How to Succeed on the Sidelines Without Really Trying

While playing touch football in Central Park 21 years ago, when we were lithe and nimble enough to engage in such athletic endeavors, we went up for a pass and came down awkwardly on our right leg and could hear the crunch of meniscus in our knee. We tried to get up and return to the huddle but crumbled to the ground and crawled to the sideline.

Thus ended our effort to change careers. We were looking forward to becoming the first 30-something rookie in the National Football League. When the game was over (think we lost 66-42, first team to 10 touchdowns), a teammate and an adversary helped us to a cab, the driver of which we directed to take us to the emergency room of Lennox Hill Hospital, where but a month later our first-born was to make his debut.

Unlike Mr. Cutler of the Chicago Bears, we could not stand, but then, we are a famous sissy, prone to jumping at loud noises and crossing to the other side of the street when confronted with a fellow walking his pit bull.

Soccer and basketball players are known for taking flops to draw foul calls, yet baseball players are urged not rub it when hit by a pitch. Just jog to first base and glare at the offending pitcher.

Body language, it seems, is all important these days. Who woulda thunk it? Mr. Cutler was tweeted to death for looking disengaged and disinterested after leaving the NFC championship game with a knee injury.

So we have a new business in mind – teaching enthusiastic facial expressions, fist pumps and jaunty stances on the sidelines, in the dugouts and on the benches courtside for injured players with a normally phlegmatic demeanor.

Class would begin with back-slapping, segueing to exhorting teammates with shouts and hand-waving and ending with practice raising arms in the touchdown signal and chest-bumping your replacement. Diplomas will be issued that will certify and indemnify graduates against accusations of sulkiness and not caring.

Meanwhile, we are still cogitating on our Super Bowl pick. Essentially a pick ‘em game with Green Bay a 2 ½ point favorite. The total is 44. We are studying game film, not to discern x’s and o’s, but to check out how a quarterback stands on the sidelines when nicked up. Hopefully he will have graduated from Kev’s Kourse in Karisma and Karing and have the sheepskin in his locker to prove it.

Had Ourselves...

…a merry little bowl season. We have our new boxers, pajama bottoms, Christmas tree necktie and cashmere scarf made in China. The boxers came just in time because our laundry is in still in the wash and fold place across the street. Can’t get there because of the Feast of St. Stephen storm that makes walking through unshoveled drifts treacherous. And more to come.

But the three kings came bearing gifts. We thought they were for us. But no! Mr. Dyer of the Auburn War Eagles, Plainsmen, Tigers (pick your nickname) rolled off an Oregon tackler without hitting the ground and was told to run by teammates when he thought he was down.

One is never down, though. The sun comes up, and if one steps gingerly through the havoc of city streets filled with trash and snow, stiff arms and spins he can get drop kicked by Jesus through the goalposts of life.

Mr. Bynum, place kicker for the Auburn side, eschewed the drop kick and let someone hold the ball as he executed his skill. We would never want to be a snapper, holder or kicker. Rather, if we were larger, we would be a right guard buried in the pile and far from scrutiny.

When we were a young slender halfback in a T-formation, the coach called what he called a 32-cross, that is, number 3 back through the number 2 hole. Alas, there was no hole and a man playing boys planted us on our rear end.

One is never down and out, though. We have the National Basketball Association (take Clippers against the points every time), the National Football League (take Seahawks to go all the way), NCAA basketball (take St. Mary’s of California against the points every time).

And never punt, always go for two points, always onside kick and never practice putting.

Fail Safe

Failure is an illusion. “Be not proud … for thou art not so,” John Donne said of the ultimate failure.

In the late, great Supe 44, the crucial decision wasn’t Coach Sean Payton’s onside kick at the beginning of the second half, which led to a score. It wasn’t Tracy Porter jumping the route (as the football mavens say) in front of Reggie Wayne, which led to a game-sealing pick six (as they also say).

No, the big moment for the fleur de lis of New Orleans vs. the horseshoes of Indianapolis was going on fourth down and goal at the two near the end of the first half – and failing. The Colts were exultant over their goal-line stand. Yet their doom was sealed. Be not proud.

The horseshoes curled in their cocoon. Why didn’t Manning and company get aggressive and throw the ball downfield to get a first down? Instead, they went three and out and punted, giving the holy ones a short field and a resulting field goal – the same number of points they would have corralled if they had not gone for the touchdown, kicked off and given Manning and company a perfect chance to increase their lead.

The rest is history, as the experts say.

Sometimes the singular failures that mark our lives mask the sweeter things that follow. The girl who guffawed when we asked her out because she smiled a certain way, yet a great love with another followed. Going for broke from behind the trees only to end up with a mere 10 yards and still make par. Then there was the truly momentous decision to poach in a doubles tennis match and send a sure winner out beyond the line and win the game on a double fault.

Here’s to failure! We wish we could have been on Bourbon Street Sunday night.

Perchance to Dream

We know that recounting dreams is fascinating to the teller and tedious for the listener, but recount we must. Somehow we had become POTUS. Yes, that’s right, president of the United States. Strangely, we had never campaigned and thus had not undergone the intense vetting of our personal life. W appeared and told us not to worry. Cut taxes and start a few wars, he advised.

We were terrified. Surely some nosy reporter would find that square-grooved Ping wedge in our bag and get us banned for life from playing with our previously unsuspecting golfing buddies. What good is a president who can’t find anyone who will play with him? A president sans golf is a sad thing to contemplate.

The snooty Old World would harrumph when we pleaded for help in our Middle East adventures. China, appearing to own this century, would refuse to buy our Treasury bonds. Portugal, Spain and Greece, teetering on the brink of budgetary disaster, would require us to pay outlandish greens fees. Children would give us the Bronx cheer when we came to read “My Pet Goat.”

Why, a man, not to mention a POTUS, without golf is like Robert E. Lee without Stonewall Jackson. “He has lost his left arm, but I have lost my right arm.” (No offense to one-armed golfers).

Yet, as we took office in midwinter and the annual addition of fat around our girth made buttoning our slacks a bit of a wrestling match, we found that our Chancellorsville victory was not pyrrhic. We had not lost our right arm. The Tea Partiers had arrived to save the day and reattach it.

Dimon and Blankfein took their bonuses in restricted stock and stock options (boo hoo), the Cosmo centerfold took the oath of office in the world’s greatest deliberative body, the productivity of the American worker surged in the latest quarter because fewer hamsters were running faster, the Super Bowl pitted the horseshoed computer with a right arm against the Big Easy “Breesy” lads.

“When you break it down,” we said to the hopeful nation, “expect Reggie Bush to pop a big return to make the difference. The Saints will go marching in. For entertainment purposes only, take the points, my fellow citizens, and invest your funtime winnings in my next campaign, in which I pledge to use a legal wedge and thus secure our return to the world’s end zone. Then drop kick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life.”

We awake on a frosty morning, floating end over end through the uprights as time expires. Good luck to all.

Unhorsed

We can almost hear the Indianapolis Colts’ President Bill Polian shouting “An ankle, an ankle, my kingdom for an ankle!” His remarkable right defensive end, Dwight Freeney, like Richard III, has been unhorsed. A torn ligament in the crucial joint just before the battle with the New Orleans Saints in Miami has apparently pushed the spread down a point to minus 5 in favor of the horseshoes.

The news must have made the saintly quarterback Drew Brees draw a breath of hope that his blind side might be less vulnerable with Freeney possibly out of action.

Our national economy had a blind side, too. Wall Street, oblivious to its own hubris, pummeled pedestrian quarterbacks with pass rushing techniques that defied chip blocks. Exotic mortgage securities and credit default swaps eventually swamped the credit markets and the pass rushers themselves. No flags were thrown.

After dusting themselves off with the help of taxpayers, the game resumed, the pass rushers doing God’s work in directing capital to its most efficient use, which meant outsized bonuses for the saints of capitalism while unemployment stayed at 10%. “Kezar Stadium, Roman Gabriel back to pass…but no! from out of nowhere, it’s Paul Volcker to intercept!”

The lion-hearted Volcker, the first and last Fed chairman to use money supply as a target and let interest rates roam where they may, has become the left tackle protecting our blind side, essentially urging a return to Glass-Steagall, the 1930s legislation that separated commercial banking from investment banking to prevent conflicts of interest. Of course, the Goldman Sachses and Morgan Stanleys, now officially bank holding companies but retaining proprietary trading desks, do not wish to be fettered.

“Yeah. That’s it. More. That’s right! I want more!” Edward G. Robinson confessed in a bathtub to Humphrey Bogart. (Name that movie, sports fans).

But in fairness, bashing Wall Street is tantamount to bashing New York. Let’s face it; the pinstriped bankers buy lots of goods and services with those checks. Folks in Detroit similarly would love to see GM, Ford and Chrysler flourish.

But there have to be rules. It reminds us of Phil Mickelson’s use of grandfathered Ping wedges with square grooves. The United States Golf Association has banned such wedges, but a successful lawsuit allowed the Ping clubs to be used. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em was the outcome. Those without an old wedge in the garage are at a disadvantage. Those who use them may not be technically cheating, but they are akin to Judge Smails invoking winter rules on a sunny summer day. How about a Fresca?

There may not be a God, as Bishop Pickering said after being struck by lightning just as he was about to break the course record at Bushwood, but down here we need someone – the Fed, the SEC , whomever – to keep the sky from falling on the weekend duffer and the blind side safe for the Central Park quarterback. Manning, Brees, Mickelson and Wall Street can take care of themselves. They get paid plenty for it.

1-800-Go Against...

… is the moniker that a good friend of ours hangs on our sporting picks (for entertainment purposes only). It was never more apt than yesterday, when we took both dogs against the spread in the NFL divisional playoffs. The only correct prediction was the over in the Arizona-New Orleans game, thanks to Reggie Bush, which, by the way, sounds like a name the patrician presidential family would have given to one of its progeny.

Nevertheless, we’re undaunted, sticking with the dogs today (Dallas and New York) to win outright, also expecting the over in the Dallas-Minnesota game (45 ½ pts) and the under (42 pts) in the New York-San Diego game. Tony Romo and Miles Austin will shred the Vikings, despite Bret Favre. Mark Sanchez is too cool and Braylon Edwards will use stickum to hang on to TD passes.

So if you want to entertain yourselves, dial the number and go against these predictions. Or take the plunge in the Atlantic off Coney Island, you brave polar bears in Speedos, but don’t blame us for significant shrinkage.

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.

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.”