Moving to a New Location

The Steele Drum, and all the blogging members of the World Sports Blog Network, can now be found at Real Clear Sports. Here's the link.

Not only will you find everything I've written so far for WSB, you'll also find my first post as a Real Clear Sports network member, on the cosmic justice being visited upon Notre Dame in the fifth year since they kneecapped Tyrone Willingham.

Look in the archives, meanwhile, and you'll find the story of how I became a blogger, and how I left newspapers last spring, somewhat against my will.

See you over there, and thanks for making the trip.

- David Steele

The Revolution’s Homemade Signs Will Not Be Televised

The Washington Redskins - who now have stooped to making up rules as they go along, like the ones stopping fans from bringing signs into FedEx Field - are doing the entire sports-loving world a favor. They’re teaching a long-overdue lesson about what it means to be a good “fan’’ (which is derived from “fanatic’’) and to be a good “customer’’ (derived from “gimme what I’m paying for, dammit’’).

Think about all the times organizations have put lousy products on the field, all the times fans have gotten fed up and stopped showing up – and all the times that someone has chided them for being “bad fans.’’ The times they’ve been called a “bad sports town.’’ The times they’ve been told they don’t “support their team,’’ and that heck, why not, just move them to another city that’ll appreciate that lousy product on the field.

That’s the message: yeah, we don’t have to be any good, but you’d better keep paying for us, because you’re required to be loyal to us, your home team. Or else.

Go ahead, find me one other business with the gall to operate like that – better yet, one that doesn’t need gall because so many buy into it. If you had a supermarket in your neighborhood that constantly sold you overpriced, outdated food that gave you salmonella, would you keep shopping there because it’s your neighborhood store? If the mechanic down the street charged you $1000 for yanking out your carburetor and putting in a new one he made out of Legos, would you keep going to you because his shop is located in the same city you live in?

Can you imagine how you’d react if these crooks told you that yes, you’re obligated to keep dropping off your Lego-filled car and keep projectile-vomiting on the way back to the supermarket, because that’s what real, true, loyal customers do? That if you go to get legitimate engine parts at another garage, or drive five miles further down the road for bacteria-free bacon (or, start biking to work and growing your own food), you’re really a "fair-weather'' shopper?

So, you probably get the point that you don’t have to let anybody shame you into continually cheering for a team that not only stinks (and actually causes vomiting on occasion), but also insults and patronizes you. This is how D.C. football fans are acting. Having already locked themselves into ticket commitments (and also seen what the team does when you aren’t able to meet those commitments), they’ve fought back in the only ways left to them. Plenty stay home, keeping parking and concession money out of the hands of ownership. Those who do go, pledge not to buy the beer and hot dogs or caps and jerseys, again asserting their consumer’s rights.

And they’ve brought signs and banners to show their anger. Oh, it’s beyond frustration; it’s a palpable sense of rage, the kind anyone can relate to if they’ve been sold a lemon of a car or spot a rat in the restaurant kitchen.

Now, as the whole country knows, Redskins officials have banned all signs brought from the outside. You can find the list of irrational reasons, scattershot enforcement, underhanded informing and explanation and hypocritical exceptions at this Washington Post blog. Understand, as well, that company-ordered extinction of angry-fan stadium signs is pretty much the universal symbol of a franchise gone totally off the rails.

The bottom line is that the Redskins are acting like some crazed mutation of the emperor with no clothes and the Wizard of Oz. You’re not seeing what you think you’re seeing, they seem to be telling us, and if you think you are seeing it, it’s because you’re a bad fan, a threat to the franchise and your fellow rooters, and you must be controlled.

The Redskins believe, somehow, that in doing this, they are winning. It’s incomprehensible what they believe they’re winning, though.

The truth is that they’re losing. Beneath that, they’d long ago lost sight of a business basic – the customer is entitled to take his business elsewhere if he’s not getting what he paid for. They’ve instead become convinced that the customer is entitled to sit down, shut up and don’t move until we tell you to.

When they’re begging for fans to come back and forgive them, maybe they’ll learn all the lessons mentioned above. Until then, at least one message might sink in to the people – don’t be afraid to stop being “fans’’ and start being “customers.’’

(Photo: The Washington Post)

The NBA is Back - All is Right with the World

There’s so much negativity out there that can feed a column topic today. After all, we’re less than 12 hours removed from the Redskins’ nationally-televised spanking by the Eagles, in front of a stadium where many of the seats not left empty by boycotting fans were filled by either Philly supporters or protesters against ownership.

As usual, the intersection between sports and society is the scene of a gruesome pile-up. Mark McGwire is being waved back into baseball by his ex-manager and his big heart and huge blinders. Officials in virtually every sport are being raked over the coals, deservedly so, especially in SEC football (again). Bob Griese is being suspended for a mid-game “joke’’ that turns the clock on the so-called conversation on race back another 50 years. Larry Johnson did the same, maybe double, with the conversation on sexual orientation. Steve Phillips has joined the non-exclusive club of successful middle-aged men tossing their careers and families into turmoil for a pointless “indiscretion’’ (to use Rick Pitino’s term). There’s much, much more.

But why dwell on any of that. The NBA tips off tonight! All is well. The sun is out, the shoes are squeaking on the hardwood, and to borrow another phrase from another season, it’s the most wonderful time of the year.

The return of pro basketball is a joy. Even more joyous is the fact that for the first time in a long, long time, we believers aren’t in a tiny, bitter, contentious minority. The hatred and nastiness harbored against the NBA by too many people with too many laptops and microphones within reach, seems to have finally receded like the tide going out. The NBA might not be as cool as it was in the glory days of the 1980s and ‘90s – and I’m feeling so chipper, I won’t even get into the scabs being peeled off of that era by the likes of Michael, Magic and Isiah lately – but its dig-ability is at its highest rate in at least a decade. The number of people openly comparing the league to a collection of street gangs, basically, has been reduced to roughly the size of Rush Limbaugh’s listener core, and that bunch is growing out of fashion anyway.

Those of us who never abandoned it, never chugged the hater-ade, never bought the tilted coverage and blighted perception and kept loving the game long after others thought the old NBA slogan had become a joke … we kept appreciating what we saw, and we’re being rewarded now with what might be another golden era.

Yet even if this was just on the level of what we’ve been seeing since Michael Jordan left the Bulls (retirement No. 2 of 3), this is a special day. The offseason gets shorter every year, but this year it felt like forever, because there was so much to look forward to after the Lakers finally wrestled the Magic to the ground to claim the title, and after the top contenders jumped into the arms race to try to pin the Lakers this time around.

True lovers of the game at this rarefied level know two things. First: football is cool, baseball is worth it at this time of year, college hoops has its pluses, but nothing gets the juices flowing like the start of the NBA season. The inevitable lull between the trade deadline and the start of the playoffs – late February to late April – is endurable because of what comes before and after it.

Second: college hoops has its pluses, but anyone who swears it’s better than the NBA has an agenda to sell or an axe to grind. Not the colleges, not international ball, not the Olympics – this is the best basketball on the planet, period, end of story, close the book, proceed to checkout, we will be closing in five minutes, thank you for coming.

At this point, the names, teams and plotlines for this season should be laid out, to make a case for why we’re bouncing up and down in anticipation. But if you know them, you know them; if you don’t, c’mon, just watch, because nothing I can say will sell it better than seeing it yourself. Gorge yourself on TNT and ESPN and your local sports-cable station, and inhale the sweet aroma of NBA League Pass while they’re giving it away for the first week – then see if your budget can stand buying the full package. The bleary eyes every morning for the next nine months are a small price to pay.

(On the other hand, this isn't complete without predictions. San Antonio over Boston in the Finals. The Spurs are being overlooked, as is my pick for his third MVP - not that that makes any sense, being overlooked with two MVPs and four rings - Tim Duncan.)

But, Drum, you’re saying, you know good and well that everything’s not perfect in that league. Don’t be a Pollyanna. Take off the rose-colored shades and quit blowing sunshine up people’s nether regions about the beauty of the game and the promise of new beginnings and new life the season brings.

Oh, I can’t do that on behalf of the NBA, but you’ll swallow that from baseball every February? And earlier, because we’re days away from the first recitation of “xx days until pitchers and catchers report.’’ No sport has more sores and pock-marks on it than the national pastime, starting with the fact that the world championship will be decided in two Northeast cities in November, but it will all be brushed away when spring beckons and the emerald chessboard is laid out and the lovely melody of horsehide and wood and … oops, I threw up in my mouth a little.

Tsar Justice, I’m genuinely sorry. I know that is your sport. But this is mine.

As much of a shill as I’m sure I sound like … I love this game.
(Photo: Washington Post)

Disconnect the Cable, Please

It’s late Friday morning in late October, and Tom Cable is still the head coach of the Oakland Raiders. Somebody please explain why.

Never mind, for the moment, that in an investigation that somehow stretched out for nearly three months, Cable was spared of assault charges by police in Napa, Calif., where the Raiders’ UFC camp … er, training camp hosted some sort of incident in August that left assistant coach Randy Hanson with a broken jaw.

Also, never mind that the Raiders’ rock-solid grip on laughingstock-of-professional-sports honors is being loosened this week only because of the slapstick routine that the Redskins franchise has become – and because the Raiders managed to win a game last week.

Just chew on this: something that began with Cable and ended with one of his assistants going to the ER, took place back in August, was unveiled in grisly detail soon afterward, and has since made Cable, the Raiders organization and the entire NFL the butt of constant jokes all across football-loving America. And despite the decision not to press charges – and when you see why, you’ll wonder if the mob was ever this efficient at altering the memories of witnesses – the Raiders and Cable are going to get clowned over this not just the rest of the season, but whenever the low points of the late stages of the Al Davis regime are discussed.

Yet for embarrassing the legendary Raider logo and smearing mud on the NFL’s so-called shield – the one everyone always talks about protecting – neither the Raiders nor the NFL have seen fit so far to even scold him or wag an accusatory finger in his face, much less slap him down with a severe punishment of any kind.

Like firing him. Or suspending him. Or fining him. Or dressing him down in public and making him look and feel as small as his actions are making the Raiders and the NFL look.

Because you don’t have to be Johnnie Cochran to grasp that, despite the lack of charges being filed, Cable caused Hanson’s injury. The police’s final report may not have put Cable before a judge, but the picture it painted was pretty damning: a raging coach out of control, having to be separated from the target of his wrath, causing the comically-implausible series of events that landed Hanson on the ground in pain, then grabbing and screaming at the injured man on the floor beneath him.

Yes, the final report is a first cousin to the classic I-didn’t-punch-my-wife-she-walked-into-a-door acquittal. Believe if it you want, don’t if you don’t, but that’s what the cops say and they’re sticking to it. And they based their report on the witnesses on hand, and since this took place in a Raiders’ coaches meeting, you can decide for yourself who figured out where their proverbial bread was buttered.

This all makes Cable look like a lunatic, his assistants look like toadies and the Raiders look like bullies. The fact that the Raiders continue to employ him furthers the perception that the only thing that puts head coaches’ jobs in jeopardy out there is standing up to the owner (where have you gone, Jon Gruden and Lane Kiffin?).

And the NFL, which is still “monitoring’’ the situation? Every minute that goes by without Cable being suspended screams “double standard.’’ The idea that Plaxico Burress shooting himself in the leg sullies the image of the league more than one of its 32 head coaches starting a near-melee in a coaches meeting and leaving one assistant’s jaws and teeth cracked – exactly what “image’’ is it trying to project, much less protect?

If you’re trying to erase the perception of a league supposedly full of thugs, criminals and street punks, and you let Cable stay around, get paid and control the livelihoods of 50-odd players, a dozen or so assistants and all the others under his watch, then what perception are you really trying to control?

To the average fan, does being left alone in a room with, and saying the wrong thing to, Burress or Michael Vick or Adam Jones or Tank Johnson or Chris Henry terrify you more than if it was Tom Cable?

Which brings us back to the original question. If the answer is “yes’’ … somebody please explain why.

(Photos: Oakland Raiders, via AP)

Chalk Up Another Win For The 'Dumb Jocks'

It ended with a statement from the leader of the ownership group, Dave Checketts, Wednesday afternoon. It was pushed along by the NFL commissioner, the head of the players’ association, no less than two team owners, the head of the NAACP and (as always) the Rev. Al Sharpton.

But the very first pushback against Rush Limbaugh’s bid to own part of the St. Louis Rams came from a couple of dumb ballplayers.

Well, it’s obvious now, not so dumb.

Mathias Kiwanuka of the New York Giants and Bart Scott of the New York Jets spoke out, without hesitation or reservation, without prodding or calculating from their agents or their team P.R. personnel and without fear of backlash or retaliation or condemnation from anybody. They made it so clear it had no chance of misinterpretation, manipulation or pulling out of context. No way, they said, would I ever play for a team owned by that guy.

Without Kiwanuka and Scott, maybe this remains in the realm of talk-show banter and comment-section ranting, and Limbaugh stays in the group, untroubled by any of his past words or deeds, probably boasting to his “Dittoheads’’ about how he’d now be getting even richer off the very people he’d mocked and belittled for two decades.

But those two players decided not to stay quiet, and then a few more spoke up or spelled it out, and then Dee Smith, the head of the NFLPA, took their collective refusal to Roger Goodell. Next thing you knew, nobody in authority in the NFL could avoid taking a stand on it. And that groundswell washed Limbaugh overboard, where he’s now bobbing in the waves trying to convince everybody that he swam out there on purpose.

To repeat: it was the players who got that wave rolling.

Yet to hear some, this was impossible. Because athletes are selfish. Greedy. Stupid. They’d play for whoever waves the biggest check in front of them. They zip their lips and would never threaten their livelihoods by taking a stand on anything controversial. They’ve tuned out the outside world, never engage in society at large, and don’t have anything close to the guts the Alis, the Smiths and Carloses, the Jim Browns and Bill Russells had in the ‘60s.

It’s a lovely myth, and it has incredible staying power. It gets repeated in every corner of the sports world as if it was taught and memorized in first grade, and now it’s taken as scripture. It’s comforting, it’s self-assuring, it’s never going to get much of an argument, because, c’mon, look at the facts.

It is worth noting, by the way, that on CNN Wednesday night, when time came to discuss the Limbaugh ownership flop, it was not one of the outspoken active players answering questions. It was Sharpton. Maybe none of the NFL’s 2,500 or so players was available that night, or maybe on issues like this, the contact lists of the major “news’’ networks have only one name in them.

The player revolt against Limbaugh, of course, should never have happened.

Except that it happened a few months ago, when NFL players – mostly in a flurry of tweets – objected to the possibility that Goodell would not re-admit Michael Vick, or slap an additional suspension on him. But that was an exception to the rule, one shot in a million.

Except that it happened a year ago, when athletes from all sports spoke up in support of Barack Obama’s presidential quest, campaigned for him, attended his appearances and debated their teammates and reporters over him, then expressed their joy and pride about his victory and the fact that they could now tell their children that anything truly is possible.

But that was a special case, an anomaly. Except that it happened three years before that, when the government’s (in)actions during Hurricane Katrina left them and other wealthy celebrities as the chief benefactors, in money, contributions and hands-on assistance, of the victims – and prompted them to say exactly how hurt and angry they were to see their homes and their people left to suffer and die.

But that was way out of the ordinary for your average ballplayer. Except that it happened two years before that, when college and professional players answered honestly that they did not like the United States invading Iraq.

Still, you should never let facts get in the way of a good story. Of course, one fact did, in hindsight, doom athletes for the rest of eternity: Michael Jordan uttering the words he later admitted he regretted – “Republicans buy sneakers, too.’’ We’re coming up on the 20th anniversary of that quote. Proof that ballplayers speak and act fairly often is spilling out of every corner of the sports universe since then; again, the above examples are just from this decade.

Yet the assumption that every jock mindlessly follows that one example of the world’s biggest athletic star recusing himself two decades ago, will live forever. Google “Michael Jordan Republicans Buy Sneakers Too’’ and you come up with 61,400,000 hits. Not all the stories are about Michael Jordan.

Just as Sharpton is the go-to spokesman for the lazy interviewer (and it’s high time everybody stopped blaming Sharpton for that), Michael Jordan is the go-to reference for the lazy analyst. Michael never did this, Tiger never does that, and all athletes are just like them.

Mathias Kiwanuka, Bart Scott and more than a few of their colleagues made liars out of those who themselves mindlessly follow that theory. And when the next group of athletes defies the conventional wisdom, the conventional wisdom will shout them down again, and it will be as if Kiwanuka and Scott had never done a thing.

(Photos: nj.com, baltimoresun.com)

Rush Isn't The Only Problem

There is absolutely no way the NFL can allow Dave Checketts to own a team.

No, you read that right. True enough, there’s no way it can allow Rush Limbaugh to own a team, and that cannot be emphasized enough nor played down in any way. Actually, I don’t even believe that Limbaugh will ever get close to it. Just as I don’t believe Limbaugh represents as large a percentage of America’s views on anything as he and his proponents want us to think, I don’t believe three-fourths of the other NFL owners will be swayed by whatever money Limbaugh brings into the bid for the St. Louis Rams’ ownership, into overlooking the damage this resolutely dangerous man will do to their select group, their league, their sport and its reputation.

You think the resistance to Michael Vick’s return was noisy? Just wait and see what happens if Limbaugh ever gets that far with the NFL. It's even got players, normally content to speak only when trash-talked to first, prepared to revolt. (UPDATE: ESPN reported Sunday that the NFL Players Association has notified the league of its opposition.)

Limbaugh’s an enormous problem, pun not intended at all (hopefully we’re all beyond the obvious, cheap weight jokes, with someone this frightening in the discussion). But once he’s disposed of, the only proper move for the NFL – or, if they get there first, the current owners of the Rams – is to summarily reject any subsequent bids by Checketts or anyone else left in his investment group.

Which is hard for me to say. In his years running the New York Knicks and Madison Square Garden when I covered the team many years ago, and the years before that when he ran the Utah Jazz, I grew to respect Dave Checketts as a basketball executive and a person with character and integrity. He’s always come off as a good man, extremely sharp, very calculating and ruthless in his own way, which isn’t a crime. He might have political views I disagree with, but if I ever knew what they were, I don’t remember them now.

Yet you’re known by the company you keep. And anyone who would even invite as vile an example of humanity as Rush Limbaugh into a business proposition gets red flags planted all over him for the rest of eternity.

This isn’t even about being friends with someone like that; this is about associating with someone so closely that you’ll accept his money in order to achieve your personal goal. If reaching that goal requires a partnership with Rush Limbaugh, then your priorities, as well as everything about yourself, are rightly called into question.

You should never want anything so badly – whether it’s strictly money or the civic pride from keeping a struggling NFL team in town – that you would even invite his assistance in any way, much less give him a financial slice of it.

It doesn’t matter if, as many have suggested in response to this Limbaugh gambit, every sports league is run by people who look and sound a lot like Limbaugh. Of course racism and racist ideas infest America’s owners’ boxes, or else the NFL wouldn’t have needed a Rooney Rule to get black men hired as head coaches, and ballparks wouldn’t have the number 42 painted on their outfield walls. Plenty have been caught in the act, by their words (Marge Schott) or deeds (Donald Sterling).

Yet to even mention them in the same sentence as Limbaugh, in light of all that he has done and said to not only offend, but openly endanger, the black populace in this country, including the family living in the White House, is to minimize the deeply, pathologically incendiary nature of what he does. And how he has used that to become rich enough to buy into the NFL, all while avoiding any responsibility for the worst manifestations of the tales he spins three hours a day.

Whatever sins the NFL hierarchy has committed individually and collectively against blacks recently and over the years, they have at least done the right thing when either forced to or when their consciences mesh with their wallets. There is now a Rooney Rule, and it did once pull the Super Bowl out of Arizona while the state was patting itself on the back for rejecting a Martin Luther King holiday. Openly embracing a man who has built a career out of making black people the enemy (including, infamously, athletes), who repeatedly proclaims that he wants the black president to fail and who laughs at his setbacks and denigrates his successes – the NFL would be begging for a backlash that would scar it for years to come.

Bypassing that is easy enough. The tougher move would follow: to shun Checketts. To send a message that the days of owners being accountable only to themselves and each other are over, and that they are subject to a code of conduct, to the scrutiny of their associates, and to the image police, the same way the players are. If Vick needs to watch who he hangs around, then so does a prospective owner like Checketts. Limbaugh is far more of a threat to decent society than any of the knuckleheads Vick let get too close to him.

Tough break for Checketts, who otherwise seems like a decent person. But if he's palling around (to borrow an old campaign line) with Rush Limbaugh, maybe he's not what he seems.

(Photo: The Charlie Rose Show)

How Curt Flood "Ruined'' Sports

Today is the 40th anniversary of what seemed like a fairly big, but hardly earthshaking, baseball trade: Curt Flood, Tim McCarver and two others to the Philadelphia Phillies; Dick Allen and two others to the St. Louis Cardinals. Pretty cut-and-dried. Until Flood refused to report and then asked the commissioner to make him … a free agent.

We all know what happened after that, and if you don’t, check out a series of stories on Fanhouse, including a pair that I wrote.

And then check out some of the comments on those stories, then decide whether you agree with them. Flood is, in fact, the Father of Free Agency … and four full decades later (technically, three and a half, because it wasn’t fully granted for baseball players until 1975), it’s still held as gospel by a stunning percentage of fans that free agency “ruined baseball.’’ Or, more comprehensively, “ruined sports.’’

You know the arguments; you may have made them, and might be making them at this moment. Players are getting paid millions to play a kids’ game that most of us would play for free. Teachers and firefighters are struggling to survive, yet A-Rod and Kobe and T.O. make more for each game than any of them will ever be paid in their lifetimes. Heck, Joe DiMaggio and Bronko Nagurski never got paid like that, and they were real stars, not like these stiffs today. If some .220-hitting shortstop can make millions, what would Mantle be worth – forget it, he’d own a piece of the team!

And loyalty? Forget it, these punks chase the dollars and that’s it. Nobody cares about winning or keeping a team together or staying faithful to the fans of a city that adores them, the way they did in the old days, when a star would play for the same team his whole career. Agents now come in and drive up salaries and blackmail teams and bleed them dry; they have more power than anybody, and things were way better when the Vince Lombardis of the world would just throw them out of his office and trade any player who tried to use one. Then these greedy, jealous bums have the nerve to go on strike, as if they’re not the luckiest people walking the earth to be making that kind of money without having to have real jobs.

Meanwhile, we keep getting charged more for tickets and paying $8 for a beer at the ballpark, and $30 to park, and now the games aren’t even on TV for free anymore, all because of these damn high salaries. Did ya know you used to be able to sit in the bleachers for 50 cents?

Blah blah blah freaking blah.

Fans this blissfully ignorant and willfully uninformed are like gold to owners, and have been for more than a century. The truth is summed up in something Jim Bouton, the author of the legendary Ball Four, said years ago: players don’t deserve all that money, but owners don’t deserve it more.

The idea that sports, leagues, franchises and owners wouldn’t have soaked the public if players didn’t start demanding a fair share of the money they generated is beyond preposterous – it’s a flat-out lie. So is the idea that pro sports is in some sort of terrible condition today because players now have a piece of the pie they had been denied for, again, more than 100 years, before Flood finally called baseball out on it.

Meanwhile, the very same people who would never accept the kind of limits on where they could work, for how much and for how long, that athletes did before Flood, except under the most desperate and poverty-stricken conditions, are the ones who complain longest and loudest about players picking where they want to play and how much they’ll accept to do it. Folks are doing that right now, in fact, being laid off by companies for no other reason than it helps out the board members’ stock value or the CEO’s profit margins – and simultaneously enraged at CC Sabathia getting to go play for the Yankees because Cleveland and Milwaukee didn’t want to pay him as much.

There is simply no way to watch, say, Tuesday’s Twins-Tigers playoff game, as transcendent a moment as sports on any level has ever produced, and whine about how everything was so much better 50 years ago before free agency. Baseball is better now. Every sport is better now. It’s just as exciting as it ever has been, and everybody’s being treated better in it. And everybody got to see it, as more people have gotten to see more games more often than ever before.

You just wonder why fans are so compelled to continually parrot the same arguments made since the 1870s by owners working solely for their own self-interest. Why players getting rich offends them so much more than, for example, Jerry Jones or George Steinbrenner getting rich. Why pure selfishness (you don’t want your favorite player to ever leave town) can be such a dominant motivation for your feelings about the games. Why you would never swear off watching movies because of what Jim Carrey earns per picture, but curse the entire landscape of professional sports because of what Manny Ramirez makes. Why, in fact, it means so much to your personal happiness how much any player makes, and whether the envy and bitterness cultivated toward them is really worth it.

Seriously, what’s it all about? Curt Flood liked St. Louis and didn’t want to go to Philadelphia just because August Busch ordered him to. For that, he and every player since have your everlasting disgust?

Flood died young, in 1997, but he took sports into the 21st century. It's time for fans to join it there.

(Photo of Curt Flood and Marvin Miller: The New York Times)