Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and the US

There’s an old saying you may have heard: “Soccer is the sport of the future, and has been for the past thirty years”. Many reasons are oft-offered as to why it will never truly catch on in the US in the same manner it is revered around the globe: Short attention spans, low scoring games (sometimes nil-nil!), uninterrupted forty-five minute halves which don’t fit American TV programming, the lack of residential soccer academies, the “Pay to Play” model common in our youth sports, and so much more. Most of these hypotheses are offered by foreigners or expats who usually start off by mocking us for calling it “Soccer” as opposed to “Football”, as it’s known elsewhere. All of these snarky observations fail to ignore the fact that over 23 million Americans now play the game, and the recent 2014 FIFA World Cup broadcasts broke all previous records for the sport in the US. One senses that the current international scorn for the state of professional soccer in the US is reminiscent of what the French wine industry thought of California wineries and their product back in the Seventies…

All this is being stated by way of an introduction to my main argument, which is: The success of American professional soccer is crucial for the sport worldwide, and all those diehard fans from England, Germany, Spain, Israel and everywhere else should pray for soccer to become one of the top spectator sports in America, and here’s why: FIFA is simply one of the most corrupt international agencies in existence. Moreover, as a federation of local associations it is an umbrella organization for dozens and dozens of shady, corrupt, manipulative and unsporting-like entities. Football is a notoriously unethical organized sport, with a never-ending world-wide litany of bribes, game-fixings, gambling scams and organized-crime ties. Witness the emerging epic scandal involving the award of the 2022 FIFA World Cup Tournament to Qatar, a nation not previously known for either its soccer prowess or even having a remotely hospitable climate, with summer temperatures routinely approaching 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Apparently massive bribes have been paid to dozens of officials to “throw” their vote Qatar’s way. And that’s just at the top. As you delve into this venal pyramid more and more stories emerge, on all levels of play, be it national teams or 4th-division semi-pros, as to the scope of the corruption that has permeated the sport.

Except in the USA.

We Americans tolerate a lot in professional sports: $13 watered-down cups of beer, leagues that refuse to be accountable for unacceptable personal-player behavior, college-athlete eligibility shenanigans, and franchises literally blackmailing municipalities into constructing private-use stadiums and arenas with public funds. But there is one thing that we do not, under any circumstance, accept, and that is corruption in how the game (any game) is played, officiated, and governed. American sports are, by and large, spotless, with no speck of corruption or smidgen of iniquity. In the rare few times when a sport’s integrity was compromised, authorities came down hard on the offenders, with lifetime bans, “death penalty” team dissolutions, and outright expulsions. Equate, if you will, the one-time “Black Sox” scandal from 1919 and the profound way it changed the way a major sport is governed, with the thousands and thousands of game-fixings that have gone on in worldwide soccer over the same time period, and the contrast will be crystal-clear.

So here’s the Feinstein Plan for restoring the honesty, dignity, and credibility of Association Football:

First, FIFA needs to own-up to its miscreant ways, cancel the Qatari games and revert them to the US for the 2022 World Cup. We have the facilities, infrastructure, and climate all in place, and, sans bribes, we would have won the bid to host anyhow.

Second, watch how America, as it cheers on its National team to the Final game (where it loses to Germany in Penalty Kicks) fully falls in love with the sport and becomes both FIFA’s largest audience and moral compass, setting the world standard for a clean sport and honest governance, with Ms. Mia Hamm appointed as the new international president of FIFA.

And last, recognize that the proper noun “Football” has been greatly tainted, except in America, and accordingly change the name of the international governing body to FISA: Fédération Internationale de Soccer Association.

It could happen.

Oh, it’s the season, all right

They’re ba-ack : Pumpkin pie, pumpkin bran muffins, largest-pumpkin contests at the State Fair, pumpkin spice caffè lattes at coffee shops, jack-o’-lanterns, catapults for pumpkin chunking, Pumpkin-flavored Coffee-Mate, pumpkin flax granola bars, Thomas pumpkin bagels, Ghirardelli pumpkin-cream chocolate, pumpkin ale, and the list goes on endlessly. No doubt we’ll soon see orange pumpkin-laced 87 octane fuel at participating gas stations…

Looks like Ichabod Crane wasn’t the last American to lose it over a pumpkin.

A Spike in the Park

A few years back I was scheduled to travel to Israel with my youngest son, Sam, on a sort of a Bar Mitzvah trip. The plan called for an eight hour layover at JFK airport, so I asked Sam if there was anything in particular he wanted to do while in the City, kind of hoping that he’d ask to spend a few hours at the Museum of Natural History. Imagine my surprise when he responded with “I want to go searching for iron spikes in Central Park.” So I asked him to explain:

In 1811, the Manhattan city fathers wisely decreed that henceforth the rest of the island will be laid out in a grid format, starting immediately north of Houston street, and running all the way up to 155^th St. A plan was drawn up, and surveyors were hired to mark out the new matrix. Where there were already buildings and streets, they simply marked the grid with white wooden markers, but in the undeveloped areas they used square iron spikes. However, in 1811 Central Park was but a gleam in Frederick Olmsted’s eye, with the initial part of the park not laid-out until 1857. According to the surveyor’s plans, the huge 800-plus acre expanse which is now Central Park was part of the intended street and avenue grid, and was marked accordingly. Over the years, as construction crept up the island, the iron spikes were pulled-out and discarded. But, since Central Part was spared being part of the grid, some spikes were rumored to survive.

So there we were, at nine in the morning on an early Spring day, trying to figure out where the original grid locations might have been. We decided, based on some information we had, to try and determine where Sixth Avenue and 66^th Street might have intersected, if the grid wouldn’t have been suspended at Central Park West Drive, where you rent those lovely carriages (that current New York City mayor Bill de Blasio is trying so hard to ban) for a ride through the park. Let me tell you, it ain’t easy. At that part of the park, not too far from the Zoo, the terrain isn’t level, and piles of glacial erratic boulders abound. We meandered about for the better part of an hour. I was peering at the ground when suddenly I heard a triumphant shout. There stood Sam, on top of a boulder pile, in a pose reminiscent of Sir Edmund Hillary summiting Everest, excitingly pointing to the square spike he’d found, marking the spot where two hundred years ago an unknown city worker had anticipated an intersection, flexed his biceps, and drove an iron bar into the Manhattan rock.

Three things

The three things that I’ve never been quite able to grasp but would have loved to be knowledgable about are pitching, wine, and Jazz.

Yiddish on Mars

It’s getting busy on the celestial highways leading to the Red Planet. First, there’s the ongoing Mars One mission, currently under preparations to send its first crew there in 2024. Then we have the two rovers, Opportunity and Curiosity, the former breaking all records and expectations, turning a planned ninety-day mission into a ten-year trek over 25 miles of Martian soil. Lastly, looking down on it are five orbiters: Mars Odyssey, Mars Express (run by the European Space Agency), Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Orbiter Mission (from the Indian Space Research Organization, who obviously also wanted to get in the game) and the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission, which NASA, with its endearing obsession with acronyms, named MAVEN (They really love their acronyms: on board the International Space Station one exercises using the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill, or COLBERT, named for the TV personality Stephen Colbert who overwhelmingly won a naming contest).

MAVEN, which almost didn’t get off the ground (literally) courtesy of the 2013 government shutdown, has recently made it safely to its proper place in Martian orbit, and is starting to send back valuable data about Mars’ atmosphere. Now that the red dust has settled, we can address the more important issue at hand, namely the naming of the mission:

Maven is a time honored Yiddish word. Originating from the Hebrew for “One who understands” and pronounced “MAY-vin” it is used to describe a person who is an expert on a particular subject matter. One becomes a maven not through their education or credentials, but rather through the acceptance, respect, and deference by others. The late New York Times journalist William Safire was famously styled as a “language maven”, thanks to his enormously important and entertaining Sunday column “On Language”. Not to be confused, say, with Bob Dylan’s “Self-Ordained Professors” (My Back Pages), a true maven becomes one by acclimation and acceptance from the laity, that is to say us mere mortals who are not versed in the nuances of the best vacation spots in Tuscany, the proper way to store an aged cognac, or how Bill Belichick would benefit from benching Tom Brady. A true Maven is the go-to authority and typically has the final word on their area of expertise.

In more recent years the word has enjoyed a renaissance of sorts, with Malcolm Gladwell (he of the “Tipping Point” fame) repurposing the word to denote what he called “intense gatherers of information”, usually in the context of the Internet, thus becoming influencers and thought-leaders to their followers.

So kudos to NASA for conjuring-up such a wonderful acronym and placing a bit of the mama-loshen (mother language) up in the heavens above. Let us all wish MAVEN a long, rich life gathering useful information about Mars, on its journey to becoming a true scientific Maven.

The Last Troubadour?

A few weeks ago the Canadian poet, novelist, singer/songwriter, Zen Buddhist monk and all-around nice guy Leonard Cohen turned 80. A couple of days later his latest album, “Popular Positions”, was released. Cohen is one of the most remarkable singers to ever grace a stage, and his journey to-date is nothing short of fascinating.

Born in 1934, Cohen was gaining fame as an up-and-coming poet and novelist. In the late Sixties he started writing songs (“Suzanne” is probably the best-known one from that era). His first record (remember those?) came out in ’67, when he was thirty-three years old, which most would agree is somewhat late in life for a recording artist’s debut. Over the years he’s done it all: participated in two wars in Israel, lived on a secluded Greek island for several years, spent five years in a Buddhist monastery on Mt. Baldy in California becoming an ordained monk, and appeared on Miami Vice, just to name a few of his diverse escapades. All the while Cohen wrote hundreds of songs or, more accurately, poetry which he had set to music. The very long list includes classics such as “Famous Blue Raincoat”, “Sisters of Mercy”, “So Long, Marianne”, “Bird on a Wire”, “First, We Take Manhattan”, “Dance Me to the End of Love”, “Joan of Arc”, “Waiting for the Miracle”, and his most famous song, which was covered by more than two hundred different artists over the years, “Hallelujah”. His songs are usually introspective and deal with universal themes such as love, sex, religion and politics. An observant Jew, born to an Orthodox family, Cohen maintains in his writing Judaic phrases and references to scripture and rituals. And then there’s his voice.

He started out as a baritone, and over the years, the cigarettes and “Ten thousand bottles of Scotch” (as he once told Terry Gross of NPR’s “Fresh Air”) it has evolved into an earth-shaking basso profundo that makes each word that he utters sound as if it comes from Mt. Sinai itself. And many of them do. In a show in Tel Aviv he decided to invoke his birthright as a descendant of Aaron, and bless the audience, in Hebrew, with the Priestly Benediction…

About seven years ago, after a fifteen year sojourn from touring, he unfortunately discovered that his long-time manager had embezzled funds and essentially spent all of his money, including his retirement accounts. At age 73 he was broke, so he went on tour again, with the intent of simply replenishing his coffers. What actually occurred was simply spectacular: The world fell in love with him. Leonard Cohen criss-crossed the globe, always in his impeccable suits (his father was in the clothing business) and wearing his trademark fedora, and blew away audiences in dozens and dozens of cities worldwide. His typical show ran three hours or more, not a single song was ever presented abridged and no medleys were performed. I was fortunate enough to see him when he came to Durham and it was truly the best concert I had ever attended. Out of respect for the man and the songs I wore a suit, tie, and fedora, only to find out that many men in the audience had done the same. His mojo fully restored, in his eighth decade he recorded two albums of new material and was inducted into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame, where he stated in his acceptance comments “I’m reminded of the prophetic statement of Jon Landau, [noted rock critic present in the audience] in the early Seventies he said “I have seen the future of Rock n’ Roll, and it is not Leonard Cohen”.

Witty, humble, warm, wise, Leonard Cohen continues to charm, inspire, and downright awe his many fans all over the world. In his inimitable self-deprecating ways he quoted from his own song as his acceptance speech:

“Well my friends are gone and my hair is grey,
I ache in the places where I used to play,
And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on.
I’m just paying my rent every day in the Tower of Song.”

May he enjoy a long, healthy life, and continue to bless us with the gift of his poetry and music.

Enough is enough

In the weeks leading up to this year’s High Holy Days I had frequented multiple restaurants, shops, supermarkets, service providers, schools, and even one government office. Not a single person in any of these locations wished me a Happy New Year. I hope that Fox TV reports soon about this blatant and coordinated war on Rosh Hashanah… Happy 5775, all!