I went to Hooters.

By the time I arrived—the place is on 56^th Street, several blocks north of Times Square, which I guess is where it belongs—my friend had already found a table for us and finished off a plate of Buffalo shrimp. I had never been to Hooters before. I brought a list of questions with me (sample question: What lines from Tennyson best describe Hooters?) but I saw pretty quickly that Hooters is not a hospitable environment for mystery. Instead, Hooters is a place to watch sports while surrounded by recent college graduates who have been asked to dress like extras from an old episode of Miami Vice.

Still, during the NFL playoffs, some sense of mystery always abides. Snake and I discussed, for instance, the very limited spectrum of emotions on Joe Flacco’s face. Flacco, the cocky but inconsistent quarterback of the Baltimore Ravens, was sitting on the sidelines after throwing a touchdown, and as the TV screens at Hooters showed close-up views of Flacco in repose, we struggled to find the right word to describe his mien: was Flacco inscrutable? Was he nonplussed? What did nonplussed mean, exactly?

We didn’t come up with any satisfactory answers for those questions, but before the game was over I found tentative answers to a few other questions I’d brought to Hooters that day.

***

What is Hooters?

The servers at Hooters, who are all female, wear very short orange shorts. The color of their shorts, I noticed, was comparable to the shiny orange of the Denver Broncos’ uniforms, but not quite the same. Without exception the servers wore pantyhose as well, usually a shade darker than their skin, maybe because they wanted to feel more clothed. Their shirts were tight. The servers talked to each other and to the kitchen workers more than they talked to their customers. I felt somehow relieved by this.

***

What, if any, behaviors or topics are “out-of-bounds” at Hooters?

“Tom Brady pisses blood the day after every game,” Snake, the black belt/Patriots fan/Tennyson scholar, told me at one point.

Where had Snake heard this? How did Snake know this?

“Brady said it himself—he pisses blood every week. All the players probably do. Brady does, at least.”

***

How is the food at Hooters? 

The Hooters menu makes a big deal about spiciness, and there are fireball graphics and titles like “9-1-1” and “Three Mile Island” to describe the various levels of chicken-wing heat. But if you order mild wings, the server in her tight shirt tells you, “You probably want medium. Mild is 95-percent butter, it has no kick at all. Medium is like mild here.” And that encapsulates the Hooters experience, in an odd way: medium is like mild.

***

How is the service at Hooters?

A few tables away from us, a youngish father with a shaved head was feeding a bottle to his squirming baby son. The father was trying to find a comfortable baby-cradling position while keeping his eyes on the TV screen to see the Ravens-Broncos game. He was there with his wife and his (or maybe his wife’s) white-haired parents. Why was this family sitting at Hooters? Didn’t they have a home? A while later, I saw the new father approach a waitress. “These wings aren’t hot enough,” he huffed, holding the plate under her face. The young woman looked miserable as she took the plate from him and walked back to the kitchen.

***

 Why does Hooters exist?

At halftime, a teenager came in with his father; the boy was wearing a Hooters t-shirt. His shirt had already been inscribed with several different female signatures—I could see the name Lisa on his back in big letters, the “i” dotted with a green marker heart. Under the watchful, approving gaze of his father, the teenager asked every waitress who walked by to sign his shirt. The busy young women all obliged, bending and smiling and touching the boy with different-colored markers. At one point, I saw the father suggest a spot near his son’s left pectoral, so the waitress had to lean across the boy’s front. The father smiled. The son smiled. But, no, Teen Guy at Hooters. No safe fun fake ritual with your dad at a franchise restaurant is going to give you a sexual identity.

***

What lines from Tennyson best describe Hooters?

Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes;
Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.

I would be happy to write that on a t-shirt for you. 

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Zinedine Zidane knows how that brand of shameful memorializing feels. Zidane, the former soccer star who led France to its only World Cup championship in 1998, became a French cultural icon in the ’90s. He led France’s national team from his position in central midfield, controlling the ball deftly, switching directions with superhuman quickness, displaying near-divine precision when he passed the ball. Thanks to all this, Zidane—whose parents were from northern Algeria—was the best-known player on a racially and ethnically diverse team that made many French citizens feel as though their nation had transcended its colonialist history. The son of immigrants became a hero to soccer fans all over the world, but in France Zidane’s biography made him more than a sports figure with a cool name.

In 2006, eight years after leading France to world football dominance for the first time, an aging Zidane powered the French team to yet another World Cup final. What he’d lost in youthful quickness, Zidane made up for with his ageless sixth sense for placing beautiful, curving passes at the feet of sprinting teammates. Zidane had come to occupy that hackneyed but irresistible sports archetype, the savvy veteran, with an extra dash of style and power. But throughout the final match of that 2006 World Cup, the Italian defender Marco Materazzi baited Zidane by saying nasty things about the French star’s sister. In the second half, an increasingly agitated Zidane—maybe forgetting that millions and millions of people were watching the match—lashed out with a ferocious head-butt, hammering his skull straight into the defender’s sternum, sending Materazzi sprawling backwards, shouting in pain.

This is the very moment that the French artist Adel Abdessemed captured in a giant bronze sculpture that now stands outside the Pompidou Center in Paris. The enormous sculpture captures the contours and wrinkles of the two players’ jerseys, the grounded, goat-like stance of the butting Zidane, the graceless backward flop of Materazzi. The imposing twinned statues are all dark metal, a bit H. R. Geiger-ish in their sleek violence (and also, as Scott Sayare nicely observed in the Times’ Artsbeat blog, the sculpture echoes some giant, bleak Soviet-era sculpture). Abdessemed, the sculptor, who claims Algerian heritage similar to Zidane’s, told Sayare that the soccer icon’s attack “offered us a rapture” because Zidane, in that moment of aggression, “expressed himself as a man.”

I remember just where I watched that World Cup final in 2006. I was standing in the backyard of a Brooklyn bar called Cherry Tree, holding a pint of beer. The game was being projected onto a mostly taut white sheet, and the moving images of the action were pale and sometimes hard to see in the summer sunlight. I was following the match in a distracted way, talking to friends, drinking, thinking how nice it was that people could bring their dogs. I’m pretty sure someone was trying to roast a pig in a shallow trench back there, which would have drawn some portion of my attention, too. But at one point I looked up at the screen and saw it—saw something: was that Zidane? Was that Zidane head-butting somebody? The ghosts on the screen were difficult to make out, but yes, the replays made it clear: Zinedine Zidane, one of the world’s most admired athletes and one of my personal soccer heroes, had violently head-butted an opponent and then been red-carded—thrown out—of the World Cup final. I was stunned.

Now, six years later, a gigantic sculpture of Zidane’s disgrace looms outside a Paris museum and library complex. What to make of this? I admire Abdessemed’s sculpture, or at least I admire its conceptual roots, because I think the artwork shows something about the mythical status we accord our most talented athletes. Maybe portraits of shamed or injured sports stars are as close as we can come to resonant religious images in our century. But the sculptor’s contention that this moment amounts to a “rapture” seems wrongheaded to me. Both men played their part: Materazzi’s weird, elaborate pseudo-Iago act remains villainous as ever, and Zidane’s response still seems immature and shameful. But beyond the sculpture, the rapture is still there—in the memories of Zidane’s play, the moves he produced impromptu, eluding and eliding, gliding around the field like a ghost who became more substantial (and somehow quicker) when his feet touched the ball. There is no easy redemption in Zidane’s story, nothing like Barry Zito regaining championship form for the San Francisco Giants after blowing it for so many years. But Zidane’s awful lapse of judgment is not an egregious Lance Armstrong-esque fall from grace, either. The rapture of the French midfielder’s play is still there in the collective memory of those who watched him; you can see it, too, in the documentary Zidane: A 21^st Century Portrait. This strange and strangely compelling film used 17 different cameras to record Zidane’s movement and stillness during the course of a single 90-minute game. The movie is slow at times, but Zidane’s transitions from expectant jogging to sudden bursts of skill are where the real rapture lies. And no one can bronze those subtle flickers of intelligent play, which is at least partly why they’re beautiful.

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Media coverage of Mario Balotelli tends to portray the young footballer as a Jekyll-and-Hyde character, a split-in-two figure: half soccer maestro, half egomaniacal monster. Depending on the moment, he’s either Super Mario or Stupid Mario. There are reasons for this reputation. Despite his undeniable talent, Balotelli is unpredictable in the worst and the best ways. As a striker, his sudden swerves and bursts of speed catch even experienced defenders like Germany’s Philip Lahm off-balance and out of position. So Balotelli is capable of scoring dramatic, often important goals. But as an emotionally immature 21-year-old who has been a high-profile soccer player since his teens, Balotelli’s volatile decisions on and off the pitch have also led to well-deserved ejections and other problems, such as house fires. Last spring, the day before an important match with his British Premiership club team, Mario’s house was set ablaze when someone ignited a bouquet of fireworks in the first-floor bathroom. Apparently Balotelli blamed the fire on a friend. But when someone comes over, hauls a load of fireworks into your bathroom and tells you “Seriously, don’t worry,” it’s probably your fault if your house burns down. And so sportswriters and soccer analysts, when confronted with a match in which Balotelli will appear, are quick to pose the following question: “Who will show up on game day—Super Mario or Stupid Mario?”

This question is frustratingly lazy. Of course it has entertainment value—it’s provocative—for some of the same reasons that Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde is still a compelling story. Vladimir Nabokov once noted that while Stevenson’s lurid little book is simplistic and slapdash, it also has a narrative power rooted in its suspenseful presentation of a split personality. The Jekyll and Hyde story “is beautifully constructed,” in Nabokov’s estimation, “but it is an old one. Its moral is preposterous since neither good nor evil is actually depicted… they are taken for granted, and the struggle goes on between two empty outlines.” Nabokov reveals his preference for the more modern sensibilities of Gogol and Kafka, whose fiction finds ways to question whether a character’s coherence is more complicated and subtle than a dramatic binary. But for sports analysts, in this age of media coaching for professional athletes and carefully tailored public personae, a binary personality actually seems like a lot to work with. And so they have found “two empty outlines” for Balotelli and his antics.

But that’s not enough. Balotelli, who is of Ghanaian descent and was adopted by Italian parents, has an unusual background for an Italian soccer star. And he has an unusual burden. In Europe, football fanaticism is still wrapped up in racist and nationalistic rhetoric to the extent that there are official movements to monitor and respond to derogatory chants and jeers that spread through the stands during matches. The FARE initiative is one response to the ugly songs of ignorant fans—you can apply to be a FARE monitor online, and unfortunately you’ll most likely be busy if you get the job. Incredibly, in the Euro 2012 tournament that ended with Spain’s 4-0 spanking of Italy, fines were levied for monkey chants directed at black players by Spanish fans and bananas thrown by Ukrainian fans when black players took the field. This ceremonial racism is part of the context for Balotelli’s behavior. On top of this, Balotelli is worshipped whenever he scores a goal, showered with money because of his star potential, but then completely reviled when he does something wrong. In some ways, then, Balotelli is merely an impulsive 21-year-old mirroring the fanatical public when he acts out his various mood swings. Unfortunately, in some of these moments, Balotelli climbs inside the empty outlines that commentators use to describe him.

That’s one reason the image of Mario Balotelli embracing his mom is moving. Presumably his mother knows him not as two characters, Jekyll and Hyde, but as a complex, gifted young man who has been both buoyed and bruised in his rise to fame. She might well clutch him and hope to protect him. The peak of international sports stardom is treacherous enough when it’s not paved with banana peels.

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For those of you who don’t know, the Mets began their 50^th season in Major League Baseball this year without a single measly no-hitter to their credit. For Mets fans, that amounted to half a century of franchise history with no No-No. (The San Diego Padres were the only other Major League team at the start of this season that had never pitched a no-hitter.) That night, though, I began to get this feeling in my gut. As I tried to return my attention to Hannah Arendt’s essay, I began believing that Johan Santana, back this season from reconstructive shoulder surgery, was going to do it—he was going to go nine complete innings without allowing the Cardinals a single hit. He was going to break the Mets’ embarrassing streak of mound-bound fecklessness.

I was supposed to be reading. I was supposed to be writing. Instead, I was staring at a little corner of the ESPN website as a real-time scoreboard kept track of Santana’s pitch count. At 9:49 p.m., I texted my brother, also a Mets fan, with amazing news: “He fucking did it.” After firing 134 pitches, Johan Santana had become the first Mets pitcher in the history of the universe to successfully throw a no-hitter.

Eventually, before the night was over, I got back to my reading. But I decided to revisit Arendt’s “What Is Freedom?” by writing a poem about what had happened in Queens that night. I would try out Arendt’s concepts and assertions in the context of Santana’s newly minted no-hitter. How hard can it be, I wondered, to write a decent baseball poem? That night I discovered that, for me at least, and especially at 10 p.m. on a Friday, it is almost impossible to write a poem of any kind. (In other words, when I finished writing my poem that night, I did not text my brother to say, “I fucking did it!”) But writing the poem brought me back to Arendt, at least, and I tried to throw some strikes. The result appears below.

***

The Miracle

1.

If I could diagram a man’s shoulder

(the inside, where the ball of bone

fits into the smooth socket padded

with cartilage and snugly wrapped in muscle)

I would place that diagram here, first.

2.

Every single pitch is a beginning.

3.

Imagine Hannah Arendt at a baseball game.

“This is strange,” she says. “The players are repeating

the same actions over and over again inside the white

lines on a field.”

“And yet–?” you ask her.

She smiles and sips her $9 beer.

4.

Every single pitch is a beginning. Good pitchers know this

in their eyes, muscles, shoulders and hands.

The finest southpaws and knuckleballers insist

on the action of effortful wind-up and release

because they’re schooled in automatism and routine, but

schooled too in the way a 95 mile-per-hour fastball breaks into the world

and delineates the texture of what’s real.

When Johan Santana, pitching a no-hitter on a cool June night in Queens,

asked his surgically reconstructed shoulder to begin 134 times

we were reminded that a miracle has pieces.

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Though he was galvanized by the 49ers’ surprising success this season, Ferlinghetti made it clear in the article that, all in all, he considers the NFL too violent and finds soccer and baseball more compelling than American football. Soccer is “like chess when you really pay attention to it,” the poet claimed. “In soccer, they never stop,” he added, bemoaning the many whistles and downs and commercial breaks of a typical NFL game.

In drawing this contrast between football and soccer, Ferlinghetti seems to be revealing a poetics of sport. An expanded version of this poetics can be found in Ferlinghetti’s “Baseball Canto,” which begins by proposing that a baseball stadium is a good place to read. “Watching baseball, sitting in the sun, eating popcorn,/ reading Ezra Pound” are the poem’s opening lines—lines that manage, in 18 syllables, to evoke a multitude of simple but satisfying activities and to suggest the richness of experience that we all have access to as readers, eaters, spectators and sunbathers. In the final stanzas of the poem, Ferlinghetti implies that baseball is more exciting than the typical Anglo-Saxon epic because of the way baseball provides a stage for men from different cultures to be heroes if they play well enough. The rules and rhythms of the game, Ferlinghetti suggests, improve on the faceless strongman heroism of the old epics. Nothing in Beowulf is as inspiring as Willie Mays rounding the bases “like a footrunner from Thebes.”

In the pre-game human interest hullaballoo surrounding Super Bowl XLVI, coming up on February 5, you will hear about Eli Manning receiving a surprise post-game visit from his brother Peyton after the NFC championship. You will hear about Victor Cruz, the gritty Giants wideout who was unheralded at the start of the season and is finishing it as a star. Probably you’ll hear about Tom Brady really wanting to win another Super Bowl as well. During all these interviews, the camera will zoom in on the players’ faces. But once the Super Bowl starts, once the masked and padded players finally take the field, the game itself will become a big moving scrum. What individuals do on the gridiron that day will be hard to parse without the assistance of slow-motion replays and expert commentary.

One thing that’s interesting about Ferlinghetti’s poem is the way the baseball players are taken individually, how they step up the plate and become heroes but at the same time poke holes in our notions about heroes needing to use force and violence in order to master other men. In the Times interview, Ferlinghetti seems disappointed in pro football partly because it hasn’t found a way to transcend the violence of the old epics. “It’s murder out there,” the aging poet said, noting that most NFL players, when they retire, are too battered to make normal progress into old age. (He would be comforted to know that former NFL running back Eddie George recently played the title role in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and is pursuing an acting career, but this is of course a glaring exception to the rule.) Ferlinghetti seems to be telling us that football, with its fragmented violence, narrows our experience instead of expanding it, overwhelming us with brutal spectacle. You can’t read Ezra Pound at a football game. In a sense, it’s not just the players who are suffering from the sport’s violence; the design and presentation of a football game does violence to its spectators as well. It attacks our attention spans and subverts our appreciation of individual details.

Of course it can be pretty hard to avoid watching the Super Bowl, even if you think football is overblown buffoonery. But keep in mind that, on Super Bowl Sunday, there are other options. That day, on ESPN 3 (the all-too-accessible free online Wonder Channel), you can watch Italian, Spanish or Dutch soccer games, or tune into the Caribbean Baseball Series and watch Mexico take on the Dominican Republic. At least one aging icon of American poetry would surely approve.

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Before the Penn State scandal broke on Nov. 5, I thought I had these Coors Light commercials more or less figured out. They were designed to appeal to men who love watching football but feel inadequate as spectators—not tough or manly enough to be true fans. When the tiny coaches lean against towering beer bottles and scream their exhortations, the watcher is reminded of the violence and intimidation inherent in the game, but is at the same time reassured. After all, there is Herm Edwards, who always had a kind of threatening glare, but he’s so diminutive that you could flick him away with a single hand. (Although there’s no need to flick Edwards away in this case, because he’s asking you to do something you’re already kind of good at: swilling beers. Put me in, Coach!)

Awful and tragic and overwhelming as the Penn State story is, I feel it’s somehow connected to our culture’s cramped archive of football-themed beer ads. But now, as details continue to trickle out of central Pennsylvania like toxic sludge dribbling out of a coalmine, I can see I missed the mark in my initial theory about Herm Edwards and the super-short coaches of Super Cold (other commercials feature Mike Ditka and Jim Mora). So I’m still wondering: what does the act of belittling football coaches suggest about our vision of sports and manhood in America?

This NPR wrap-up of the Penn State football scandal is one of the clearest, most concise I’ve seen, so I’ll offer the link and sum up in the briefest manner possible: Jerry Sandusky, a former Penn State player and defensive coordinator, was charged with sexually abusing eight boys over the course of a decade and a half. Many of the instances of abuse allegedly took place in the showers of the Lasch Football Building on the Penn State campus. Several different people witnessed Sandusky showering with boys, and news of Sandusky’s behavior spread to the iconic head coach of the Penn State football team, Joe Paterno, and to the university’s president, Graham Spanier (who, believe it or not, has a background in family counseling and sociology). Information was shared, inquiries were conducted, but none of these supposedly exemplary leaders did the right thing. Now Spanier and Paterno, a craggy, paternal, benevolent-seeming football coach if there ever was one, have been fired, and many Penn State students, fans and alumni are outraged that “Joe Pa” hasn’t been allowed to go out on his own terms. How was Paterno supposed to know what exactly was going on and what to do about it? He’s just a football coach.

Except in this country we don’t see football coaches as “just football coaches.” We tend to ascribe to them—coaches in general, maybe, but football coaches in particular—certain wisdom about the hearts of men. A good football coach, we like to think, has character and knows how to judge character. He motivates by believing in and appealing to the character of the men he includes on his team. This brand of motivation goes beyond football, we tell ourselves. This is the reason so many of us (myself included) loved watching the television adaptation of H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights: because the show revolved around a humble high school football coach who taught lessons about the ethical dimensions of living. “You are a molder of men,” the coach’s wife tells him in one episode. In another episode, a full season later, one of the coach’s protégés tells him the same thing: “You are a molder of men.” We can almost believe the phrase when the wife says it, because she loves her husband, because he’s such a great guy. But when we hear the phrase again, in the mouth of another character—Coach, you’re a molder of men—we realize it’s ridiculous. And we realize we are ridiculous for so badly wanting this to be true: coaches mold men. The book Friday Night Lights never makes such assertions; instead, the author suggests that football glory is as likely to ruin a young man’s character as to teach him about responsibility. But in the TV show, in episode after episode, Coach Taylor teaches his players how football can illuminate a man’s soul. 

Of course Paterno should have been fired: his stature as a football coach had no bearing on his common sense; he showed a horrendous failure of leadership off the field. And this brings us back to the tiny coaches in those insipid ads. Why would we want to see these authority figures as innocuous little toy men? Because we understand that we care too much about what football coaches do. These guys have our spiritual wellbeing in their hands, and we feel guilty for making them so important, making the sport our religion. In the commercials we poke fun at them, shrink them down, pretend like they’re only good for shilling cold beer. Look at the little coach! But when the game comes back on after the commercial break, when we see the coaches prowling the sidelines with those authoritative headsets covering their ears, we half-believe they can hear our prayers.

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It may or may not be true that the majority pro baseball players are Neanderthals, but so far this season, several prominent Major League players have agreed to participate in Dan Savage’s It Gets Better project. The idea behind Savage’s campaign is that young people who are gay may need to hear testimonials from gay adults and sympathetic celebrities about surviving their isolated, difficult, full-of-doubt teen years. LGBT kids need to feel that the future is full of choices; they need to see that adults and young people who once felt uncertainty and shame about who they are now feel pride and a sense of freedom.

The first Major League team to film an It Gets Better video in support of LGBT youth was the San Francisco Giants; the most recent squad to join the campaign is the Boston Red Sox. One thing about the videos that fascinates: these stiff-upper-lip baseball men really don’t know how to talk to the camera when they’re asked about something other than their batting average. At one point, Boston infielder Kevin Youkilis says, “A lot of people go and get therapy—myself included,” which is more amazing than anything anyone else says about sexual orientation in the Red Sox video. While I’m not a Red Sox fan, I felt unaccountably proud of Kevin Youkilis for trying to open up in his It Gets Better appearance. I knew Youk—the grandson of Romanian Jewish immigrants—was one of the few active Jewish Major Leaguers. But talking about his own therapy experience in a public service video about sexual orientation? Youkilis is way more Woody Allen than I expected.

There’s one especially poignant photo of the emotional tumult that took place when Derek Jeter crossed the plate after hitting a home run for his 3,000^th Major League hit. In this picture by the photographer Robert Sabo, Jeter’s back is to the camera—we see the famous No. 2 on his pin-striped jersey, and a smudge of dirt on his pin-striped pants, a sign that he’s still full of hustle after all these years. His teammates are flooding from the dugout to give him a milestone mazel tov. There’s A-Rod on the right edge of the frame, smirking under his dark glasses, hands held high as if he’s the one who did something great. But the face in the center this portrait of collective joy is the face of the Yankees’ battered and embattled catcher, Jorge Posada.

Both of Posada’s arms are wrapped around his friend, clutching, signaling something purely generous and unjealous in the embrace. There is a wide smile spread over Posada’s face, which is tucked up next to Jeter’s helmet. It’s a picture of love (which gives this line from the New York Post an unintended resonance: “Posada and Jeter: four rings together”).

When I first saw it in the sports pages, the photo moved me. It also made me think through the semiotics of fist-bumping and rump-slapping and helmet-knocking, the homoerotic and homophobic physical gestures that male athletes display in different sports. When is it okay in baseball for men to embrace? Pat a teammate on the ass? When is it appropriate to keep things to a low-key congratulatory fist-bump? (My wife and I sometimes employ the fist-bump when we’ve gotten the baby to bed, or cleaned up the apartment after having friends over for dinner; the light tapping together of knuckles has a satisfying connotation of We did something good while openly acknowledging that the victory may be short-lived.)

When asked about the embrace at home plate, Posada told reporters that his first words to Jeter were, “I’m proud of you.”

It’s a sweet sentiment between teammates and old friends. But the Yankees can make the season more memorable—and more full of pride—by signing on to the It Gets Better project and making one of those painfully low-rent videos. Production values aren’t important in this case. It’s the players showing their faces, wearing their team colors and speaking up that matters.

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You started walking about a month ago. At first, you could only make it five or six steps before losing your footing—before dropping, a bit violently, into a sitting position on the floor. This surprising turn of events never seemed to upset you, although it scared the hell out of me a few times. (I wonder if this is why grown-ups like theme park rides: a rollercoaster may help us remember the long-ago rush of learning how to walk.) Anyway, your balance has improved slowly, day by day, and now you can go a dozen steps or more in a row. You’re getting quicker. You march back and forth in our Brooklyn apartment, seeing very little of interest aside from your haggard and astonished parents. You seem delighted by your own motion.

I’m supposed to be writing a sports column right now. But your headlong bipedalism is as amazing to me as anything I’ve seen from a pro athlete in the last few weeks. So in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals, both of which were decided very much to my liking, I am writing down a brief record—something we can look back on later—mixing together your most audacious acts of toddler athleticism with recent pro sports highlights.

This morning, you picked up an empty baby shampoo bottle as you went walking around the apartment—this bottle is one of your favorite toys right now for some reason—and you held it like a roaming quarterback holds a football when he breaks out of the pocket, looking downfield for an open receiver. Except you put the shampoo bottle in your mouth, you kept tasting it. You kneeled down to pick up a white ribbon with your other hand—kneeling without falling, that’s new—and you shook the limp ribbon as though you expected it to make some kind of sound.

The basketball player Dirk Nowitzki, a very tall German man, just helped the Dallas Mavericks win the NBA championship. Nowitzki’s key highlights were his driving end-of-game lay-ups—he elevated above his defenders and managed to score even though the people trying to stop him were notorious bad-asses. (You will learn as you go through life that it can be great fun to root against notorious bad-asses.)

At breakfast you were holding a couple of the silvery measuring spoons that you like to carry around. You put half a blueberry in the teaspoon, then squeezed another half-blueberry next to the first one. You’re beginning to understand what a spoon is for: we use them at the table when we eat. But you don’t fully comprehend the mechanics of spoons yet. Soon you picked the blueberry pieces out of the teaspoon and jammed both berry-halves into your mouth with your fingers. As you chewed, you stuck your hand in your mother’s water glass.

This guy in Major League Soccer scored an unbelievable circus-stunt goal the other day. He didn’t even really look at the goal as he shot the ball. As your father, I feel guilty that I waste time watching soccer highlights, but I watch them anyway. I care about our national soccer culture. This concern has been a horrendous waste of time and a great source of pleasure throughout my adult life.

When you walk, you keep your feet spread way apart, a very wide stance. Once you figure out a narrower stance you’re going to be sprinting around, here one moment, gone the next.

The Boston Bruins just won the Stanley Cup Final for the first time in 39 years. The star of the championship series was the Bruins’ goalie Tim Thomas, who was astounding at every turn. Thomas sank into that extrasensory groove that hockey goalies are sometimes blessed with, as though the hockey puck, from their perspective, is as big and slow as a chocolate cake.

You’ve been bossing around the big red ball. Your mother has an inflatable exercise ball that is about as tall as you are; Mom uses the ball to stretch out, strengthen her back and help her balance—she lies across the ball in our big room like a shipwreck victim floating on a scrap of wood. But you, you shove this ball around, give the gigantic faceless globe your sternest looks, push it with your hand so that it rolls away from you, then chase after it and push it some more. Because our apartment’s floors slope unpredictably in some places (and because you can’t push very hard yet), the ball often pauses in mid-roll and then starts moving back in your direction. The first few times this happened, you were terrified. Now you stand your ground—a little scared still, I think, but determined. You hold your hand up as the red ball bears down. You push back.

Crawling is so stable, four on the floor, perfectly functional—some speedy version of crawling works for gorillas, why not for us? The more I see you totter around, on the edge of crashing every third step, the more I appreciate the messed-up miracle of momentum that we learn to take for granted.

Now you’re asleep. Almost all the picture books we read to you end with sleeping; the protagonist, puppy or wombat or whatever, winds up closing his or her eyes and snoring on the last page. I wonder if these images of sleep make an impression on you. My guess is you’re on your feet even in your dreams.

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In the Book of Job, a capricious, punishing God speaks from behind the obscuring protection of a whirlwind. God’s formerly pious subject, Job, is suddenly questioning Him and bitching about all kinds of things: he’s taken aback by a series of unexpected health problems, feels enraged and cheated by the death of his livestock and won’t shut up about the calamitous ends of his sons and daughters. When Job complains, God kicks up a twister and projects His voice from the eye of the storm:

Who is this whose ignorant words
Smear my design with darkness?
Stand up now like a man;
I will question you: please, instruct me.*

I couldn’t help thinking of the Book of Job when I read Jeffrey Toobin’s recent New Yorker article “Madoff’s Curveball.” The article, a profile of New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon, is Toobin’s best ever for the magazine. But if you’re a Mets fan, the article is also Toobin’s worst, because it prefigures the team’s utter doom.

Toobin went behind the scenes of one of Major League Baseball’s most troubled franchises and, with the zeal of an inspired investigative reporter, pieced together a portrait of a powerful man cratering under the pressure of financial ruin. Toobin, who doesn’t normally write about sports (his usual subject is the legal profession), has made the clannish cadre of New York sportswriters around him envious of his big scoop: he got the Mets’ owner to talk trash on the record about his own team. While eating cheeseburgers in the owner’s box with Toobin during a Mets-Astros game, Wilpon began to make taunting remarks about Mets stars Carlons Beltran, Jose Reyes and David Wright. The team as a whole, Wilpon declared, is “snakebitten” and “shitty.” All of his comments were published in Toobin’s article.

Wilpon seems to be engaged in his own re-telling of the story of Job, but he’s confused about which role he is meant to play. Sometimes he imagines himself as a helpless mortal whose happiness and good fortune have been erased by the powers that be (or, in this case, by a combination of overrated sluggers and Bernie Madoff). In other moments, Wilpon casts himself as a betrayed and angry god. I guess if you own a sports franchise this kind of self-deification is an occupational hazard, but as a Mets fan I find Wilpon’s outburst inexcusable. The injury-riddled Mets had fought their way back to a .500 record before Wilpon’s comments were published; since then, thanks in part to a serious morale problem created by the guy who signs their paychecks, the Mets have been in a tailspin.

Toobin’s reporting has touched off more controversy than any New York City baseball story since Roger Clemens threw the shard of a broken bat in the general direction of Mike Piazza in the 2000 World Series. Now Wilpon and the 42-year-old hedge fund manager who has decided to buy into the Mets franchise are in the New York sports pages every day. Despite all this coverage, though, I am not satisfied. Stand up like a man, now, Mr. Wilpon: please, instruct me. When your players are fighting game after game for their dignity, for the good of the team, what do you hope to accomplish by taking a bat to their balls?

***

*From Stephen Mitchell’s 1987 translation.

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During Ramirez’s career, cataloguing and critiquing “Manny Being Manny” moments became a pastime within America’s Pastime. In Cleveland, when he was playing for the Indians, Manny once left his paycheck (which was worth a lot—a lot—of money) in an empty boot in the visitors’ locker room. As a member of the Red Sox team that won two World Series championships in 2004 and 2007, Manny began to re-conceptualize the Green Monster at Fenway as his personal man-cave, retreating to the backstage area of left field to sip a sports drink or talk on his cell phone or, most memorable of all, so he could pee (in the middle of an inning) behind the ballpark’s hallowed scoreboard. As a Los Angeles Dodger, Manny argued with manager Joe Torre about whether the slugger’s famous dreadlocked tresses would or would not be trimmed back. And it’s all led to this: faced with a 100-day suspension for using a performance-enhancing drug, Manny Ramirez has decided to quit the game for good.

Without Manny, we now have to rely on a handful of ball-playing crazies who seem to me mere shadows of Ramirez. Who are the clowns now? The San Francisco Giants’ closer Brian Wilson is at least interesting and genuinely eccentric. Like Manny, Wilson has crafted some sublime moments of theater during his career, including the time when he arranged for a mostly nude dude to walk across the room during an at-home interview. But the best bits of Wilson’s fooling take place off the field—the insane antics he performs during games are mostly predictable, game-related, the products of emotion and fierce competitiveness. You couldn’t really say the same about Manny Ramirez’s game-time behavior—odd, yes, but predictable, no. And Manny’s off-season weirdness was sublime in its own way as well. The best example of that, I think, was his attempt to sell (or help his neighbor sell) a grill on eBay in 2007. The listing included pictures of Manny standing next to the grill, along with a message that began, “Hi, I’m Manny Ramirez. I bought this AMAZING grill for about $4,000 and used it once…”

It’s funny to think of “performance-enhancing drugs” in the context of performance art. Did Marina Abramovic, performance artist extraordinaire, need banned substances to make it through her grueling performances at New York’s Museum of Modern Art last year? Abramovic sat for hours on end in the museum’s atrium, day after day, inviting visitors to sit across from her and look into her face. No one was supposed to say anything. Some visitors sat with Abramovic for a couple minutes, some for much longer. For Abramovic, who according to the MoMA website “began using her own body as the subject, object and medium of her work in the early 1970s,” it was just Marina being Marina. And I believe that if Manny had made it to MoMA for that particular exhibition, if he’d sat across from the lauded artist and looked into her eyes, he might have recognized himself.

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