Why IS it always Balotelli? Missed in the stupefying events of extra time vs. QPR was Mario’s super touch to free Khun Aguero for the Prem-deciding tally. His insertion at 75 minutes, or whenever it was exactly, surely rolled millions of eyeballs around the world. Yes, Roberto Mancini should be applauded for swallowing his pride and running out both Mario and Carlos Tevez after saying they’d never play for the club again. But Balotelli has, by turn, been a moribund and distracting force in 2012. There was no reason to play him. Only desperation-laced necessity brought him on Sunday afternoon, late, along with Dzeko, against 10-man Rangers. But few men can so effectively and quickly put to rest all the psycho-vainglorious-marketing issues we might have with the guy. (Joey Barton should be so lucky). Whatever the packaging, Balotelli makes it happen. His possession at the top of the box, his lunging toe-poke to Aguero… Both touches were brave and deft. (All credit to the Argentinean for exhibiting the cool not to shoot straight away; Taye Taiwo would surely have been blocked it.) Balotelli has again shown himself to be that rare footballer who at once repels and attracts us neutrals. It’s not always him. It’s just that he’s so very good enough, often enough, that we genuinely want to see what he does next.

When I was kid in the 1970s, jellybeans were a particular obsession and while the big, commercial confection purveyors didn’t pay this segment a whole lot of attention back then, neither was it hard to find them, all year long.

Today candy marketers treat them as a seasonal item, available in bounty only the 6 weeks ahead of Easter. This surely troubles my fellow jellybean aficionados, yet when they do arrive in stores, sometime in February or early March, they come in an ever expanding range of flavors, many inspired by tried-and-true candy genres never before associated with the jelly bean.

Easter 2012 seems as good a time as any to parse the jellybean’s curious evolution of variety and accessibility. Like so many things (a handful of jelly beans in particular), it’s something of a mixed bag.

My mother and maternal grandfather were both jellybean enthusiasts and to the extent the choices allowed it, connoisseurs. I embraced this legacy from a young age and took it to a new level.

There was an inside joke my mother and I shared on this subject, though it wasn’t so much a joke as a cover for snobbery. Basically, anything but first-class jellybeans were derided as “inferior” and, more often than not, it was only a pectin-style jellybean that made the grade. We might be given some jellybeans, or I might bring some home, and if they weren’t up to snuff we’d look at each other very gravely and pronounce them “inferior”.

Then we’d devour them just the same.

What makes a pectin jellybean? In cooking, pectin is commonly used as a natural thickening agent in jams and jellies. The first pectin available for purchase was derived from apples, which are naturally rich in it. Pectin is essentially a complex carbohydrate, which is found both in the cell walls of plants, and between the cell walls, helping to regulate the flow of water between cells and keeping them rigid. You’ll note some plants begin to lose part of this complex carbohydrate as they age; apples left out too long get soft and mushy as the pectin diminishes. When apples are perfectly ripe, they have a firm and crisp texture, mainly due to the presence of pectin.

I couldn’t tell you what the addition of pectin does or is meant to achieve in the jelly bean-making process. I can only tell you what distinguishes the finished product. The candied shell of a pectin jellybean is shinier than a regular Brach’s jellybean. It’s also more brittle, though that term isn’t exactly apt.

Many folks are familiar with jellybeans made by Brach’s. They’ve been around forever and can still be found, year round, in places like CVS and Walgreen’s. These are not pectin-style jellybeans. Their coatings are dull and when you press two Brach’s jellybeans together, nose to nose, each sort of smushes into the other.

The candied coatings of pectin beans have more integrity. Russell Stover has made a quality pectin jellybean for decades. When you press two Russell Stover jelly beans together, nose to nose, one will inevitably prove stronger and simply burrow into the other — the weaker coating will crack and splinter into small but identifiable pieces as it gives way… This is not idle observation, by the way. I performed this critical testing for many years, as a youth, so the world might better distinguish one jellybean genre from another.

The upshot is that pectin jellybeans provides a crisper, cleaner eating experience, in line with the role it plays in ripe apples. In other words, it’s the mushiness of a non-pectin jellybean, inside and outside your mouth, which renders it inferior.

•••

Flavor is another distinguishing factor, of course. Pectin bags are primarily citrus in nature, i.e. lemon (yellow), lime (green), cherry (red), grape (purple) and orange. Russell Stover threw in pineapple (white) and grapefruit (pink), but not all pectin jellybean purveyors went for these options.

Some of these pectin assortments included licorice (black) and some did not (Russell Stover didn’t go there, for example, and still doesn’t). Black jellybeans are divisive. Some people love them, some hate them. Some like them well enough but don’t want to eat them with any OTHER jelly beans, as some argue licorice or anis-flavored anything doesn’t really go well with anything else (I reside in this camp).

Read into this dyamic larger cultural issues as you will. But know that I’m talking about jellybeans only.

Back in the 1970s there were dozens of independent jellybean makers, pectin and otherwise. Some of the varied products would appear in stores ready-packaged in cellophane packets; some were offered in bulk, to be scooped out, weighed and dropped into small paper bags.

But these varied assortments all tasted a bit different. There was no uniformity, adding nuance to the “inferior/superior” judgment.

But I think this much can be said without fear of reprisal: The draw of pectin jellybeans is that all those citrus flavors go together. You can grab a handful and not worry about one flavor not “working” with another (save the licorice issue, which is subject to taste).

Russell Stover brand jellybeans were always considered to be pretty good. They were solid pectin entries that had the added allure of being available broadly. However, I remember the best jelly beans were the kinds you found in the cellophane packets at specialty candy emporia, places like Bailey’s, an upscale ice cream and confection shop in Wellesley, Mass., where I grew up.

Bailey’s was quite a place, the stuff of nostalgic confection fantasy. The ice cream was top notch and old fashioned (never soft-serve) and the candy first-rate, featured as it was behind a giant, glass-faced display case that ran the entire width of the store. It was one of those places where you stepped up into the establishment from the street, which added to its class somehow, along with the small, marble-top tables served by rounded, wrought-iron chairs. When you had a bit of cash, this was the place to get superior jellybeans (in addition to fine chocolates, traditional ice cream sodas and sundaes).

The other end of the spectrum was a plastic bag of Brach’s jellybeans, which you could find just about anywhere, despite their inherent inferiority. Somewhere in between were the beans we bought at the Wellesley College candy shop, in the school’s student union-type meeting place, The Schneider Center. This place was only a 5-minute bike ride from my house, and many a run was made there for jelly beans in particular — scooped from large jar, weighed out and poured into small paper bag.

There were other jelly bean-like products out there on the market: Mike & Ike, essentially low-grade, elongated pectin jelly beans that came in a box; Good ‘n Plenty, the all-licorice cousins to Mike & Ike; Brach’s offered a “spiced” version of its jellybeans (never a favorite of mine); and then there were Skittles, which debuted in the late 1970s. These were and remain undoubtedly jellybeanesque but their shape, thicker pectin shells and chewier insides set them apart. I’m not sure anyone dislikes Skittles, but it’s hard to call them “jellybeans”.

•••

The late 1970s and early ‘80s brought the first real change to the jellybean universe, so far as I was concerned, and it wasn’t necessarily a change for the better. Jelly Bellies debuted in 1976 but I’m not sure I was aware of them until I went off to college in 1982.

Jelly Bellies were, without a doubt, an innovation. These were quality pectin beans whose manufacturers pioneered the selling of beans in single, fantastical flavors. At first the novelty of a buttered popcorn- or peppermint stick-flavored jellybean might have seemed inviting and fun. Some varieties really worked (watermelon) while others didn’t (bubble gum), but it’s hard not to applaud the creativity, this completely new take on the milieu. If I’m not mistaken, Jelly Bellies also pioneered the flavoring of both the candy coating and the jelly within. This provided a very strong taste the likes of which one needs, presumably, to pull off something like a Dr. Pepper jellybean. One cannot hope to do that with a flavored coating alone.

The problem comes when you try to eat a sour green apple Jelly Belly as part of a handful that includes others flavored of buttered popcorn, margarita, strawberry cheesecake, chili mango and Dr. Pepper. As we were prone to intone during the ‘80s, “Gag me.” In specialty stores one could buy a bag of entirely one flavor, or one could buy/mix them according to personal taste, for lemon drop and raspberry surely do go well together.

But all too often Jelly Bellies were purchased and continue to be packaged for commercial sale en masse and utterly mixed up with a dozen different flavors represented in any one bag. Sorry, but that’s just too many disparate flavors to be consumed by the handful — for that is the way one is meant to eat jellybeans, grabbing a bunch and popping 2-3 at time, confident that no matter which 2-3 you pop, they will work together on a flavor level.

Sadly, because they don’t work together on this level, one is obliged to eat Jelly Bellies individually, savoring those tastes Jelly Belly does well and cursing the rest. Jellybeans, in my view, were not meant to be consumed on this individual basis.

I must be alone in this, or part of a distinct minority, for Jelly Bellies proved so popular that nearly all the independently manufactured pectin varieties disappeared over the next 20 years. Brach’s and Russell Stover have hung in there, but for years starting in the mid-1980s, I would go into candy shops and scan the dozens of clear-plastic Jelly Belly receptacles seeking a citrus-only mix of pectin varieties, or the independently produced cellophane packets of yore. No dice. They weren’t there, either on account of low demand or competitive pressures from Jelly Belly, whose corporate overlords might well have insisted that stores carry its product only and no competitors.

•••

I’m not exactly sure when the game changed once again, but methinks it was on or around the millennium, as candy makers began to leverage their various brands (and tastes) by putting them to work in other confectionary contexts. Think Reese’s Pieces, the taste of a Peanut Butter Cup deftly rendered in M&M form, or Oreo candy bars.

There was a further and related development. In the 21^st century, we live in an era where candy purveyors are continually in search of limited edition sales. Distributing jellybeans only on or around Easter is one example of this dynamic, seasonally driven. But there are other examples of genre-twisting that come and go more or less randomly: the dark chocolate Kit Kat, the Pina Colada Almond joy, etc. Some of these innovations must test or sell particularly well, because they remain consistently available (the dark chocolate Milky Way is frankly a huge improvement on the original). Others, however, appear in some special-offer bin for a time only to disappear without a trace.

I’m here to tell you the jellybean segment has been greatly enhanced by this confluence of candy marketing initiatives. We may not see all these new entries but for a few months each year, as winter segues to spring. But they are welcome additions to a genre too long starved of innovation and hamstrung by the misguided Jelly Belly Syndrome.

See here a few examples of what I’m talking about:

• Starburst Jelly Beans — A prime example of a distinct candy taste brilliantly adapted to the jellybean genre. Like Jelly Bellies, Starburst beans use both a flavored center and flavored shell to maximize taste. Tart and admirably pectin in composition, they trade on the winning Starburst flavor spectrum while providing the ability to eat by the handful — every flavor goes with the others. Indeed, this is a step up from Starburst chews, whose squares are rarely eaten together — too much unwrapping and chewy mass for that. One might not have realized that all the Starburst flavors work so well together, but they do. Oh they do.

• Jolly Rancher Jelly Beans — There’s nothing quite like the taste of a Jolly Rancher, though it’s hard to describe just what distinguishes its essence from other hard candies. (There was something distinctive about Hawaiian Punch that is similarly hard to pin down). Whatever it is, this essence has been successfully rendered in jellybean form, and an appreciative public applauds. The signature green apple and watermelon tastes work extremely well according to the handful test.

• Lifesaver Jelly Beans — A let down, but this should come as no surprise for Lifesavers were considered a banal candy choice by friends and colleagues as far back as 1975. Even 35 years ago they were seen as something one’s grandparents might prefer. Boring. Nostalgia is another arrow in the candy- and snack-marketing quiver these days, but I’d bet that Lifesavers are too far gone (their fans too many deceased) to save the brand and its jellybean incarnation.

• Sweet Tart Jelly Beans — This was the entry that really got me thinking about how sophisticated and nostalgia-driven these cross-over jelly beans had lately become. Everyone loves a Sweet Tart, and coating a jellybean with its essence is a master stroke. They are definitely not pectin style beans; the coating is more cakey/chalky, as a Sweet Tart should be. But they pass the handful test and taste like no other jellybean out there.

I’m surely missing some of the new jellybeans out there on shelves this Easter, but you get the idea. Here’s hoping that marketers/manufacturers continue to plumb these depths for new innovations, trading on different aspects of the candy culture, and the culture at large, to better devise and sell product. (A recent version of the Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans, inspired by the Harry Potter series, featured flavors described as earwax, dirt, pepper, and vomit.)

Yet, sadly, none of these innovations works effectively toward solving the seasonal issue. Some of us need jelly beans all year round for heaven’s sake. Surely my waistline doesn’t need them, but it’s damned difficult to find even Russell Stover brand jellybeans after April 15 or prior to February 15.

Two years ago I got the strong urge for some proper jellybeans and, having been foiled by several Russell Stover store displays that featured nothing both chocolates and sugar-free jellybeans (not bad but a poor substitute, all things considered), I went online. Turns out you can easily order Russell Stover beans direct from the factory. So I ordered a dozen bags and enjoyed them with my kids for 2-3 blissful weeks.

The idea of ordering something like jellybeans via something as fanciful as the Internet would naturally have been completely unimaginable in the 1970s. But then, as now, we work with the tools we have. In this era, on the dual continua of jellybean innovation and availability, this represents progress.

Two-plus weeks into the Jeremy Lin Era, you’ve no doubt heard the odd reference to one Billy Ray Bates. When basketball sage of yore Bob Ryan recently did a podcast with heir apparent Bill Simmons, Billy Ray’s out-of-nowhere emergence in 1980 was held up as the only apt comparison. Indeed, Ryan — whose stellar work for the Boston Globe in the 1970s and ‘80s fueled my interest in sports writing — claims to have been the first to make the Billy Ray analogy.

Not so. I believe I can claim to have made it almost immediately — not only because I, too, revere David Halberstam’s iconic book, “Breaks of the Game”, in which Billy Ray’s legend figures prominently, but because I stare Mr. Bates in the face every day when I sit down in my barn office. Yes, I own the poster pictured here and have since 1981. I only wish I’d have taken better care of it through the years. I mean, how many of these can there be out there?

Listen to the podcast linked above. It’s 45 minutes of all-world basketball chatter. But it should be said that even the Billy Ray analogy doesn’t quite fit (despite the fact that he, too, was cut by the Rockets before signing the 10-day contract that stuck). Bates was a brawny, 6’4” shooting guard, not a point guard like Lin. What’s more, he wasn’t completely unknown and unheralded: Billy Ray was voted Rookie of the Year in the Continental Basketball Association, the D League of its day; he won the CBA All-Star Game dunk contest and is reported to have broken no less than four backboards. Even in the media dark ages of 1980, word like that gets around.

In other ways, Lin has a ways to go in order to produce the same impact. Billy Ray was a gunner par excellence — he once scored 40 points (in 32 minutes) against the San Diego Clippers, and 35 in 25 minutes against the Mavericks — but he saved his best for the playoffs, averaging 25 ppg in the 1980 tournament and 28.3 ppg a year later (still a franchise record).

So while the Billy Ray-Jeremy comparison might be the best we can identify in the long history of the NBA, it’s not perfect — which merely speaks further to the truly anomalous goings-on in New York these days. The point guard aspect makes it completely unique. There simply isn’t any sort of precedent for a point guard emerging from developmental-league obscurity to score and dish on this scale.

If we mine the point guard vein a little deeper, we begin to better understand the evolution of this phenomenon. Lin was an excellent high school player and solid contributor on some decent Harvard teams, decent for the Ivy League anyway. But he never starred or produced anything like the numbers we’ve seen these last few weeks. Further, he was cut by both the Golden State Warriors and Houston Rockets this year. Clearly he didn’t show this sort of offensive firepower in either place.

Why? Well, because he was doing what he’d always done, what marginal back-up point guards in the NBA are supposed to do — that is, run the offense and avoid mistakes.

Lin himself has said that he was determined in New York to try something else — clearly what he was doing in Houston and Oakland weren’t working. This is not the same ol’ Jeremy Lin now setting the League on fire. It’s a radical departure, of his own making. That he landed in New York beside a coach who doesn’t care about defense (Lin remains a suspect defender) and encourages such aggressive (some would argue reckless) offensive hedonism is either blind luck, fate, or both.

Perhaps without knowing it, Lin changed his game in New York by channeled his inner Billy Ray.

The irony of most my-car-just-got-towed situations, which require clear thinking and practicality, is that most times you encounter them when half in the bag. My friend Rose and I were considerably more buzzed than that on this night, at 1 a.m., when we bounded out of Bunratty’s to find my car missing. This one still stings because parking in that BayBank lot after-hours was just flat out mindless and, of course, I was perfectly sober when the decision was made. I knew better. We were probably racing to see Dumptruck, our favorite band and the headliners that night. Great show.

However, when we emerged and found the car gone, we doubled back to the corner outside the club, the intersection of Commonwealth and Brighton avenues, where we might find a pay phone. Remember them?

Indeed, the standout moment from this evening, or one of them, was the way Rose ordered and then savagely attacked an Italian sausage sub from some street-cart vendor as I navigated the telephone information system (remember that?) in order to locate the appropriate impoundment lot. The fact that Rose is now a vegetarian plays a role in this amusing memory, but mainly it resonates because it was the template for how a 20something male might impulsively buy and inhale street food in a drunken, late-night,  haven’t-put-anything-in-my-stomach-for-6-hours-except-8-Black-Label-bar-bottles sort of way.

It took a long time to determine that my car had been transported to Alewife, 20 minutes away on the Cambridge-Arlington line. I mauled a sausage sub myself, waiting on the phone. Having estimated the cost of liberating my ‘82 Honda Accord, plus cab fare, I hit the ATM. When we arrived at the lot, it became clear we were 10 bucks short. The attendant would not negotiate. Would not take my license or credit card as collateral. Infuriating, and by now it was 3 a.m., and Alewife is way off the beaten track. We faced the prospect of walking all the way out to Mass Ave., hailing another cab, finding an ATM, and going back.

As we walked sullenly through the chain-link lot gate, a cop rolled by us at observation speed. By now, we’re pretty damned sober, or so it seemed. Counter-intuitively I flagged him down and told him the whole, sad story. “Get in.” He took us to the ATM, waited for us and delivered us back to Alewife. By now it was close to 4 a.m. and we were totally sober.

We went straight home, as we’d already eaten.

[This is the second in a series on urban parking misadventures and their sometimes harsh repurcussions. See the first installment here.]

I was again reminded, by the recent passing of esteemed golf course architect Geoffrey Cornish, of just how integral the act of walking is to the practice and perception of golf course design.

Mr. Cornish died at his home in Amherst, Mass. on Feb. 10, at the ripe old age of 97. Much has already been written about him, in golf circles, though maybe not so much about his work. Every day, right up until the very end of his long life, Mr. Cornish walked/hiked the nearby Lawrence Swamp. Many a tale was related this week about younger men struggling to keep up. For a guy who designed more than 200 golf courses over the course of a 70-year career, and was known and loved by nearly everyone, it seemed an odd thing to fixate upon.

I grew up in New England and have lived here pretty much my entire adult life, so I’ve probably played close to 75 of the 200-plus courses credited to Geoffrey Cornish. Still, his design work is difficult to assess, and in detailing why that is, we get a fuller picture of the man — and why he was such a beloved and unique figure.

For starters, Mr. Cornish, though Canadian born, was a frugal Yankee on a par with all too many of his clients. He was the anti-signature architect, if you will, often taking jobs with small budgets, on land of questionable golfing value, and making from this the best course he could — one that might be efficiently maintained. (He was trained as an agronomist, after all.) It should come as no surprise that few men designed more municipal tracks than Mr. Cornish (the solid Chicopee Muni in Western Mass., pictured above, is but one example).

Consider the vast number of 9-hole courses where he added new nines, or the rudimentary courses he renovated and/or formalized. I can think of several examples of real dog tracks that Mr. Cornish made whole, and wholly improved, with his renovations and 9-hole expansions. They are today understood to be “Cornish designs”. But it must be said that an architect more concerned with his signature, his reputation, might not have even taken these jobs. But Mr. Cornish could turn down no one.

By the same token, this mixing and matching of his work with that of others tends to muddy evidence of his design skill. In the late 1950s at Wahconah CC in Dalton, Mass., Mr. Cornish added nine to a spectacular original loop laid out in the 1930s by Wayne Stiles. The newer work frankly pales in comparison. However, at Brunswick (Maine) GC, Mr. Cornish did essentially the same thing and his nine — some of his very best work — is certainly equal to that of the Stiles nine, maybe better. In neither case does there seem to have been an attempt on Mr. Cornish’s part to carry on Stiles’ style from the original holes. I’m not sure what that means… Just figured I’d throw it out there.

•••

In writing the previous paragraph, I confirmed and dated design credit for both Wahconah and Brunswick by consulting my copy of The Architects of Golf, a veritable tome that Mr. Cornish first compiled, in the late 1980s, in partnership with Golf Digest Architecture Editor Ron Whitten. The Architects is a hard book to describe. For starters, it’s encyclopedic in size and scope, a compilation of all the golf courses on Earth that also catalogs all the architects who designed them, and when. It’s all cross referenced and complemented by mini biographies on the hundreds of folks who’ve pursued this craft since the late 19th century. It was, when it came out, and remains an extraordinary research achievement and resource. Of course, its very recognition and sober celebration of so many architects, many of them contemporaries of his in the design field (and competitors), again shows how little Mr. Cornish cared for his own aggrandizement.

Mr. Cornish’s propensity to team up with people, as he did with Whitten, on projects design-related and otherwise, again displays his utter disinterest in the spotlight. This is laudable in any human being but quite extraordinary in the golf course design realm. Here again, it tends to diminish or obscure his architectural legacy. Two of Mr. Cornish’s best and best-known designs are the North and South courses at Stow Acres CC in Central Massachusetts. But he designed them both during his 13-year partnership with Bill Robinson. Ditto for the lovely 36 holes at Bretwood in Keene, N.H., Manchester CC and Quechee Lakes in Vermont, and dozens of others. In assessing them, one wonders whose work this was because Mr. Cornish was always working with someone. Even his nine at Wahconah was designed with Rowland Armacost (or so I was reminded by consulting the book he produced, with Ron Whitten). Robinson would leave the firm and relocate to the Pacific Northwest in the late 1970s. Shortly thereafter Mr. Cornish brought in another young partner, Brian Silva; in the 1990s, Mark Mungeam made three.

Assigning individual design credit within a course architecture firm is always a difficult business and, in this case, it cuts both ways. Mr. Cornish was not a golfer — yes, you read that right. He didn’t really play the game and some of his earlier work (pre-1980) is marked by awkward elements: doglegs that bend in the wrong place, landing areas that aren’t up to the task, etc. It’s easy to chalk this stuff up to his non-golfer status, or the fact that he designed that particular course for a song (in a swamp). But truly, who takes responsibility for the good and the bad: Robinson or Cornish or Armacost or the owner who finished the course himself because he ran out of money? In the case of Geoffrey Cornish, it’s hard to know.

This sort of determination is made even more difficult by the fact that Mr. Cornish never had a bad word to say about anyone. My firm handled media for Cornish, Silva & Mungeam for many years starting in the late 1990s, and Mr. Cornish and I often chatted casually re. the various design attributes of certain holes attributed him over the years. Bill Robinson got nothing but praise.

At one point in the 1990s, when there was a spate of golf books being published on “great” architects, I got a notion to write one on Stanley Thompson, for whom Cornish first worked as a young soil scientist during construction of Vancouver’s famed Capilano GC — in 1935! I mean, here was a walking, talking, living, breathing link to the Golden Age of Golf Course Design — and Thompson, one of the game’s all-time talents, characters and rogues. I remember getting on the phone with Mr. Cornish and talking to him about The Toronto Terror. He spun a few dry but entertaining, admiring yarns highlighting Thompson’s propensity for drink, his canny freewheeling ways on and off the course site. It was gold. Pure gold! But when I told him of my grand plans, Mr. Cornish demurred. He couldn’t possibly provide these stories for publication. I believe he used the word “untoward”.

I suppose I could attempt to recount those stories here, but Mr. Cornish clearly didn’t want to be the purveyor of gossip. At this stage especially I’m loath to go against his wishes. Needless to say, the book idea proved dead on arrival.

I caught up with Brian Silva this week to pass along my condolences and reminisce a bit. He pointed out that while few of Mr. Cornish’s courses were  considered for the various Top 100 lists, “The man would rank right up there on any Top 100 humanist list. Such a gentleman. None of us will ever, ever, ever know anyone like him again. He was more than a jacket and tie, a guy who walked fast. People talk about unforgettable characters, but he was unique. He had a greatness about him — and no ego, in a business overrun with egotists.”

•••

I chaired a golf conference back in the mid-1990s during my tenure as editor of Golf Course News. The inimitable Pete Dye was the keynote speaker and I introduced him. Someone during the Q&A period asked him about how he dealt with all these “environmental activists” sticking their noses into his various projects.

“Well, let me tell you how I handle them,” he answered, and I’m paraphrasing here. “The first thing I do is invite them out to the project and chat them up for a time. Then I walk ‘em around the property. Then I walk ‘em some more. Then I walk ‘em some more… Then I lie to ‘em.”

I’ve always liked that story. It’s apropos of what I learned from working alongside and writing about so many golf course architects these last 20 years: Walking is a big part of what they do. When they arrive on a virgin site, they walk it for weeks — routing holes, evaluating the land’s rise and fall, noting what may or may not have to be graded, where the natural green sites might be placed, and which flora/fauna will need to be avoided/preserved. I’ve been on quite a few of these preliminary site walks and they’re often as fascinating as they are physically invigorating.

It’s the same drill when they are building or refurbishing a layout — why ride around a course under construction, or renovation, in a cart? You gotta walk the holes, approaching these developing greens, bunkers and tees from the ground, as a golfer would encounter them.

You gotta remember that this is exactly what Geoffrey Cornish did (always in jacket and tie, mind you) for six-plus decades, as he designed, expanded and renovated golf courses all across New England, the Northeast and Eastern Canada. He walked. In the early 1990s, when he stepped away from everyday design duties, he just kept on walking. Only last week did he stop.

Out of the blue Thursday night the wife suggested we order, On Demand, one of the movies nominated for Academy Awards. It came down to Tree of Life, Midnight in Paris or Moneyball. We went with Moneyball and both found it extremely enjoyable.

Some 12 hours later, I happened upon an all-too-rare but typically brilliant article from Bill James, the godfather of modern statistical analysis as it relates to sports, baseball in particular. I’ve been a fan of James for more than 20 years (his Historical Baseball Abstract is perhaps the finest bathroom reading ever devised by man), but in the last 24 hours I’ve been jolted anew by the power of his thinking.

Without James, I would never have considered Dwight Evans Hall of Fame material, despite watching him patrol right field for the Red Sox for 17 years. Further, without James there would have been no Moneyball, neither book nor feature film.

For a woman who likes baseball well enough (my wife once resided in the Chicago neighborhood of Wrigleyville) and lives in New England (surrounded by “die-hahd” Red Sox fans), there was a lot in the film for her to like and/or relate to: Brad Pitt, naturally, but also a triumph- and pathos-packed story and myriad Sox references. Still, I was surprised by the extent to which she was engaged by the statistical analysis on which the story is based — the idea that ballplayers can be cannily appraised with such statistical breadth, and that a modest organization like the Oakland A’s could use that edge to compete with richer teams. It was handled beautifully in the context of the movie. I had assumed Hollywood would find ways to soft-peddle it, and they did — building up around it other storylines (Pitt’s single fatherhood, the magical rise of one-time journeyman and former Sox catcher Scott Hatteburg) to defray the essential wonkiness of the stat theme.

But the stat stuff was interesting to her. I hope she reads the James story linked here because what Moneyball author Michael Lewis and the makers of this film (Bennett Miller directed) have done is attach broader meaning and appeal to the gob-smacking insights James pioneered. Maybe she won’t care enough about Dewey Evans to read all the way through, but I would never have dreamed to share such a story with her before we watched Moneyball together.

It’s been a long time since I’ve lived in Boston, which is to say it’s been a long time since I’ve been towed. Cars do get towed in Maine, I suppose, but vehicular hazards here are more centered on avoiding large antlered mammals in the roadway, as opposed large, often bearded, exclusively bipedal mammals hooking your stationary vehicle to a still-larger vehicle and hauling it away.

Further, my life here (I moved north in 1992) has been predominately family-oriented, pastoral and deliberate. In Boston, where I lived from 1986-92, I was single, urban and reckless — and nothing illustrated more viscerally the risk-reward drama of that urban, directly post-collegiate existence than lighting out for a party or club, circling a particular destination for a legal parking spot, successfully hunting one down (perhaps on the cusp of legality), leaving your largest and most valued possession there, only to return three hours later and find it gone — or find it untouched! It could go either way, of course. It was a survivalist game of cat and mouse that I played, with some skill, for many years opposite the traffic authorities across Boston, Cambridge, Brighton and Somerville. I’d like to think that six years of eschewing parking garages saved me more money than I ultimately spent on tickets and towing fees. But that’s not at all clear.

What I undoubtedly gained was a slew of great tow stories, which I will endeavor to chronicle here. Most tales of tow are tales of woe, where the system clearly got the best of me. That wouldn’t be a full and accurate portrayal, however. I could just as easily detail for you all the times I parked successfully in the alleyways that divide city blocks in Back Bay, or parked sans resident sticker (and sans incident) in neighborhoods all over Greater Boston, or discovered and repeatedly exploited my “secret” parking nirvanas on Church Street/Harvard Square, behind the Chapter 11 Saloon in Union Square/Somerille, and in that private driveway just off Charles Street/Boston. But I won’t be doing that. As they say in the newspaper business, it ain’t news when the plane lands safely.

Great Moments in Towing: “The Return”, Fall 1986

If there were an international governing body of traffic incidents, where meticulous logs were kept re. the speed with which one regains possession of a towed vehicle, I might just hold the world record. On this occasion, having seen the truck slowly pass by the first-floor window of my Beacon Hill apartment, my ’78 Dodge Omni in tow, there was nothing to do or say but bolt through the door and take off after my car on foot. I caught the truck in Government Center, maybe a third of a mile up Cambridge Street. At first the dude wouldn’t let me ride with him, but he ultimately took pity, acknowledging the effort perhaps, and waved me into the cab.

The impoundment lot on this fateful night was South Boston, hardly remote. Dude let me out 100 yards before reaching the entrance (so as not to reveal his breech of protocol). There was but one woman in front of me at the desk, in a fur coat and acting very Back Bay. They knew her, so frequently did she flaunt the parking system apparently. She soon paid and was gone; 5 minutes later I followed suit and exited through the same door. Dude was taking my car off the hook as I handed him the receipt. Hightailing it back to Beacon Hill couldn’t have taken 10 additional minutes.

I’d confirm the elapsed time, from the moment it was put on the hook to the time I returned to the Joy Street apartment, at 30-32 minutes. The period stretching from my moment of realization (that my car had been towed) to the actual Return could not have exceeded 25-27 minutes, and that’s gotta be some kind of record.

This wasn’t my apartment exactly, where it all started and finished. My girlfriend Amy and her roommate Tim (we had all three been at Wesleyan together) were the lessees. I just cribbed there a lot, and anyone who knows Beacon Hill — with its high- density residential, its narrow one-way streets, and its proximity to three high volume employment venues (Mass General, the State House and Government Center) — knows that parking there is about as challenging and high-risk as the Boston street scene could get in 1986. Tickets could be a twice-weekly affair, if one wasn’t careful. While this was a pre-computerized age (it took years for the DMV to realize what a scofflaw one was), boots and tows remained an ever-present danger. Who knew how close to the towing or booting precipice one stood? A letter might arrive; one might not read it for a week; two weeks later one might be four more tickets in the hole, maybe five. Was the next ticket the one that got you towed?

I have to confess on this occasion to another breech of protocol: We were going out that particular evening; it was early on a Friday or Saturday night. Everyone else, four or five others, were clustered in the back of the Joy Street apartment. Standing in the front bedroom, alone, I saw hints of the whirling red lights approaching. For an instant, I actually thought to myself, “Some moron got himself towed.” The regret was instantaneous, as I recognized the car — and that I was the moron.

No one even noticed when, without word or warning, I bolted out the door and down Joy Street. Twenty-five minutes later I returned and they were like, “Where have you been?”

I got towed.

“Oh no… Well, we’re going to be really late now.”

No, I already got it back. Let’s go.

Patriots practice squad player Malcolm Williams high-fives a Mexican TV reporter after taping a vital interview on Tuesday.

Settle down, people. Thank you. Let’s get started, shall we?

Good morning, and welcome to this year’s Pre-Super Bowl meeting of the Bert Bell Memorial Support Group. Yes, it’s been a long season in many respects but we’re almost there! [Half-hearted applause] With each other’s help, we can survive another NFL season with our families and psyches in tact. My name is Rudy, and I’ll be your enabler this morning.

I can see we have some unfamiliar faces this year. Great to see you; you’re welcome here. Are there any questions? … Yes, you can leave that Colts paraphernalia in the coat check room… Okay, sure: The trash can is down the hall, around the corner… No, but that’s an excellent question: This is not an NFL-sanctioned meeting. This is important people, so listen up: Our group is not affiliated with the league office in any way.

This isn’t about the league, people; it’s about you. As we are each week during the NFL season, we’re here for your benefit. The fans’ benefit…

We have a busy morning planned. Today we’re going to discuss chip-to-dip ratios and the merits of large-screen television rentals. Those will be round-table discussions. We’ve also set aside some time for role-playing; our topic this week is, “Can I bring my wife? No really, I’m serious.”

But before we get started, we have a special guest speaker. I’d like to introduce Hal Phillips; he’s vice president pro tem of SWACO, Sports Writers Against Corporate Omnipotence, and he’s here to talk about scheduling.

Mr. Phillips?

[Light applause]

“Thanks, Rudy. Nice to see you back in football, putting that Jesuit education to good use… Good morning, football fans.”

GOOD MORNING, MR. PHILLIPS.

“Before I get started, I want you to know that we at SWACO are just like you. We love football and that’s why we want you to look back — back to January 2000, when the NFL in its momentary wisdom chose to conduct the Super Bowl exactly one week following its conference title games.

“As you know, the league routinely extends the period between its  conference championships and Super Sunday to a full fortnight. But that year, 2000, was different, and look at the results: The game itself was superb, a last-second tackle at the goal-line to preserve a 23-16 Ram victory over the Titants — not the anti-climactic blowouts we’ve come to expect.

“Further, the ‘short’ week automatically reduced the drone of media hype by half, leaving in its place actual anticipation for the game itself. Imagine that! Less insipid pre-Super Bowl prattle AND a competitive championship game that fits into the time-honored scheduling parameters to which pro football teams have adhered for 80 years.

“Simply put, football enthusiasts — even those who, like you, don’t have meaningful lives outside of football — don’t need two weeks of pre-Super Bowl ‘coverage’. The litany of reports (‘on location’, where desperate pundits literally scrounge for meaningful ‘news’) is nauseating enough after three or four days. Two weeks of this piffle is completely over the top. We at SWACO further believe that if football fans, fresh off 21 days of fawning playoff coverage, aren’t by then familiar with the respective Super Bowl combatants, surely they never will be.

“Make no mistake: This extra week isn’t there for teams to ‘get healthy’. It isn’t there because the two teams couldn’t fully adjust to the gravity of their Super Bowl moment in a single week.

“No. The extra week is there so the NFL’s corporate partners will have 7 additional days to foist their products upon us, via television, radio, web and the print press. [Circumspect murmurs float through the crowd]

“To support the thousands of Super Bowl-oriented advertisements, to synergize with the ubiquitous and tedious Super Bowl contests (which are essentially corporate fronts for still more advertisements), media outlets are obliged by their corporate sugar daddies to ‘preview’ and analyze this single football game for two solid weeks.

“This sort of rehash, while unnecessary and invariably annoying, is obligatory during the week directly leading up to the Super Bowl. We at SWACO understand and accept this. However, we feel it’s craven and superfluous to jam this piffle down anyone’s throat a full 12 days before kickoff.

“Even more important, however, we at SWACO believe the two-week break is competitively amoral. Yes, you heard me right. Pro football games aren’t meant to be played every other week; they’re meant to be played on consecutive Sundays, one after another, until a champion is crowned.

“Let’s be very clear about this: Professional football is predicated entirely on a team’s ability to prepare for an opponent — physically, mentally and strategically — in one week’s time. Bye weeks notwithstanding, regular-season records, playoff position and playoff qualification itself are determined on the sole basis of this 7-day framework.

“To throw it out the window for the Super Bowl — the most important game of the season — perverts the entire process.

“Think about it: The two-week layoff is one reason Super Bowls are traditionally lopsided, mind-numbing affairs. It’s a pretty simple equation: Give a superior team two weeks to prepare and the possibility of a walkover is only enhanced.

“Keep it to a week and anything can happen.

“Exhibit A: The absorbing Rams-Titans game in 2000.

“Exhibit B: The previous Super Bowl to be contested just one week after the respective conference championships — the 1990 affair, when the Giants claimed a similarly thrilling 20-19 victory over the Bills.

“Indeed, the Super Bowl’s average margin of victory when employing a two-week layoff is 17 points; with a week’s break, the average margin is a mere 7 points. Isn’t that what we want? A game where the conclusion isn’t forgone? A game contested in the same way as those preceding it, under the same competitive strictures? Was the Giants’ win over the Cowboys on the last game of the regular season this year any less important, in the great scheme of things, than this Super Bowl? The Giants wouldn’t be in Indianapolis right now if it weren’t. That game was contested with a week’s preparation. Why should the Super Bowl be any different?

“Corporate America has already perverted football in too many ways to count. Witness the plethora of mandatory television time-outs, the most offensive being those book-end commercial breaks following points after touchdown. You know the ones I mean: the PAT, three minutes of ads, the kick-off, then three more minutes of ads. The new kickoff-from-the-40 rule results in so many touchbacks, rarely does the return even represent actual game content. It’s outrageous!

“Citizens: You may think this policy is set in stone, but it’s not — not if we act immediately, with purpose, together. The sanctity of the Super Bowl depends on it.

“Thank you.”

So, I’ve got a question: Following a week when one team lost 24-2, and another ended abruptly under new playoff OT rules, what happens when an NFL playoff game goes into overtime and, under these new rules, an opening possession results in a safety?

We were informed, as OT loomed in Denver on Sunday, that the only thing that could end the playoff game without both teams getting the chance to possess the ball was a touchdown on the opening possession. However, it seems to me that a safety on that first possession should also end the contest. Indeed, it must end it, by my reckoning.

We all got a glimpse of the new rules governing OT during the Broncos’ Wild Card victory over Pittsburgh on Sunday.

In short, the old system had been pure sudden death: If you won the toss, got the ball, moved into field goal range and made said kick, the game was over. The first score of any kind won the game, in other words.

The new rules were devised to address what was believed to be an unfairness: the idea that your season could be ended, by an opposing field-goal kicker, in overtime, without your team ever having touched the ball. The new system says:

•  if you win the toss and score a field goal, the other team gets the ball and has a chance to tie with a field goal — in which case the game proceeds in pure sudden-death fashion from the moment the second field goal is kicked — or win the game with a touchdown.

• if you win the toss and fail to score, the game essentially proceeds in pure sudden-death fashion from the moment you punt or otherwise turn the ball over.

• if you win the toss and score a touchdown the game is over; the other team does not get a chance to respond — as indeed The Steelers did not following the Denver’s 80-yard TD pass on the first play of overtime Sunday.

My question is — and I think the answer is both byzantine and self-evident — what happens if you win the toss and your QB is sacked in the endzone for safety?

It says here that this eventuality must also end the game immediately, under the new rules, as the result of a safety means  the scoring team gets the ball back… right?

[The Harold Herald, the blog prototype I launched in the early 1990s, was nothing if not political, though the coverage wasn't always traditional, nor was it my own.  Mark Sullivan, a fellow alum/refugee from the Enterprise-Sun newsroom, was a frequent contributor. Today he's a skilled and prolific blogger in his own right. His HH essay below, marking the passing of Richard Nixon, was always a favorite of mine.]

By MARK SULLIVAN

Dave was in a triumphant mood when he stopped by my dorm room one night early in the fall of my sophomore year at Boston University. He was quaffing mightily from his favorite mug, a prep-school tankard emblazoned with a Pegasus-like winged beaver, and was pickled to his sizable gills.

I have a picture in my mind’s eye of Dave as he looked that night: The jumbo build, characteristically clothed in club tie and seersucker that gave him the look of giant Ivy League Good Humor man, but this night wrapped in a too-small blue dressing gown; the large head, topped by an outsized Boys’ Regular haircut — part Kemp, part Koppel, crowned by an ungovernable cowlick; the Mr. Limpet-like fish-lips and spectacles, the latter worn for chronic nearsightedness and leading him a resemblance to Piggy, the precocious but doomed overweight boy in the film, Lord of the Flies.

Dave had brought his transcript of President Richard Nixon’s resignation speech, which he proceeded to read in his best Milhousian timbre. When he came to the end of a page, Dave would toss it with a flourish over his shoulder, the sheets fluttering through the air and landing between my bed frame and the wall.

As he approached the end, he summoned all the stage poignancy he could muster: “Uhh, this is, ehr, not goodbye,” he read in choked, Checkers-speech tones, building to the farewell line in fractured Nixonian French: “This is, uhh, ehr, au-rev-oyeur.”

There were tears in his eyes.

I thought of Dave recently when news came of Richard Nixon’s death. David idolized Nixon, or, as he called him, “the, euhr, Pray-sident.” In conversation, Dave would often lapse into his Nixon voice, which was similar to the Nixon impersonation Dan Ackroyd did on Saturday Night Live. The Nixon voice was always preceded and intermittently punctuated by a distinctive low “euhrr” from the back of the throat, as in, “Euhrr, get down on you knees and, euhr, pray with me, Henry.” The delivery was always accompanied by a dismissive, two-digit wave of his index and middle fingers.

Dave Kept about him trappings of his hero. On the large Papal flag that hung on his dorm-room wall were pinned various “Nixon’s The One” campaign buttons. He liked to compose memos, which he would initial “RN.” Opposed to the Kennedys on principle, he liked to play a 1960s novelty recording of the Troggs’ Wild Thing sung by a comic impersonating Bobby Kennedy.

Dave had Praetorian Guard leanings: He once assigned himself the job of advance man to a student-union candidate, preceding his man into the auditorium and giving the audience the “Up, up” gesture, proclaiming, “All rise! All rise for the Pray-sident!”

As a character, Dave was, in a word, preposterous.

He came from a Pennsylvania industrial town on Lake Erie where his family was in the tire business, and from which Dave, given his predilections, had happily escaped none too soon. He endured a checkered career in private school and ended up at Avon Old Farms, in Connecticut, which had been the prep school of last resort.

He weighed in at a good 250 and was given to blazers and oxford-cloth buttondowns of commodious cut, wide-wale corduroys, Norwegian fisherman sweaters, L.L. Bean duck loungers, which were tested by his wide, almost Flintstonian feet. In appearance, he suggested a cross between convicted Nixon aide Chuck Colson and Tweedledee.

Dave disliked the light and kept the shades in his room perpetually drawn, leaving his complexion continually pasty. He was ticklish and did not like to be touched. He chain smoked non-filtered Camels, several packs a day. The butts in his unemptied ashtrays were piled like Mayan pyramids, and his fingers were dyed yellow from the nicotine. He would rise some mornings at 6:30 and immediately begin drinking straight sloe-gin from his 28-ounce Avon Old Farms mug, the flying beaver on which was named Amy.

Dave’s romantic orientation was a matter of conjecture. Some thought him to be asexual. He became obsessed with one friend, John, an easy-going preppie from Wisconsin who sailed boats. Dave referred to John as “the Pray-sident” and kept an hour-by-hour itinerary of John’s classes, which Dave carried about in a case he called “the political football.” John and his roommates gave Dave a key to their dorm suite, which Dave would clean and vacuum.

Dave was put out when John took up with Lacey, a coquette who looked like one of the Sagal twins in the Doublemint ads, who wore lipstick and earrings in the boat when she coxed the women’s crew at Henley, and who interned one summer for Sen. Packwood. Dave thoroughly disapproved of Lacey whom he dismissed as a “hussy.”

•••

In the fall of 1980, when he was a freshman, Dave engineered a monumental prank on a hapless, pear-shaped junior named Bob, who had been the butt of numerous practical jokes when he lived on my floor the previous year. Dave telephoned a Bob, representing himself as an aide to President Carter, and convinced a credulous Bob the president wanted to interview him for a campaign radio spot featuring comments from the college students across America. Dave then segued to his Carter impersonation, taking in a flummoxed Bob hook, line and sinker.

In a follow-up call to the campus newspaper, Dave, once again pretending to be a Carter aide, convinced the editor that a BU student had been called by the president. The paper, swallowing it, ran a story and photo of Bob on the front page in the next morning’s edition. A happy Bob waddled up and down campus the next day, stacks of papers under his arm, handing out copies.

Dave was gleeful after he pulled off the hoax, arguably his greatest college triumph. In Nixonian fashion, he kept tapes of the calls, which had recorded off a phone jack.

Dave could be lavish in his attention to friends. For Ronald Reagan’s 1981 inaugural, he hosted a midday champagne reception in a study lounge he’d commandeered and papered with college Republican posters. He once presented me with a carton of Sullivans, imported British cigarettes he had purchased on a whim after spying the label. He behaved like a fat cat lobbyist in the way he dispensed gifts and favors; but rather than buying votes, he was trying, it seemed, to ensure friendship.

Dave expected, in return for his hospitality, to be paid proper court, as might be extended a Henry Adams-style host of a society salon. Perhaps I did not continue to pay him the appropriate attention, for in my last term at college, Dave began to cut me on the street. I never discovered what slight, real or perceived, I had committed to end up on the Enemies List.

I wonder where Dave is today.

Watching the Nixon funeral on C-Span, I scanned the faces in the crowd of mourners. G. Gordon Liddy was there, and Spiro Agnew, and Chuck Colson. There was no sign of Dave.

I picture him in Pennsylvania, unwilling heir to a tire company, a hunched figure walking the shore of Lake Erie alone, like his hero, in wingtips.