Welcome to HalPhillips.net, where the headline news remains the July 2022 publication of H.P.’s best-selling popular history, Generation Zero: Founding Fathers, Hidden Histories & The Making of Soccer in America. Click the graphic above to purchase via Amazon. There you may procure print or eBook editions, in addition the newly release audio edition. Or, if you like, click here to buy from Barnes & Noble. Phillips and his publishers at Dickinson-Moses Press have also created a wicked companion site at www.genzero.halphillips.net. Do visit there for book news, excerpts, recently published features and podcasts from the author, and all manner of GZ-centric blogging, pictures, reviews and testimonials. One more thing: You may wish to visit Phillips’ GZ-centric Instagram feed, a pretty cool digital museum & gallery dedicated to U.S. soccer ephemera from the 1970s and ‘80s.
Oh, Pioneers! GenX Rediscovers the Moderate Joys of Microdosing
Observing the proliferation of dope stores here in my former mill town is, by now, old hat. They’re everywhere across the Great State of Maine and their attendant foot traffic has even begun to attract pleasantly parasitic commerce, like the Casa Del Taco truck that took up residence beside one shop, the Cure Cannabis Co., before mysteriously disappearing three weeks later.
I don’t frequent these marijuana dispensaries (though I would pay to see the staff at Cure dressed up like Robert Smith). I know a dozen folks who’ve been growing their own for decades. When Maine legalized the skunk in 2009, when municipalities decriminalized possession in 2013, I got separate calls from friends familiar with my personal habits. You celebrating? they asked. No sir, I told them. My lifestyle hasn’t changed one iota.
But psilocybin? That’s another matter. After consuming my fair share of mushrooms during the 1980s, I didn’t partake for long stretches of my subsequent adulthood. There were a few one-off experiences during The Aughts, when I consumed the same 3 to 3.5 grams that folks routinely scarfed during the second Reagan administration. But I mainly left them alone — because a standard 20th-century dose of 3.5 grams could mean a 7- to 9-hour commitment. Easy to carve out, as a college student, over a weekend. Not so much when one is working 9 to 5, with a wife and small kids.
However, I’m here to report that shrooms are back, in a very different but curiously familiar way, particularly among my Gen X and late-stage Boomer cohort. Psilocybin products remain technically illegal in Maine, for now. But not in California or several other states… Ain’t federalism and the U.S. Postal Service grand?
The difference 40 years can make has proved both fascinating and nuanced. Four or five years ago, a buddy of mine revealed that he’d been procuring his mushrooms in a unique form: from a vendor who, when he wasn’t painting houses, gathered the particulate, or shake, from the bottom of a 1-gallon plastic storage bag. He’d fill and sell cute-little 1-gram capsules that, I discovered, represented the perfect microdose. Perfect for me anyway.
Nothing psychedelic, mind you. As with THC and alcohol, everyone processes these chemical compounds differently. I never got an acid-style trip out of psilocybin shrooms, no matter how many grams I gobbled. These 1-gram shake capsules produced a delightfully toned-down buzz that lasted 2-3 hours and didn’t continually lobby my brain for more, more, more. You know, like other white, powdery drugs I associate with the 1980s.
For example, I caught Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew’s spectacular “Remain in Light” review, early in August. They went on around 9 p.m. After parking the car and popping a gummy, I remained plenty wide awake and ready to have fun till midnight. A most pleasant stimulant. Plenty sober enough to drive home. No trouble sleeping afterward.
Today, of course, gummies are the in-vogue medium for shrooms and cannabinoid THC, and there exists an entire universe of delivery media: chocolate, root beer, oils and tinctures, salves and creams. I frankly prefer to smoke the kind bud: Its old-school results remain immediate and predictable, for me. Yet that’s precisely the noteworthy thing about these manufactured products: By paying attention to gram dosage, one can monitor and enable only the buzz one desires — no more, no less. Brands differ, but my older, wiser friends and I have found consistency within most any manufacturer’s product line.
That unknown variability had always annoyed me when it came to homemade hash brownies, or pot cookies: How strong are these? “Uh. I dunno, dude.” Not a science.
The corporatization of dope has its drawbacks, as well, but it has delivered to the marketplace consistent expectations and results on the buzz front. It’s no mistake that beer menus today routinely include the percentage of alcohol for each pint on offer. The legalization of weed and other products has influenced an entire industry in this way.
Critically, the active ingredient in shroom gummies is stronger and calibrated differently compared to the analog method. According to the National Institutes of Health, “a 25 mg psilocybin fixed dose is approximately 2.5 grams of dried Psilocybe cubensis mushroom. However, it is important to note, there is intra- and inter-species variability of psilocybin content.”
I’m intrigued by the way all these particulars, including our understandings of dosage, have evolved in the course and context of my own life. Back in 1985, the fall of my senior year in college, I went to visit a friend at UMass. A buddy of his had a bunch of mushrooms and asked me to move some for him, back at my own institute of higher learning. This I proceeded to do, in addition to partaking myself, chaperoning other folks on maiden voyages, and eventually microdosing — though that terminology had not yet been coined. Still, I’d pop a cap before a party. Another time, I remember downing a fat stem before the annual Nebraska-Oklahoma football game, the day after Thanksgiving. Nothing like a mild shroom buzz to watch nimble quarterbacks prosecute the triple-option wishbone.
While arguably ahead of their time, these casual microdoses eventually gave me pause. The worry: I was beginning to normalize the shrooms by microdosing them, however responsibly I may have been doing so. To my 21-year-old mind it felt immature, perhaps reckless, maybe even a slippery slope. When the supply was depleted, I didn’t seek out more. For decades, I considered shrooming only on special occasions, at the suggestion of others. A couple times I took the plunge but most of the time I demurred.
Now, on the verge of 60, all these folks around me are microdosing pretty much exactly as I had my senior year in college! What had seemed reckless back then is now prosecuted with great intention and precision, by demonstrably reasonable old people. And Talking Heads are back on tour in support of an album released in 1980. Amazing.
I’m not the least bit surprised the Maine Legislature approved last
September a commission to study the possibility of legalizing psilocybin; or that elsewhere shrooms are now being prescribed to people who struggle with depression and PTSD. Everyone’s different, and even the big doses never made the walls breathe or the trees talk — not to me. What they can do, for a time, regardless of dosage, is take one completely outside of one’s self, to a place where one might examine his/her own experiences in completely new ways.
I remember one young man in particular whom I chaperoned on his first psilocybin experience, back in the day. He was sitting on the tailgate of a gigantic ‘70s-era station wagon, calm and contemplative, but he’d clearly been laughing with great vigor. One could see it in his eyes. “This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever done,” he told me, without any trace of irony, anxiety or pride. “I’m never doing it again.”
With the experience of decades, I wish I could have responded, Hey, I get it. Next time — if there is a next time — try taking one third as much.
It’s Time to Start Cutting Kids from High School Sports Teams, Again
It’s official: I’ve started writing a monthly column for the local newspaper, the one serving our beloved twin cities of Lewiston and Auburn. It’s called RiverWatch (my editors insisted I come up with a “standing head”) and you can read the second installment here. Be warned: Content at SunJournal.com resides behind a paywall. I would encourage readers, especially those here in Maine, to suck it up and subscribe. For one affordable price, subscribers get all the news from Greater L/A, the state’s second largest metro area; everything from our sister paper, the Portland Press-Herald; plus access to content at the Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal.
Here’s a teaser below: My most recent column fixates on the controversial pledges high school students are required to sign in order to play sports, participate in dramatic productions, or play in the band (spoiler alert: I’m against them, as they smack of coercion). As an addendum to that piece, let me say something else to high school athletic directors across Maine:
Please reinstitute the practice of cutting team rosters down to manageable sizes.
I covered high school sports early in my journalism career. Cutting kids from JV teams was de rigeuer 30 years ago, and for eons prior. Ten years ago, I was familiarized with more recent roster-management practices, here in Maine, once my kids reached their teens. What I discovered? Over the course of three decades, no-cut policies had largely won the day.
Some aspects of this issue remain uncontroversial: Why deny anyone the chance to play a sport? That sentiment continues to ring true — for 10 or 12 year olds. As kids get older and move along to higher grades, we can agree sports become a little less about participation and a little more about competition, skill development, college resume polishing and yes, winning.
By high school, coaches and the administration should not shy away from cutting a team down to practical size — so that boys and girls, especially on the junior varsity, get the game and practice time they need to improve. There were 18 girls on my daughter’s JV softball squad. So the coach sat 3-4 kids every game, in a rotation, to accommodate all those players. This undermines the whole idea behind a junior varsity: to develop players for the varsity. In the service of not hurting someone else’s feelings, kids who need the game-time experience aren’t getting it.
This probably strikes some readers, especially those uninterested in sports, as hopelessly small bore and callous. Yet the issue is more nuanced and frankly more broadly relevant here in Maine, where an entire 4-year high school might have only 250-300 kids. At schools this small or smaller, oversized rosters seriously limit a school’s ability to offer student bodies the widest possible range of extracurricular activities.
My daughter’s JV soccer team, for example, had 22 kids on it — including four seniors! (I didn’t even think seniors were allowed to play JV…) In any case, not cutting those half a dozen kids actually denied those very same girls the chance to experiment and perhaps find something at which they could excel, or maybe enjoy far more. If a kid gets cut from soccer, for example, she can try another fall sport like field hockey or cross country. Or she can do the play, or get involved in the Big Sister program.
In a perverse way, by trying not hurt their feelings, we are denying kids the chance to try and/or learn something new.
What’s more, administrations at Maine’s many small, rural high schools are obliged to actively spread kids around, lest certain activities be discontinued. If 22 kids are coming out for JV softball, turnout for the track or lacrosse team is invariably down, as are numbers in the band. At schools this size, it’s something of a zero-sum game. Meaning, it’s even more important not to carry bloated rosters.
Look, my daughter had largely positive experiences playing both JV soccer and JV softball. The coaches were great. Yet both teams were way too big, in terms of numbers, because a decision was made not to cut anyone. All to avoid bruising young egos.
Administrators should empower coaches to cut those kids, like high school coaches did routinely, for decades. Some kids might shed a tear, but eventually they’ll take their talents elsewhere and perhaps keep another school activity viable. In the short term, their parents might pitch a fit, citing the years and years they spent driving Suzie or Johnnie to soccer practice. In time, however, the kids and the school community will benefit.
In this Age of Identity, is Augusta National Presenting as … a bit Aussie?
AUGUSTA, Ga. — Is it me, or did the 2024 Masters Tournament concluded last month exude a subtle-but-fascinating Antipodean vibe? I’m not talking about the field itself (though I do think ESPN and CBS could have done with an Aussie Cam, to track the progress of Mssrs. Davis and Smith), but rather the course itself. I came away convinced that the 2024 presentation at Augusta National Golf Club has subtly moved closer to the Sand Belt stylings of Royal Melbourne, as opposed to the iconic American parkland for which ANGC has for many decades served as standard-bearer.
The Good Doctor, Alister MacKenzie, laid out all 18 holes at ANGC (with Robert Tyre Jones) and all 36 at RMGC (with Alex Russell) some 90 years ago. In Georgia, architect George Cobb subsequently authored several changes during the 1950s and ’60s. Yet most golf fans recognize that, between major championships, this golf course is routinely renovated and tweaked. Last week’s telecast revealed a few new cupping areas, enabled by reworked contours on and around the putting surfaces. A few loblolly pines have also gone missing, some by design, some due to old age, and some out of an abundance of caution, due to the massive tree limb that fell to earth during last year’s tournament.
Augusta National rarely comments on any of these adjustments, as we’ve come to expect. What’s more, its broadcaster partners scrupulously (some would say obsequiously) follow the club’s lead in this regard. As do the course design and construction professionals who carry out this annual off-season adjustment work.
Still, I noticed a few things that felt new, and all of them struck me as rather Australian.
First, the bunker edges at Augusta National are looking more and more like something we’d see at Royal Melbourne, Kingston Heath or Metropolitan. I’m not sure when this edging practice actually started, in Augusta, but this year I noticed for the first time just how much of the soil profile is visible at the top of the greenside bunkers especially. Either way, this is very much a stylistic flourish associated with the top courses in Australia, especially those in the famed Sand Belt region south of Melbourne.
The modifier design nerds like to deploy when describing this style of bunker edge is “sharp”. The definition of said edge is indeed very neat and clean, and balls don’t trickle down a collar or embankent into these bunkers: They drop in, directly. To be clear, I’m not about to claim that this style was instituted course-wide this past winter. More likely, it’s been introduced already, perhaps in a few spots, and expanded to include most every green complex, save 14, where no bunkers exist.
Aussie/Sand Belt bunkers and those at Augusta National have long shared two more qualities: steep faces and flat bottoms. This shared characteristic typically means a ball hits the face, doesn’t embed, and rolls back down to a fairly level bunker floor. This architectural choice has a competitive aspect (anything buried in the face would result in a terrifically difficult recovery shot) and an ease-of-maintenance aspect. It also looks smart.
We can agree Augusta National’s bunkers have presented and played this way for years. It seems to me the club has finally added this soil-forward edging presentation to fully complement the effect.
It’s Been 20 years since I Eulogized my Cat
Twelve years ago when I moved to Maine from Greater Boston I traded an apartment in the relativly leafy suburb of Natick for one in the heart of downtown Portland, an act which obliged me and my two cats, Scott and Zelda, to become urbanites. This, as I explained to Scott at the time, was admittedly counterintuitive; not many Massholes go north to seclude themselves from the great outdoors. But I did assure him, as he was the more adventurous of the two litter mates, that someday he’d be an outdoor cat once more.
Five years later, having taken on a wife, child, dog and sole proprietorship, I delivered on that promise. We moved to rural New Gloucester and Scott, once an indoor cat against his will, was free again to roam the countryside as he pleased. Zelda did too, of course, but she’s always been more of a homebody. The former Ms. Sayre never experienced the thrill of the wild that her furry companion did. For months after our arrival in The NG, Scott would prance through the sliding door into the house and pause to look up at me, his whiskered face beaming with squinty-eyed satisfaction. “This is AWEsome,” he clearly communicated to me. “You’re a man of your word.”
Scott died Friday morning, so this particular memory and scores of others are rushing over me just now. He’d been sick: a horrible earache and weight loss associated with what the vet presumed to be kidney failure, a common and ultimately fatal issue for 15-year-old cats like Scott. I hadn’t seen him all of Thursday — a problem because he needed his anti-biotic pill. A couple weeks earlier, during an initial round of similar treatments, he had disappeared for 48 hours and I thought, with great sadness, that he might have taken off for good rather than endure the indignity of another forced pill-popping. But I did find him; he was under the bed in our guest room, resting amid the sagging, tattered under-linings of the box-spring.
That’s where Silas found him Friday morning. I reached in to give him a soothing pat before the tricky matter of extrication, but his fir was oddly cool to the touch.
•••
I am a cat person. Dogs I’ve learned to appreciate but I shall always prefer a cat’s snuggability, cleanliness, independence and innate poise. They would appear possess a self-respect that lends more meaning to their affection. Dogs are great, but they seem pre-programmed to slobber love on humans regardless of who you are or how you treat them, because it’s implicit that they’ll starve without you. They are truly dependent, whereas cats, if they feel mistreated, will withdraw their affection and treat you with the appropriate wariness, or they’ll simply run off and take their chances with some other human, dinning on voles they kill and consume in the meantime.
By the same token, when a well-treated cat lets down its defenses and makes itself vulnerable to your love, it really means something. I’m not one to anthropomorphize unduly, but human-feline relationships feel, to me, more interpersonally genuine.
Developers Gonna Develop: So, Let’s Not Sneeze at Golf’s Flexible Utility
This story in The New York Times, published mid-February 2024, struck a chord. Not because I’m a golfer, but because I’ve written quite a lot about abandoned golf courses, the re-wilding of courses, even the resuscitation of courses gone fallow. As long ago as 1994, the NYT has even seen fit to quote me on the subject of how many golf courses is enough, and how many legitimately eco-friendly credentials an operative golf course can claim.
This recent Times piece proved a solid piece of reporting, and the comments section was chock full of even more examples of layouts that have been returned, in full and in part, to open space. In each case, everyone appreciated the fact that here was a gorgeous piece land where the public could now hike, walk their dogs, bird-watch, etc.
In a golf economy where 150 courses were shuttered annually — a culling the U.S. golf market endured every year from 2008 to 2021 — what to do with former course properties proved a fairly pressing issue. But that market correction appears got have stabilized. There were approximately 90 golf course closures in the U.S. last year (as measured in 18-hole equivalents), according to the National Golf Foundation. There were also more new course openings in 2023 than at any time since 2010: 24 18-HEQ.
For a variety of reasons, the golf establishment will always be expected argue for just how sustainable golf courses should be, as golf courses, and how many of them (and what sort of facilities) we really need, full stop. But it’s important to think about these issues in two different ways:
First, the issue actually hinges in critical respects on access. The real problem, in America, is that private clubs here are so very private. The idea that non-members in a particular community might use a private golf course property as open space is pretty much anathema. Whereas, in the U.K. and Australia, and across Europe, it’s common place. There, even the most private clubs often double as places where non-members can play golf — but also walk their dogs, cross-country ski, even hike. More important, this ethos trickles down to all courses, where golfers treat the property as a playground, while an even larger population of non-golfing locals treat them as quasi-public spaces.
We don’t do that here in the United States. Our private clubs are very exclusive in comparison — and this attitude trickles down, too. One doesn’t see walking paths for non golfers (and their dogs) even at public and municipal courses in the U.S. Why not? This is something the golf course industry can and should work to address. Why not build community walking and biking trails through public courses, which account for some 90 percent of the golf course facilities in America? Read all those comments on the Feb. 2024 NYT story above: Folks just want to walk these properties with their dogs, maybe hike a bit, or ride their bikes on these decommissioned course properties. If this is what the community seeks, and these activities can be enjoyed inside and beside operative golf courses, why not be a better neighbor? Who knows, you might sell more food & drink in your grille room, or find new customers for your banquet facility.
Second, it’s critical that golfers and non-golfer alike recognize that courses offer a level of flexibility that other development categories do not. As February’s NYT story illustrates, even golf courses that viably served a golf population for decades can pivot to other public services quite quickly and easily. I’m not sure that I agree with the subhead above: that most courses are in some way “paved over”. Many of the golf courses closed down the last 20 years were decommissioned to make room for housing, something desperately needed in this country. If that’s what we mean by “paving,” that’s another outcome I can live with. Yet here again, not all developments allow for such repurposing, not with such relative ease.
What’s a Design Nerd to Think, “When Nines Don’t Match”?
[Ed. This piece appeared 25 years ago in a magazine called TravelGolf Maine founded by a fellow named Park Morrison. It didn’t last long (1998-2001) and, sadly, Park passed away last year. I’m including the story here because surely it never made it online — and because it appeared, in print, under a favorite pen name of mine. Another serendipitous fact: When I traveled to Lovell, Maine to “research” the story, the course ranger, lounging in a cart parked by the first tee at Lake Kezar CC, was none other than Bill Bissett, retired athletic director at Hudson (Mass.) High, one of the schools covered by The Hudson Daily Sun, where I served sports editor from 1989-90.]
By Henry Choi
Opinions differ when it comes to appraising so-called schizo layouts, those courses where one nine barely resembles the other. In northern New England — where scads of nines were laid out in the 1920s and ‘30s, only to be expanded many decades later by different architects — the issue is more salient than perhaps anywhere in America. Because there are just so many of them, the question remains: Does one decry the stylistic divergence or applaud the diversity?
Two courses in the border regions of Maine and New Hampshire inform the debate. North Conway Country Club and Lake Kezar CC are separated by 20 miles. And yet, the nines on each course feel even further apart, light years in fact, when it comes to style, terrain and vintage. That both tracks remains such good fun tips our fledgling debate toward applause.
This part of New England is remote but hardly underdeveloped. The resort nature of North Conway, N.H., cannot be lost on first-time visitors to its eponymous, semi-private country club, where the 1st tee is set back just 50 yards from a bustling main drag replete with myriad factory outlets, hotels and restaurants. Indeed, the clubhouse at NCCC sits directly beside the Conway Scenic Railway Station, a massive, red-roofed, Victorian-era structure painted a vivid shade of yellow.
It’s quite a sight, but nothing like the vista next door. The 1st at NCCC (the image above) is one of the great opening holes in all of New England, a 418-yard par-4 with long views of Cathedral Rock in the distance and, of more pressing concern, O.B. all along the left side. It takes some real concentration to block it all out and belt one — right over the train tracks! — to a fairway 70 feet (!) below.
Don’t get the wrong idea, however. The remaining golf at North Conway CC isn’t about dramatic elevation changes. At all. After this inaugural plunge, the course plays entirely in the subtly contoured flood plain of the Saco River. It’s scenic — with the river running through it and White Mountains surrounding it — but it’s relatively flat and eminently walkable.
The opening nine here dates to 1928, when Ralph Barton, a protégé of Seth Raynor, reworked a older, rudimentary loop. The charm of these opening holes lies in the subtleties of their small, steeply pitched greens guarded closely by deep bunkers. The 4th is a wonderful short hole, a make-or-break 140-yard pitch to a putting surface that falls away steeply on all sides. Every so often the land here does move with surprising drama. The 354-yard 5th plays right along the river; the back tee calls for a drive across a bend in the Saco to a swaled landing area, which is then crossed by a stream at 240 yards. The green looks harmless enough, until you look over the back side and see the ground fall away steeply some 20 feet.
The second nine at North Conway arrived much later, in the mid-1960s, courtesy of New Hamster-based architect Phil Wogan, and no — the two loops do not go together stylistically. The front side putting surfaces are set mostly at grade, while the bulk of Wogan’s greens are raised up in mid-century mode made fashionable by Robert Trent Jones, Sr. Yet the backside putting surfaces are quite cool and challenging in their own right, especially the saddle job at the par-3 13th — and the epic volcano that sits at the business end of the sublime-but-potentially-cruel, 434-yard, par-4 14th.
•••
Thanksgiving in China: Two Stories Behind the Story
It’s been a decade since this piece was published in the print edition of LINKS Magazine, under an original headline that, as I recall, played on the “China Syndrome” trope. I recently ran across it online. So I’ve shared it here, 10 years down the road.
Almost immediately upon publication of this feature, President Xi Jinping started calling out golf as a tool of corrupt bourgeoise elites. At the time, many observers viewed this rhetoric as merely opportunistic. After all, the mainland Chinese course- and player-development markets were booming. Golf had just been designated an Olympic sport — and the Chinese LOVE Olympic sports. Surely golf wasn’t in any real trouble there. Surely this was Xi scoring political points. Surely this anti-golf rhetoric would pass.
Well, that moment might well prove the historic high-water mark for both Chinese golf and the subject of my story, Mission Hills, then largest golf resort on earth. Because Xi wasn’t posing. The Central Government had banned new course development a decade prior, a fact that provincial apparatchiks and rich developers had chosen to ignore. See here a piece I wrote for GCM China a year after the LINKS story, in 2015, detailing the haze of politics and environmental concerns — some real, some manufactured — then swirling about the Chinese golf industry. Five years later, more than 100 courses had closed down. As many as 500 remain operational today, but their existence is maintained very quietly indeed. A robust golf media sector had once thrived in China; today that roster of magazines, websites and TV channels has disappeared almost entirely. Mainland Chinese still love their golf. For a while, later in the 2010s, they simply played the game on holiday in Vietnam, Thailand and Japan. Once COVID-19 emerged in February 2020, that brand of tourism (all tourism) ground to a halt.
A lot can happen in a decade.
A lot can happen in a single night, too, and that’s the other story behind this story. To report the LINKS piece, I had traveled to Shenzhen, home to Mission Hills and the beating heart of hyper-capitalist China. I had arrived in Hong Kong, via Manila, just before Thanksgiving 2013, when the idea of a mainland Chinese and pro-democracy protests seemed the stuff of dark fantasy. As per usual, I stayed with good friends, a married couple — she a native Hong Konger, he an American expat who has lived and worked there for decades. They treated me to a Thanksgiving supper at The American Club. That evening I treated them to dinner at The China Club, a famous old-world restaurant of the early British-protectorate variety.
My subsequent travel plan, endorsed and scheduled by my hosts, and Mission Hills itself, was simple: Get a cab after dinner to a special bus station located near the Chinese border. Hong Kong is, of course, an island. An archipelago actually. But its land mass also includes a famous hunk of mainland, Kowloon, which shares the border with Shenzhen. Because Mission Hills caters to so many Hong Kong-based members and resort guests, motor coaches run regularly from this station, over the border and back again, every day of the week.
So I poured myself into a cab, along with my big suitcase and golf clubs. It was 15 minutes to the bus station. Yet upon our arrival, it was clear the bus station was closed. I asked the guy where the border crossing might be. He nodded and dropped me 10 minutes up the road. After clearing customs, lugging my oversized bags up stairs and through tiny turnstiles, I emerged from the border facility to find the immediate environs completely devoid of taxis.
This had been my half-cocked alternate plan: Get over the border and hire a taxi to Dongguan, where Mission Hills and my on-site hotel were located. I possessed an early smartphone, but nothing like Google Maps or Translate existed at that primitive time. What’s more, I had not yet secured a People’s Republic of China SIM card — and there was no shop inside the border building — so my iPhone was essentially useless. Having visited China several times before, I knew it was always wise to have a Chinese friend or hotel concierge write out important addresses, in Mandarin, because very few cabbies in Beijing or Shanghai speak or understand a lick of English. These measures had not been undertaken as part of my half-baked, half-in-the-bag travel pivot.
Finally, I located not a cabbie but ‘a guy with a car.’ Sometimes, in China and Southeast Asia, that’s preferable. He and I spent quite a while trying to communicate exactly where it was I wanted to go. For all its celebrity and sheer size, “Mission Hills” meant nothing to this fellow. Neither did “Dongguan” or “golf”. I resorted to swinging imaginary clubs, then showing him my golf clubs. This seemed to result in a measure of recognition. So I got into his car.
Ten minutes later, he pulls over on a busy highway, where he gets out and starts chatting and gesticulating with half a dozen other guys by the side of the road. “This is where I get robbed, beaten up or both,” I said to my now-completely-sober self. Better to go down swinging, so I put my passport in my front pocket and joined them. Turns out my driver was basically selling my fare to the highest bidder! Soon I was transferring my stuff into a different unmarked car headed north.
Once again, I’d received no real indication that this driver had any idea where Mission Hills or Dongguan were, or whether he fully understood that these were my intended destinations. But lo and behold, 45 minutes later we pulled up in front of a hotel — my hotel! Filled with thanksgiving, I located an ATM and paid the man handsomely.
What Made Grandma Grandma? ‘Kantika’ Deploys Clever, Analytic Tool: Fiction
Book Review
There is historical fiction. There are the literary cousins of memoir and family history. Then there is the canny, lyric hybrid Elizabeth Graver deploys in Kantika, the 2023 novel that tracks her own family’s 20th-century journey from Constantinople to America, by way of Barcelona and Havana. Don’t worry: Ellis Island and its many overworked tropes do not figure here. Those are generally reserved for Eastern Europeans and Ashkenazi Jews. Graver’s people are the decidedly Mediterranean, metropolitan and mercantile Sephardic Jews, first invited to the Ottoman capital by Sultan Bayezid II, in 1492, following the Christian Reconquista of Spain.
Four centuries on, the author introduces her great grandfather, the cultured, haute bourgeoisie owner of a textile concern, until he isn’t. After retooling his factory during The Great War, to produce military uniforms, the new Turkish government absconds with it. Or so Alberto Cohen tells his wife and children. Did Ataturk really take their livelihoods and social standing by eminent domain? Or did this charming-but-passive sensualist fritter or perhaps gamble it away instead? Such questions are rarely meted out for certain, not in real life, not within families, certainly not looking back across generations. Graver is unflinching in her fleshing and framing of such consequential gossip, yet the novelist can also absolve or blame or leave ambiguous all the saucy or ambivalent bits, pretty much at her whim. To the narrative’s great benefit.
And so Rebecca — our protagonist, the author’s maternal grandmother — decamps with her penniless relations for Barcelona, just as she comes of age. There she marries a largely absent dullard because four centuries on, in what would shortly become Franco’s Spain, Sephardic men are hard to find. She builds a business and bears two children, only to be widowed at 30. Her older sister, already emigrated to the U.S., makes her a speculative, trans-Atlantic match with another widower, Sam Levy, whom Rebecca meets in Havana. As a test. Twenty-four lusty hours later, they are married and aboard a boat bound for New York City.
Stories of American immigration tend to concentrate less on the old country, the conditions that obliged one to light out for the territory in the first place. I am grateful that more than half of Kantika is set abroad. Not everyone in a family might choose to emigrate, or is allowed to. Rebecca waits two years for her boys to join her in America, for example; her aged parents expire before their papers & passages are secured. What’s more, the ones who do manage to leave tend to self-select according to their strength of self, adventure and determination. To some extent, these metrics account for the can-do immigrant spirit that has, in large part, made the U.S. what it is. After the same fashion, it enabled and informed the distinct culture of the American West. In short, the sad sacks tend to stay home. The same goes for those immigrants who get dragged to a new world and never leave the old neighborhood. (In Greater Boston, where I grew up, they have a name for those folks: The Lace-Curtain Irish.)
There are plenty of sad sacks in the Cohen family, in any family, and this story does not ignore or pigeon-hole them. But Rebecca is determinedly bound not necessarily for bigger things but the next thing, all the while singing and cajoling, striving and faltering, dusting herself off and risking it all again. America and its celebrated dreams do not magically lift her blended family out of working-class hardship. In several not-insignificant respects, she was sold a bill of goods (by her sister!). Yet Graver still depicts Depression-era Queens and this new, extended family with a clear-eyed, richly detailed generosity, which feels deserved.
The Cohens and Levys will never be confused with the high society Sephardim of Steven Birmingham’s esteemed 1971 history, The Grandees. But neither did he create characters as earthy and captivating as Rebecca. Working in non-fiction, he didn’t create them at all. The humans who populate Kantika, while technically the fabrications of a novelist, nevertheless feel markedly genuine — because, in these pages, the reader recognizes them as actual historical figures, relatives and literary characters all at once. This genre Graver cleverly contrives here: It can’t be her own invention, can it? Either way, her sketches of fin de siècle life by the Bosphorus, the portraits of her great grandparents in particular, and the language of those newly arrived in Barcelona, then the boroughs of Gotham, all ring very true. As do the black & white photographs that headline the chapters. I took the time to study each one, delighting in my recognition of these blood relations we’ve come to know via the unfolding drama. These components and others all deliver such splendid narrative impact because, it seems to me, they strike the reader as more authentic and intimate than mere details in a work of fiction, while never succumbing to the gloss of memoir or family history. Because the author is clearly moved by the epic sweep of this tale, so are we.
The word “kantika” means “song” in the old Judeo-Spanish language of Ladino, the accent of which Rebecca never shakes. One imagines that Graver herself — a Boston College professor whose 2013 novel, The End of the Point, was long-listed for the National Book Award — was enthralled by her grandmother growing up. And perhaps a bit intimidated by such a robust, borderline domineering, still-rather-foreign figure. Graver and I attended Wesleyan University together in the mid-1980s; we didn’t really know each other, but we did share several English classes. Perhaps the cynical, white-bread nature of the New England small college initially led her to dismiss as mere mythos her grandmother’s literary potential. Credit the free-thinking Jesuits in Chestnut Hill and maybe a tenure track for leading her back to subject matter, a legit heroine’s journey, that was there all along.
The NBA Didn’t Require Ernie D… Dave Gavitt and The Big East? Oh yes.
It’s never too late to mark and quantify the impact of Ernie DiGregorio. Not in New England. Not when the subject is college basketball. Yet here’s the immediate news peg, the reason to contemplate Ernie D and his attendant rabbit hole early in 2024: It was 50 years ago this week that DiGregorio set the NBA rookie record for assists in a game: 25, for the old Buffalo Braves, during a 120-119 win over the hapless Trailblazers, in Portland, on New Year’s Day 1974.
This particular moment in NBA history, in and of itself, packs enough meaningful hoops serendipity to justify an entire 30 for 30 documentary:
• Ernie D led the Association in assists that 1973-74 season, his first. He led the league in free throw percentage, too.
• The Trailblazers were indeed terrible enough to earn the no. 1 pick in the June 1974 draft. They took a guy named Bill Walton.
• The Braves coach that record-setting January night? Dr. Jack Ramsey, who left for Portland the summer of 1976, whereupon he and Walton immediately led the Blazers to their only NBA championship.
• After acquiring Nate Archibald in September 1977, Buffalo let DiGregorio go — to the Lakers, who waived him halfway through the season. Boston signed him but didn’t offer a new deal. Just like that, Ernie D’s NBA run was over.
• That same summer, Buffalo owner John Y. Brown Jr. swapped franchises with Celtics owner Irv Levin, who promptly moved the Braves to San Diego.
• A year later, the newly christened Clippers signed Walton, meaning Ernie D missed playing with The Big Redhead by only a couple Degrees of NBA Separation.
Consensus NCAA Player of the Year in 1973, at Providence College. NBA Rookie of the Year in 1974. Out of the league by the summer of 1978.
Today, that sounds like an epic tale of crash and burn. Yet the mid-1970s did represent the most turbulent period in NBA history. The league had battled the ABA for talent and eyeballs the previous 10 years, before absorbing its competitor prior to the 1976-77 season. Free agency was instituted at roughly the same time. Many on-court careers were cut short or otherwise doomed by the ensuing roster consolidations, by franchise-swapping owners, by drugs, by a decidedly incoherent league promotional strategy. In the pre-cable age, television networks weren’t at all convinced the NBA would ever prove marketable as a major sporting enterprise. One reason why: The newly merged league was far more Black (the pre-merger NBA was so lily white, there was meaningful playing time for not one but two Van Arsdales!). Would middle America ever watch something so “urban”? Ultimately, yes; it would. But as late as June 1980, two full years after Magic and Larry showed up, CBS was still showing NBA Finals games at 11:30 p.m. EST, on tape delay.
It’s no coincidence that college basketball first planted its own flag during the Seventies, this period of marked NBA chaos/weakness. In this sliver of broadcasting daylight, especially, college hoops created a viable toehold in the culture. And it was the college game where Ernie D would prove a far more influential figure.
Hal Phillips: More good guys with guns? No thanks
[Ed. The column below ran in the Lewiston Sun Journal on Saturday, Oct. 28, 2023, three days after 18 were killed during a mass shooting. Online version linked here. Because it resides behind a paywall, the content is reproduced here.]
We’re fine.
That’s what I’ve been texting to dozens of friends and family, starting at about 8 p.m. Wednesday night. We live in Auburn, across the Androscoggin River, which separates our small city from our slightly larger sister city. As of Friday, there was still an active shooter at large, two days after he gunned down 18 innocent people, first in a Lewiston bowling alley, then at a roadhouse four miles across town.
As American citizens, you are surprised by none of this. Saddened and sickened maybe, but not surprised. By now you know the drill: shelter in place, wait on news of the man’s capture, and hope no more lives will be needlessly taken. Another day, another responsible gun-owning American instantly transformed into a mass-murdering criminal.
These good guys with guns who, at any moment, might mutate into the felons from whom only more guns will protect us? These guys (and they’re all guys) literally walk among us, 24/7/365.
I honestly don’t think this country turns out more than our proportional share of folks living on one side of this very fine line, or the other. Every industrialized nation deals with the real-world fallout from mental illness. Fortnite and other equally gruesome single-shooter video games are played by billions of under-adjusted humans the world over. Casually extreme violence, as depicted in film and television, is consumed in every country on Earth, in every conceivable language.
Yet only this country endures so many mass shootings, more than one a day. See the database at gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting. Forty-four events and counting in October alone. Not every “active shooter” event results in “mass” fatalities. So far, according to the Associated Press, the nation has witnessed 36 mass-killing events in 2023 — the second-highest number on record in a single year.
As I sit here, sheltering in place, the obvious question is, Why us?
The National Rifle Association, most of the Republican Party, and other gun rights advocates bridle at the mere question. They’ve lobbied for years against the collection of data on such matters. Waving away the data we do have, they declare the issue intractable. Can’t be helped, they tell us.
Since 1977, when extremists hijacked the NRA, they’ve been telling right-leaning voters that these deaths are the price of “freedom.” What we actually need, they say, are more good guys with guns — to stop all the bad guys with guns.
These automatic and semi-automatic weapons: They serve up ever-more killing capacity. But their superpower is turning law-abiding U.S. citizens into depraved criminals, in the blink of an eye. Former military. Firearms safety instructor. Army reservist since 2002. Do good guys come any better qualified that that?
I don’t own a gun. Never even fired one. When a mass-shooting takes place right across the river, however, one feels newly empowered to speak up.