Today, the New York Red Bulls opened their 25th season of play by beating FC Cincinnati at home, 3-2. Next Saturday afternoon, they visit the suburbs of Salt Lake City, Utah, to take on Real Salt Lake.

Note that they can call themselves "Real" -- in this case, meaning "authentic" but "royal" in Spanish, and pronounced "ree-AL" instead of "REEL" -- all they want, but nobody's going to confuse them with the now 13-time European Cup winners, Real Madrid. On the other hand, RSL have an MLS Cup, while Metro, to their dismay and that of their fans, do not. (Nor, of course, do the considerably newer NYCFC.)

Before You Go. We think of Utah, we think of the Wild West. Desert. National Monument Valley. We forget that it's also in the Rocky Mountains. I flipped out when I heard that it was chosen as the site of the 2002 Winter Olympics. Winter? Utah? But it's got mountains, and it's got snow. For years, the license plates even said, "Ski Utah."

This is Utah in early March. The weather could be a factor. The Salt Lake Tribune is predicting the high 50s for daylight on Saturday, and the low 40s for the evenings. You will need a jacket. No rain expected until Sunday, but that won't be a problem unless you're staying overnight.

Utah is in the Mountain Time Zone, 2 hours behind New York. Adjust your timepieces accordingly.

Tickets. Real Salt Lake averaged 17,771 fans per home game last season. That's about 92 percent of capacity. Fortunately, as an away fan, you have the advantage of set-aside seats for fans of your team. RSL's are in the north end of the upper deck, Sections 233 and 234. Tickets are $34.

Getting There. It's 2,174 miles from Midtown Manhattan to downtown Salt Lake City, and 2,169 miles from Red Bull Arena in Harrison to Rio Tinto Stadium in Sandy. In other words, if you're going, you're flying.

Because, driving, you'd have to get onto Interstate 80 West in New Jersey, and – though incredibly long, it's also incredibly simple – you'll stay on I-80 for almost the entire trip, getting off at Exit 306 for downtown Salt Lake.

Not counting rest stops, you should be in New Jersey for an hour and a half, Pennsylvania for 5:15, Ohio for 4 hours, Indiana for 2:30, Illinois for 2:45, Iowa for 5 hours, Nebraska for 7:45, Wyoming for 6:45, and Utah for 1:30. That's about 37 hours, and with rest stops, and city traffic at each end, we're talking 2 full days.

That's still faster than Greyhound and Amtrak. The station serving both, Salt Lake Central Station, is at 300 South 600 West. But Greyhound offers only 1 trip per day between New York and Salt Lake, leaving Port Authority at 5:15 PM and arriving at 9:50 PM 2 days later, changing buses in Denver. Round-trip fare is $636, but it could drop to $360 on advanced purchase.

On Amtrak, you would leave Penn Station on the Lake Shore Limited at 3:40 PM on Wednesday, arrive at Union Station in Chicago at 9:50 AM Central Time on Thursday, and switch to the California Zephyr at 2:00 PM, arriving at Salt Lake City at 11:05 PM Mountain Time on Friday, about 15 hours before kickoff.

Getting back, the California Zephyr leaves Salt Lake City at 4:30 AM on Sunday, arrives in Chicago at 2:50 PM on Monday, and the Lake Shore Limited leaves at 9:30 PM and arrives in New York at 6:35 PM on Tuesday. Round-trip fare: $551, which could be cheaper than the bus, and only takes a few minutes longer.

Newark to Salt Lake City is a relatively cheap flight, considering the distance. You can get a round-trip fare for under $700. The problem is, you'll have to change planes in Denver.

Once In the City. Founded in 1847 by Mormon leader Brigham Young (who famously found what he thought was the right spot for his followers and said, "This is the place") and named after the Great Salt Lake, Salt Lake City is the smallest anchor city in North American major league sports, except for Green Bay, Wisconsin: 193,000.

But it has a metropolitan area population of about 2.5 million and rising, which makes it larger than NBA markets San Antonio, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Oklahoma City and Memphis, and MLS markets Kansas City and Columbus -- and not that far behind Vancouver.

Society in the State and the City remains dominated by "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints," a.k.a. the Mormons. So, in Star Trek IV, when James T. Kirk, having traveled back in time with Spock, tells a woman that Spock was in Berkeley, California in the 1960s and "did a little too much LDS," it was a mistake, not a reference to Spock being a Mormon.

Despite it being a Western university, I don't think there were very many Mormons at the University of California, Berkeley in those days. They were much more likely to have attended the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah State University in Logan, or, especially, the school named for their faith's leading figure, Brigham Young University in Provo.

Nevertheless, like Austin in Texas, Little Rock in Arkansas, Atlanta in Georgia and Lincoln in Nebraska (but definitely not the suburbs of any of those), Salt Lake City is an increasingly liberal capital city in an otherwise very conservative State.

I put it this way: In Salt Lake City, Mitt Romney, America's most famous living Mormon, is regarded as "severely conservative"; in the rest of Utah, he's "Massachusetts Moderate Mitt." (As Dick Smothers would say, "That was not a compliment." Dick and his brother Tom probably also had a few things to say about Mitt's father, George, Governor of Michigan and a Presidential candidate in the 1960s.)

Salt Lake City has the most confusing street names I've ever seen. In place of numbered streets, such as "West 6th Street," they have "600 West," then divide them along the other access, so it reads as "South 600 West." I suppose that if you've lived there all your life, this would be second nature to you. Or North 200 Nature to you. But it would drive me bananas.

At any rate, Main Street is the east-west divider, with State Street taking the place of 100 East, and West Temple -- not "West Temple Street" or "West Temple Avenue" or anything like that, just "West Temple" -- taking the place of 100 West. There's also a North Temple and a South Temple, but not an East Temple. South Temple is the north-south divider. The exact centerpoint is Temple Square. Interstate 215 forms a partial "beltway."

ZIP Codes for Utah begin with the digits 84. The Area Codes are 801 (overlaid by 385) and 435. Rocky Mountain Power runs Salt Lake City's electricity. Salt Lake City was 91 percent white as recently as 1970, but is now 66 percent white, 22 percent Hispanic, 8 percent Asian, 3 percent black and 1 percent Native American.

The Utah Transit Authority runs buses and TRAX light rail. Routes numbered 001 to 199 run east-to-west, 200 to 299 run north-to-south, 300-399 are express, 400 to 499 are intercounty, 500 to 599 are neighborhood routes, 600 to 699 are Weber/Davis County routes, 800 to 899 are Utah County Routes, and 900 to 999 are Ski Service/Seasonal routes.
A square bounded by Temple on the north, 200 East on the east, 500 South on the south, and 400 West on the west, plus the State Capitol, Salt Lake Central Station and Old Greektown Station, are a Free Fare Zone. Otherwise, within Salt Lake City, a one-way fare is $2.50, and a Day Pass is $6.25.

The "sales and use tax," as it's known in Utah, is 4.7 percent for the State, and rises to 6.85 percent in Salt Lake City.

Going In. The official address of Rio Tinto Stadium, or "The RioT" (pronouced like "riot"), is 9256 South State Street, and it is 16 miles south of downtown Salt Lake City.

If you're driving in from downtown: Take I-15 South to Exit 295, and follow South 255 West and West 9400 South to the stadium. I've seen one source that says, "The stadium is unbelievable. The parking is just bad." This may be true: The map shows there isn't much parking on-site. However, the Jordan Commons mall, across State Street to the east, and the South Towne Exposition Center, across 9400 South to the south of that, may have more. Parking runs from $6.00 to $10.00.

By public transit: Take the 701 TRAX, heading toward Draper, from City Center Station to Sandy Expo Station. It's a 32-minute ride. Then it's a 10-minute walk, west on 9400 South and north on the access road to the stadium.
The stadium, whose naming rights are owned by a British-based mining company (appropriate for a soccer team in a mining State, even if most of the company's business is in Australia) opened on October 9, 2008, and the Red Bulls were the visiting team, playing RSL to a 1-1 draw. The field has always been natural grass, and is aligned north-to-south.
RSL share the stadium with their development team, Real Monarchs SLC (Salt Lake City) of the 2nd-tier United Soccer League (same league as NYRB II), and the Utah Royals of the National Women's Soccer League, formerly Kansas City FC.

The stadium hosted the 2009 MLS All-Star Game and the 2013 U.S. Open Cup Final. It has also hosted 4 matches each by the U.S. men's and women's soccer teams, all victories until the most recent USMNT match there, a 1-1 draw in a friendly with Venezuela on June 3, 2017. In their most recent match there, June 7, 2018, the USWNT beat China 1-0. It hosted 2 games of the 2013 CONCACAF Gold Cup. Concerts at the stadium have included The Eagles in 2009, Paul McCartney in 2010, Journey in 2011 and Neil Diamond in 2012.

Food. The team comes right out and says it on their website: "Eating is not a spectator sport." 
Being an American of Polish descent, I agree with this. Going clockwise around the stadium:

* The north end has Snowie (a snow cone stand), Real Faves (also pronounced "Ree-AL"), Twin Peaks, Chili Verde, Millcreek Pizza and Maverik Bonfire Grill.

* The northeast corner has Moki's Hawaiian and Totally Nuts.

* The east side has Border Burrito, Pass the dog (a hot dog stand), Snowie, Chile Verde, Real Faves, Millcreek Pizza, and another Snowie stand.

* The south end has Maverik Mayhem and Real Faves.

* The west side has Four Corners Smokehouse, flanked by 2 Chili Verdes.

Team History Displays. RSL began play in 2005, and named themselves after Spanish giants Real Madrid, after rejecting names like the Golden Spikers (which sounds more like a good name for a volleyball team, but certainly has a Utah connection) and Blitzz (which was reminiscent of the the failed Utah Starzz of the WNBA, not to mention the Chicago Blitz, who failed in the USFL in 1983 and 1984). They won the MLS Cup in 2009. A flag flying over the stadium denotes the title.
Oddly, while they have won a league title, they have never finished 1st in the Western Conference in the regular season, though they have finished 2nd 3 times. I suppose this makes them the Miami Marlins of MLS, except that their stadium isn't a garish airplane hangar, their uniforms aren't stupid, they've got insane heat but not the humidity to match, and they've never had a cheap asshole as their owner (as far as I know), or a legendary former player who hasn't yet adjusted to his new position.

RSL were runners-up in the CONCACAF Champions League in 2011, and achieved a dubious "double" in 2013, losing the Finals of both the MLS Cup and the U.S. Open Cup.

(D.C. United won the American version of "The Double" in 1996, the Chicago Fire in 1998, and the Los Angels Galaxy in 2005. L.A. won the MLS Cup but lost the MLS Cup Final in 2002. D.C. won the Open Cup but lost the MLS Cup Final in 1997, L.A. did that in 2001, Chicago in 2003, Sporting Kansas City in 2004, the New England Revolution in 2007. But no other team has lost both Finals in the same season.)

RSL don't have a team hall of fame, and did not select an all-time team for their 10th Anniversary in 2015. There's also no viewable display for their retired numbers. Their 1st was the 9 of Jason Kreis. That name should sound familiar to you: He was named MLS Most Valuable Player when helping the D.C. Scum to the 1999 title, and was the 1st head coach of New York City FC, before the club's pathetic performance led to him being fired after just 1 season. He later managed Orlando City, and now manages the Under-23 squad for the USMNT.
He was acquired as RSL's 1st player, before their 1st season, in 2005, and he scored the 1st goal in club history -- which he also did for FC Dallas (then the Dallas Burn) in 1996. Early in the 2007 season, he retired as a player and was named RSL's manager, a post he held through 2013, when he took over at Man City NYC.

Between this job and the Orlando job, he was an assistant to Jurgen Klinsmann on the national team -- which is ironic, because he played for it only 14 times, and never in a major tournament. (He could have been selected for the World Cup in 1994, 1998, 2002 or 2006; or for the CONCACAF Gold Cup in 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2003 or 2005. But he never was.)

They've also retired the 11 of Javier Morales, a midfielder on their MLS Cup winners, and now an assistant coach at Inter Miami.

Since RSL's inception in 2005, they and their arch-rivals, the Colorado Rapids, have competed for the Rocky Mountain Cup. Real have won it 11 times, including the last 4, and the Rapids 4 times, including the 1st 2. In overall games, Real lead 22-11 with 16 ties. They have never met in the Playoffs.

Stuff. The Real Salt Lake Team Store is in the northeast corner of the stadium. The usual team gear can be found there. Perhaps Utah's Western heritage could be invoked with the selling of cowboy hats with the team's logo on it.

Finding media about the team may be difficult. As far as I can tell, there's no books about the team, and the only video I could find was a record of their championship season, It's For Real - Real Salt Lake MLS Cup 2009 Champions.

During the Game. RSL's big rivalry is with the Denver-based Colorado Rapids, and it is a nasty one, much more so than the one between the NBA's Utah Jazz and Denver Nuggets.

The Red Bulls and NYCFC are not the Rapids. So, what's the safety factor? I saw one source that said, unless you sit among the home supporters in the south end, you should be able to make friends. But I saw another source that said, "If you are a supporter from another team STAY AWAY. The Real Salt Lake supporters in black shirts were rude and offensive. Security did nothing to prevent them from hassling and cursing away fans."

I don't know what this person meant by "hassling." But if it's anything up to and including what the NYCFC fans tried outside Bello's in Summer 2015, then anyone visiting should know that they won't be on home turf. You will be outnumbered. Best not to escalate anything.

RSL holds auditions for National Anthem singers, instead of having a regular. Keeping with the "royal" image of Real Salt Lake, their mascot is Leo the Lion, as in "King of the Jungle."
In 2011, Branden Steineckert, the drummer for the punk band Rancid and an RSL fan, wrote the song "Believe" in honor of the club. It has since been adopted as the team's official anthem, being sung at the beginning of every home game, as well as after all goals scored by RSL.

Real Salt Lake has eight official supporters groups: Rogue Cavaliers Brigade (RCB -- "We have been called 'the best fans in the stadium,' our foes have called us 'scary,''childish' and 'immature'"), The Loyalists, Salt City United (SCU), Section 26, La Barra Real, Union de Real, The Royal Pride (TRP), and The Royal Army. Except for Section 26 and The Royal Army (which is dispersed throughout the stadium), all supporters groups sit in the south stands.

Their chants are mostly borrowed. Chelsea's tune becomes, "Carefree, wherever we may be, we are the famous SLC!" Like Southampton and Tottenham, they use "When Real Goes Marching In." There's "Salt Lake 'Til I Die,""Can You Hear the (Opponent's Fans) Sing?", "Wings of an Eagle" (instead of "Sparrow"), "Who the Fuck Is Colorado" (instead of "Are Man United"), "Let's Go Fucking Mental,""I Believe That We Will Win," and an oldie but a goodie from American football: "Hit 'em again, hit 'em again, harder, harder!" They use "A rope, a tree, we'll hang the referee," but vary it with, "I'm blind, I'm deaf, I wanna be a ref!"

Like many teams, they've adapted the Beatles'"Yellow Submarine," in their case for a player who dives: "You go down like a Tijuana whore, a Tijuana whore, a Tijuana whore!"

After the Game. Salt Lake City is one of the safest cities in the country. You should have no trouble getting back to your car or your hotel all right.

If you want to go out for a postgame meal or drinks -- yes, alcohol can be purchased and consumed in Utah -- across South State Street, the Jordan Commons Mall has a Joe's Crab Shack and a Cold Stone Creamery. However, due to the lateness of the hour, getting in might not be possible. A little further down State Street are Crown Burgers and Iceberg Drive Inn.

Back in downtown Salt Lake, Lumpy's, at 145 S. Pierpont Avenue between 100 and 200 West, was recently cited on Thrillist's list of the best sports bars in every State as the best one in Utah.

As far as I know, there are no bars or restaurants anywhere near Salt Lake City that are known hangouts for New Yorkers.

If your game in Salt Lake is during the European soccer season (which is now approaching its climax), there's one place that shows up whenever you look up area soccer bars: Fiddler's Elbow, at 1063 East 2100 South, 5 1/2 miles southeast of downtown, in the Sugarhouse area. Bus 209, then a 3-block walk east on 2100.

Sidelights. Aside from the Jazz, Salt Lake City doesn't have much sports history, but may still be worth a visit beyond the game.


For most of its history, it seated a little over 12,000 people. By the time the Jazz got good in the mid-1980s, among the NBA's 23 teams, only the Milwaukee Bucks had an arena with a smaller capacity. It was time to build a larger arena.

On of the last events there was an AC/DC concert on January 18, 1991, at which fans rushed the stage, and 3 of them were trampled to death. It took 20 minutes for someone to get word to the band about what had happened, and they stopped the concert. Most likely, you didn't hear about this (unless you were a fan of the band or a Utah native) because the Persian Gulf War had started 2 nights before, and that was all that TV news wanted to talk about. (As opposed to a similar incident at a Who concert in Cincinnati in 1979, which even got a WKRP episode about it.) A lawsuit was filed against the arena operators and the band, and was eventually settled out of court.

The Salt Palace was demolished in 1994. The Salt Palace Convention Center was built on the site, and includes the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and a concert hall, Abravanel Hall. 100 South Temple.

* Smith's Ballpark. This 15,411-seat ballpark, one of the largest in the minor leagues, has been the home of the Salt Lake team in the Pacific Coast League since 1994, known first as the Buzz, then as the Stingers starting in 2001, and as the Bees since 2006. They are currently a farm team of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

It was built on the site of Derks Field, which had been home to area baseball since 1947. The original Salt Lake City baseball team played from 1911 to 1984. As the Bees, they won the Pioneer League (then Class C) Pennant in 1946, 1948 and 1953, and the PCL Pennant in 1959. As the Salt Lake City Angels, they won the PCL Pennant in 1971. As the Salt Lake City Gulls, they won the PCL Pennant in 1979. But the current Bees have never won a Pennant, last making the Playoffs in 2013.

The Salt Lake Trappers won Pioneer League (now a Rookie League) Pennants in 1985, 1986, 1987 and 1991, making a total of 10 Pennants for Salt Lake City teams. En route to the 1987 Pennant, they won 29 straight games, to set a North American professional baseball record. In 1994, the Trappers moved upstate to become the Ogden Raptors. 1365 South West Temple, 2 1/2 miles south of Temple Square. Ballpark station on TRAX light rail.

* Rice-Eccles Stadium. Home to University of Utah football since 1998, this 45,807-seat stadium was the centerpiece of the 2002 Winter Olympics. It was built on the site of the previous Rice Stadium, built in 1927. It was Real Salt Lake's 1st home field, from 2005 to 2008, and the U.S. soccer team beat Costa Rica there on June 4, 2005.
* Jon M. Huntsman Center. Home to University of Utah basketball since 1969, it was renamed for a major university contributor, the founder of Huntsman Chemical Corporation and the father of a former Governor. (Jon Huntsman Sr. died last year, while Jon Huntsman Jr. is still alive.)

Most notably, the arena then known as the Special Events Center hosted the 1979 NCAA Final Four, including the legendary Final, won by Earvin "Magic" Johnson's Michigan State over Larry Bird's Indiana State. It has hosted 81 NCAA Tournament games, 3rd-most of any arena.

Both the stadium, at 451 1400 East, and the Huntsman Center, at 1825 East South Campus Drive, are about 3 miles east of downtown, and can be reached by TRAX light rail at University Campus South station.

Utah State University is in Logan, 83 miles north on U.S. Route 89. It is not easily reachable by public transportation. Brigham Young University (BYU) is in Provo, 45 miles south on I-15. TRAX does extend to Provo Central Station, taking about an hour, and then you can transfer to the 830 or 831 bus to the campus.

* Maverik Center. Originally known as the E Center, this 12,500-seat arena hosted the 2002 Winter Olympic hockey tournament. The East Coast Hockey League's Utah Grizzlies have played there since it opened in 1997. (Yes, I know: Utah is on neither the Pacific Coast nor the East Coast. I didn't name these leagues.) 3200 Decker Lake Drive, in the suburb of West Valley City. TRAX to Decker Lake station.

Don't count on Salt Lake City ever getting a team in a sport other than the NBA and MLS. Its metro area population would rank it 29th in MLB, 26th in the NFL, and 23rd in the NHL. For now, the closest teams in those leagues are in Denver, 523 miles away.

And yet, while the Denver Broncos are Utah's favorite NFL team, and the Colorado Avalanche its favorite NHL team, it doesn't hold true in baseball. According to an article in the April 23, 2014 edition of The New York Times, Salt Lake City's vast distance from any major league team means that its favorite teams are the teams it's used to seeing on TV: The Yankees and Red Sox each got 17 percent in a poll, and the next-closest in the poll was the Los Angeles Dodgers, with a mere 7 percent. It's not until you get to Uintah County, 160 miles east of Salt Lake (and 320 miles west of Denver), that you get to definitive Colorado Rockies territory in Utah.

Utah has never produced a President. Mitt Romney, born in Detroit and living most of his life in Boston, but having a home in the Salt Lake suburb of Park City, was nominated for President in 2012, but didn't come all that close to winning. So there's no Presidential Library or Museum nearby. Romney has now been elected to the U.S. Senate.

The most famous Utahan remains Mormon leader Brigham Young. His home, The Beehive House, is a Salt Lake City landmark. 67 East South Temple Street, downtown. The spot where Young told his followers, "This is the place" is now the This Is The Place Heritage Park, a "living history" park, a "Mormon Williamsburg" if you prefer. 2601 Sunnyside Avenue South. It is part of the University of Utah campus, as is the Natural History Museum at 301 Wakara Way. Both can be reached by Bus 3 from Temple Square.

As I mentioned, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art is part of the new Salt Palace complex. The Museum for Speed includes exhibits about the speed records set at Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats. 165 East 600 South. Bus 200 from Temple Square.

Golden Spike National Historic Site commemorates the meeting of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads to form the 1st transcontinental railroad on May 10, 1869. Interestingly, both of the locomotives shown in the famous photo were made within a reasonable drive of us: Rogers Locomotive and Machine Works of Paterson, New Jersey built Union Pacific No. 119; and Schenectady Locomotive Works of the Albany area built Central Pacific Railroad #60, a.k.a. Jupiter.

6200 North 22300th Street West (no, I checked, that address is not a typo), in Corrinne, 86 miles northwest of Salt Lake City and around the Great Salt Lake itself, up I-15 and Utah Route 83. Ironically, it's not reachable by train. Nor by bus: You'd have to rent a car to see it. It's about 32 miles southeast of the actual location, usually referred to as Promontory Point, but actually named Promontory Summit, near Brigham City. ("Promontory Point" is a different place.)

The tallest building in the State of Utah is the Wells Fargo Center in Salt Lake City, 422 feet high. (It should not be confused with the building of the same name that is the new Philadelphia sports arena.) Main Street and 300 South. But the most famous building in the State remains the Salt Lake Temple at Temple Square, the Mormons'"Vatican."

As the home of National Monument Valley, many of the films made in Utah have been Westerns, including Stagecoach, The Searchers, How the West Was Won, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid -- which gave its name to Kid portrayer Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival -- and the Wild West scenes from Back to the Future III. The beginning sequence of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, with 18-year-old River Phoenix playing a 13-year-old Indy, was said by the credits to take place in "Utah, 1912," and was indeed filmed in the State. The spot in Forrest Gump where Forrest stops running is on U.S. Route 163 in Monument Valley.

As for Salt Lake City itself, a scene from Legally Blonde 2 was filmed at the Jazz' arena, and another at the State Capitol. The High School Musical movies were filmed at East High School, 3 miles east of downtown. 840 1300 East. Bus 220.

But the most famous movie shot in Salt Lake was set in California's San Fernando Valley in 1962: The Sandlot. The houses of Scotty Smalls and Benny "the Jet" Rodriguez are at the corner of Bryan Avenue and 2000 East, 5 miles southeast of downtown. Also Bus 220. The actual sandlot, renovated for the film's 20th Anniversary in 2013, is behind 1386 Glenrose Drive South at Navajo Street, 4 miles southwest of Temple Square. Bus 516. Patrick Renna, who played catcher Hamilton "The Great Hambino" Porter, filmed another movie in SLC, The Great Unknown, in 1997.

TV shows set and/or filmed in Utah include the late 1950s Western Union Pacific, Touched By an Angel (the angels' car had Utah license plates), its spinoff Promised Land, Everwood, and the Mormon-themed drama Big Love and reality series Sister Wives.

*

Like a lot of cities, Salt Lake City can be a bit of an acquired taste. But it's a good soccer town, and it could be a good roadtrip for a Red Bulls or NYCFC fan.

1. George Washington never said, "I cannot tell a lie." In 1800, within months of the death of the Father of Our Country, Mason Weems wrote The Life of Washington, which included the story of 6-year-old George (this would be in 1738) taking a hatchet, which he used on a cherry tree and "barked so terribly."

When confronted by his father about it, little George said, "I can't tell a lie, Pa. You know I can't tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet." And Augustine Washington embraced his son, sorry that he had lost the tree, but glad that his son was honest about it.

The very story of George Washington not being able to tell a lie was, itself, a lie. Or, at least, no one has ever proven it to be true, and no subsequent biography has been able to confirm it. Indeed, the original story only says that he damaged the tree, rather than chopping it down, which is how the story is usually told.
Certainly, Washington believed the adage that "Honesty is the best policy." And there may have been an incident in which he was caught in a difficult situation, with his father or someone else, and came clean rather than lie. But the cherry tree story? Most likely, it never happened.

2. Thomas Jefferson never said, "That government is best which governs least." He may have believed it. Certainly, he preferred that local and State governments have more power than the federal government has ended to allow them.
But there is no record of the statement in his public speeches or his surviving letters, and the man wrote a lot of letters, and even invented a special desk with a second pen, a proto-copier. So we have more of his own copies of his letters that survive than we do of the letters he sent.

When liberals want to quote Jefferson, they tend to use words from the Declaration of Independence, such as, "All men are created equal." When conservatives want to quote Jefferson, they tend to cite, "That government is best which governs least." Typical of conservatives to either lie or believe something that isn't true.

The saying first appeared in public in 1849, 23 years after Jefferson's death, in Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau. His back-to-nature ideas certainly would have appealed to Jefferson, but he wasn't quoting Jefferson.

In that book, Thoreau also compares government to a machine, presaging by more than a century the 1964 speech by Mario Savio during the University of California's "Free Speech Movement," where he wanted people to "put your bodies on the gears."

3. Abraham Lincoln never said "The Ten Cannots." In 1916, the Rev. William Boetcker wrote The Ten Cannots, and they have come to be considered part of the conservative "gospel":

• You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
• You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
• You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.
• You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
• You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
• You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
• You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
• You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.
• You cannot build character and courage by destroying men's initiative and independence.
• And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.

Was Boetcker a great prophet? After all, the Bolshevik Revolution happened the next year. Well, no: Karl Marx had written The Communist Manifesto 68 years earlier; the Paris Commune had risen and fallen 45 years earlier; the American labor movement had been well underway since then; and the Populist movement and the Progressive movement had both risen and fallen. But today's conservatives can certainly agree with all 10.

Today's liberals? They don't want to discourage thrift. And they don't want to destroy the rich. But they do know that regulated capitalism is better than under-regulated capitalism, something conservatives refuse to accept.

What does any of this have to do with Abe Lincoln? In 1942, the Committee for Constitutional Government published a leaflet titled Lincoln on Limitations. It included some genuine Lincoln quotes, but it also included The Ten Cannots, and attributed them to him. Oddly, Boetcker was still alive (and would remain so for another 20 years), and never stepped forward to correct the record.
As a result of that, the Cannots' attribution to Lincoln has persisted. Former President Ronald Reagan made the attribution in his speech to the 1992 Republican Convention. In 2015, Governor John Kasich of Ohio made the attribution in an appearance on Fox News Sunday.

Would Lincoln have believed the Cannots? Maybe. But he has been established as having said this, something modern Republicans would never have agreed with: "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

Why, Abe, you shameless Commie.

4. Horace Greeley never said, "Go west, young man." If you're not familiar with Greeley, that's understandable, given how long it's been since he was a national figure. And he barely counts as a politician at all, having been in public office for a total of 4 months, and only ran for office once, and rather reluctantly. But, surely, you're familiar with the saying.

In 1841, Greeley had founded the New York Tribune -- which merged in 1924 with the New York Herald, and formed one of America's best-written newspapers, until it folded in 1966. Greeley used his paper to advocate for liberal causes, including the abolition of slavery. In 1848, he was elected to fill the brief, unexpired term of a Congressman from New York, as a member of the Whig Party. He became one of the founders of the Republican Party in 1854.
By 1872, with slavery abolished, he was one of the most admired men in the country. A group calling themselves the Liberal Republicans, unhappy with the corruption in the Administration of President Ulysses S. Grant (Grant himself was not involved, but he kept standing up for the men who were), decided to nominate Greeley for President, despite his serious under-qualifications and his never having considered running for the office himself.

The Democratic Party, in a bit of a mess as they were seen as the party of the defeated Confederacy, was also desperate to get rid of Grant, and they nominated Greeley, too. As a result, pretty much every attack that Greeley had hurled at the Democrats for a quarter of a century was hurled back at him, including that he supported racist policies, even the nascent Ku Klux Klan.

In addition, his wife got sick, and he effectively stopped campaigning to be by her side. She died 5 days before the election, and he won only 6 States, all formerly slaveholding States. All this took a terrible toll on his own health, and he died a few days later.

Today, though, he's best remembered for saying, "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country!" Certainly, he favored Western expansionism, and was happy to popularize the slogan in an 1865 editorial. But he didn't come up with the words himself. It has been alleged that John Babson Lane Soule first used it, in the Terre Haute Express in Indiana in 1851. But this might not be correct, either. We might never know the truth, but it definitely didn't start with Greeley.

5. Grover Cleveland never said, "A public office is a public trust." In 1884, Cleveland was the Governor of New York, and the Democratic Party's nominee for President. One of his campaign aides was former journalist William C. Hudson, who printed up leaflets saying, "Cleveland's motto: A public office is a public trust!"
Cleveland was -- or, at least, claimed to be -- a man who prized honesty above all things, and didn't want to be quoted as saying something he didn't say. He asked Hudson, "Where the deuce did I say that?" Hudson explained that he never said the exact words, but that his every speech and his every policy expressed the idea. Satisfied that the burden of honesty had been met, Cleveland allowed the leaflets to continue to be printed.

Accepting the nomination for Governor in 1882, Cleveland had said, "Public officers are the servants and agents of the people." He won a nasty and close election for President in 1884, and in his Inaugural Address, he said, "Your every voter, as surely as your chief magistrate, under the same high sanction, though in a different sphere, exercises a public trust." In each of these cases, the wording was close, but not exact.

The earliest known form of the phrase goes back to Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, 3 times a failed Presidential nominee. In an 1829 speech, he said, "Government is a trust, and the officers of the government are trustees, and both the trust and the trustees are created for the benefit of the people."

6. Theodore Roosevelt never said, "To anger a conservative, lie to him. To anger a liberal, tell him the truth." There is no record of this statement in any of TR's public speeches or writings. Besides, more of his policies, especially in his 1912 run to regain the Presidency on the Progressive Party ticket, would now be considered liberal rather than conservative. He was talking about universal health coverage then. And Bernie Sanders was only in graduate school at the time. (Joke.)
The quote has also been attributed to Winston Churchill, who seems to be a magnet for fake quotes; and Rush Limbaugh, who may well have made it up, even though he is a conservative and one of the biggest liars in American history.

7. Warren Harding never said, "Return to normalcy." When Harding, a Senator from Ohio and the Republican nominee for President in 1920, supposedly said this, some people said, "normalcy" wasn't even a real word, that it should have been "normality." But the word had appeared in print before.

In the wake of World War I, and President Woodrow Wilson's moves to get America more involved on the international stage, a majority of Americans wanted nothing to do with that. And Harding, whatever else can be said about him (and plenty of it was bad), tapped into this feeling. He sat in a recording studio so that his standard stump speech could be put on record, and he said the following:

America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.

Harding won the election in a landslide. The result was a "paper prosperity" and scandal. Within 2 1/2 years of his Inauguration, Harding was dead: He had kept his ill health hidden from the public. Within 9 years of his Inauguration, the stock market had crashed, and the full scope of his personal and professional corruption had become widely known. He was then, and remains now, regarded as one of the country's worst Presidents.

Speaking of the stock market crash of 1929, and the subsequent Great Depression:

8. Herbert Hoover never said, "Prosperity is just around the corner." When Harding died in 1923, Vice President Calvin Coolidge became President. He was not corrupt like his predecessor, but he kept the same economic policies. In 1927, he famously said, "I do not choose to run for President in 1928." Maybe he saw the crash coming, and decided to get out, and leave his successor holding the bag.

Hoover was Secretary of Commerce under Harding and Coolidge, and seemed both professionally and personally qualified for President. It can be argued that his life before the Presidency and his life after it were exemplary. But his Presidency was a disaster. It wasn't all his fault: The market probably would have crashed soon, anyway. But the fact that it did so within 8 months of his Inauguration hurt him badly.
It's not fair to say that Hoover caused the Depression. It's also not fair to say, as has usually been said these last 90 years, that he did nothing to fight the Depression. It is, however, fair to say that he didn't do enough, and that some of the things he did do worked a little bit, and he should have backed them further. He didn't, and he thought the Constitution prohibited him from doing any more.

When he went from one of the great landslide wins in 1928 to an even bigger landslide loss to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, Roosevelt acted as though the Constitution did allow him to do much more, and the argument that it didn't failed to hold.

At some point from 1930 onward, Hoover is alleged to have tried to boost people's confidence in the economy by saying, "Prosperity is just around the corner." But there's no evidence that he ever said it. The closest he came was in 1931, at the annual dinner of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States: "We have now passed the worst, and with continued unity of effort, we shall rapidly recover. There is one certainty of the future of a people of the resources, intelligence and character of the people of the United States. That is prosperity."

But things did get worse, and when Inauguration Day came on March 4, 1933, the economy was on the brink of total collapse. Hoover couldn't stop it. Roosevelt did.

9. Richard Nixon never said, "I have a secret plan to end the war." Or anything remotely like that. That saying has been around since the 1968 Presidential election.
If he had such a plan, the right thing to do would have been to call outgoing President Lyndon B. Johnson, and arrange a meeting, and tell him the plan. If it worked, LBJ would have gotten the credit, but Nixon could also have claimed credit, and he still might have beaten LBJ's Vice President, Hubert Humphrey. If it had failed, or if LBJ had refused to try it, Nixon could have gone to the voters and said, "I tried." By not telling LBJ the plan, he was essentially letting people die just so that he could win the election and then put his plan into action, and that would have been unconscionable.

But he didn't have such a plan, secret or otherwise. Nor did he ever say that he did. Indeed, he apparently would have been willing to share the plan with LBJ. As Ray Price, one of Nixon's speechwriters, explained a few years after Nixon's death:

That myth had its origin in the New Hampshire Primary, when a wire-service reporter, new to the campaign, filed an article misinterpreting one line of Nixon’s standard stump speech: that "a new administration will end the war and win the peace."

We on the Nixon staff immediately pointed out, to all who would listen, that he had not claimed a "plan." Nixon himself told reporters that if he had one, he would have given it to President Johnson.

It was his rival for the nomination, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who derisively added the word "secret," and, on that basis, reporters and commentators ever since have snidely accused Nixon of claiming a "secret plan" he did not claim and denied having.

The mere suggestion that Nixon had a plan to end the war, but was keeping it a secret to help his electoral chances, was plausible, given that, even before this campaign, he had a reputation as one of the most deceitful and craven politicians in American history. For Nixon's critics, it seemed like exactly the sort of thing that "Tricky Dick" would do.

But he didn't do it. Say what you want about Richard Milhous Nixon, but his heinous acts did not include this one.

10. Sarah Palin never said, "I can see Russia from my house." That was Tina Fey, doing an impersonation of the Governor of Alaska and Republican nominee for Vice President, in the cold open of the September 13, 2008 installment of Saturday Night Live. It seemed like the sort of thing that dingbat would have said, but the real thing didn't say it. And Fey did revive her career by going on SNL and, mostly, just repeating verbatim things Palin said. But this wasn't one of them.

What did Palin say? Two days earlier, in her 1st major interview after being nominated, she sat down with Charles Gibson, then the anchor of ABC World News Tonight. He asked her about the proximity of Alaska to Russia, specifically easternmost Siberia, and she said, "They're our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska." And, given a day with clear enough skies, that turns out to be true.

The problem was this: She seemed to be citing this actually true fact as a foreign policy credential. It shouldn't have been considered one. In other words, it was actually dumber than the dumb quote misattributed to her.

Of course, 8 years later, Donald Trump got into the White House, with help from Russia. Which led to a joke: "Sarah Palin can see Russia from her house, but Donald Trump can see Russia from anybody's house."

March 6, 1983: The United States Football League begins play.

July 29, 1986: The USFL won its antitrust lawsuit against the National Football League -- but the jury awarded damages of just $1.00. With antitrust awarded trebled, and appeals leading to inflation, the check the NFL eventually wrote came to $3.76. That's right: Three dollars and seventy-six cents.

Why did the USFL sue? Because they needed the money to go head-to-head with the NFL by playing in the Fall, instead of in Spring and Summer. Whose idea was that? The owner of the team in the New York market, the New Jersey Generals.

His name was Donald Trump.

There's a saying: "Everything Trump touches dies." But is he really the person primarily responsible for the USFL folding?

Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame Donald Trump for Killing the USFL

5. The Commissioners. Chet Simmons was named the USFL's 1st Commissioner. He was a very successful TV sports executive. But he expanded the league too fast: They had 12 teams in 1983, but it jumped to 18 in 1984. That was too many: Instead of more good players and more good teams, there were more bad players, more bad teams, and more bad ownership situations.

He resigned in 1985, shortly before the 3rd season began. He was replaced by Harry Usher -- who, by a weird coincidence, shared his birthday with the USFL: March 6, 1939. He was happy to plunge the league into the antitrust suit, which was a huge mistake. After the verdict, he canceled the 1986 season, and that was all she wrote.

To put it another way: Pete Rozelle, then the Commissioner of the NFL, is often regarded as the greatest Commissioner any sports league has ever had, and putting Simmons and Usher up against Rozelle was like putting a couple of middleweights up against Muhammad Ali. Simmons and Usher may have meant well, but, if you'll pardon the pun, they were way out of Rozelle's league.

4. The Markets. The USFL had to have teams in the 3 biggest markets: New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. But the teams in those markets didn't do well. But they made big mistakes in putting teams head-to-head with established NFL teams.

Yes, they were smart to put teams in markets that didn't have NFL teams at the time: Birmingham, Jacksonville, Memphis, Orlando, Phoenix. In particular, putting teams in Baltimore and Oakland, which had both just lost teams, was a good idea. And the teams in Detroit and Tampa Bay seemed to do better on the field than the NFL teams in those markets.

But putting teams in Boston, Denver, Detroit, Houston, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Washington was a mistake. And some of the markets that didn't have NFL teams simply weren't able to support a team: Portland, San Antonio and Tulsa.

3. The Owners. Some overstated their ability to pay expenses. Some underestimated the difficulties in running a professional football franchise. Some abandoned their teams when they realized that they would have to compete with NFL teams directly in Autumn 1986.

There were 18 separate teams in the USFL. Only 6 -- the Birmingham Stallions, the Denver Gold, the Los Angeles Express, the New Jersey Generals, the Oakland Invaders and the Tampa Bay Bandits -- played all 3 seasons without moving. And, of those, the Gold were merged into the Jacksonville Bulls; the Bandits were in a hopeless situation, since their owner, John Bassett, easily the most competent owner in the league, was dying of a brain tumor and was not properly functional, putting the team in financial meltdown; and the Express were even worse financially, forcing the league to take over ownership.

It wasn't a total failure, though: The Jacksonville Jaguars showed that pro football could succeed in their city; the Arizona Wranglers showed that it could succeed in the Phoenix area the Memphis Showboats showed that it could succeed in Tennessee, although the Houston Oilers would play only 1 season in Memphis before moving to Nashville to become the Tennessee Titans; and the Oakland Invaders showed that the problem in Oakland wasn't the market on the East side of San Francisco Bay, it was Al Davis' greed. (Or, given that the Raiders have now abandoned Oakland for a 2nd time, I should say, the Davis family's greed.)

2. The NFL. They are unbeatable. There have been 9 challengers to them: The 1926 American Football League, the 1936-37 AFL, the 1940-41 AFL, the 1946-49 All-American Football Conference, the 1960-69 AFL, the 1974-75 World Football League, the 1983-85 USFL, the 2001 XFL, and the 2019 Alliance of American Football. (I'm not counting the new XFL, because their result is yet to be determined.)

* The 1960-69 AFL succeeded, mainly because they were run by Al Davis, who was not only mean, like Trump; but smart, unlike Trump.

* The AAFC succeeded to the point where 3 of its teams were absorbed into the NFL: The Cleveland Browns, the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Colts.

* The 1936-37 AFL got 1 team absorbed into the NFL, the franchise now known as the Los Angeles Rams.

* The others failed completely. The WFL failed so hard, they suspended operations in the middle of their 2nd season; the AAF, late in the regular season of their 1st.

To put it another way: The NFL has now played a full 100 seasons; all of its challengers combined, 26 -- 16 if you take out the '60s AFL.

The NFL learned its lesson from its dealings with the '60s AFL: Take control of the narrative. Let people know that they are the real football league, and that all others are pale imitations. This, as much as anything else, is the reason the USFL didn't have a good chance.

But one reason stands out above all others:

1. Conditioning. And I don't mean the players staying in good condition. I mean the way sports fans are conditioned.

Most people just aren't interested in watching football in the Spring and the Summer. Even with the Super Bowl extending the NFL season into the 1st week of February, they are trained to think of February to June as basketball and hockey season; and April to October as baseball season.

Colleges have training camps, and their annual intrasquad (Solid Color vs. White/Gray/Gold) game, in the Spring. But they don't have games that count in the Spring. High schools? Some States have Spring football, but most don't. For most Americans, Spring football was just... weird.

And as for the Summer, who wants to sit in 90-degree heat for 3 hours, without the natural breaks of innings giving you a good chance to cool off, get food, or use the bathroom?

The World League of American Football (sponsored by the NFL, so not a direct challenger) played in the Spring in 1991 and 1992. The AAF played last Spring. The original XFL played in the Spring and Summer in 2001, and all failed. The new XFL has started again, and attendance and TV ratings are pitiful.

If the funding, and the competent ownership of the teams had been in place, and the USFL had consolidated to the point where, with the possible exception of the Generals and the Express (got to have the New York and Los Angeles markets), no team was playing in the same market as an NFL team, they could have survived a while longer, possibly long enough to get their 4 best teams (commercially, not necessarily competitively) absorbed into the NFL in a mini-merger.

Under those conditions, Trump, for one of the few times in his life, would have been right.

VERDICT: Not Guilty. As much as I would like to blame Trump for the USFL folding -- after all, I loved that the Generals, unlike the Giants and the Jets, actually called themselves "New Jersey" instead of "New York" -- it just doesn't work.

Think of this analogy: The USFL was a hospital patient, dying of many things. Trump was an incompetent doctor, but even if he had been competent, the patient's chances of survival were not good.

Or to use a legal analogy: If it were a civil case, where a preponderance of the evidence was needed, maybe we could find against Trump; but, in a criminal case, where guilt has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, he can't be convicted -- of this charge.

Imagine having more championship rings than you have fingers. In the history of North American major league sports, only 2 athletes have ever achieved that: Bill Russell and Henri Richard.

Russell is now 86 years old, and has had health difficulties. Richard was younger, but has now left Russell alone in this category.

Henri Joseph Richard (pronounced the French way, "On-REE Zhoh-SEF Rih-SHARD") was born on February 29, 1936 in Montreal. He is probably the most famous person ever born on Leap Year Day. But, officially, he was 84 years old, not 21.

He was 15 years younger than his brother Maurice Richard, the legendary Montreal Canadiens star known as the Rocket. And, being just 5-foot-7, he was short enough that his nickname became the "Pocket Rocket."

Since Maurice began playing for the Canadiens in 1942, when Henri was just 6, they didn't see much of each other. So that when Henri made his Canadiens debut in 1955, when he was 19 and Maurice was 34, the bond between them would be as teammates far more than as brothers.

But it would work. The 1955-56 through 1959-60 seasons would be Maurice's last 5 in the NHL, and Henri's 1st 5, and the Canadiens won the Stanley Cup all 5 times. It is a feat unmatched in NHL history. In baseball, the Yankees won 5 straight World Series, 1949 to 1953. In the NBA, Russell's Boston Celtics won 8 straight, 1959 to 1966. But no other NHL team, not even the Canadiens themselves, has done 5 straight.

The Canadiens and the Yankees have won titles in the same calendar year 5 times: 1953, 1956, 1958, 1977 and 1978. The Canadiens and the Celtics have done so 8 times: 1957, 1959, 1960, 1965, 1966, 1968, 1969 and 1986. And the team that leads the NFL in Championships, the Green Bay Packers, have shared title years with the Canadiens 5 times: 1930, 1931, 1944, 1965 and 1966. There has never been a year in which all 5 won in the same year.

The brothers had different playing styles. Maurice was a lefthanded right wing, while Henri was a righthanded center. Maurice described himself as, "I wasn't the best player, I was the best scorer." He scored 544 goals, a record he raised from 324, and led the League 5 times, but never led the League in assists, finishing his career with 966 points. Henri finished with 358 goals, peaking at 30 in 1960, but twice led the League in assists, finishing with more career points than Maurice, 1,046.

Henri would play 20 seasons for the Canadiens, totaling 1,256 regular-season games, both of which remain franchise records. He won a 6th Stanley Cup with them in 1965, and a 7th in 1966, scoring the Cup-clinching goal in overtime of Game 6 against the Detroit Red Wings. The "Habs" won again in 1968 and 1969.

The 1969-70 season was uncharacteristically bad for the Canadiens, and they didn't even make the Playoffs. They were in transition, as some older stars had left, and the players that would come to dominate the NHL in the 1970s were still working their way up.

But 1970 would be a difficult year in another respect. "The October Crisis" is a story that most Americans don't even know, but it almost tore the Province of Quebec apart, and could have shaken the entire nation of Canada to its foundations had Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (father of current PM Justin Trudeau) acted differently.

Tensions, especially between Anglophones (English-speakers) and Francophones (French-speakers) were still strong as the Canadiens moved into the 1971 Stanley Cup Playoffs. It didn't help that it was already known that it would be the last time for team Captain Jean Beliveau, who was retiring. By this point, Henri Richard was seen as the team's overall leader.

In the Quarterfinals, the Canadiens pulled off a shocking upset, defeating the defending Champion Boston Bruins, including winning Games 2 and 7 at the Boston Garden. To this day, it may be the loss that stings Bruin fans the most.

The Canadiens then beat the Minnesota North Stars in the Semifinals, setting up a Finals with the Chicago Blackhawks, led by Bobby Hull, Stan Mikita, and a goaltender the Canadiens had let go because they had a glut of them, Tony Esposito.

Think about this: In the late 1960s, the Canadiens had Esposito (brother of Bruins star Phil) and Rogie Vachon, and let both of them go, and they both went on to Hall of Fame careers, and yet the Canadiens never missed either of them, because they had another, Ken Dryden, waiting in the wings.

Jim Pappin of the Hawks won Game 1 in Chicago with an overtime goal. The Hawks also won Game 2, before the action shifted to Montreal. In front of the most passionate fans in hockey at the Montreal Forum, the Canadiens tied the series up.

The action went back to Chicago Stadium for Game 5, and Canadiens head coach Al MacNeil benched Richard. The Hawks won 2-0. After the game, speaking to reporters for French-language newspapers, Richard called MacNeil "incompetent" and "the worst coach I ever played for."

He was not the 1st Habs player to accuse MacNeil, who didn't speak French at all, of favoring Anglophone players. The tensions of October rose again, and MacNeil received death threats. The Montreal police assigned bodyguards to his family for Game 6 at the Forum. He played Richard, and the Habs won 4-3.

May 18, 1971. Game 7. A crowd of over 21,000 jams into a steamy Chicago Stadium. Dennis Hull (assisted by his brother Bobby) and Danny O'Shea give the Hawks a 2-0 lead. It looked like they would celebrate in front of their home fans, while the Canadiens were doomed to be remembered as a team doomed by personality conflicts.

But late in the 2nd period, Jacques Lemaire, later to coach the New Jersey Devils to their 1st Stanley Cup, got the Canadiens on the board. Four minutes later, Lemaire assisted on the tying goal -- by Henri Richard. At 2:34 into the 3rd period, Richard finished his redemption and scored the go-ahead goal. The Canadiens' defense held the Hawks off for the last 17 minutes and 26 seconds, including a kick-save by Dryden on Pappin that might be the best-remembered save in hockey hisory, and they were Stanley Cup winners for the 17th time -- the 10th for both Beliveau and Richard.

At 35, Richard was no longer the kind of athlete who could have blamed an ill-timed quote on youth and inexperience. After the game, he and MacNeil hugged it out. Richard admitted, "I should have kept my mouth shut until the Finals were over. There is so much pressure on me and the coach." But he also called the win, "the best of all ten Stanley Cups I've won," and added, "I hope we forget everything except that we won."
Interviewed in 2009, he said, "I was angry, and I said some things I probably shouldn't have said. I spoke out because I thought it was necessary. I'm not saying it's right, because it's important to respect the coach. But I just wanted to play hockey."

MacNeil was a defenseman who had played for each of the teams in the Finals, including with Richard on the Canadiens in the 1961-62 season. But his position as head coach had become untenable. He wasn't fired, but he was demoted: The 1st native of Canada's Maritime Provinces to be an NHL head coach (he was from Sydney, Nova Scotia), the Habs made him head coach of their farm team in the American Hockey League, the Nova Scotia Voyageurs (based in Halifax).

It turned out to be the right move, as he led them to 3 Calder Cup (AHL championship) wins over the next 6 years, helping to build the Canadien dynasty that would be forged by his successor, the bilingual Scotty Bowman. He would be the Canadiens' director of player personnel in the 1978 and 1979 seasons, earning 2 more Stanley Cup rings. And he would coach again, with the Flames in both Atlanta and Calgary. He is still alive, 84 years old.

With Beliveau's retirement, Richard was named Captain of the Canadiens. After an off-season in 1972, they won the Cup again in 1973, again defeating the Blackhawks in the Finals. It was the Pocket Rocket's 11th Cup, his 1st as Captain. Years later, he would say, "No one's going to break that record. It's impossible. I say that without boasting. There are too many teams now, and the best players are too spread out."
He played 2 more seasons, including receiving the 1974 Bill Masterton Memorial Trophy for "perseverance, sportsmanship and dedication," and retired in 1975. Early the next season, the Canadiens retired his Number 16. It would later also be retired for a player who wore it before him, Elmer Lach. In 1979, Henri Richard was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame. In 1998, The Hockey News named its 100 Greatest Players, and he was ranked 29th. In 2017, the NHL named him to its 100th Anniversary 100 Greatest Players.

He was named one of the Canadiens'"Club Ambassadors," working in community outreach. He and his wife Lise were married for more than 50 years, with 5 children and 10 grandchildren. As far as I can tell, none of them ever played professional hockey.

In 2015, Henri Richard was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and dropped out of public life. He died this morning, March 6, 2020, at age 84, in the Montreal suburb of Laval, Quebec.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, like his father a Montreal native, and born the year of Henri's controversial Cup win: "A legend on and off the ice, in Montreal and beyond, Henri Richard was one of the fiercest competitors in hockey history."

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman: "Henri Richard was one of the true giants of the game. The entire National Hockey League family mourns the passing of this incomparable winner, leader, gentleman and ambassador for our sport and the Montreal Canadiens."

Bob Gainey, Hall-of-Famer whose career start overlapped the end of Richard's: "He was an intense, very quiet leader, when being that was okay. He was humble, when being that was okay. He had the competitive fire to battle against bigger/stronger and succeed."

Guy Lafleur, another Hall-of-Famer who came up as Richard was wrapping up, spoke of his leadership: "When a player wasn't doing his job on the ice, it wasn't Scotty Bowan who went to see him, it was Henri Richard."

Even the Canadiens' arch-rivals, the Toronto Maple Leafs, paid their respects: "One of the game's greatest winners and an inspirational ambassador for hockey, the Maple Leafs are saddened to learn of the passing of Henri Richard."

With his death:

* There are only 2 surviving players from the Canadiens' 1956 Stanley Cup winners: Jean-Guy Talbot and Don Marshall.

* There are 4 from the 1957 Cup winners: Talbot, Marshall, Phil Goyette and Andre Pronovost.

* There are 6 from the 1958 Cup winners: Talbot, Marshall, Goyette, Pronovost, Marcel Bonin and Al Langlois.

* There are 7 from the 1959 Cup winners: Talbot, Marshall, Goyette, Pronovost, Bonin, Langlois and Ralph Backstrom,

* There are 7 from the 1960 Cup winners: The same 7 as from 1959.

Next Saturday, the New Jersey Devils travel to play the Florida Panthers. This may be the only NHL arena that Devils fans can "take over," meaning have more fans than the locals. If you'd like to be one of them, take heed.

Before You Go. It's South Florida, in mid-March. Check the Miami Herald and Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel websites for their local forecast before you go. Currently, they're saying that Monday afternoon will be very warm. Low 80s during the day, and the low 70s at night. Fortunately, no rain is predicted for the weekend. You'll still want to be comfortable, so you should pack at least 2 days' worth of summer clothes.

Florida is a former Confederate State, and parts of Miami sure seem like a foreign country. But you won't need to bring your passport or change your money. And it's in the Eastern Time Zone, so you won't have to fool with your timepieces.
Tickets. In the 2014-15 season, the Panthers averaged 11,265 fans per home game, last in all 5 North American major sports leagues, including Major League Soccer. This season, they're averaging 13,994, ahead of only the Islanders and Ottawa. Their 82.1 percent of capacity filled also ranks 29th, ahead of the same teams.

Their low attendance might have something to do with the fact that the BB&T Center -- the 5th name the building has had in its 21 years of existence, mirroring the Philadelphia Flyers in a way that does not suggest success -- is 20 miles west of downtown Fort Lauderdale, and 35 miles northwest of downtown Miami.

Apparently, the Panthers' organization did not learn the lesson of the Richfield Coliseum. The Cleveland Cavaliers thought that people would no longer go into the city to watch their awful team, so they should move it to the suburbs, where their fan base (read: White people who would pay to watch basketball played by black men, as long as they didn't have huge Afros or bad attitudes but did have some white teammates) lived. So the Coliseum was built in the middle of farmland, 20 miles south of downtown Cleveland and 20 miles northwest of downtown Akron, and their attendance sucked for 20 years until they moved to downtown Cleveland. The Panthers made the same mistake.

Therefore, tickets should be easy to get. You can probably show up 5 minutes before puck drop and buy any ticket you can afford. And they're cheap by NHL standards -- law of supply and demand, I suppose. Lower level seats are $115 between the goals and $70 behind them. In the upper level, they're $40 between and $35 behind.

Getting There. It's 1,253 miles from the Prudential Center in Newark to the BB&T Center in Sunrise. Knowing this distance, your first reaction is going to be to fly down there. This is not a horrible idea, as the flight is just 3 hours.

Fort Lauderdale does have an international airport, and you could fly round-trip, non-stop, on United Airlines for as little as $292. More likely, though, you will flying in and out of Miami, which would be twice as much.

The train is not a very good idea, because you'll have to leave Newark's Penn Station on Amtrak's Silver Star at 11:22 AM and arrive in Fort Lauderdale at 5:17 the next day's afternoon, a 30-hour ride, which, in this case, will leave you with a little over an hour and a half before puck-drop. The return trip will leave at 8:50 AM and return to Newark at 10:40 AM, "only" 26 hours – no, as I said earlier, there's no time-zone change involved.

Round-trip, it'll cost $431. And the station isn't all that close, at 200 SW 21st Terrace. Fortunately, the Number 22 bus will take you to a short walk from the arena. Unfortunately, that sounds a lot like trying to get a bus to and from the Nassau Coliseum, which was not fun.

How about Greyhound? There are 7 buses leaving Port Authority every day with connections to Miami, and most require you to change buses in Richmond and Orlando. (I don't know about changing buses in Orlando, but I have changed buses in Richmond, and I can tell you: It is not fun.) The ride, including the changeovers, takes about 30 hours. Round-trip fare is $458, but you can get it for $251 on advanced-purchase. The Fort Lauderdale station is at 515 NE 3rd Street. You'll need to take the Number 50 bus to the Number 72 bus to get to the arena.

If you want to drive, it'll help to get someone to go down with you, and take turns driving. You'll be going down Interstate 95 (or its New Jersey equivalent, the Turnpike) almost the whole way. It'll be about 2 hours from the Lincoln Tunnel to the Delaware Memorial Bridge, 20 minutes in Delaware, and an hour and a half in Maryland, before crossing the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, at the southern tip of the District of Columbia, into Virginia. Then it will be 3 hours or so in Virginia, another 3 hours in North Carolina, about 3 hours and 15 minutes in South Carolina, a little under 2 hours in Georgia, and about 5 hours and 45 minutes in Florida before you reach Fort Lauderdale.

Given rest stops, preferably in one in each State from Maryland to Georgia, and 2 in Florida, you're talking about a 28-hour trip.

Once In the City. Naming a Florida town "Sunrise" makes some sense. The U.S. Army established a stockade named Fort Lauderdale in 1836, named for the commander of the detachment of soldiers who built the first fort, Major William Lauderdale. The town was incorporated in 1911, at the beginning of the first building boom in Florida. The Miami-Fort Lauderdale metropolitan area is a big market, with about 6.4 million people. But while Miami has about 453,000 people within the city limits, Fort Lauderdale has just 178,000, and Sunrise only 94,000.

Because Florida is so hot (How hot is it?), and air-conditioning didn't become common until the mid-20th Century, Miami was founded rather late by the standards of the East coast, in 1825, and wasn't incorporated as a city until 1896. The name is derived from the Mayaimi tribe of Native Americans. Miami Avenue is the east-west divider, Flagler Street the north-south.

The Miami Herald, Fort Lauderdale's Sun-Sentinel, and the Palm Beach Post are the major newspapers in the area. And, considering how many ex-New Yorkers are around, you might also be able to get the Times, the Daily News, or, if you're really desperate (or really conservative), the Post.

Numbered Streets go east-west in Fort Lauderdale, while numbered Avenues and Terraces go north-south. The east-west divider is Andrews Avenue, and the north-south divider is Broward Blvd. The city has no beltway.

The sales tax in Florida is 6 percent, and it doesn't rise further in Broward County, which includes Fort Lauderdale and Sunrise. But it's 7 percent within Miami-Dade County. ZIP Codes in Miami start with the digits 330, 331 and 332; in the Fort Lauderdale area, 333; and in the Palm Beach area, 334 and 349. Florida Power & Light runs the Miami area's electricity.

No longer thought of as a haven for retired Jewish New Yorkers, Miami is the most Hispanic city east of Texas: 70 percent, with half of that, 34 percent of the total, being of Cuban origin, many of them refugees from the 1959 Castro Revolution and their descendants.

It should be noted, though, that, after 2 generations, there are Cubans in South Florida who don't remember living under the Castros, and find out that things weren't so great under the Batista regime, either, and thus don't automatically vote Republican because of the single issue.

The city is 19 percent black, 10 percent white, and only about 1 percent Asian. Miami-Dade County as a whole is about 65 percent Hispanic, 17 percent black, 15 percent white, 2 percent Asian, and 1 percent Middle Eastern. North of the river is mostly black, and a few miles north of that mostly white; while south of the river is mostly Hispanic.

Since 1984, South Florida has had a rapid-transit rail service, Metrorail. However, the arena can't be reached from it. You will need to take the Number 7 bus from downtown. The fare for the Metrorail and the Metrobus is $2.25.

Going In. The BB&T Center, named for a bank, has been the home of the NHL's Florida Panthers since 1998, and there's a reason the team is called "Florida" instead of "Miami": The arena is 34 miles northwest of downtown Miami, and 14 miles west of downtown Fort Lauderdale, in a town called Sunrise. It's 22 miles from Hard Rock Stadium, home of the Dolphins; 34 miles northwest of downtown Miami, and 35 miles each from the homes of the Marlins and the Heat.

It was known as the National Car Rental Center from its opening until 2002, then the Office Depot Center until 2005, then the Bank Atlantic Center until 2012, and the BB&T Center since then. Branch Banking & Trust Company, based in Charlotte, also has the naming rights to the tallest building in the Carolinas (the BB&T Center in downtown Charlotte), the arena at Northern Kentucky University in Highland Heights, and the BB&T Pavilion entertainment venue in Camden, New Jersey.
The arena's official address is 1 Panther Parkway, Sunrise, FL 33323. As near a I can tell, "Panther Parkway" is NW 136th Street. To get there from I-95 South, take Exit 129 onto Florida Route 70/Okeechobee Road. Take that to Florida's Turnpike South. Get off at Exit 71, for FL-869 S/Sawgrass Expressway. Take Exit 3 for FL-816/Oakland Park Blvd. Turn right from Oakland Park Blvd. onto N. Flamingo Road. The 2nd right is NW 136th Street.
To get there from downtown Fort Lauderdale, take U.S. Route 1/Federal Highway South to Interstate 595/Port Everglades Expressway West, to the Sawgrass Expressway. Take Exit 1B to Pat Salerno Drive, and the arena and its parking lot will be on your right.

To get there from downtown Miami, take I-95 North to Exit 12A onto Florida's Turnpike. Take Exit 54 to the Port Everglades Expressway, and then follow the directions from Fort Lauderdale. For general parking, enter through Gate 1, 2, 3 or 7. Parking costs $20.

The rink runs east-to-west -- well, northeast-to-southwest. The Panthers attack twice toward the west (southwest) end of the arena.
The arena opened with a concert by Celine Dion, and on Millennium Eve, December 31, 1999, it hosted the last full Bee Gees concert with Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb all still alive. It has hosted the 2003 NHL All-Star Game, professional "wrestling" and UFC events, one of Barack Obama's final rallies in his 2008 Presidential campaign, and, this past March, a CNN Town Hall on Gun Control in response to the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in nearby Parkland. (Mrs. Douglas was a journalist who fought for women's right to vote and the preservation of the Florida Everglades, and lived to be 108: 1890-1998.)

Food. With a great Hispanic, and especially Cuban, heritage, and also being in Southeastern Conference country (hello, tailgating), you would expect the hockey team in South Florida to have great food at their arena. But it looks like food is just about an afterthought at the BB&T Center.

It has restaurants accessible through their premium seating, such as the Penalty Box, the BB&T Chairman's Club and the Legends Lounge. There are also several bars that any fan at least age 21 and with money can use.

There are 3 food courts on each of the Plaza and Mezzanine Levels that include a wide selection of items on the menu. Guests also have an opportunity to enjoy dining on the two Party City Patios outside the Plaza Level food courts.

Team History Displays. Not much. The Panthers won the Eastern Conference in 1996 and the Southeast Division in 2012, and hang banners for those titles. But their 1st 2 retired numbers aren't for players: 37, for original owner Wayne Huizenga, born in 1937; and 93, for their 1993 founding, for Bill Torrey, the former Islander boss who was their 1st general manager and built their conference title. Tonight, though, they will finally retire a number for a player: 1, for Roberto Luongo, goaltender from 2000 to 2006, and again from 2013 to 2019.
There are 7 individuals with a Panther connection who are in the Hockey Hall of Fame, but only 1, Pavel Bure, played more than 2 seasons for them (in his case, 3: 1999-2002). The other players are Dino Ciccarelli, Igor Larionov, Joe Nieuwendyk and Ed Belfour. In the "Builders" category, there's Torrey and 1st head coach Roger Neilson, for whom their press box is named. Torrey has received the Lester Patrick Trophy for contributions to hockey in America. Bure has been elected to the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) Hall of Fame, and was named to the NHL's 100th Anniversary 100 Greatest Players in 2017.

They don't have a team Hall of Fame, but they do have a "Den Of Honor," located on the Plaza Level between Sections 115 and 121. It's a museum, featuring photos, jersey and other equipment, and other items connected to the franchise's 27-year history. According to their website, "It also honors the people and organizations that continue to help South Florida grow as a hotbed for youth and high school hockey." (Hockey hotbed? South Florida? I think someone's been out in the sun for too long.)

The Florida Sports Hall of Fame is located at Lake Myrtle Sports Park in Auburndale, 232 miles northwest of downtown Miami, and 213 miles northwest of the BB&T Center. As yet, there are no Panthers players inducted.

Understandably, their main rivalry is intrastate, with the Tampa Bay Lightning. It was sparked before the Panthers had every played a game, with legendary player Phil Esposito, the Lightning's 1st general manager, calling them "the stinking Panthers," and their 1st head coach, Terry Crisp, calling them "the Pussycats." The Panthers' 1st general manager, Crisp's former Philadelphia Flyers Captain, Bobby Clarke, didn't like that. Crisp ended up laughing it off, saying it was just entertainment, but Espo kept calling them "the stinking Panthers" for as long as he had the job.

In spite of the Bolts being the more successful franchise, the Panthers have won more games, 66-62-10. They have never met each other in the Playoffs. In spite of the rivalry being called the Governor's Cup, there is no actual trophy.

Stuff. The Panthers have Pantherland, a team store, on the south (southeast) side of the building; and both a CCM Heritage Store at Section 122 and an Old Time Hockey Store at Section 112, paying tribute to early hockey (which, by this point, means anything prior to the team's establishment in 1993). There's also a Panthers IceDen in the nearby town of Coral Springs.

Since the Panthers don't have much history -- in those 27 years, they've made the Playoffs exactly 5 times, and they're not going to make it a 6th this year -- don't expect to find too many books and DVDs about them. After their 1996 Conference Championship, Dave Rosenbaum wrote Miami Ice: Winning the NHL Rat Race With the Florida Panthers. (I'll explain the "rat" reference shortly.)

When the team began in 1993, they released a Florida Panthers Video Hockey Guide. The next year, an Inaugural Year tape, Heart & Soul. That's right, tape. Videotape. Amazingly, these 2 VHS releases and Miami Ice are available on Amazon.com. But that's about it.

During the Game. A November 19,2014 article on The Hockey News' website ranked the NHL teams' fan bases, and listed the Panthers' fans at 25th out of 30, pointing out that "They'll watch a winner." Maybe, but the arena being far from the downtowns of either Miami or Fort Lauderdale doesn't help. Nor does Florida's skewing toward a higher age.

Safety should not be an issue. The arena is an island in a sea of parking, and is nowhere near the ghettos of Miami.

South Florida is loaded with people who came from elsewhere, including ex-New Yorkers. The stereotype is that, when a New Yorker gets old, if he has enough money to do so, he moves to Miami. Especially if he's Jewish. Or Italian. As a result, you may see a lot of people who used to go to Ranger or Islander games, some of whom maintain their old allegiances, get the MSG Network on their cable system, and have adopted the Panthers as their "second team."

Be advised that, just 3 seasons ago, the arena had a problem with the plumbing. The toilets clogged up and overflowed. You'd expect this at an older arena like the Meadowlands or the Nassau Coliseum. But this is not an old arena. I'm not saying it will happen again, just that it has happened fairly recently, and that it could happen again.

The Panthers' mascot is Stanley C. Panther, obviously named for the Stanley Cup (which, of course, hasn't yet been won by the team). He used to wear Number 93, in honor of the team's founding, until the number was retired for Torrey. Now, like so many other sports mascots, including our own N.J. Devil, he wears Number 00. Information about Stanley can be found at Stanley's Den.

Ghaleb Emachah, a Venezuelan-born tenor of Arab descent who came to the U.S. at age 21, settled in Fort Lauderdale, and became a contestant on American Idol, is the Panthers' regular National Anthem singer. Their goal song is "Out of Our Heads" by the Dropkick Murphys, adding a panther growl sound effect. But their biggest chant is the generic, "Let's go, Panthers!"

During the 1996 season, the Panthers' Scott Mellanby saw a rat in the locker room, and whacked it with his stick. He then used the same stick to score 2 goals in that night's game. John Vanbiesbrouck, the former Ranger goalie by then with the Panthers, called it not a hat trick, but a "rat trick." Thereafter, instead of fans throwing hats onto the ice when a players scored 3 goals in a game, they threw plastic or rubber rats when a player scored 2.

By the time they reached the Conference Finals, and knocked off the Philadelphia Flyers to advance to the Stanley Cup Finals, they were throwing the rats after every goal. Even when Uwe Krupp scored the triple-overtime winner to give the Colorado Avalanche the Cup in Game 4 of the Finals, the fans used that last opportunity of the season to throw all their rats onto the ice, making it difficult to award the Cup. This resulted in an off-season rule change by the NHL that allowed for referees to penalize the home team if fans disrupt the game by throwing objects onto the ice. Nevertheless, on occasion, the fans still throw the plastic and rubber rats onto the ice, after 18 years.

After the Game. As I said, the arena isn't in a neighborhood. There's a mall with chain restaurants across 136th Avenue, but if that's not your cup of tea (or mug of beer), you may have to head back to Fort Lauderdale or Miami.

I checked for area bars where New Yorkers gather, and found one for each of the city's NFL teams. The South Florida Jets Fan Club meets at Hammerjack's, at 5325 S. University Drive in Davie, 11 miles southeast of the arena. American Social is the home of the local Giants fan club, and also caters to fans of the Yankees and Knicks, at 721 East Las Olas Blvd., 18 miles east in downtown Fort Lauderdale. Bokamper's, a bar chain run by former Miami Dolphin linebacker Kim Bokamper, has several outlets nearby.

Don't bother looking for Dan Marino's restaurants: They've all closed. He's had financial setbacks, partly due to paying his extramarital baby mama millions of dollars in hush money.

If you visit Miami during the European soccer season (now drawing to a close but starting again in mid-August), the Fado Irish Pub chain has an outlet downtown, at 900 S. Miami Avenue. Brickell on Metrorail, Tenth Street Promenade on Metromover. Another possibility, especially if you're a Liverpool fan, is Churchill's Pub, at 5501 NE 2nd Avenue, 4 miles north of downtown, in Little Haiti. Bus 9.

Sidelights. On November 30, 2018, Thrillist published a list of "America's 25 Most Fun Cities," and Miami came in a surprisingly low 12th. The Miami-Fort Lauderdale area's sports history is long, but aside from football, it's not all that involved. I'll get the Fort Lauderdale ones out of the way first.

* Fort Lauderdale Stadium and Lockhart Stadium. Built in 1962, the Yankees moved their spring training headquarters to the 8,340-seat Fort Lauderdale Stadium after being assured that, unlike their spring home of St. Petersburg at the time, their black players could stay in the same hotel as their white players. The Yankees remained there until 1995, by which point Tampa was not only long since integrated, but was willing to do pretty much anything city resident George Steinbrenner wanted, including build him a new spring home for the Yankees.
The Yankees' Class A team in the Florida State League also used it as a home field. After the Yankees left, the Orioles used it from 1996 to 2009. Although it no longer has a permanent tenant, or even a spring training tenant, it still stands, and the Fort Lauderdale Strikers use it as a practice facility. 1401 NW 55th Street.

Built in 1959, Lockhart was a 17,417-seat high school football stadium, across 55th Street from Fort Lauderdale Stadium, along 12th Avenue. It was home to 4 different teams called the Fort Lauderdale Strikers, including the original NASL's version from 1977 to 1983, and the new NASL's version from 2011 to 2016. It hosted MLS' Miami Fusion from 1998 to 2001.

It hosted 3 games of the U.S. national soccer team, including the November 23, 1980 2-1 victory that was the 1st time the U.S. ever defeated Mexico on home soil, the 1st time anywhere since the countries' 1st meeting, in the 1934 World Cup. It also hosted Florida Atlantic University's football team from 2003 to 2010, after which their on-campus stadium opened.

It was demolished in 2019, to be replaced by what is currently named Inter Miami CF Stadium, of about the same capacity. Inter Miami will play their 1st home game there on the same day as this Devils-Panthers game, and will remain there into the 2022 season, after which their permanent stadium is expected to open. At that point, this stadium will serve as a training ground and reserve team home for Inter Miami.

1350 NW 55th Street, at 12th Avenue. For both stadiums, take Bus 14 from downtown Fort Lauderdale to Powerline Road & 56th Street, then walk 2 blocks west.

* Marlins Park and site of Orange Bowl. The home of the team that became known as the Miami Marlins when they moved in for the 2012 season was built at the site of the stadium known as the Miami Orange Bowl. It will be a long time before it builds up anything of  history, but it will never match the history of the classic horseshoe with the palm trees at the open east end.

Opening in 1937, and known as Burdine Stadium until 1959, it hosted the Orange Bowl game on (or close to) every New Year's Day from 1938 to 1995, and once more in 1999 when the Dolphins made the Playoffs to make their new stadium unavailable.

It also hosted the University of Miami football team from 1937 to 2007 (famed for its fake-smoke entrances out of the tunnel); the Miami Seahawks of the All-America Football Conference in 1946 (they moved to become the Baltimore Colts after just 1 season, but this was arguably the 1st "major league" team in any of the former Confederate States); the Bert Bell Benefit Bowl (a game involving the 2nd-place teams in each of the NFL's divisions from 1960 to 1969, also known as the Playoff Bowl, a game so lame that Vince Lombardi once called it "the only game I never want to win"– and he didn't); the Dolphins from 1966 to 1986; and the Miami Toros of the North American Soccer League from 1972 to 1976, including the 1974 NASL Final, where they lost on penalties to the Los Angeles Aztecs.

And it hosted 5 Super Bowls, most notably (from a New York perspective) Super Bowl III, when the Jets beat the Colts in one of the greatest upsets in sports history, on January 12, 1969. It also hosted Super Bowls II (1968, Green Bay over Oakland), V (1971, Baltimore over Dallas), X (1976, Pittsburgh over Dallas) and XIII (1979, also Pittsburgh over Dallas). All subsequent South Florida Super Bowls, including the one the Giants won in 2012, Super Bowl XLVI, have been held at the Dolphins' stadium.

The Orange Bowl was where the Dolphins put together what remains the NFL's only true undefeated season, in 1972. The Canton Bulldogs had gone undefeated and untied in 1922, but there was no NFL Championship Game in those days. The Chicago Bears lost NFL Championship Games after going undefeated and untied in the regular seasons of 1932 and '42. And the Cleveland Browns went undefeated and untied in the 1948 AAFC season, but that's not the NFL.
* Hard Rock Stadium. Probably best known under its original name, Joe Robbie Stadium, the Dolphins' home was named for their longtime owner, who had it built for them and for a hypothetical MLB team that became the Marlins. It's 15 miles north of downtown Miami, in a location that's been called, at various times, Miami, Miami Lakes, Miami Gardens, Carol City and Opa-Locka. Sounds like a bad variety show sketch.

The Stadium is between 199th and 203rd, and between the Turnpike and 27th Avenue, across 203rd and Snake Creek from Calder Race Course. The exact mailing address is 347 Don Shula Drive, for the coach who won the Dolphins' 2 titles and the record number of NFL coaching wins he has.

Public transportation there is a bit tricky. You'd have to take Metrorail from downtown to M.L. King Rail Station, then transfer to the Number 27 bus, riding that to NW 199th Street & NW 27th Court. And then you'd have to walk down 199th for about 15 minutes and turn into the parking lot. Not exactly ideal. (Somehow, I don't think a situation like this, especially with a transit station with his name on it, was part of Martin Luther King's dream. But he certainly would have approved of a racially mixed crowd watching racially mixed teams playing each other.)

The stadium has been home to the Dolphins since 1987; the Orange Bowl game in 1996, 1997, 1998 and since 2000; the University of Miami football team since 2008 (their games were the last thing the Orange Bowl stadium hosted before its demolition to make way for Marlins Park); the Marlins from 1993 to 2011; and the Champs Sports Bowl from 1990 to 2000.

It's hosted 6 Super Bowls: XXIII (1989, San Francisco 49ers over Cincinnati Bengals), XXIX (1995, 49ers over San Diego Chargers), XXXIII (1999, Denver Broncos over Atlanta Falcons), XLI (2007, Indianapolis Colts over Chicago Bears, and the only Super Bowl that's yet been rained on), XLIV (2011, Packers over Steelers), and LIV (2020, Chiefs over 49ers).

It's also hosted 2 World Series: 1997, Marlins over Cleveland; and 2003, Marlins over, uh, let's move on. It hosted 4 BCS National Championship Games: 2001 (Oklahoma over Florida State), 2005 (USC over Oklahoma), 2009 (Florida over Oklahoma) and 2013 (Alabama over Notre Dame).

The stadium is also a premier U.S. soccer venue. On August 4, 1989, London's Arsenal played Argentine club Independiente, each team coming off winning its national league title. Arsenal won, 2-1, but only 10,042 fans came out to see it in the oppressive August Florida heat. (Perhaps this is why Arsenal did not play in North America again for 25 years, coming to Red Bull Arena in 2014.)

Other major club teams to play there include Mexico's Chivas of Guadalajara; England's Chelsea of London, Liverpool, Manchester City and Manchester United; Spain's Real Madrid and Barcelona; France's Paris Saint-Germain; Germany's Bayern Munich; and Italy's AC Milan, Internazionale and Juventus.

The U.S. national team has played there 4 times: A 1-0 loss to Colombia on April 22, 1990; a 1-1 draw with Bolivia on February 18, 1994; a 3-1 loss to Sweden on February 20, 1994; and a 1-0 win over Honduras on October 8, 2011. Other national teams to play there have been England, Croatia, Mexico, Brazil, Educador, Peru, Venezuela, Chile, Ghana and South Korea. It has been selected by the U.S. Soccer Federation as a finalist to be one of the host venues for the 2026 World Cup.

* Miami Freedom Park. The proposed 25,000-seat stadium for Inter Miami is set to be built on the grounds of International Links Melreese Country Club, bounded by 37th and 42nd Avenues, and 14th and 21st Streets, across from Miami International Airport. It is set to open during the 2022 season. MetroRail to Airport Station.
* Comfort Inn. This hotel, across 36th Street from the airport, was the site of the Playhouse, once considered one of South Florida's finest banquet halls. It was here, on January 9, 3 days before the Super Bowl, at a dinner organized by the Miami Touchdown Club, that Joe Namath of the Jets was speaking, and some drunken Colts fan yelled out, "Hey, Namath! We're gonna kick your ass on Sunday!" And Joe said, "Let me tell you something: We got a good team. And we're gonna win. I guarantee it!" He was right.

NW 36th Street between Curtiss Parkway and Deer Run. MetroRail toward Palmetto, to Allapattah Station, then transfer to the 36 Bus.

* Site of Miami Stadium. Also known as Bobby Maduro Stadium, this was the home of the original Miami Marlins, of the Florida State League. Seating 13,000, it was known for its Art Deco entrance and a roof that shielded nearly the entire seating area, to protect fans from the intense Miami weather.

The FSL team that played here was known as the Sun Sox from 1949 to 1954, the Marlins from 1956 to 1960, the Marlins again 1962 to 1970, the Miami Orioles 1971 to 1981, and the Marlins again from 1982 to 1988. These teams won FSL Pennants in 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972 and 1978 -- giving Miami 7 Pennants, counting those won by the NL Marlins.

Miami Stadium was the spring training home of the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1950 to 1957, the Dodgers in their first season in Los Angeles in 1958 (it can be said that "the Los Angeles Dodgers" played their 1st game here, not in California), and the Baltimore Orioles from 1959 to 1990.

It was demolished in 2001, and The Miami Stadium Apartments were built on the site. 2301 NW 10th Avenue, off 23rd Street. It's just off I-95, and 8 blocks north and east from the Santa Clara MetroRail station.

* American Airlines Arena. The "Triple-A" has been the home of the NBA's Miami Heat since 2000, including their 2006, 2012 and 2013 NBA Championship seasons. 601 Biscayne Blvd. (U.S. Routes 1 & 41), between NE 6th and 8th Streets, across Port Blvd. from the Bayside Marketplace shopping center (not exactly their version of the South Street Seaport) and the Miami outlets of Hooters, the Hard Rock Café and Bubba Gump Shrimp. The closest rapid-rail station is Overtown, the same stop for the previous sports arena…

* Site of Miami Arena. This was the home of the Heat from 1988 to 1999, the NHL's Florida Panthers from 1993 to 1998, and the University of Miami basketball team from 1988 to 2003. When the Overtown race riot happened in January 16 to 18, 1989, in the week before Super Bowl XXIII, area residents took great pains to protect this arena from damage, and succeeded.

This building was demolished in 2008. Only 20 years? Apparently, like the multipurpose stadiums of the 1960s and '70s, and the Meadowlands Arena and the Nassau Coliseum, it served its purpose – getting teams to come in – and then quickly became inadequate. Grand Central Park, a public park, was built on the site. 701 Arena Blvd., between Miami Avenue, NW 1st Avenue, and 6th and 8th Streets. Overtown/Arena rail station.

* Riccardo Silva Stadium and FAU Stadium. Florida International University is at 11200 SW 8th Street, 16 miles west of downtown. Its Riccardo Silva Stadium, formerly FIU Stadium, opened in 1995 and seating 23,500, is at 11310 SW 17th Street. Bus 8. It is home to Miami FC, the largest team in the area until the Beckham team finally takes the field, if it ever does.
FIU should not be confused with Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. Its 29,419-seat FAU Stadium, which opened in 2011, is at 777 Glades Road, or FAU Blvd. & N. University Drive. Tri-Rail to Boca Raton station. On October 14, 2014, the U.S. soccer team had a 1-1 draw with Honduras at FAU Stadium.
* Gulfstream Park. Built in 1939, this racetrack is home to the annual Florida Derby, one of several warmup races for thoroughbred racing's Triple Crown. It's hosted the Breeders' Cup in 1989, 1992 and 1999. 901 S. Federal Highway (U.S. Route 1), in Hallandale Beach, 16 miles north of downtown Miami. Bus 9 to 29th Place & Aventura Blvd., then Bus 1 to 9th Street.

* Hialeah Park Race Track. The other great thoroughbred course in Florida (South or otherwise) opened in 1922, closed in 2001, and reopened in 2013. It also hosts a warmup for the Triple Crown, the Flamingo Stakes. 2200 E. 4th Avenue in Hialeah, about 10 miles northwest of downtown. MetroRail to Hialeah.

* Sports Immortals Museum. This museum is in Boca Raton, at 6830 N. Federal Highway (Route 1), 50 miles north of downtown Miami. It's got a statue of Babe Ruth, and some memorabilia on display.  However, some people have reported that much of the memorabilia they sell has been judged to be fake by authenticators, so buyer beware. Theoretically, it's reachable by public transportation from Miami, but you'd need to take a bus to a train to a bus to a bus (32 to Tri-Rail to 70 to 1), and it would take about 3 hours. If you don't have the time to make for this, by car or otherwise, skip it.

* Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital. For the last 30 or so years of his life, the Yankee Clipper lived in South Florida, and while he pretty much ignored his one and only child, son Joe Jr., he adored his grandchildren and children in general. He was a heavy donor to local hospitals, and the Children's Hospital named for him was established in 1992. There is now a statue of him there. 1005 Joe DiMaggio Drive, Hollywood. about 20 miles north of downtown Miami. 22 bus to Hollywood Tri-Rail station, then a mile's walk.

* Miami Beach Convention Center. Opened in 1957, it seats 15,000 people. The American Basketball Association's Miami Floridians played here from 1968 to 1972. The 1968 Republican Convention, and both major parties' Conventions in 1972, were held here. (The Republicans nominated Richard Nixon each time, and the Democrats nominated George McGovern.) Why? Simple: They wanted to be away from any city's downtown, putting water between themselves and wherever the hippies and another antiwar demonstrators were staying.

This building hosted the heavyweight title fights of 1961 (Floyd Patterson-Ingemar Johansson III, Floyd won) and 1964 (Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston I, Clay winning and then changing his name to Muhammad Ali). Just 9 days before Ali forced his "total eclipse of the Sonny," on February 16, 1964, the Beatles played their 2nd full-length U.S. concert here. They visited Ali at his Miami training center, and a famous photo was taken. Elvis Presley gave a pair of concerts here on September 12, 1970.
Convention Center Drive between 17th Street and Dade Blvd. The Jackie Gleason Theater, where "The Great One" taped his 1960s version of The Jackie Gleason Show (including a now rarely-seen revival of The Honeymooners) is next-door. This, and any other Miami Beach location, can be reached via the 103, 113 or 119 Bus, or a car, over the MacArthur Causeway.

* Site of Coconut Grove Convention Center. This former Pan Am hangar, attached to the Dinner Key Marina in 1930, was used as a Naval Air Station, a convention center, a concert hall, a 6,900-seat sports arena (the Floridians played a few home games here), and as the indoor-scenes studio for the USA Network show Burn Notice.

It's also been known as the Dinner Key Auditorium. Under that name, on March 1, 1969, The Doors gave a concert here, and lead singer Jim Morrison supposedly committed an indecent act there. (Yeah, he told the crowd, "I'm from Florida! I went to Florida State! Then I got smart and moved to California!")

It was demolished in 2013, and a park is being built on the site. 2700 S. Bayshore Drive, at Pan American Drive & 27th Avenue, in the Coconut Grove section of town. Number 102 Bus to Number 48.

* Gusman Center for the Performing Arts. Formerly the Olympic Theater, Elvis sang here on August 3 and 4, 1956. 174 E. Flagler Street, downtown.

On March 26, 1960, Elvis taped a segment for The Frank Sinatra Timex Show, subtitled Welcome Home Elvis, in the ballroom of the Fontainebleau Hotel. It was his 1st TV appearance since his discharge from the Army 3 weeks earlier.

Frank was not initially a fan of Elvis, but his 2-year peacetime-but-Cold-War hitch for Uncle Sam -- further emphasized by the fact that an ear condition left Frank himself 4-F, meaning he didn't serve in World War II -- convinced a lot of grownups that he was all right after all, and Frank and his fellow Rat Packers were now happy to go along -- down to Frank's daughter, 15-year-old Nancy (6 years from becoming a star in her own right), being the first "name" he saw when he got off the plane.

Elvis sang both sides of his 1st post-service single, "Fame and Fortune" and the soon-to-be-Number 1 hit "Stuck On You." Then he sang Frank's "Witchcraft," and Frank sang his "Love Me Tender," and they closed the latter song together. They remained friends for the rest of Elvis' life.

The Fontainebleau, then as now, was the most famous hotel in Miami, in Florida, indeed in the entire Southern U.S. 4441 Collins Avenue in Miami Beach.

In addition to the preceding, Elvis sang in South Florida in Fort Myers at the City Auditorium on May 9 and July 25, 1955; in West Palm Beach at the Palms Theater on February 20, 1956 and the West Palm Beach Auditorium on February 13, 1977; and in Hollywood at the Sportatorium on February 12, 1977.
* Museums. Miami isn't a big museum city. There's the Miami Science Museum, at 3280 S. Miami Avenue (Vizcaya Station on Tri-Rail); the Miami Art Museum, at 101 W. Flagler Street (downtown); the Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), at 1103 Biscayne Blvd., Museum Park station on Metromover; and the Patricia and Philip Frost Museum of Science, at 3280 S. Miami Avenue, Vizcaya station on Metrorail.

* Colleges. The largest college in the area is, as you might have guessed, the University of Miami. Its new Donna E. Shalala Student Center, named for the former University President and U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Bill Clinton, is at 1330 Miller Drive, about 7 miles southwest of downtown. University Station on Metrorail.
The Kennedy family had a compound in Palm Beach, but sold it in 1995. It's still in private hands, and not open to the public. Also in Palm Beach is the Mar-a-Lago Club, a hotel and members-only club built in 1927 by cereal company heiress and socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post. In 1985, it was bought by Donald Trump, and he's turned it into his "Southern White House," disgracing the nation there every other weekend. 1100 S. Ocean Blvd. Bus 1 from downtown West Palm Beach will get you to Dixie Highway & Southern Blvd. (U.S. Routes 1 & 98), but you'd have to walk almost 2 miles over Southern Blvd., across Lake Worth Lagoon and Bingham Island, to get to the sandbar on which Palm Beach sits.

There was a "Little White House" in Key West (111 Front Street), used by Harry Truman (and, to a lesser extent, his immediate successors Dwight D. Eisenhower and Kennedy), and it's open to tours. But that's a long way from Miami: 160 miles, with no public transportation between the 2 cities, and Greyhound charges $110 round-trip for a 4 1/2-hour ride.

* Movies & TV. Several TV shows have been set in Miami. A restaurant called Jimbo's Place was used to film scenes from Flipper and Miami Vice, and more recently CSI: Miami and Burn Notice. It's at 4201 Rickenbacker Causeway in Key Biscayne, accessible by the Causeway (by car) and the 102 Bus (by public transportation).

If you're a fan of The Golden Girls, you won't find the house used for the exterior shots. It's actually in Los Angeles. The address mentioned on the show was 6151 Richmond Street, but that address doesn't exist in Miami. The exterior shot used for the hospital in its spinoff Empty Nest was also in Southern California.

If you're a fan of those not-quite-golden girls, the Kardashian sisters, the penthouse they use to tape the Miami edition of their "reality show" is on Ocean Drive between 1st and 2nd Streets in Miami Beach. But I don't think they use it anymore, especially since Kourtney and Kim have since "taken New York."

Greenwich Studios has been used to film Miami Vice, True Lies, There's Something About Mary
and The Birdcage. It's at 16th Avenue between 121st and 123rd Streets, in North Miami, and often stands in for Miami Beach for the TV shows and movies for which it's used. 93 Bus.

Other shows set in Miami include Surfside 6, Dave's World (based on the Miami Herald columns of Dave Barry), Nip/Tuck, Dexter, and Jane The Virgin.

For the moment, the tallest building in Miami, and in the entire State of Florida, is the brand-new 868-foot Panorama Tower, at 1101 Brickell Avenue. Tenth Street Promenade station on Metromover. And that won't last long as the tallest, since it will be surpassed in 2020 by the 1,005-foot One Bayfront Plaza, at 100 S. Biscayne Blvd. Bayfront Park station on Metromover.

The tallest of Miami's older buildings is the Freedom Tower, built in 1925 as the home of the now-defunct Miami News. It now houses Miami-Dade College and a Museum. 600 Biscayne Blvd., downtown, across from the American Airlines Arena. Freedom Tower station on Metromover.

It's 18 days to Opening Day, and the Yankees look like an episode of M*A*S*H, without the comedy. Here's a list of the current injuries, and when the players can be expected back:

* Miguel Andujar, 3rd base, shoulder: Missed most of last season, but is already back playing Spring Training games, including in left field, in place of Giancarlo Stanton.

* Ben Heller, relief pitcher, back: Probably by Opening Day, March 26.

* Gary Sanchez, catcher, back: Maybe not by Opening Day.

* Giancarlo Stanton, left field, calf: Maybe not by Opening Day.

* Aaron Judge, right field, ribs: At least April 1, meaning he might be back in time for the home opener.

* James Paxton, starting pitcher, shoulder: At least May 1, more likely June 1.

* Domingo German, starting pitcher, domestic violence suspension: Eligible to return on June 5.

* Aaron Hicks, center field, elbow: At least July 1.

* Luis Severino, starting pitcher, elbow: Tommy John surgery, so out for the season. This is a terrible blow.

And none of this is due to the coronavirus.

In other words, the Yankees' Opening Day lineup (I won't arrange it in batting order) could be as follows:

1B Luke Voit
2B DJ LeMahieu
SS Gleyber Torres
3B Gio Urshela
LF Miguel Andujar
CF Brett Gardner or Mike Tauchman
RF Clint Frazier
DH Gardner or Tauchman, whichever doesn't play CF
C Kyle Higashioka

Does that fill you with confidence? Because it sure as hell doesn't fill me with confidence. Maybe I would have more confidence if Frazier, with the million-dollar bat and the five-cent glove, were the DH.

And, at least through the start of June, the starting rotation is likely to be, in order of effectiveness: Gerrit Cole, Masahiro Tanaka, J.A. Happ, Jordan Montgomery and Jonathan Loasigia.

For the moment, we won't have to do what we did last year, with Chad Green pitching 2 innings and then praying the bullpen held together. But we're already down 3 starters for the 1st 1/3rd of the season.

As they say on TV medical dramas: I'm not going to lie to you, it doesn't look good.

*

Days until the next Primary or Caucus: 2, this Tuesday, the Michigan Primary. Since last I did this, the race for the Democratic nomination for President has gone from Bernie Sanders leading the field, with no clear runner-up, to Joe Biden leading the field, and everybody but Sanders having dropped out and endorsed him. Elizabeth Warren hasn't endorsed anyone yet, but Kamala Harris waited until today, after all the other women (except for the meaningless gadfly Tulsi Gabbard) have dropped out. If Biden wins Michigan, the race is essentially over. If Sanders wins it, he still has a chance.

Days until Arsenal play again: 3, on Wednesday, at 2:30 PM New York time, in Premiere League action, away to Manchester City. Yesterday, they beat East London team West Ham United. They have also advanced to the Quarterfinals of the FA Cup, although they have been eliminated from the UEFA Europa League. So now, their only chance to get into next season's UEFA Champions League is to finish 4th or higher in the Premier League -- or 5th, if Man City's CL ban is upheld, which is by no means a certainty.

Days until the New York Red Bulls play again: 7, a week from today, at 7:00 PM, away to Minnesota United. Yesterday, they had a 1-0 lead away to Real Salt Lake, and then allowed an equalizer in stoppage time. This tie felt not like kissing your sister, but like kissing her best friend. You know, the one with the great personality.

Days until the New Jersey Devils next play a local rival: 13, on Saturday night, March 21, against the New York Islanders, at the Prudential Center. The next game against the Philadelphia Flyers will be on Saturday afternoon, March 28, at the Prudential Center. The Devils are not scheduled to play the New York Rangers, a.k.a. The Scum, for the rest of this regular season, and it is unlikely that the Devils will make the Playoffs and face them there.

Days until the Yankees' 2020 Opening Day: 18, at 1:00 on Thursday, March 26, away to the Baltimore Orioles. Under 3 weeks.

Days until the U.S. national soccer team plays again: 18, at 3:45 PM New York time on March 26, 2020, against the Netherlands, at Philips Stadion in Eindhoven, home of PSV Eindhoven.

It's March, which means Spring Training for baseball. The idea originated in 1886, when Adrian "Cap" Anson, 1st baseman and manager of the Chicago White Stockings (forerunners of the Cubs), took his players to Hot Springs, Arkansas, to "boil the beer out of them." It worked: As they had the year before, Chicago won the National League Pennant.

Spring Training is held in warm-weather, "Sun Belt" locations, so that players can practice and play without worrying about the nasty Winter weather in the Northeast and the Midwest. An exception was during World War II, when gasoline rationing (to save it for the troops) led to travel restrictions. This canceled the 1945 All-Star Game.

It also led to teams staying close to home for Spring Training, in spite of the cold. The Yankees played in Atlantic City; the New York Giants in Lakewood; the Philadelphia Athletics in Frederick, Maryland; and so on.

Top 10 American Regional Sports Quirks

1. Florida and Arizona: Spring Training. No other sport has regional sites for its preseason training camps. They're relatively close to their team's usual home base, and preseason games are nearly always at the site that one team or the other uses for its major league games.

Florida became the location of choice, a.k.a. the Grapefruit League, when the most successful teams in each League, the Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals, set up shop in St. Petersburg. Arizona, a.k.a. the Cactus League, was born when Chicago Cubs owner William Wrigley built a ballfield near his Biltmore Hotel outside Phoenix.

2. Maryland and Virginia: Lacrosse. In 1878, the Baltimore Athletic Club went to a track meet in Newport, Rhode Island, and saw people playing lacrosse. They got hooked on the sport, invented by indigenous Canadians, and brought the game back to Charm City. In 1882, the city's Johns Hopkins University started a team, and it caught on in the rest of Maryland, and spread to Virginia.

What I can't figure out is why the sport is so popular in the Chesapeake region, but not in the rest of the country. It's a grass sport that moves a ball forward toward a goal, like football and soccer; has sticks like hockey; is aggressive like football and hockey; and is higher-scoring than either hockey or soccer.

When I was at East Brunswick High School in the 1980s, out of 34 high schools in Middlesex County, only 3 had a lacrosse team, all boys: St. Joseph's of Metuchen and Wardlaw-Hartridge Academy of Edison, both very preppy schools, so, if you were to guess which schools in the County would have such a team, you'd guess them; and Edison High, which you wouldn't have expected. By the end of the 20th Century, most schools in the County had a boys' lacrosse team, and some had girls' teams, and EB's were both good.

But New Jersey, New York, and pretty much everywhere else hasn't embraced the sport the way the Chesapeake region has. Even Delaware, which is on the Delmarva Peninsula, and Washington, D.C. (admittedly, a mostly-black and poor school district), haven't taken to the sport the way Maryland and Virginia have.

3. Miami and Connecticut: Jai alai. A sport native to the Basque region of northern Spain and southern France, it gained popularity in Latin American countries, and in the heavily-Hispanic city of Miami. So that explains that.

But why Connecticut? There were jai alai venues, known as frontons, in Bridgeport, Milford and Hartford starting in the 1960s. The growth of gambling, including in Atlantic City and at the Connecticut casinos of Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods, doomed those, and also hurt the ones in Florida. By 2001, the sport was done in the Nutmeg State.

4. Florida: Dog racing. Specifically, greyhounds. This was big enough in the 1970s to be featured on an episode of The Odd Couple. However, it became regarded as animal cruelty, and has been phased out in recent years.

In 2018, Florida passed a bill shutting down the dog tracks by 2021. Presuming the process is completed, the only States where it will still be legal are Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, Texas and West Virginia.

5. Portland, Oregon: Soccer. True, soccer is popular all over the country, and all over the world. But, for whatever reason, Portland likes it better than most places. Until Atlanta United came in, the Portland Timbers seemed to lead Major League Soccer in attendance every year. And the Portland Thorns continue to lead the National Women's Soccer League in attendance.

6. Hawaii: Triathlon. The "Ironman Triathlon" is hosted at Kailua-Kona on the "Big Island" of Hawaii. It consists of 3 different kinds of races that are too long for most people: First a 2.4-mile swim, then a 112-mile bicycle ride, and finally a traditional marathon run of 26.2 miles. To do either of the 1st 2 is difficult, to do the last is really inadvisable, and to do all three is freakin' insane.

For comparison's sake: My longest swim has been maybe a quarter-mile, my longest bike ride has been 75 miles, and I may have once done enough walking in a day to add up to a half-marathon, although the longest run I've ever done is 10 kilometers -- about 6.2 miles, or 1/4 of a marathon.

I don't know why this competition caught on in Hawaii, and not in the hot beach States of California or Florida. Then again...

7. California and Hawaii: Surfing. Surfing competitions just don't happen on the East Coast, not even in Florida. There's a reason that only places in California (their home State) and Hawaii are mentioned by the Beach Boys in their signature song, the 1963 hit "Surfin' U.S.A."

8. New England: Candlepin Bowling. Unlike most bowling pins, which are considerably wider at the bottom, candlepins are only slightly tapered at each end, so that, from a distance, they look like the same width throughout.

In addition, the balls are smaller than in traditional bowling, and don't have finger holes. And you're allowed 3 balls per frame instead of the usual 2, because the shape of the pins makes them harder to knock down. And the pins that do get knocked down remain on the "field" within a frame.

Like basketball, volleyball, and the American version of tennis, candlepin bowling was invented in Massachusetts in the late 19th Century -- in this case, in 1880 in Worcester. It spread throughout New England, and with the rise of television, New England stations broadcast tournaments. It became popular in every New England State except Connecticut, and also in Atlantic Canada (the Maritime Provinces, except for Newfoundland). But I don't know why it didn't spread to the rest of North America, the way standard bowling did.

There's also duckpin bowling, where the pins are the same shape as standard bowling, but half the height, and the balls are small with no fingerholes like in candlepin.

9. Boston and Detroit: College Hockey Tournaments. Since 1952, first at the old Boston Garden, and since 1996 at the building now known as the TD Garden, Boston has hosted the Beanpot Tournament, between the hockey teams of Boston College, Boston University, Harvard University and Northeastern University.

Detroit also has an annual college hockey tournament, the Great Lakes Invitational. Every year, the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Michigan Tech, and a 4th invitee compete in it. It is usually held at the home of the Detroit Red Wings: Olympia Stadium starting with the tournament's inception in 1965, at Joe Louis Arena when it opened in 1979, and at Little Caesars Arena in 2018. The one exception was the 2017 tournament, which was moved to Comerica Park, home of the Detroit Tigers, to coincide with the 2018 NHL Winter Classic (and thus, there was not GLI in calendar year 2017).

It's not clear what other cities could host such a tournament. The Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul could, but don't. Minnesota's obsession is hockey at the high school level first, then collegiate, then pro. New York couldn't do it, unless they wanted to go a bit farther afield, and include Columbia (in New York City), Army (a bit Upstate), Princeton (in nearby New Jersey) and Yale (and New Haven is twice as far from Manhattan as Princeton is).

10. Alaska: The Midnight Sun Game. There are collegiate baseball leagues -- leagues for college-age players that are sponsored, but amateur, so the players can continue to play college baseball -- all over the country, most notably on Cape Cod in Massachusetts and in Alaska.

But the Alaska Baseball League is played so far north, they can start a game at the 3,500-seat Growden Memorial Park in Fairbanks at about 10:30 PM, and complete it at 1:30 AM, and the Sun will still be out.

Next Sunday night, the New York Red Bulls travel to St. Paul to play Minnesota United FC.

Before You Go. A January 30, 2019 article on Thrillist admitted what most of us already suspected: Taking into account that people in Alaska are generally nuts, and don't mind what would, statistically, be worse, Minnesota has the worst Winters of any State.

You should consult the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and St. Paul Pioneer Press websites for their forecasts. They're predicting mid-40s for Sunday afternoon, and low 30s for evening. So while the legendary Minnesota cold will not be hitting you, you should still bring a Winter jacket.

Minnesota is in the Central Time Zone, 1 hour behind New York. Adjust your timepieces accordingly.

Tickets. The stadium seats 19,400, so their average home attendance last season, 17,948, was a sellout. Then again, this being soccer, you'll be in the away fans' sections anyway, in Section 108, in the northeast corner. Tickets are $34.

Getting There. It's 1,199 road miles from Times Square in New York to Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis (the spot where Mary Tyler Moore threw her hat in the air in the opening sequence of her 1970-77 CBS sitcom), and 1,182 miles from Red Bull Arena to Allianz Field. Knowing this, your first reaction is going to be to fly out there.

If you order now, you could get a round-trip nonstop flight on United Airlines from Newark to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport for a little over $600. When you get there, the Number 55 light rail takes you from the airport to downtown in under an hour, so at least that is convenient.

Bus? Not a good idea. Greyhound runs 3 buses a day between Port Authority and Minneapolis, all with at least one transfer, in Chicago and possibly elsewhere as well. The total time, depending on the number of stops, is between 26 and 31 hours, and costs $457 round-trip, although it could drop to as little as $317 with advanced purchase.

The Greyhound terminal is at 950 Hawthorne Avenue, at 9th Street North, just 3 blocks from Nicollet Mall, 2 from the Target Center arena, and from there just across the 7th Street overpass over Interstate 394 from Target Field.

Train? An even worse idea. Amtrak will make you leave Penn Station on the Lake Shore Limited at 3:40 PM Eastern Time, arrive at Union Station in Chicago at 9:50 AM Central Time, and then the Empire Builder, their Chicago-to-Seattle run, will leave at 2:15 PM and arrive at Union Depot in St. Paul (not Minneapolis) at 10:03 PM -- after the game would end, unless there's a lot of overtime. So you'd have to leave New York on Friday afternoon.

From there, 214 4th Street E., you'd have to take the Light Rail Green Line to downtown Minneapolis. It's $368 round-trip -- potentially, cheaper than the bus. And you'd probably have to spent not one but two nights in a hotel.

If you decide to drive, it's far enough that it will help to get someone to go with you and split the duties, and to trade off driving and sleeping. You'll need to get into New Jersey, and take Interstate 80 West. You'll be on I-80 for the vast majority of the trip, through New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio. In Ohio, in the western suburbs of Cleveland, I-80 will merge with Interstate 90. From this point onward, you won't need to think about I-80 until you head home; I-90 is now the key, through the rest of Ohio and Indiana.

Just outside Chicago, I-80 will split off from I-90, which you will keep, until it merges with Interstate 94. For the moment, though, you will ignore I-94. Stay on I-90 through Illinois, until reaching Madison, Wisconsin, where you will once again merge with I-94. Now, I-94 is what you want, taking it into Minnesota and the Twin Cities, with Exit 235B being your exit for the University of Minnesota area, and Exit 233A for downtown Minneapolis.

If you do it right, you should spend about an hour and a half in New Jersey, 5 hours and 15 minutes in Pennsylvania, 4 hours in Ohio, 2 and a half hours in Indiana, an hour and a half in Illinois, 2 and a half hours in Wisconsin, and half an hour in Minnesota. That's 17 hours and 45 minutes. Counting rest stops, preferably halfway through Pennsylvania and just after you enter both Ohio and Indiana, outside Chicago and halfway across Wisconsin, and accounting for traffic in New York, the Chicago suburbs and the Twin Cities, it should be no more than 23 hours, which would save you time on both Greyhound and Amtrak, if not on flying.

Once In the City. Like the baseball Twins (who arrived in 1961), the NFL Vikings (ditto), the NBA Timberwolves (1989), the NHL Wild (2000), and the departed NHL North Stars (1967-1993), the soccer team is called "Minnesota," because they didn't want to slight either one of the "Twin Cities."

Well, these "twins" are not identical: They have different mindsets, and, manifesting in several ways that included both of them having Triple-A teams until the MLB team arrived, and the teams were known to feud as much as San Francisco and Oakland, Dallas and Fort Worth, Baltimore and Washington, if not as much as Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Minneapolis has about 414,000 people, St. Paul 302,000, and the combined metropolitan area a little under 4.2 million, ranking 16th in the U.S. -- roughly the combined population of Manhattan, The Bronx and Staten Island -- or that of Manhattan and Queens. Denver is the only metropolitan area with teams in all 4 sports (and now, all 5 if you count MLS) that's smaller. The market is 20th in population in MLB, 18th in the NFL, and 17th in the NBA, the NHL and MLS. And, despite being the smaller city, St. Paul is the State capital.

As Twins founding owner Calvin Griffith said, with glee and bigotry, when he moved the Washington Senators there, the people of Minnesota are white -- but no longer overwhelmingly so. The Twin Cities' white population is down to 70 percent, as immigrants come in from Latin America and Africa. Minneapolis, in particular, is now 62 percent white, 19 percent black, 11 percent Hispanic, 6 percent Asian, and 2 percent Native American.

"Minneapolis" is a combination of the Dakota tribal word for water, and the Greek word for city. It was founded in 1867 with the name St. Anthony Falls, and, of course, St. Paul, founded in 1854, is also named for an early Christian saint. In Minneapolis, Hennepin Avenue separates the numbered Streets from North and South, and the Mississippi River is the "zero point" for the Avenues, many (but not all) of which also have numbers.

Each city once had 2 daily papers, now each is down to 1: Minneapolis had the Star and the Tribune, merged in 1982; St. Paul the Pioneer and the Dispatch, merged into the Pioneer Press and Dispatch
in 1985, with the Dispatch name dropped in 1990. Today, they are nicknamed the Strib and the Pi Press.

The sales tax in the State of Minnesota is 6.875 percent. It's 7.775 percent in Minneapolis' Hennepin County, and 7.625 percent in St. Paul's Ramsey County. Bus and Light Rail service is $2.25 per ride during rush hours, $1.75 otherwise.
ZIP Codes in Minnesota start with the digits 54 and 55; with Minneapolis having 553, 554 or 555; and St. Paul having 550 and 551. The Area Codes are 612 for Minneapolis, 507 for its suburbs, and 651 for St. Paul. Interstates 494 and 694 are the Twin Cities'"beltway." Xcel Energy supplies electricity, and CenterPoint Energy supplies gas.

Going In. "MNUFC" (always abbreviated like that, not "MUFC" like Manchester United) plays at Allianz Field. Like the new stadiums of European soccer giants Bayern Munich of Germany and Juventus of Turin, Italy, it is named for Munich-based Allianz, the world's largest insurance company.
The address is 400 N. Snelling Avenue, in St. Paul, at the intersection of St. Anthony Avenue, just off I-94/U.S. 12/U.S. 52, about 3 miles west of downtown St. Paul and 6 miles east of downtown Minneapolis. Green Line light rail to Snelling Avenue. If you drive in, parking is $20.
The stadium seats 19,400, and supposedly has capability to be expanded to 24,474. The field is aligned north-to-south, and the surface is natural grass. Last year, the Loons hosted Hertha Berlin of Germany (losing 1-0), Aston Villa of Birmingham, England (losing 3-0), and C.F. Pachuca of Mexico (playing to a 2-2 draw). On June 18, 2019, the U.S. men's national team (USMNT) kicked off the 2019 CONCACAF Gold Cup at Allianz, beating Guyana 4-0.

Kiosks serving Mexican cuisine, Southern barbecue and Indian fare are meant to reflect the diversity of the St. Paul neighborhood where the new stadium is located — and to entice soccer’s global fan base...

Next Sunday at 5:00 PM, the New Jersey Devils travel to Tampa to play the Tampa Bay Lightning.

In 2014, I saw a blog post (I don't remember who wrote it) by someone who called San Diego "the Tampa of California." I think he owes San Diego an apology.

Before You Go. While the game will be indoors, you'll still have to get around, so you should know about the weather. Even though it's mid-Autumn here, it isn't there.

The Tampa Bay Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times) and the Tampa Tribune are both predicting temperatures in the high 80s in the afternoon, and the mid-60s at night. Florida must be where the cliche, "It's not the heat that's so bad, it's the humidity" began. But no rain or even high humidity is being predicted. Still, be prepared to sweat when you're outside the arena.

The Tampa Bay region is in the Eastern Time Zone, so you don't have to change your watch, or the clock on your smartphone. And while Florida was a Confederate State, you don't need to bring a passport or change your money.

Tickets. The Lightning are averaging 18,878 fans per game this season, nearly a sellout. They did so last season and the season before, too. This means that, proportionally, they're doing better at the box office than any other Florida team, including the Miami Heat and the Orlando Magic. It also means that, if only 1 team is likely to still be in Tampa Bay in 10 years, surprise, it's the hockey team.

In the Lower Level (100 sections), seats between the goals will run you $137, behind the goals $104. In the Upper Level (300s), $80 and $53.

Getting There. It is 1,136 road miles from Times Square in Manhattan to downtown Tampa, and 1,126 miles from the Prudential Center in Newark to the Amalie Arena. Sounds like you're gonna be flying.

This may be your lucky trip: You can get a round-trip nonstop ticket for under $200 -- cheaper than the train and the bus. Tampa International Airport was originally named Drew Field, after John H. Drew, a land developer who gave the land to the Army, before the Air Force was spun off from the Army.

If you want to take a side-trip to Disney World, you could fly to Orlando (which is 92 miles from Tampa) and rent a car, but I suspect that hotels will be cheaper in the Tampa Bay area, and get more expensive the closer you get to Disney.

Amtrak's Silver Meteor train leaves Newark Penn Station at 3:38 every afternoon, and arrives in Tampa at 12:49 the following afternoon. That's right, 21½ hours. It leaves Tampa at 5:27 PM the next day, arriving in Newark at 6:23 the following night. Round-trip fare is $310.

You can get a Greyhound bus out of New York's Port Authority at 11:00 Tuesday morning and be in St. Petersburg by 3:20 Wednesday afternoon. That's a little over 28 hours. Round-trip fare can be as high as $327, but advanced purchase can bring it down to as little as $223.

The catch is that you'd have to change buses twice, in Richmond and Orlando. And the layover in Richmond is 3 hours and 15 minutes. And I don't like the Richmond Greyhound station, and I doubt that you will, either. There's also hourlong layovers in Fayetteville, North Carolina and Jacksonville. The Tampa Greyhound station is at 610 E. Polk Street, 4 blocks from the Amtrak station.

If you do prefer to drive, see if you can get someone to split the duties with you. Essentially, you'll be taking Interstate 95 almost all the way down, turning onto Interstate 10 West at Jacksonville and then, after a few minutes, onto Interstate 75 South. Just outside of Tampa, you'll switch to Interstate 4, and take that to the end, before its merge with Interstate 275, onto Nebraska Avenue South, riding that into downtown Tampa.

It should take about 2 hours to get through New Jersey, 20 minutes in Delaware, an hour and a half in Maryland, 3 hours in Virginia, 3 hours in North Carolina, 3 hours in South Carolina, 2 hours in Georgia, and a little over 5 hours between crossing into Florida and reaching downtown Tampa.

Given proper 45-minute rest stops – I recommend doing one in Delaware, and then, once you're through the Washington, D.C. area, doing one when you enter each new State, and then another around Orlando, for a total of 7 – and taking into account city traffic at each end, your entire trip should take about 26 hours. Maybe you can do it in 24 if you speed and limit your rest stops to half an hour each, especially if one of you drives while the other sleeps, but I wouldn't recommend this.

Once In the City. "Tampa" is believed to be a Native American name meaning "sticks of fire," while St. Petersburg, like the city of the same name in Russia that was known as Leningrad in the Soviet era, is named after the first Pope, the Apostle Peter.

Tampa, founded in 1849, is home to 380,000 people; St. Petersburg, founded in 1888, is home to 260,000; and the metro area as a whole 3.1 million, so while neither city is big, it's a decent-sized market, and thus should be drawing a lot more people for baseball and football games.

One of the reasons it's not is that, much like the Miami area, Tampa Bay has a justly-deserved reputation for having a lot of retirees, people who either are too old, and thus possibly too frail or at least too tired, to leave their houses and drive into St. Petersburg; or have just had it with the inconveniences of life, and are satisfied to get their baseball on television. Nearly 1 in 5 residents of the Tampa Bay area, 19.4 percent, is age 65 and over.

Ethnically, the region is 76 percent white, 11 percent black, 11 percent Hispanic (considerably lower than Miami), and 2 percent Asian. Another difference is within the Hispanic community: Unlike the Cuban-dominated Miami, Tampa Bay's is 30 percent Mexican, 28 percent Puerto Rican, 13 percent Cuban, and 29 percent all others (Central and South American). Separately, the cities of Tampa and St. Petersburg both report being about 58 percent white, 23 percent Hispanic, 16 percent black and 3 percent Asian.

In Tampa, Whiting Street divides the city's streets into North and South, and the Hillsborough River into East and West. In St. Petersburg, Central Avenue divides the city into North and South, and while there appears to be no East-West divider, 1st Street seems to set off a section with Northeast addresses. Although Interstate 75 must be crossed to enter either Tampa or St. Petersburg, the region does not have a "beltway."

HART, Hillsborough Area Regional Transit, runs buses, $2.00 Local and $3.00 Express. PSTA runs $2.00 buses around St. Petersburg. There is no subway or commuter rail. So, if you want to go into St. Pete, taking the 100X bus from downtown Tampa ($3.00) and transferring to a bus in St. Pete ($2.00) will be $5.00 each way.

The sales tax in Florida is 6 percent. ZIP Codes in Tampa begin with the digits 335, 336 and 346; in St. Petersburg, 337; in nearby Lakeland, 338. The Area Code for Tampa is 813, 727 for the St. Petersburg side of the Bay, and 941 south of Tampa Bay.

Going In. The Lightning's arena opened in 1996 as the Ice Palace. It became the St. Pete Times Forum in 2002. In 2012, the St. Petersburg Times renamed itself the Tampa Bay Times, and, since it still owned the arena's naming rights, it became the Tampa Bay Times Forum. In 2016, it became the Amalie Arena, is named for Amalie Oil Company, founded in Pennsylvania but now based in Tampa.
The arena is downtown, has an official address of 401 Channelside Drive, and is also bounded by Morgan Street and Old Water Street. Depending on which lot you enter, parking will be either $15 or $20. Since the arena is on the waterfront, bounded by the Ybor Channel on the south, you'll probably be entering on the north side. There is an elevated walkway connecting the arena area with the adjacent Embassy Suites hotel complex.
The Tampa Bay Storm of the Arena Football League have played at the arena since 1997. The arena hosted the NCAA Frozen Four in 2012 and 2016, and the 2012 Republican Convention, at which Mitt Romney was nominated for President. The rink runs north-to-south. The Lightning attack twice toward the north end of the arena.

Food. The Tampa Bay region is known for its Spanish and Hispanic heritage. Cuban sandwiches, featuring freshly sliced ham, pork, and Genoa salami on toasted Cuban bread with Swiss cheese, pickles and mustard, are sold throughout the stadium.

Local chain PDQ, a fast, casual dining restaurant that specializes in fresh hand-battered chicken tenders, sells chicken tenders, sandwiches, fresh salads, fries and other favorites off their restaurant menu, outside Section 102. Mr. Empanada, Tacos Trueno, Anthony's Italian Sandwich, Deli and Stir Fry and a carving station will be new offerings around the arena. Additionally, a new portable concession stand on the 100 Level will feature fresh, hand-rolled sushi for fans attending Lightning games and Amalie Arena events. A gourmet grilled cheese portable concession stand will also be available on the 100 Level concourse.

Holy Hog has a location on the 100 level. The local BBQ restaurant opened their first location on the Bud Light Party Deck at the beginning of the 2014-15. Items available at Holy Hog include award winning barbeque, mac n' cheese, beef brisket sandwiches and other favorites from their restaurant menu.

The Lightning will be offering fans the option to purchase value meal items at select locations around Amalie Arena. Value items at Lightning home games will include $4 Kayem hot dog, $4 garden salad, $4 chicken nuggets, $5 Lynchburg nuggets and fries and $8.75 super slice of pizza and a 12 oz. soda.

The premium menus at Amalie Arena have also been updated for the upcoming season. Firestick Grill will now offer fresh rolled sushi, grilled veal rack chop, hydroponic green salads and fresh stone crab claws. Fans enjoying events and Lightning games from the suite level will now have the option to order World of Beer pretzels with beer cheese dipping sauces and the famous Columbia Restaurants 1905 salad.

Team History Displays. The Lightning hang their 2004 Stanley Cup banner, their 2004 and 2015 Eastern Conference title banners, and their 2003, 2004, 2018 and 2019 Division title banners from the rafters. True, the Devils also have banners for Division and Conference title seasons in which we also won the Cup, but with as many banners as we have, and with the 3 Cup banners at the opposite end of the arena, it doesn't look like we have a brief history of success all clumped together. Even the Islanders and Flyers, who had dynasties and haven't won the Cup since, have enough banners to make it look worth their while. The Bolts, as yet, don't.
There are 5 Lightning players who have been elected to the Hall of Fame. Dino Ciccarelli and Denis Savard each played only 2 seasons for them, Mark Recchi only 1, and each is better known for playing elsewhere. Dave Andreychuk played the last 4 seasons of a 640-goal career for the Lightning, and Martin St. Louis is newly-elected. Vincent Lecavalier is now eligible, but is not yet in.

Phil Esposito, elected for what he did with as a player with the Boston Bruins and then the Rangers, was the Lightning's 1st general manager. He's also been given the Lester Patrick Trophy for contributions to hockey in America. No Lightning players were named to the NHL's 100th Anniversary 100 Greatest Players in 2017, although Esposito was, for his play in Boston.

The Lightning have retired Lecavalier's Number 4 and St. Louis' Number 26. Andreychuk's 25 is not currently being worn, suggesting a future retirement for his number as well. The Lightning do not yet have a team Hall of Fame. Nor did they name a 25th Anniversary All-Time Team when they had the chance last year.

The Florida Sports Hall of Fame is located at Lake Myrtle Sports Park in Auburndale, 48 miles northeast of Amalie Arena. Andreychuk is the only Lightning player yet elected.

The Lightning's rivalry with the Florida Panthers has a trophy called the Governor's Cup, given to the winner of the season series. The Panthers have won it 13 times, the Lightning 12 (including the last 3 seasons, counting this season), with 2 no-awards, in 1996 due to a split of the season series, and in 2005 due to the NHL season being canceled by Gary Bettman's lockout.

The Panthers -- presumably angry because the Lightning were the 1st NHL team in Florida, thus the name "Florida Panthers" rather than "South Florida" or "Miami" -- also lead the all-time series in games, 66-62-10. Ah, but the Lightning have won a Stanley Cup, and the Panthers have not. The teams have never met in the Playoffs.

Stuff. The Tampa Bay Sports store is located to the right of the main staircase, inside the McDonald's Ticket Office on the west side of the arena.

Whether the Store sells team books and DVDs, I don't know. Most likely, the only DVD they would sell would be the official 2004 Stanley Cup highlight video. As for books about the team, you may be out of luck, despite the team now having surpassed their 25th Anniversary. Steve Yerrid published Tampa Bay Lightning Winning Ways: The Making of a Championship Heart, but that was back in 2005, during the yearlong lockout, and is now well out of date, with no mention of current star Steven Stamkos.

During the Game. A November 19, 2014 article on The Hockey News' website ranked the NHL teams' fan bases, and listed the Lightning's fans at 24th -- not good, but 1 above their arch-rivals, the Panthers. The article says, "A good team at a bargain price? Why don't more people support the Lightning?"

In fact, they're averaging a sellout. They're a National Hockey League team averaging more fans per game than their metropolitan area's Major League Baseball team. There is no other metro area where the NHL team outdraws the MLB team. Whatever the Lightning's issues are, attendance is not one of them. (Although the ticket prices, once among the League's lowest, are no longer a bargain.)

Although the locals -- the ones who are not transplanted New Yorkers or New Jerseyans, anyway -- really, really hate the Yankees and Yankee Fans for repeatedly "taking over their ballpark" (as if it were much of a task, or much of a prize), their hockey fans don't have the same kind of rivalry with any of the New York Tri-State Area hockey teams -- not even the Rangers, whom they beat in last year's Eastern Conference Finals.

They will not fight you. Aside from the occasional brawl between football players in the "hate triangle" between the University of Florida, Florida State University and the University of Miami, there is rarely violence at sporting events in Florida.

Sonya Bryson, a retired Air Force sergeant, is the Lightning's regular National Anthem singer. Their goal song is "Fluxland," by the group of the same name. The big chant is, "Let's go, Bolts!"

The team's mascot is ThunderBug -- actually, a lightning bug. (Get it?) He wears a Lightning jersey with Number 00 on it. The team also has the Lightning Girls dancers.
On occasion, the Lightning will wear a 3rd jersey with "BOLTS" in diagonal script, a la the Rangers. Since the team did not exist before 1992, this is not a "throwback," jersey, it's a "fauxback."

After the Game. Despite some crime issues -- Tampa natives Dwight Gooden and his nephew Gary Sheffield both dealt with gang violence growing up in the 1970s and '80s -- Downtown Tampa is not an especially high-crime area. And, as I said, Bolts fans do not get violent. You might get a little bit of verbal if you're wearing opposing team gear, but it won't get any worse than that.

If you're looking for a place to relax with a postgame snack and drink, a mall named Channelside Bay Plaza is across Beneficial Driver from the arena. It has a Hooters, a Japanese restaurant named Oishi, a "fusion" restaurant called Flambe', and a ColdStone Creamery.

Malio's, in downtown Tampa at 400 N. Ashley Drive at Kennedy Blvd., is a locally famous restaurant, known around there as George Steinbrenner's favorite. He had a private room there, as does the still-living Tampa native and Yankee Legend Lou Piniella.
If you're looking to spend time with others from the Tri-State Area, "Legends Sports Bar, Billiard, Hookah and Grill" is the home of the New York Giants Fan Club of Tampa Bay. But it's at 1339 E. Fletcher Avenue, on the north side of Tampa, about 9 miles due north of the arena. The home of the New York Jets Fan Club of Tampa Bay, Peabody's Bar & Grill, is similarly far away, at 15333 Amberly Drive on the north side of Tampa, 14 miles northeast.

If  you visit during the European soccer season (as we are now in), and want to see your favorite club play on TV, the best soccer bar in the Tampa Bay area is MacDinton's, in Hyde Park, about 2 miles over the Hillsborough River and west of downtown. 405 S. Howard Avenue at Azeele St. Bus 30 to Kennedy Blvd. & Howard Avenue, then 3 blocks south on Howard. Unless you're a Liverpool fan, in which case you might prefer Pokey's, at 100 E. Madison Street, downtown, near the Hillsborough River waterfront.

Sidelights. The Yankees' spring training home, George M. Steinbrenner Field (formerly Legends Field), is at Dale Mabry Highway and Tampa Bay Blvd., across from the home of the NFL's Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Raymond James Stadium. (Raymond James is a financial holding company, not a person native to Tampa who deserved the naming rights.)

The University of South Florida (USF) also plays football at Raymond James. The U.S. national men's soccer team has played there, and has won a friendly with Ecuador, 3-1 on March 25, 2007; won a friendly with El Salvador, 2-1 on February 24, 2010; lost a CONCACAF Gold Cup match to Panama, 2-1 on June 11, 2011; won a World Cup Qualifier with Antigua & Barbuda, 3-1 on June 8, 2012; and won a CONCACAF Gold Cup match over Martinique, 3-2 on July 12, 2017.

Playing there, the women's team has won a friendly with South Korea, 1-0 on November 8, 2008; won a friendly with France, 1-0 on June 14, 2014; a SheBelieves Cup match with England, 1-0 on March 3, 2016; and another SheBelieves Cup match there on March 5, 2019, a 1-0 win over Brazil.

North of Raymond James was Al Lopez Field. (Lopez, a Hall of Fame catcher and manager, was a person native to Tampa who deserved the naming rights.) North of that was the Buccaneers' first home, Tampa Stadium, known as The Big Sombrero because of its weird shape. It was built in 1967 with 46,000 seats, and expanded to 74,000 when the Bucs were expanded into existence in 1976. The United States Football League's Tampa Bay Bandits also played there.

The Giants won Super Bowl XXV there. It also hosted Super Bowl XVIII, in which the Los Angeles Raiders beat the Washington Redskins; the 1984 USFL Championship Game, in which the Philadelphia Stars beat the Arizona Wranglers; and 3 games of the U.S. soccer team. It was demolished in 1999.

Raymond James Stadium hosted Super Bowl XXXV, with the Giants losing to the Baltimore Ravens, and Super Bowl XLIII, with the Pittsburgh Steelers beating the Arizona Cardinals. It is scheduled to host Super Bowl LV on February 7, 2021. It also hosted the 2016-17 College Football National Championship Game, in which Clemson beat Alabama.

The entire group of current and former stadium sites is north of downtown Tampa, near the airport. Take the Number 30 bus from downtown to the Number 36 bus to the complex.

One of the legendary homes of spring training baseball, Al Lang Field (now Progress Energy Park), named for the Mayor who promoted St. Pete as a spring training site, is at 1st Street SE & 2nd Avenue S., 2 miles east of the Trop, in downtown St. Pete on the shore of Tampa Bay.

The spring home of the Yankees from 1947 to 1961, the Mets from 1962 to 1987, and the St. Louis Cardinals from 1947 to 1997, it is no longer used as a major league spring training or Florida State League regular season facility. In fact, the new Rays ballpark was supposed to be built on the site, but they haven't been able to get the funding, so Al Lang Field remains standing. It is the home of the new version the Tampa Bay Rowdies, in the new version of the North American Soccer League, the second division of North American soccer. Bus 100X to Bus 4.

Tampa-based teams have won Florida State League Pennants in 1920, '25 (Tampa Smokers), '57, '61 (Tampa Tarpons), '94, 2001, '04, '09 and '10 (Tampa Yankees). St. Petersburg teams have done it in 1975, '86 (St. Petersburg Cardinals) and '97 (St. Petersburg Devil Rays, who won a Pennant before their parent club had even played a game). The Clearwater Phillies won a Pennant in the same year as their parent club in Philadelphia, 1993, and won another under their current name, the Clearwater Threshers, in 2007, presaging their parent club's success.

To get to Tropicana Field, home of the Rays since their inception in 1998, you'll have to go onto Interstate 275, and cross the Howard Frankland Bridge – a bridge named for the local businessman who proposed it, built in 2 spans, 1960 and 1990, and so traffic-ridden it's known locally as "the Howard Frankenstein Bridge" and "the Car-Strangled Spanner"– over Tampa Bay itself and into St. Pete.
Opened in 1990 as the Florida Suncoast Dome, and nicknamed the White Elephant because of its exterior color and lack of a tenant for the sport for which it was intended, the name was changed in 1993 when the NHL's Lightning came in, making the stadium the ThunderDome. But they were only there for 3 seasons, until the building now known as the Tampa Bay Times Forum opened.
In their home opener, October 10, 1993, the Bolts set what was then an NHL record of 27,227 fans in the quirky seating configuration the place had at the time. So an expansion hockey team -- in Florida, mind you -- in the era before you could buy game tickets online, managed to outdraw a winning, Internet-era baseball team.
Anyway, when the Devil Rays (as they were known from 1998 to 2007) arrived, the stadium's name was changed to Tropicana Field -- but, make no mistake, this blasted thing (or thing that should be blasted) is a dome. In 1999, it became the only building in Florida (so far) to host an NCAA Final Four; Connecticut beat Duke in the Final.

The official current seating capacity is 31,042, but that's with several sections of seats tarped over. The actual number of seats is 42,735, but that doesn't give the Trop an "intimate setting." Like the hardly-mourned Kingdome in Seattle, the high, gray roof gives the stadium the look of a bad mall. Those "catwalks" around the rim don't help. And that awful field -- one of the few ever, and the only one now, to have a dirt infield with the rest of the field being artificial turf, instead of just dirt cutouts around the bases -- may make you nostalgic for Giants Stadium's awful experiments with real grass.

But the seating design itself may look familiar to you, in shape if not in color: It was copied from Kauffman Stadium (formerly Royals Stadium) in Kansas City. Don't look for fountains in the outfield, though: That would be too classy for this joint.

The Lightning played their 1st season, 1992-93, at Expo Hall, part of the Florida State Fairgrounds. It seats only 10,425 people, so it was never going to be more than a temporary home, but they outgrew it immediately, because, unlike the new Ottawa Senators, who came into the NHL at the same time, they weren't horrible; indeed, they were rather respectable from the off. 4800 U.S. Route 301, about 8 miles northeast of downtown. It would take 3 buses to get there.
Tampa Bay does not have an NBA team, nor is it likely to try for one in the near future, even though it would rank 20th in NBA markets. The Orlando Magic play 93 miles from downtown Tampa, while the Miami Heat are 279 miles away. Yet, mainly due to LeBron James (but also due to Shaquille O'Neal being much more recently in Miami than in Orlando), the Heat are more popular in the Tampa Bay region than the Magic are -- and the Los Angeles Lakers are nearly as popular as the Magic, probably because of Shaq and Kobe.

The Tampa Bay History Center is across from the arena at 801 Old Water Street. The Florida Aquarium is at 701 Channelside Drive, east of the mall. And Busch Gardens, with its African theme (for political correctness reasons, they can't call it "The Dark Continent" anymore), is at 10165 N. Malcolm McKinley Drive, 10 miles northeast of downtown. Take the Number 8 bus to 7th Avenue & 15th Street, then walk up 15th Street to 11th Avenue and catch the Number 18 bus, and take that to Busch Blvd.

The Beatles never played a concert in the Tampa Bay region. Elvis Presley did: In Tampa, at the Fort Homer Hesterly Armory on May 8 and July 31, 1955, and on February 19 and August 5, 1956; and at Curtis Hixon Hall on September 13, 1970, April 26, 1975 and September 2, 1976; in St. Petersburg, at the Floridian Theater on August 7, 1956, and the Bay Front Center on September 3, 1976 and February 14, 1977; in Sarasota at the Florida Theater on February 21, 1956; and in Lakeland, at the Polk Theater on August 6, 1956, and at the Lakeland Civic Center on April 27 and 28, 1975 and September 4, 1976.

This should provide you with some non-sports things to do in the Tampa Bay region. And, if you want to go there, Walt Disney World is 70 miles up Interstate 4, an hour and 15 minutes by car from downtown Tampa.

No President has ever come from Florida. Two men who served as Governor ran for the Democratic Party's nomination for the office, but neither came particularly close to the nomination: Reubin Askew dropped out after the 1984 New Hampshire Primary, and Bob Graham didn't even make it to calendar year 2004, much less to the Iowa Caucuses.

The Tampa Bay region doesn't have a lot of tall buildings. The tallest, at 579 feet, is 100 North Tampa, named for its address at Whiting Street downtown, formerly named the Regions Building.

Oh, and, get this: As New York is known as the Big Apple, Tampa likes to call itself the Big Guava. In the words of the immortal Jack Paar, I kid you not.

As far as I know, the only major-network TV show set in the Tampa Bay region  has been Second Noah, ABC's 1996-97 series starring Daniel Hugh Kelly as a veterinarian at Busch Gardens. Cougar Town was set in fictional Gulf Haven, supposedly in Sarasota County, which would put it about 60 miles from Tampa. Quite a few films have been set there, though, including Cocoon, Edward Scissorhands and A Time to Kill.

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So, if you can afford it, go on down and join your fellow Devils fans in a little Florida hockey. You'd probably have more fun in Tampa than in the Panthers' out-of-the-way arena. Winning, well, that's another matter.

The Coronavirus, a.k.a. COVID-19, has, thus far, killed about as many Americans as our worst mass shootings. That number could rise to more than the 3,000 or so that were killed on 9/11.

That's the best-case scenario. What might happen if we had a government that gave a damn about its citizens. We don't. Donald Trump only cares about himself, so he's going to do whatever he thinks it will take to keep him in the White House and out of prison. And he has botched this thing six ways to Sunday.

And the stock market, the one thing that had been saving Trump, giving him free rein to say, "Re-elect me because the economy is great," is in free-fall. It's lost a net 4,600 points in the last 4 trading days -- and that includes a 900-point gain on Monday.

Actor Tom Hanks, and his wife, actress Rita Wilson, were in Australia, and feeling a little under the weather. They got tested. They've got it.

There has been some panic, and the idea of Hanks, one of America's most beloved actors, having this disease has freaked some people out. The scientists say that of the people who get it, maybe 2 or 3 percent will die, most of them older people and/or those with compromised immune systems. In other words, if you get it, you may feel lousy for a few days, but you probably won't die because of it. In this one way, it is like the flu, although it may take longer to run its course.

Thus far, New Jersey has reflected this: As of this writing, a little before 1:00 PM on Thursday, March 12, we have about 25 cases, but only 1 death, a 69-year-old man. Most schools in New Jersey are closed, and other States are likely to follow.

Last night, Trump gave a speech from the Oval Office, contradicting his earlier claims that the virus was a hoax to make him look bad and would go away quickly.

But in that speech, his face was oranger and puffier than usual, his right eye was squinting as if he couldn't read the teleprompter (an activity he had mocked Barack Obama for), he slurred some words (twice in a space of 30 seconds, he turned the word "relief" into "reliff"), and gave the impression that he was either sick or on drugs (Adderall is the most-rumored one).

The way that sports has handled it has varied. Before anyone in America realized it was going to be a problem, it was out of control in northern Italy, and Italian soccer games have been played in closed stadiums, with only people necessary to make the game happen allowed in. There is talk that the rest of Europe will do the same.

In America, the NBA has suspended its season, as 2 Utah Jazz players, Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell, have tested positive. Most teams have played about 65 of their 82 regular-season games.

Think about this: This NBA season has seen the collapse of the league's most recent quasi-dynasty, the Golden State Warriors; season-long, or nearly so, injuries to superstars Steph Curry and Kevin Durant; the injury-delayed arrival of super rookie Zion Williamson; and the death of league legend Kobe Bryant -- and none of those stories is the biggest story of the season. The biggest story of the season is that we don't know if -- and, if so, how, the season will be resolved.

Major League Soccer has suspended its season for the next 30 days, at which point it will reassess the situation.

The NHL office has announced it is continuing its season, but will watch for further developments.

The NCAA has announced that its basketball tournament, a.k.a. March Madness, would be played, but "behind closed doors." Suppose they gave a tournament, and nobody came? Conference tournaments, the last activity before the NCAA Tournament, have also been canceled.

Major League Baseball is, like the NHL, taking a wait-and-see approach. The only cancellation thus far has been the home opener series for the Oakland Athletics, and their hand was forced when Alameda County banned large gatherings.

What does all of this mean for my blog? Last September, due to a health scare and some other things going on in my life, I announced that I wouldn't do Trip Guides for the NBA this season. That turned out to be the right thing to do, as this disruption would have messed that up.

As for the NHL: I've done them for every team this season, except one, the Minnesota Wild. That one is due a week from today, on March 19, since the Devils are supposed to play there a week from then, on March 26. I still intend to do that one.

As for MLS: I can't do any more of those until I know what the league intends to do.

As for MLB: I will do those until the Commissioner's office changes its plans.

Somebody on Twitter wrote of yesterday, "Today was like if (Billy Joel's song) 'We Didn't Start the Fire' was a day." And someone responded:

Schools close, Tom Hanks, trouble in the big banks
no vaccine, quarantine, no more toilet paper seen.
Travel ban, Weinstein, panic COVID-19
NBA, gone away, what else do I have to sayyyyyy

We didn't start the virus. No, we didn't light it, but we're trying to fight it.

UPDATE: A few minutes after I posted this, the NHL also suspended its season. A couple of hours later, MLB suspended Spring Training, and suspended regular season games for the 1st 2 weeks of the season, at which point it will reassess. A couple of hours after that, the NCAA canceled both its men's and women's national tournaments outright.

And Arsenal revealed that manager Mikel Arteta tested positive. The Premier League postponed their match with Brighton & Hove Albion this Saturday, but hasn't suspended the season outright yet.

It's been a while since I posted. Mainly because hardly anything is happening in sports. The coronavirus has put pretty much everything on hold, and we won't even know for how long for a while yet.

World War II resulted in travel restrictions, which hurt sports a little, but not a lot of sports cancellations -- at least, not in this country.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy led to people staying home and doing nothing but watch the TV coverage of the funeral proceedings for 4 days -- but there were still NFL games played that Sunday.

The closest parallel is to the 9/11 attacks. Everything, from sports to the New York Stock Exchange, was shut down from Tuesday morning, September 11 until Monday morning, September 17. Some things for a little longer.

This will be longer than that. Much longer. It's looking like it will be at least a month. It may be 2 months. It may be longer than that. We just don't know.

What was it like during that weeklong shutdown after 9/11? How does it compare with now? And how much has the world changed in the 18 years and 6 months since?

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We didn't know how bad it would be. The front page of the New York Daily News on September 13, suggested 10,000 people had died. It was quickly revised to 5,000, and then, when records were checked to see who was in the Twin Towers and hadn't been found alive, and checking against duplicate entries, down to 3,000, still the worst one-day loss of life on American soil since the American Civil War.

This time, the loss of life is likely to be far worse. As of this writing, on the evening of March 15, 2020, there have been 1,629 people confirmed to have the disease, and 64 of them have died. But it will go way up. Hundreds. Thousands. Perhaps millions. We can only guess at this point. And that would have a deeper effect on our national psyche than the all-at-once blow that the 9/11 attacks were.

On 9/11, people whose loved ones hadn't yet been found pretty much knew that those people were dead. Many people were missing for only the 1st day and later found alive, but anybody still missing as the sun rose on September 12 wasn't going to be found alive. (As far as I know, nobody has yet been proven to have used the attack as a convenient way to fake their death and run off with money or an illicit affair.) That time, as Yogi Berra might have said if he'd become an investigator instead of a baseball player, even within the uncertainty, there was certainty.

In addition, we don't have the particulars as to who is going to die. We have already seen some prominent people stricken, including husband-and-wife actors Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta, and the current Mayor of Miami, Francis X. Suarez. But there is, as yet, no indication that any famous person will die from it. Surely, some will.

Among the notable people who died as a result of the 9/11 attacks were television producer David Angell, conservative TV legal analyst Barbara Olson, and hockey player turned scout Garnet "Ace" Bailey. (No relation to the old-time hockey star Irvine "Ace" Bailey.)

In this current crisis, we're addicted to our TV sets, our smartphones, the Internet. In 2001, smartphones were few and far between, a lot of us still hadn't really figured out the Internet, and for those of us in the New York Tri-State Area who still didn't have cable TV, WCBS-Channel 2 was the only station we had left. They still had their antenna on top of the Empire State Building. Everybody else had theirs on top of 1 World Trade Center. So we had one channel, and the same damn thing on, for an entire week.

And that's all we watched: Images of the carnage, updates from police and fire department leaders, politicians making statements, pundits speculating about America's response to al-Qaeda and its allies. The parallel to the 4 days after the JFK assassination was made.

But distractions were few. No sports. No regular TV programming. At least now, we still have new TV content, although some production is being shut down. We won't see the effects of that for a few weeks. If life otherwise returns to normal in, say, 2 months, it'll be like an extended TV Summer, or maybe a writers' strike, as happened to shorten the TV season a few years back.

The sports that were frozen were different. The Houston Astros were still in the National League, on their way to winning its Central Division for the 4th time in 5 years, and no one was accusing them of cheating. The San Francisco Giants had not won the World Series in 47 years, the Boston Red Sox in 83, the Chicago White Sox in 84, and the Chicago Cubs in 93. The Astros, Arizona Diamondbacks, and the team now known as the Los Angeles Angels had never won a World Series. The Astros, D-backs, the Angels, the Colorado Rockies, the Tampa Bay Rays and the Texas Rangers had never even been in one.

The New England Patriots, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the New Orleans Saints, the Seattle Seahawks had never won a Super Bowl. The Bucs, Saints, the 'Hawks, the Carolina Panthers had never even been in one. The Philadelphia Eagles had won NFL Championship Games, but not a Super Bowl. The Arizona Cardinals hadn't been in an NFL Championship Game in 54 years, and that was 2 cities ago. The Colts had won a Super Bowl, but not since moving from Baltimore to Indianapolis.

The Miami Heat, the Dallas Mavericks, the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Toronto Raptors had not yet won an NBA Championship. The Heat, the Mavs, the Cavs and the Raps had not even reached the NBA Finals. The New Jersey Nets had won ABA Championships, but had not yet reached the NBA Finals.

The Tampa Bay Lightning, the Carolina Hurricanes, the Anaheim Ducks, the Los Angeles Kings, the Washington Capitals and the St. Louis Blues had not yet won the Stanley Cup. The Lightning, the 'Canes, the Ducks, the new Ottawa Senators, the San Jose Sharks, and the Nashville Predators had not even reached the Stanley Cup Finals.

The Montreal Expos had not yet become the Washington Nationals. The St. Louis Rams and the San Diego Chargers had not yet moved back to Los Angeles. The Oakland Raiders had not yet moved to Las Vegas. The Houston Texans had not yet begun play.

The Nets had not yet moved to Brooklyn. The Vancouver Grizzlies were in the process of moving to Memphis. The Seattle SuperSonics had not yet become the Oklahoma City Thunder. The original Charlotte Hornets had not yet become the New Orleans Hornets or the New Orleans Pelicans. The Charlotte Bobcats had not yet begun play, nor become the new Charlotte Hornets. The Atlanta Thrashers had not yet become the new Winnipeg Jets. The Vegas Golden Knights had not yet begun play.

There were 11 MLB teams, 17 NFL teams (more than half), 13 NBA teams and 7 NHL teams that have since moved into new venues. Every New York Tri-State Area sports team except the Knicks and the Rangers has done so.

The holders of the World Championships were the Yankees, the Baltimore Ravens, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Colorado Avalanche. That's a lot of purple. Lennox Lewis was the undisputed Heavyweight Champion of the World -- and remains the last man to be so. Manchester United held the Premier League title, Liverpool the FA Cup, and Bayern Munich the UEFA Champions League.

The Olympic Games have since been held in America, Greece, Italy, China, Canada, Britain, Russia, Brazil and Korea. The World Cup has since been held in Japan, Korea, Germany, South Africa, Brazil and Russia.

David Ortiz was a mildly interesting slugger for the Minnesota Twins. Tom Brady had thrown exactly 3 passes in regular-season NFL games, completing 1. Drew Brees and Eli Manning were still in college. Aaron Rodgers, LeBron James and Megan Rapinoe were in high school.

Cristiano Ronaldo was 16 years old. Lionel Messi and Sidney Crosby were 14. Colin Kaepernick, Steph Curry, Clayton Kershaw and Stephen Strasburg were 13. Kevin Durant was about to turn 13. Mesut Ozil, Alex Morgan, Patrick Kane, James Harden were 12. Jose Altuve and Mike Trout were 11. Kawhi Leonard was 10. Aaron Judge was 9. Mookie Betts and Bryce Harper were about to turn 9. Paul Pogba was 8. Giannis Antetokounmpo was 6. Patrick Mahomes was about to turn 6. Gleyber Torres, Connor McDavid, Joe Burrow, Lamar Jackson and Sam Darnold were 4. Christian Pulisic was about to turn 3. Nico Hischier and Kylian Mbappe were 2. Zion Williamson was 1. Jack Hughes was 4 months old.

What were the current managers and head coached of the Tri-State Area teams doing then? Barry Trotz of the Islanders was the head coach of the Nashville Predators. Adam Gase of the Jets was an assistant coach at Louisiana State University. Mike Miller of the Knicks was an assistant coach at Kansas State University. David Quinn of the Rangers was an assistant coach at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Aaron Boone of the Yankees was playing for the Cincinnati Reds. Jacque Vaughn of the Nets was about to start playing for the Atlanta Hawks. Chris Armas of the Red Bulls was playing for the Chicago Fire. Ronny Deila of NYCFC was playing for Odds Ballklubb in Skien, Norway. Luis Rojas of the Mets was playing in the farm system of the team now known as the Miami Marlins. Alain Nasreddine of the Devils was playing for the minor-league Hamilton Bulldogs. Joe Judge of the Giants was playing at Mississippi State University. And Walt Hopkins of the Liberty was in high school in Sparks, Nevada.

The idea that two people of the same gender could legally be married, and have all the legal benefits of marriage, was considered ridiculous. But then, so was the idea that corporations were "people," and entitled to the rights thereof.

George W. Bush had been "President" for less than 8 months, and the idea that his time in the White House would be dominated by terrorism would have been considered ridiculous. Indeed, while many Americans had heard of Osama bin Laden, few had heard of his organization, al-Qaeda.

Former Presidents Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, and their wives, were all still alive. Barack Obama was a State Senator in Illinois. Hillary Clinton was in her 1st year in the U.S. Senate from New York. Donald Trump was about to open the 72-story Trump World Tower, then the tallest all-residential structure on Earth. Derek Jeter would be one of its tenants, although he would later move out.

The Governor of New York was George Pataki. The Mayor of New York City was Rudy Giuliani, and running to replace him were a dedicated Democratic public servant, Mark Green, and a playboy Republican billionaire, Michael Bloomberg.

The Governor of New Jersey was Donald DiFrancesco, filling in the expired term of Christine Todd Whitman, whom Bush had appointed Director of the Environmental Protection Agency. (And Republicans wondered why we called Bush "stupid.") Running to replace DiFrancesco were former Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler, who was so conservative he made the new "president" look like George McGovern; and Woodbridge Mayor and former State Senator Jim McGreevey, who seemed very popular with the ladies, and he seemed to reciprocate their feelings. If we only knew...

There were still living veterans of World War I, the Mexican Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Baltic and Irish Wars of Independence. There were still living survivors of the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the General Slocum fire of 1904, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, and the sinkings of the Titanic in 1912 and the Lusitania in 1915.

The Pope was John Paul II. The current Pope, Francis, had just been named Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio. The Prime Minister of Canada was Jean Chretien. The Prime Minister of Britain was Tony Blair. The British monarch was Queen Elizabeth II. (That hasn't changed.) The holder of the Nobel Peace Prize was Kim Dae-jung, then the President of South Korea. There have since been 3 Presidents of the United States, 5 Prime Ministers of Britain, and 3 Popes.

Major novels of 2001, later turned into movies, included John le Carre's The Constant Gardener, Ian McEwan's Atonement, and Yann Martel's Life of Pi. There were, as yet, only 4 Harry Potter books, and only 3 installments of A Song of Ice and Fire. The 1st Harry Potter film would not debut until November, and no one had yet tried to turn ASOIAF into a TV series or a film.

Major films of the late Summer and early Autumn of 2001 included Original Sin, The Princess Diaries, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Jeepers Creepers, The Musketeer, Rock Star, Zoolander, Mariah Carey's Glitter (a film considered so bad it was nicknamed "Flashdunce"), a high school reworking of William Shakespeare's Othello titled O, and the baseball film Summer Catch. Some of these films' box office would be hurt due to their release close to September 11.

Television shows that had recently aired their final first-run episodes included Nash Bridges, Diagnosis Murder, Baywatch, Walker, Texas Ranger, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Moesha, Xena: Warrior Princess, Star Trek: Voyager, Moesha, and, after 33 years, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Also, Seven Days, whose "Go back a week in time to prevent a horrible occurrence" premise would have been cruel to maintain in the time after 9/11.

Recently debuted were My Wife and Kids, The Weakest Link, Trailer Park Boys, Six Feet Under, Witchblade, and The Amazing Race. However, some shows saw the attacks stop -- or, if premiering afterward, prevent -- their momentum, including the prequel series Star Trek: Enterprise and the Bonanza tribute Ponderosa. This also applied to Kim Delaney's post-NYPD Blue legal drama Philly, and the superhero spoof The Tick.

On the other hand, some new shows did just fine, possibly due to their premise, including the Superman reworking Smallville, with its theme song "Save Me" by Remy Zero; spy series Alias and 24; law-enforcement dramas Crossing Jordan and Law & Order: Criminal Intent; and the sitcoms Scrubs, According to Jim, Reba and The Bernie Mac Show.

On Smallville, Tom Welling was soon to debut as Clark Kent -- but not as Superman. George Clooney's disastrous appearance in Batman and Robin was still the most recent version of the Caped Crusader. Tobey Maguire was filming his 1st appearance as Spider-Man, and Pierce Brosnan his last as James Bond. Paul McGann's one-shot was the most recent version of Doctor Who.

No one had yet heard of Omar Little, Leroy Jethro Gibbs, Michael Bluth, Rick Grimes, Wynonna Earp, Lisbeth Salander, Bella Swan, Michael Scott, Don Draper, Katniss Everdeen, Walter White, Jax Tller, Richard Castle, Leslie Knope or Sarah Manning.

Khloe Kardashian, Rob Kardashian, Lady Gaga, Emilia Clarke and Kit Harington were in high school. Kevin Jonas, Joe Jonas, Rihanna and Emma Stone were in junior high. Louis Tomlinson was 9; Jack Gleeson, Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, Nick Jonas, Miley Cyrus, Nicki Minaj and Zayn Malik were 8; Ariana Grande, Liam Payne, Niall Horan, Harry Styles and Justin Bieber were 7; Kendall Jenner, Sophie Turner and Abigail Breslin were 5; Maisie Williams was 4; Kylie Jenner was 3.

The Number 1 song in America was "I'm Real (Murder Remix)," by Jennifer Lopez, featuring Ja Rule. It replaced "Fallin'," a spectacular debut single for Alicia Keys, whose title (if not subject matter) became problematic after the Towers fell.

The last big event in New York before the attacks was a tribute concert for Michael Jackson at Madison Square Garden. The next big event in New York after them was The Concert for New York City, which included ex-Beatle Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend of The Who, Elton John, David Bowie, Eric Clapton... and Billy Joel, who showed up drunk, saw all these British rock legends, and said, "What's with all the teacups? Where are all the Americans?"

There were plenty of Americans, including James Taylor, John Mellencamp, Bon Jovi, Janet Jackson, Jay-Z, Destiny's Child, and Backstreet Boys. Bruce Springsteen didn't show up, but Melissa Etheridge played "Born to Run" and her own "Come to My Window" -- and, both times, her microphone cut out, but the entire crowd sang along anyway.

A little exercise to get us through this long stretch with no sports. I'll name a greatest player ever for each team. If a team has been in more than one city, I'll do it for each separate city. In following entries, I'll do it for the other North American major league sports.

Alphabetical order by current team name:

Arizona Diamondbacks, 1998-2019 (since the 2020 season hasn't happened yet): Randy Johnson. Their only qualified Hall-of-Famer. Their only other player in the Hall is Roberto Alomar, and he only played 38 games for him, in his last season, 2004.

Atlanta Braves, 1966-2019: Greg Maddux. Milwaukee Braves, 1953-1965: Eddie Matthews. Boston Braves, 1871-1952: Warren Spahn. Braves overall, 1871-2019: Hank Aaron.

Baltimore Orioles, 1954-2019: Cal Ripken Jr. St. Louis Browns, 1902-1953: George Sisler. Browns/O's overall: Sisler. Ted Williams called Frank Robinson the most underrated player of all time, but he only played 6 (admittedly important) seasons with the O's. Picking Cal ahead of Brooks Robinson was tougher. But Sisler may be the greatest forgotten player: A .340 lifetime hitter who was considered the best-fielding 1st baseman of his era. His 257 hits in 1920 stood as a record for 84 years. He could even pitch a little. He'd be remembered a lot more if he hadn't fallen 188 hits short of 3,000.

Boston Red Sox, 1901-2019: Ted Williams. Not quite the greatest hitter who ever lived, but he could be 2nd behind Babe Ruth. Carl Yastrzemski was a very good fielder, as well as a great hitter, so he makes this closer than you might think. David Ortiz, of course, is Sox fans' biggest hero. But he is ineligible, and you know why.

Chicago Cubs, 1876-2019: Ernie Banks. Maybe, with the 2016 World Series win under his belt, someone like Anthony Rizzo, Javier Baez or Kris Bryant will surpass the man known as Mr. Cub. But 512 home runs, and excellence over 19 seasons (1953 to 1971) and at 2 different positions (shortstop and 1st base) helps Banks.

Chicago White Sox, 1901-2019: Frank Thomas. If Shoeless Joe Jackson had been allowed to finish his career, he might rank ahead of the Big Hurt. But he wasn't, and so he doesn't.

Cincinnati Reds, 1882-2019: Johnny Bench. I could tell you that Pete Rose is ineligible, but I won't. I can tell you that Rose split his career between Cincinnati and Philadelphia, but, really, it wouldn't matter. If Pete had spent his entire career in Cincy, Bench would still be ahead of him. No runs, no drips, no errors.

Cleveland Indians, 1901-2019: Bob Feller. A tough call, but Napoleon Lajoie, Tris Speaker and Jim Thome all split their careers with at least 1 other team.

Colorado Rockies, 1993-2019: Larry Walker. Their only Hall-of-Fame player, qualified or otherwise.

Detroit Tigers, 1901-2019: Ty Cobb. The Georgia Peach hasn't played a game in 92 years, but that .366 (or .367) lifetime batting average is still a record, and those 4,189 (or 4,191) hits still put him ahead of Hank Greenberg and Al Kaline.

Houston Astros, 1962-2019: Craig Biggio. Over 3,000 hits, 4 Gold Gloves, 7 All-Star Games, 6 postseason berths including the Astros' 1st Pennant, and, as far as we know, no cheating.

Kansas City Royals, 1969-2019: George Brett. It took the Royals until 2014 to so much as make the Playoffs without him. And I doubt that any player on their 2014 and '15 Pennant winners will surpass him.

Los Angeles Angels, 1961-2019: Nolan Ryan. So many great players have played for the Halos, but split between them and other teams: Frank Robinson, Hoyt Wilhelm, Nolan Ryan, Rod Carew, Reggie Jackson, Don Sutton, Bert Blyleven, Dave Winfield, Lee Smith, Eddie Murray, Rickey Henderson, Vladimir Guerrero, Hall-of-Famers all. Guerrero recently became the 1st player to go into the Hall with an Angels cap on his plaque. But he was only with them for 6 years. Ryan was there for 8, and the bulk of his achievements was with them: 138 of his 324 wins, 2,416 of his 5,714 strikeouts, 5 of his 8 All-Star Games, and 4 of his 7 no-hitters.

Los Angeles Dodgers, 1958-2019: Sandy Koufax. Brooklyn Dodgers, 1883-1957: Duke Snider. Dodgers overall, 1883-2019: Koufax. Jackie Robinson was their most important player, and a great player, but not their greatest player.

Miami Marlins, 1993-2019: Miguel Cabrera. The toughest call for any teams. They've had 5 players reach the Hall of Fame, but they had a combined 5 years with the Marlins. I could have chosen Gary Sheffield, but we'll never know how much of his contributions were real. I could have chosen Jeff Conine, the man known as Mr. Marlin, who was on both World Championship teams, but didn't come close to a Hall of Fame career. So I went with Cabrera, who only spent the 1st 5 seasons of his career with the Fish.

Milwaukee Brewers, 1970-2019: Robin Yount. Paul Molitor comes close. Prince Fielder does not. Christian Yelich might surpass him, but not yet.

Minnesota Twins, 1961-2019: Kirby Puckett. Washington Senators, 1901-60: Walter Johnson. Senators/Twins overall, 1901-2019: Johnson. Puckett's fine all-around career was shorter than it should have been, but it was still ahead of Rod Carew, who split his career between Bloomington and Anaheim. And while Harmon Killebrew was sensational in his one dimension, he was such a one-dimensional player. But the Big Train was just too good a pitcher to not be this franchise's all-time best.

New York Mets, 1962-2019: Tom Seaver. No other choice.

New York Yankees, 1903-2019: Babe Ruth. For all the amazing things about the Sultan of Swat, consider how good he had to be to finish ahead of Lou Gehrig (the greatest 1st baseman ever), Joe DiMaggio (a candidate for the greatest center fielder ever), Mickey Mantle (ditto), Yogi Berra (a candidate for the greatest catcher ever), Derek Jeter (a candidate for the greatest shortstop ever), and Mariano Rivera (the greatest relief pitcher ever) -- and, if you don't care if he used steroids, Alex Rodriguez (a candidate for the greatest 3rd baseman ever).

Oakland Athletics, 1968-2019: Rickey Henderson. Kansas City Athletics, 1955-1967: Enos Slaughter. Philadelphia Athletics, 1901-1954: Jimmie Foxx. A's overall: Henderson. Not that Rickey's ego needs any more fluffing, but, as Bill James put it, you could cut his career in half, and have 2 Hall-of-Famers.

Philadelphia Phillies, 1883-2019: Mike Schmidt. Phils fans already chose him as such on their 1883-1982 Centennial Team -- and he still had 199 home runs, 5 All-Star Games, 3 Gold Gloves, a Pennant and an MVP award to go.

Pittsburgh Pirates, 1882-2019: Honus Wagner. Roberto Clemente was a fantastic all-around player, whose cultural importance surpasses that of almost every player who's ever lived. Ralph Kiner and Willie Stargell were two of the greatest sluggers who ever lived. And Bill Mazeroski may have been the best-fielding 2nd baseman ever, and also hit the most important home run ever. But Wagner, 103 years after his last game, is still the greatest shortstop ever, with 3,420 hits and a career OPS+ of 151.

St. Louis Cardinals, 1882-2019: Stan Musial. Say what you want about Rogers Hornsby, Bob Gibson, Lou Brock and Albert Pujols, but none of them did for the Cards what Stan the Man did.

San Diego Padres, 1969-2019: Tony Gwynn. Not every "Mr. (Team Name)" is a team's greatest player ever, but Gwynn is both Mr. Padre and that team's greatest player ever.

San Francisco Giants, 1958-2019: Willie Mays. New York Giants, 1883-1957: Christy Mathewson. Giants overall, 1883-2019: Mays.

Seattle Mariners, 1977-2019: Ken Griffey Jr. This was going to be a tough call, since I thought he had spent only about half of his career with the M's. But once I looked at their career records again, and saw that Junior actually had 13 seasons in Seattle, compared to Ichiro Suzuki's 14, I realized that the power numbers meant that I had to give it to Griffey.

Tampa Bay Rays, 1998-2019: Evan Longoria. Their only player yet to make the Hall of Fame is Wade Boggs, and he played just 2 seasons for them, at the end of his career. But Longoria is their all-time leader in both home runs and RBIs, and he won 3 Gold Gloves with them, making this a little easier than for the other Florida team.

Texas Rangers, 1972-2019: Adrian Beltre. Technically, this shouldn't be all that hard. It should be Ivan Rodriguez. But he used steroids, so he's ineligible. Fergie Jenkins and Nolan Ryan had some great years for the Rangers, but not enough of them. In contrast, Beltre had 8 years with them, the last at age 39, and he was still producing runs for them.

Toronto Blue Jays, 1977-2019: Roy Halladay. The Jays have had 8 Hall-of-Famers, but it could be argued that none of them had their best years in Toronto. Halladay and Roberto Alomar are the only 2 that come close, and, for reasons of longevity -- 12 seasons, as opposed to Alomar's 5 -- Halladay comes closer, even if he was better in Philadelphia.

Washington Nationals, 2005-2019: Stephen Strasburg. Montreal Expos, 1969-2004: Tim Raines. 'Spos/Nats overall: Raines. Admittedly, Max Scherzer makes this a tough call. Bryce Harper no longer does.

Part II of a series.

Arizona Cardinals, 1988-2019: Aeneas Williams. St. Louis Cardinals, 1960-1987: Larry Wilson. Chicago Cardinals, 1920-1959: Dick "Night Train" Lane. Cardinals overall, 1920-2019: Wilson. I could have gone with Kurt Warner for the Arizona years. Lane may have been the best cornerback ever, but he split his career with 2 other teams. Wilson may have been the best safety ever, up there with Emlen Tunnell, Willie Wood, Paul Krause and Ronnie Lott.

Atlanta Falcons, 1966-2019: Claude Humphrey. Deion Sanders was a Falcon for only 5 seasons. So was Tony Gonzalez. Morten Andersen was there for 8, but he was a kicker. For longevity, and for being the godfather of the 1st good Falcon team, the late 1970s'"Gritz Blitz," I'm giving it to Hall-of-Famer Humphrey.

Baltimore Ravens, 1996-2019: Ray Lewis. You don't have to think he was a good guy. You should admit that he was the best linebacker of the 21st Century.

Buffalo Bills, 1960-2019: Bruce Smith. Even if O.J. Simpson hadn't done what he did after leaving Orchard Park, Bruce would still be ahead of him.

Carolina Panthers, 1995-2019: Cam Newton. His days in Charlotte now appear to be done, but he is clearly the best player in franchise history.

Chicago Bears, 1920-2019: Walter Payton. How do you choose among Payton, Red Grange, Bronko Nagurski, Sid Luckman, Gale Sayers, Dick Butkus and Mike Singletary? We are talking about some of the best and baddest players ever. But who was better, badder, or sweeter than "Sweetness"?

Cincinnati Bengals, 1968-2019: Anthony Munoz. With the possible exception of Forrest Gregg, he was the best offensive tackle of all time.

Cleveland Browns, 1946-2019: Jim Brown. The greatest football player of all time? It's either him or Jerry Rice, and I don't want to hear about no cheating Tom Brady.

Dallas Cowboys, 1960-2019: Emmitt Smith. Bob Lilly? Roger Staubach? Tony Dorsett? Troy Aikman? No, go with the game's all-time leading rusher.

Denver Broncos, 1960-2019: John Elway. A lot of really good players, including some greats on defense, but Elway is still the franchise's defining player, even if his skill as an executive now appears to have been limited to bringing in Peyton Manning.

Detroit Lions, 1934-2019: Barry Sanders. Bobby Layne split his career with Pittsburgh. Doak Walker cut his career short. Dick "Night Train" Lane split his career with 2 other teams. Joe Schmidt, despite still being alive at this writing, isn't as well remembered as some other great defensive players of his time. But Barry often seemed to be beyond human.

Green Bay Packers, 1919-2019: Don Hutson. For all the greatness of the Vince Lombardi years, even Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, Forrest Gregg, Ray Nitschke, Willie Davis and Willie Wood can't match Hutson, the game's 1st great receiver, from the Curly Lambeau era. Nor can Mike Holmgren era players like Brett Favre and Reggie White. Nor can Aaron Rodgers, not that I would call him a player of the Mike McCarthy era.

Houston Texans, 2002-2019: J.J. Watt. He's not ahead of Earl Campbell as Houston's best player ever, but he is for the Texans franchise.

Indianapolis Colts, 1984-2019: Peyton Manning. Baltimore Colts, 1947-1983: Johnny Unitas. Colts overall, 1947-2019: Unitas. How great do you have to be to be ahead of Peyton? As great as Johnny U, who still gets some acclaim as the greatest quarterback who ever lived.

Jacksonville Jaguars, 1995-2019: Fred Taylor. The Jags don't yet have any Hall-of-Famers. Tony Boselli wasn't there long enough. So, until somebody else develops, it's probably a coin flip between Taylor and Jimmy Smith.

Kansas City Chiefs, 1960-2019: Willie Lanier. A tough call over fellow Super Bowl IV-winning defenders Buck Buchanan and Bobby Bell, and their quarterback, Len Dawson. Patrick Mahomes? Looks great, and got them their next ring, but he's got a long way to go.

Las Vegas Raiders, 2020: Haven't happened yet. Los Angeles Raiders, 1982-1994: Howie Long. Oakland Raiders, 1960-1981 and 1995-2019: Art Shell. Raiders overall, 1960-2019: Long. Hard to believe that this franchise, so long known for freaks and rogues, has as its greatest player a straitlaced intellectual from a Jesuit school in the Philly suburbs. For the L.A. years, Howie is a close call over Marcus Allen.

Los Angeles Chargers, 1960, 2016-2019: Philip Rivers. San Diego Chargers, 1961-2015: Kellen Winslow Sr. Chargers overall, 1960-2019: Winslow. Lance Alworth and LaDainian Tomlinson make it a tough choice.

Los Angeles Rams, 1946-1994 and 2015-2019: Deacon Jones. St. Louis Rams, 1995-2014: Marshall Faulk. Cleveland Rams, 1936-1945: Bob Waterfield. Rams overall, 1936-2019: Jones. Up there with Reggie White as the best defensive end of all time, and the coiner of the term "sack," Deacon was his name, flattening ballcarriers was his game.

Miami Dolphins, 1966-2019: Larry Csonka. Sorry, Dan Marino, but you didn't win a ring.

Minnesota Vikings, 1961-2019: Alan Page. For all that Fran Tarkenton achieved, when you think of the Vikings, you think of their 1970s "Purple People Eaters" defense, led by Page.

New England Patriots, 1960-2019: John Hannah. Usually considered the greatest guard in football history, and he never had to cheat.

New Orleans Saints, 1967-2019: Drew Brees. Until he led them to victory in Super Bowl XLIV, it was a tough choice, possibly Rickey Jackson. But with Brees now having some of the best passing numbers ever, it's him.

New York Giants, 1925-2019: Lawrence Taylor. You don't have to think he was a good guy. You could admit that he was the best linebacker of the 20th Century. Actually, the Giants may have had a better linebacker before LT was even born: Sam Huff. And Mel Hein, from back in the 1930s, might have been the greatest center ever.

New York Jets, 1960-2019: Curtis Martin. Joe Namath brought them that title, but his career stats just don't match up with those of Curtis, including 10,302 rushing yards and 58 touchdowns -- plus another 2,439 yards on 367 catches.

Philadelphia Eagles, 1933-2019: Chuck Bednarik. The best center ever? It could have been "Concrete Charley." The best linebacker of his era? If not Huff, it could have been Bednarik. Yes, he is a contender on both counts, the last of the 60-minute men.

Pittsburgh Steelers, 1933-2019: Joe Greene. Terry Bradshaw is rightly beloved, but even he would say, "Describe the Pittsburgh Steelers? Defense." And no defensive tackle, not even Merlin Olsen, was ever better than Mean Joe Greene.

San Francisco 49ers, 1946-2019: Jerry Rice. How good do you have to be to be ahead of the possible greatest quarterback who ever lived, Joe Montana, who gave him a jump-start to his career? Maybe the best player ever. It's either Rice or Jim Brown.

Seattle Seahawks, 1976-2019: Russell Wilson. It's not too soon to say so. Certainly, it wouldn't be, if Pete Carroll hadn't stupidly called that pass.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 1976-2019: Derrick Brooks. A tough call over his teammate Warren Sapp, and earlier Bucs defensive stalwart Lee Roy Selmon.

Tennessee Titans, 1997-2019: Eddie George. Houston Oilers, 1960-1996: Earl Campbell. Oilers/Titans overall, 1960-2019: Campbell. George should be in the Hall of Fame. Campbell not only is, but is one of the defining running backs of his or any other era.

Washington Redskins, 1937-2019: Sammy Baugh. He was the game's 1st great passer. He was a great defensive back. And he is the all-time leading in punting yard average. Think about it: In today's terms, he was Patrick Mahomes, Richard Sherman and Brett Kern at the same time.

Part III of a series.

Atlanta Hawks, 1968-2020: Dominique Wilkins. St. Louis Hawks, 1955-1968: Bob Pettit. Milwaukee Hawks, 1951-1955: Pettit. Tri-Cities Blackhawks, 1946-1951: Deanglo King. Hawks overall, 1946-2020: Pettit. It says something about this franchise that the best player they've had since Pettit retired, 55 years ago, is 'Nique, a one-dimensional player (dunking) who as mocked for being the namesake of a fictional highway where no passing was allowed.

Boston Celtics, 1946-2020: Bill Russell. Sport's ultimate winner. An Olympic Gold Medal, 2 National Championships, and, for the C's, 11 NBA Championships.

Brooklyn Nets, 2012-2020: Brook Lopez. New Jersey Nets, 1977-2012: Jason Kidd. New York Nets, 1967-1977: Julius Erving. Nets overall, 1967-2020: Erving. The Doctor would have given Kidd and Lopez a taste of their own medicine.

Charlotte Hornets, 1988-2002 and 2004-2020: Larry Johnson. Alonzo Mourning was a better all-around player, but wasn't in Charlotte long enough.

Chicago Bulls, 1966-2020: Michael Jordan. I could have said Will Perdue, just to see if you were paying attention.

Cleveland Cavaliers, 1970-2020: LeBron James. Especially the 2nd time around.

Dallas Mavericks, 1980-2020: Dirk Nowitzki. Mark Cuban proved he could run a Dairy Queen, and Dirk proved he could run the floor.

Denver Nuggets, 1967-2020: Dan Issel. David Thompson was better, but was only there for 7 years, Dikembe Mutombo for 5. Issel had 10.

Detroit Pistons, 1957-2020: Isiah Thomas. Fort Wayne Pistons, 1941-1957: Bobby McDermott. Pistons overall, 1941-2020: Thomas. You don't have to like him, especially if you're a Knicks fan, and to a lesser extent a Bulls fan. But, for this team, he's it.

Golden State Warriors, 1971-2020: Steph Curry. San Francisco Warriors, 1962-1971: Wilt Chamberlain. Philadelphia Warriors, 1946-1962: Chamberlain. Warriors overall, 1946-2020: Chamberlain. No, Rick Barry doesn't get this, not since Steph captained a 2nd title. But Wilt still leads everybody.

Houston Rockets, 1971-2020: Hakeem Olajuwon. San Diego Rockets, 1967-1971: Elvin Hayes. Rockets overall, 1967-2020: Olajuwon. Both the Big E and Akeem the Dream (as he was known, and spelled, at the time) played at the University of Houston. And Hayes did play for the Rockets again at the end of his career. But Hakeem is far and away the Rockets' all-time best.

Indiana Pacers, 1967-2020: Reggie Miller. That's included the ABA years.

Los Angeles Clippers, 1984-2020: Chris Paul. San Diego Clippers, 1978-1984: Bill Walton. Buffalo Braves, 1970-1978: Bob McAdoo. Braves/Clippers overall: Paul. This may change over the next few years. Then again, knowing this franchise, that's a layup, but hardly a given.

Los Angeles Lakers, 1960-2020: Earvin "Magic" Johnson. Minneapolis Lakers, 1947-1960: George Mikan. Lakers overall, 1947-2020: Johnson. Magic ahead of Elgin Baylor, Jerry West, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, James Worthy, Shaquille O'Neal, Kobe Bryant, and LeBron James -- and, except for Wilt, that would have been true even if all of these guys (as Baylor, West and Worthy did) spent their entire careers with the Lakers.

Memphis Grizzlies, 2001-2020: Mike Conley. Vancouver Grizzlies, 1995-2001: Shareef Abdur-Rahim. Grizzlies overall, 1995-2020: Conley. Ahead of the brothers Pau and Marc Gasol.

Miami Heat, 1988-2020: Dwyane Wade. LeBron was better for a career, but not for the Heat.

Milwaukee Bucks, 1968-2020: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He was better in L.A., and with them longer. But who's going to top him in Milwaukee? Giannis? Not yet.

Minnesota Timberwolves, 1989-2020: Kevin Garnett. There really isn't a 2nd option.

New York Knicks, 1946-2020: Walt Frazier. Don't tell me Patrick Ewing. He predicted titles. Clyde won them.

New Orleans Pelicans, 2002-2020: Anthony Davis. The fact that he forced his way out to go to the Lakers doesn't change that. Nor does the fact that they had the Hornets name until 2013.

Oklahoma City Thunder, 2008-2020: Kevin Durant. Seattle SuperSonics, 1967-2008: Gary Payton. Sonics/Thunder overall, 1967-2020: Payton. If KD had stayed, he'd be ahead, but he didn't, so he's not.

Orlando Magic, 1989-2020: Dwight Howard. Longevity puts him ahead of Shaquille O'Neal and Anfernee "Penny" Hardaway

Philadelphia 76ers, 1963-2020: Wilt Chamberlain. Syracuse Nationals, 1949-1963: Dolph Schayes. Nats/Sixers overall, 1949-2020: Chamberlain. The greatest player in basketball history. If you have to ask why, you don't know basketball.

Phoenix Suns, 1968-2020: Steve Nash. This was close. I could have given it to Paul Westphal. Had he spent 7 seasons with them instead of 4,, I would have given it to Charles Barkley.

Portland Trail Blazers, 1970-2020: Buck Williams. Bill Walton was more important, but injuries insured that he wouldn't be the choice here.

Sacramento Kings, 1985-2020: Mitch Richmond. Kansas City Kings, 1972-1985: Otis Birdsong. Cincinnati Royals, 1957-1972: Oscar Robertson. Rochester Royals, 1923-1957: Bob Davies. Royals/Kings overall, 1923-2020: Robertson. The NBA's oldest franchise, and the Big O tops everyone they've got -- but that's less a testament to his talent than it is an indictment of what they've done since he left in 1970.

San Antonio Spurs, 1967-2020: Tim Duncan. David Robinson was somebody special. It took somebody special to surpass him.

Toronto Raptors, 1995-2020: Vince Carer. For 1 season, it's Kawhi Leonard. For a career, it's still Vinsanity.

Utah Jazz, 1979-2020: Karl Malone. New Orleans Jazz, 1974-1979: Pete Maravich. Jazz overall, 1974-2020: Malone. The Mailman by a hair over John Stockton.

Washington Wizards, 1997-2020: Gilbert Arenas. Washington Bullets, 1973-1997: Elvin Hayes. Baltimore Bullets, 1963-1973: Earl Monroe. Chicago Zephyrs, 1961-1963: Walt Bellamy. Overall: Monroe. Earl the Pearl.

Part IV of a series.

Anaheim Ducks, 1993-2020: Teemu Selanne. Even having started his career in Winnipeg can't dislodge the Finnish Flash from this honor.

Arizona Coyotes, 1997-2020: Shane Doan. Winnipeg, Jets, 1972-1996: Bobby Hull. Jets/Coyotes overall, 1972-2020: Hull. Doan was the last active player for the old Jets, and edges Teppo Numminen among 'Yotes.

Boston Bruins, 1924-2020: Bobby Orr. He only played 10 seasons for them, and only enough games to add up to 8 full seasons. But it says a lot about them that professional sports have been played atop North Station in Boston for 92 years, and there's only 2 athletes honored with statues there: Bill Russell, who won 11 titles with the Celtics, and Orr, who won just 2, but revolutionized the sport, and did as much as any human being, living or dead, to popularize it in America.

Buffalo Sabres, 1970-2020: Gilbert Perreault. The team's all-time leading scorer did more for them than Dominik Hasek did. Don't tell me how great Hasek was: He was never even the 2nd-best goalie in the NHL, because he was always stuck behind Patrick Roy and Martin Brodeur.

Calgary Flames, 1980-2020: Jarome Iginla. Atlanta Flames, 1972-1980: Tom Lysiak. Flames overall, 1972-2020: Iginla. It's hard to overlook the 1989 Stanley Cup winners, including Lanny McDonald, Theoren Fleury, Joe Nieuwendyk, Al MacInnis and Mike Vernon. But Iginla, who may have been cheated out of the 2004 Cup, is the team's career leader in most offensive categories.

Carolina Hurricanes, 1997-2020: Rod Brind'Amour. Hartford Whalers, 1972-1997: Ron Francis. Whalers/'Canes overall, 1972-2020: Francis. Francis isn't quite the best player if you count only the Carolina years, but he's close.

Chicago Blackhawks, 1926-2020: Bobby Hull. The Golden Jet's stats have been surpassed by many, including his son Brett. But he replaced Maurice Richard as hockey's most exciting player.

Colorado Avalanche, 1995-2020: Joe Sakic. Quebec Nordiques, 1972-1995: Peter Stastny. Nords/Avs overall, 1972-2020: Sakic. Patrick Roy might be the greatest goaltender of all time, but his career was split in half between Montreal and Denver, and so he's not the greatest player ever for either.

Columbus Blue Jackets, 2000-2020: Rick Nash. He was with them for only 7 years, but is still their career leader in most offensive categories.

Dallas Stars, 1993-2020: Mike Modano. Minnesota North Stars, 1967-1993: Neal Broten. Stars overall, 1967-2020: Modano. He might be the best forward American hockey has ever produced. The best American player? See the Rangers' entry.

Detroit Red Wings, 1926-2020: Gordie Howe. Mr. Hockey is still the greatest player ever. Don't tell me Orr was: He played his last game at 30. Don't tell me Wayne Gretzky was: When he was 38, he had to retire; when Howe was 38, he was still 1 of the top 5 players in the game.

Edmonton Oilers, 1972-2020: Wayne Gretzky. It's easy to forget that they won the 1990 Stanley Cup without him. But even Connor McDavid will not surpass him.

Florida Panthers, 1993-2020: Roberto Luongo. It was a tough choice between him and Pavel Bure. If either had spent his entire career in South Florida, that would have clinched it. Luongo was there longer.

Los Angeles Kings, 1967-2020: Marcel Dionne. Maybe one of the 2012 and '14 Stanley Cup winners will overtake him, possibly Dustin Brown, Anze Kopitar, or Jonathan Quick. Then again, we thought Luc Robitaille might, and he didn't. Wayne Gretzky? He was only a King for 7 1/2 seasons, and he wasn't nearly for them what he was for Edmonton.

Minnesota Wild, 2000-2020: Marian Gaborik. Hard to pick one for this team, especially since Mikko Koivu, their all-time scoring leader, doesn't really jump out at you. But Gaborik remains their all-time goalscorer, and was a fantastic player.

Montreal Canadiens, 1909-2020: Maurice Richard. Maybe the Habs have had a player or two who was more talented than the Rocket, but not greater. In Quebec, he is still L'idole d'un peuple -- "the idol of a people," or "the idol of a nation."

Nashville Predators, 1998-2020: David Legwand. He's the all-time leader in points, assists, games and seasons, so he's an easy choice.

New Jersey Devils, 1982-2020: Martin Brodeur. Colorado Rockies, 1976-1982: Lanny McDonald. Kansas City Scouts, 1974-1976: Wilf Paiement. Scouts/Rockies/Devils overall, 1974-2020: Brodeur. Marty's better.

New York Islanders, 1972-2020: Denis Potvin. Mike Bossy was more spectacular, but Potvin was not only more important, but better.

New York Rangers, 1926-2020: Brian Leetch. Mark Messier had the better career (which is true for all but maybe 10 players, ever), and he certainly had the franchise's greatest moment. But Leetch was a Ranger for longer, including said moment, when he, not Messier, won the Conn Smythe Trophy as Playoff MVP, the 1st American to win the award. He may still be the best American-born player ever.

Ottawa Senators, 1894-1934 and 1992-2020: Daniel Alfredsson. It's hard to judge players of the original "Silver Seven" team's era against today's players -- the very name, implying 7 players on the ice, as was the case until around 1910 or so, proves that it was a different game. Maybe King Clancy would be the all-time Ottawa player had he not left for Toronto in 1930.

Philadelphia Flyers, 1967-2020: Bobby Clarke. Dirty? Yes. Great anyway? Yes. You try playing 15 seasons in the NHL with both diabetes and a bullseye on your back.

Pittsburgh Penguins, 1967-2020: Mario Lemieux. I don't care what Sidney Crosby achieves, he won't be better than Lemieux.

St. Louis Blues, 1967-2020: Brett Hull. He may not have come close to a Stanley Cup until after he left St. Louis, but he's ahead of Garry Under, Bernie Federko, Al MacInnis and Keith Tkachuk. It will be a while before we can determine that one of the 2019 Stanley Cup winners has surpassed him.

San Jose Sharks, 1991-2020: Patrick Marleau. He scored 508 goals for them. The next-closest player is Joe Pavelski with 355.

Tampa Bay Lightning, 1992-2020: Steven Stamkos. Ahead of Martin St. Louis and Vincent Lecavalier, without having won a Stanley Cup as they did in 2004? For peak, definitely, yes. For a career, if it's not a yes yet, it will be.

Toronto Maple Leafs, 1917-2020: Frank Mahovlich. The Big M was the scoring star of their biggest, best, and last dynasty.

Vancouver Canucks, 1970-2020: Pavel Bure. Trevor Linden might be Mr. Canuck, but, in this case, spectacular performance beats long-term excellence.

Vegas Golden Knights, 2017-2020: Marc-Andre Fleury. Although he'll be better remembered as a Pittsburgh Penguin, he'll be VGK's 1st Hall-of-Famer.

Washington Capitals, 1974-2020: Alexander Ovechkin. Go ahead and say nice words for Rod Langway, Mike Gartner and Adam Oates, but this one is easy.

Winnipeg Jets, 1972-1996 and 2011-2020: Bobby Hull. Atlanta Thrashers, 1999-2011: Ilya Kovalchuk. Thrashers/Jets overall, 1999-2020: Kovalchuk. If you have to name a member of the "New Jets," it's Blake Wheeler. But if you have to name a single overall Jet, it's the man whose Golden Jet nickname gave the team its name. Sure, it was the WHA, but Hull, more than Gordie Howe of the Houston Aeros, dominated that league.

Part V, and the conclusion, of a series. This one is tougher, since soccer is a much more transient sport than the traditional North American "Big Four." Especially when you consider "loan spells."

What a player did elsewhere, including for his national team, even if it was the U.S. team, is irrelevant here. It's what he did playing for his Major League Soccer team that matters.

There are 4 MLS teams that were named for teams in the North American Soccer League, all on the Pacific Coast: The Portland Timbers, the San Jose Earthquakes, the Seattle Sounders and the Vancouver Whitecaps. Carryovers are not permitted. Nor will great players from NASL teams in a team's city be counted: New York can't count Pele, Los Angeles and Washington can't count Johan Cruyff, and Boston and Toronto can't count Eusebio.

Atlanta United, 2017-2019: Josef Martinez. The Venezuelan has made this choice very easy.

Chicago Fire, 1998-2019: Piotr Nowak. A good Polish player would certainly find a home in Chicago, and he sure did.

FC Cincinnati, 2019: Kendall Watson. The Costa Rican was trusted to be team Captain.

Colorado Rapids, 1996-2019: Marcelo Balboa. Good player, but how did a defender become a team's most popular player ever? Probably the long flowing hair.

Columbus Crew, 1996-2019: Brian McBride. He is a big figure in the histories of both club and country. Or, to use Crew fans' favorite adjective, "Massive."

FC Dallas, 1996-2019: Jason Kreis. Elsewhere, he's probably better known as a manager, but, in North Texas, he's their all-time leading scorer.

D.C. United, 1996-2019: Jaime Moreno. John Harkes, Jeff Agoos and Eddie Pope did more for the national team, but, as I said, that doesn't matter for this list, so it's Moreno. A close 2nd is his fellow Bolivian, Marco Etcheverry.

Houston Dynamo, 2006-2019: Brian Ching. Most goals, most assists, and 8 seasons without going blind looking at his teammates' hyper-orange jerseys.

Inter Miami, 2020: Can't say yet, as they just started.

LA Galaxy, 1996-2019: Landon Donovan. For all their international legends -- David Beckham, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Steven Gerrard -- and American legends Cobi Jones and Edson Buddle, it's Donovan who tops their list. And, again, the national team and what he's done for them isn't counted toward it.

Los Angeles FC, 2018-2019: Carlos Vela. He wasn't good enough for England's Premier League, but he found his level at Exposition Park.

Minnesota United, 2017-2019: Ethan Finlay. Hard to choose a player from a team so new, unless someone makes it obvious, as Josef Martinez did for Atlanta.

Montreal Impact, 2012-2019: Evan Bush. Unique among MLS teams, their best ever is a goalkeeper.

Nashville SC, 2020: Can't say yet, as they just started.

New England Revolution, 1996-2019: Taylor Twellman. Studio analysis doesn't enter into it.

New York City FC, 2015-2019: David Villa. Not Andrea Pirlo: He was washed up by the time he got to Yankee Stadium II.

New York Red Bulls, 1996-2019: Thierry Henry. I know, I said what a player did elsewhere doesn't matter. But, while Bradley Wright-Phillips scored more goals for the former MetroStars, he wasn't better.

Orlando City, 2015-2019: Dom Dwyer. Better known as Mr. Sydney Leroux.

Philadelphia Union, 2010-2019: Sebastien Le Toux. Holds more team offensive records.

Portland Timbers, 2011-2019: Diego Valeri. The Argentine is 1st in goals, 1st in assists, and 2nd in appearances, including the 2015 MLS Cup win.

Real Salt Lake, 2005-2019: Javier Morales. Far and away their all-time leading scorer.

San Jose Earthquakes, 1996-2019: Chris Wondolowski. Wondo gets a bum rap for his insufficient performances for the national team. But he has scored 155 goals for the Quakes. Next-best is Ronald Cerritos, with 61.

Seattle Sounders, 2009-2019: Clint Dempsey. Like I said, his USMNT achievements have nothing to do with this.

Sporting Kansas City, 1996-2019: Tony Meola. The goalkeeper from Kearny, New Jersey found a home far from PATH, on the Plains.

Toronto FC, 2007-2019: Sebastian Giovinco. Not good enough for Juventus in his homeland, but for the Ontario Reds, he was more than good enough.

Vancouver Whitecaps, 2011-2019: Russell Teibert. The fact that the midfielder is from Canada (albeit Niagara Falls, far across the country) shouldn't matter, but his longevity and performance do.

Walt Frazier is ageless, timeless, and peerless. He may be the coolest human being who ever lived.

Walter Frazier -- no middle name -- was born on March 29, 1945 in Atlanta. This being the pre-1964 South, he went to all-black schools, including David Tobias Howard High School in Atlanta. He is only its 4th-most important alumnus, trailing civil rights activists Martin Luther King Jr., Maynard Jackson and Vernon Jordan. It is currently being renovated and converted into a middle school, as a feeder school for Henry W. Grady High School.

Like Willie Mays, he was a quarterback who thought football was his best sport, but, in a statement that was then true as far as professional football was concerned, he said, "There were no black quarterbacks, so I played basketball."

He accepted a basketball scholarship from Southern Illinois University. Although integrated, and in the same State as Chicago, don't let that fool you: SIU is in Carbondale, and it's more Southern than Illinois. It's further south than St. Louis (106 miles to the northwest). It's closer to Memphis (212 miles to the southwest) than it is to Chicago (332 miles to the north).

But he excelled there, being named an NCAA Division II All-American in 1964 and 1965. He got them to the Division II Final in 1965, losing to a University of Evansville team that featured future Chicago Bulls star and Utah Jazz coach Jerry Sloan.

He lost his eligibility for the 1965-66 season, for academic reasons. SIU, whose teams are called the Salukis, after a breed of hunting dog similar to an Afghan hound, joined NCAA Division I for the 1966-67 season, and, under coach Jack Hartman, advanced to the Final of the National Invitation Tournament.

It had been several years since the NIT really mattered, since the college basketball point-shaving scandal of 1951. Certainly, no one believed that SIU could seriously challenge NCAA Tournament winners UCLA, coached by John Wooden and starring Lew Alcindor, later to rename himself Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

But the NIT did get Frazier to Madison Square Garden for the 1st time, and in the Final, SIU played Marquette University of Milwaukee, coached by Rockaway native and former Knick Al McGuire. The Salukis won, Frazier was named the Tournament's Most Valuable Player, and New York took notice of him. SIU would retire the Number 52 that he wore there.

The Knicks took him with the 5th pick of the 1967 NBA Draft. He joined a team that already had Willis Reed at center, Bill Bradley and Cazzie Russell at forward, and Dick Barnett at guard. But while they won their season opener, they dropped their next 4, before Frazier made his professional debut on October 28, 1967. He played 34 minutes, attempted 8 shots, and made just 1, although he had 8 rebounds and 7 assists. The Knicks lost, 111-98 to the Detroit Pistons at The Garden.

Their last game at the 49th-50th Street and 8th-9th Avenue Garden was on February 10, 1968, and they beat the Philadelphia 76ers 115-97. Their 1st game at the 31st-33rd Street and 7th-8th Avenue Garden was on February 14, and they beat the San Diego Rockets 114-102.

In mid-season, general manager Eddie Donovan fired head coach Dick McGuire, Al's brother and a Hall of Fame guard for the Knicks in the 1950s, and moved him to the post of scouting director. Red Holzman, who had helped the Rochester Royals win the 1951 NBA title, was named head coach, and everything began to come together. Frazier was named to the NBA's All-Rookie Team.

On December 19, 1968, the most important trade in Knick history was made. The Knicks sent Walt Bellamy, a Hall of Fame center but not really someone who fit Holzman's plans, and Howie Komives, a good but not great guard, to the Pistons for forward Dave DeBusschere. "Double D" became the key to the Knicks' defense.

Now, the starting five that symbolize team basketball in New York was in place: Reed, DeBusschere, Bradley, Frazier and Barnett. True, the Boston Celtics, who won 11 titles in 13 seasons from 1957 to 1969, had really "invented" the team game as far as the NBA was concerned. But don't tell that to Knick fans: To them, the great coach was William "Red" Holzman, not Arnold "Red" Auerbach.

As the Knicks got better, the New York media got interested in their personalities. Reed was the Captain, the on-court leader who took nonsense from his own players and took no prisoners from the opposition. DeBusschere was the enforcer, which is not to say that he was dirty: He was aggressive, but clean, more Gandalf the Wizard saying, "You shall not pass!" than a typical Ranger goon.

Bradley was the Princeton and Oxford intellectual: Not that they weren't all smart -- Barnett got a Ph.D. in education, and has been referred to as "Doctor Dick" ever since -- but Bradley was on another level, with John McPhee's book about him being titled A Sense of Where You Are. He always seemed to know what was going to happen next on the court.

Frazier was the coolest cat in the game. He wasn't just (Cliche Alert) smooth as silk on the court, playing both offense and defense as if no effort was needed (which was deceptive, as he was a hard worker). He became the fanciest dresser in the league, his suits and fedora hats leading someone to compare him to Warren Beatty in the film Bonnie and Clyde. He has been "Clyde" Frazier ever since. He also began to favor fancy cars, fancy restaurants, and fancy women. He was the ultimate man about town.

We recently saw the conclusion of Season 1 of Star Trek: Picard on CBS' streaming service.

There have now been 8 Star Trek TV series. Here they are in chronological order, from our perspective:

1. 1966-69: Star Trek, a.k.a. Star Trek: The Original Series or TOS
2. 1973-74: Star Trek, a.k.a. Star Trek: The Animated Series or TAS
--. 1979-94: Movies based on The Original Series
3. 1987-94: Star Trek: The Next Generation, a.k.a. TNG
4. 1993-98: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a.k.a. DS9
--. 1994-2002: Movies based on The Next Generation
5. 1995-2001: Star Trek: Voyager, sometimes abbreviated to VOY
6. 2001-05: Enterprise, renamed Star Trek: Enterprise in 2003, sometimes abbreviated to ENT
7. 2017-current: Star Trek: Discovery, sometimes cheekily abbreviated to STD or Disco
8. 2020-current: Star Trek: Picard, a.k.a. STP

And here they are in chronological order, from their characters' perspective:

2151-61: Enterprise
2256-57: Discovery
2265-69: The Original Series
2269-70: The Animated Series
2272-93: Movies based on The Original Series
2364-70: The Next Generation
2369-75: DS9
2371-78: Voyager
2372-79: Movies based on The Next Generation
2399: Picard

I'll rank the movies another time. How should these TV series be ranked? I personally assigned a ranking of 0 to 10 for each season of each series, totaled them, and divided these figures by the shows' number of seasons, so that the longer series don't have the unfair advantage of having more good -- or the unfair disadvantage of having more bad -- episodes.

Here's what I came up with:

8. Discovery: 5.00. Horrible 1st season, the worst in Trek history, including the stupid "spore drive," the pointless profanity, and the overall darkness that made people think of J.J. Abrams'Trek that dare not speak its name. Speaking of which, Disco's redesign of the Klingons was nearly as stupid as those of the movies in question.
Unlike most Trek series, though, it was able to save itself before Season 3. The introduction of the Constitution-class USS Enterprise, complete with Captain Christopher Pike, Number One and young Spock helped a lot.

Sending the USS Discovery to the 32nd Century, with the implication that the United Federation of Planets has disintegrated, is troubling, especially for those of us who prefer a more optimistic Star Trek.

7. The Animated Series: 4.50. The least-seen series, mainly because it only aired once, on Saturday mornings in the days of Watergate, before being picked up by nostalgia-themed cable-TV networks. I didn't see it in full until 2018.
Saying it ran for 2 seasons isn't really fair: In total, it ran 22 episodes. Being animated, they could do things TOS simply couldn't, including much more fantastical species to be allies and opponents. And some of the stories were good, including giving Nichelle Nichols more to do as Nyota Uhura, and filling in some of Spock's background.

But the animation style now seems crude. It's comparable to another Filmation series of the period: Super Friends. If you can watch it for free, go ahead. But unless you're an absolutist who has to see everything Star Trek, and haven't yet seen it, don't spend money to do so.

6. Voyager: 5.86. Not only did this show fall victim to the 1st 2 seasons trap, but its 1st 2 seasons were the worst 1st 2 seasons of any Trek show. But Season 3 saw the transition from Kes to Seven of Nine, and switching the enemies from the Vidiians and the Kazon to the Hirogen and the Borg.
The show got considerably better, mixing in light episodes with dark ones, and, like DS9, having a fine 7th season and a very satisfying finale.

5. Picard: 6.00. Only 1 season to judge so far, and the dark tone of its 1st half was truly depressing. Nearly all of us wanted to see Jean-Luc Picard again -- and also ex-Borgs Seven of Nine, Hugh and Icheb -- but not like this. We certainly didn't want to see a 9/11 -- or, as the more proper metaphor turned out to be, a Reichstag Fire -- on Mars. And, yes, about half of the profanity would have been fine.
The series was saved by the reintroduction of Will Riker and Deanna Troi. The season finale polarized people, but I thought it was very appropriate, given the character (as in the personality and judgment) not just of Picard, but of Data. And the season did end on a very hopeful note. If they do make a 2nd and a 3rd season, and they're as good as the 1st, this show will gain on this list.

4. Enterprise: 6.25. The idea of a prequel series reminded us all that the original show was about the exploration of space, and of Gene Roddenberry's idea: A combination of "Hornblower in space" and "Wagon Train to the stars."

(Created by British author C.S. Forester, in novels published between 1937 and 1967, Horatio Hornblower was a sailor in Britain's Royal Navy between 1793 and 1848. Wagon Train was a Western airing from 1957 to 1965, switching from NBC to ABC in 1962.)

The novelty, and the fact that it was now the only Trek series on the air, helped. The 9/11 attacks coming just 15 days before its preselected premiere date didn't, and a lot of people who would have had great enthusiasm for the show lost it.
The 1st season was decent, if a bit frustrating, as we needed time to get to know these characters. The 2nd dragged a bit. The "Xindi arc" made the 3rd season compelling TV, even though it was even darker than the Dominion War arc on DS9. The 4th season, including the aftermath of the Xindi War, the look at pre-Spock Vulcan, and the start of the conflict with the Romulans, was interesting. The series finale was polarizing, but I admit that I liked it.

3. The Original Series: 6.33. The 1st season was unlike anything anyone had seen in science fiction before. In spite of some silliness, and some limitations due to the available technology (overuse of stock footage, papier-mache boulders), and the occasional overdoing-it of William Shatner, it holds up pretty well, and the 21st Century "remastering" helps. The 2nd season was even better.
True, the 3rd season, with the budget cuts and the production of Fred Freiberger, left a lot to be desired. If it had been allowed to be as good as the 1st 2, it would still top the list.

2. Deep Space Nine: 6.71. This one began in the shadow of The Next Generation, and fell victim to the pattern established by that show that it takes a Trek series 2 full seasons to really get going. But the 3rd season, with the introduction of the Dominion as a threat, and of the USS Defiant as a small but badass starship, helped.

Yes, the later seasons of this 1st Trek series developed without the input of Roddenberry were dark. (And the writers pissed me off by saying that baseball had died on Earth after the 2042 World Series -- now just 22 years away.) But not entirely. And it had better character development than any other Trek series. (Heck, TOS and TAS had no character development, as nearly every episode was self-contained.)

DS9, a better show overall than TOS? I don't agree, but the math suggests otherwise. I think I can live with it.

1. The Next Generation: 6.86. Going into this show, my father, an original Trekkie from 1966, and I had hope, but not really expectations. Could they really copy what TOS had gotten right, and fix what went wrong? There were signs in the 1st 2 seasons that they would, but they made a lot of their own mistakes.

Season 3 changed everything, symbolized by a switch from the jumpsuits to more suitable uniforms. The mistakes got fewer. The cultural sensitivity was increased. The scripts got better. The character development got better. And then came "The Best of Both Worlds, Part I,"Star Trek's 1st season-ending cliffhanger, and arguably the greatest cliffhanger in the history of television.

Season 4 was the best overall season of Trek ever, to that point, and it may still be. Season 5 nearly matched it. Berman and Piller at Burbank. The last 2 seasons were a slip, but, if Q was right, and all good things must come to an end, it ended very well. (Or so we thought it was the end, until Picard.)

By a slim margin, TNG remains the best Star Trek series to date. But Discovery and Picard are currently ongoing, and may yet reach new heights of quality, boldly going where no Trek series has gone before.

I know, this Coronavirus pandemic is getting to all of us, in various ways. Some of us, more than others. Some of us are merely bored. Some of us are getting cabin fever. Some of us are going broke and running out of supplies. Some of us, it's affecting our mental health in serious ways.

But we're going to get through this.

On January 20, before most of us had even heard of this virus, I posted the following:

We have survived 3 years of this Administration. You have survived it.

You, yes, you are a survivor. Think about it:

* If you are at least 11 years old, you survived the George W. Bush Administration.

* If you are at least 19 years old, you survived the entire Dubya Administration and the 9/11 attacks.

* If you are at least 29 years old, you survived the Cold War.

* If you are at least 31 years old, you survived the Ronald Reagan Administration.

* If you are at least 39 years old, you survived the entire Reagan Administration.

* If you are at least 46 and 51 years old, you survived the Richard Nixon Administration. And I have survived each of the preceding along with you.

* If you are at least 51 years old, you survived the entire Nixon Administration.

* If you are at least 58 years old, you survived the Cuban Missile Crisis.

* If you are at least 65 years old, you survived the Vietnam War, either serving in it or avoiding having been drafted into it.

* If you are at least 85 years old, you survived the Korean War, either serving in it or avoiding having been drafted into it.

* If you are at least 93 years old, you survived World War II, either serving in it or avoiding having been drafted into it.

* And if you are between 79 and 91 years old, you survived the Great Depression.

Congratulations on surviving everything that you have survived.
This country has survived all of that, and a Civil War, and a Revolution, and, yes, disease outbreaks, such as the yellow fever that often struck low-lying cities like Boston, Philadelphia and New Orleans with regularity. The parallel is appropriate, because yellow fever is spread by a virus (carried by mosquitoes), the symptoms are similar, the time of feeling bad is similar if you survive, and the date rate is similar if you don't. A vaccine for it exists.

Things may even be better afterward. The sense of community that we gained during the Depression and strengthened in World War II, lost thereafter, regained after 9/11, and then lost again as Trump divided us, is already beginning to return. Bad news for him.

And there will be great art coming from this. History -- and this article, published yesterday by Cracked.com -- suggests it is a certainty.

The Black Death of the 1340s, the bubonic plague, killed 1/3rd of the people of Europe. But it meant that employers who survived had to bid more for the workers who were left. They made more money, and so did the employers. Both could afford frivolous things for the first time glory days of ancient Rome, 1,000 years before. They started to buy books, sparking the rise of modern literature. And works of art, moving that forward. It was a rebirth -- in French, "Renaissance."

William Shakespeare never caught the plague, but he got a boost from it -- twice. In 1593, unable to put plays together and appear in them, he "self-isolated," and wrote several of his better-known poems, and one of his best-remembered plays, Romeo and Juliet.

That play references a plague: The priest sent to tell Romeo about the plan for Juliet to appear, not actually be, dead never got to Mantua where Romeo had been exiled, because he came to a plague-plagued town first. And let's not forget the dying words of Mercutio, friend to Romeo's House Montague, and thus enemy to Juliet's House Capulet: "A plague o' (on) both your houses!"

There was another plague outbreak in England in 1606. That time, he wrote 4 plays. Timon of Athens is generally considered not to be a big deal. Antony and Cleopatra, a decent-sized deal. King Lear and Macbeth are considered 2 of the biggest deals in the history of English-language literature. And each of those, except Antony and Cleopatra, reference a plague.

Another bubonic outbreak, in England in 1665, became known as the Great Plague. It closed down Cambridge University, forcing a student to stay home and think. Self-isolating, he self-educated, thinking about things like light and gravity, and how they worked. His name was Isaac Newton, and, over the next 25 years, his writings invented modern physical science.

Tuberculosis basically raged as an epidemic throughout the 19th Century. At one point, 1 out of every 4 people who died in Europe and North America did so due to T.B. Never was there a better Century for world literature. The disease killed John Keats at age 25 in 1821, Emily Brontë at 30 in 1848, her sister Anne Brontë at 29 in 1849, Honoré de Balzac at 51 in 1850, and Anton Chekhov at 44 in 1904. 

(Jane Austen died in 1817 at 41, but it probably wasn't T.B. Addison's disease and lymphoma have been suggested. Another Brontë sister, Charlotte Brontë, died in 1855 at 38, and the cause was given as T.B., but she was pregnant, and modern scholars think it was more likely due to constant morning sickness causing dehydration.)

Many 19th Century literary works featured a heroine dying young. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights in 1847, at which point she and her sisters were already all ill. Alexandre Dumas fils' La Dame aux Camélias (The Lady with the Camellias) in 1848. Henri Murger's Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (Scenes of Bohemian Life) in 1851. Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary in 1856 (although Emma Bovary dies by suicide, not disease). Victor Hugo's Les Misérables in 1862. Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment in 1866. Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina in 1878.

Not female, and definitely no hero, but definitely dying of a disease, a jungle fever in what was once known as "Darkest Africa," is Kurtz, the character around whom Joseph Conrad's 1899 European colonialism-themed Heart of Darkness revolves. That story became the basis for Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now.

And, of course, operas traditionally had unhappy endings. In 1853, Giuseppe Verdi took La Dame aux Camélias and turned it into La Traviata (The Fallen Woman). In 1895, Giacomo Puccini took Scènes de la Vie de Bohème and turned it into La Bohème. In each case, the Italian opera has achieved a fame that has eclipsed that of the French novel upon which it was based.

The AIDS epidemic of the 1980s hit New York's theater community, with a large portion of it occupied by gay men, very hard. Larry Kramer wrote The Normal Heart. William M. Hoffman wrote As Is. Tony Kushner wrote Angels in America.

Terrence McNally -- not a survivor of HIV, but a survivor of cancer, but with his immune system thus compromised, and thus on March 24 he died, becoming one of the more famous victims of COVID-19 -- wrote Love! Valour! Compassion! And Jonathan Larson, whose death at 35 in 1996, right before it could be staged, was due to a heart defect, not AIDS, wrote the musical Rent -- an unapologetically obvious update of La Bohème.

Just as novels, plays, films, paintings, you name it about various wars often appear even before a war ends, you can be sure that, within 5 years from now, someone who has survived the coronavirus pandemic will produce the 1st great work of art based on it.

And most of us will be there to see it.

Because we're going to get through this.

We have already gotten through so much. We're stronger and tougher than we know, until we have to know.

The history of sports is loaded with unlikely heroes. Tom Dempsey was less likely than most. But sports also proves that the unlikely is not impossible.

Thomas John Dempsey was born on January 12, 1947 in Milwaukee, and grew up outside San Diego in Encinitas, California. He was born with no fingers on his right hand, and no toes on his right foot. He had to wear a special "half shoe," and he seemed unlikely to become a sports legend.

But he went out for the football team at San Dieguito Academy, and made it as a placekicker, wearing a different special shoe, whose flat front seemed to make kicking easier. He continued to wear it at nearby Palomar College, and into the NFL.

Opposing players claimed that it made things easier for him. This had previously happened with Ben Agajanian, who had lost his toes (but kept the rest of his foot) in a work accident, but still kicked in the NFL with a flat-fronted shoe. Agajanian challenged other kickers to try wearing his shoe, but none did. In Dempsey's case, none could, and he just took the comments in stride.

He was not selected in the 1969 NFL Draft, but was signed as a free agent by the New Orleans Saints. While soccer-style, side-approaching and instep-kicking kickers had begun to appear in the 1960s, Dempsey was still of the straight-ahead variety using the big toe, or the flat surface he had in place of a big toe. He was named to the Pro Bowl as a rookie.

On November 8, 1970, the Saints were playing the Detroit Lions at Tulane Stadium, and trailed 17-16 with time for one more play. The early Saints were terrible: They had debuted in 1967, and were 13-34-2 in their brief history, including 1-5-1 that season. Tom Fears, the Hall of Fame receiver for the Los Angeles Rams who had been named their 1st head coach, had just been fired, and this was their 1st game under J.D. Roberts, who finished out that season and lasted just 2 more.

At this point, the NFL had the goalposts on the goal line. And the record for the longest field goal was 56 yards, by Bert Rechichar of the Baltimore Colts in 1953. In the 17 years since, no one had even attempted a field goal longer than that. It was the kind of stunt that could only be done at the end of the 1st half or the end of the game, for fear of giving the opposition great field position.

The Saints were on their own 44-yard line. Their quarterback was Billy Kilmer. Two years later, Kilmer would take the Washington Redskins to the NFC Championship and Super Bowl VII. But, at this point, he was best remembered as a single-wing quarterback at UCLA, and not a great passer. The idea of Kilmer flinging the ball 56 yards for a touchdown did not fill Roberts with confidence.

But Dempsey, who had kicked a 55-yarder the year before, thought he could make it, and convinced Roberts to let him try a field goal from a distance far beyond that from which anyone had yet had the guts to try. Not even in the freewheeling, recently wrapped-up AFL.

This was in New Orleans, a city below sea level. It was on real grass, not artificial turf, and this was the middle of the season, so the field was in bad shape. (Tulane Stadium would get artificial turf the next season.) There was no kicking tee: In the NFL, that's only legal for kickoffs. There was game-winning pressure. Years later, a scientist hired by ESPN determined that the flat front of Dempsey's half-shoe may actually have made the kick less likely to be good. His only advantage was a slight wind behind him.

What's more, he decided he'd actually have a better chance if the placement were an addition yard back, 8 yards instead of the legally-mandated 7, making the kick 63 yards.

Dempsey faced the enclosed north end of Tulane Stadium's semicircle. Jackie Burkett snapped the ball, and it was low. Holder Joe Scarpati had trouble with it, but set it down properly. Dempsey sent the ball straight on, and it flew, and flew, and flew...
And it perfectly split the uprights, good by a full 3 yards. Finale score: Saints 19, Lions 17.

There is surviving videotape of the kick, but it's in bad shape. You're better off looking at NFL Films' version. Unfortunately, both are from the press box on the west side of the stadium, so the view is sideways. There seems to be no surviving footage that shows the kick straight-on, either from the front or the rear.

"I was more concerned about kicking it straight, because I felt I could handle the distance," Dempsey said. "I hit it sweet."

The stunning kick was the highlight of not just the Saints' season -- they wouldn't win another game, finishing 2-11-1 -- but, arguably, their entire history until their Super Bowl season of 2009-10.

The next season, 1971, Dempsey was traded to the Philadelphia Eagles, and he led the NFL in field goal percentage, 70.4 percent, kicking a 54-yarder. He spent 4 seasons with them, the 1st 3 with those awful white helmets with green wings, before they went back to the traditional white (or silver) wings with green helmets for 1974. He spent the 1975 and 1976 seasons with the Los Angeles Rams, 1977 with the Houston Oilers, and 1978 and 1979 with the Buffalo Bills, before retiring.
In 1974, the NFL moved the goal posts from the goal line to the end line, at the back of the end zone. From that point onward, a 63-yard field goal would be made not at your own 37, but your own 47. In 1977, the NFL added the "Tom Dempsey Rule": "Any shoe that is worn by a player with an artificial limb on his kicking leg must have a kicking surface that conforms to that of a normal kicking shoe." Dempsey was still active, so he was "grandfathered in," and allowed to continue using his flat-fronted shoe.

He finished his career making 252 out of 282 extra points, or 89.4 percent; and 159 of 258 field goals, or 61.6 percent. (Maybe 63 would have been appropriate, but he wasn't quite that good.) He tried 39 field goals from 50 yards or longer, and made 12 of them, an astounding percentage for the time.

He was elected to the Saints' team Hall of Fame. He has never been elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio -- only 2 pure kickers, as opposed to pre-1970 kickers who also played other positions, have been: Jan Stenerud and Morten Andersen -- but the shoe he wore for the record-setting kick is on display there.

Dempsey's record stood alone until 1998, when Jason Elam of the Denver Broncos tied it. It was tied again in 2011, but Sebastian Janikowski of the Oakland Raiders. Both of these kicks came in the mile-high air of Denver. In 2012, David Akers, then with the San Francisco 49ers, hit a 63-yarder against the Green Bay Packers, in a city that's 581 feet above sea level.

On December 8, 2013, 43 years after Dempsey set the record, Matt Prater of the Broncos broke it, kicking a 64-yard field goal to end a half against the Lions, the same team against whom Dempsey's kick was made. This, too, was in Denver. I remind you that Dempsey kicked his 63-yarder below sea level.

On October 7, 2018, in Charlotte, North Carolina, 761 feet above sea level, Graham Gano did something no kicker had done since Dempsey: Kick a game-winning field goal 63 yards or more. He did so to give the Carolina Panthers a 33-31 win against the New York Giants. Afterward, he told the media that he always wanted to kick one that far to win a game, just like Dempsey had. Dempsey heard about it, and sent him an autographed kicking tee.

The aforementioned Sebastian Janikowski now holds the career record for most field goals of at least 50 yards, 53.

Following his career, Dempsey returned to New Orleans, to the suburb of Metairie, with a wife named Carlene, and they had 3 children: Daughters Ashley and Meghan, and son Toby. He worked as a salesman for an oil company, and then Saints owner Tom Benson, who owned a string of car dealerships, hired him to run one.

In 2005, the Dempsey house was flooded as a result of Hurricane Katrina. He said, "The hurricane flooded me out of a lot of memorabilia, but it can't flood out the memories."
But the memories would go: In 2013, he revealed he was suffering from dementia. A scan showed 3 holes in his brain. This is not unusual for a football player, especially from his era, but it is unusual for a kicker, a position with considerably less physical contact, especially to the head.

But it wasn't dementia that would end up ending the life of Tom Dempsey. He had been taken to a senior residence in New Orleans, and he was 1 of 15 residents who tested positive for the coronavirus. He died yesterday, April 4, 2020, at the age of 73.

Joe Scarpati, who held the kick, is now 73. Born in Brooklyn, he grew up in Scotch Plains, Union County, New Jersey, played at North Carolina State, and played 6 seasons as a safety with the Eagles, before playing for the Saints in 1970, and it turned out to be his last season, due to a knee injury.

Jackie Burkett, the center-linebacker who snapped the ball, was born in Alabama and grew up on the nearby Florida Panhandle (sometimes nicknamed "Floribama" or "the Redneck Riviera"), was an All-American at Auburn, played both center and linebacker for the Baltimore Colts from 1960 to 1966, was an original Saint in 1967, played for the Dallas Cowboys in 1968 and 1969, and returned to the Saints in 1970. As with Scarpati, it would be his last season. He died in 2017, at age 80.