Film Review: "The Last King of Scotland"

An Innocent Abroad, Seduced by a Madman

By MANOHLA DARGIS
The New York Times
Published: September 27, 2006

Strange to think that the flamboyantly lethal nut job Idi Amin died in Saudi Arabia just three years ago. About 80 at the time, he had fled Uganda in 1979 after murdering upwards of 300,000 souls. Larger than life physically and metaphorically, he was a former heavyweight boxing champion with a brilliant sense of leadership as a performance: as a dictator, his methods were brutally antediluvian, but his public relations cunning was consummately 20th century. Smiling into cameras, he dropped provocations like bombs: “I don’t like human flesh. It’s too salty for me.”

The queasily enjoyable new fiction film “The Last King of Scotland,” based on the novel by Giles Foden and directed by Kevin Macdonald, creates a portrait of this famous Ugandan dictator from inside the palace walls. Furiously paced, with excellent performances by Forest Whitaker as Amin and James McAvoy as the foolish Scotsman who becomes the leader’s personal physician, the film has texture, if not depth and enough intelligence to almost persuade you that it actually has something of note to say. It would make a terrific double bill with Barbet Schroeder’s mesmerizing 1974 documentary, “General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait,” of which Mr. Macdonald has obviously made a close and fruitful study.

As it also happens, “The Last King of Scotland” would make an even better double bill with Stephen Frears’s forthcoming film “The Queen,” a sly peek at the current British monarch in the wake of the death of Princess Diana. (Amin once wrote milady: “Dear Liz, if you want to know a real man, come to Kampala.”) Amin was an amateur merchant of death compared with the historic British monarchy, but he absorbed the lessons of its colonial tyranny fatally well.

“The Last King of Scotland” makes the case that Amin was rational enough to understand his country’s tangled relationship with British imperialism and to inject that sociopolitical understanding into words. If this lecture feels a little too neat and contrived, well, that’s entertainment.

And how! Cannily designed to please and repulse, “The Last King of Scotland” uses a self-anointed outsider, Nicholas Garrigan (Mr. McAvoy), as its initially empathic point of entry.
Arriving in Uganda in the early 1970’s, this young doctor evinces an understandable wide-eyed enthusiasm and wonderment at the sights and sounds around him. He’s alive to his exciting new world, which the exceptional cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, who shot Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later” and Lars von Trier’s recent films, paints in deeply saturated color. The otherworldly Fauvist palette, as well as the interludes of frenetic cutting, at times recall the Brazilian art-house exploitation flick “City of God,” though Mr. Macdonald, who has a background in documentary, proves somewhat savvier about the politics of representation.

Crucial to that savvy is the director’s vision of Amin as Dr. Frankenstein and monster both. A period fiction with a high-gloss historical finish, “The Last King of Scotland” is also a very contemporary, pointedly resonant film about blowback. That said, and despite some background filler, Mr. Macdonald isn’t interested in furnishing history lessons, and the details of Britain’s African adventures remain largely unstated. In 1888, much as it did throughout Africa and the world, the British government gathered together dozens of different ethnic groups and various kingdoms under its control, naming this new protectorate and commercial venture Uganda. Many pounds of profit later, in 1962, Britain granted Uganda its independence; the African nation has been struggling to recover ever since.

In 1971 Amin ousted Milton Obote, who had become president after tossing out the country’s king five years earlier. (Mr. Obote himself may have been responsible for half a million deaths.) “The Last King of Scotland” opens shortly after Amin has seized power, and his madness had yet to take at least visible bloom. After a brief spell working at a clinic run by a white British doctor (Adam Kotz) and his wife (a very fine, almost unrecognizable Gillian Anderson), Garrigan signs on with Amin. The Scot eagerly makes the transition from rural slum to Amin’s Kampala compound, embracing his ready-made privilege as he drinks in the general’s charisma and hungrily feeds on his praise. A master of manipulation, this Amin knows a choice morsel when one flies into his trap.

Despite his vaguely Falstaffian proportions, Mr. Whitaker doesn’t look like the man he’s playing, a point that becomes less crucial as the performance takes root. As much a seducer as a destroyer, his Amin changes moods on a dime depending on the gas percolating in his bowels or the threats on his person, real and imagined. It’s a role rich in gristle and blood, and Mr. Whitaker makes the most of it, even if the performance and the film’s essential conception of Amin never push deep or hard enough. This actor can play devious, as his brilliant turn in “The Color of Money” showed early in his career. But what you need in a film about a man who fed the corpses of his victims to the crocodiles is something more, something hateful and vile.

“The Last King of Scotland” delivers shocks worthy of the horror film it becomes. Garrigan is the kind of man who exploits his own boyishness, successfully with women, perilously with Amin, and Mr. McAvoy expertly makes the character’s naïveté seem at first appealing, then foolish and finally odious in the extreme. As a stand-in for all the white men who have unwisely and cravenly journeyed into the proverbial heart of darkness, the character effectively serves his purposes, and you shake your head, tsk-tsk, right on schedule.

Clearly, the film means this journey to be as inwardly directed as outwardly bound, though the larger message here, one that might make you blanch after you nod, is that the misery of other people makes unsettling entertainment, no matter how pretty the pictures and valuable the players.

“The Last King of Scotland” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). There is brutal violence from start to finish, including a scene of very graphic, believable-looking torture.

THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND

Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Kevin Macdonald; written by Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock, based on the novel by Giles Foden; director of photography, Anthony Dod Mantle; edited by Justine Wright; music by Alex Heffes; production designer, Michael Carlin; produced by Andrea Calderwood, Lisa Bryer and Charles Steel; released by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Running time: 121 minutes.

WITH: Forest Whitaker (Idi Amin), James McAvoy (Nicholas Garrigan), Kerry Washington (Kay Amin), Simon McBurney (Stone), Gillian Anderson (Sarah Merrit) and Adam Kotz (Dr. Merrit).

Ann Coulter: Who Knew Congressman Foley Was A Closeted Democrat?

October 4, 2006
http://www.anncoulter.com

At least liberals are finally exhibiting a moral compass about something. I am sure that they'd be equally outraged if Rep. Mark Foley were a Democrat. The object lesson of Foley's inappropriate e-mails to male pages is that when a Republican congressman is caught in a sex scandal, he immediately resigns and crawls off into a hole in abject embarrassment. Democrats get snippy.

Foley didn't claim he was the victim of a “witch hunt.” He didn't whine that he was a put-upon “gay American.” He didn't stay in Congress and haughtily rebuke his critics. He didn't run for re-election. He certainly didn't claim he was “saving the Constitution.” (Although his recent discovery that he has a drinking problem has a certain Democratic ring to it.)

In 1983, Democratic congressman Gerry Studds was found to have sexually propositioned House pages and actually buggered a 17-year-old male page whom he took on a trip to Portugal. The 46-year-old Studds indignantly attacked those who criticized him for what he called a “mutually voluntary, private relationship between adults.”

When the House censured Studds for his sex romp with a male page, Studds — not one to be shy about presenting his backside to a large group of men — defiantly turned his back on the House during the vote. He ran for re-election and was happily returned to office SIX more times by liberal Democratic voters in his Martha's Vineyard district. (They really liked his campaign slogan: “It's the outfit, stupid.”)

Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy referred to Studds' affair with a teenage page as “a brief consenting homosexual relationship” and denounced Studds' detractors for engaging in a “witch hunt” against gays: “New England witch trials belong to the past, or so it is thought. This summer on Cape Cod, the reputation of Rep Gerry Studds was burned at the stake by a large number of his constituents determined to torch the congressman for his private life.”

Meanwhile, Foley is hiding in a hole someplace.

No one demanded to know why the Democrat Speaker of the House, Thomas “Tip” O'Neill, took one full decade to figure out that Studds was propositioning male pages. But now, the same Democrats who are incensed that Bush's National Security Agency was listening in on al-Qaida phone calls are incensed that Republicans were not reading a gay congressman's instant messages.

Let's run this past the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals: The suspect sent an inappropriately friendly e-mail to a teenager — oh also, we think he's gay. Can we spy on his instant messages? On a scale of 1 to 10, what are the odds that any court in the nation would have said: YOU BET! Put a tail on that guy — and a credit check, too!

When Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee found unprotected e-mails from the Democrats about their plan to oppose Miguel Estrada's judicial nomination because he was Hispanic, Democrats erupted in rage that their e-mails were being read. The Republican staffer responsible was forced to resign.

But Democrats are on their high horses because Republicans in the House did not immediately wiretap Foley's phones when they found out he was engaging in e-mail chitchat with a former page about what the kid wanted for his birthday. The Democrats say the Republicans should have done all the things Democrats won't let us do to al Qaida — solely because Foley was rumored to be gay. Maybe we could get Democrats to support the NSA wiretapping program if we tell them the terrorists are gay.

On Fox News' “Hannity and Colmes” Monday night, Democrat Bob Beckel said a gay man should be kept away from male pages the same way Willie Sutton should have been kept away from banks. “If Willie Sutton is around some place where a bank is robbed,” Beckel said, “then you're probably going to say, 'Willie, stay away from the robbery.'"

Hmmmm, let's search the memory bank. In July 2000, the New York Times “ethicist” Randy Cohen advised a reader that pulling her son out of the Cub Scouts because they exclude gay scout masters was “the ethical thing to do.” The “ethicist” explained: “Just as one is honor bound to quit an organization that excludes African-Americans, so you should withdraw from scouting as long as it rejects homosexuals.”

We need to get a rulebook from the Democrats:

Boy Scouts — As gay as you want to be.
Priests — No gays!
Democrat politicians -Proud gay Americans.
Republican politicians - Presumed guilty.
White House Press Corps - No gays, unless they hate Bush.
Active Duty U.S. Military - As gay as possible.
Men Who Date Liza Minelli - Do I have to draw you a picture, Miss Thing?

This is the very definition of political opportunism. If Republicans had decided to spy on Foley for sending overly friendly e-mails to pages, Democrats would have been screaming about a Republican witch hunt against gays. But if they don't, they're enabling a sexual predator. Talk to us Monday. Either we'll be furious that Republicans violated the man's civil rights, or we'll be furious that they didn't.

Music Review: Sam's Town by The Killers

The Killers
Sam's Town
Album Review
http://www.contactmusic.com


The Killers must have finally tired of their persona as one of the campest bands around as they have reinvented themselves far away from their foundation and mascara Hot Fuss days by revealing themselves as moustache and beard wielding cowboys hell bent on rock 'n' roll rebellion. Somewhere along the line from the bands epic debut, Brandon Flowers has realised the importance of a good show tune and their second album, Sam's Town, is full of them from the Meat Loaf/Bat 2 resonating When You Were Young to the rotting drug ranting of Uncle Johnny.

The first single to be snatched from the sure to be jumbo-platinum album is, When You Were Young, a track that's got as much balls as Mr Brightside with as much energy as Glamorous Indie Rock 'n' Roll wrapped up in as much charm and fascination as you'd like from the Las Vegas foursome. Having vanished from English radars for over a year there was always going to be a lot riding on this track to re-establish The Killers as the most essential band around and within the first 10 seconds you can't squabble their ability, and as the album unfolds you find yourself declining into the same depraved state of obsession that many people found themselves during the bands now shadowed debut.

Although the new grungy look will put off some indie-disco kids, the new Springsteen and Depeche Mode sound is stable beyond comprehension with thrice the arrangement and structure of their previous work holding together lyrics with more compassion and capability than ever before. The basic question that needs answering is; is this as good as Hot Fuss? And the answer is so undoubtedly, yes. If Hot Fuss hit the bullseye, this album has split a pin with precision as it's taken the bands raw energy, stripped it down and reassembled it into something much bigger than ever before. Sam's Town is like Hot Fuss on LSD and left in a Wacky Warehouse for a month before being taken for a spin with Evil Knievel and left to its own devices to fester. It's authority and style is equalled by its anger and tracks like Bones have a sinister flail amongst its operatic vocals that harness the darker side of Vegas as indeed the whole album does. "Don't you want to come with me, Don't you want to feel my bones on your bones, It's only natural", Brandon murmurs from behind the Monty Python crossed with Tim Burton instrumentations that gesticulate around from side to side like a pair of baseball boots in a tumble dryer.

Uncle Johnny Did Cocaine starts like a Sonic The Hedgehog theme tune and sadistically shifts into a depressing harangue like an 80s power ballad that's been left to decay in a cupboard for years without sunlight. The Killers of yesteryear would have surely made this a sarcastic song with mischievous riffs and bubbly bass lines, but with their new poise has come a will to expand their sound following on from the fascinatingly perverse Get Trashed that graced the Smile single. With, Read My Mind, Brandon has given himself some room to vocally let go and yowl in a 90s fashion while the atmospheric, end of night, track has done what it took U2 over 20 years to realize. The well oiled Disney-esk soundtrack is a mammoth show tune rather than an indie anthem showing talent throughout its glittering riffs and pumping chorus until its bittersweet closing lines, establishing The Killers as stadium rock gods instead of flouncing grunge venue hanger-ons. The albums title track, Sam's Town, is again a kitsch performance ditty that has a 'live' feel to it in the way that Midnight Show did. Based around a nightclub in Vegas, this track reminds us of where the band came from with all their showmanship and euphoric displays of command and surging vigour which is at last on show in the way it should have been from the offset.

Enterlude and Exitlude add more smoke and mirrors to the floor show of Sam's Town and despite the album not having that same under-produced Brightside indie rock 'n' roll vibe, they have moved on in the way that their fans should, excepting the fruition of a band that's shaped another top quality album. From start to finish there are few limitations and little imperfections on this album and although you could use the phrase 'over produced' you would have to say it's been well 'over produced' and each track crashes into the next with decorum, gravity and majesty and forges a new direction for The Killers who have finally given us their true work.

Alex Lee Thomson.

Click Here for The Killers, When You Were Young Audio

Mike Lupica: Derek's night has a ring to it

The New York Daily News
October 4, 2006


The captain of the Yankees, one of the most famous and popular Yankees of them all, comes out of his clubhouse in the late afternoon. Kim Jones of the YES Network, who has an appointment to interview Derek Jeter before he goes out to stretch with the rest of the Yankees, is waiting for him. Before Jones can say anything Jeter says, "I have about 92 seconds." The television lights go up, Jeter answers a couple of questions like he is going from first to third. Then he is gone, down the runway toward the Yankee dugout, bat in hand, walking fast, nearly running now. The playoffs are starting. In an October when he goes for his fifth World Series ring, this time the playoffs start with 5-for-5 from him against the Tigers.

The Yankees have not won the World Series for five years and that means Jeter, who we once thought might win World Series the way Joe DiMaggio did, hasn't won, either. He is not just the captain of the Yankees. He is their DiMaggio. It's not like everybody else has been losing for five years and he gets to be bulletproof. It doesn't work that way for Joe Torre and it doesn't work that way for the shortstop.


If Jeter could win the whole thing by himself, maybe he would have as many rings as DiMaggio by now. He does not. As much as the Yankees are going to hit teams the way they hit the Tigers a couple of times last night, lay teams out the way Ray Lewis lays out a quarterback, they are still going to need the kind of big outs they got from Scott Proctor in the top of the seventh last night, when Magglio Ordoñez was the tying run in a game the Yankees were supposed to have won already.


Proctor is supposed to be one of the guys out of Torre's bullpen who gives them seventh and eighth innings the way Nelson and Stanton once did. For all the greatness of so many Yankees, Jeter and Mo Rivera and so many others, they have won the World Series only when the whole bullpen has been great.


"You still need to pitch, you still need to catch the ball," Torre says. Jeter always says the same thing.


But if there is a game plan for these Yankees it goes like this: A little of the old magic out of the bullpen, a lot of offense. If it goes like that, the Yankees finally win again.


The offense still starts with Jeter, even if he no longer leads off. It starts with him and last night it ended with him, with his fifth hit of the night, that shot over the center-field wall in the bottom of the eighth. This is the October when he hears the same "MVP" chants at the Stadium that he has been hearing for so much of the second half of the season. If big things happen again for the Yankees, if they finally move off 26 world championships with enough big innings, it is expected that Jeter is in the middle of it all. This is his team as much as Torre's. Torre's job has always been made easier because Jeter is on his team and in his clubhouse, whether he thinks taking up for A-Rod is part of his captaincy or not.


And so in Game 1 of another October for him, coming into that Game 1 with more postseason hits than any player in history, Jeter hits the ball all over the Bronx and even goes to his right and starts a double play in the top of the third that was the play of the game. His place again last night. His time of year. Biggest postseason night he's ever had, even if it's just the first.


"You always wish going into a playoff game really quick that you had something against the (opposing) team, that you didn't like their players, that you had some extra motivation," Detroit manager Jim Leyland was saying yesterday. "But you don't (with the Yankees). How can you not like Derek Jeter?"


Then Leyland watched Jeter come out of the blocks even faster than he ever had before in October. A single to left in the first inning, his first time up. A double behind Johnny Damon's infield single in the second, a run scored as the Yankees were going ahead of the Tigers, 5-0. Then came a single to right in the bottom of the fourth and then another double and another run scored as the Yankees were making it 7-3 in the bottom of the sixth. He had 142 postseason hits coming into last night. Now the number is 147. His last two at-bats of the last postseason, Game 5 against the Angels, also produced hits, before A-Rod grounded into that famous 5-4-3 double play. So make it seven in a row now.


He has produced bigger numbers than he did during this regular season, even had a bigger batting average once. He has never been more important to his team. It is why he has a chance to get the MVP award away from Justin Morneau and Frank Thomas. None of that will matter to Jeter if he doesn't win his fifth World Series ring, if there is finally a Yankee team worthy of standing with those first Yankee teams on which Jeter played.


So he got his hits last night. The Yankees hit the Tigers big and fast and loud in the third and scored more later. Scott Proctor got out of the seventh and Kyle Farnsworth got through the eighth after walking the leadoff batter. Then Mo Rivera closed things out. This is the way the Yankees used to win all the time. For one night, these were the Yankees Jeter remembers.

T.J. Quinn: Captain and The Clipper

The New York Daily News
Sunday, September 17th, 2006

Every day the Captain walks into the clubhouse with his grande skim cappuccino from Starbucks, answers questions at his locker, goes off to the training room, takes batting practice, takes the field on a sprint ahead of the rest of the guys, plays baseball without much more emotion than an occasional pumped fist.

There is something in Derek Jeter's routine, the clean lines and the gentle strides that looks familiar to a couple of old Red Sox.

He was born to pinstripes, never grandstands, never gives voyeurs a glance within. He has the unquestioned respect of a clubhouse where players carry enough MVP and Cy Young awards to fill a wing of a museum, and the same respect from those who play against him.

The old Red Sox players remember someone else like that.

"He's got a little Joe DiMaggio in him," says Bobby Doerr, the 88-year-old Hall of Fame second baseman who came into the game a year after DiMaggio and left at the same time. "You look at a player for what he does, for what he represents. That's the awe we had with Joe D."

Jeter, Doerr says, is worthy of the mantle.

"Right now, I think he might be the best player in baseball. There's nothing he can't do, for God's sake," says the Red Sox' 86-year-old legend-in-residence Johnny Pesky, speaking New England heresy. "He's the epitome of a Yankee."

There has been a quiet search for the modern DiMaggio ever since Paul Simon wondered about Joltin' Joe's forwarding address in 1968, although Simon was singing about more than a lost ballplayer.

Red Smith, maybe the greatest of all sportswriters, laid it out in the final column of his career in January of 1982, about why he maintained his faith that he wouldn't spend the rest of his days with middling, uninspiring ballplayers: "I told myself not to worry. Some day there would be another Joe DiMaggio."

They were the last words Smith wrote. There hasn't been one since.

Jeter is playing toward what might be his first MVP award this season - both Doerr and Pesky say he deserves it - or possibly his first batting title. DiMaggio had three of the former and two of the latter, in a career that lost three years to World War II. He was also considered the greatest centerfielder anyone had seen until the emergence of Willie Mays. By that standard, the Clipper eclipses the Captain.

But those who knew DiMaggio and have seen Jeter say the comparison is legitimate.

"They have the same kind of mannerisms," Yogi Berra says. "Joe never walked to the outfield - he always ran on the field, he always ran off, just like Jeter. (Players) all looked up to Joe. Joe did everything perfect like Jeter does. I knew Jeter as he came along; he's a loner a little bit, he likes to be private. But all the girls go after him. With Joe, it was the same thing."

Frank Torre, Joe's older brother, knew DiMaggio for years and has watched Jeter since he was a rookie shortstop and Joe was a new manager in 1996.

If anything binds Jeter and DiMaggio, it is their sense of occasion.

"Some people perform at a higher level when the chips are down and that's why it's important not to look at stats," Frank Torre says. "But look at (Jeter). One of them plays they still talk about in Oakland. The flip. That's leadership taking over."

In David Halberstam's book, "Summer of '49," he writes of how Charlie Keller was awed by DiMaggio's intensity when he had to rise to a moment, such as facing Bob Feller: "You could actually see the veins and muscles in DiMaggio's neck stand out, Keller remembered."

From his home in Nantucket, Halberstam says, "I think (Jeter is) more a real leader than DiMaggio was in some senses. DiMaggio was clearly the best player of his era, but he was very aloof, so the leadership was that he was the great DiMaggio and that he always played hard and that the bigger the game, the better he played."

Jeter, ever reserved, gives the expectedly demure response when asked about the comparison.

"I've heard people say it. It's flattering anytime you hear something like that. It's kind of unfair to him, though," Jeter says, sitting in front of his locker. "I've only been here a little while."
If there are similarities, they are accidental, Jeter says. "It wasn't like I molded myself after him. You can't be something you're not or you aren't going to be believeable."

There may never be another Joe DiMaggio in the way Paul Simon and Red Smith pined for one. Elegance has been replaced by hipness, swing by hip-hop. The counterculture DiMaggio despised is rooted in the game and baseball no longer dominates the cultural landscape the way it did in the 1940s, before television was common, before cable existed, before the NFL and NBA were viable leagues. In that sense, it would be hard for Jeter, or anyone, to be larger than the game. Alex Rodriguez might have been a candidate, recognized as the best all-around player in baseball, but he has been criticized too much for having a manufactured personality. People can get too close now, and lines show up in players' faces the way they never did on newsreel footage. Jeter's mystique might come from the fact that he has guarded his privacy with the same intensity DiMaggio did.

Dom DiMaggio, now 89 and living in Southeastern Massachusetts, admires Jeter, but he isn't so quick to dub him his older brother's successor.

"For one thing, we know that Joe was extremely graceful. On the field, his every move was just as graceful as can be," Dom says. "I think Jeter is a little more, not voluntarily showy, but Jeter plays hard and it shows. Joe, everything he did, he played hard, but he did it so smoothly and gracefully it didn't appear he was doing it hard."

Part of being Joe DiMaggio meant never letting them see you sweat. Ernest Hemingway saw in DiMaggio the perfection of grace under pressure, which is why he befriended him and had Santiago, the Old Man in "Old Man and the Sea" refer to him as "the great DiMaggio."

"I never seen him slide for a ball in the five years I played with him," Berra says. "He caught everything shoulder high."

The relationships with the media were different, too. Writers were sometimes part of the inner circle at Toots Shor's and other hot spots, but they knew they were never to share their private view of DiMaggio with the rest of the world.

"We used to ride the trains together. We ate with the writers, we drank with the writers," Berra says. "It's changed a little bit."

Inside the clubhouse there were only a few reporters, not the dozens greeting Jeter and his teammates, even for an unexciting mid-week game against a second-division team.

"Joe just sat at his stool, have something to read, smoke his cigarette. Nonchalant," Berra says. "He'd be there looking around. You say, 'Hi,' he says 'Hi' to you. Them days, they didn't have it like they do now. We used to park out in the street and walk in." Now fans in the Bronx are kept 100 yards away, reduced to shouting at players who walk from the fenced-in parking lot to the stadium entrance.

What Berra sees in Jeter that reminds him of DiMaggio is the command of the clubhouse. Coming to the Yankees 60 years ago, he says, there was no question DiMaggio was in charge.

"You were a little scared of him at first. You got to know him after a little while and it's okay," Berra says.

Even Joe McCarthy, the stern manager who guided the team through much of the 1940s, had a healthy respect for DiMaggio's place."

When Joe McCarthy started a meeting of players in the clubhouse once, Joe wasn't there yet, he got there about five minutes late," Dom DiMaggio says. "(McCarthy) stopped the meeting and they waited for him, Joe had his topcoat on, his jacket, he took them off. And Joe McCarthy said, 'O.K., we'll start all over again.' Joe laughed, McCarthy laughed; they understood each other. But they knew what the deal was."

Everyone around Joe DiMaggio knew the deal. If you were loyal, he would be loyal.

"If you did something with Joe that he didn't like, that was the end of it," Dom DiMaggio says. "And the person who had done it knew that he had made a mistake, and he knew Joe was right, and he admired Joe despite the fact that Joe cut him off because he knew he made the mistake."

It could be saying the wrong thing to the press, hot-dogging or loafing on the field, embarassing DiMaggio, being too familiar with him or breaking rules like bringing wives to the wrong occasions.

There is also some of DiMaggio's famous pride in Jeter, too.

Jeter has been known for freezing out transgressors as well, notably Rodriguez following the 2001 interview in Esquire in which he said Jeter never had to lead and wasn't as good a player.

When Ruben Rivera was caught stealing one of Jeter's gloves, it was ultimately Jeter who decided Rivera's fate, and Jeter decided Rivera should not be a Yankee.

When Jason Giambi fought to regain his teammates' respect following his all-but-explicit admission of steroid use, it was Jeter who signaled to the rest of the team that Giambi had paid his dues. On the other hand, when Rodriguez was being booed like a Bostonian at Yankee Stadium earlier this year, members of the team noticed that Jeter did not put an arm around A-Rod or tell fans that they should support their third baseman.

While Dom DiMaggio says he admires Jeter, he says it takes more than leadership or stoicism or elegance or greatness to claim his brother's legacy. It takes all of them.

"You'll get ballplayers that might have the statistics that might match Joe, but they might not match the overall person," he says.

For decades he has been hearing baseball people talk about the next Joe DiMaggio. He heard Paul Simon's song, heard Red Smith's vision that someday there would be another.

"Has there been one?" Dom DiMaggio says. "I haven't seen one come around."

For now, Jeter might come the closest.

Bob Ryan: Problem Now Oversized

The Boston Globe
October 2, 2006

Thanks to the cheaters, everyone in baseball now is presumed guilty until proven innocent.

You may be a diehard Roger Clemens fan and say you don't want to believe your guy has used performance-enhancing drugs to pitch like this into his mid-40s, but don't sit there and tell me you haven't wondered about it.

And why is that? It's because you've seen and heard too much already. You know it's possible. After all, we've seen the still-active player whose autobiography could be entitled, ``Honey, I Shrunk The MVP." We all know funky stuff's been going on.

What about Albert Pujols? Don't we all want him to be Mr. Clean? Of course, we do. But don't tell me you haven't heard people wondering out loud about him. And why? Just because. Is this fair to Albert Pujols? No. It's manifestly unfair. But, thanks to the cheaters, that's where we are.

I could go on and on. I've been asked about Big Papi this year. Do I think he's on the juice? I tell 'em, well, David Ortiz looks more like an offensive lineman than some cut, well-defined Muscle Beach kind of guy. He doesn't look any different than he did five years ago as a Twin. It wouldn't make any sense to me. But since he's hit 173 home runs and driven in 525 runs the past four years, and since we live in these, shall we say, juicy times, someone's gonna ask questions.

The newly accused all have issued their denials, naturally. Well, duh. You didn't expect Clemens to react to the report that his was one of the names -- I love this word -- "redacted" from a search warrant affidavit filed in Phoenix at the end of May in connection with the Jason Grimsley case by saying, "Hey, you got me. I loved being Roger Clemens too much to give it up, so I did what I needed to do in order to keep it going," did you?

According to MLB.com, what Roger's saying is this: "I didn't see [this report], nor do I need to see it. But for the people involved, I think it's very dangerous and malicious and reckless on their part for some guys to have a document or whatever he did and supposedly put it out there with somebody else's writing on it. Grimsley never worked out with myself or Andy [Pettitte, also named] at any point. I don't know where that's coming from. When it's going to take a serious turn for me is when one of my sponsors pulls out. Then somebody's going to be responsible for that. Then my lawyers will take over from there."

(Come to think of it, where exactly is the official denial in all that Clemensese?)

Pettitte was more direct. "I haven't done anything," he said. "I've never used any drugs to enhance my performance on a baseball field before."

It's easy to pick on Grimsley, a journeyman pitcher who -- isn't it conveniently strange? -- seems to have passed through certain major league locker rooms without anyone remembering he was there. It would be nice if we had a "better" source, some people are saying.

Well, no one wanted to believe Jose Canseco when he made his own accusations a while back. Just a crazy man looking to sell books, we were told. That's what I wanted believe, anyway. Then came that dramatic March 17, 2005, session before a congressional panel, when we witnessed the embarrassing spectacle of a sobbing Mark McGwire becoming the first American to invoke the four and a half amendment, and we knew that Canseco was not the loose cannon we thought he was.

Sure, we'd always prefer air tight, credible sources. But in the real world, you take the sources you get. Sometimes you can't do any better than a narcissistic, aging slugger and a mediocre reliever who was caught receiving a shipment of human growth hormone at his home, which led to the aforementioned affidavit. It turns out Canseco was a lot more credible than we originally believed. Grimsley may turn out to be a similar investigative gold mine.

Or maybe not. But sooner or later there will be other equally flawed "sources" as this performance-enhancing-drug mess plays out to an ever-disgusted public.

The problem now, as we all know, is that anabolic steroids are no longer the big issue. The enhancement substance in question is human growth hormone, and the reason for that is baseball doesn't test for it. That would require a blood test, and for that the Players Association would have to approve a change in the existing policy. It was hard enough to get the PA hierarchy to sanction urine testing, let alone have it agree to blood testing. But the time has come.

Yes, the time has come for responsible players with clout to take the initiative in demanding full testing for human growth hormone, or anything else that requires a blood sample. Is it not in the best interests of those who really are clean (I hope I'm not naive in assuming they still make up the majority) to expose the cheats, not solely because the cheats have gained a competitive advantage, but also because the cheats have created a climate in which no good deed goes unquestioned?

I honestly believe people now expect to hear stories like this. The average baseball fan has become like the average European sports fan who has learned to live with the non stop revelations of drug chicanery involving such sports as weightlifting, wrestling, athletics (i.e. track and field), and, of course, cycling, in which no one is surprised when some champion is stripped of his (or her) crown because of proven use of performance-enhancing drugs.

Roger Clemens might be totally innocent. But since these are juicy times, and the only other pitcher who's ever thrown as hard at his age is the sainted Nolan Ryan, people can't help wondering. And Nolan Ryan? Nah, don't tell me . . .

Is this what Players Association honchos Donald Fehr and Gene Orza want for their sport? In case they don't know, that's what they've got.

Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist. His e-mail address is ryan@globe.com.

Bob Klapisch: Jeter, Howard Best; Then There's Pavano

October 1, 2006
Bergen County Record

A dizzying finish to the 2006 season has made it impossible to stop, exhale and distinguish the winners from the losers. With unfinished business in both leagues, it's (almost) unfair to decide on the big-ticket items such as the MVP and Cy Young awards. But someone has to handle life's tougher chores.

To wit:

AL Most Valuable Player: Derek Jeter

Despite what David Ortiz said or implied, this coronation is bestowed on those who most greatly influence a successful team's journey to the postseason. Big Papi was great, but his Red Sox were not. Jeter, on the other hand, batted .412 in July, when the Yankees were in the midst of a pennant race, and batted a crazy .388 with runners in scoring position.
Runners-up: Johan Santana, Justin Morneau

NL Most Valuable Player: Ryan Howard

The Phillies thrilled even their cynical fan base in September, taking their pursuit of the wild-card berth until the final weekend of the regular season. For that, they can thank Howard, the National League's most prodigious home run hitter since Barry Bonds -- minus the steroids, we all presume. Think the NL wasn't scared? Howard drew 16 intentional walks in September.
Runners-up: Albert Pujols, Jose Reyes

AL Cy Young Award: Johan Santana

This is mother of all no-brainers, considering the Twins' ace led the American League in wins, strikeouts, ERA and innings. You could make an equally strong case for Santana winning the MVP, as well. The Twins won nearly 85 percent of the games Santana started; without him, they were merely a .500 team. That's the definition of invaluable.
Runners-up: Chien-Ming Wang, Roy Halladay

NL Cy Young Award: Trevor Hoffman

Plenty of qualified starters here (Brandon Webb, Chris Carpenter, among others), but we have a soft spot for the Padres' closer, who led NL relievers with a 1.92 ERA and 44 saves. Hoffman has flourished for a decade as a non-strikeout artist, relying on illusion (his change-up) over power (a sub-90 mph fastball). Hoffman is as big a reason as any for the Padres' journey to the postseason.
Runners-up: Webb, Carpenter, Carlos Zambrano

AL Rookie of the Year: Jon Papelbon

Might've blossomed into baseball's greatest closer in what eventually will be the post-Mariano Rivera era. But the Red Sox overused their 26-year-old star and will pay a heavy price. Papelbon will become a starter in 2007, leaving a huge void in Boston's bullpen. Still, there's no diminishing Papelbon's achievements: his 0.92 ERA, .167 opponents' average and 75 strikeouts in 681/3 innings were all better than Rivera's. But we'll never know if Papelbon would've come close to the great Yankee closer's career path.
Runners-up: Justin Verlander, Francisco Liriano

NL Rookie of the Year: Ryan Zimmerman

We knew there was something special about the Nationals' third baseman when he clubbed a ninth-inning home run off Billy Wagner in the third game of the season, turning what should've been a 5-4 Mets victory into an eventual 9-5 defeat. Those 110 RBI were no coincidence.
Runners-up: Dan Uggla, Hanley Ramirez, Matt Cain

AL Manager of the Year: Jim Leyland

They say it's impossible to personally motivate the professional athlete in this day and age; only money will accomplish that. Leyland disproved that theory, rallying the Tigers in a way that Alan Trammell, his predecessor and a legend in Tigers' country, could not. The 61-year-old Leyland, who spent six years in blissful retirement before returning to the dugout, proved that there's no such thing as an age gap if you're smart and fair and treat players with respect.
Runner-up: Ron Gardenhire

NL Manager of the Year: Joe Girardi

Girardi may or may not get fired in a few weeks (we're betting he's history), but not even Marlins ownership will be able to minimize the way Girardi mobilized a roster that used as many as 22 rookies. Florida lost 31 of its first 42 games, yet managed to insert itself into the wild-card race all the way into late September. And now Girardi may be forced to look for another job (probably replacing Dusty Baker in Chicago). Go figure.
Runners-up: Willie Randolph, Grady Little

AL flop of the year (team): Orioles

Guess luring Leo Mazzone away from the Braves didn't help all that much. The O's finished next to last with a 5.32 ERA.

NL flop of the year, (team): Braves

Only remaining question is: Will Bobby Cox be back in 2007?

AL manager on the hot seat: Buck Showalter

That's four straight years of the Rangers finishing out of the running in the Central Division, three of which have been under .500.

NL manager on the hot seat: Dusty Baker

Right there with Girardi in terms of shaky job security. The Cubs have turned into a National League joke, 30 games under .500, having been on a fast decline ever since winning the Central Division in 2003.

AL story line to watch in 2007: Manny Ramirez

Only the Red Sox' slugger knows in his heart whether he tanked the month of September with a knee injury. Regardless of how hurt Ramirez was (or wasn't), the Sox finally may have had enough. Look for Ramirez to be traded this winter.

NL story line to watch in 2007: Pedro Martinez

The more the doctors probe, the more they realize how dramatically the Mets' ace has fallen apart. From the hip, to the toe, to the calf and now the most devastating injury of all, a torn rotator cuff. It's not impossible to think we've seen the last of Pedro.

Good guy of the year: Torii Hunter.

For appointing Timii Graupe of Blairstown as the team's batboy when the Twins were in town last month. Graupe suffers from neurofibromatosis, and became such a fan of the Twins' center fielder, he changed the spelling of his name from Tim to Timii.

Weasel of the year: Carl Pavano.

Forget all the injuries and the money he's nevertheless accepted from the Yankees, the right-hander fired his agent for falling $50,000 short in the pursuit of a $40 million contract. Not only did Pavano can Scott Shapiro, he refused to pay the commission on the $39.55 million he did get from the Yankees.

* * *

By the numbers

36
Home run differential between Ryan Howard's output in 2005 and 2006 (going into the final weekend of the season). The record for a one-year uptick is 38, set by Davey Johnson, who hit five HRs in 1971, then blasted 43 the following season.

79
Fruit baskets landed on Tommy Lasorda's doorstep on Sept. 22, helping to commemorate his 79th birthday. Identical baskets were sent by 79 of his former players with a personal message from each of them. Lasorda donated the gifts to a children's hospital.

157
Postseason contests have been played in Yankee Stadium, tops in the big leagues. Second on the list is Fenway with 59, followed by 53 at the now-defunct Busch Stadium in St. Louis.

14
Players who have held the National League career home run record, the most recent of which is Barry Bonds with 734. He passed Hank Aaron's previous mark on Sept. 23.

2
Managers have yet to be ejected from a game this season: Willie Randolph and the A's Ken Macha.

* * *

Power rankings

1. Yankees: The greatest offensive assembly of the Joe Torre era -- and maybe beyond.
2. A's: Rich Harden is back, which is another way of saying: Beware the AL's best rotation.
3. Mets: If they lose in the first round, would the season be considered a failure?
4. Dodgers: Impressive turnaround for a franchise that was all but dead a year ago.
5. Twins: It's a one-man universe in the Metrodome: Santana and prayer for the AL Division Series.

* * *

This date in baseball

1973: In the first game of a scheduled makeup doubleheader at Wrigley Field in front of only 1,913 fans, a day after the regular season ends, the Mets beat the Cubs, 6-4, to grab the NL East flag. The Mets, who were 11½ games behind Aug. 5, nevertheless clinch in their 82nd victory, which along with the Padres in 2005 remains the lowest number of wins ever to win a title.

They said it

"My contract status, right now, I could care less about it. I might retire. I don't know. It's a big option. I'm not going to be a middle bullpen, 5 ERA guy. Either I can come back and be a dominant pitcher, or I'll take it to the house."

-- Red Sox reliever Keith Foulke, telling the Boston Globe about the possibility of retirement.

Lindsey Buckingham: "Right Out in the Spotlight and Feeling Invisible"

By ANTHONY DeCURTIS
The New York Times
Published: October 1, 2006

Not Too Late,” the song that opens “Under the Skin,” Lindsey Buckingham’s first solo album in 14 years, begins with a surprisingly confessional verse. “Reading the paper, saw a review,” the lyric runs, “Said I was a visionary, but nobody knew/Now that’s been a problem, feeling unseen/Just like I’m living somebody’s dream.”

In rock critic circles, the term “visionary” clings to Mr. Buckingham the way “fleet-footed” defines Achilles in Homer’s “Iliad.” As singer, guitarist, songwriter and producer for Fleetwood Mac, he has garnered much of the credit for “Rumours,” the 1977 pop masterpiece that has sold close to 20 million copies in the United States alone. Even that album’s more daring follow-up, “Tusk,” widely regarded as a commercial failure for having sold a mere two million copies, won Mr. Buckingham critical admiration for his willingness to ditch a hit-making formula in favor of daring sonic experimentation.

So how is it possible for a member of one of the best-selling bands in history to feel “unseen”? Speaking by telephone from his home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles (“not the O.J. side,” he took pains to point out), Mr. Buckingham seemed a bit chagrined.

“Much of Fleetwood Mac was a double-edged sword,” he said. “Band politics can be joyous and supportive, or competitive and sinister. For me things tended more often to fall into the latter category. Maybe that’s because I was the glue, the one putting the songs together, and yet I wasn’t necessarily the one with the political power in the group. That’s a strange place to be. But, you know, that’s my paranoid side.”

Still, paranoia is only one of the facets of Mr. Buckingham reflected on “Under the Skin,” which will be released on Tuesday, his 57th birthday. Emotionally he long ago overcame his stormy breakup with Stevie Nicks, Fleetwood Mac’s most visible star, which devastated the two of them while generating some of the band’s most gripping songs, like Mr. Buckingham’s “Go Your Own Way.”

Since his last solo album in 1992, he has married, and he is now the father of three young children. And after a decade’s absence from Fleetwood Mac (not including a performance for Bill Clinton’s 1993 inaugural festivities), Mr. Buckingham rejoined the band in 1997 for its hugely successful live album “The Dance” and has remained a member in good standing ever since.

He found the group’s last tour, which followed the release of the album “Say You Will” in 2003, especially invigorating, despite (or perhaps because of) the departure of keyboardist and songwriter Christine McVie. “I was in a really confident place,” he said. “Whatever ‘Say You Will’ turned out to be, just having done a new studio album with the band was a great thing. And as much as we missed Christine, how that translated for me is that I was able to get up there and be a guy onstage. The testosterone level was high, which was great for me. I don’t know if Stevie was real happy with it, but that’s a whole other story.”

The pleasures of his reconciliations and new beginnings run through “Under the Skin,” along with the jitters and insecurities chronicled in “Not Too Late.” Songs like “Show You How,” “It Was You” and “Shut Us Down” depict a man determined to find his dream woman and commit, despite his deep-seated fears about himself and the evanescent quality of love.

Mr. Buckingham wrote and recorded much of the album while on the road with Fleetwood Mac, which tempered his tendency to tinker in the studio. “I wanted to make songs that were a step or two above sitting in your living room playing for somebody on guitar,” he said. By Mr. Buckingham’s lush standard — his taste for densely layered melodic textures has drawn frequent comparisons to the work of his idol, Brian Wilson — “Under the Skin” is a stripped-down affair, focused intently on Mr. Buckingham’s voice and acoustic guitar. But it also features electronically treated vocals playfully chase and shadow each other, skittering bass and percussion parts, fleet guitar finger-picking and subtle orchestral coloration. The result is a kind of intensely modern folk music, candidly personal, seemingly direct songs that flirt with soul-baring and then retreat into an enveloping cocoon of sound.

“Those are probably my strong points,” Mr. Buckingham said about his production skills and his eloquent acoustic guitar playing. “I’m not the best singer, and I don’t even think of myself as a writer per se. I’m a stylist. But you can get a long way on style, so I’ll take it. I’ll work with what I got.”

Mr. Buckingham will perform six weeks of solo shows in support of “Under the Skin,” including an Oct. 10 date at Town Hall in Manhattan. Meticulous to the point of obsession, he is worried about that performance, since he will have only three warm-up shows beforehand. “My phrase of the month is, ‘New York’s going to take what they get and like it,’ ” he said, laughing ruefully. “I’m just a little frightened that we’re not going to be able to pull it off.”

Once his tour is done, Mr. Buckingham, uncharacteristically, has more than an entire album of new, more rocking songs that he wants to record and put out “in a fairly short amount of time.” And after that?

“Well, there’s Fleetwood Mac,” he said, a smile nearly audible in his voice. “I suppose I don’t have to, but they’d like to do something. And why wouldn’t I want to do that?”

Joel Mowbray: Endorsing Farrakhan's Man?

Joel Mowbray
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
October 2, 2006

Heading into November, Democrats potentially have a story that ought to be both feel-good and helpful in appealing to a small, but growing constituency. The Democratic Congressional candidate for Minnesota’s very blue Fifth District is on the verge of becoming the first-ever Muslim elected to Congress.

But embracing the candidate poses enormous risks. Keith Ellison has a disturbing history with the Nation of Islam and has received financial and other help from a self-identified supporter of Hamas.

Over the next two months, the Democrats will need to embrace or distance itself from Ellison. Democratic credentials on national security could be undermined if they fail to denounce a candidate closely allied with someone that a senior Democrat described as having “intimate connections to Hamas.”

Known for months has been that Ellison was involved in the 1990’s with the Nation of Islam, which even he now concedes is racist and anti-Semitic. In a letter of apology to the local Jewish community, Ellison claimed that he was never a member of the NOI and thus didn’t realize until later the organization's ugly ideology. But according to press accounts at the time, Ellison served as NOI spokesman at a 1997 public hearing where he defended—in his own words—“the truth” of a government official’s supposed comment that “Jews are the most racist white people.”

Only learned recently and far more troubling is Ellison’s seemingly tight connection with Nihad Awad, co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), whom he met almost two decades ago at the University of Minnesota.

Ellison’s campaign obviously has downplayed the affiliation with Awad. But here are the facts: Awad headlined a fundraiser last month that the campaign estimates netted $15,000 to $20,000, and in July, and it appears that CAIR's co-founder bundled contributions totaling just over $10,000. (The campaign issued a terse denial on the latter point, though it refused to explain away overwhelming evidence to the contrary.) The campaign has gone so far as to suggest that Awad did all this without having any contact with someone he’s known since the late 1980’s.

The Democrat’s supporters have taken a different tack. Rather than defend Awad or downplay his connections to the candidate, Ellison partisans have attempted to paint attacks on the candidate as overtly partisan or even bigoted. A Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist, for example, recently suggested that Ellison is under attack solely for being Muslim.

But it is top Democrats that have issued some of the most stinging rebukes of CAIR. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Senate’s second-leading Democrat, has said that CAIR “is unusual in its extreme rhetoric and its association with groups that are suspect.” Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, who chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, has stated flatly that CAIR “has ties to terrorism.” Sen. Schumer has special disdain for Awad and CAIR’s other co-founder, Omar Ahmad, saying in a 2003 hearing that both men have “intimate connections with Hamas.”

The words most damning to CAIR, though, have been uttered by its co-founders. At Barry University in Florida in 1994, Awad declared, “I’m in support of the Hamas movement.” Addressing a youth session at the 1999 Islamic Association of Palestine convention in Chicago, Ahmad glorified suicide bombers who “kill themselves for Islam”: “Fighting for freedom, fighting for Islam, that is not suicide. They kill themselves for Islam.” (Transcript provided by the Investigative Project.)

Despite representing the Nation of Islam and currently affiliating with Awad, Ellison has received the unabashed support of the Minnesota Democrat-Farm-Labor Party and its activists. He won the party’s official endorsement in May, then won what was essentially a three-way primary last week with 41%. Praise has not yet poured in, however, from national Democrats.

While Democrats need to win every seat possible race in order to take control of the House, distancing the party from Ellison likely would not cost him the victory in a district Kerry won with 71%. Which means that Democrats could give Ellison an ultimatum to sever ties with CAIR and Awad without risking losing the seat.

Even if cold-shouldering Ellison could result in a win-win, the party would risk alienating Muslims, a small, but potent voting bloc in several key states. Democrats might well prefer to bask in the glow of “first Muslim in Congress” stories that are sure to start running even before November.

Right now, Democrats in Washington appear divided. The Democratic National Committee referred this columnist to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and that organization dodged questions about the candidate, offering only this platitude: “We feel confident that Minnesota families will decide to send him to Congress this November.”

At a certain point, especially if controversy surrounding Ellison and his affiliations mounts, national Democrats likely will respond decisively. But even if they choose to remain silent, his welcome on Capitol Hill if he wins, particularly what committee assignments he receives, could be scrutinized not just by Republicans, but even many Democrats.

No wonder national Democrats are taking their time.

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Joel Mowbray is author of Dangerous Diplomacy: How the State Department Threatens America’s Security.

Jonathan Last: Post-9/11 Conflicts Rooted in History

It's not just Afghanistan, Iraq and a "war on terror." It's the West vs. the Islamic world, a clash that has never abated.

By Jonathan Last
The Philadelphia Inquirer
October 1, 2006

Soon after 9/11, the Bush administration labeled the conflict into which it plunged this country the "war on terror." But this is no more descriptive than calling the fight in Iraq a "war on IEDs." The more pressing question is: Are we, or are we not, engaged in a larger clash of civilizations?

If the answer is "We are," the clash long predates 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and George W. Bush. It predates America itself. It is a clash between Western civilization and the Islamic world.

Harvard professor Samuel Huntington first made this case in 1993, in his famous article "The Clash of Civilizations" in the journal Foreign Affairs. "Conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilizations has been going on for 1,300 years," he wrote. After the founding of Islam, Muslims spread their faith by the sword. Islam conquered North Africa and pushed into Europe, where it ruled in Sicily, Spain, Portugal, and parts of France. Twice, the forces of Islam laid siege to Vienna. For 1,000 years, Islam advanced and Christendom retreated.

As Pope Benedict XVI explains in his book Without Roots, the very concept of "Europe" emerged as a reaction to the surge of Islam. Not until the failure of the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 did the Islamic tide recede definitively. For the next 300 years, Western civilization was ascendant and the Islamic world stagnated.

But the conflict between the two cultures never fully abated. Throughout the 20th century, Western countries tussled with Islamic states or their non-state proxies. And, as columnist Mark Steyn points out, when you gaze at conflicts around the globe today, the one constant is Islam. Muslims are fighting, or have recently fought, Jews in the Mideast, Hindus in Kashmir, Christians in Nigeria, atheists in Russia, Buddhists in Thailand and Burma, Catholics in the Philippines, and Orthodox Christians in the Balkans.

Some argue that these conflicts arise not from a clash of civilizations, but from specific grievances, such as the West's support of Israel. This is an unsatisfactory argument. In his 1990 essay "The Roots of Muslim Rage," professor Bernard Lewis pointed out: "The French have left Algeria, the British have left Egypt, the Western oil companies have left their oil wells, the westernizing shah has left Iran, yet the generalized resentment of the fundamentalists... against the West and its friends remains and grows and is not appeased."

The cause of conflict is not what the West does, but what the West is. Lewis gives two examples. When Israel was first founded, U.S. support was less than wholehearted. Instead, it was the Soviet Union that, through its proxy Czechoslovakia, sent Israelis arms to defend themselves in their first war. In 1956, the United States intervened to help force the British and French out of Egypt. Still, through the '50s and '60s, the Muslim world joined with the Soviets in resenting America.

In November 1979, Islamic terrorists took control of the Great Mosque in Mecca. In Islamabad, a Muslim mob was outraged. The response was to attack and burn - the U.S. Embassy. If Western opinion on the clash is divided, many Islamic voices are quite candid on the subject.

"The war with Israel is not about a treaty, a cease-fire agreement, Sykes-Picot borders, national zeal, or disputed borders," Ayman al-Zawahiri explained this year. "It is rather a jihad for the sake of God until the religion of God is established."

Zawahiri, of course, is an al-Qaeda leader. But the views of other Islamic leaders sound similar.
"Let the entire world hear me. Our hostility to the Great Satan is absolute," Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah said in 2002. "Death to America will remain our reverberating and powerful slogan."
Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proclaimed in 2005: "[We] will soon experience a world without the United States, and Zionism and will breathe in the brilliant time of Islamic sovereignty over today's world."

"It is not the world against Iraq. It is the West against Islam," wrote Safar Al-Hawali, dean of Islamic Studies at Umm Al-Qura University in Mecca. This last quote, however, is not from 2003 - it is from 1990, and Hawali was speaking about the first Gulf War.

Two lessons and three caveats here. Lesson one: When we face horrors such as the Beslan school massacre, the assassination of Theo van Gogh, the bombings in Bali, or the beheading of Daniel Pearl, we are seeing not a response to this policy or that action, but the latest episode in a long, historic struggle. Second: No matter how frightening, sometimes you must take your adversaries at their word.

First caveat: Appearances can deceive, and even the wise can be wrong. Second, even if this is a clash, it still could be short-circuited via unforseen events (such as the invention of a hydrogen fuel cell, or the rise of a great Muslim teacher who persuades millions to reject fundamentalism).
Finally, as Lewis writes:

"There is something in the religious culture of Islam which inspired, in even the humblest peasant or peddler, a dignity and a courtesy toward others never exceeded and rarely equaled in other civilizations."

If we accept that this is a clash between civilizations, two questions face us: How does this change our thinking? And the painful one: What do we do about it?

Contact Jonathan V. Last at jlast@phillynews.com.

Mark Steyn: At Gitmo, detainees get La-Z-Boys, pastries

October 1, 2006
Chicago Sun-Times

'This is not just a bad bill," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. ''This is truly a dangerous bill." And it's not just a dangerous bill. It's also "unconstitutional" and "unconscionable" and represents the loss of the nation's "moral compass."

Wow! That's quite a lot for a humble bill on military trials for terrorist (OK, "alleged terrorist") detainees. But Vermont's lefty colossus wasn't done yet in his excoriation of the Bush administration. "Even they cannot dismiss the practices at Guantanamo as the actions of a few bad people," he continued. "Before they just did it quietly, and against the law, on their own say-so, but now they are obtaining license to engage in additional harsh techniques that the rest of the world will see as abusive, as cruel, as degrading and even as torture."

Hmm. I should say a word about "the practices at Guantanamo." As it happens, I've just got back from Gitmo. (That glitch on my green card was finally straightened out.) I've visited several prisons in several countries over the years and never seen anything like this one. Granted, most of what I know about enemy detainee camps comes from what Rear Adm. Harry Harris, who runs Guantanamo, calls "bad movies and worse TV shows," and from a distance very little seems to have changed: the basic look -- barbed wire and watch towers -- would be recognizable to any World War II POWs. But, close up, pretty much everything else has been flushed down the toilet of history. Indeed, even the toilet has been flushed down the toilet of history: In the interests of cultural sensitivity, Gitmo cells were fitted with "Asian-style toilets," because "that's what the detainees prefer." Given that much of the matter that should be going down there ends up being flung over the guards, it seems that this sensitivity over choice of bathroom fixtures is not always appreciated. When visitors like yours truly swing by, the camp likes to serve them the same meal the prisoners get. This being Ramadan, Adm. Harris was particularly proud of the fresh-baked traditional pastries his team had made for the holy month.
And he was right: The baklava was delicious. "Baklava" is said by some linguists to come from the Arabic for "nuts" -- and, indeed, in that sense this entire war can sometimes seem like one giant baklava. There was a film out earlier this year called ''The Road To Guantanamo,'' and the poster showed the usual emaciated prisoner hung by shackles against a dungeon wall. No doubt the actor in question did the full Robert De Niro and lost 40 pounds to get himself looking that cadaverous.

If they've got anything like that going on at the real Gitmo, they must be doing it behind the confectioner's sugar at the back of the pastry chef's cupboard. If you're hoping to hear about the old wooden chair under a bare lightbulb swinging on its cord, here's the reality: The detaineeare interrogated on either a La-Z-Boy recliner or a luxuriously upholstered sofa -- blue plush with gold piping.

As for being emaciated, it's the only death camp in history where the soi-disant torture victims put on weight. In contrast to the undernourished thesp in the movie version, the average gain at Gitmo is 18 pounds. The Afghan detainees were the chunkiest Afghans I've ever seen. If they ever make it home, their old comrades -- the lean wiry warriors of the Hindu Kush -- will wonder why a party of Florida retirees has suddenly shown up. These Pushtuns are pushing a ton.

And, if you do start losing weight suddenly, don't worry. As one of the camp's medical staff explained, they offer free colon-cancer testing for jihadis over 50. If President Hillary decides to have another crack at socialized medicine in 2009, there are worse slogans than "Every American should have the right to the same health-care plan as a Sudanese terrorist who put his arm out stabbing a prison guard."

Perhaps this is what Senator Leahy means by "abusive," "cruel," "degrading" "torture." If you're used to the Afghan health system, no doubt it's profoundly humiliating to be offered free colonoscopies every time you bend down to use the prayer mat. Nevertheless, it surely requires a perverse genius to have made the first terrorist detention camp to offer homemade Ramadan pastries a byword for horror and brutality. If I had to summon up Gitmo in a single image, it would be the brand-new Qurans in each unoccupied cell. To reassure incoming inmates that the filthy infidels haven't touched the sacred book with their unclean hands, the Qurans are hung from the walls in pristine surgical masks. It's one thing for Muslims to regard infidels as unclean, but it's hard to see why it's in the interests of the United States government to string along with it and thereby validate their bigotry.

When I put this point to Adm. Harris, he replied, "That's an interesting question," and said the decision had been made long before he arrived. He explained that they had a good working system whereby whenever it became necessary to handle a Quran -- because a weapon or illicit communication had been concealed in it -- a Muslim translator would be called to the cell to perform the task. But I wasn't thinking of it in operational so much as psychological terms: What does that degree of abasement before their prejudices tell them about us? Mulling it over since I got back, I'd go further: It seems to me that one sign this war is over is when Muslims are grown-up enough not to go to full-blown baklava nuts over other folks touching their Qurans.

Of course, for the likes of Sen. Leahy, not only is the war far from over, it hasn't even begun. Almost every argument in this area isn't "about" the war so much as whether there even is a war. As the Washington Post reported, "The Senate joined the House in embracing President Bush's view that the battle against terrorism justifies the imposition of extraordinary limits on defendants' traditional rights in the courtroom."

Well, they're only "extraordinary" if you regard these men as traditional "defendants." If you regard them as traditional wartime detainees -- rather than OJs in turbans -- the only "extraordinary" aspect of this is the kid gloves with which not just their Qurans but the jihadists themselves are handled. This is the only war in American history in which enemy detainees have been freed before the end of hostilities. Of those released, at least 22 are known to have returned to the battlefield in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. The ones who remain are dangerous men, no matter how "sensitive" you are. They unscrewed the foot pads from those Asian-style toilets and used them as bludgeons to attack the guards. After listening to Pat Leahy's contribution to the debate, I wonder if the Gitmo medical facility's lavish team of mental health experts might not be more usefully deployed to the U.S. Senate.

©Mark Steyn 2006

Selena Roberts: Football Grows, and Students Go the Way of the T. Rex

SELENA ROBERTS
The New York Times
Published: October 1, 2006

True, it was a reputed cupcake course. But as an English major at Rutgers University, the honors student Robert Andersen couldn’t just curl up with Chaucer or Twain. The guy needed a science credit.

It was in a geology course called Dinosaurs where Andersen discovered the extinction of the Rutgers student athlete.

Outside the classroom door, Andersen witnessed paid attendance takers, who functioned as nannies, as they waited patiently for athletes, usually football players, to walk up and utter the magic password, “I’m here.”

Check, the player went to class. Check, the coach is happy. Check, the program has integrity.
“It’s just a sham,” Andersen, a senior, said Friday. “Are you truly a student athlete if there is someone who has to make sure you go to class?”

The definition gets narrower by the budget cut. At a university besieged by a fiscal crisis — with shortened library hours, staff reductions and canceled classes — Rutgers is eliminating six sports, including crew, fencing and swimming, to save $1.2 million. Nearly equal to the salary of the football coach, Greg Schiano.

“One of the saddest parts,” said Norman Levitt, a math professor, “is that some of the people getting hurt the most are the student athletes — and I’m talking about the student who gets up at 3 a.m. to row.”

“Rutgers,” he added, “is turning into a standard-issue football factory.”

It’s industrial athletics. All around the country, the quaint notion of a student athlete has been stored in a hope chest amid a fool’s-gold pursuit of big-time football.

Officials are lining up to sell their souls to join the arms race of Division I-A, right down to the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the founder of Liberty University. As Forbes recently reported, the Liberty student handbook warns of “witchcraft, séances or other satanic or demonic activity.” (And yet the football program plans to leap to I-A from Division I-AA, anyway.)

Big football is a faith-based proposition. Athletic directors go rah-rah when they talk of their revenue-producing team as if to cleverly conflate it with profit-making. They are not the same.
Almost all Division I-A football programs bleed money in school colors. In the fuzzy math of college accounting, it is difficult to tell the depths of the red because many football teams put, say, laundry, outside the athletic budget ledger.

Whatever the exact total, the Scarlet Knights lost at least $3 million on football last year. As officials will say, this is the price for winning. For the first time since 1976, Rutgers is in the top 25, a ranking bound to surge after the team’s tense victory Friday night against the South Florida Bulls — a football team since 1997. For South Florida, a little-known commuter college, football was born as a branding tool.

“I would rather say it’s a rallying point, not a branding tool, for us,” Robert E. Mulcahy III, the Rutgers athletic director, said by telephone Thursday. “We’re a research university that stands on its own as an academic institution.”

Football has put that identity at risk. Campus computer labs shut down early to conserve money, but the football machine churns on with game films rolling across what has been described as a 42-inch plasma television in the locker room.

“We have a television in the locker room,” Mulcahy said. “I can’t tell you what it is. I don’t know.”

Rutgers’s recruiting money for academically distinguished students with stellar SAT’s has been slashed, but the football budget will increase next year along with Schiano’s salary. “It’s demoralizing to the faculty,” Levitt said.

It’s not as if the bandwagon has square wheels at Rutgers. It’s not as if Rutgers is a campus full of football curmudgeons.

“When Rutgers was horrible at football, students tailgated but never went into the game,” Andersen said. “Now they tailgate, but a larger majority of kids actually go into the game.
“They’re doing well, but it’s like, at what expense?”

The cost is to Rutgers’s intellectual capital. How can the university square its football excess with a fiscal demand for academic austerity? Just what kind of student is wooed by the siren song of a supersize football program? As Andersen said, it appears the university is in search of “kids who want to paint their faces and scream and yell at football games.”

There is another aspect to Rutgers’s football strategy: provide rich boosters with a business perk and an incentive to give. Ply them with victories, with luxury amenities for clients, a winner’s identity for themselves, and watch the money roll in. Last year, Mulcahy said, the Scarlet R Club, the fund-raising arm of the athletic program, collected a record $5.8 million in donations.

The amount doesn’t touch the $20 million-plus raised by organizations like the Gator Boosters from Florida. But even at universities with deep-pocketed donors, the money doesn’t cover the football debts.

This is a sucker’s game. The sport is a money pit and, often, a magnet for corruption. As seen throughout college football, booster influence creates conflicts and opens the way for chicanery.
As it traverses this slippery slope, Rutgers seems oblivious to cautionary tales.

So football expands. Let the fencers fall on the sword with the rest of Rutgers.

“Everybody has to decide what’s important,” Mulcahy said. “Just because we have budgetary concerns doesn’t mean we have to stop having a vision for the future.”

Mulcahy is doing his job. But the vision is just as much of an illusion as the attendance by some football players in a certain cupcake class.

“Halfway through, a few at a time, they’d walk out the back,” Andersen said.

At Rutgers, the disappearance of the authentic student athlete is embodied by a course called Dinosaurs — a study in extinction.

E-mail: selenasports@nytimes.com

Thomas Boswell: After So Long, So Long

[One of the best of all time writes about one of the best of all time. - jtf]

The Washington Post
Friday, September 29, 2006; E10

A few hours after learning that he would not be the manager of the Washington Nationals next season, Frank Robinson entered the dugout, the place that has been his home for so much of the last 51 seasons. Every other Nat, driven away by a steady rain, had retreated to the clubhouse.
But Robinson had an appointment to keep two hours before game time. He'd promised to speak with a college journalism class. For Robinson, few days in his life have been harder than yesterday, when he had separate meetings with team president Stan Kasten and General Manager Jim Bowden. "Not as hard as hitting the slider," Robinson said of those meetings, one of which included tears. "Not as hard as managing a baseball team." But, at 71, about as hard as they come.

Yet, at a time when Robinson had every right to sit in his office and argue with the walls, he made time for the George Washington University students. After being introduced to the class as "Dr. Frank Robinson," because of his honorary doctorate from GW, the manager had the whole group laughing at his stories within minutes. For a quarter of an hour in the dugout, he chatted them up, answered their questions, sold his sport, educated a new generation and fulfilled all his responsibilities.

The students left with smiles. Baseball, what a wonderful game, and that dignified Dr. Robinson, how impressive. They didn't know that he had just learned that he would probably never wear a uniform again, never hold a game in the palm of his hand, never be the boss, never feel the pulse of a pennant race and have a whole city cheer for him, as he did just one year ago.

The reason they never guessed the state of his heart is because Robinson has decided to go out with class. Or, more likely, that's just the nature of the man. Whatever conflicted feelings he no doubt has, he expressed no bitterness and harnessed his pride.

After he finished with the students, he perched on the dugout's back row, watched the rain and talked for half an hour. "I've been fortunate for 51 years," said Robinson, the National League rookie of the year in 1956. "You only get so many chances [to manage]. I felt I'd had my chances. So, I thought, 'Let someone else who's younger have a shot.' Then I got this offer to manage the Expos -- for only one year, I thought.

"And look how it's turned out," Robinson said proudly. On top of his Hall of Fame career and his status as the first black manager, he has now added a dignified and significant Last Act to his eminent résumé. He's been the face of the franchise for a team that returned baseball to Washington after 33 lost seasons. These two brief seasons at RFK now "rank very highly" in Robinson's pantheon of achievements. "Unique and special, very special memories," he said.

However, Frank doesn't want those memories, this new connection with a baseball-hungry city, to end. "If the ballclub would like to have me [next year], I would definitely consider it," he said.
"It would depend on whether the position had real responsibilities. If it does, you got me."
But when he looks at the Nationals current front-office structure, what does he see? "It's pretty full," he said.

"I understand that my role would change as I get older. I may not be as sharp. Some people don't think I grasp that, but I do," Robinson said. "I may want to enjoy life more at some point.

"You have to separate yourself from the game over time. I've been lucky. It hasn't happened abruptly to me -- 51 years," he says, surprised at the number. "That's pretty amazing, especially in this game." He doesn't quite say "cutthroat" game.

"I've always told my players, when your time is over, that's it. The game doesn't owe you anything," he said. "If something is offered, that's a plus."

For Robinson, something of substance absolutely must be offered, no matter how it is carved out. The best quality of the current Nationals -- the cussedness that has allowed them to win 70 games in an injury-devastated season that easily could have produced 100 losses, is almost entirely a reflection of Robinson.

"Frank won't let you quit," catcher Brian Schneider said. "He had a meeting in Colorado [after four straight losses this month] and he talked about how the game has to be played. We came out and started winning.

"Believe me, you don't want to get called into that office."

This week, when an infielder nonchalantly missed a one-hop smash, Robinson called a mound meeting not to chastise the pitcher but to pointedly ask the infielder: "Are you okay? You didn't go after that ball very hard. Are you hurt?" Those words are code: Do it again and I'll jerk you right off the field in the middle of the inning.

"Oh, I've seen him do it," Schneider said.

Robinson chuckles at that recent memory. "If I ask them for the effort, then I've got to give the effort, too, even if it's the last week of the season. All season, the effort has been there. I'm very proud of 'em."

Some players don't respond to Robinson, but those who do are fiercely loyal. "That's very, very sad for him and a lot of us," second baseman Jose Vidro said when he heard the news. "He was here in the hard times and always kept his head up. He thought, with new owners, that he'd have an opportunity to be on the same level with everybody else. . . . I'm a little bit shocked.
That's business."

But now the part of it that includes wearing a uniform is over. The thought of this made Robinson feel "different" and "strange." But he described himself as "at ease," although there was moisture in his eyes when he said it.

"Well, it's time to go," he said at a pregame news conference at which no official announcement was made, but not a shred of doubt was left. Robinson raised his fists like a boxer as he spoke and shadow-punched for a second, as if with his fate. "Just got a bad call from the umpires. They didn't want to reverse it." He meant it, but spun it as a joke.

Asked by the media if he'd been "disrespected" he said, "No, no," emphatically.

In the last half-century there has been no finer baseball man than Frank Robinson. There have been others who deserve a tie with him. His distinction is not that he won MVP of both leagues or managed more than 2,200 games or any of the other standard accomplishments, mountainous though they are in his case.

Robinson's defining distinction was his glowingly upright character, his authentic, often uncompromising integrity. Like his high school basketball teammate and lifelong friend Bill Russell, Robinson always thought out his opinions, whether on baseball or social issues, then spoke them bluntly and defended them consistently.

To describe a baseball manager as "a man of character" would, in many cases, seem ludicrous. Machiavellians and pragmatists, those who hedge their words and cover their backs, often do best in the job. But Robinson chewed out players when he thought it necessary. General managers and owners knew where he stood whether they liked it or not. As Robinson sat and watched the rain in the dugout, he didn't think about himself. He kept talking about the Nats -- the newly acquired speed of Felipe Lopez, Bernie Castro and Nook Logan, the chances of re-signing Alfonso Soriano, the impressive start by rookie Beltran Perez and the unique "makeup" of Ryan Zimmerman. Next year. Robinson only wanted to talk about next year. You can't stop him. His guys are going to be a lot better than people think. Watch and see. If the Nats make Soriano an offer that's "in the ballpark," he thinks the left fielder will be back.

It's clear that, given half a chance to stay near the core of the Nats, Robinson's heart isn't going anywhere.

With a little luck, a little negotiation and common sense, the Nationals and Robinson may actually pull this off. Can the end be graceful?

"Contrary to what some people think, yes, it can," he said.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Nationals Officially Part Ways With Robinson

[Frank Robinson was one of the greatest players of all time...his 586 home runs were not enhanced by any drugs and most of them came against pitchers throwing off mounds fifty percent higher than today's 10 inches. His intensity, perspective, and greatness will be missed. - jtf]

Trailblazing Career Is Likely at an End
By Barry Svrluga
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 1, 2006; A01

In 1975, when the Cleveland Indians needed a replacement for Ken Aspromonte as manager, owner Ted Bonda took what was, at the time, a bold step. He named Frank Robinson to the position, the first African American to manage a major league club.

Yesterday afternoon, as he formally was removed from a manager's job for the last time in his storied career, Robinson reflected on that status, one that always will be by his name: first black manager.

"And," Robinson said, making light of the situation, "the first one to be fired four times."

The official announcement that Robinson -- a 71-year-old Hall of Famer -- would not be asked back as manager of the Washington Nationals finally came yesterday, and the occasion was marked by remembrances not only of his role in bringing baseball back to the nation's capital, but with nods to his significance in the history of the game. When the Nationals took the field against the New York Mets in their penultimate game of the season, Robinson's counterpart in the visitors' dugout was another African American, Willie Randolph.
"I probably wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Frank," Randolph said.

Yet Robinson's absence will leave the club's most prominent faces -- owners Theodore N. Lerner and his son, Mark; President Stan Kasten; and General Manager Jim Bowden -- all white in a city that is majority black, at a time when baseball is desperately trying to spark interest among young urban African Americans.

Robinson has strong views on the importance of black participation in baseball, ones he occasionally expresses. Yet as much as Robinson has served as the face of the franchise since it came to the District last year -- he certainly was its most notable name -- the team didn't promote him as an icon. He admitted that he didn't get out in the city much, traveling between the ballpark and his apartment on Connecticut Avenue NW. His participation in civic affairs largely was low-key, mostly centered around Holy Comforter-St. Cyprian Roman Catholic School on Capitol Hill, where he spoke occasionally and participated in various activities.

Nationals officials did not go into detail about what qualities they will pursue when the search for Robinson's replacement officially begins tomorrow. But Bowden said the club is well aware of the issue.

"There'll be diversity in this entire organization from top to bottom," Bowden said. "It doesn't matter if it's scouting, player development, managers, coaches, players. This organization is all about diversity."

The ousting of Robinson as manager after five seasons -- three in Montreal, the last two in Washington -- was, Bowden and Kasten admitted, an awkward situation, largely because of Robinson's standing in the game. He ranks sixth on the career home run list, is the only man to win the most valuable player award in the American and National leagues, and has held nearly every position in baseball -- all-star player, coach, manager, front office member, Major League Baseball executive.

Robinson was told of the decision on Thursday, in part because he had requested advance notice so that he could, as he said, "say goodbye." The Nationals are planning to pay tribute to Robinson before, during and after today's season finale at RFK Stadium, and they will host a "Frank Robinson Day" next season. Though Robinson and Bowden have discussed the possibility that Robinson would take another job within the organization, no decision has been made. Robinson has been adamant that he would want a job only if it had real, decision-making power.

For two days, Robinson had danced around the questions about his future, his eyes watering from time to time. Yesterday, sitting next to Bowden at a news conference in a small room in the bowels of RFK, he tried to sound content.

"It's been a good ride for me," he said. "Fifty-one years. . . . I never walk away from anything. When I'm hired to do a job, I do the best I can as long as I can."

Robinson managed for parts of 16 seasons for four franchises -- Cleveland, the San Francisco Giants, the Baltimore Orioles and the Montreal Expos, who became the Nationals. He never won a division title, and he finished with a winning record just five times.

Neither Bowden nor Kasten would discuss the reasons behind the decision, other than to say "it was in the best long-term interest of the franchise," as Bowden put it. But several Nationals officials felt for some time that Robinson didn't keep up with modern statistical analysis and he didn't communicate enough with his players. Robinson, in turn, defended himself as he pursued the opportunity to stay on beyond this season.

Robinson has long said he wouldn't truly reflect on his accomplishments until he was out of baseball completely. Now, that time could be here.

"I want it one day to [be] where an African American or minority manager is hired, and there's no mention of" race, he said. "I think that's when we'll have achieved what we've been trying to achieve all these years in baseball as far as managers are concerned."

He understands, though, that Washington is a special case. Alphonso Maldon Jr., a former official in the Clinton administration, is a minority partner in the Nationals' ownership structure, the senior vice president for external affairs. He and Kasten have participated in community meetings in all eight wards in the District, and while he has no say in whom the next manager will be, he said the franchise is acutely aware that the racial makeup of the club's leadership will be noticed in the community.

"We are going absolutely as far as we have to go to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to experience the Nationals," Maldon said.

When Major League Baseball sold the Nationals to the Lerner group earlier this year, it did so only after the group expanded to bring in more racial minorities, and MLB officials at the time said they put such stress on the issue because of Washington's population.

"I think you have to feel the heartbeat of the city," said third base coach Tony Beasley, an African American who spent his first year in the majors this season. "I know it was a really important issue when they were talking about the ownership. I would think it would be something that would be in the forefront as far as coaches and things of that nature.

"You have to do your homework on each one of those decisions, but you also have to recognize who your fan base is -- and who you want it to be."

Last night, such thoughts were far from Robinson's mind. He had been pondering the end for most of the previous week, if not most of the entire season.

"Anytime you're looking at the end, it'll be emotional," he said. "How much? I don't know. That's not something you can think about or you can rehearse. They might all pffffff ," and he took his mammoth hands and waved them away from his body, as if the emotions were spewing out.

Before the first pitch, Robinson turned to the crowd and tossed out some baseballs. He will do the same again today, when he pulls on a baseball uniform for the final time. He is unsure of what comes next. He knows only one thing for sure.

"As far as I'm concerned, in my heart and my head, this is it," Robinson said. "Plain and simple."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company