Decades

These are a few of our favorite things when the dog bites and the bee stings:

Mustard on scrambled eggs.

Marlboros, not the generic brand.

Parlays over straight plays (for entertainment purposes only).

Diet coke with a Big Mac and fries to keep our girlish figure.

The Meineke Car Care Bowl.

Directing the placement of the Christmas tree from a perch on the couch.

Christmas Eve shopping with the kids at the South Street Seaport and lunch at Wendy’s.

Paula Creamer’s beautiful swing and pink ball.

Laughing at ourselves when putts for double bogie lip out.

Faithful friends who are dear to us and gather near to us once more.

We are torn, torn we say! when it comes to remembering the last year of the aughts and reminiscing over a decade in this sporting life.

We learned to simulate playing golf, no small feat given our advanced age and lack of cocktail waitresses.

Our children, who advanced far beyond us in scholarship and athletic accomplishment.

Those who endured much with more grace and wit than can be measured.

The hound hotel, which can be a good place to go when the slings and arrows cloud the skies.

David Tyree’s miraculous helmet catch.

OU’s national championship against Florida State.

Boise State’s trickeration win against OU.

Of course, the 2004 Red Sox.

New Year’s resolutions are upcoming (six-pack abs are among them). Have yourself a merry little Christmas. We’ll muddle through somehow.

Time and Tide

Some think this sporting life we lead is all candy and nuts and a very merry Christmas. Let us let you in on a not- so-secret secret; it’s really ifs and buts, double faults, a chunked wedge shot and a parlay (for entertainment purposes only) that against all advice successfully calls the money line on the Pittsburgh vs. Cleveland game but not the over-under. Ouch, baby.

But all is not lost. Though the Browns and Steelers failed to get near the point total predicted, retail sales last month jumped twice as much as the consensus expected. Things are on the mend in this season of light, though youngsters are still sent marching off into the maw of endless war, perhaps the only job they can land, while, God bless them, Goldman Sachs executives make the sacrifice of taking their bonuses in stock.

We loved the player who walked out on Cincinnati Bearcat coach Brian Kelly when he told his undefeated team at its banquet that he was leaving them in the lurch before the Sugar Bowl game with Florida to take the Notre Dame job. This bold, go-to-hell response from a young scholar bodes ill for the golden domers who desire above all else relevance and enlivens hope for the future of American youth.

We are usually an optimistic sort, believing that the next drive will soar straight into the fairway, that the five-iron will land softly close to the pin and that the birdie putt will rattle into the cup. Is there a more satisfying sound than that rattle? Well, maybe the gentle snore of a well-fed baby, or new-born whippoorwills calling from the hills, as Nat King Cole crooned a million summers ago when summer was a comin’ in but fast.

Where has that world gone? Each generation when it reaches a certain age asks the same question. We recently spoke with a person dear to us who called the closing out of the “oughts” as a lost decade. Not so.

Mark Ingram, the remarkable young halfback from Flint, Michigan, playing for Alabama, tearfully and gracefully accepted the Heisman Trophy last night, ushering in a new decade for us sporting men and women. His next job is against Texas and then on to professional riches. Some 40 years from now, he might be savoring that rattle in the cup.

He Sendeth Rain...

We awoke besotted by riches yesterday morning after a college football banquet that kept this sporting man on a couch that doubles for a bed and breakfast nook, remote control in hand, watching a Far East-made flat screen for a whole half of a three-hundred-and sixty-fifth of a twirl around the star that rises in the east. You’ve seen the son of a gun, it has something to do with chlorophyll and Vitamin D.

The love handles expanded, but so did a love for a game meant for the teenager and the man child. The pro game consumes the sporting public, but the student-athletes inspire awe. After a tough day of calculus, pre-med and Shakespeare, they take to the gridiron to win one for ….

Forgive us, but when a Nazarene invests a game -- a game, mind you -- with biblical significance emblazoned under eyes that are misting over, we have to chuckle (a character flaw of ours that has others chuckling at us).

“These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33). Oh yeah?

Perhaps Tim Tebow, the formidable Florida quarterback, should have had Matthew 5:45 on his coal black strips: “For He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust.”

The just being the proud Nebraska squad with a coach in a collarless sweatshirt who would have been forgiven if he ranted at the blatant rigging of the Bowl Championship Series. Time had run out on the evil empire from Austin as the wide-eyed McCoy inexplicably rolled right and threw the ball out of bounds. Any other game and the refs are jogging off the field, letting the underdogs celebrate.

But no! From out of nowhere! An extra second is allowed for a BCS scenario that was pre-ordained. OK, call us conspiracy theorists, but, hey, any other game?

Wait, there’s more.

Fresno State, attempting a game-ending two-point conversion to defeat the Fighting Illini, appeared foiled by a brilliant deflection of a pass at the goal line, but a large man captured the flying pigskin in a gut that we are approaching and trundled into the end zone for the winning points as time waned. So he’s got that going for him, which is more than we can say, having slept through the calculus final.

And then there was the holder for Pitt’s extra point. He couldn’t get the ball down and twirl the laces, giving Cincinnati a chance to come back and win a pick’em game.

God bless all the gallant young men -- and the ladies and old sporting fellows who cheered them -- for 12 hours of sedentary bliss (well, not the ladies; they were jumping and shaking pom-poms)

He maketh his sun to rise…

Whose Woods These Are, I Think I Know

It turns out that Eldrick Woods is just like you or me. OK, he has a little more do-re-mi, no love handles and is able to escape from impossible lies to make par with a panache that perplexes we triple bogey fellows. But stuff happens -- even to the world’s best golfer. The best a man can get? We’re clean-shaven, too, but fall far short of expectations. We missed a patch of whiskers on one jowl the other day and felt the sting of imperfection.

Mr. Woods, after all, is just a man. As much as we wish not to revel in celebrity gossip, it is impossible not to look away from the billionaire with a flaw, though his swing and putting stoke are, dare we repeat, the best a man can get.

Only Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Jack Kennedy remain in our pantheon of stainless heroes. Well, Jackson, a college professor, superstitiously sucked lemons while leading his corps, Lee ordered the calamitous charge against Cemetery Ridge, and JFK had a dalliance with the gal who crooned “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.”

Charles Barkley and John Daly can laugh at themselves. Mr. Woods, apparently, can only kiss his wife, children and dogs in photo-ops. Not that Mr. Woods is required to do so, but Messrs. Barkley and Daly lead this sporting life and accept it for what it is.

Which leads us to the conclusion that we are all sinners and have tales that are easily punctured. In one way or another, we all have had someone angry at us for our sins chasing us with a metaphorical seven-iron.

Let’s hope we get off with a $164 fine and enough left over for the greens fee at a muni track, which we will attempt to conquer in a few hours.

The Better Part of Valor

Football genius Bill Belichick took the road less traveled and it meant all the difference. Instead of punting on fourth down with 2 minutes and change left in the game, ahead by 6, he ordered his troops to go for it on 4th and 2 at their own 28-yard line. They failed. Kevin Faulk took the pass beyond the first down marker but juggled it and was driven back, giving Peyton Manning and his horseshoe helmeted heroes a short field for the victory.

As a young friend wise beyond his years pointed out to me the other day, in Frost’s poem, the narrator sighs, wondering what might have been had he followed Yogi’s advice that when you come to a fork in the road, take it. And all along I thought Frost’s protagonist was smugly patting himself on the back for turning his back on the crowd.

This hubris seems to be spreading. On Saturday, in The Game, Yale’s young coach called for a fake punt on 4th and 22 deep in the Bulldogs’ own territory. The ensuing run came up 7 yards short and Harvard took over to score the winning touchdown.

Also on Saturday, Les Miles, the coach at LSU inexplicably failed to call a time-out until 9 seconds remained. His Tigers pulled off a remarkable screen pass to cover 40-plus yards and a first down at the Ole Miss 6-yard line with 1 second remaining. Then, even more inexplicably, the LSU quarterback spiked the ball to end the game.

To coin a phrase, sometimes we cut off our noses to spite our faces. The same is true of this sporting life. Instead of punching an errant tee shot into the fairway from the lie between imposing oaks, we try the heroic 7-iron over the expansive canopy in an attempt to reach the green. But the Titleist smacks into a trunk and ricochets with the speed of a gunshot and returns to fracture the hero’s fibula, ending his golf season prematurely. You can look it up.

Sometimes the road less traveled is that way for a reason.

World Series Diary III: Scaredy Cat

Fear is a valuable but debilitating emotion. It is one thing to fear God and the tornado tearing across the prairie toward your ramshackle farmhouse, rightfully causing you and Auntie Em to run for the root cellar. It’s another to fear failure and thus invite it. How many putts has Kev left woefully short for fear of sending the Titleist down a sloped green to the rough on the other side?

After a camera carom and a flair for the flare handed New York the game the day before, the fireman- turned-arsonist Brad Lidge helped the pinstripers to the brink of a 27th World Series triumph. Eschewing his best pitch, the slider, scared that a wild pitch could plate the go-ahead run, the Phillies’ Lidge served up a two-out fastball to Alex Rodriguez, who stroked the winning hit in the ninth inning yesterday. Might as well have hit him in the ribs again and fired up your team with -- what? A bench-clearing brawl, of course.

It’s bracing how this sporting life teaches us, even as we age ungracefully, that knee-knocking moments, like fatigue, make cowards of us all. Except for Johnny Damon, who used to look more like the Nazarene than Derek Jeter. After a nine-pitch battle, He singled and then promptly walked on water, stealing second and going on to third, taking advantage of an unguarded third base caused by the shifted infield.

Now the Philadelphia team rests its hopes on James Bond, alias Cliff Lee, who was a work of art in the first game. Fellow Arkansan A.J. Burnett goes for the empire on three days’ rest. Expect no parade on lower Broadway yet. Another game will be played in the Bronx.

Meanwhile, Kev loves to putt. Think I’ll roll a few on the carpet right now.

World Series Diary II: The Empire Strikes Back

What must it feel like to see the empire’s Mariano Rivera jogging to the mound when you’re down a couple of runs? Though we are not privy to the inner monologue of Philadelphia’s hitters, it would surely be screaming: “We’re doomed! Doomed, I say”!

Yes they were. Mr. Rivera overshadows all, much like an eclipse of the sun sends the tribesmen of aboriginal civilizations scurrying away from the boiling pot holding the leader of a safari who stumbled onto sacred ground. The hi-def screens at Yankee Stadium should read “Abandon Hope, all ye who enter here” when Mr. Rivera stands 60-feet, 6-inches from the hexagonal plate we fondly call home.

He should be the MVP every year. The exception that proves the rule, of course, is the seventh game of the 2001 World Series, but that was against a drawn-in infield. In this case, a six-out save seemed all but predestined. Rivera is Calvinism personified. Since God has already determined who is to be saved, it matters not a whit what one does on the diamond to achieve it.

A.J. Burnett left his evil twin in the clubhouse, allowing only one run and Mr. Rivera to summon the gods to push the moon between the sun and the earth and scare the Phillies into submission.

Pedro , for his part, made two mistakes, but “for want of a nail” on the hoof of a horse a battle is lost.

We must question, however, Charlie Manuel not sending the runners in the eighth inning with one out on a 3-2 count, as the redoubtable Tim McCarver pointed out. Still, blue’s call was wrong. There was no double play. Utley was safe, but life is not fair, something we are impressed with every day.

The cure for the senior circuit representatives? They must resume swatting the ball out of the confines to retain their championship. The series, as this sporting life, will not be won by small ball.

World Series Diary: The Name Is Bond

Ladies, there’s a new fashion trend in leather accessories this fall for fending off unwanted advances. Wear a baseball glove and leave the thick laces normally tied at the wrist and the outside of the hand hanging loose. This seems to hypnotize pinstripers (powerful bankers or Yankee hitters) unable to believe they can’t get to first base with you.

Just ask the Phillies’ Cliff Lee, the artful Arkansan who addled the most powerful line-up in baseball in their own home-run derby park in the first game of the 2009 World Series. The untied straps of leather dangled at the wind-up, then they slapped like Indiana Jones’ whip when the ball came out in the bare hand, striking out 10, walking none and giving up not one earned run in a complete game 6-1 Phillies victory.

More impressive, Mr. Lee’s sangfroid makes him the leading candidate to become the next James Bond. “What’s the point of being nervous?” he said after the game.

The Smersh operatives known as the Bronx Bombers were dispatched with an array of pitches (one of which is called a spiked curveball) that rivaled all the gadgets with which Q equips 007. His nonchalant, hip-high catch of a pop fly and his behind-the back, matador-like snaring of a hot ground ball up the middle brought insouciant Bond-like smirks to Mr. Lee’s face. It was as if he were saying, “This game is too easy.”

Meanwhile, the pajama-clad CC Sabathia labored manfully for the empire, despite giving up two homers to fellow left-hander Chase Utley. We won’t even go into manager Joe Girardi’s pitching changes here. It was like Dr. Evil dispatching underlings with the touch of a button.

But the fun has only begun. Tonight, Pedro takes the mound for the visitors in the new Yankee Stadium, a house meant to revive the glories of Pharaohs past with new monarchs. Can the aging tomb raider steal a win?

In any event, James Bond has managed to keep the free world alive for another day.

Magical Flags

Whatever happened to fact-based reality?

“In my heart,” umpire Tim McClelland said, the Yankees’ Nick Swisher left third base too early on a fly ball out. In the words of a philandering husband caught red handed: “Are you gonna believe me or your lyin’ eyes.” At least the husband cited an organ with the power of vision.

Then Mr. Napoli, the catcher for the Angels of Anaheim, tags two dolts, Messrs. Posada and Cano, each inexplicably looking at third base, not standing on it, and Mr. McClelland only calls one out. How hard can it be to enforce the rule that while the ball is in play a runner not on a base can be tagged with the ball and ruled out?

This malady is not confined to professional sports. The Southeastern Conference seems determined to keep Florida and Alabama undefeated with blatantly wrong calls against their scrappy opponents. Just this past week, Lane Kiffin, the brash head coach of Tennessee, justified his decision to run down the clock and not run another play before going for a game-winning field goal against the Tide because he didn’t want “a magical flag” to appear. It was blocked by a ‘Bama behemoth who yanked his helmet off in celebration, which should have resulted in a penalty and a re-kick, according to rules aficionados.

Those weighted yellow hankies flying haphazardly through the fall breeze and the decisions of old men in blue with questionable cognitive skills remind us that to expect a fair outcome is to believe Bernie Madoff had Faustian powers to bend the stock market to his will.

To expect perfection is delusional, but necessary. Is it right to howl when one has been jobbed? Of course. Don’t basketball coaches “work” the refs to get a favorable call down the line?

Mr. Kiffin of Tennessee, though reprimanded for his comment, has sent a not so subtle message to the SEC officiating crews that they better not be seduced by the glamour teams. The age of extra slo-mo video renders the men in blue subject to the scrutiny every man, woman and child must now endure. Tip: re-read every e-mail message before hitting send.

Kev claims no special insight into the human heart, or his own, for that matter, but “magical flags” land on our daily fields of play all the time. To not object is cowardly.

Tomorrow's Hero

Goat, thy name is Chase Utley. Wait, maybe it’s the left side of the Angels infield, Chone Figgins and Erick Aybar, who should wear the horns. And let’s not forget young J.A. Happ, who not so happily walked in the Dodgers’ winning run.

In the Dodgers-Phillies game, Mr. Utley, the second baseman for the Philadelphia team, inexplicably threw away a sure double play in the 8th inning with a heave way wide of first baseman Ryan Howard, allowing the tying run to score and spoiling the two-hit, no-run effort by the forever young Pedro Martinez. A sports psychologist may be needed.

Mr. Happ failed on a 3-2 count to Andre Ethier, who resisted the temptation to swing and “drove” in the winning Dodger run with a bases-loaded base on balls. Ouch, babe.

Later, back at the Yankee ranch, Messrs. Figgins and Aybar looked at each other like little leaguers as a pop-up fell harmlessly between them at the edge of the outfield grass, allowing the pinstripers to plate a run in chilly Yankee Stadium (The Bronx was not burning).

All of these miscues led to great wailing and gnashing of teeth among those who live this sporting life. These failures shall forever be called “Castillos”, named after the New York Metropolitans’ Luis Castillo, whose inability to catch a pop fly for the final out this past season allowed the pinstripers to score two runs and ruin dreams of riches for a sporting man with a stake in the outcome.

None of these goats will miss a meal, though we might want to feed them tin cans instead of the pellets that are doled out at petting zoos. However, let’s be fair. These young men will not sleep well tonight. Well, maybe they will. I remember a young boy in tears after a strike-out to end the game, but I also remember the same boy stroking a two-out, two-strike double into the gap in left center in Prospect Park to drive in three runs and lead his team, down seven runs in the final frame, to an improbable come-back victory. In fact, I’m taking Athens (OU) against Sparta (Texas) today and the Lucky Charms girls soccer team against whomever they face today.

Yesterday’s goat could be tomorrow’s hero. For every “Bonehead Merkle” there is “I don’t believe what I just saw!” You can look it up.

4.25 Inches

Common Wisdom:
The culture vultures said The Beatles were just a passing fad. Ponderous pundits said the United States wasn’t ready to elect an African-American president. The bully George Amberson Minafer (in Booth Tarkington’s “The Magnificent Ambersons”) believed the automobile would never replace the horse. Economists drunk on algorithms thought the unemployment rate would never hit 10% again. Football minds stuck in play-action and the West Coast offense opined the wildcat formation was a gimmick that top-notch defenses would soon defenestrate.

As it turned out:
Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. The audacity of hope. Whoa, Nellie. The Great Recession. The return of the single wing.

Yep, the New York Jets’ defensive genius Rex Ryan was befuddled by the Miami offense, just as Alan Greenspan never saw the housing bubble collapse coming. We have seen the future and it works. Sure, there are no fullback spinners in the Dolphins’ playbook, but the new single wing (aka the wildcat) is here to stay, so you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone.

Inserting rookie Patrick White into the wildcat in the fourth quarter with the game on the line gleamed with confidence. Ricky Williams as the crossing back (fullback in the old single wing) in front of the tailback (Ronnie Brown) puts the rock into the hands of dynamic runners with an extra blocker at the point of attack, the key attribute of the single wing.

It occurs to me that I need a new blocker at my point of attack – aka the closely cut greensward that surrounds a hole 4.25 inches in diameter. A new strategy is required. Use your mentality, face up to reality, Cole Porter told us. Once the weather clears, it’s off to the practice green with wedge and putter in hand. Mastering these sticks, breaking 100 will be a snap. Once I do some push ups, reaching the greensward in two will be possible and breaking 90 will loom.

Of course, this strategy risks using up all the good strokes God originally granted me, but I’m willing to believe He has some greater plan in mind for my golf game. As a friend of mine reminds me, God hates a coward.

Then I’ll be infallible and qualified to assume the papacy when Benedict is gone, though some lobbying of the College of Cardinals may be in order.

Picks this week: Take road favorite Cincinnati and give the 2 ½ points against South Florida tonight (QB Tony Pike will expose the Bulls). Take Oklahoma and 3 ½ points tomorrow against Texas at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas (OK, I’m biased, but with two losses OU has the incentive to play the spoiler). On Sunday, take the Saints and give the 3 points against the Giants (Drew Brees is too good to lose at home).

Season of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness

The world is strangely silent now. Oh, I know wars still rage and suits still bark at the suitless and the well-perfumed clippety-clop heels still resonate in Grand Central Terminal. The cars and trucks still roll by my Brooklyn apartment all hours of the night. A comely Polish waitress still asks me what I’m reading as I dig into bacon and eggs. Youtube still provides hours of mindless reliving of youth. Sports talk radio still provides a background for a restless night’s sleep. Golf still beckons one to the course for one more joust for glory before winter clamps down.

But something is missing now. It’s the cicadas. My brothers and I used to catch them and fly them around on a string.

Only yesterday, it seems, the throaty mating call (if that is what it is) hummed through the trees of summer, a comforting murmur as one strolled in shorts and a golf shirt. Now the long pants must come out, a jacket must be at hand to guard against the winds of change. ‘Tis “the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” Mr. Keats penned. But I must object. ‘Tis the season of sadness and loss. Why, I am hitting the driver on par threes and not hitting the green. One must acknowledge his limitations.

If one is a student, fall is a time of hope, a chance to be better, a new chapter. I remember this. But if one is in his dotage, and I speak for myself, it is a melancholy season, a time to regret chances lost. Summer contains the seeds of its own demise, as God planned it. Let’s see if the Rockies can sweep the Dodgers.

Aristotle

Who has it better than us?

Does it get any richer for the sports fan over the weekend than two girls’ soccer games at the Parade Grounds in Brooklyn, pennant races, college football drama on Saturday, U.S. Open meltdowns on Sunday and uncomebackable comebacks against the best on Monday, and National Football League all day Sunday and two more on Monday night?

Nope. It’s all good (is that still the au courant saying?).

Mr. Del Porto, guns glistening in his sleeveless blouse in the Queens County September sunlight, somehow dispatched Mr. Federer, whose black sox may have undone him. Superstitious, I know, but these things have consequences. To my detriment on the golf course and elsewhere, I continuously rebel against Aristotle’s admonishment: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.”

There’s more, though. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. A defensive back makes a remarkable leap to slap an arching pass into the hands of a Denver receiver behind everyone who scoots to the score with seconds remaining.

But is luck, as Aristotle posited, the residue of practice? The defensive back did what he was trained to do and ended up costing his team the game. Should we teach him not to disrupt the play and allow the pass to take its course? Of course not. Can’t do it, as Mike Singletary would say. One must always try.

Guys

We play for fun and play out of fear.

The fun is hitting the perfect approach shot and the fear is missing the birdie putt. The fun is stroking a frozen rope to left field and the fear is getting thrown out at first. (Believe me, it happened). The fun is being part of a perfect game and the fear is booting a ground ball to spoil it. The fun is sprinting to the end zone and the fear is having the ball stripped at the one-yard line. No one wants to be “that guy,” but one must accept the moniker if this sporting life is to have any piquancy.

Failures must accompany successes for the latter to be sweet. To be unerring surely would bring on the old ennui. Yet the Pope probably doesn’t entertain an encyclical proclaiming an allegiance to Lucifer just to stir up another schism and have some fun. You would think that “those guys” who win all the time must find life boring, but then “those guys” are different than “that guy.”

And I mean gals as well as guys.

Take Melanie Oudin, the Georgia peach who scrambled her way into the mix in the Queens County tennis tournament known as the U.S. Open. She’s one of “those guys” who declared she wasn’t going anywhere but forward. And even though eliminated in the quarterfinals, you get the sense that setbacks mean little to “those guys,” such as Ms. Oudin. It’s just a hiccup on the way to glory.

One hopes that President Obama is one of “those guys,” too. Only the secure are most successful, after all. The world is filled with “that guy” who misses the birdie putt. It’s “those guys” who make make all the difference. “That guy” depends on "those guys."

Don't Let It Be Forgot

Those of us who grew up in the jaunty sunlight of the Kennedy clan are now at twilight. Time to pass the torch to those who will wake up in the morning with places to go and people to see. Kev, a Ted Kennedy delegate at the 1980 Cleveland County (Oklahoma) Democratic convention, is bereft but optimistic. Those with the torch will do better than us.

Playing football at noon recess at Christ the King in Lubbock, Tex., on Nov.22, 1963, a new Cajun kid in school from Louisiana ran onto the dirt field to announce JFK had been shot. Father McGovern canceled the altar boys’ meeting for that weekend.

And now it’s on to Chicago, Bobby said, as I turned off the TV, only to be awakened by mother that June day in 1968 to be told that the third brother had fallen.

Ted Kennedy, flawed as we all are, refused to accept his flaws as a definition of his life and legacy. He picked himself up and said give me the ball, just as OU’s bad boy Joe Don Looney told coach Bud Wilkinson and QB Monte Deere in 1962 and took the handoff for a 60-yard touchdown run to beat Syracuse in the waning moments (you can look it up), just as the Pinstripers’ 2003 hero Aaron Boone seeks a comeback to baseball from heart surgery.

The torch, the pigskin, the horsehide. We hold on to them as long as we can, and then they must be passed, handed off, tossed to the best of us. They'll do the same.

Second Acts

As Big Daddy said in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” the odor of mendacity is powerful, sister girl.

Louisville basketball maestro Rick Pitino, “success book” author and motivational speaker, is revealed as less than the man he pretended to be. Who made “six years ago” the statute of limitations?

The bloody ankles’ David Ortiz, “big poppie” and lovable slugger, says somebody slipped him a performance-enhancing mickey in his blueberry-banana smoothie. Who put the lemonade in my lemonade?

And now Michael Vick, who gets $1.3 million this year as long as he stays away from your poodles, is working overtime at the Philadelphia Eagles training camp. Who let the dogs out?

There are plenty of second acts in American sporting life, so we have that going for us. Which is nice.

But the checkered past can never be repealed. It can only be repeated (the definition of insanity) or addressed by excuses and apologies to allow one to limp along, the latter option not as good as a time machine, but the best that the real world offers.

Pitino will never sell another “how to be like me” book. Ortiz may be done, too, not because he is a bad guy but because he can’t turn on the inside pitch. Vick, however, will go to the Super Bowl (write it down), not because he’s a super guy, though he might turn out to be. The premise of Christianity, my preferred religion, is to deny the power of Satan, who whispers seductively that you can’t change.

Can’t repeat the past? Of course, you can, old sport, Gatsby confidently told Nick Carraway. But who would want to?

Korea, Greece and Ireland

Yin and Yang were on the Hazeltine golf course today in Minnesota. The red-shirted one had yin but no yang, striking the ball with characteristic panache, but taking the name of his father Zeus in vain when his ambrosia-fed muscles failed to make putts sink as they should. Doesn’t Tiger mean godlike in Greek?

I know how you feel, Eldrick. Well, maybe not exactly, because my six- and ten-footers succeed with such rarity that my partners and the foursome behind us look on with shock at a brown leprechaun dancing around the green when his Titleist dips into the cup.

The unflappable Y.E. Yang, on the other hand, had both going for him. The South Korean flag with its yin-yang motif was a suitable symbol for his game down the stretch. You can’t have one without the other if you expect to win, in life or in golf. Scoring an eagle on the par four 14th to take the lead, Yang curled a 200-yard shot on the 18th with a hybrid club and sank the birdie putt to claim the victory while Mr. Woods, probably doubtful of his Olympian heritage, slouched toward Orlando as television cameras predictably followed him first after his bogey putt on 18.

Yang, dressed in all-white like a lamb to the slaughter, didn’t get the memo that you’re supposed to sweat when teamed with Woods when he has a 54-hole lead in a major tournament.

Meanwhile, Padraig Harrington did a favor for all of us weekend duffers by singing “Frosty the Snowman” on a par three. To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart, Patrick Moynihan said. I’m sure mine will be broken this week on some par three when I don’t have my yin and my yang.

Screenplay

I’m writing a three-chord song, “The Left Wing Blues,” which will accompany an epic moving picture that has even more than the health care debate and Wall Street bonuses to keep audiences riveted.

In one scene, for instance, our hero thinks he is squared up perfectly with his target and strikes the ball flush, yet it rockets sharply to the sinister side instead of straight down the fairway. His buddy immediately places a club at his feet, which revealed that his perception of the landscape before him was severely skewed. The obvious correction is to aim at what he perceives to be the right of his target. But the mind’s eye is a terrible thing to lose, to paraphrase Dan Quayle (the Sarah Palin of his time).

Later, our hero (let’s call him the Marlboro Man) finds that rivals on the rodeo circuit are flinging their lariats with much better effect when it comes to capturing calves and tying their hooves together. The loop keeps missing the young bovine’s head to the left, falling limply to the dust of the arena. Is human growth hormone the answer? No, MM, solid citizen that he is, insists he will only take over-the-counter supplements and protein shakes.

In the middle plot point, MM confronts big government, which is trying to turn him into – gasp! – a Western European. He escapes with the help of a comely pharma/HMO lobbyist (our Bond girl). “They seek him here. They seek him there. Those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in heaven? Is he in hell? That damned elusive Pimpernel.”

The climax finds MM and lobbyist (think Claudine Auger in Thunderball), guns blazing, rescuing derivatives traders clinging to George Washington’s statue at Federal Hall on Wall Street from the clutches of Mr. Big’s socialists who would confiscate well-deserved wealth made possible by fiscal deficits and taxpayer largesse. They fly to the sports books in Las Vegas and parlay their way into even more-deserved riches by correctly betting the over-under in a Hamilton Tiger Cats - Montreal Alouettes game.

The dénouement: Back on the golf course, our Bond girl points MM to the right and his ball effortlessly soars in a Ruthian blast to the far reaches of the short grass.

The sequel: if she can only correct the putting stroke and save us all from the yips and the evils Mr. Big is plotting.

Evidence of a Higher Being

Golf is a perverse pastime. It requires concentration and nonchalance in equal parts. You have to care and not care at the same time. It is the blend that those of us not blessed with a carefree mind and natural athletic grace attempt to concoct to approximate the real thing.

It is our superstitious opinion that a putter contains only so many true rolls and that practice depletes that number. After all, why do so many sluggers forgo the home-run derby the night before the All-Star game?

And it is a truism, not a superstition, that a good big man will beat a good little man every day. Remember the look on Michael Spinks’ face when he saw Mike Tyson charge out from his corner? That visage of terror haunts us to this day. It wasn’t quite that bad with good little old man Tom Watson on Sunday at Turnberry, but you could tell when he pulled the putter back for an eight-footer that would have won The Open Championship that fear had conquered him.

Carrying the torch for us 50-somethings, he cared too much and then the wheels came off in the playoff. He was simply one stroke too old. As Vince Lombardi said, fatigue makes cowards of us all. And fatigue strikes the aging with much more frequency than it does the younger. This is the way God planned it and we must accept it

Now Stewart Cink, the fellow with a golfer’s tan that includes his pale pate when unhatted, a jarring sight, is no teen-age phenom, but his assertion that he felt no nervousness rings true. Doubt afflicts the older man as he grows tired. We must again go to the young genius Keats when he addressed the nightingale thusly:

What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;


Notice the modifiers preceding “man” – good, big and little. By taking one more club, the little man swinging with confidence can carry the water and set himself up for a birdie putt, while the big man with a grandiose opinion of his talent will take a pitching wedge and shank it into the wildlife clustering at the edge of the pond.

Similarly, the good young man will beat the good old man more often than not. Again, this is God’s plan. The Bishop in Caddyshack who “theoretically” could have beaten the course record in a thunderstorm missed the point when he declared in the bar at Bushwood that there is no God.

Of course there is, your eminence. He made Watson take the eight-iron instead of the nine.

They Don't Write 'em Like That Anymore

“Green grass ‘round my window
Young leaves that the wind blows…” (Green Grass, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, 1966).

Oh fuggedaboutit. Kev’s trash-strewn Brooklyn thoroughfare sprouts nothing but vile rap lyrics at decibels that make us want to join the NRA, secure a shotgun and blast several engine blocks while blaring Petula Clark from our cute little Sony boom box. “Don’t sleep in the subway, darling,” would be our “hasta la vista, baby.”

But we realize it’s a free country. We ended our popular music infatuation around 1969, extended by a Steely Dan and Allman Brothers habit in the 1970s, and so acknowledge we have become a cranky old man standing athwart history and yelling, Stop! Yeah, I’m feelin’ groovy all right.

Let’s be clear. We’re usually an optimistic sort, and will return to that sunny clime soon enough. For now, we slog through a slough of despond, imploring Miss Market and our zen-like putting stroke to return. Anthony Kim and Hunter Mahan must be going through the same thing, watching the red-shirted master of the universe roll in a 20-foot putt on 16 for the winning margin. Not to mention Andy Roddick, whose serve wasn’t broken until the 30th and final game of the fifth set at the All England Club. As a wise friend of mine has noted, guys like Eldrick Woods and Roger Federer “command the elements.” The rest of us must live with our imperfections. They are legion. Roddick’s defeat was foreshadowed as early as the second set, when he flubbed away a 6-2 advantage in the tiebreaker. Mahan’s 62 was only a tease. He foolishly warmed up on the range for a playoff.

The “green shoots” rally now must face the earnings reporting season beginning this week. And the employment data – not only the payroll losses but the shrinking workweek – point to a different kind of recovery. “Broke, disgusted, agents can’t be trusted,” as the Mamas and Papas intoned (told you we are trapped in the sixties), the American consumer isn’t going on a spending spree this time around. Don’t buy the market. Stick with what we used to call on Wall Street, “special situations.” PALM, NVAX, F, and consider airlines now that oil prices are fading. We’ll be looking for others and will report back.

Luckily, the Hess station next door saves us 45 cents on cigarettes. But we think we’ll soon have to start rolling our own.

Stitch It Up, Doc

Recall the metallic taste and smell of blood? Seldom do middle-aged urban, sedentary adults experience it, but it is one of those startling sensations of childhood, when we are fearless and the physical world abruptly slaps some sense into us and it’s off to the emergency room for a stitch here and there. Needless to say, we and our offspring have been sewn up multiple times, only to be surprised when it happens anew.

The United States Department of Labor reported that employers shed far more jobs than anticipated in June and stocks beat a hasty retreat to the ER, much like Kev and his fellow sissies on the golf course today, who heard the rumble of thunder on the 18th hole and picked up their well-struck balls plugged in the squishy sod of Split Rock where the family Bronks used to live and the Battle of Pelham was waged in October of 1776. The latter “saved the revolution” according to the hole markers. We’ll have to look it up.

Times being what they are, this patriot wished for a shotgun in his bag to bag a family of “wild” turkeys clucking around a tee box, oblivious to the swack of titanium on Titleist as they pecked the ground for their daily bread. Oh well, probably would have sprayed buckshot at the Acela train speeding by on the outskirts and missed the plucky fowl, much like missing the fairway most of the showery day, requiring the services of a savvy lawyer.

The jobs data need a fast-talking spinmeister, too. All of the components – jobs lost, wages, hours worked, average work week – were inescapably grim. We won’t bother you with the particulars, but the anticipated recovery in the second half is thrown into serious doubt.

We remain hopeful, though. Not to put lipstick on a pig, but we remain enamored of the glamour of filthy lucre. It is our opinion that the choice between God and mammon (that is, excruciating destruction of wealth vs. happy days are here again) is a false premise. Listening to Wall Street “economists” bloviate on facts that are apparent to all but the illiterate is the equivalent of reading yesterday’s newspaper. Money supply growth and fiscal stimulus (and more to come until it works) will kick in.

No one will be blamed for taking money off the table (Kev wishes he had done so with his baseball picks last week), but the jobs report makes stocks cheaper. Which means we’ll get back in when they look too cheap. Now, where’s our shotgun? Dinner, like youth, must be served.

Mortality

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” (W.B. Yeats, the Second Coming). Something stalks us, fellow boomers, and it isn't tryng to give us the comeback player of the year award. Popular culture contemporaries are checking out at a frightening clip.

Farrah Fawcett’s high point was as the pin-up girl at her most come-hitherest, despite her best efforts to grow into a serious actress. Michael Jackson’s impressive oeuvre came to be overshadowed by the bizarre personal life. Only Billy Mays’ entertaining sales pitches remain an authentic legacy, in our view. That’s all he did or apparently aspired to do. Here was a guy who could take his work, but not himself, seriously. Aged 62, 50, and 50, respectively.

“What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.” (Ecclesiastes, King James version).

(We are big on quoting better writers than ourselves today, one an Anglo-Irish poet contemplating the post-Great War world, the other some anonymous Israelite who concluded wisely that all is vanity).

We think these thinkers have something to offer the living who are still toiling, or playing, in Kev’s case, in the vineyards of this sporting life. Catastrophe and other minor setbacks lurk at every corner. Miss Market can look like Farrah Fawcett one day and Phyllis Diller the next, can do the moon walk then retreat to Neverland, can promise stain removal from your favorite shirt with OxiClean and you believe her.

We think this immortal is still on the side of the living. Durable goods orders and personal income data point to recovery, though the savings rate has soared compared to consumption. That transition could be wrenching, but is to be expected. Kev’s transition from genius to nitwit in baseball picks is similarly a shock, but not fatal. At least PALM keeps rewarding (forecasts of positive cash flow by year-end). F will survive. Still with NVAX but looking to take profits soon.

In the meantime, life treats us well. A beloved girl is a softball champion. The U.S. soccer team acquitted itself well in a valiant effort against the Brazilian juggernaut (though whoever passed out those plastic horns to the crowd should be brought up on charges)and Albert Pujols continues to amaze fans of the stumbling Redbirds.

It is hard enough to accept love handles as a fact of getting on in years when, in our heads, we remain 25, rich, witty and irresistible to all women, but the prospect of demise unsettles all but the sunniest of men. Saw a funny poster the other day: “My goal is to live forever. So far, so good.”

Here's Johnny

“I hold in my hands the envelopes. My 4 ½ year-old daughter Katherine Mary could tell that these envelopes are hermetically sealed. They’ve been kept in a mayonnaise jar on Funk and Wagnalls’ porch since noon today. NO ONE knows the answers inside these envelopes, but you, in your mystical and borderline divine way, will ascertain the answers without even knowing heretofore the questions. Isn’t that correct, sir?” (Ed McMahon, courtesy of a CNN video).

“May an incontinent yak spray your poppy fields with ayatollahs.” OK, I made that one up, mixing up all sorts of mysterious visitors from the mysterious East while channeling Johnny Carson.

Mr. McMahon has gone onto his eternal reward, another sign that we baby boomers are limping to the finish line. Seems like yesterday that Leno slid behind the desk, only to yield it to O’Brien. When will St. Peter welcome the rest of us? It is certain he will, hopefully far into the future.

Just as certain is failure on the golf course. Fan-favorite Mickelson, Come-back kid Duval and Ricky Bobby (nee Barnes) had a chance to claim the United States Open Championship at waterlogged Bethpage, only to fall short on a Monday blessed with sunshine now and then. At least they replenished their Vitamin D requirement, in short supply these days in old New York.

Rather than conquest, failure was the motif at the public course in Nassau County, or is it Suffolk? I live in Kings County, on the same sliver of turf jutting into the Atlantic, and, as insular as I am, remain ignorant of political boundaries. Mr. Glover, hitting fairways and making putts, was far more much in touch with the ground beneath him than Kev, whose muddy, horse-barn smelling sneakers are still drying out.

‘Twas a day to remember. Saw Tiger Woods, not that big of a guy really, in all his glory. If he hadn’t teed off early on Thursday, he probably would have won. We shouted Boomer Sooner to fellow son of old OU and British Open champion Todd Hamilton, who responded with the Tuck Fexas gesture that is treasured on Commerce and Elm Streets in Dallas in October while the swells live it up in the Adolphus Hotel and throw TVs out the windows. Saw the ferocious, yet calibrated, swing of Bubba. And from merrye olde England, Mr. Fisher acquitted himself well.

All of this meant a day away from Miss Market, who refuses to be charmed. Our delicate relationship is, well, delicate. As is Kev’s baseball picking ability. Blew three games last night, one on a walk-off home-run. Oh, if ifs and buts were candy and nuts! We will bounce back, of this Kev is sure.

More importantly, there’s a softball game tonight in Prospect Park. We’ll laugh if we triumph and do the same if we smell the camel breath. Kind of like McMahon.

Into Each Life

I believe the definition of par is the number of strokes an expert golfer requires to complete a hole. The par for a 72-hole tournament’s completion is four days, which may have to succumb to Mother Nature’s par for the skies of New York lo these many days.

Instead of delivering buttery bucketsful of sunshine, she has deemed it necessary to strap kegs of Poland Spring to the gray clouds. Our promising tan is fading, and the makers of sunblock lotion must be laying off thousands.

In the meantime, Mother Nature’s niece, Miss Market, must be obeyed as well. We cannot bend them to our will. Even Tiger Woods, 11 strokes off the lead after 36 holes as we write, must bow every now and then to the vagaries of nature.

Miss Market will increasingly inflict pain or rain riches according to the broad-brush data released every week. That’s because stock prices will more and more respond to news about the general health of the economy than the efforts at political jockeying on legislation. Change in financial sector regulation is a given, as is health care reform, deficit spending and money supply growth. Barking about reforms being too much or too little is quibbling. Too often, we seek the perfect at the expense of the possible. Recovery is baked in the cake.

Last week, the Conference Board reported that its index of leading economic indicators rose 1.2% in May, the second straight monthly increase. And the Philly Fed index rose to negative 2.2 in June from negative 22.6 in May, the best business condition in the Philadelphia region since September. New orders and shipments improved, as employment remained very weak. Those who still have jobs are running faster on the treadmill.

We will have to run a little faster this week to make up for the baseball picks last week. We picked the wrong day to take the Floridian fish over the pinstripers, the same day we foolishly believed the Coors Field tall boys would turn chilly against the plucky Bucs. Earlier, we put our faith again in young Vin Mazzaro of the Elephant patches against the old Brooklynites in southern California.

Mother Nature and Miss Market can be obstinate, but patience will bring them around. Stay long equities and oil, short bonds. The U.S. Open will crown a champion sooner or later. Here’s hoping it’s later, as Kev has a Thursday ticket good for Monday if they can’t finish today. Long shot investment tip of the week: Go long Duval, short Barnes.

Young Girls They Do Get Weary

One lesson Kev thinks he has finally learned as he approaches the turn to the home stretch is that you can’t tell people how to feel. Least of all Miss Market. Our pouting paramour will not succumb to sunny encouragement, snapping her feral fangs at the hand on her shoulder, laughing maniacally at such bromides as: “Hey, it’s not so bad,” or “Remember all the good times,” or “There’ll be blue birds over the white cliffs of Dover.”

You tell her that Pudge Rodriguez has now crouched behind the plate more times than Carlton Fisk and exhort her to do the same. You tell her that even the graceful, intricate – nay, beautiful – pitching motion of Tim Lincecum must lose a game now and then. To no avail. We must let her edge back to us in her own good time. Not helping her in this direction are the latest economic data.

Wholesale inflation was 0.2% in May. Higher energy prices offset a drop in food prices, according to the government. The core producer price index, which excludes food and energy prices, fell 0.1%. At the retail level, inflation also rose just 0.1% last month.


Industrial production fell 1.1% in May to the lowest level in 11 years and is down 13.4% in the past year, the largest year-over-year decline since 1946. And capacity utilization fell to a record-low 68.3% last month, down from 69%. The Krugmanites have a point. This indicates much slack to be taken up before inflation becomes a problem, a condition much to be wished for.


Inflation and interest rates must rise to convince her she has pricing power again, but the mills of the gods grind slowly. We can’t tell her or anyone else how to feel.

Meanwhile (our fallback transition), stay with PALM. Much chatter about a takeover by industry giants looking for an avenue into the smart phone market. F still has value. Wait for GMGMQ to slip. Hoping NVAX catches fire again.

Wish I had taken the underdog Nationals against the pinstripers last night. Long Islander John Lannan outpitched the suspect Chien-Ming Wang, who nevertheless showed some gumption against the new “first in war, first in peace, last in the American (now National) league” team.

Tell Me You're Coming Back to Me

Is Miss Market a changeling, one of those offspring of elves and fairies that the wee folk exchange for human babies? Why, just the other day we danced merrily through a meadow of green shoots with her. But when the sun arose the next, we found a slain rabbit in our pot when we attempted to make our morning oatmeal. And there she was, tangled hair and pointed ears, hissing like Catwoman in a field of burnt straw.

Suspicions that the economic recovery on the horizon was a mirage were roused by the Empire State survey of manufacturing conducted by the New York Fed. The data showed a decline in May after two months of improvement. Oil prices fell, as did interest rates, the most recent fear of the financial press. These are not indicative of green shoots. Kev is of the opinion that rising commodity prices and higher interest rates should be cheered as a sign of acceleration in the real economy, not brakes on the recovery.

But the familiar arc of expansion and recession that has marked the post-war period has turned unfamiliar. That’s because the model has been revealed as a changeling as well. As the United States turns from consumption to saving, incomes decline as jobs vanish, which reinforces contraction and the great hunkering down. So despite all the reserves the Fed has pumped into the system, banks find fewer viable businesses to loan to. The liquidity trap is not a tender one.

Yet policy makers surely know this. The cleansing power of a collapse in economic activity and the erasure of iconic American enterprises some call for would be so great as to cut serious gashes in the cord that binds a society together. So Bernanke, et al., must keep pushing on the string, hoping that the trauma of change from consumption to saving doesn’t entirely dissolve the rope to which we are hanging by a thread. The effort of government spending and Fed largesse is aimed at supplying a parachute to slow the descent so the pilot can live to fly another day.

For the investor, this means rewiring the brain. Look for things “to begin stop worsening” as the Bank of Japan said was happening in its latest dispatch. Being nimble and not too greedy will be prized attributes. Waiting for GMGMQ, DXO (oil) and SLV (silver) to get cheap again, keeping PALM and F in the portfolio. Plaxico Burress and Michael Vick look as if they will get a second chance in the NFL soon. So shall we. Miss Market will comb her hair, don the cocktail dress and take our arm.

As we heard Jean Arthur say to Cary Grant the other night: “I’m hard to get, Jeff. All you have to do is ask.”

I'm a Loser

It was every Little Leaguer’s nightmare – failure most conspicuous. How many men in suits scurrying through the canyons of old New York carry the burden of losing the game as little boys because leather failed to secure the old spheroid? The ignominy must have led them to foist all those toxic assets on the unsuspecting masses.

Is Luis Castillo the new Marv Throneberry? Legend has it that Marv’s New York Metropolitan teammates threw him a birthday party in the clubhouse but didn’t give him a piece of cake because they were afraid he’d drop it. Renouncing his resolution not to go against the pinstripers at home, Kev had victory in his grasp as Mr. Castillo sidled under Mr. Clutch Alex Rodriguez’s pop fly with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. ‘Twas not to be. Two runs scored. Kev’s billfold asked “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

And how about Dwight Howard? He has become the bizzaro world Superman. Mr. Howard only had to make one of two free throws to put the game out of reach for the central Floridians. But no! as Howard Cosell used to interject during the half-time highlights on Monday Night football. One Lala land three-pointer and an overtime later, he of the glistening other-worldly shoulders was shrunk to a mere mortal.

Kev won’t speak for you, but he’s of the mind that we are all little boys. If Kev were Mr. Castillo or Mr. Howard, he would be crying like a 10-year-old who just struck out with the bases loaded or clanged the go-ahead free throw off the rim. But then again we are all odd fish. Failure makes some of us stronger, others of us despondent.

We want to castigate Mr. Castillo for his miscue that cost us greens fees this week, but can’t summon the nerve. He must feel bad enough.

Our cure for the “Mets”? Quit calling themselves the Mets. It smacks of the Cro-Magnon lumbering to extinction. They are the Metropolitans, lords of the universe, boulevardiers, bon vivants et raconteurs. Swagger, ye losers. After all, the pinstripers were pounding Mr. Rodriguez as if he had swatted it out of the park. Talk about a clutch “hit.” Some guys have all the luck.

Sentimental Journey

Our radio crackled nostalgically the other morning with the interference of electrical stuff in the ether on a showery morning in old New York. It reminded Kev that we inhabit an imperfect world. As much as we labor to bend the elements to our will, Zeus will hurl his lightning bolts while we wait out the storm in a west Texas college professor’s office, listening to KLBK dj’s spin “Sukiyaki” and “Hello Stranger” in between reports of tornado sightings.

Wait! Wake up, Kev, it’s not the spring of 1963. No need to cower in the civil defense-approved shelter. The storm is passing, but an eye toward the horizon is only prudent. All decisions, though based on the best information our senses and cerebellums decipher, can fall prey to the reptilian brain that sometimes overwhelms and incites us to do foolish things. This is the reason God made lawyers, bookies, bail bondsmen and fore caddies.

The latest dispatches from the data gatherers tell us that initial jobless claims declined in the latest week and retail sales and consumer sentiment rose last month. These latest green shoots are heartening if not concrete proof that things are on the mend. Who knows if some beetle or blight will devour the hopeful young?

This sporting life is a messy affair, but as long as the supply of chewing gum and duct tape holds out, we’ll muddle through. In other words, the recovery effort is a pastiche led by “experts” (Bernanke, Geithner, et al.) who purport to know something we don’t. Yet they and we serfs, as St. Paul said, are looking “through a glass darkly.”

But look we must, however clouded our view. Kev finally triumphed by going with the bloody ankles against the pinstripers, whose manager continues to refuse to think outside the box. Why not put Rivera on the mound in the 8th inning? The Bucs also put bucks in the pocket with a win over the well-fed Cox-led tomahawks.

How can you go against Halladay tonight in Toronto? Because interleague play is a different proposition. The Marlins get to use a DH and the 10-1 pitcher has to lose at some point. And how about taking the Athletics vs. the Giants, even though Lincecum is on the hill for the McCoveyites? Because young Vin Mazzaro (a green shoot?) has yet to give up a run in his two career starts. Jump on this kid.

However, long shots must be cashed in when they prevail. Got out of General Motors (GMGMQ) at $1.15 after buying at $0.88. We’ll look to get back in at a lower price.

Sticking with PALM (the Pre phone is a beauty, according to a friend who’s seen one), F and NVAX (The World Health Organization says there’s nowhere to hide from the swine flu).

Also considering a new business – opening a Zen putting school. See the ball, be the ball. No blindfolds, though.

Our Little Black Book

Every dog has its day. Hooted at as a malingerer by vengeful packs of yapping pinstriper fans, Carl Pavano pitched nine innings of shut-out ball to lead the Tribe over the Pale Hose last week and enrich Kev. And long spurned by her bitter once-burned suitors, Miss Market continues to tame the bears. Methinks they doth protest too much and will soon be checking their cell phone contacts for her number.

Yet we remain wary, knowing that the coquette has the capacity to lead us on and then pout when she doesn’t get her way. What could cause her to spurn us? Three things: geopolitical/terrorist catastrophe, economic indicators that refuse to validate what Bernanke and others perceive as the incipient recovery and the related discovery that stock prices are ahead of what the economy is promising. Well, I guess that’s two things really.

In any event, what matters in the short run for those with dough at stake is the news flow. Job growth should take a while, but stock prices expect that. Key this week will be Thursday’s release of retail sales data and Friday’s University of Michigan report on consumer sentiment for May. Expectations are that both will point to tentative revival. Also to be monitored is the blitz of U.S. Treasury auctions of notes. The yields necessary to sell them will affect the equity markets as much as the bond markets.

The great deflation-inflation debate is for another day. We’ll get to it eventually, but for now we’re concerned about profits to pay greens fees and Mr. Landlord.

Our darling, PALM, has taken a beating recently, though we’re still significantly in the black. Those wishing to take money off the table would be entirely justified. The Pre phone has been released and the battle with Apple and Research in Motion is joined. News is that Apple is cutting the price of the original iPhone to $99. Let’s get physical.

Brave souls who ventured with Kev into Novavax (NVAX) and GM (ticker is now GMGMQ), have been rewarded. If you bet the ranch on these two you would be considerably better off than if you left Summer Bird out of your trifecta box at Belmont. Both are up more than 30% since purchase May 1 and June 1, respectively. Ford is still a keeper.

But Kev picks losers as well. Sonnanstine pitches a superb game for the Rays tonight at the Yankee Stadium launching pad (NASA should consider blasting space probes to Pluto from home plate), but the homers, like the DJs used to say about the hits on AM radio, just keep on comin.’ I’m swearing off going against the pinstripers at home unless Harmon Killebrew, Hank Aaron, Ralph Kiner and Jimmie Foxx are in the opposing line-up.

We Wax Poetic

Is the world too much with us? Wordsworth’s wonderful line resonates far beyond what the simple Anglo-Saxon words represent. They suggest a certain weariness, a sigh at the realization of the incessant to’ing and fro’ing that life demands. Yet, to and fro we must if we are to find profitable enterprises that will keep us to’ing and fro’ing for yet another day.

The nation’s employers continued to shed jobs at frightening levels, according to the Automatic Data Processing survey, suggesting Friday’s employment data from the United States Department of Labor will yield a number close to the consensus estimate of another 550,000 jobs lost in May. Expect renewed sightings of green shoots if the number comes in lower. A good sign – initial jobless claims were lower in the latest week.

Meanwhile, technicians espy hope in the S&P 500 moving above its 200-day moving average this week, a sign, so they say, that the path of least resistance is higher equity values. Speaking of which, Novavax (NVAX) soared 74% today on news that a study of its flu vaccine had begun under the auspices of the National Institutes of Health. If only Kev had bet the ranch! This could be a big winner or big loser and is not for the faint of heart. PALM continued its climb in anticipation of the Pre smart phone to go on sale Saturday.

But enough of serving mammon.

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;Little we see in Nature that is ours;…” (William Wordsworth)

Respite was found in the soggy turf of Dyker Beach, where carts were forbidden this morning and Kev and his companions walked 18 invigorating holes. A frisky squirrel investigated our ball on the fairway, and for several seconds Kev was sure the furry rascal would carry it away in expectation of a full day’s meal. Thankfully, he realized it was not edible and scampered as we approached with hybrid club in hand. And though the youthful two of our foursome were natural athletes who inspired heroic efforts on the part of the aging, the latter failed to break 100.

But the putting stroke has improved tremendously. Must have had four lip out after perfect reads today. Offsetting, though, was a nine on the fifteenth hole after reaching the rough just off the fringe in three and expecting to chip on and putt for par. Needless to say, disaster resulted. Can someone have the yips with a wedge?

Summertime

Put away the long pants, sweaters, windbreakers, hunched shoulders and sneering cynicism. Forget the calendar. Summer is here. Time to gorge on golf, bask in baseball, tone the tan, pick the ponies, tweak the tennis serve, pen poetry, marvel at Miss Market and indulge in any other alliterative activity that makes the heart soar and shoves the blues to another season. Fly me to the moon.

Scolds who wish the profligacy of the United States in recent decades will visit yet more plagues on the citizenry have seen their best days. They will be left behind, scowling and snorting about “kids these days” while the car stereos blare obnoxious “music” and the car companies, insolvent or not, jockey for position to provide a carapace for one man’s insistence to share his entertainment with the rest of the world walking by.

Auto sales last month were better than expected, even for GM. They were down year-on-year, but up significantly from April. Pending sales of existing homes ratcheted up for the third month in a row in April, according to the National Association of Realtors. Oil rebounded late to close a couple of pennies lower, but it’s fast closing in on $70 a barrel. China keeps growing. To feed itself it must.

Green shoots are showing buds if not flowering, though skies remain menacing. To come tomorrow is the ADP data on layoffs, and on Friday the May nonfarm payroll numbers from the United States Department of Labor will help clarify things.

The arguments for and against recovery are as contentious as the never-ending contretemps among pinstriper fans over whether Joba Chamberlain should start or be the setup man for Mariano. Will a collapsing dollar and rising interest rates sink the USA, or will fiscal and monetary stimuli restore American vigor? Both outcomes are plausible, but for now summer seduces me. Staying in equities and commodities, those things we use to build things, seems the more summery outlook. And we are nothing but summery now after seeing the promised land by breaking the sound barrier of 100 on the golf course.

In the meantime, got a tee time at Dyker Beach on Thursday. Anyone who would care to join me will see a new putting stroke perfected on the living room rug that insures birdies – that’s right, birdies, not par. It’s summer and the fish are jumpin’. Catch ‘em if you can.

See the USA in a Chevrolet

You can draw a direct line from the Declaration of Independence to Dinah Shore, who touted GM's most visible nameplate.

Walk through Prospect Park and trod the same ground George Washington skedaddled through in August of 1776 fleeing the British and Hessians who had routed the Continentals in the Battle of Long Island. Kev saw no red coats with muskets there this weekend, just red-shirted young ladies, fearless as only the young can be, playing a game with ball and bat that began in the young republic as something called rounders.

Little has changed in the game since the Knickerbockers played all comers at Elysian Fields in Hoboken. Well, ok, the mound has been lowered, the pitch count has become a much-watched statistic, gloves have become lengthier, and players’ bodies have swollen and shrunk with the ebb and flow of, ahem, B-12 injections. But it is still a kids’ game invested with the American dream of pastoral sublimity – a pastime without a clock, as the seven-hour, 25-inning collegiate affair between Texas and Boston College attested to.

In the meantime, though, the clock ticks in the world of striving and getting. Before you know it, the ground shifts under your feet and all the striving doesn’t result in any getting. The latest tremor is the reorganization of General Motors under the aegis of the taxpayer, but it is not a quake. Largely foreseen, the UAW and bondholders inevitably had to bow to the less-worse than the catastrophic. Proof of the inevitability is the blythe reaction of the stock market. Although four shares of GM will now secure a Big Mac (no fries or Coke), Miss Market cares not a whit and goes merrily on her way, gathering her rosebuds while she may. Just hope my dream of owning a new Corvette does not go aglimmering and I can live my own Tod and Buz Route 66 adventures.

As capricious a mistress as she is, she cannot help but respond to the soft summer cooing of newborn whippoorwills. It brings out the nurturing side of her. The latest song of hope comes from the purchasing managers survey (now the Institute for Supply Management). Its diffusion index rose to 42.8% in May from 40.1%. That still indicates contraction in the manufacturing sector, but not as steep as prognosticators thought. More importantly, the new orders sub-index, an indicator of future activity, rose above 50% for the first time in a year and a half.

Miss Market is also a Yankees’ fan, apparently. She giveth and taketh away. The Tribe let Kev down tonight, issuing too many walks to the pinstripers, giving its latter-day muderers’ row too many chances to rattle run-scoring doubles off the wall. Still have the Dodgers tonight, but Kuroda looks like he wants to issue free passes as well. Already 40-some odd pitches into the second inning, what looms?

Well, Washington escaped to Manhattan and lived to fight another day and father a country that lets us take all the time we need on grass and dirt with bat and ball and leather. The clock is clicking elsewhere. Stay invested in equities and commodities, shun government bonds, and enjoy the open road.

Return to Normalcy?

In normal times (whatever those were), rising oil prices and interest rates would be a cause for worry. Oh for the early ‘80s when the Hollywood actor became president and there was a USSR trying to tame Afghanistan and Paul Volcker targeted bank reserves!

In these fascinating days, hikes in energy prices and bond yields should be welcome. The not so hidden agenda of the controlling authorities is to inflate away debt and worry about the consequences later. Krugman and others insist that inflation Cassandras are false prophets and that deflation is the enemy. They may well be right, but Kev thinks the Nobelist and his ilk are betting as wrongly as Kev did on baseball this past week.

Though rates dropped after spiking earlier last week, they can only go up this year. If they don’t, then the Obama presidency will be a failure because it will mean the problem that was thrust upon it – restarting economic activity – has not been solved. Fiscal and monetary captains will not turn off the spigots until the prices of goods, services and money go up. Lock in a mortgage now if you have a job.

And jobs data will be key this week. ADP will report corporate layoffs on Wednesday, and the Labor Department will tell us on Friday how many more lined up at the soup kitchen in May. Any negative number below 550,000 will be greeted with cheers in the equity market.

But there are no normal times. They have never existed. What’s good for General Motors is good for the USA? It has taken Kev, because it’s all about him, well into his later years, to realize his expectation that eventually all secrets would be revealed was a mirage. Yet, we still court Miss Market. We can do no less. Finer minds than Kev’s summon her. Be nimble, be quick, and believe in God or not, but take your time on putts.

Still in with PALM, F, AMD, and looking to get back into DXO. Get out of government bonds while the getting is good.

Animal House

Economists embrace mathematical models because they offer the illusion of authority. And indeed they are right to stick with the rigor of numbers. Facing facts and manipulating them into an algorithm that predicts the future is the truest avenue open to men and women. We only have our history to draw from. Past encounters and experience inform our decisions, wrong as they may turn out to be.

Kev’s “dog “ theory has taken a beating this week at the old ball game, but Miss Market has been a fierce lioness. She is a hungry mommy, intent on feeding her kittens (or is it cubs?), her mate and herself, enabling Kev to feed his brood and keep Mr. Landlord happy. In short, she is an animal.

In a speech today, the Dallas Fed president, Richard Fisher, patted himself and his colleagues on the back with the remark that monetary policy had succeeded in reigniting “animal spirits” in the strivers and sportsmen who toil in the fields, golf courses and streams of these United States of America. This is what is called going out on a limb. There are many who see only darkness and cave-dwelling ahead.

We may have shot errant arrows at ball clubs that escaped our hunt, but we spy an antelope, or ibex, or some kind of antlered beast brought down by our loving mate for protein-loving investors. Let us feast.

PALM’s Pre phone will be much coveted. After Sprint’s exclusive arrangement expires, Verizon and ATT will pounce to offer this rival to Apple and Research in Motion. PALM is volatile, but wait until Christmas sales take off. Ford is a stalwart. Buy oil (green is good, but dinosaurs died for a reason). We can’t predict the future, but try we must.

Anything can happen. When was the last time both catchers (masks in place) and both managers were thrown out? It happened today in youbetcha Minnesota in a game between the bloody hose and the twinkies.

And by the way, Zambrano was right to protest in his demonstrative way. I’ve done the same thing when blowing a three-foot putt or a second serve. We are animals with spirit after all.

Decoration Day

Heard a bunch of good jokes on the golf course on Monday, none of which can be repeated in a family column. Enjoyed stories from the “oldest members of the club” (see P.G. Wodehouse). These honorable fellows were gracious enough to permit this hapless duffer to invade their muni preserve and enjoy their company in an aged and hallowed tournament in the county of Kings. I learned much, far more than just how to manage a golf course or wave a wand with conviction. You had to be there.

But, though my group would recoil in horror, I have to admit that putting bores me. Three- and four-putts – among other flubs – doomed me, but I just can’t get interested. I have this superstition that you only have so many good putts or base hits in any one stick, and that you shouldn’t waste them on the practice green or in the batting cage. This is perverse, I know. Other than a lack of the requisite motor skills, it explains why I will never make the senior tour or learn to hit a breaking ball. Therapy is called for and I will seek it immediately.

That confession made, Miss Market seems to have the same malady. She leaps at “green shoots” (a soaring drive to the middle of the nicely cut fairway) then Dutch elm disease (insouciant putting) in the form of a record drop in home prices in the first quarter blights the promising foliage. Yet consumer confidence as measured by the Conference Board surged last month and hope springs anew on the next hole. We understand each other, Miss Market and I, which is to say we are goslings who have lost mom and dad to golfers with shotguns in their bags and must waddle about figuring out on our own what to eat and how to find it.

Now, the consumer confidence readings are notorious for inaccurately predicting future spending, but they do, at least, give us an idea of whether animal spirits are stirring. The onus is on Obama and the Democrats to deliver. Americans know stimulus is coming. Whether it does the trick, “only time will tell,” as the TV reporters say in concluding their stand-up recitations of “news.”

For now, I can’t let loose of PALM yet. If consumer confidence is rising and the Pre phone lives up to the hype, the stock could be worth well more than at midday May 26. Ford, which will soon be the only American car company left standing on its own two feet is a keeper, too. AMD still has value, we think. Sticking with Novavax in the biotech sector for no other reason than a New Delhi-native golf partner on Saturday assured me it was a solid Indian company (HQ in Maryland) on the right track. Though I wonder if this is tantamount to Cubs manager Lou Piniella sending in pitcher Carlos Zambrano as a pinch-hitter last night. The ploy failed, much to Kev’s delight since he took the Bucs, but it was original.

Cashing in on SLV and DXO for the bucks they’ve made so far and to keep the wolf from the door, but for the long run, precious metals and oil should pay off when inflation gets going again if you want to stick with them as summer and the driving season begins on what has come to be known as Memorial Day.

In 1866, the ladies of Columbus, Mississippi, are said to have been the first to honor the fallen in the recent War Between the States, decorating graves of the rebel dead and then strewing flowers on the scorned Union graves moldering from the Battle of Shiloh, but Waterloo, New York, is also said to be the site of the first Decoration Day. It matters little, of course, who began the tradition, but it has evolved into a universal nod to the United States and its sons and daughters, whether they be descendants of the Grand Army of the Republic or the United Confederate Veterans, who have covered themselves with glory.

Played golf, took profits, grilled ribs for the family and picked up potato salad and baked beans at the deli last night, got a good night’s sleep. Nobody has it better.

Game on!

The World Champion Philadelphia club of the National League brought the mighty American League pinstripers to their knees tonight, taking advantage of the mysterious winds of the Bronx bandbox, putting Kev in the plus column. We will forgive our taking the bloody socks of Boston against the glove-challenged Metropolitans of Queens, but Kawakami, alias KK, stood up brilliantly against Halladay in the home of Sherman’s gift to Lincoln. It must be hell for unreconstructed Confederates to see that statue at 59th Street with Nike hailing the victor astride his prancing mount. But it’s just a game, after all.

Just a game? What nonsense. Why, it is the very reason for living. If it were not for games, the world would be a dreary place, fit only for debtor prisons and dour sires and mares counting the pennies they earn while the mules in their harnesses plow the 20 acres allotted them.

God (your higher being or whomever) has now given us summer. A delicious sweat trickles on our brows. Shorts and polo shirts are required wear. A golf glove keeps the left hand noticeably paler than the rest of the exposed appendages. The same glove protects the mole on my index finger knuckle that has reminded me which is my left hand since I was a boy. I pray it doesn’t fade.

But I stray beyond what makes the world goes ‘round – fear and greed.

Just as the previous administration knew its bread was buttered by preventing another terrorist attack on U.S. soil, so does the present one know that economic recovery will define it. Fiscal and monetary policies have as their single goal reviving animal spirits even at the cost of soaring inflation down the road.

Bush, Cheney, et al., were willing to sink to waterboarding to prevent another 9/11. Obama, Geithner, Bernanke, et al., will risk all to get the U.S. fully employed again. The bet they are making is that growth will be robust enough to pay for the debt used to get it going. They could well be wrong, and the U.S. could be saddled with slow growth, massive inflation and a collapsing currency, but given that they hold all the reins of power, I wouldn't doubt that climbing out of the mess is all but certain, though it may land us in another mess.

In the meantime, though, staying with equities, oil and other commodities seems the path of least resistance.

And Lebron is indeed King James, the guy who ruled Britain when Shakespeare wrote “The Tempest.”

Oh yeah, broke 100 the other day with a brilliant display of course management. I’ll insist on nothing less in the future

The Wedge Will Return

Kev is a melancholy baby, not because he has anything to complain about, but because he is embarrassed by his riches when much of the world is filled with danger and sorrow. Golf score was in triple digits again today, but he is enthused about his full swing under the tutelage of a good friend and smart guy in the sun and breeze of Dyker Beach.

The check will hit the bank tomorrow. He has tickets to the U.S. Open and Belmont. His supply of diet coke and Hungry Man TV dinners will keep him hydrated and fed. His children are beautiful and healthy. The Athletics pulled through for him tonight against the Rays, more than compensating for his loss by taking the O’s vs. the pinstripers, who used the jet stream to knock three homers in a row off an otherwise artful moundsman.

Didn’t have to worry about bombs lobbed onto the first tee by drones. Enjoyed deepening his tan and head of hair that needs a crew-cutting now that summer is upon us. Didn’t have to care that he lost his sand wedge at a prior hole, knowing, somehow, that it would return.

No, we are brought to our knees by recalling the verse of John Keats, a genius who died at the age of 25, who wrote of the nightingale’s immortal life beyond the experience of those who wave a wand at a dimpled ball and pretend it means something.


“What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs.”

What a description of putting strokes, or stock picking. Kev grows worrisome about the stock market. To paraphrase Keats, there is no long run for the sentient species. Somebody told me that homo sapiens are the only animals that laugh because they are the only ones who know they will die.

But let’s not despair in our inability to reach the green in two. The wedge returned, finished 18 with a double bogey and that lucky ol’sun will be out tomorrow.

Palm has killed us recently, Ford has hung in, AMD has been a stalwart. NYT is up because takeover rumors are rife. Life is good. Buy oil.

Time and Time Again

Why does the phrase "timing is everything" resonate when applied to stand-up comedy and meeting the love of your life, but is smirked at by "financial advisors.”? Don't try to time the market, they insist. Yet, when to buy or sell is the only advice we want.

The “lost decade” for equities flies in the face of the stocks-for-the-long run crowd. Rob Arnott, an analyst recently roiling the advice waters with a study in a financial journal, is persuasive, not because he produces data that show bonds beat equities for 40 years, but because Kev thinks he actually makes a case for picking equities now and going to cash when inflation kicks in, which it surely will. A tricky move, sure, but there's no other way to make dough during one's investing lifetime. In the long run, the sun will burn itself out and the earth will become a frozen ice ball. Before that happens, you can buy low and sell high, or at least try. Otherwise, just stuff it under the mattress. Not that there’s anything wrong with that if you’re so inclined.

Yesterday Kev was faced with a long par 3 over water on a course he hadn’t played for several years. Large outcroppings of rocks loomed on the left, his usual landing place when he attempts to put some mustard into his swing, but the temptation was too great. Out came the driver. Didn’t hit the green, but managed a smooth hit that faded to the right. Chipped on and two-putted for bogey. He was pleased. We will spare you the stroke-by-stroke recounting of various 8s and 7s that peppered his score card. Those are the toxic assets he must somehow get off his balance sheet, and he’s confident he will.

But pessimism abounds. Nick Paumgarten’s "The Death of Kings" in The New Yorker this week is a brilliant piece about the meltdown of Wall Street and is recommended reading for Karousing with Kev’s followers, but is far too scolding. Paumgarten is smitten with the doomsayers who saw the catastrophe, to their credit, but expect more catastrophes to follow. It’s as if they insist that only the cleansing of world war will set things right again. A great quote Paumgarten comes up with is “Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell.”

Well, in the purgatory we now inhabit in this life, we are tortured for perhaps several hundred thousands of years, as the Sisters of St. Joseph told us in the second grade, but the good sisters assured that we venial sinners would get out when our time was served. Kev thinks we’ll get out sooner if we refuse to lay up. Go for the green and if you come up short, take a 4.

The week ahead will bring NAHB housing data on Monday, U.S. home starts on Tuesday, FOMC minutes on Wednesday and Philadelphia Fed survey results on Thursday. We all know housing statistics will be in the dumps, but expect a renewed sense of less difficult times.

We believe stocks have room to move higher. The day will come to get out, but not yet. Miss Market is coy but not unfeeling. She has a sentimental streak for the greedy, whom she counts as her soul mates.

The Name Is Bond

Oh the humanity! Retail sales -- all that stuff we buy -- fell 0.4% last month, the Commerce Department tells us, and Miss Market gave us a quick backhand slap across the face. Who are we to argue? She responds as she will and we must take it like men. “For king and country…” as James Bond (alias Sean Connery) famously reported as his reason for dallying with a cold war spy.

But all will be forgiven. I can see Connery canoodling with the Bond girl in the lifeboat after defeating Dr. No and Auric Goldfinger and crushing Smersh, or was it Spectre?

Oh well, whomever the foe, the rally will resume, I think.

Consider that Ford, though we shareholders suffer from the dilution, has enough confidence to test the appetite of equity investors (aka, gamblers) with its intention to bolster its balance sheet from the sale of new stock.

Consider that banks are champing at the bit to be rid of TARP dough so they can again compensate their brilliant employees as much as they want.

Consider that oil is flirting with $60 a barrel.

We are leaving our secret lair as if all were going to plan. Obama, Bernanke, Pelosi, Reid, Geithner (or whoever will eventually replace him) will not be denied, despite the gnarled remonstrances from the ancien regime.

We are also working on our hideous short game. If I chunk too many tomorrow, then so be it, but staying with F, PALM, AMD (getting a boost from the EU sanction against Intel), DXO. Money supply and deficit spending will get it going

Kev (yes, he’s still a third person and green-shoots guy) is looking to make it four in a row. Chipper Jones and Martin Prado are my heroes today. You can look it up.

A Day at Forest Park

The greensward glistened in all its rain-softened lushness before us. My professor friend and two more elderly gents who happened to join us stepped to the tee box with visions of par dancing in our heads.

The maitre d’hôtel of this paradise, a diminutive crew-cut son of Italy, had welcomed us with a smile and laugh, greeting me with a “Happy New Year” and a handshake. I had not visited his Tuscan villa off the Interborough for almost a year, but he constructed a perfect bacon and egg sandwich on a roll with butter to properly slicken my right hand in preparation for the first swing of the driver. Predictably, I dribbled it up the middle and lost my second shot in the deep rough.

A repeatable swing I have. I just want to replace it with a good one. Shot the same score on the back nine as the second, but need to lower each by ten, a seemingly impossible task but one which I will pursue this sporting season with all the zest of our host. I was in fat city, so to speak, all day, but not living off the fat of the land. Pitches that should have landed pin high for a chance turned into three-shot chunks and then three-putts.

Our majordomo showed up again driving the beverage cart as the professor searched for his ball in the trees and rough to the left of the 14th green. “Hey, it’s on the cart path, shankanopolous. Take a drop” he roared. We roared as well.

But life is good. On the 15th, over the water, hit the green and made par. The 16th, eminently birdie-able, became multibogey-able, and the rest I’ll leave to your imagination.

Yet I believe in the future, just as Miss Market does. This redoubtable dame refuses to give into the gloom. The world economy is braking well short of the depression that helped spawn a global war which shaped the world for us boomers. The New York Times' Krugman on the skeptical center-left and the Washington Post's Samuelson on the skeptical center-right are way too pessimistic.

Many more jobs vanished in the USA in April, but the pace is slowing. Australia reported a decline in its unemployment rate. China alleges a firming of demand. Oil is climbing.

Just as I will fix my wedge play, Miss Market will not be denied. She must have her way. Stay with F, PALM, AMD, DDR, SLV, DXO and NVAX.

Tra La It's May...

“…the lusty month of May.

“That lovely month when ev’ryone goes Blissfully astray.”

Apologies to Lerner and Loewe and the gambling public, which includes those who trek to the track known as the stock market.

But Kev insists. Sweatered and blue jeaned this May morning, pondering whether to shave and what the weather will be at 10 o’clock tomorrow when he tees off at the course Babe Ruth used to play, he is remaining buoyant and taking the cue from Camelot’s lovely verse, not the Wall Street chestnut of “Sell in May and go away.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with being a fan of show tunes. I wore out the cast recording on our Silvertone stereo from Sears as a kid.

But let’s not get carried away like Guinevere. Trimmed positions in Ford and PALM this morning to take profits and pay the Little Sisters of the Poor who manage my sporting life, but still holding on. Cringing at my swine flu play, Novavax, which has plummeted since my tout, but still holding on. The faint of heart will be forgiven if they bail. Now they tell me this virus is not that big of a deal! Oink. But a guy who told me to take Dunkirk in the Derby was wrong, too. Whoa, Nellie.

Getting out and getting back in is becoming a problem for the investing (read, gambling) public. Hope you got back into new Yankee Stadium last night when they began the game after nine o’clock, but you should have hung out with the family at the Hard Rock Cafe for a multi-bucks hamburger dinner before heading to the Escalade purchased by selling credit default swaps for AIG.

Into each life a little rain must fall.

Construction spending rose last month. Bernanke is chirping about economic growth later this year, though high unemployment will continue to persist. But it’s clear now to all but the crybabies that the economy will soon start hitting more greens in regulation

Resist at your own peril. Reason and rhyme tell us the corner has been turned. The market for equities will not swoon because the survivalists and conspiracy brothers wish it. Not to be invested is to put down the rifle with all the fish in the barrel.

And, anyway, It’s May, it’s May!

“Those dreary vows that ev'ryone takes, Ev'ryone breaks. Ev'ryone makes divine mistakes. The lusty month of May!”

Weep No More, My Lady

The sun shines bright on our old Kentucky home, just as it does for each of us who longs for his Indiana home on the banks of the Wabash far away; or New York New York, the city that never sleeps; or the left coast where birides sing and everything; or Swanee, where you’d give the world to be among the folks in D-I-X-I-E, or Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plains. Add to the mix New Mexico, for which no iconic lyric has yet been penned. It's home to a gelding named Mine That Bird.

But America is more than a home. It’s a romance that causes men and women, young and old, to sigh with joy that men in ten-gallon Stetsons, ladies in sleeveless crinoline and flouncy caps of their own and horseflesh as beautiful as a spring day exult in two minutes of glory as mud flies onto the silks of the jockeys. Anyone who didn’t tear up his losing ticket without a care and take a sip of his mint julep is to be pitied. As someone said, everything, including life, is too short not to partake. Needless to say, my pie-in-the-sky Exacta box of Dunkirk and Flying Private lies in shreds. I picked the wrong strong horse and the wrong long shot.

Mine That Bird, trundled to Churchill Downs in a trailer by his lame trainer, Bennie Woolley, a no-nonsense son of a gun with a broken ankle, sunglasses and no necktie, somehow slipped through a narrow opening at the rail in the home stretch and exploded when he and jockey Calvin Borel saw no equine haunches in front of them.

The sporting life has been bountiful today. Yankees at 1:00 pm, Mets at 4:00, Derby at 6:30, Bulls-Celtics at 8:00 (listening on the radio as I write, but will get to the TV shortly), not to mention a scintillating girls’ softball game at 9 this morning in Prospect Park to start things off.

The economic calendar next week is filled as well. Expect better news, culminating with the jobs report on Friday. The past week offered support for those who root for underdogs. The economic future may be a 50-1 shot, but improvements in the University of Michigan consumer confidence and purchasing managers’ surveys tell me that Miss Market sees daylight on the rail. Her nostrils are flaring.

Innoculation Nation

Attempting to make money from misery is miserable, positively swinish. But someone’s got to do it. And directing capital to drug makers who aim to profit by alleviating misery makes me feel better, which I could use after my common cold caused me to find every bunker at Dyker Beach yesterday. At least that’s my story for shooting 106 and I’m sticking to it.

How many of us have been able to survive and reproduce, have stellar careers in the arts, sciences, professions and hamburger flipping because of a mold called penicillin?

Now, my stellar career has been more white dwarfish than super nova, so I hesitate to offer ideas to all but the intrepid sailor willing to test his balsa wood Kon-Tiki against the mighty Pacific. But just as I know my next approach shot will hit the green next week, I know there are people brainier than I attacking the H1N1 influenza and they could be right -- saving lives and enriching investors.

Kev (yes, in his megalomaniacal certainty that it’s all about Kev, he is referring to himself in the third person) is adding Novavax (NVAX) to the portfolio at $2.03. This Rockville, Md., company reported encouraging results from its virus-like particle (VLP) vaccine in mice and ferrets dosed with the 1918 Spanish flu virus.

I’m no scientist or lover of rodents, and this is obviously a speculative roll of the dice that only the lonely should play, but I’m buying into it for now.

PALM, F, AMD, DDR remain as well. This is no bear market rally. Obama’s competence becomes more evident every day, and markets are responding.

Don't know much about the NBA, but Bulls-Celtics series is terrific. Derrick Rose sunk me in last year's NCAA championship game. Maybe he'll make up for it in Boston tomorrow like he did last night in Chicago. The Bulls will win outright.

Meanwhile, taking Dunkirk in the Kentucky Derby tomorrow. Hopefully, some horse’s behind (there are a bunch of them) won’t get in his way.

Sign of the Times

Gross domestic product plummeted at a stunning 6.1% annual rate in the first quarter, the government tells us. Throw a tea party, not the one with bags from Ceylonese plantations tossed into Boston harbor, but the one on a sunlit yawn with crumpets and lots of jam. Wear ascots.

The story is in the mix – the cleansing decline in inventories and the rise in consumer spending is making our party. The train is leaving the station. Sure, there will be more tales of financial malfeasance and outbreaks of torch and pitchfork curmudgeons at various stops when we take on more coal and water and let Gary Cooper off to duel at high noon, but the path of least resistance has been paved. The choo-choo, fired by fiscal and monetary stimulus, is staying on the rails. The 2009 second-half recovery is playing out.

All that said, the inflationary world where savings evaporate and borrowing booms will meet us down the track. Great Depression II has turned into garden variety recession. Take what God has given us, which are cycles. Stock prices recover ahead of GDP.

In the event, though, things go awry. My Redbirds’ ace Lohse did his job last night with six scoreless innings, but the Cards lost 2-1 to the Braves. Nevertheless, I’m laying another dime on St. Louis and the stock market, even though the Steinbrenners are cutting ticket prices, a good sign because they are behind the curve. Prediction: Phil Hughes remains in the bigs and Joba is back in the bullpen.