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.