Parents’ Nightmare: A Misdiagnosis of ADHD

This story, from Tuesday’s LA Times, frightened and relieved me at the same time. 

Los Angeles Clippers’ center Chris Kaman is an exceptional person.  Only a few men at any given time are capable of playing center in the NBA.  There are hardly enough qualified centers to go around.  Physical gifts like size, speed and shooting accuracy must combine with the ability to process rapidly the flow of the game, the positions of all the players, the coach’s designs. 

Coming up as a ballplayer and student, Kaman had to learn all that, under the influence of powerful psycoactive medications he didn’t need — Ritalin and Adderall — from age 2 1/2 through high school for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).  However,

Kaman, who had trouble remembering plays and concentrating on the court in college and in the pros, disclosed Sunday that he was misdiagnosed.

Kaman actually had an anxiety disorder that caused him to over-analyze situations and scenarios.

“Growing up, I had to take the medication my whole life,” said Kaman, who said he grew so frustrated taking the medication that he would come home from school and cry.

“I can’t take back time. I wish I could. But I can’t. It really bothered me to take the medication every day. I felt I had to take the medication to make me feel like a regular person. It was kind of backward.”

His misdiagnosis was discovered in July by Hope139, a 5-year old organization based in Grandville, Mich., that studies the brain. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, between 3% and 5% of children have ADHD, with symptoms that include hyperactivity and impulsiveness.

According to Hope139’s research of about 40,000 patients, up to 15% of those on medicine for hyperactivity do not have the affliction.

You got kids?  You get the impression as a parent that it’s a lot more than 3 to 5 percent of kids who are being diagnosed with ADHD. If your kid seems intelligent but gets bad grades, is rambunctious, talks too much, is forgetful, the ADHD diagnosis seems to linger in the air with every doctor visit.

Raising my son, I made up my mind to strap myself to the mast and get us through adolescent and not listen to any such diagnosis.  As frustrating as raising my son could be at times, I did not want him taking these medications.  I figured the cure to what seemed to be ailing him was merely to grow up.  Which, at 17, he’s showing signs of doing, to our relief.

What happened to Kaman is exactly what I worried would happen to my son:

The medication Kaman took had the opposite effect on him, said Dr. Tim Royer, the organization’s chief executive.

Kaman’s brain was already working in overdrive, and the medication provided an added stimulus. The dosage was increased to the point that Kaman’s mind became overloaded and he became less animated. “He stopped being a behavioral problem, but he got too much medicine and it shut him down,” Royer said.

Kaman stopped taking medication once he entered college at Central Michigan because he no longer had to sit in one place for more than a couple of hours.

But his concentration in college, and once he signed with the Clippers, was still lacking. He could focus on the man he was guarding but not on weak-side defense, or as Royer put it, “He could see the tree in front of him, but not the forest.”

How is this generation of parents, pediatricians and psychologists going to be judged?  Kaman’s story is going to become better-known soon, and we’ll all be taking a second look at how these medications were sold as the panacea to so many families.

Kaman is hoping to become a spokesman for children who are misdiagnosed or are simply looking for another alternative instead of taking medication for hyperactivity. “I’m using my resources as much as I can to try and help people,” he said. “I was trying to see if it worked first. I’m on a platform being in the NBA where I can help people.”
 

Not Hating Barry Today

Today’s All-Star game in San Francisco, which Barry Bonds will start in left field, has prompted sportswriters all over the country to get in one more lick against the controversial slugger before he breaks Henry Aaron’s home run record. Like the ever-predictable Bill Plaschke:

(Bonds) thinks he can disappear this winter having avoided asterisk and indictment. He will probably be voted into the Hall of Fame by those who consider him greater than his flaws.

It’s all finally coming together. The perfect crime is nearing completion.

Barry Bonds thinks he’s getting away with the murder of baseball’s integrity.

And here in the final stretch of his great escape, man, did he rub it in.

“Do you know me?” he scolded one of the dozens of reporters who surrounded him Monday. “What have I done? Do you know anything I’ve done? Have you seen me do anything wrong? I ask you a question. Have you seen me do anything wrong? So how can you judge me?”

I hate Barry Bonds because he is a member of the San Francisco Giants. I hate all the Giants, unless like Jeff Kent and Jason Schmidt they join the Dodgers. It comes with being a Dodger fan. I also hate Barry Bonds because he sounds like a complete jerk, a toxic personality.

But I don’t hate Barry because he allegedly used steroids and human growth hormone, which allegedly helped him hit a lot of his home runs. I’ve made my peace with his record, and I don’t think it should be stigmatized. His home runs are a reflection of his talent and perseverance, not his cheating.

First of all, you can’t take a drug that improves your hand-eye coordination. No matter how much extra muscle Barry might have added, his ability to put wood on the ball didn’t come with it. He was a Hall-of-Fame level hitter when he was still skinny and presumably substance-free.

But the more compelling reason Bonds’ record should be acknowledged is this: Steroids and whatever he used were being used throughout baseball during the entirety of his career. If Bonds’ home run records are tainted, then so is every baseball record from roughly 1987-2003. During that period, some have estimated that 50-90 percent of all players used something. Barry Bonds’ substance abuse didn’t give him a competitive edge. It met the competitive level he faced — including that of pitchers.

The league and the teams knew that a lot of players were doping themselves, but did nothing until their hands were forced by the embarrassment of Jose Canseco’s revelations. Bonds surely figured, as many players figured, that this is what his profession demanded of him — what he was being paid all that money to do. He was supposed to help his team win, and he did that job. The home runs were hit in games. They weren’t just an exhibition of strength. They were runs, and all those runs helped the Giants win.

Who is to say that if all these chemicals had been effectively banned throughout Bonds’ career, so that a clean Bonds only faced clean pitchers, we might not be right where we are now, on the verge of Aaron’s record being broken? Seeing fewer 96 mph pitches might have compensated for the loss of an inch or two on his biceps. For all we know, steroids vs. steroids left us with a wash, competitively.

If a baseball fan wants to be angry at anybody today, be angry at the commissioner and the team owners. They had to know what was going on, the health risks all the players were taking for the sake of staying in the competition, and they did nothing about it for nearly two decades.

High-level baseball officials gave all would-be ballplayers a Hobson’s choice between doing what needed to be done to stay competitive, or protecting their health and likely falling out of the majors.  There’s no document they sent to young ballplayers where they said this explicitly, so they undoubtedly think their hands are clean.  But the league bears the moral responsibility.

Right now, former Senator George Mitchell is slowly completing an investigation of steroids, etc. What I hope Mitchell has the courage to say is, steroids and growth hormones were ubiquitous in baseball for many years. Because they were ubiquitous, they did not effect overall competition. But because the players were taking a major health risk, the league should have been policed the game better.  For that, the league should be ashamed, and should impose some kind of sanction on itself that hits the pocketbooks of owners, not players.

Players shouldn’t take the blame for the failure of the league–not even the obnoxious Barry Bonds.

Don’t Wipe Out!

The poster of this YouTube clip calls it a tsunami, but that’s not the case.  However, it’s quite a ride — possibly a 50-foot wave that rolled up at Jaws, a beach in Hawaii.

According to Wikipedia, the hazards of big-wave surfing include:

In a big wave wipeout, a breaking wave can push surfers down 20 to 50 feet below the surface. Once they stop spinning around, they have to quickly regain their equilibrium and figure out which way is up. They may have less than 20 seconds to get to the surface for a breath of air before the next wave hits them. Additionally, the water pressure at a depth of 20-50 feet can be strong enough to rupture one’s eardrums. Strong currents and water action at those depths can also slam a surfer into a reef or even the floor, which can result in severe injuries or even death.

One of the greatest dangers is the risk of being held down by two or more consecutive waves without the chance to reach the surface for air. Surviving a triple hold-down is extremely difficult.

So, you root for this guy to stay on his board.  Click the video to see if he does.

Bob Oates on the “Unique” Reggie Bush

A few years back, the LA Times Sports department decided that longtime pro football writer Bob Oates should “only” appear online.  At the time, it appeared to be a kind of demotion, or maybe a clover-filled pasture for this aging scribe to frolic in.  Now, it’s clear that for the Times as well as most newspapers, they need to look hard at how they can get people to look at their online product.  Bob Oates would be a fine writer to start promoting as “exclusively online.” 

His column today on the New Orleans Saints (and ex-Trojan) Reggie Bush is a good example.  Oates is not a flashy writer, and thank goodness for that.  But he’s thoughtful, insightful and imaginative.  Here’s a taste:

Reggie Bush is so greatly different from all other NFL players — past and present — that the question of the week is again how his employers, the New Orleans Saints, will use him in the Dallas game Sunday night. The crowd of Cowboy fans will see a player who is the NFL’s most dangerous runner in an open field. Yet the Saints have never shown that they know the best ways to get him open.

To date, they’ve been alternating Bush with running back Deuce McAllister, which is a conventional way of lining up two great players. But there’s nothing conventional about Bush. First off, the Saints should realize that as an NFL player, Bush is primarily a receiver, not a scrimmage runner. Instead of rotating him and McAllister, they should regularly start both of them, using Bush as a third wide receiver in a basic three-wide-receiver offense.

I watched some of last Sunday’s Saints game against the San Francisco 49ers, and assume it was that incredible performance that inspired Oates to write this.  When he was with USC, when Bush was “on,” he seemed unstoppable — blessed with quick moves and speed, but incredibly powerful and hard to tackle.  But that was against other college boys.  It was amazing to see this mere rookie dominate another pro team.  Sunday night’s Saints v. Cowboys game looms as the game of the year so far.

A Generation of Wired Shadow-Boxers; or “Wii are the World”*

I raised a son and a step-son during the age of the video game console. I saw video-games become the contemporary symbol for all of what’s wrong with today’s youth, and joined in the worrying. One of the raps against electronic games was players were “sedentary,” just sitting on the sofa for hours pushing buttons rather than enjoying the fresh air outside. (“Fresh air,” a phrase only used by parents.)

Apparently, Nintendo listened to us. (I know I’m late to covering the Wii, but under the rules of blogging, if it’s new to me, it’s news.) Anyway, according to a couple of stories I saw today in the Wall Street Journal, Nintendo designed the Wii’s controller so that players’ body movements control the game, not just their button selections. You have to play it standing up.

And now, parents have a new worry: Their kids might hurt themselves.

But as players spend more time with the Wii, some are noticing that hours waving the game’s controller around can add up to fairly intense exertion — resulting in aches and pains common in more familiar forms of exercise. They’re reporting aching backs, sore shoulders — even something some have dubbed “Wii elbow.”

More fear:

Another hazard: collisions. All those flailing arms can sometimes inadvertently smack into lamps, furniture and even competing players. IGN.com, a popular site that reviews videogames, said one player testing the Wii lost her grip and sent the controller flying into a wall. Blaine Stuart of Rochester, N.Y., mistakenly whacked his fiancée, Shelly Haefele, while playing tennis and also accidentally hit his dog while bowling.

Even the physically fit are challenged by this thing:

Ryan Mercer, a customs broker in Indianapolis, lifts weights several times a week. But that hasn’t helped much with the Wii. After playing the boxing game for an hour and a half, his arms, shoulders and torso were aching. “I was soaking wet with sweat, head to toe — I had to go take a shower,” he says. And the next morning? “I had trouble putting my shirt on,” says the 21-year-old avid gamer.

Nintendo has several videos on Youtube that illustrate what players must do. Here’s one of them:

If you didn’t know any better, you’d think these kids were suffering from advanced case of Tourette’s syndrome. But this is obviously a coming thing. The Wii is outselling the Sony Playstation 3 so far.

And I want one.

*Update: I just came across a fascinating blog post by Michael Zack Urlocker, guest-blogging on his “brother” Michael’s site. Michael is a “disruption consultant,” which sounds like a growth industry to me. (Zack “is a pseudonym for a Silicon Valley software executive rapidly approaching his mid-life crisis.” He is also a busy blogger.) Zack analyzes Nintendo’s business strategy brilliantly.

Read the whole thing, but here’s a tidbit.

The Nintendo Wii is the runt of the litter when it comes to hardware specifications. It doesn’t have the HD graphics, surround sound or DVD drives of its more expensive competitors. But it’s outfoxed both Microsoft and Sony by packing more fun for a fraction of the price. Nintendo Wii sells for $250 compared to $500 for the Sony Playstation and around $400 for the Microsoft Xbox 360. Nintendo also includes throws in a set of 5 simple but addictive games dubbed Wii Sports with every console, making the Wii a much better value and a more complete offering out of the box. More importantly, Nintendo has parlayed their lower cost hardware into two further competitive advantages: games are cheaper to develop and they make money on every console sold. While it sounds like basic common sense, for the gaming industry this goes against all of the conventional rules.

It’s always instructive to watch a successful business innovation unfold before your eyes. “Zack” is a good guide to this one.

**Another Update.  I came across a blog that specializes in California insurance law and, after reading the same WSJ story I read, the writer came to this unsurprising conclusion about what the flailing arms and flying controllers might lead to:  

Sony has included warnings against these and other perils in the product manual [PDF], but little details like that never need to reach the jury if you pick the right venue and play your cards right.  So to our friends of the plaintiff’s bar we say: Fire up the word processors!  Nintendo’s put a shiny new cause of action under your tree! 

A Perfect Sunday Evening at Dodger Stadium

Could it be that after 18 years of frustration, the Los Angeles Dodgers finally have a team it’s fun to root for again? Based on Sunday night’s game against the San Francisco Giants, which I attended with my wife, my brother and my 4-year-old niece, the signs are good. 

(O, muse, give me the wit and skill to write this post that people indifferent to baseball might enjoy it!) 

Greg Maddux is a famous pitcher, who spent most of his career with the Atlanta Braves.  He turned 40 this year, which is old for a ballplayer.  This season, Maddux was pitching for the Chicago Cubs, who are having a dismal season.  Maddux was having the kind of year a great pitcher usually retires on; a few brilliant outings that brought back reminders of past glories amid a succession of bad games that made fans think, “He’s done.”  Despite Maddux’s apparent descent into mediocrity, on the last day of July Dodgers’ GM Ned Colletti traded for him.  

Maddux’s first Dodger game was startling; a no-hitter against the Reds that he was forced to leave due to a lengthy rain delay after seven innings.  His second game was also successful, though not as brilliant.  His third game was last night, against the Dodgers’ longtime rivals, who were pitching their best pitcher, Jason Schmidt, and it was magical.  

Maddux started the first inning by giving up a hit, a solidly struck single by Randy Winn.  The next batter hit a fly ball that was caught, but the third batter, Ray Durham smacked another single.  Up came Barry Bonds, another old player possibly in his last season, but still a threat to hit a home run or at least a bases-clearing double and put the Dodgers in the hole.  And Bonds did hit the ball hard, but Maddux reflexively reached up and caught it, and then threw to first base to get another out; and the inning was over.

From that point on, Maddux did not allow another hit. He didn’t walk anybody. No Giant reached base.  He was perfect the rest of the way, until he was taken out for a pinch hitter in the bottom of the eighth.  The only reason Maddux had to come out then was that the Giants’ pitcher, Jason Schmidt, had shut out the Dodgers to that point as well.  Schmidt pitched a great game.  It was one of those 0-0 games that only real baseball fans can love.

It wasn’t just that Maddux was perfect.  It was the efficient way he achieved perfection.  Maddux no longer possesses a real fastball.  The Dodgers have several pitchers who can throw the ball 95-97 miles an hour.  Maddux fastest pitch is about 85 mph.  What Maddux can do is aim the ball exactly where he wants to aim it, and vary the speed of the ball enough so that the hitter can never feel confident that if he just swings in a certain location, he’ll hit the ball hard.  And, he threw strikes, almost exclusively, so the batters knew that if they didn’t swing, they’d be struck out. 

As it happened, Maddux only struck out four, but he didn’t have to do more than that to completely dominate the Giant hitters.  They would swing at his first or second pitch, and hit it weakly, right at somebody. He needed a few good defensive plays to help keep runners off the bases, including another one of his own. Bonds almost hit a home run off him in the seventh, but it didn’t go quite far enough, and it was caught for an out.

It is hard to convey to a non-fan how amazing the following statistic is:  In his eight innings, Maddux threw 68 pitches, and 50 of them were strikes.  (In the same number of innings, Schmidt threw 114 pitches.)  Most starting pitchers are taken out after they’ve thrown 100 pitchers, and they usually hit this threshold by the sixth or seventh inning.  The high ratio of strikes to balls is amazing.  If you divide these numbers by the eight innings he pitched, an “average” inning by Maddux last night consisted of only 8.5 pitches (to get three hitters out), of which 6.25 of them were in the strike zone.  That is a level of finesse you just never see. In his 20-year major league career, I doubt Maddux has ever pitched with such precision.  Nor have many other pitchers, ever.  

Schmidt also eventually gave way to a pinch-hitter, and so lesser pitchers for both teams finished the game.  The Dodgers’ relievers maintained the shutout.  But in the bottom of the tenth, the Giants’ pitcher — a guy named Vinny Chulk — gave up a home run to the first batter he faced, the Dodgers’ 23-year-old rookie catcher, Russell Martin. 

Martin’s home run was certainly dramatic, and very gratifying to the 55,000 people who attended the game, most of us Dodger fans.  It symbolized a part of the 2006 Dodger story — the flood of new young players. That’s the angle the Los Angeles Times emphasized in its headline and story.   

The Times’ headline was bizarrely obscure: “This Victory is Grade-Eh.”  Unless you happen to remember the 1970s SCTV characters The McKenzie Brothers, two drunken Canadians who punctuated every sentence with “eh,” and unless you happen to know that Russell Martin is Canadian, you would think the Times was saying, “This victory was so-so.” 

The bigger miss, however, was the Times failure to emphasize the exquisite artistry of this game. I can say sincerely that if the Giants had managed to win, I would have been just as amazed and moved by what I saw.  It was the greatest baseball game I have attended in person in my life. 

“Say What??” Or: A Trip Down Memory Lane With Saturday’s LA Times

If you’re too young to have listened to Jim Healy’s nightly sports news/comedy act during evening rush hour, too bad, and today’s column by former LA Times Sports Editor Bill Dwyre (“Journalist Bill” on Healy’s show) won’t affect you like it affected me — laughing helplessly at the recollection of how Healy mashed up real sports scoops with sound clips of various sports figures at their worst. You can listen here to some of Healy’s bits — out of context, who knows if they’ll seem funny unless you heard them when they were fresh.

Dwyre got me to raise my eyebrows when I read this part:

Healy had news flooding in from everywhere. He had a million leakers, and it became a badge of honor to be one of his snoops. Sometimes, it almost seemed as if he were clairvoyant.

Once, a decision was made about a major firing in The Times’ sports department, and Journalist Bill, who was going to do this Friday, told his wife about it Wednesday night. He told no one else. Thursday afternoon, Healy had it on the radio. Mrs. Journalist Bill has not been trusted since.

Okay….

Speaking of the LA Times, today’s front page carries a long feature by former pop music editor Robert Hilburn. Now, if you were too young to miss his long journalistic career, no worries. The story is the encapsulation of almost everything he ever wrote — Hilburn distilled, for better and for worse. Only Bruce Springsteen is missing among the cast of characters he profiles.

Despite all the caveats about Hilburn’s clunkiness and repetitiveness, I recommend the piece. He tells many stories I found (to use a Hilburn word) “affecting.” Like this one about John Lennon:

I was a fan of the Beatles. But I also wanted to know more about the man behind the 1970 album “Plastic Ono Band,” a flat-out masterpiece. It was Lennon’s first solo album and a chilling attempt to move beyond the emotional scars of being abandoned by both parents.

In the opening lines, Lennon sang about loss so painful that his voice seemed tied to a nerve deep inside: “Mother, you had me / But I never had you/ I wanted you / But you didn’t want me.”

When I finally met Lennon in 1973, he was temporarily estranged from his wife, Yoko Ono, and living in Los Angeles. Depressed about the separation and the pressure of trying to live up to his fans’ high creative expectations of him, he spent much of his time partying with friends or drinking and taking drugs on his own; sometimes drinking a bottle of vodka or half a bottle or more of brandy a day. Years later, he told me that when he had an important business meeting the next day, he’d spend the evening with me because I didn’t drink.

“I think I was suicidal on some kind of subconscious level,” he said of what he called his “lost weekend.”

“The goal was to obliterate the mind. I didn’t want to see or feel anything.”

One evening at his hotel, Lennon turned on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and ordered up cornflakes and cream. I didn’t think much of it until the same thing happened another night.

“What’s up with the cornflakes?” I finally asked.

He smiled.

As a child in London during World War II, he explained, he could never get milk, so this was special. The lesson of the evening was that there are some childhood losses you can deal with through room service. For
Lennon, the harder ones could be exorcised only through his songs.

And then this story, with a similar subtext, about Michael Jackson:

I got the rare chance to observe this new pop phenom at close range, before allegations of child molestation and the resulting legal actions began to rule his life. In 1984, during the “Victory” tour, I worked with him on his autobiography for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, then an editor at Doubleday.

She wanted a formal autobiography; he wanted a picture book. One evening, I began to see how difficult a book of any sort would be. Jackson had handed me a folder with dozens of family photos. I picked out a shot of an elderly man, who turned out to be his grandfather.

“I love him very much,” Jackson said.

“OK, shall we put that in the book?”

He looked shocked. “Oh, no,” he said, “that’s too personal.”

After nearly an hour of this, he decided it was enough work for the evening. Popcorn was ordered from his personal chef, then he pulled a video from one of the huge trunks he took on tour. Slipping it into the VCR, he settled on a couch and said, “Let’s watch cartoons.” Jackson was 26.

For all his brilliant showbiz instincts, Jackson was ill-equipped to deal with many of life’s most routine matters, as if the years of childhood stardom had left him socially stunted and more than a little frightened. His world was so guarded that admission to his room was strictly by invitation only.

Part of this, most certainly, was security, but Jackson also was not good at dealing with people, especially adults. Adults could be cruel, he said.

I understand Hilburn’s working on a book. I’m sure I’ll read it, gnashing my teeth all the way through, to find nuggets like these.

Speaking of LA Radio…

It’s more than a little ironic that, according to the Spring 2006 Arbitron radio ratings released yesterday, talk-radio KFI is tied for first place with Univision’s KLVE, which programs music in Spanish. KFI’s afternoon and evening programming is now almost completely dedicated to tirades about illegal immigration, especially “The John and Ken Show,” four drive-time hours of rabble-rousing. It’s the first time an AM station has been in the top slot for nearly 20 years, so I have to assume that screaming about “closing the border” and the alleged perfidy of MEChA is a hit formula. Bummer.

———

Also, Bud Furillo, R.I.P. The obituaries emphasized his role as sports editor of the Herald-Examiner, nurturing gifted columnists like Allan Malamud and Melvin Durslag, but I got to know of him through his long stint as the lead sports guy on KABC. Can you imagine, a news-talker like KABC devoted three or four hours every afternoon, during drive time no less, to sports? The best show I heard was “The Steam Room” with Bud “The Steamer” Furillo and his partner, usually Tommy Hawkins, but also Geoff Wicher or Rick Talley, which was on the air from about 1979-87.

(Furillo is pictured at right, looking kind of nervous.)

KABC had the Dodgers during that period, so my drives home during baseball season would be all about listening to Bud and Tommy set up that evening’s Dodger game.

Bud’s radio persona was that of an ever-optimistic fan. The Dodgers would win a few games, look like they might be turning a mediocre season around, and there would be Bud, imploring LA: “Are you on the bus? Are you on the bus??” He got me onto that bus many a summer.

“I am such an idiot.”

Is it my imagination, or does Father's Day always happen on the final day of the U.S. Open or some other big golf tournament? Most of my recent Father's Day memories include hanging out in the ancestral kitchen with my Dad and several brothers, eating the remains of whatever pot-luck feast the family created, waiting for a golf match to end so I could escape to the beach.

Golf is a TV sport I enjoy more in theory than in reality. It takes too much time to follow a golf tournament. But part of my Father's Day memory bank includes watching the final hours of the final day, when something wonderful or horrible sometimes happens. Yesterday's match took the cake. My Dad watched the last hole with his face about three inches from the TV. Unlike a basketball tournament, the NBC broadcast rarely cut away for a commercial, so the drama/farce was unrelenting. There was little conversation around the table; just a lot of "wow," and "where did that shot go?"

If you avoided the whole media onslaught, the match can be summed up this way. The tournament was almost over and Phil "Lefty" Mickelson was winning. Then he hit a shot that landed in a trash can.

There's a lot of good writing out there today about Mickelson's train-wreck of a final round, but this piece from ESPN.com's Pat Forde puts it in a context that non-sports fans will also appreciate. A sample:

No other sport leaves its combatants as mentally exposed at moments of peak pressure. We see their strengths and frailties etched upon their faces, carved into their body language, expressed through their swings. There is no running and no hiding.

When a golfer's arms turn to cement and his mind races toward panic, there are no teammates to pass to, no timeouts to call, no refs to blame. The game is the ultimate merciless meritocracy.

(snip)

Lefty's response to acute pressure seems to be rash boldness. He had sublimated that urge to do something reckless in recent years, with results (three major championships, where forever there had been none) that should have reinforced that newfound prudence. But Sunday at Winged Foot, with less-qualified contenders collapsing all around him, Mickelson couldn't resist joining them by reverting to the old brain-lock days.

He made a bizarre early decision to gouge a 4-wood out of gnarly rough, a brilliant idea that produced a one-foot flub and an eventual bogey. He got away with serially errant drives on a course that rewards accuracy. But at finishing time, Mickelson couldn't resist the suicidal impulse to fish that driver out of the bag — then he couldn't resist trying to hit a hero shot out of trouble when a simple punch-out to the fairway might have saved the day.

In Jim "Bones" Mackay, Mickelson might have the most involved caddie in golf. But short of placing him in a sleeper hold, no caddie and no swing coach and no fawning gallery could save Phil from himself Sunday.

With the crater from the implosion still steaming, Mickelson owned up to the monumental gag job.

"I am such an idiot," Lefty said.

Floyd Patterson, R.I.P.

World champion heavyweight Floyd Patterson, who died May 11 at 71, was remembered at a memorial today in New Paltz, N.Y.:

The Rev. Dan O'Hare, who met Patterson shortly after the boxer retired to New Paltz in 1973, said, "I didn't understand how this gentle, kind person beat up people."

O'Hare said he later saw photographs of Patterson helping up men he had knocked out.

Another picture, printed on the back of the memorial's bulletin, shows a smiling Patterson and the scar tissue on the knuckles of his big left hand, which the 190-pound boxer used to knock out Ingemar Johansson and retake the heavyweight crown in 1960.

Patterson's son, Floyd Patterson II, recalled going to a dinner where his father left the table for the restroom and didn't come back. He was found talking to fans. His son said Patterson would talk and sign autographs as long as people wanted him to.

Patterson won the heavyweight boxing title in 1956 when he knocked out Archie Moore. He lost and regained the title in fights with Ingemar Johansson and lost the title for good to Sonny Liston. Patterson retired in 1972 with a 55-8-1 record and 40 knockouts. He was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1991.

Patterson was the first boxer to ever to regain the heavyweight boxing crown after losing it, that history playing out over three classic bouts with Ingemar Johansson in 1959-61. He lost it the second time to Sonny Liston and lost the rematch, both times in first-round knockouts. After the Liston fights, Patterson continued his career long enough to get three more shots at the title, in 1965 and 1972 against Cassius Clay/Muhammed Ali, and in 1967 against Jimmy Ellis.

In between the Liston knockouts and the Clay challenge, writer Gay Talese wrote a famous portrait of Patterson, "The Loser." I happened to check out The Gay Talese Reader: Portaits and Encounters from the library shortly after Patterson died, so I read the piece. It first appeared in Esquire when that magazine published the best non-fiction in the country. "The Loser" is truly beautiful, poignant writing — an honest, clear-eyed writer encountering a honest, insightful subject who had a great story to tell. (The Talese collection also includes classic portraits of Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra.)

When Talese visited Patterson at his remote upstate New York training center, Patterson was in training even though, at that time, the boxing world thought Patterson was through — at 29. Patterson continued boxing for the same reason he started in the first place: "I liked beating people because it was the only thing I could do… Whether boxing was a sport, I wanted to make it a sport because it was a thing I could succeed at." But, contemplating his life, Patterson seemingly startles the near-invisible narrator Talese when he claims he is "a coward."

"When did you first think you were a coward?" he was asked.

"It was after the first Ingemar fight."

"How does one see this cowardice you speak of?"

"You see it when a fighter loses. Ignemar, for instance, is not a coward. When he lost the third fight in Miami, he was at a party later at the Fountainebleu. Had I lost, I couldn't have gone to that party. And I don't see how he did."

"Could Liston be a coward?"

"That remains to be seen," Patterson said. "We'll find out what he's like after somebody beats him, how he takes it. It's easy to do anything in victory. It's in defeat that a man reveals himself. In defeat, I can't face people. I haven't the strength to say to people, 'I did my best, I'm sorry,' and whatnot."

Patterson admitted to Talese that he brought a disguise with him — fake whiskers and mustache and a hat — to every fight after his first lost to Johannson. He won every fight from then on until Liston, but after Liston beat him, he used the disguse to slip away, first by car from Chicago to New York, then on an airplane from New York to Madrid, a location he chose upon reading the city's name on a sign at the airport.

"You must wonder what makes a man do things like this. Well, I wonder too. And the answer is, I don't know…but I think that within me, within every human being, there is a certain weakness. It is a weakness that exposes itself more when you're alone. And I have figured out that part of the reason I do the things I do, and cannot seem to conquer that one word–myself–is because… is because…I am a coward."

Amazing for a writer to get a 29-year-old world-famous and successful athlete to say things like this. Amazing that the young man could acknowledge that weakness within his heart — and then work his way back for three more legitimate shots at the top in the next seven years.

(Sports Illustrated recently interviewed Talese about the Patterson story and his other writings on sports. It's here.)

Just People Talking

Jeff Jarvis' Buzz Machine continues to impress me. Jarvis is a blog-evangelist, without question, and his focus is always on the future. But he's not overly impressed with himself, nor does he pump up the blog phenomenon to be more than it really is. In a post yesterday, he reports that some of the early, innovative bloggers he admires have become disappointed in the form.

Specifically, Matt Welch, an early and much-admired blogger who now works on the editorial pages of the Los Angeles Times, might have set his expectations a bit too high when he started his blog shortly after 9/11 — which started a genre that was called "warblogging." Jarvis quotes Welch from a recent Reason essay:

“What do warbloggers have in common, that most pundits do not?” I enthused. “I’d say a yen for critical thinking, a sense of humor that actually translates into people laughing out loud, a willingness to engage (and encourage) readers, a hostility to the Culture War and other artifacts of the professionalized left-right split of the 1990s…a readiness to admit error [and] a sense of collegial yet brutal peer review.”

Man, was I wrong….

To which Jarvis replies:

I think the problem starts when people get big enough to think that they speak for others… just like newspaper editorial pages. The real blogger speaks only for himself or herself. It’s just people talking.

It's hard not to get excited when you're at the forefront of a new communications media, as Jarvis and Welch both were. But while bloggers serve as sources of news and opinion for their readers, what makes this media truly unique is the way communities form around them–communities of people talking.

That's why I don't understand bloggers who refuse to allow comments on their posts. Too many of the most popular bloggers, especially those associated with the right, apparently are repulsed by the inane and obscene chatter that fills up comment areas on left-wing blogs, and fear that the left-wingers will clog their sites with the same angry bleats.

So? Make rules.

My favorite site, DodgerThoughts, has rules. Jon Weisman won't tolerate any four-letter words, and if one commenter attacks another personally, the comments are removed. If you want to post, just play by those rules.

The site flourishes. On Easter Sunday, about 600 comments were posted before, during and after the day's game. The comments Jon gets are disproportionately witty, informed and interesting –and some of them are stupid. But I think a reverse Gresham's Law works on his site and others like it — the good comments drive out the bad. People like their online community, and work with the site's owner to protect the conversation space they've created. Commenters will state a certain comment is out of line even before Jon notices it. What's really fun to see is when some of the regulars gang up on a nasty interloper, and drive them into submission through clever mockery–like Cyrano de Bergerac.

Jarvis says the blog-conversation takes place across different blogs, and that's certainly true too. Some of the comment-less blogs do a lot of linking, and respond to what's been said about their own posts. Fair enough, but not a good reason to block comments. A blog without comments is an incomplete experience — like a movie without music.