The squeaky-pulley-ed rope holding the paper target I’d just shot at couldn’t come back to my camp counselor fast enough for me, at the shooting range at the New Hampshire camp named Pemigewassett, named, no doubt, for a tribe that my tribe had extinguished with single-shot rifles more than two centuries earlier. (Our rival camp? Tecumseh). As if I cared.

All I cared about was that I knew I’d squeezed off a shot with my single-shot .22 that had felt very, very accurate. As instructed, my form had been perfect: splayed prone with my right leg straight back behind me, my left cocked off at 45 degrees. My elbows were perfectly spaced, my hands steady, the stock secure but not tight against my shoulder, my trigger finger not anxious, but confident and rhythmic.

I wasn’t much of an athlete in the other sports. And I liked that, in this first week of summer camp,  the rifle felt like an extension of me. I didn’t know if it meant I was any kind of athlete  - or even a sportsman–  but I knew I was good at shooting.

I carefully lay the gun down, and waited for the counselor to unclip the target. I don’t know if he smiled or not before handing it to me.

Bulls eye. Whatever this meant, I could shoot a gun.

Three single-shot rifles have killed people around the country recently, all involving rifles wielded by children. All three happened because felonious parents, imbibing parents, or both kinds of parents left the rifles loaded within reach of children.

In the case of the killing of a 2-year-girl by a 5-year old in Burkesville Kentucky, the death involved a rifle made for and marketed for use by young children.

Burkesville, in the southeastern corner of the Appalachians, at the bottom of the state, in Cumberland County, near the Tennessee border, sits on the banks of the Cumberland River. Sold by the Iroquois in 1786, a century later it was a major civil-war battle site, involving not only the Union and Confederacy, but a Confederate sympathizer guerilla named Champ Ferguson who routinely went beyond the pale, war-ethics-wise, but was never subject to Confederate discipline. The last courthouse burned by Confederates during a rampage in 1864 was Burkesville’s. I’m assuming that back then, lots of people had single-shot rifles in their cabins.

Today, the average per capita household income in Burkesville is a little over $17,000. No commercial boats ply the river. Wiki lists no industry or economic base for either the town of the county, but lumbering by international companies provides some income.

Today The New York Times ran a dispatch from Burkesville written by a very good reporter, who, as seldom happens with the usual Times socio-anthropological effort, came back with virtually nothing. Burkesville doesn’t want to be part of a “trend”.

I don’t blame them. Whenever, say, David Brooks starts talking about “trends” (red v. blue, Bobos vs….was it Bozos?) I walk/read the other way.

The other killings? I have no clue what was happening outside Nashville, when a kid shot a sheriff’s wife at a cookout, or in New Jersey, where a kid shot his little sister.

But as for Burkesville? As no historian of the southern Appalachian Range, I can only surmise. But I’m going to guess that deer, possum and squirrel have been an ongoing source of protein for a very long time in a part of the nation that now lies in the ninth percentile of per-household economy in the United State of America (from the bottom).

And I’m going to even surmise that the county’s ranking is not because the parents are lazy. I’m going to guess that, absent much chance of succeeding in the America you and I enjoy every day, families in Burkesville want their tribe, no matter what you and I might think of it, politically or otherwise, to survive. And that to hunt mammals in the woods, bows and arrows will largely be ineffective for children. And in Cumberland County, I am going to guess, if everyone in the family knows how to hunt for food, your tribe lessens its chances of becoming extinct.

If you were living in abject poverty, and the New York Times and a German film crew came down to cover a local two-year-old girl’s funeral, would you be justified in punching the film crew after the funeral, as two men did? Got me. What do I know?

But if The Times came in, got nothing from the locals to adhere to your thesis, and photographed the trailer where the dead girl lived, and then wrote that the father “shoed horses” and that “The death has convulsed this rural community…where everyone seems to know the extended Sparks family” (subtext: “inbreeding”) would you be justified in being angry? Yes.

Some years ago, I attended the annual Knob Creek machine-gun festival in West Point, Kentucky, up at the top of the state, just south of Louisville. Every year folks with fully-automatic machine guns, whose manufacture is no longer legal for private use, assemble in a hollow to see people shoot off and display those that are legal. At the one I attended, a guy in the grandstands wore a tee-shirt with a picture of Adolf Hitler accompanied by the slogan, “I’m coming back, and next time, no more Mr. Nice Guy.”

I was privileged to shoot three guns. The Uzi was scary because the damned thing was so light, the bullets flew just about everywhere. The semi-automatic currently for sale at Gander Mountain? Where each trigger-squeeze vaults a round? Much easier to aim. The water-cooled tri-pod-mounted Winchester from World War One, where you could just slowly and steadily scrape the horizon with .30-caliber bullets that could kill 30 enemies in 30 seconds? A breeze. I want no part of any of them. I want them melted and turned into some sort of energy that can help people who live in, say, impoverished counties that need power.

I think back to my rifle at Camp Pemigewassett. Did I have the slightest notion I was wielding an instrument of death that morning? Human or forest-mammalian? Nope. I did know that I had to go to soccer in the next “athletic period.” After that, Arts & Crafts, where I’d have to a flying duck out of wood using a band saw, which scared me to death. Damned if I was going to lose a finger to a band-saw.

All that I am suggesting, clearly against a hurricane-force wind, is that that to concentrate on regulating guns without considering context is as silly as arguing against large sodas for a city of millions, some of whom can’t afford Pellegrino.

Semi-autos? Ban them for the private sector. Background checks for a parent who buys a kid rifle for his son? Including a single DUI? Absolutely.

But until we decide that the people of Burkesville, Kentucky, deserve better than being afterthoughts for the wealthiest people in the nation, well, when it comes to teaching your kid how to hunt…I’m ready to listen.

Last year, our 30th marriage-wise, happened to coincide with our Third Annual Bah Humbug Anti-Christmas road trip to Miami. The kids are gone, and holidays had always been a tad insanely pressured anyway, so Melissa and I had gotten into this habit of taking back-road road trips South, ending in a Miami hotel or rented apartment for a week, with beach and wine and the high life at our near beckon…

…But we’d come to learn by this last Christmas that the odyssey was mostly highlighted by the road detours to completely integrated-&-friendly diners in a backwoods railroad town in South Carolina; an astounding 4-star restaurant in a mini-mall outside of Asheville; peanut and cheerleader museums. You get the idea: a whole lot more authentic than Miami Beach, which was a mangrove swamp until the Army Corps of Engineers decimated some Carribbean island by stealing all of its sand and creating a soundstage to launch Jackie Gleason’s career. (Bushwick:  Just Google it. He was Big.)

Last year, on our way back north, we pulled off, lured for some unknown reason, into a village named Darien, at the bottom of the state of Georgia, an hour south of Savannah, an art-foodie-town, and an hour north of Jacksonville, a proud rebel city. Darien’s roots were some 400 years old. Its tiny village center, about 100 feet from sunglint-ey marshes with amazing reeds, with the actual ocean somewhere within canoe-navigable distance, but no Big Boats nor marinas in sight, featured, on street after street, century-old cottages, and, in the air, the funky scent of a kind of nature that I, a deciduously-trained arborealist of New England, had never enjoyed. Although…now I was.

It also had a cool coffee shop, and a wine store/locavore food boutique. And, walking on some of the shadier streets, tattooed hoodied kids, like my own son. This last detail, in particular, provided a sense of having randomly stumbled across a strange home away from home.

When we got home I found a local Darien realtor, and asked her to send us available properties. And now, every morning, when we awake and immediately turn on our communicator machines (mine a MacBook Air, hers an I-something) after finding out all the horrible news of what happened globally overnight, we then open the daily Darien dispatch: a home for sale on the tidal coast in a state that no rational person would ever consider visiting.

Not to mention the weekly notices from the Darien wine/food store about new wine, new food, new festivals. Which never failed to dissuade my aging, logical WASPean NYC mind.

Then, this morning, there was this daily posting from our Darien realtor , and damned if I didn’t feel, well, like fantasy was infringing upon possible reality. Out the backyard of the acre: your own warped dock distancing into magically unknown marshes and rivers. Nothing else human is sight. A small house, on one acre, with old Southern-ey trees, though they seem pretty, um, permanent to me. A separate studio building…wherein, if I spent most of the day and part of the night in it, writing foolish musings, our marriage might survive another 30 years. (And, yeah, the whole goddamned property for so little money that you’d just laugh out loud if I cited it.)

Of course, we won’t buy it. That’d be insane — not when, every morning, we can wake up to that funny little _actual_ Conde Nast Traveler life, on our screens, and dream for a few minutes, and then get back to this one, wherein, after decades of being comfortably media-ish, we live within a rail commute of Midtown, and have wonderful friends. Which works just fine.

Unless…Oh, come on.

When can anyone honestly start over?

But what if, as you enter Act III, you can?

Just askin’.

In real-business-land if someone mismanages a Cumby franchise into the ground by serving hot-dogs made of Labrador scraps and selling Little Debby cupcakes past their shelf-life date, the 7-Eleven across the street doesn’t snatch him up. If Paul Reiser’s show gets cancelled after two episodes by NBC, Comedy Central doesn’t grab him to write Stewart’s jokes.

In BigSport, if someone proves unable to command a billion-dollar sports corporation for the fourth time, and gets fired for incompetence, does a competing franchise hire him? Eventually, yes. How else to explain Doug Collins? Your next coach, sooner or later?

Yes, he “retired,” to spend more “time with his family.” At least he didn’t say, “I had car trouble.” No, owner Joshua Harris insists, Collins wasn’t pushed into a five-year consultancy gig after agreeing to accept the $4.5 million he was contractually due for next year, which would have been his fourth year, which is a year that, as a coach, Collins has never reached.

“I think I’ve done a lot of good things for this organization,” Collins said. “This organization is all I know. It’s all I’ll ever know. I’m going to be a Sixer for life,” or until the Timberwolves or the Magic call him to jumpstart the franchise before burning it out because Larry Brown isn’t yet available and Billy Martin never will be: “He’s just right for this team,” some Silicon Valley dude will say. “Hey, Collins took three of his four teams to the playoffs….” in a league where, if your coach is actually a good, innovative, savvy basketball guy, making the playoffs is as difficult as getting a reservation at Arby’s.

This was Collins’ fourth gig. Let’s start at the beginning. Hired by Jerry Krause in Chicago to staunch the Stan Albeck bleeding, within two years Collins’ Bulls team won 50 games. By the end of his third year, en route to losing to the Pistons in the playoffs with Michael Jordan, according to beat writer Sam Smith in the July 9, 1989 edition of the Chicago Tribune, Bull owner Jerry Reinsdorf and Krause saw a coach “breaking down in his office…players plotting to cause the coach an embarrassment that night get him fired…staff being splintered apart by his egoism…burning the candle at both ends…given to excess in his lifestyle off the floor…abus(ing) players during games with loud accusations and streams of epithets…aimed at the stands….creating new plays daily.” Also, Reinsdorf really didn’t like it when Collins intimated that he wanted to be the GM, too. When he already answered to one.

After being fired, he collected on the final year of his contract.

Six years later, Piston owner William Davidson, CEO of his family’s glass company, which had been sued six times and once had to settle with a competitor for $40 million for stealing fiberglass technology, decided that Doug Collins would put a jolt into the lethargic Grant Hill-led Pistons. In Collins’ first year, he was swept in the first round. But, as would become the pattern, the next year the Pistons went 54-28. Attendance at The Palace in Auburn was fourth in the league. They lost in the first round to The Cavs.

The next year, Collins was gone after 55 games, in part according to a wire-service report, because “his leadership style rubbed many players the wrong way…. Collins’ players reportedly tired of him, contending his intense, emotional style no longer was effective.” Reportedly, another factor had been Collins’ asking for a renegotiation of his contract after that second season.

The next stop, six years later, was Wizards (isn’t that, like a KKK rank?) owner Abe Pollin allowed Michael Jordan, a part owner of the team, to become president and player, and hired Collins to coach his collapsing supernova of a formerstar: the coach who, many years earlier, had led Michael to…no rings. Those two seasons in Washington brought identical 37-45 records. Doug was gone and Jordan went on to become, I think, the least successful owner of a pro basketball team in modern history. (I haven’t combed the pre-Korean War records of the Basketball Association of America.)

Six years later, it was the Sixers,under Comcast’s aegis, who needed Collins’ booster cables; Comcast brought him on because, damn, he’d always been so charismatic on television. And the pattern repeated. In the second year, after the team was sold to a buyout specialist named Joshua Harris, with a roster of names largely recognizable to eleven people outside of their families, Collins took the team to seven games in the Eastern semis against the Celtics.

Then his team traded for Andrew Bynum. Without knowing that he’d had offseason knee surgery in Germany. Collins’ role in said ignorance? Only that, according to Philly writers, he was the “de facto” GM. Bynum didn’t play, and Doug didn’t win, and, well you see where we’re going with this. By April, the press said that Collins was going to be out, but you could have maybe seen it all coming when, the previous November, the employee of Harris, a Harvard MBA owner who’d gotten his foot in the Money Biz in “private equity trading” – see “algorithms — when he was questioned about whether he was an “analytics guy,” said “No. If I did that, I’d blow my brains out,” There’s 20-page printouts after every game - I would kill myself.” Then Collins pointed to his head. “My analytics are here.” And then to the place above the waistband of his Sixers sweat suit – “and here” – meaning, his, like gut.

Good coaches patch together teams which lose their stars (see Phil Jackson sans Jordan, 55 wins). Bad coaches burn themselves out while they’re burning themselves out. Tightly-wound good/bad coaches win in the process (RIP, Billy).

Really bad sports corporations, run by men trapped in the old Profit Formula wherein if you fear losing more than you lust for winning, look at the most available hamster wheel for leadership.

So I hope Doug has a great family life for the foreseeable future. I can’t wait to see him sitting in front of Michael in Charlotte in a few years…for, at most, 2 1/2 years. But, of course, a great deal wealthier…if not the best of teachers.

As a fan of the Knicks ever since Phil Jackson donned a uniform, I really, really, really, really, really hope that @TheRealLJ2 is not the real Larry Johnson, former Hornet, former Knick, even though there’s nothing to indicate on his Twitter site that he isn’t. Photographs of the real LJ, and his wife, and pictures of Knicks, and running commentary on Knick games, and the Tweeter’s photo being a shot of Larry Johnson as a Knick — all of it indicates that if the tweeter isn’t the real Larry Johnson, @TheReaqlLJ2 is an incredibly deft and savvy LJ impersonator.
I do not hope that this is a fake site because in the last two days he has tweeted, albeit sort of ungrammatically (these are legit transcriptions): “homosexuality is nothing to fear, I don’t think it belongs in a mans locker room”; “I’m attracted to women,is it ok for me to walk around a women’s locker room naked, and they be naked”; “I don’t Jason Collins personally but he seems like a great guy. Me personally gay men in the locked room would make me uncomfortable”; “Ppl ! this is nothing against Jason or homosexual’s,all I’m saying is this don’t belong in a man’s locker room”, and “I don’t judge anyone!! I have fallen short of the grace of Allah myself, but stop trying to make this acceptable.” (That one got 12 retweets.)
On the Wikipedia site for Larry Johnson the former Knick (“This article may contain wording that promotes that promoted the subject in a subjective manner without imparting real information”) I discovered that LJ has recently converted to Islam. The Twitter site includes a posting about how bad it is to eat pork, which, well, it probably is, but, IMHO, not for religious reasons.
The Wiki site makes no mention of the fact that LJ reportedly sired five children by four different women. It does say he once signed a contract with the Charlotte Hornets for $84 million, which at that point was a record-breaker, and appeared in an episode of Family Matters. But none of that is really relevant to my point, I guess.
To be clear: If the tweeter is the real Larry Johnson, he has every constitutional right to air his assertions, although they seem a tad, um, dumb, because they seem to infer that a) when someone sees someone naked, the sight of said nudity is automatically arousing (he has apparently never been to the linemen’s corner in an NFL locker room, or the pitcher’s corner in an MLB locker room); b) that unlike heterosexual men, whose lives comprise balanced appetites, gay men think sex is the be-all and end-all to life, and that the sight of a genital would make them start frothing at the mouth, and quite likely be unable to pounce upon the possessor of said genital; c) a real “man,” who should be the sole occupant of the inner sanctum of a locker room, is defined as a man capable of impregnating any woman who crosses his radar.
No, to be clear: What worries me, and not just as a Knick fan, is that the team’s website, as of 4/30/13, lists as “Business and Organization Representative” a man named Larry Johnson. And that the Wiki site mentioned that Johnson was now occupying said position. And that whatever that job title actually means, the word “Representative” implies that he is representing to someone, presumably outside of that manly locker room, The New York Knickerbockers.
I may be alone here, but, given recent occurrences, I do not think that he should be representing a basketball team when we seem to be taking the first steps toward turning a very important corner, gender-preference-in-sports-wise. Turning that corner may take decades, and it’s going to be like walking into a hurricane wind, but it’s sort of dumb for a team to be represented by a – excuse my German – Neanderthal. But that’s only if the tweeter is the man.
This morning, always (and probably deleteriously to my own career advancement) having followed the Hippocratic Oath (“First, Do No Harm),” I e-mailed the Knick PR guy and apprised him of the circumstances.
He answered with one word: “Thanks.”
He did not say whether @TheRealLJ2 was Larry Johnson, but then, I hadn’t asked him. I wanted to be, like, a person first, and not a journalist. (Plus, as a journakist, who wants to piss off the PR guys if you need access for your next book?) And I figured that this was the first he’d heard of the situation.
And I really, really, really, really. really want to be believe that the tweeter isn’t the man we knew so humorously as “Grandmamma” in those Converse commercials. Even if I can’t help wondering whether the real LJ knows the grandmammas of those five kids.
So please, Knicks: Track down this imitator, threaten him with a lawsuit, and end this farce. Your “Representative” should not be saddled by the specter of an ignorant imitator haunting your employee. You’re having too cool a season to have an albatross like that hanging around your neck.

I’ve always been fascinated by the televised first round pick-parade of the NFL draft, not only because The New York Giants are my religion (and yes, literally, they are) but because Day One of “The Selection Process” offers such a great through-the-looking-glass, Bizarro-world take on American history, wherein the newly-acquired human is paraded out for inspection for the largely Caucasian audience after being sold to the master, only at that point, it’s the meat that’s just scored the millions, guaranteed, and it’s The Man who paid it ,in prayer that his new product might restore some luster to a foundering franchise. (Especially if, as of 4/25, you’re Browns owner Jimmy Haslam, now under a very serious federal fraud charge investigation because your truck-stop company has been charged with ripping off Hispanics, and it’s looking grim for the Clevelanders, even though, IMHO, his Pilot-Flying J franchise at Exit 153 off I-40 in Albuquerque serves the best chicken-friend steak in the lower 48.)
Entertainment-wise, though, the problem with The Draft used to be that, despite the efforts of the World Wide Leader (that’d be ESPN to the infidels), it was all generally as thrilling as watching the woman in the hairnet slice your half-pound of the half-off turkey loaf behind the deli counter. Plus which Mel Kiper’s hair had gotten so weird that you could literally go to any of the Eastern European shoe-shine people at Eddie’s in Grand Central and say, “I’d like my shoes to be the same color as Mel Kiper’s hair, only more accurate in their draft predictions,” and they instantly knew what you were referring to, even if they were women from Kazakhstan.
But now, thanks to the ESPN/NFL marketing combine, the First Few Hours of the Draft are nothing less than American Theater – Kabuki Theater, perhaps, but Theater nonetheless. I know that this is true because it all happens on a Thursday, which, when I was younger, used to be a day in the week, football-wise, like David Byrne’s Heaven, where Nothing Ever Happened. But then, because pro football got so big that a single day (Sunday) or two (add Monday) or three (add Saturday) weren’t enough to rein The Game in, Thursday became a day of weird reverence: a day when a) the season started, and, b) games were now weirdly being played, and then, now c) since the draft was worthy of being a three-day event, like a Phish festival at an abandoned air force base, it would begin on Holy Thursday.
This year, I turned to ESPN at 5, three hours before the first pick of the Kansas City Chiefs, about whom I knew little other than they were really bad, because if the whole thing started three hours early, that meant that The First Round of The Draft had become something like the Oscars, without the Red Carpet. So for the first time in my life I bought some wings from a chain wing place and hunkered down at 5, and turned on the television to see a big desk, where a man named (supposedly) Trey Wingo kicked off this evening of import by announcing his fellow panelists: “The Commander-in-Chief,” an old guy I didn’t recognize who turned out to be an out-of-work former general manager; Keyshawn Johnson, an out of-work wide receiver with all the charm of a bored Audi dealer; Cris Carter, a very smart man, and Tom Jackson, who acts like someone named Tom Jackson would.
The first thing I heard was Jackson saying that defensive ends would be in high demand: “These kids know where the money is: it’s in getting the passer.” That was at eight minutes after five. I turned off the television and went away for two hours and 22 minutes.
Then, at 7:30, I came back to the television to see a most unholy trio sitting at huge desk in Radio City Music Hall, the most beautiful Deco theater in the world, which felt sacriligious: Chris Berman, who would be my favorite carnival barker luring me into the snake-woman tent if I liked carnivals, and whose own hair-color now reminds me of that fake peat soil they put in the gardens of Applebee’s in Lawrence, Kansas; Scary Jon Gruden, who has now turned into a caricature of the doll and actually looks as if he were a true homicidal maniac with that grin that you see on those ads on your Facebook screen that say, “Want to See Who’s Been arrested in your neighborhood?”, and Kiper, who, stunningly, is still employed.
Then it got weirder than I even imagined it could be. Thirty minutes before anyone was actually “selected”, 22 guys called “top prospects” were marched one by one onto the stage, before they’d actually been picked, announced by name by a guy whose voice was like Satan imitating Michael Buffer. What if they actually weren’t picked in the first round, or, until, even the bottom of the second or third? Not possible. So were they all going to be first-rounders, which means it was fixed? I didn’t care, as long as the Giants got one of them.
But when I learned that this pre-draft half-hour was sponsored by something called “IShares in Blackrock,” which sounded as if it were a secret message to rich people trying to invest in mercenaries, I had no further questions. Of course the corporate fix was in. Cool, as long as we got one of those 22, all of whom were dressed very well.
Then, to kill time, Chris Berman started to talk about Mante T’eo, but only so that he could reveal that he himself had spent “a lot of time in Hawaii” in the offseason. I was very happy for him, having myself spent all of my offseason wondering whether the snow on the roof was so deep the house might sink.
Then two new talking heads came onto the screen: Chris Mortensen, who looks like a real person who loves the game of football, looking really unhappy when someone named Adam Shefter, who doesn’t, was talking next to him. With fifteen minutes still open before Pick One, I went outside and planted a black currant bush I’d bought earlier in the day because even if it matures, unlike Berman, Gruden and Kiper, it won’t talk or dye the color of its fruit.

At 8:03 p.m. Roger Goodell walked onto the stage where Bernstein, Sinatra, Yo Yo Ma and many women with really long legs had performed, when the draft was supposed to actually begin, but instead introduced Joe Namath and Phil Simms, who were there to talk about the Super Bowl in New York next year. This advertorial was not really needed, given that trying to sell the Super Bowl to football fans is like trying to sell the heat of the sun to homo sapiens. Then, finally, it began. I reached for the wings and the wine. Okay…yes, I was ready for some, um, football.
At 8:07 EST, Goodell said the Kansas City Chiefs were on “the clock” and, the show was on. The Chiefs chose Eric Fisher, a left tackle from a college called Central Michigan. Berman said that Fisher was from “a blue-collar family,” wherein Gruden quickly picked up on the story line and said, “This is what America’s all about. This is a great night for me. I like seeing nights like this,” at which point I realized that I was not simply watching irrelevant entertainment; I was watching the unfolding of an American dramatic story-line as vivid and important as the dramas of Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and William Faulkner. This was an evening when sport would no longer subsume itself to folly. In the greatest performance space in New York City, the drama of America was now unfolding. And all I cared about was linebackers? I was so missing the point.
At 8;24, after a commercial for…ESPN?… the Jaguars took another offensive left tackle named Luke Joeckel from Texas A&M. He was very big. At 8:34, the Dolphins traded up to third took Dion Jordan, a defensive end from Oregon. The cameras showed Dion talking on a phone with a piggy-curly-tail-wired land line circa Mad Men, which isn’t all that surprising in a league that uses faxes. Gruden said he was shocked because the guy was “narrow.” Gruden then said that Dion “made a lot of money rushing off the edge,” even though, to my knowledge he’d not actually made any money making football yet, at least, not legally.
Then the Eagles chose Lane Johnson, a tackle from Oklahoma. He had a buzz cut. Kiper said that this was “an amazing turn of events,” right after Johnson hugged a guy on camera who had suspenders and was wearing a black cowboy hat, and I never found out whether that was the thing that was amazing. Now it was Detroit’s turn, and since Detroit needs love, I paid strict attention, especially when Barry Sanders came out to announce the pick!…until Goodell announced that Barry Sanders was out there not because the city lost 2/3 of its population in the last few years, but because Barry was selling NFL Madden 25.
The Lions chose Ezekiel Ansah, a guy from Ghana who went to BYU. Berman called him Ziggy, like he was a pal, and said he was “a natural athlete”. Kiper said “Ziggy” had “a mean streak’”, which seemed wrong for someone from a Mormon university, but maybe BYU doesn’t always accept students for their belief in Joseph Smith’s Golden Plates. Then Suzy Kolber interviewed him, and after Ansah spoke appropriate quotes about winning The Super Bowl, Suzy said, “Well said,” which seemed to mean that she had ascertained that Ziggy was, you know, smart and articulate.
The Browns then took Barkevious Mingo out of LSU. “I like what Cleveland just did,” Gruden said, which made me happy for Cleveland, to know that Jon Gruden approves of what they did.
Berman then said we’d see what was “going to happen in the desert,” although it turned out the next pick was the Cardinals, who, in Phoenix, are as near the desert as Brooklyn is to The Catskills. They took a guard from North Carolina named Jonathan Cooper. Gruden said, “He’s a finisher,” which I assumed referred to the fact that it took him five years to finish at UNC.
But now it got really exciting, when St. Louis traded up to get the Buffalo pick, The Rams took Tavon Austin from West Virginia. Gruden said, he could “stretch the field vertically,” which is nothing, really, less than super human (“Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! Able to stretch a football field vertically!”)
The Jets were next. Berman said they were in “a big rebuild: There’s no other way to say it,” although there were lots of other ways to say it, and more grammatically. “They have to get a lot of better players” would have been one. They took Dee Milliner, a DB from Alabama. Jon, very excited, said he was a “football-savvy” guy who was also a “tackler,” all of which sounded really good if he were going to be paid to play football
Tennessee would choose next. I was excited because it meant that, after this pick, we’d be more than halfway to the Giants, and it was only 9:23. The Titans took Chance Warmack, an Alabama guard. I guess he isn’t fast, because Gruden said, “If you don’t like 40-yard dash times in guards then don’t time your guards in the 40-yard dash,” so I vowed to never again do so.
The Chargers were next. They took (“with the 11th pick in the 2013 NFL draft,” Goodell said, as opposed to the 1962 AFL draft,) D.J. Fluker, the Alabama tackle. Kiper said that Fluker’s performance against LSU “had made him a lot of money.” Oakland was next. Gruden said, “They need players,” which immediately explained why the Raiders hadn’t been successful of late: They didn’t have enough players. They took one. I think they should have been allowed to take two.
Then Sal Palantonio, analyzing the next pick, again the Jets’, used the word “adverse” when he should have used “averse” so I stopped listening. Gruden said that the potential next pick, a quarterback, “had lost his fundamentals” after five games the season before, which couldn’t be good, because wouldn’t that mean he couldn’t run, or pass, or maybe even stand up? They took a defensive tackle who Gruden said wasn’t really a “true offensive tackle,” which might open them up to fraud..
The Panthers took Star Lotulelei. A defensive tackle from Utah whom maybe is a Morman, The Saints took a safety who, Gruden said, had “ physical presence,” which I had assumed was sort of a thing any football player needed. But what did I know? What good would a metaphysical presence be?
Buffalo came in now, the only New York state team in the NFL, and since they had traded Ryan Fitzpatrick, Jon Gruden said their new coach Dough Marone was probably “having his guts ripped out,” and was “torn in half,” presumably because he didn’t know who to pick, or a Zeus had descended as an eagle to punish him for something in a past life . He took E.J. Manuel, Florida State’s quarterback. They took a lot of pictures of him holding a Bills’ jersey with his name already stitched on it by a really agile seamstress. He was the first one to thank his mom, and so I am now his biggest fan.
The Steelers took someone about whom Kiper said that all he did behind the line of scrimmage was “wreak havoc.” The Forty-Niners took Eric Reid, a defensive back from LSU. Mel said, “He had a 40 ½ vertical,”
Now it was only 10:15, and it was my time. I was Tangled Up In Blue. I put the cheese popcorn aside, poured another glass of semillion blend, and settled in.
Then ESPN cut to a commercial for Dairy Queen’s “5-buck lunch”. And another for Holiday Inn Express. Then State Farm. Then Best Buy. Then the Dairy Queen one again. Then one for…the NFL draft I was missing.

Then they were back in Radio City Music Hall. “With the 19th pick in the 2013 NFL draft,” said the blond man, “The New York Giants take Justin Pugh, tackle, Syracuse.” “He’s an athlete,” said Gruden. I didn’t care about the rest of the picks, so I finished my wine and turned off the television, secure in the knowledge that even if our choice couldn’t wreak vertical havoc, and hadn’t made Jon Gruden happy, at least we hadn’t drafted, say a librarian.

I’m told that a photograph from The Boston Massacre already is being circulated to news sources depicting someone with a leg blown off. I was told of the photograph of the missing leg by a friend named Lamar Graham who, as editor-in-chief of nj.com, the state’s largest news disseminator, told me that he’d refused to run it, which confirms what I’ve known for a couple of decades now: that Lamar is a great journalist.

Disaster coverage, wherein the disaster has taken and maimed human life, is, for the responsible journalist, the most horned dilemma of all. Do I do my best at what I have been hired to do — be the neon lens onto the scene, wherein the more vivid the detail, the more compelling the tale? — or do I act as the best human being I can be, wherein that lens must have filters? (That was a loaded question. Next time Lamar gives a seminar on how to run a website, I’m going to be there.)

Because here’s the thing: bad news – whether its nature is disaster or gore or geek – is not to be defined as an event to be weighed by our ability to be transfixed by it. It happened independent of our need to be fascinated by it. It has a context. And, of course, disaster and death have the hugest context of all.

This is nothing more than an open plea to any journalist in Boston over the next few days, with her or his “boots on the ground,” entrusted to bring us facts: weigh your words and images very carefully. Please.

Many, many years ago I covered a plane crash which killed everyone on board the plane. Eager reporter that I was, and schooled in the “Get the story first and best!” school , with half the gaping, wounded fuselage still on fire in a field I slipped through some police tape into the field, and hooked up with a couple of coroner’s deputies planting little plastic flags in the ground where they saw evidence, and, at their side, I catalogued the severed limbs I’d seen. It was easy; as anyone who has been close to stuff like that knows: You just go into shock, as if a plastic visor is descending over your sensibilities, and become The Reporter.

I was proud of my enterprise. I filed my gruesome story, only to discover the next day that the editor had taken out all the anatomical detail. “It was too gory, hunh?” I said, over the phone, from 2,000 miles away. “No,” he said. “You don’t get it. Relatives of the victims are going to read that, and it’s going to make their loss even harder to bear. `Did what he described belong my brother?’ Never forget that you’re not writing to be noticed. You’re writing for people to inform them about what has happened.” Then he invoked Hippocrates’ Oath, which pertains awfully particularly at times like these: “First, Do No Harm.”

Find a very quiet outdoors natural space. Sit legs crossed — not painfully so. Sit upright. Close eyes almost all the way, but not so far you can’t see light at bottom. Now start taking breaths in increments of twelve. Keep counting to twelve, and when you reach twelve, start over at one. The point is to make sure you’re concentrating on that goal so that all over thoughts — all_ other thoughts, when they start to intrude, get pushed away, off yr radar. The point is that within 15 minutes, you’ll stop hearing deadline voices and personal id-shouts and start hearing the squeaking of centuries-old chinese bamboo of you’re in Thailand, or bids two miles away if you’re in the Berkshires, or the wind in a dead maple in the next county, or the wing beat of a crow in Kansas. Or, as George Atkinson of the Raiders once told me, “When you’re in that zone, you can hear an ant piss on cotton.” Now, when you’ve gotten to where relatively few unwanted thoughts are intruding — 15? 30? mins.? open your eyes and slowly stand. Now, close your eyes completely and bend from the waist — flopping, like a rag doll, no muscles tensed. Bend at forward at the the waist letting your arms dangle as loosely as you can. Now start counting to 60: at 1 you are going to start standing up by tensing feet muscles, at 60 you will be fully erect. The point is to do it that slowly: it’s the journey, not the destination. At the start, tense your feet muscles, then your calf muscles, then your knees,ip and sup, then your thighs (by now you’re at 20). Then, the butt muscles, which starts to raise your torso with them — but the upper torso must stay flopped down. Now, vertebra by vertebra you back is straightening — 30 to 45. But head hangs totally loose, chin down. At 55, your shoulders will now be upright. Over the next five breaths raise your head, feeling the next muscles do their job. At 60, open your eyes. Nirvana (at least for an hour or so.)

https://tvfury.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/the-fury-files-peter-richmond/

I wasn’t courtside for either of Bernard King’s consecutive 50-point games in 1984 (the Knicks won both), or the 60-pointer the following year (a game they lost). As a Knick freak, I feel as if I must have been, but the calendar says otherwise. I was in Miami. But I do remember that a few years later, when I interviewed him for The Miami Herald one day in an empty Garden before practice, when I tried to bring up what had happened back in Utah he told me, quite emphatically, that we weren’t going to go there.
I had to try. Maybe, as a sportswriter, I shouldn’t have.

But I’ve never been good at separating the sportsman from the man when it comes to his treatment of women, whether it’s Bobby Cox (shoe-in for the MLB Hall of Fame, 2014), whose wife retracted the charges she’d filed about how he’d hit her in 1995, as long as Bobby undertook “violence counseling,” or Michael Irvin (inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame, 2007), whose parties in 1996 at that Texas motel were intense enough for a policeman to take out a hit on Irvin’s life. (True, there was no evidence that either of the “topless models” who partook of his regular parties was coerced; it was just the cop’s common-law wife whom Irvin allegedly threatened if she testified about said parties.)
In team sports, hall of fame inductions are the penultimate reward, outranked only by a ring (ask Patrick Ewing, who would gladly give up the Hummer he received on his appreciation night [the car kind, not the Gold Club kind; see court testimony, 1999], and probably his right leg, to have one).

These are Bernard King’s statistics: as a member of the Utah Jazz: five felony forcible sexual-assault charges: three for forcible “sodomy,” two for forcible “sexual abuse.” Convictions after the arrest? Just one, after King pled down to misdemeanor to “_Attempted_ Forcible Sexual Assault.”.

I do not pretend to know what happened in Utah. I do know that, reportedly, he was passed out from the use of alcohol after police subsequently went to his apartment after the woman’s complaint. He reportedly pled down after six different lie-detector tests said that he was telling the truth when he said he had no recollection of what happened that night.

I do know that alcohol sometimes allows inner demons to emerge. And that, never having had a multi-millioned career at stake over the actions of a drunken evening when I had acted feloniously, I can easily imagine pleading down, given that the difference between a felony and a misdemeanor could be fairly significant for my career. His sentence was suspended, and he underwent treatment for alcohol in California. He came home and went to meetings. And five years later, became the basketball player he’d once promised to be. He averaged 33 points a game in 1985 for New York. The Knicks finished that season 24-58.

He would play for seven teams (twice for the Nets).

None won a ring.

Then, in 1994, now 37, one year after he’d retired, according to a report in the Associated Press, he was arrested for allegedly choking a 22-year-old woman while intoxicated. The wire-service account states that when police arrived, King was asleep; that he was charged with third-degree assault, and that the woman was treated at New York Hospital.

Then, in 2004, now working for Bruce Ratner, King was arrested and charged with three counts of assault and one count of harassment after security at a hotel in lower Manhattan were alerted to alarming noises in a hotel room at 4:30 in the morning. The court report, according to the AP, said that King’s wife “suffered a cut with bleeding, and bruises, swelling and redness to her eye and forehead.”

The New York Daily News’ account , citing her “swollen” face, read, in part, “`He pushed me down to the floor three times’” a bruised and trembling Shana King told cops, according to court documents. `This has got to stop. I want him arrested.’”

She subsequently declined to proceed with the charges. King was ordered to attend 10 marriage-counseling sessions.

I am not condemning Bernard King if he’s innocent of all of these charges. I’m just using Bernard King the basketball player, whom I did see, several times, perform amazing feats of basketball-ism, as an example. Because if we continue to celebrate men who are even suspected of the cowardice that hitting a woman entails, voting them into institutions which are meant to celebrate character as well as athletic prowess, we’re devaluing sport.

That King and Cox might have had abuse problems is irrelevant. That’s between the man and the substance. That they hit women, if they did, is unconscionable.
If you Google “Bernard King” today, you will see photographs of him wearing a crown and a cape, like a king. If you read his Wikipedia entry, you will find no mention of his arrests.

I have visited Naismith’s hall up in Springfield several times. I’m not sure I ever will again.

Unlike many of my social-media colleagues who were lucky enough to meet Roger Ebert, I never did. I only knew him a while back as a guy on a TV show, with another guy in the other chair, presuming to tell me whether a movie was good or not. He and Gene Siskel’s relationship had a comforting vibe, but I, a bristly pseudo-artist-critic from the isle of Manhattan, always felt as if I were being ever-so-slightly lectured by an ever-so-slightly professor about a subject far too subjective to be bandied about by a couple of Midwestern white guys. (On top of which, the thumbs-up, thumbs-down thing creeped me out: flashes of the emperor in his Coliseum luxury box deciding the fate of a gladiator, on a whim.)

Truth is, I never decided whether to go to a movie because of what Roger Ebert said about it. What could a guy for the plodding Trib know about the essence of a film, its nuance, its art? Real movies only aimed to capture the hearts and minds of we sophisticates on the East Coast (the Philistines who made them out in Lemming Angeles? As if.) But Carl Sandburg’s big-shouldered meatpacking town telling me whether Terrence Malick or David Lynch were frauds? or Woody? Please. Canby! Kael! Salon-y-zambuca-sipping Critics! The Second City could teach me a lot about architecture…but movies?

Then I grew older, and the world grew snarkier, and Siskel died, which was sad-making, but still, if their pairing had made for such immortal TV, why go on with the show with a replacement? Roger and the other guy lost me for good.

And then, in 2010, a few years ago, apparently long out of the loop, I read about Ebert’s health. About how thyroid cancer had left him with no jaw, and after three reconstructive surgeries had failed, leaving him looking grotesque, he refused to try any more, because, in his own words, “This is what I look like.” He said he thought that as a culture we are very bad at dealing with sickness, and, in one fell swoop, he did a whole lot to change that.

And then I read that he was a master chef, even though he could not taste – indeed, took nutrition through a tube. And that while he couldn’t talk, he had a text-to-
message program that allowed him to give interviews.

And I started paying more attention to his movie reviews, He saw 306 movies last year. And no, he wasn’t the best movie critic out there, not by any means. He was not Anthony Lane (although he was better than Denby, if I have to flash my prejudices.) But he wasn’t mean. He wasn’t attitudinal. He never let his ego get in the way of his criticism.

And when he announced yesterday that he was taking a Leave of Presence, because cancer had reappeared, but he announced about 11 different other things that he was going to be backing, I thought: Man, you did it. Ill, you’ve aged gracefully. Here comes a third act that the rest of us will admire, and enjoy: Selfless Roger Ebert projects all over the place: an arsenal of artistic sanity in a world gone angry.

Then he died. And I instantly knew what was up with that prolific message that had offered 24 hours earlier so much hope for the future: He was subtextually telling us: “This is the possibility of the future if what I have envisioned, but won’t see. A day or so from now, I’ll be gone. I hope you guys will take some of the good I hoped to create, express and exemplify, carry on.” Unlike any other writer I’d ever known, (except for Updike), he didn’t even hint that he was on his way out.
No one has ever died with more grace. We owe him this: to look at the insane good fortune with which we’ve been blessed, and to go to the movies.