THE SADDEST PART of covering sports, I found early in my four-decade career, was when an athlete, so dependent on the full function of his or her body to earn a mighty good living, suddenly could no longer count on its cooperation. 
As a rookie on the Knicks beat in the late 1970s, I watched a young, promising forward named Toby Knight chase a long rebound into the corner during a preseason game against the Celtics in Portland, Maine. As he turned to outlet the ball, his knee buckled, An ACL tore.
I visited him in the hospital, brought him a book, before surgery but this was before advancements in technique made returning to full health from that particular injury likely. Knight did come back but only a shell of his former self and was gone from the NBA soon after. A lefty, he had a sweet jump shot, th0ugh nothing quite as pretty and seemingly without a limit to its range as Jason Tatum's.
It seemed pretty obvious to most people watching Tatum writhe on the Madison Square Garden floor Monday night what had just happened. Me, especially, having torn my Achilles tendon almost a year ago chasing a tennis ball, slouching forward and pushing off my right ankle with my racket in motion. 
I wrote about the injury and my decision--for now--not to play tennis anymore and risk further time sacrificed to rehab recently for New Jersey Monthly Magazine. But how much of a hardship is that? What am I giving up that can't be replaced by competing with myself, instead of a few fellow aging hackers, on an elliptical machine or a jog in the park?
Tatum? He's sitting at home by now, waiting to trade a splint for a boot, worrying about putting his foot down too soon, wondering if he'll be back within or after a year and how much of his extraordinary physical gifts he will still have. 
He is 27 with his whole life ahead of him, just not sure how much of it will continue as a Hall of Fame basketball life. My older son got to hang around with him once at a mutual friend's birthday party in Manhattan. Said he seemed like the nicest young guy. Comes across that way to those in the media who have covered him. Committed to his craft and to his team. 
In my post-newspaper years, I still watch a fair amount of NBA, especially playoff ball, without a specific favorite team. I make up the rooting as I go along. A year from now -- perhaps a little sooner, or later -- I'll be rooting for Jason Tatum to return as the 42-point lethal weapon he was in that sickening moment when he went down at the Garden, and out.

       

     THOSE SADISTS at Tennis Channel were showing the 2019 Wimbledon final again the other day, and, what luck, I flipped onto it just as Roger Federer was serving for the epic match at 8-7 in the fifth set. I watched long enough to see him fire off consecutive aces at Novak Djokovic to reach double match point. That was it, all I could take. I wasn't about to relive the pain again of seeing Federer make the insanely radical regression from the verge of cementing his status as the greatest male player of all time to tennis tragic figure, if only in the context of what this match was potentially worth to him.
   All summer, I encountered devout Fed fans--I count myself as one even though I'd like to believe I have reported and opined on him as any objective journalist would--who recoiled in horror as he lost his serve, then dropped a third tiebreaker to Djokovic, the fantastically perseverant Serb. Then we all settled into a weeks-long malaise, which included a revulsion to the mere sight of tennis.
     My New York Times colleague, Chris Clarey, ran down a few more such fans before the start of the U.S. Open--they, too, shared their sadness and foreboding that Federer had somehow missed, or blown, what was likely his last best chance to add to his ever-fragile record of 20 grand slam titles. Yeah, most of us have written him off at various times in the past decade and delighted in being wrong. But he's 38, for crying out loud. His upper back barked again during his quarter-final loss to Grigor Dmitrov at the Open. Damnit, he should have won Wimbledon because that would have been the fitting career exclamation point even as he played on for another couple of slam-fruitless years.
     A 21st major title would hardly have fortified Federer's record, or laid undisputed claim to the greatest ever throne, a subjectively assigned seat for any player in any sport. If he never wins another match, Federer will always have his dedicated GOAT support, in part based on the sheer majesty of his game--just as a generation of baseball fans would swear they never saw a better ballplayer than Willie Mays. But Wimbledon would at least have been the signature debate clincher for those who have spent a decade and a half aboard Federer's tennis-as-ballet bandwagon. Weeks before his 38th birthday, he took out Rafa in the semis and Novak in the finals on Centre Court. Case freaking closed! 
    Honestly, I doubted he would win the match until that second ace skittered away from Djokovic on the scarred lawn. I sat up on the couch--downsized now to occasional Times contributor and an ocean removed from any vow of journalism ethics--and raised my fists. One more, Roger. Then slowly sank back onto the pillows, resigned to the inevitability of the outcome.
      Now the equally deserving force of nature that is Rafa, crowned Sunday night as Open champion for the fourth time, finds himself, at 33, one measly slam behind. The King of Clay at the very least has a handful more French Opens in his future, barring serious injury. Djokovic remains four behind but is only 32, arguably late middle age for a sport whose superstar time clock has been dramatically reset by Federer.
   There, of course, remains the possibility of a long-awaited next generation breakout--Daniill Medvedev anyone?--imposing itself on the Big 3's ultimate pennant race. But who knows? Maybe Federer actually does have another Aussie Open or Wimbledon run in him, and he will create another moment like 8-7, 40-15, the edge of triumphant eruption. For now and possibly for a very long time, his failure is  replayed again and again in the minds of his deflated fans across the globe. 
       That in itself is punishment enough. No thanks to ever watching it again on TV. ​

       When the news was out, Ali had died, my son, Alex, texted me. "RIP, Ali." He was in Philadelphia three times zones away with friends. I was out to dinner with an old newspaper colleague in Oakland's Jack London Square. "You should write something," he said.
      The New York Times, where I have worked for 25 years, had already summoned a lineup of sports writing  legends, who had traveled the globe with Ali, chronicling the historic fights of a man who didn't need 21st Century connectivity to become the world's most famous athlete, or person. Dave Anderson. Bob Lipsyte. George Vecsey. I had the privilege of working with all three before they retired. Now I look around at the N.B.A. finals at all the ambitious, talented journalists two and three decades younger than I am. I was an adolescent fan-boy when Ali was dancing in his prime. Near the end of his career, I broke into the newspaper business covering another sport. Never did see him fight live.
       Still, Alex insisted, "You grew up with him."
       Yes, the fight night memories of sitting around the kitchen table in my family's apartment in Staten Island's West Brighton Houses are fond ones, my dad fiddling with with the dial, locating the fight, allowing me to stay up past my school night bedtime. He was no great sports fan and certainly no Ali fan, repelled by the self-aggrandizement. Like so many young baby boomers, I couldn't resist him, couldn't imagine a more compelling athlete, and that was long before he put a face on a generation in contempt of a most sinful war.
        The 1965 night Ali fought Sonny Liston in a rematch of the bout in which he'd taken Liston's title, I lingered in the bathroom too long. My father yelled out, "The fight is starting." By the time I'd finished my business and walked into the kitchen, he was unplugging the radio. "Go to bed," he said. "It's over." He didn't look happy. The kid with the big mouth had won, a knockout in round one, after Dad had predicted that Liston would "give it to him good."
        I became fascinated with that fight, staged in Lewiston, Maine, which I had never heard of. Wasn't championship boxing an event for smoke-filled arenas in great urban centers? Why there, in the middle of nowhere? Fifty years later, my curiosity not satiated, I drove up to Lewiston, spent a few days, looking for the story of the fight, finding along with it the great symbolism it held for the city.
       http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/20/sports/the-night-the-ali-liston-fight-came-to-lewiston.html
        I learned that the fight had landed in Lewiston because a Massachusetts district attorney, fearing for its legitimacy, had pulled the plug on staging it in Boston Garden less than a month before the settled date. The promoters needed a site to preserve a new revenue stream, the miracle of closed circuit television. They would have held it in a corn field, if necessary, and practically did.
        I would later watch Frazier beat Ali in their epic first Madison Square Garden fight a mile away, at a theater on 14th St. Then Ali and Foreman from Kinshasa, Zaire at an old movie house, the Paramount on Bay St., in Staten Island. And somewhere in Brooklyn, an Ali-Norton bout from Yankee Stadium with my dad, who argued bitterly on the drive home that they'd stolen the decision from Norton because Ali was the meal ticket.
        Alex was born in November 1989. My dad died seven months later, not long after I had taped Buster Douglas's knockout of Mike Tyson for him and watched it with him when he and my mother were over to babysit one Saturday night. He sat on the couch, holding Alex, while we reminisced about the old Ali fights. Was something passed down that night, grandfather to grandson, while I experienced what was one of the last happy memories of my father alive?
        From his toddler days of dribbling a miniature basketball around the apartment in Chicago Bulls wear, plastic red glasses (a la Horace Grant) sliding down his nose, Alex was always an unusually astute young sports fan. Some of his early bedtime stories actually came from NBA team yearbooks. Later, he moved on to more traditional narratives, including a book of retrospectives from Ali opponents. We read a chapter a night, each perspective so different, so savored. Around that time, the 2001 biopic starring Will Smith hit the theaters. Alex was in middle school. I took him to see it. He loved the ending, Ali on the ropes, in the Kinshasa rain, arms raised in triumph.
        At home, whenever we would stumble upon an old Ali classic -- the real Foreman fight, anything from the Frazier trilogy -- we would curl up on the couch.
        Alex was still texting me hours after the Ali announcement, two a.m. back east Saturday morning, urging me to write something.
       Some of his texts:
       "The most important athlete ever."
       "He was part of what we learned in school, much bigger than sports."
       "He's the only athlete that can top Jordan for me."
       I asked him: "What are you still doing awake?"
       He texted back: "This is too important. I was born in '89 and I feel the impact."
       Before we signed off, he said: "You raised me right," his appreciation for my helping him understand the magnitude of the man.
       I fell asleep thinking, thank you, Ali, for connecting the generations of your lifetime, and presumably, hopefully, many more to come.

  

Gordon (Scotty) Stirling, who had a long career in professional sports and especially in the NBA, died Wednesday at 86 in Sacramento. May he rest he in peace. He had little during the 15 months he served as general manager of the Knicks.
 Stirling succeeded Dave DeBusschere at the position in 1986, a particularly turbulent time around Madison Square Garden, as an embattled Hubie Brown fought to hang on as coach, as the young Patrick Ewing struggled to find his footing in a chaotic organization and as everyone wondered what the hell was going on with the rehabilitating star, Bernard King.
     A devastating knee injury at the tail end of an already lost 1984-85 season had sent King into virtual seclusion as he took on the challenge of a comeback from severe ligament damage -- in those days pretty much a career kiss of death. No one in the media knew what was going on with King because the Knicks didn't seem to know much either. It was Stirling's most vexing issue -- how to reconstruct a team without knowing how its most dynamic player was faring in rehab.
     As an insurance policy at the small forward position, Stirling did a sensible thing. He drafted the future slam-dunk champion Kenny (Sky) Walker in the first round of the '86 draft. Pressed by reporters that night on the future of King, as he had been for months on end, an exasperated Stirling snapped, "I hear he's up at Upsala working out. Go see for yourself."
     Filip Bondy and I were NBA reporters in those days at the Daily News. We decided to take Stirling's advice.
     I lived in Brooklyn Heights and Bondy in the Bronx and we agreed to meet early at Upsala, a small college, now defunct, in East Orange, N.J. Our original plan was to get there before King and to hide somewhere in the gym where we could spy on his workout.
     Workaholic that he was, King was already on court, along with a trainer, when we arrived. Our view through a window from outside was not great but it was better than nothing. At one point, King seemed to become aware that someone was watching. He turned and stared at the window from the far side of the court. We ducked into the bushes, and waited. King didn't. He walked out a side door of the building and around to the front. Crouching, we heard a familiar voice from behind.
     "What the hell do you guys think you're doing?" King said.
     We told him the truth -- we had come to see him work out on Stirling's advice.
       King scowled. "Fuck Scotty," he said.
      Heading for the front door of the gym, he stopped and turned back to us. King was no fool. Knowing the Knicks had drafted Walker, potentially his replacement, he realized he had a perfect opportunity to send a message to the Knicks without having to deal with them. 
      "Want to come in and watch me work out?" he said.
      We told him that's what we'd come for. In we went to watch King do a series of drills, play one-on-one with a muscular Upsala player and bury a fair share of trademark turnaround jumpers from the baseline.
      "How'd I look?" he said, sitting down for a post-workout interview.
      We told him he had looked really good and meant it. Not that we were medical experts, but he didn't seem to be holding back, or limping. He wasn't close to playing in a game, though. Perfectionist that he was, King's goal was not to just get back to the NBA; it was to regain all-star status, which he eventually did, except not in New York.
      King didn't suit up again at with the Knicks until the final six games of the following season -- and by then Ewing was injured, shut down. They never played together. Another year of bad basketball led to the dismissal of Stirling and the hiring of a new GM-coach tandem in Al Bianchi and Rick Pitino, which, after some early success, would bring more dysfunction. 
      With his trap pressing defenses, Pitino couldn't envision any future with King and his rebuilt knee. The Knicks let him walk after those six games. And when he was back to where he could again dominate a game, King returned to drop 49 points on the Knicks one night at the Garden while the fans howled for Bianchi's head, chanting "Al Must Go." Soon Bianchi was gone, too, replaced by Dave Checketts on the seemingly endless conga line of Knicks executives.
       As for our King exclusive at Upsala, a giddy Bondy and I thought it was destined to be a major Daily News story -- until we got back to the office to discover the editors already planning the next day's back page: Len Bias, projected as the next great Celtic in Boston, had died after celebrating being the second pick of the draft by using cocaine.
      You can't plan the news. You can relish the memories. Many years later, I returned to what had been the Upsala gym -- and now belongs to a high school, East Orange Campus -- to watch my son play a junior varsity game. I told a friend about what had happened the last time I had sat in that building, mentioning how Stirling had inspired a scoop.
      "That's right," my friend said. "I forgot he was the Knicks' GM."
      So here's to you, Scotty Stirling. Gone, but not forgotten.

 During the second week of the recent Wimbledon tournament, I posted a photo similar to this one with the heading: "My favorite place in sports: Wimbledon, Centre Court." In response, someone wrote: "I hope you will write a column to explain why."
  Too much going on, not enough space and a little too indulgent for my New York Times readers, I thought. Better for this forum. So here is why I would choose Centre Court over all the great sports venues I have visited -- and there are many that I still do admire and enjoy -- if it came down to one event, one wish.
   It is not only beautiful but it is virtually timeless. With the exception of the updated electronic scoreboard and video for player challenges and the practical addition of the roof five years ago, it could be any year of any decade.  The size and scope of the arena haven't been compromised for the sake of additional revenues that surely could be maximized. The feel of the place is much the same for Roger Federer as it was for Rod Laver. I like feeling connected to history there.
   Most of all, after a long year of assaults on the senses, there are no explosions of fire during player introductions, no earsplitting music between every break in a match, no mindless prerecorded prompts for "everybody (to) clap your hands."
   Are the guests in the Royal Box and the affluent folks who monopolize the majority of the tickets the kind of sports fans I'd want to run at the pub afterward? Probably not. But even on that memorable Monday afternoon in 2001, when the rabid riffraff queued up for the Goran Ivanesevic-Patrick Rafter final delayed one day by rain, there was a decorum observed that is unheard of elsewhere, in any sport, and, in tennis, especially at the U.S. Open.
    Before crucial points, you can hear someone coughing or sneezing in a distant row. Nobody is yelling into their cellphone after a celebrity sighting, so common in New York. Nobody is dodging the ushers, trying to sneak into a better seat. Nobody is bolting in the middle of a point for a Nachos run.
    On Centre Court, the match is the entertainment, start to finish. Your mind is clear to focus on the nuances of the game, or free to wander away from it all for as long as you'd like without being numbed into submission by continuous noise. Before this last tournament, I hadn't been to Wimbledon in five years. I didn't know how much I'd missed it until I sat at Centre Court and had an uninterrupted few moments to actually think about it.

       It is not easy watching yourself on the big movie screen and certainly without the benefit of makeup. So when I saw myself in Lenny Cooke -- the documentary on the one-time New York high school legend who never made it out of the basketball bush leagues -- for the first time last spring, I slid low in my seat and waited anxiously for the next scene.    
       I had only found out that night that the Safdie brothers, Josh and Benny, had put me in their film, which is currently having a week's run at the Lincoln Plaza Film Society in New York, among other cities, on the way to probable pay television availability. The footage is of me interviewing Lenny at his home in southern Virginia for a long story I did http://nyti.ms/1iSXes8 in the New York Times in March 2012.
       Adam Shopkorn, the producer of Lenny Cooke, had picked up the project he'd started in 2000-01, when Cooke was rated ahead of LeBron James. I decided to tell the Times story, in part, through the filmmakers -- and how their presence in Cooke's less-than-glamorous life was restoring a measure of the stardom he thought he was destined for way back when.
      My own experience with Cooke began in 2000, when my editor at the Times, Neil Amdur, asked me to look into the story of a black basketball star from Brooklyn who had moved in with a white family in affluent Bergen County, N.J. to help steady himself, academically and otherwise. I did a series of columns on Cooke, which began hopefully http://nyti.ms/1f46unK but ultimately began to drift toward an unhappy outcome http://nyti.ms/1f46unK that occupies the second half of the film. My scene, I was told, was used to connect the Lenny of old with the Lenny of now.
       In addition to being a fascinating cautionary tale (don't take my word for it, but try Richard Brody of The New Yorker http://nyr.kr/1cfujWr) Lenny Cooke is worth seeing just for the old footage Shopkorn compiled when Cooke was touring the premier high school camps and competing against James, Carmelo Anthony, Amar'e Stoudemire and Chris Bosh.
      As for my acting and screen presence, I'd like to thank the academy in advance  for not nominating me and further exposing me.

 

     A year ago, I wrote a long piece in the New York Times http://nyti.ms/QQJpYP  about how elite teenage soccer players were newly involved in a tug-of-war between their high school teams and academies sanctioned by the United States Soccer Federation. U.S. Soccer's strategy is to develop players for national programs and/or potential college scholarships by training them year-round the way the rest of the world does -- in rigorous programs that eschew the high school model of cramming several games a week during a relatively short fall scholastic season.
     The story focused on two players from my town, Montclair, N.J. -- Oliver Murphy, a senior, and Joseph Rodriguez, a junior. Both had been stars on the Montclair High School team the previous season. Anticipating that he would playing college soccer on the Division III level,  Murphy dropped off the top Match Fit Academy club team and remained with the high school squad. Rodriguez, harboring a dream of playing for an age-appropriate national team, stayed with Match Fit, commuting 50 miles each way to West Windsor, N.J. for weeknight practices and home games. Weekend road games against other academy teams could be as  far south as Virginia.
     Not surprisingly, Rodriguez found it difficult to stay away from the high school games. They were a few blocks from campus and these were the boys he had grown up playing with, his best friends. In the crowd, he watched Murphy and company struggle throughout most of the season, including two deflating 1-0 defeats to Montclair Kimberley, the local private school, in front of large, exuberant crowds.
     But Montclair, behind Murphy, caught fire in the state playoffs and wound up winning a sectional title by beating neighboring West Orange, before losing in overtime in the group state semifinals. Rodriguez was pained not being part of it. As his father, Paul, said at the time: "It's killing him." So when he accepted a scholarship to play Division 1 soccer at Drexel late last spring, he made up his mind to return to the high school team for his senior season.
     With Murphy gone to Trinity College, Rodriguez became the team's leader and best player. Montclair avenged the two losses to Montclair Kimberley, won an impressive county championship, but in a twist of fate lost to West Orange in the sectional semis in the last game of Rodriguez's high school career. He told the local Montclair Times it had all been worth it -- the highs, the lows, everything.
      The benefits of the academy programs, outlined in my story, are undeniable, especially for that very special player and most likely for American soccer in the international arena. But the rewards of Murphy's and Rodriguez's experiences, while harder to quantify, are also impossible to deny. In a sports culture that grows increasingly regional/national and more segregated by ability, something is invariably lost -- a sense of neighborhood, of crosstown and border rivalries that stir the passions.
      High school coaches are hoping a pattern is developing and that players, upon settling on a college, will figure out that they can have it both ways. I'm not so sure; the academies are pushing harder for kids to commit to them sooner. But I hope the coaches are right. The U.S. might not win the World Cup with our old developmental system. But a lot of adolescent lives will probably be richer for it.

     With tennis' Grand Slam season behind us, and baseball's regular season down to its final days, it has occurred to me that these very different sports do have at least one thing in common. Fans of the most famous rivals can be impassioned and provincial to the point of being impossible.
       I never really would have put followers of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal in the same category of Yankees and Red Sox fans -- or any team sports, for that matter. Tennis is supposed to be more genteel, a place where folks have a healthy respect for all great players and choose their rooting interests based on matchups.
      But two columns I wrote in the New York Times for the recent U.S. Open have convinced me otherwise. Federer versus Nadal -- on the court and as a concept -- may as well be Boston-New York. Or Real Madrid-Barcelona, for the sake of a comparison Nadal would better appreciate.
       The first column (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/sports/tennis/federers-farewell-should-be-celebrated-but-not-too-soon.html?pagewanted=all) dealt with with Federer's slump and the inevitable speculation of how long he would continue to play. The mere mention of what I called the R word set Fed followers into a frenzy. How dare I or anyone try to push this brilliant artist out before his time -- which, of course, was only an interpretation of the column, not the point.
       That column drew 172 responses, far more than the average piece for which a comment page is offered.
       The second piece (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/sports/tennis/in-federer-nadal-rivalry-best-debate-is-yet-to-come.html) was written after Federer was beaten in straight sets by a Spaniard he'd never lost to, Tommy Robredo, in the fourth round in straight sets. The defeat was not only sobering for all who root for and admire Federer; it also deprived the Open of an anticipated showdown with the peaking Nadal in the fourth round.
       The point of the second column was to argue that even if Federer's decline was worse than feared and his days as a viable contender at the four majors was concluding, his rivalry with Nadal was likely to continue in a historically grander sense. Nadal now has 13 slam victories, four behind Federer's record 17. Nadal is only 27. Assuming the tendinitis in his knees don't force him off the tour for more prolonged periods (granted, the odds would appear to be about 50-50), Nadal would have a real chance to equal or surpass Federer, given his off-the-charts competitive hunger.
       The second column drew 187 responses, as it set off the Greatest Of All Time (GOAT) argument. Federer fans had grown accustomed to standing behind the Grand Slam firewall or by insisting that Federer at his height was the most complete tennis package ever. Nadal fans ask the logical question: even if Nadal doesn't catch Federer, how can anyone be the greatest when his career record against his primary rival is 10-21?
       Though hardly rising to the level of soccer hooliganism, the debate often sounded like a good screaming match on sports talk radio. Which, of course, in the final analysis is a credit to Federer and Nadal -- two Europeans who get a serious rise out of an American newspaper audience.