By GORDON GLANTZ

Gordonglantz50@gmail.com

@Managing2Edit

GORDONVILLE — In a perfect world, the now-completed 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio should have been a rallying point in Casa de Glantz.

No more fighting for the remote when it is time to decide between “The Bachelor” or a sporting event. No more zoning out when an obscure topic comes up at the dinner table.

With Sofia now 9, these were to be the first Olympics when she really could fully comprehend what was happening up there on our new 60-inch screen.

And even though I’ve gained the smarts to work the Smart TV, I figured Netflix would have to take a break for the Olympics.

But something happened on the road to Rio (yes, I’m aware of the movie by that name).

HBO’s “Real Sports” kept it “real” and shed light on the dark underbelly that is the whole Olympic syndrome we buy into every two years (Winter Olympics come two years after the summer these days, so that we stay nice and inundated with the concept of good will through sport).

Exposing the exploitation tactics of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Real Sports confirmed a semi-quelled inkling that sports journalism may now be the standard-bearer of the once great fourth estate.

And it turned me off, just about completely, to any interest in the Rio games, while serving as a stark reminder that an event designed to make the world seem perfect is a delusion.

But then I had to consider my 9-year-old ultra-precocious daughter, Sofia, who was going into the Games buoyed by a Lifetime movie on Gabby Douglas she had seen on Netflix after a long détente over what to watch once the Smart TV riddle rhymed.

She was deeply interested, and asking a lot of questions. When it comes to all things sports, whether I know or not, I’m the Answer Man around here.

As it was, the two most televised sports in the first week were gymnastics and swimming. Sofia, inbound for fourth grade, has been taking gymnastics since the summer after Kindergarten and has been taking more serious 1-on-1 swimming lessons this summer.

She was doing her own “routines” in front to the TV, and pretending to swim back and forth. It was too cute, and too reminiscent of what I used to do – often in full costume – when I watched sports. (Confession: I still watch the Eagles in a jersey and hold a now half-deflated football as a comfort toy.)

So I put all disgust from the “Real Sports” segment on the shelf and watched with her, even when Mommy and Nana slithered away from the scene.

This is what we Dads do.

Sofia was cheering for Douglas, after seeing the aforementioned movie, but I reminded my half-Jewish daughter that she needed to hold a warm thought for team captain Aly Raisman. We also cheered for Michael Phelps to make history, were amazed by Katie Ledecky and couldn’t understand how and why Sweden would be formidable in swimming when the other more “winter” countries (Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, Austria, Finland, etc.) were struggling to get on the radar in any event.

It brought back memories of my first real Olympics experience: the Munich Games of 1972.

I was 7, and my whole world was sports. I remember watching from the couch for much of Mark Spitz’s exploits. I also remember being on “vacation” in Washington, D.C. for the end of the Games, and trying to understand – as much as I could at that age – what was going on when the Israeli athletes were taken hostage and murdered by Palestinian terrorists.

At the time, I thought the subsequent theft of the basketball gold medal from the U.S. men’s basketball team was more egregious, but I soon came to learn that it paled in comparison. It came full-circle when I read a Doug Collins interview stating that what had happened to the Israelis pretty much dampened the spirits of the team and that they “just wanted to go home” as much as play that gold medal game against the former Soviet Union.

Olympic officials tried to separate sports from politics, but they were proven – just as Hitler’s Berlin Games of 1936 and the black power salute of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on a Mexico City medal stand in 1968 or the mass boycott of the Moscow Games of 1980 did – to be impossibly intertwined.

That’s the one aspect of the modern Olympic Games in which the spirit of the ancient Greek Olympiad cannot be recaptured. In those days of yore, with the likes of Plato and Socrates among the honored spectators, there was a mandatory cessation of regional hostilities to allow for safe passage of soldiers to travel and be able to compete.

How and why could that have been the case in a supposedly less-evolved time in history? Maybe because the ancient Olympics also had a spiritual side.

They believed the Gods were watching.

These Gods probably looked away in disgust sometime between the full-time modern revival in Athens in 1896 and the stripping of Jim Thorpe’s 1912 gold medals in 1913.

Although smoke-and-mirror productions – like the grandiose opening ceremony in Rio –  can put a proverbial bandage on a gunshot wound, the internal bleeding had already begun behind the scenes.

And it was clear there was no cessation of regional hostilities to allow safe passage – even to the opening extravaganza.

That night in Rio, members of the Lebanese delegation refused to share a bus with the Israeli team.

And so it began.

And continued.

A female representing Saudia Arabia, which has a poor record on women’s rights, withdrew from the judo competition rather than risk having to compete in the second round against an Israeli, Gili Cohen. (If the Saudi didn’t want to compete, her name doesn’t deserve to be mentioned.)

On the men’s side, in judo, Israel’s Or Sasson was graced in competition by Egypt’s Islam El-Shehaby. After Sasson scored what is the sport’s version of a knockout (or pin), Sasson’s fervent attempt at a handshake was rebuffed. While the crowd jeered, the referee ordered Shehaby to take the customary bow and eventually got a feeble nod.

The action was a post-script in most places. Given the volatile nature of the Middle East, who wants to take sides, right? Decried in the Israeli press and met with passing disgust in the U.S., excuses were initially made by officials (the IOC has a history of anti-Semitism going back to Hitler’s games).

In a delayed move, El Shehaby was sent home by his own country – likely to a hero’s welcome, which he will need to avoid the shame of losing to a Jew.

And make no mistake about it, this is what this all about.

Recognition, and treatment of the Palestinians, are just easy excuses. It is the same reason Israel has a harder time qualifying for the World Cup in soccer or the Olympics in basketball. Instead of competing against nations from its own region, it has to compete against European nations because neighboring countries refuse to compete.

Meanwhile, the “Real Sports” report delved into safety in Rio. During the games, there have been incidents, up to and including U.S. swimmer Ryan Lochte and teammates half-concocted their story about being held up at gunpoint (it was kinda sorta true, but not really, and yet another controversy that got a ridiculous amount of mainstream media coverage while Louisiana literally floated away).

According to Associated Press, these other incidents include the following:

• An Olympic security officer was fatally shot after he and two others got lost near a slum near the airport.
• A pair of Australian rowing coaches were robbed at knifepoint Friday in Ipanema. A day later, also in Ipanema, Portugal’s education minister was robbed at knifepoint.
• Stray bullets have twice flown into the Olympic sports complex in Deodoro.
• Two windows were shattered on a bus carrying journalists (local official say rocks, but those on the bus think bullets).
• Bomb squads have set off several controlled explosions after finding unattended items such as the backpack near the basketball arena. Detonations also have happened near the finish line of a cycling race and of a Copacabana Palace hotel.

While all these actions pale in comparison to what happened in Munich, just think of the mileage – the positive international press – that would be generated if the animosity was dropped, like when there was a cessation in battle in the ancient games, if something as simple as a shared bus ride and a handshake and man-hug occurred.

We know that would play well in, say, the UK or Canada or Australia or the Netherlands. But it would be seen as a national disgrace in places like Lebanon and Saudi Araba and, yes, Egypt (treaty or not).

How do I explain all of this to Sofia, when she is watching with the same wide eyes I once had?

I want to tell her all, and one day I will, but Olympic moments – like the so-called 1980 Miracle on Ice (I personally don’t think it was quite the miracle it was made out to be) – should be coveted before her innocence is lost.

For now, I suppose I’ll keep it simple.

And do what we Dads sometimes have to do.

I’ll lie.

I’ll say the Gods are watching.

By GORDON GLANTZ

Gordonglantz50@gmail.com

@Managing2Edit

GORDONVILLE — Been giving a lot of thought lately to what it means to grow old.

Being on the north side of 50, if only by a year, will do that to a guy.

More or less, I still love – or at least like, or am bemused by – the same music and television shows from my youth (while picking up some strays along the road of life).

I am still given to bouts of unabashed immaturity, often manifested by practical jokes with Sofia serving as my assistant.

And that little girl, sometimes 9 going on 19 and sometimes 9 going on 19 months, keeps me young in so many ways.

Yeah, there are the physical reminders – less hair up top and more girth in the gut.

And I am mastering the art of small talk. I can do the wave and nod thing and the final plunge of discussing the weather and traffic patterns.

But I think we age as we lose drip on our youth.

Listening to Bruce Springsteen 24/7 won’t halt that that inevitability.

No one gets out of here alive.

We lose our grandparents, our parents, our aunts and uncles and we age with each loss.

By the time we lose our friends, well, you don’t need a calendar to tell you how old you are.

Rick MacLeish was not a personal friend of mine. I met the man twice. Once, as I waited in a long line at a car dealership – Matt Slapp Something or Other (I think Chevrolet, but don’t hold me to that) in the Northeast – but they hustled us all through the line pretty quickly.

My heart pounded as I approached. He quietly asked my name and I stammered with a response. He proceeded to spell it incorrectly – G-O-R-D-E-N – which is actually amazing, considering the number of people named Gordon, like Gordon Lightfoot, from his native Canada.

Because of the length of the line, my impatient stepfather told me he would be back “later” to pick me up. Because of the precision of the movement of the line, he was nowhere to be found when I was done.

So, without a concrete definition of what “later” meant, I did what any stupid 9-year-old would do.

I walked home.

By the time I got there, the late autumn chill had taken its toll and my mother put me in a warm a tub. I didn’t quite understand my stepfather’s panic when he got back to Matt Slapp, but I can only imagine how I would feel – actually I can’t – if the same thing happened with Sofia if she were waiting in line for an autograph from Becky G (her second-favorite teen idol behind Sabrina Carpenter).

When he saw me in the tub, he couldn’t get too mad. I was home. And, really, he should have waited —  and been more concrete about when and where — and he knew it.

But this was 1974. Parents didn’t see child abductors lurking on every corner. We played, out of view, until dark.

My favorite sport to play was street hockey, pretending to be like guys like Rick MacLeish.

All was forgotten and I went to bed happy, despite any panic I caused. I had interfaced with my second-favorite Flyer – Bobby Clarke was like Secretariat pulling away from Sham in the Belmont Stakes – and I had his autograph (I had Clarke’s, too, but it was not from a personal encounter).

The second meeting with MacLeish was a bit different. I was acting in a professional manner as a working member of the press at the Philadelphia Sports Writer’s dinner in Cherry Hill. I walked out of the press room to look for Tommy Lasorda (I worked for the Norristown paper, and we were required to write about Lasorda whenever he passed gas) and almost collided with someone around my own size.

He politely said “excuse me” and timidly stepped aside. His face, like any of the Broad Street Bullies, was unmistakable.

“Rick MacLeish,” I pronounced, much more confident than when I was nine, introducing myself as he shifted his beer to his left hand and shook mine.

We spoke for about five minutes, tops, during which I did most of the talking in a quiet corner where there were so many other Philadelphia sports icons walking around that no one would have even noticed.  I told him he was my second-favorite Flyer, about the Matt Slapp incident and how I spent hours in my garage trying to replicate the quickness and power of his surreal wrist shot.

I also told MacLeish that whenever my father managed to get tickets for a game – no easy task in that time frame –  he always scored a goal, and that I even saw a hat trick or two.

He quipped that he would have gotten me season tickets if he had known.

We also talked about the goal he scored against the Boston Bruins in Game 6 of the Stanley Cup finals, which held up for the duration in a 1-0 win. He said that the deflection was not an accident. He explained that he and Andre “Moose” Dupont tirelessly worked on it in practice. Dupont would shoot it about an inch off the ice and he would deflect it. By the time the situation arose in the game, it was like second nature. For the first time in a game situation, it worked.

He joked that the other power-play point men, Bill Barber and Tom Bladon, shot too hard to spend time on it with them but that “Moose shot it nice and slow, but accurately, and could only get it as high as around the ankles anyway.”

I saw Lasorda – actually, I heard him, too – from the corner of my eye. I was promised five minutes to do a power interview, so I had to excuse myself. MacLeish shook my hand again (hockey players were always gentlemen) and blended back into the crowd from which he came.

I spotted him again, alone in a corner of the VIP area, and thought about resuming the conversation. But I had a story to write, and wanted it out of the way before the dinner, and I didn’t want the man to think I was some sort of a stalker.

So, those are my Rick MacLeish stories. It might be a sign of age, but neither is ever told that often.

From time to time, I would run into someone from overnight camp or somewhere else in my youth, and they would luckily remember me more for my wrist shot than by buck teeth and Jewfro.

My response would be that “I got it from watching MacLeish.”

And I starting watching MacLeish again.

Part of staying young, I suppose, has been some small semblance of computer literacy. The Flyers’ first of two cups is recalled most by the final series, with Clarke winning Game 2 in overtime and MacLeish’s tally in Game 6 that goalie Bernie Parent would preserve, but they got there by edging past a New Rangers team in seven games that was probably better than Boston.

I found Game 7 of the Ranger series on You Tube and what immediately struck me was how dominant MacLeish was in that decisive contest.

And after he passed away this past week at age 66, I watched it again. The whole thing.

It made me feel young.

It made me feel old.

Most of all, it made me feel he was worth that long walk home.

 

 

 

By GORDON GLANTZ

Gordonglantz50@gmail.com

@Managing2Edit

GORDONVILLE — May 25, 2014.

That was the day that the president used the occasion of Memorial Day weekend to visit troops in Afghanistan, California was memorializing the victims of a shooting rampage two days earlier and Pope Francis visited the Holy Land and talked about … peace in the region.

It was also the day that Sofia had a play date about 45 minutes from our house. Not too far to say no, but too far to go home just to come back 2½ hours later.

My wife and I decided to use the occasion to explore the thriving metropolis of Harleysville (Montgomery County).

Not feeling much like the Vikings of yore, we wound up at a joint called the Harleysville Hotel, which is a pub/sports bar that I suppose is hoping on Friday and Saturday nights.

We sat down at a table that, literally, had a TV screen right above us.

There was no choice but to look at it.

And the Phillies game was on.

I told my wife that this was the first time I had bothered to lay eyes on the Phils this season. Surprised, she asked why.

I answered her question with a question: why should I?

While I rarely win an argument – especially when your wife is lawyer – she accepted my rationale.

It was already predetermined that the 2014 season was going to be like a B-level action-adventure flick with the well-worn plot twists, mandatory car chases, gratuitous violence and predictable ending.

It’s the kind of movie that permeates the cable dial, and the kind that I click right through in a desperate attempt to stimulate the few remaining brain cells I have left.

The 2014 Phillies, by design, were pretty much the same way. They entered the season needing everything to go absolutely perfect to maybe linger in the conversation for a wild card berth.

Instead, nothing has gone right.

And I say goodbye and good riddance.

On May 25, the villain of this horror movie was Josh Beckett of the Dodgers. From the few early-game pitches I watched, while also checking out the more enthusiastically played college softball game on another screen, I muttered that the feeble Phillies were not going to touch him.

As the burger and fries arrived, I paid more attention to the stubborn ketchup bottle than to the Phillies.

It wasn’t until I got home later and was scouring the Internet for sports information as I prepared for the pending PhillyPhanatics.com Blog Talk Radio show that I saw Beckett had actually no-hit the Phillies.

I was neither mortified nor embarrassed to be Philly-born and bred.

I was simply bemused.

And in the months since, I have looked back on that day with regret.

Had we not walked into the Harleysville Hotel, a place with more television screens than patrons, I would be able to say that I made it through the current season without watching a pitch.

Instead, there is a caveat: I have not watched a pitch by conscious choice, and the only time I did by happenstance was the same day when they were humbled into a state of hitlessness in a season that has seen a once powerful offensive team come up as futile as the pope’s pleas for peace.

OBJECTIVE VIEW

It’s not like I am some sort of sports seer – like some Vegas oddsmaker with the soul of Nostradamus – to know that the Phillies were not going to be worth the time and effort.

I was just objective enough to not be like a subjective kid in a Phillies’ cap.

And it’s not like I dislike baseball.

The Phillies were my first favorite team in 1970. I learned to read the sports agate page by comparing their record against that of the National League West cellar-dwelling San Diego Padres. I watched repeated showings of highlights on the 1950 World Series during rain delays until the slow and steady rise by the middle of the “Me” decade culminated with a highlight to wash away being swept by the Yankees as the high-water mark.

In 1980, and in heart-stopping fashion, they won it all.

I never really mustered the same enthusiasm for the Phillies, or baseball, after the moment when Tug McGraw fanned Willie Wilson with Philly’s finest walking behind the backstop with police dogs on leashes.

It was like finally getting to kiss your high school crush at graduation, and checking it off the bucket list.

Baseball was probably No. 4 on my list – football slowly overtook hockey, with basketball a semi-distant third – but anyone who knows me knows that there pretty much is no No. 5.

No golf. No tennis. No soccer. No NASCAR. No Boxing.

Just the big four – including baseball, and I’m not wired to do anything other than to root, root, root for the home team.

Yes, I still cringed when Jim Fregosi pulled Roger Mason for a worn-out Mitch Williams. From my sixth sense, I knew the Joe Carter homer was coming, just like I knew this disastrous season was on the horizon before the first story about a non-roster invitee coming off Tommy John surgery ran in the antiques known as newspapers on the day when pitchers and catchers reported back in February.

I still played fantasy baseball in a carry-over league, building a team that was ready to dominate before the strike of 1994 caused the league to fold.

I still went to Cooperstown a few years later and considered it the hallowed ground that it is, even without Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson enshrined.

And I’ll talk baseball – arguing matters like whether the 1977, 1980 or 2008 Phillies were the best in franchise history (I got 1977) and what 25 guys would make the roster of the All-Jewish Team – without hesitation.

Heck, my favorite all-time board game remains Strat-O-Matic Baseball.

I enjoyed the window of opportunity being reopened in the first decade of the new century, one that saw a World Series title in 2008 and a loss to the Yankees in the 2009 World Series before the slow and steady decline to where we are now began.

It now seems that my 7-year-old Sofia, who I will have seen bat more times this year in her coach-pitch softball league (I was an assistant to the assistant coach) than Ryan Howard or Chase Utley until the ends of their careers, will also be watching highlights of a World Series loss (circa 2009) to the dang Yanks two decades from now.

The difference is that she probably won’t care.

And if she does, it won’t be from my influence.

FINAL STRAW

If I had a final straw on the back of a camel under the care of a chiropractor, it was the trade deadline that just passed with nary a move by overmatched GM Ruben Amaro Jr.

It is true confession time, folks.

I may not have been subjecting myself to the pitch-by-pitch torture of games – although maybe I would if I suffered from insomnia – but I have been following the Phillies fairly closely.

I check the boxscores, and team stats, every morning after a game. I read whatever I can about the progress – or lack thereof – of the few farmhands that, through attrition, they sell to the unwashed masses as prospects.

And I was getting psyched for the possibilities of the trade deadline.

Understanding that baseball is not like other sports, where being brutal does not guarantee a chance for a short wait before retooling through the draft or farm system (even if the stink in the barn is fumigated by the arrival of imports from other organizations), it was clear a push onto the reset button was vital.

They may have even become worth watching, dare I say it, if only for the sake of morbid curiosity.

It came and went with nothing.

A hollow feeling, to say the least.

I had the MLB Network on the tube for more than two hours – after clicking through some “B” movies – and they didn’t even mentioned the word “Phillies” until a half-hour after the deadline pass.

And when they did, it was with a passing chuckle and shrug.

A recent potentate, your Phillies have plummeted that far off the radar screen.

Bottom line: This organization can’t get out its own way if it tried.

The farm system is in shambles, both in terms of finding talent and cultivating what bit of it remains. Everywhere you look, you see once-heralded homegrown players – Maikel Franco, Freddie Galvis, Roman Quinn Jesse Biddle, etc. – backsliding.

And they can’t even make a trade, if only for the sake of doing it to make themselves relevant (with the Eagles about to render them completely irrelevant), while in “seller” mode.

Amaro can’t be trusted to rebuild. And his boss, Dave Montgomery, is best-suited to be in his office deciding what date would best to give away Harry Kalas bobblehead dolls.

But the real issue, the core of the matter, is not about either one of the non-dynamic duo who get pushed out in front of television cameras to bemoan bad luck of injuries.

GETTING OWNED

I recently came across a poll that asked which Philadelphia team you’d buy if money were no object.

My answer, after careful consideration, was the Phillies.

Even though they are No. 4 on my list.

Even though baseball, compared to the other three major sports, brings up the rear here in Gordonville.

Even though I haven’t watched a pitch – by choice – this season, and certainly don’t plan to with the sounds of pads popping at Eagles’ training camp.

Why?

Better question than about my blind eye to their B-movie script and Bollywood ending.

The other three teams are in better hands. They may make mistakes, but the goal is to win, not just exist in a state of suspended animation.

My purchase of the Phillies would be done as a public service. Personally, I am good with the Phillies, overall. Numerous division titles, five pennants and two World Series titles since I dared to care at age 5.

But what about everyone out there who still cares? They are the ones being slapped in the face while being asked to present their mortgage papers to bring their families to a game.

You could say the Phillies’ high payroll is proof that the mystical ownership group lurking in the shadows cares about winning, but it was more caring about the windfall of a window of opportunity opening by happenstance – and in spite of a dunce for a manager – a few years back.

They developed man-crushes on the nucleus of the team, sticking themselves with onerous contracts and not realizing they needed to make pragmatic moves before standing in quicksand and yelling “help” at the 2014 trading deadline while the rest of the league laughs.

Without going to Google, can you name one of the Phillies’ owners?

I can’t.

And until one steps out of the shadows and takes charge, I am not watching.

Not even at the Harleysville Hotel.

This column first appeared at http://www.phillyphanatics.com