This article included reproductions of the forms from Willie Mays in 1951; Rocky Colavito (undated); Warren Spahn (1947); Bill Mazeroski (Jan. 2, but no year); Ted Williams (1939); and Roger Maris (1957). They asked for such information as hobbies, playing experience, name of spouse and children, etc.

What caught my eye was the space for “ancestry.”

The form changed over the years. In earlier versions, it was just a blank line for the player to fill in. Later on, there were a series of “check lines”:

___ English   ___ French  ___ German ___ Hebrew ___Irish  ___ Other

You get the idea. Mays wrote “Negro” on his blank line. Maz put down “Polish” in his “other” line; Williams wrote “Welsch/French,” neglecting to include his maternal Mexican heritage. Conspicuous by its absence: Italian. (Of course, there were practically no Latin America presence in those days.)

Maybe I’m being too sensitive, but one of these designations is not like the others.

Steve Gietschier, former senior managing editor of research at The Sporting News, said in an email

The Sporting News began the practice of distributing biographical questionnaires to major league players and prospects as part of the effort to publish the Baseball Register starting in 1940. As you know, each Register entry included not only stats but also biographical data, including such questions as: Hobbies, How Your Name is Pronounced, and Most Outstanding Achievement in Baseball.

Most players filled out the questionnaires. Some did so year after year. The early ones make for interesting reading.

When I started at TSN in 1986, we were no longer distributing questionnaires. The thinking was two-fold: first, we were getting the data we needed directly from the clubs, and second, modern players were simply not willing to fill out questionnaires.

Tim Wiles, director of research at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown said

For much of the 20th century, the Hall of Fame sent very similar questionnaires to players, stopping sometime in the 1980s after the return rate plummeted in reverse proportion to player incomes…

Our questionnaires also have an ethnicity line, with some interesting results.

When I started here, Greg Maddux and Steve Carlton were the only guys to win 4 Cy Youngs.  While both are a bit iconoclastic and have senses of humor, they both list “Native American” as their ethnicity.

In a subsequent note, Wiles wrote, “It all comes down to: By whose definition? My favorite permutation is: Is Fergie Jenkins an African-American, even though he’s Canadian?

* * *

The news out of Dubai has been rife with speculation about who assassinated Hamas terrorist commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a local hotel.  Israeli agents and al-Mabhouh’s Palestinian rivals are high on the guess list.

But amid the who-did-it debate, a happier Dubai event was taking place. A few weeks ago, Shahar Peer became the first Israeli woman to compete in a professional sporting event in the United Arab Emirates.

Peer, a superb tennis player, defeated several highly ranked competitors on her way to the semifinal round of the annual Dubai championships. The 22-year-old then lost to American star Venus Williams, who went on reclaim the title she had won the previous year. But no less significant was Peer’s stunning performance and how she got there in the first place.

Her appearance was a year overdue. Peer was part of the draw for the 2009 Dubai championships, and her name like that of the other players had been supplied to the Emirates authorities long in advance. Yet the day before the opening matches, Peer received word that the UAE had denied her a visa.

Tournament director Salah Tahlak said Peer’s presence “would have antagonized our fans” because of their opposition to Israeli policies.

In fact, 2009 was dotted with international insults to Israeli athletes. Weeks after the Dubai event, the Swedish Taekwondo Federation blocked Israeli participation in the annual championships at Trelleborg. On the eve of the tournament, 45 Israeli athletes had to cancel their flight plans.

In October, at the fencing world championships in Antalya, Turkey, the Iranian team dropped out without notice. The Iranian government forbade its fencers to compete after learning that they were in seeding brackets with Israeli athletes. Iran’s disruptive behavior drew barely a nod from the Turkish hosts.

Effrontery to Israeli delegations was not limited to athletic competitions. Two Israeli women, both research doctors, were abruptly disinvited to a conference in Egypt on breast cancer. The sponsoring organization, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, told the women that the Egyptian Health Ministry was barring them. The doctors were doubly shocked by subsequent Komen and Egyptian claims that the Israelis themselves had decided not to attend.

Neither the Swedish, Iranian, Turkish nor Egyptian authorities were seriously criticized for their misbegotten behavior. But sponsors of the Dubai tennis tournament reacted differently, and therein lies a huge lesson.

Peer responded indignantly when she was notified of her ban in 2009. Larry Scott, the chief executive of the Women’s Tennis Association Tour, echoed Peer’s assertion that politics should be kept separate from sports. After consultations among the players, and with Peer’s concurrence, the tournament was not canceled, but the Dubai authorities were hit with an avalanche of penalties.

Scott warned that if Peer were prevented from playing in Dubai in the future, “they would run the risk of losing their tournament.” Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal’s European edition dropped advertising for the 2009 event and cable television’s Tennis Channel canceled its planned coverage.

Soon after, the WTA levied a fine of $300,000 on the Dubai tournament organizers. The WTA board also demanded that the organizers post a $2 million guarantee that henceforth all players who qualified would be allowed to compete. The UAE would have to show proof of entry permission for any Israeli player at least eight weeks prior to the tournament. Further, Venus Williams said she would not play again in Dubai unless Peer were admitted to the 2010 contest.

The threat of losing the tournament and its accompanying money, attention and prestige evidently impressed the Dubai organizers. Peer’s participation in 2010 made that point even though none of her matches were on the center
court. All were relegated to an outside court with limited seating, presumably as a safety measure.

Still, Peer’s iron determination to play, and play well, drew plaudits from commentators around the world. Above all, her presence signified the ability to rectify a wrong when good people are insistent.

The Iranian fencers in 2009 were permitted to let politics trump their commitment to compete. Their Turkish hosts and fellow competitors remained stone silent rather than call for penalties for the Iranians’ blatant discrimination. Nor were the Swedish and Egyptian authorities who disinvited Israeli participants even censured, let alone penalized.

If ignored, such injustices will be repeated. Dubai 2010 demonstrated how concerted efforts can help change errant behavior.

Overseers of all these events would do well to heed Scott’s words after the UAE agreed to the WTA’s stipulations: “Thanks to the courage of Shahar, and all those individuals and organizations, including her fellow players that supported her, the UAE has changed their policy and another barrier of discrimination has fallen.”

(Leonard A. Cole is the co-chair of the Task Force on Anti-Semitism for the Jewish Agency and former chair of the Jewish Council of Public Affairs.)

Look carefully at the logo on the cap of Rabbit Maranville, circa 1914.

There’s a rather lengthy “forensic” attempt to identify the circumstances of this shot at the Baseball Researcher blog, but here’s the upshot:

…[I]n 1914, there was no stigma associated with the swastika. Well, at least very little. On January 26, 1912, the New York Times ran an article with the headline “‘Jinxes’ Have No Place With Yankees: Manager Wolverton Will Drive Superstitious Ideas Out of His Ball Team.” The article goes on as follows:

“Manager Harry Wolverton of the Yankees says that the day of the superstitious ballplayer is over. He doesn’t believe in jinxes, good or bad omens, rabbits’ feet, swastika signs, or all that ancient baseball lore.”Despite the best efforts of Harry Wolverton, the lucky swastika was and continued to be embraced by people around the world, including ballplayers. In fact, it is my belief that the Braves wore the special “swasti-caps” on Opening Day of 1914 as a good-luck charm … or at least as an end-the-bad-luck charm.

The Boston Braves entered the 1914 season having finished in the National League’s second division 11 straight years — dead last in four of the previous five campaigns. Opening the season in Brooklyn, it’s not hard to believe that the exasperated club might choose to adopt a good luck symbol to help turn things around.

At first it appeared that the superstitious move was a failure. The club lost both games in Brooklyn and continued to slide downhill for nearly three months. After dropping both ends of a doubleheader to Brooklyn on July 4, the Braves found themselves with a record of 26-40, in last place and 16 games out of first. Then, things turned around.

The Braves won their next four games and, ultimately, 68 of their final 87. The turnaround was nothing short of incredible, as the club took sole possession of first place by early September and ultimately grabbed the pennant by 10.5 games over the second place Giants. In the World Series, Boston dismissed the powerful Philadelphia Athletics in four straight games.

Today known as the “Miracle Braves,” Boston’s celebrated comeback remains unparalleled in big league history. Who would have guessed that it all began with a superstition and a symbol that has long since become taboo?

You can read the entire entry, which parses the where’s and when’s of the photo, here.

With so much going on in the world, so many more important issues to think about about, why waste time worrying about people trying to throw a ball through a hoop or hit a disk with a stick?

I heard about this piece by Slate’s John Swansburg on the “Hang Up and Listen” podcast (also a Slate product). I actually had to listen to it twice to make sure I got it.

“At the most basic level, I stopped following sports because being a sports fan took too much time,” writes Swanburg, Slate’s culture editor. I don’t know his age or family situation; many of my contemporaries put aside their own sporting lives to take their kids to their own activities. I have just one child, so it was not much of an issue in our house. But too often, especially in recent years, have been the occasions when I’ve found myself on the softball field on a hot summer evening asking, “What the heck am I doing out here?”(this mostly comes when my team is losing by a lot). And I suppose a differentiation has to be made between participation for the sake of exercise and camaraderie and merely being a passive observer (but let’s be honest, softball is not really exercise).

That was then:

Not all that long ago, the media diet of even the most dedicated fan was far less rich. Before cable, satellite, and the Web, you could follow the home team on local TV and radio; if you missed the game, you could read about it in the paper the next morning. To keep up with the rest of the sports world, you subscribed to Sports Illustrated or the Sporting News and watched whatever games made the network broadcasts.

This is now:

[T]hese new ways of following sports have made it easier for a casual fan to slip into Big Fan territory. There was a time when I’d catch a game here and there, watch SportsCenter a few nights a week, and really start paying attention come playoff time. I woke up one day not long ago (to a clock radio blaring WFAN) and found that I had a Google alert for “Kevin Garnett knee,” a subscription to Baseball Prospectus, and a genuine interest in the Twitter updates of Juan Pablo Montoya.

(A NASCAR racer; I had to look it up.}

Obviously the media is to blame, especially the Internet, which feeds the lust for news, gossip, and statistics every minute of every day.

The problem — if you even want to call it that — is that  Swansburg wants to replace the time he devotes to sports to other leisure activities, such as reading or watching TV/movies. Sports, he notes, “demands” your attention. “You pretty much have to watch them live,” to get the full benefit he writes in the article, whereas you can record TV programs or catch up on films you missed via Netflix. So he’s just substituting killing time with one “unproductive” endeavor with another.

At this point, Swansburg has not been away from the games long enough to forget everything. On the Procast, he described a recent visit to his family’s home in Boston for a Hanukka party where he talked about the Red Sox with his 97-year-old grandfather. Sweet. So sports does serve at least one purpose: bringing family and friends together.

He writes, “I may return to the fold. Maybe I just need a break.”

“Hang Up” panelists Josh Levin, Mike Pesca, and Stefan Fatsis tried to talk Swansburg off the ledge. Of course they do, it’s their job to talk about sports, and if fans start leaving the fold, if they begin to realize there might be more important things to do out there, then where does that leave them? Or me, come to think of it?

Please disregard this entry.

With the Knicks well on their way to a 106-91 blowout, Al Harrington was whistled for a charge and began complaining to the referee. Maccabi Coach Pini Gershon took issue with Harrington’s behavior, then proceeded to do the same thing. The referee did not care for Gershon’s comments and gave him the technical.

Gershon remained in front of his team’s bench, not far from where the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert was sitting. It was as if Gershon were preparing to call the next play and put in a couple of substitutes. For a few moments, it seemed as if no one knew what to do with him, until a clutch of league representatives scurried over.

“He wouldn’t leave,” said Scott Jaffer, an N.B.A. security official who spoke with Gershon on the court. “I tried to talk him out of it. They wanted to stop the game.”

Then things got reaaly weird.

The game is played as a fundraiser for Migdal Ohr, a center for orphans and abused and underprivileged children in Israel. The founder and president of the organization is Rabbi Yitzchak Dovid Grossman, described in this New York Times story as having “a long white beard, a black hat and a black coat.” Grossman tried to intervene on Gershon’s behalf:

Not knowing that two technical fouls result in an automatic ejection, he attempted to persuade the referee to change his call and allow Gershon to stay.

“But he says that this is the law, that he must leave,” Grossman said, referring to the referee in broken English.

“What can I do? I tried. I tried to make peace.”

This back-and-forth evidently took a considerable amount of time.

While Gershon argued on one side of the court, the Knicks seemed mostly confused on the other. They stood around their bench waiting. So Nate Robinson decided to find out if basketball was going to resume and worked his way into the argument.

“I was over there just trying to figure out what was up,” said Robinson, who added that the coach and the rabbi “started speaking a different language,” which was Hebrew.

“It threw me off,” Robinson said. “I needed a translator.”

Now I don’t know if I’m being overly sensitive here. Was Robinson trying to be funny? If not, it really strikes me as silly and/orjust plain ignorant. This isn’t the first time the Knicks played an Israeli team. You would think they would know that the “foreign language” was Hebrew, unless they’re just so insulated in their own little world that they can’t be bothered to learn anything about their opponents, as people or as athletes.

Here’s more on the event from the Associated Press.

Photo illustration by Darrow / Vanity Fair

Limbaugh, the conservative syndicated blowhard, actually got his start in sports. In the 1970s he served as director of promotions for the Kansas City Royals and had a brief stint with ESPN on its football telecasts in 2003. He was fired for comments he made about Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, stating that the athlete was overrated and overhyped because the media wanted a black quarterback to succeed.

So now he wants a team of his own?  Pardon the Interruption reported on its show last Friday that several African American players said they would refuse to play for a Limbaugh-owned franchise. Rev. Al Sharpton sent a letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goddell in his capacity as president of the National Action Network, urging that Limbaugh not be approved for ownership.

In today’s New York Times, sports columnist George Vecsey wrote:

Limbaugh comes with other weighty history. This is the bloke who, after an ugly brawl in the N.B.A. in 2004, recommended that the league be renamed the Thug Basketball Association. He also likened the two teams to the Crips and the Bloods, two national gangs. Nice. This posture may play well out where car radios are tuned to Limbaugh, but it should not play with N.F.L. owners and the cities they represent.

Opposition is loud and plentiful and coming from all directions: columnists like Vecsey, politicians, civil rights leaders, bloggers, etc. The league executives have all these rules about how players should comport themslves, how their uniforms should, look, whether they can Twitter or not. Let’s hope they have a sense of perspective when it comes to things that really matter.

This is an annual issue, as we get closer to the High Holy Days, and with so many high profile players, it will be interesting to see who does (or doesn’t) do what. It’s easier for the pitchers to get moved around in the rotation (Marquis and Scott Feldman are the only starters), but for everyday anchors like Kevin Youkilis, Ryan Braun, and Ian Kinsler — whose teams are all vying for post-season berths — well, that will really be the test.

* * *

According to the JTA,

Yuri Foreman, who is undefeated in 27 professional bouts, will challenge super welterweight champion Daniel Santos (32-3-1) for the World Boxing Association title, the 15 Rounds Web site reported Tuesday.

Dovid Efune, Foreman’s spokesman, said the fight is expected to take place Nov. 14 in Las Vegas.

“He’s got a Jewish head attached to his Jewish fist,” Efune said in a telephone interview. “He’s a very tactical player. He boxes like he’s playing chess.”

Foreman, 29, is fervently religious and is studying to become an Orthodox rabbi.

* * *

J Weekly, the San Francisco (Jewish) treat, ran this profile on Omri Casspi, the Sacramento King’s latest draft signee. The team hosts the Portland Trailblazers in a pre-season exhibition on Oct. 7 and begin the regular season on Oct. 28 as guests of the Oklahoma City Thunder. The Kings are set to take on Jordan Farmar and the World Champion Los Angeles Lakers on a pre-seqson match-up on Oct. 15, then “for real” on Dec. 26.

* * *

Brett Favre shouldn’t be waiting for any holiday cards from Rabbi Eliyahu Fink (finkorswim.com), who believes there’s way too much emphasis on sports:

I dislike Favre, but it is not really his fault. ESPN makes me hate Favre with over-reporting and unprofessional, blatant favoritism and flattery of Favre. It is just impossible to like a guy who is in the news that much.

For others, the hatred toward Favre is due to his “treachery”. To illustrate I have some photos for you.

In a lot of ways, terrible to say this I suppose, but apart from the fact that Hitler got taken away and persuaded to do things that I have no idea whether he wanted to do or not, he was in the way that he could command a lot of people, able to get things done. In the end he got lost, so he wasn’t a very good dictator.

Eccelstone made his remarks in an interview with The London Times on July 4. He has since apologized for his comments in a letter to the editor of the Times.

In an effort not to take anything out of context, read his entire response, an excerpt of which is excerpted below:

I have no complaints about the quote — it is what I said — but it was not what I meant to say. Not surprisingly it has upset a number of people in the Jewish community, in Germany and elsewhere. Those who don’t know me think I support Hitler’s atrocities; those who do know me have told me how unwise I was to articulate my points so badly that it should have been so widely misunderstood.

Yesterday on the Tony Kornheiser-less Pardon the Interruption,  Michael Wilbon and guest host Dan LeBatard took up the topic.

Wilbon: We only seem to talk Forumla One racing on this show when it intersects with Nazis. Last year, F1 executive Max Mosley got outed for participating in a Nazi-themed S&M game. Now, F1 head Bernie Eccelstone is quoted by The Times of London as saying that “Apart from the fact that Hitler got taken away and persuaded to do things that I have no idea whether he wanted to do, he was able to get things done.” Eccelstone says, of course, he was misunderstood and, of course, some of his best friends are Jewish. Danny, you think this takes him off the hook?

LeBatard: No, I think what you need to do is whenever you’re in a position in sports where you are speaking to people as the head of an organization, and Hitler enters your mind in any way…

Wilbon: Shut it down…

LeBatard: Stop whatever you’re doing, run from the room, screaming, with your arms over your head. Even if the word “Adolph” comes in and you;re thinking of Rupp, just leave the room…do not continue down the path.

Wilbon: It’s inconceivably stupid. Now, in America, this wouldn’t have been toleated. I mean every single columnist would have been calling for this person’s head. This is not America. Other places in the world — and western Europe is even one of them, where this all played out — people often say, “You know what, he’s a moron,” and then they go on. There are different means and methods and levels of passion in different culures. In the United States, this guy would be out, but, Danny, I don’t think that’s necessarily going to happen in the F1 culture in which he operates.

LeBatard: Well, you just mentioned in passing a Nazi S&M game; we just blew right past that story.

Wilbon: The whole thing is just too bizarre to contemplate.

A member of the House of Lords has said he is delighted that the 40th anniversary of the murder of 11 Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics will be remembered at the Games in London in 2012.

This is the tale of  Don Budge, Baron Gott­fried von Cramm, and Big Bill Tilden competing at Wimbledon in 1937. The book foreshadows the coming Holocaust and the treatment of men like von Cramm, who tried to keep the secret that he was homosexual.

His Jewish doubles partner had fled Germany; so had his Jewish lover. In the months leading up to the match, von Cramm was interrogated by the Gestapo about his homosexual activities, was barred from playing singles in the French Championships, divorced his wife and lost the Wimbledon final for the third straight year (to Budge, no less).

I’m always skeptical of words like “greatest” or “best” in a title; there’s rarely universal agreement on the given subject. As the reviwer puts it, “By illuminating the terrible shadows of time, Fisher shows that hyperbole may be fleeting, but champions are not.”

The Wall Street Journal also posted a review.

In celebration of Wimbledon, the Jewish Museum of Florida will host two screenings of A Perfect Match on June 28 at 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. The documentary tells the story of Althea Gibson, an African-American from Harlem, and Angela Buxton, a Jewish girl from London, who overcame racial and religious intolerance to win the 1956 Wimbledon doubles title.

Tickets for A Perfect Match are $25 ($18 for Jewish Museum members) and include a Q&A session with the filmmakers, plus a tour of the museum’s Jews in Sports exhibit.

The Jewish Museum of Florida is located at 301 Washington Ave. in Miami Beach. For reservations, call 305-672-5044, ext. 3164.

Over the past 15 years, Jewish members of the House and Senate, for the first time, have occupied a number of elected leadership positions in both the House and the Senate, and in this session of Congress, there are six Jewish committee chairs in the Senate and four Jewish committee chairs in the House.

And this season, three of the brightest young stars in the major leagues are Jewish: the Boston Red Sox’s Kevin Youkilis, the Milwaukee Brewers’ Ryan Braun and the Texas Rangers’ Ian Kinsler. All three were on the 2008 baseball All-Star team, and all three are good bets for this year’s team as well.

He makes baseball comparisons as a knowledgeable American, and now he is undertaking a soccer mission for the nation that gave him shelter. He has joined the committee that is seeking to bring the World Cup of soccer to the United States in 2018 or 2022.

“I will be 99 years old,” he said in his deliberate style, referring to 2022. “I have sort of a moral obligation to stay around.”

Henry Kissinger with Inter-American Development Bank president Iglesias and Pelé in 2000 (Photo: David Mangurian - IDB)

The Israeli squad reached the quarterfinals of the Davis Cup for the first time in more than 20 years as they upset host Sweden, 3-2. Harel Levy and Dudi Sela each beta their opponents in five sets.

Following the debacle in Dubai, officials in Malmo, Sweden warned that the match would have to be played with no fannies in the seats because of security issues, with organizers saying they couldn’t guarantee the safety of the Israelis. But they could guabarntee it for every other team? (Harvey Araton wrote about the silliness of that in a recent NY Times column.) As it was a lucky 300 got to watch the contest.

According to a Feb. 24 item from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency,

Swedish organizers … cited security concerns for the empty-arena policy when the national tennis squads compete March 6-8 in the southern city of Malmo, cbssports.com reported. Anti-Israeli demonstrations spurred by Israel’s recent military operation in Gaza are expected during the best-of-five series.

Stockholm, saying it could better guarantee security, had offered to host the match, but officials in the capital realized later they did not have enough time to organize before the Israelis arrived Feb. 28.

Stockholm officials claimed that Malmo’s decision was political. Malmo, Sweden’s third largest city, has a left-leaning government and a large Muslim minority. Its leaders have strongly criticized Israel after the Gaza invasion; some called for dropping the Davis Cup match. Stockholm has a center-right majority that is more pro-Israeli.

Malmo Mayor Ilmar Reepalu insisted the decision to bar spectators was solely based on security concerns. He noted that pro-Palestinian groups had disrupted a recent pro-Israel demonstration by throwing bottles, eggs and fireworks.

Andy Roddick

“This is a political stand which is something that very few athletes take, and I will happily lead the applause,” said. Mr. Tony.

In an story that appeared in the London Independent

“I really didn’t agree with what went on over there,” Roddick said in Memphis, where he is playing this weekend. “I just don’t feel like there’s a need for that in a sporting event. I don’t think you make political statements through sports.”

I had the opportunity to take in an exhibition game between Tel Aviv and the New York Knicks prior to the 2007 season. Several members of the Israeli team were originally from the U.S. Perhaps they were being politically correct when the spoke of how much they enjoyed playing in the Holy Land, and how “messed up” it was that there was so much violence in the region.

Parker, who currently plies his trade for the Toronto Raptors in the NBA, conveyed the sentiment in Araton’s column:

“Oh, yeah, you feel it,” he said, when asked if there was a stigma attached to playing for Maccabi. “It’s not with the other players or anything, but with the atmosphere, the fans. They’d wave Palestinian flags. They’d yell things.

“And we always had security, beefed-up security. We’d have it in the hotels, on the bus. Going through the towns on the way to the arena, we had police escorts. For us, that was the norm.”

Comparing Parker with Peer’s situation, Araton notes,

Security was also the rationale last week in Dubai, where [she] was denied a visa to enter the United Arab Emirates to play in a major tennis event. No one explained why officials waited until the 11th hour and 59th minute to announce their decision. When widespread condemnation ensued and the tournament was threatened with extinction, security conditions miraculously improved.

A visa, the authorities said, would be given to the Israeli doubles player Andy Ram for the coming men’s tournament. (Andy Roddick has said he will boycott on principle, and good for him.)

Justin Gimelstob, a player representative on the ATP Board, said earlier this month that if Ram had been denied entry to Dubai it would have “serious ramifications” that would be dealt with “harshly.”

“We have to wait for all the official information to come in and see what the reason for the denial is” if it happens, Gimelstob said. “Tennis is the ultimate meritocracy and we take pride in that.”

Gimelstob — a 2006 inductee of the JCC MetroWest Jewish Sports Hall of Fame with 10 singles and 15 doubles titles as a professional — said there was “no room for interpretation” in the ATP rules for the rejection of a player based on nationality, a situation he called “surprising, disappointing, demoralizing and repulsive.”

Wilbon quoted American star Venus Williams as saying that the players didn’t protest because “they didn’t want to faily their sponsors.” Kornheiser wasn’t sympathetic.

“Venus Williams, as a minority player herself, should understand discrimination in all forms,” he said. “Players can side with sponsors or they can make a political statement.”

Both pundits recalled the stance Arthur Ashe took when he agreed to play in South African during apartheid. Ashe demanded that black and white spectators be allowed to sit together, which had never heretofore been allowed.

Wilbon concluded that tennis players do what’s best for themselves as individuals and don’t look at the big picture.

[sic]

A story in today’s New York Times notes that ” A group of United States Senators, led by Arlen Specter, sent N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell a letter Tuesday expressing their continued disappointment over the league’s policy of showing games exclusively on the N.F.L. Network.”

Nice to know that in these times of fiscal crisis, our politicians have their priorities straight.