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.

Masterful

It’s been said before, but bears repeating: The charm of sports as opposed to other forms of entertainment is that the actors write the script. There is no hidden Hollywood hand guiding the action to its often obvious dénouement. Even reality shows are edited to deliver the most outrageous or melodramatic impact. The raw spectacle of athletic competition can be pedestrian or soaring, much like life itself, but it is reality unfolding before our eyes with no outcome inevitable.

On Sunday, the canvas of Augusta National Golf Club soaked up a Jackson Pollockian riot of colors, provided a backdrop for a Shakespearean gamut of human heroics and folly and kept me from preparing Easter dinner until well past the time I promised. Even my sainted mother, a sports fan but usually unaware of golf, was riveted and didn’t complain she wasn’t being fed on time.

Given up for lost after Saturday’s round, the Woods-Mickelson duel was to be a subplot. CBS in its wildest pleas to the golf gods couldn’t have expected the rivals to catch fire and work their way up the leader board, giving Jim Nance one more chance to intone the only scripted line in this drama: “A tradition like no other.”

Yet they did, writing their own play, rejecting the scenarios of sports writers, who pointed out the obvious difficulty of sitting so far off the pace and having to pass so many players to make up ground.

I shan’t bore you with a shot-by-shot replay. Hooking around trees to the green, sinking long eagle putts, missing eagle putts, bogeys on 17 and 18. Pick up a sports page to relive it.


I saw these things, thanks to the miracle of television.

The humorless Greek god in his signature Sunday best – a red shirt – his sycophantic hunchbacked henchman at his side. Hah, I fall into the trap, writing a script where none exists except in the players themselves.

The once best-golfer-never-to-have-won-a-major brilliant and erratic, in a zone on the front nine, making mistakes at Amen Corner as a friend of mine predicted. To us right-handers, lefties have a certain fascination. They are like mirror images, the same but backwards, lending a peculiar grace to their motion.

The young Texan with the impossibly cute blond tour wife, hanging around the scorer’s tent and implausibly being recalled to play another hole or two – as it turned out just one.

The down-home Kentuckian, the very face of Anglo-Saxon hill folk in his visage and accent (I am afflicted as well), seemingly poised to give middle-aged men everywhere a sip from the fountain of youth, falling just short on his par putt at 18.

And finally the Argentinean victor, furiously chewing gum instead of chain smoking as he did two years ago in winning the U.S. Open. Unpretentious to a fault, this merry old soul would be the delight of everyone on a crowded muni track. He sees the ball, hits the ball, engaging in none of the excruciatingly painstaking pre-shot routine and doubt that can make a round of golf like waiting for a subway at 2 in the morning.

Oft have I rued picking up golf late in life, having missed all the fun, lived and vicarious, for so long. But now I feel it a blessing, knowing that the remaining years will be filled with adventure, untainted by ennui. Now I can say, “Remember the 2009 Masters?” with authority if not shot-by-shot recall.

Now I must clean my clubs and roll a few birdie putts on the carpet.