patience, conviction and cause.

Today, in this space, the now hounded quarterback Vick, the home run anti-hero Barry Bonds, the allegedly rogue N.B.A. ref, the chemically aided cyclists and even poor, misunderstood Michael Strahan must wait while Cheek explains why mixing politics and sport — specifically the international version — does not violate any sacred, time-honored code.

“The Chinese say, ‘Don’t politicize the Olympics,’ but that’s ridiculous,” Cheek said. “The only reason they wanted it was political, to prove they are a great power on the world stage.”

•

For the record, he does not support calls to boycott Beijing, only using the Games as leverage to move the Chinese government on Darfur. If his two Olympic experiences have taught him anything, it is that the Games — rampant commercialism and scandals notwithstanding — are as good a stage as any “to fight for an ideal that you believe in.”

More than his medals, Cheek is no doubt remembered for donating his 2006 Olympic prize money to a sport and humanitarian organization championed by Johann Olav Koss, the Norwegian speed-skating legend. For the standard post-Games period, Cheek was the face on the Wheaties box, America’s feel-good Olympian. He became a regular on the corporate speaking circuit, admittedly cashing in to fund a Princeton education he deferred for one year.

Retired from skating, Cheek resumed giving back, formed his own charitable campaign — called it “Where Will We Be?” — to galvanize Olympians and raise money to fund worthy causes.

He began by stepping onto the Darfur soapbox, but the more he learned about displacement and genocide, the more he couldn’t get off it. He spoke at a Washington rally with Barack Obama and Hollywood activists, targeting, in part, Bush Administration policy. He testified before Congress. He traveled to China, Egypt and the troubled area in Chad near its border with Sudan.

He would like to work with Ira Newble, the journeyman basketball player who last spring collected signatures from his Cleveland Cavaliers teammates on a letter to China protesting Darfur — absent, most notably, the young superstar, LeBron James.

“Most Olympians are nowhere near that level of fame,” Cheek said. “But if it’s a choice between standing up for something I believe in or not because I’m worried about celebrity or money, it’s a no-brainer.”

If only that were the rule, not the exception, a breath of fresh air in the dog days of an uncommonly depressing sports summer.

E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com

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