Tribal Affairs: Boxing's Golden Boy was Jewish

There is a long history of Jewish fighters who embraced Irish names and boxing as vehicles out of the LES ghetto. Art Aragon wasn't one of them, at least not until later in life.

Boxing's "Golden Boy" -- a sports celebrity on par with Joe Namath, though never a world champ -- was raised Catholic in East L.A. But his second wife was Jewish, and Aragon converted so he could marry her (and presumably his third wife, who also was Jewish; his fourth, however, was not). From a short appreciation I wrote about Aragon for this week's paper:

"My grandfather wouldn't let my mother marry him because he was a real swinger," Aragon's son, Brad, recalled recently. "So he offered him $100,000 to just leave. And my dad said, 'I can't be bought.' Then my grandfather said, 'Well, Irene, he's not Jewish.' So he converted."

Aragon, who died last month at his Northridge home after suffering a stroke, was buried at Mt. Sinai Memorial Park, a worthy resting place for someone who shrank his conversion certificate so he could be a "card-carrying Jew." He was 80 when he was buried on April Fools' Day.

"Everybody expected, because he was such a joker, him to wink his eye and say, 'Just kidding,'" Brad Aragon said.

Julian Eget, the EVP of the World Boxing Hall of Fame, which inducted Aragon in 1990, told me that the Golden Boy might not have been an observant Jew, except for enjoying the food, but he was certainly a proud one.

"It was incredible for me," Eget said. "It just doesn't happen; most of the time it goes the other way, people changing their names and trying to hide from being Jewish."

Aragon was so proud of his heritage that Eget believed had made the rare Abrahamic decision to receive an adult circumcision.

"No. That's not true," Aragon's son assured me, offering some details I left out of the story. "My dad had his sh-- clipped when he was a kid."

Dodgers strikeout adding Canter's to Koufax

Canter's Deli and Sandy Koufax -- two names that evoke the words 'Jewish Los Angeles' unlike any other. With the Tribe's contributions to Los Angeles' eateries and baseball team, it's fitting that the Dodgers would offer the delicacies that seem as much a part of Judaism as the Passover story: salt-cured beef and matzah ball soup. It only took 50 years for that to happen.

Part of a multimillion-dollar field-level expansion project at Dodger Stadium, Canter's Deli -- an anchor of the Fairfax district since 1948, but with an L.A. history that dates back to 1931 in Boyle Heights -- joined Gordon Biersch, Panda Express and all those Dodger Dog windows. Its menu is truncated but carries the essentials: matzah ball soup, corned beef and pastrami sandwiches and that marriage of the two meats, the Canter's Fairfax.

An avid Dodger fan -- the kind who takes his wife to games on their anniversary -- I was eager to sample the new fare. The line was short and my Canter's Fairfax was served up suspiciously quickly. Indeed, something terrible happens to thinly sliced, heavily salted meat when placed under a heat lamp. It doesn't melt in your mouth -- it flakes.

What I couldn't find at Canter's or any other concession stand was a kosher hot dog. Providing a kosher nosh would require renovating the kitchens at Dodger Stadium and peeling Farmer John's grip from its hot dog monopoly. A Dodger spokeswoman said the club has "no immediate plans" for this.

Fortunately, I don't keep kosher. But plenty of Angelenos do, and for years they've felt like they're missing out of one of the most enjoyable elements of rooting for the Dodgers: Eating a lukewarm hot dog that is never as tasty as you remember.

This is from a piece I wrote for this week's Jewish Journal. Plenty of other stadiums offer kosher nosh, including the Boston Red Sox, who just announced the additional menu item alongside the Fenway Frank. That makes Steve Getzug, an L.A. public affairs executive and founding member of the Lou Barak Memorial Hot Dog Committee (I could be so lucky in death), a bit jealous.

"Our field of dreams," he said, "includes kosher hot dogs."

Beckham's boy to enter Jewish day school

If Jews and anti-Semites have one thing in common, it's that they spend all day talking about who is and isn't Jewish. David Beckham has been the subject of much of this discussion. Further fueling speculation that the Galaxy's biggest salary is more than just "half-Jewish," he and Posh Spice have decided to enroll their 3-year-old son at a Jewish school:

The former Manchester United and England captain moved to Los Angeles in 2007, after signing a five-year contract with L.A. Galaxy.

The Sun states that the couple last week visited the nursery school, which is "attached to a Jewish temple in Los Angeles," to meet with staff.

However, the report quotes a source as saying that there is "no plan" for three-year-old Cruz "to be educated in the Jewish faith."

David Beckham is often reported to have Jewish roots on his mother's side, and, according to The Sun, he recently referred to himself as "half Jewish."

The Beckhams have matching Hebrew tattoos showing a line taken from the Song of Songs. The tattoos read: "I am for my beloved and my beloved is for me."

In Los Angeles, where schools are so bad, people go through a lot of measures to avoid sending their kids to public schools.

NBA player discusses growing up with polygamists

To this point, I haven't posted about the raid of a polygamist community in Texas that delivered some 400 children into foster care. But this interview from CBS' "Early Show" is a good entry point. (Blogger won't let me embed the video, so click here.)

The subject is Cleveland Cavaliers center Lance Allred, who grew up in a polygamist community. It's an odd rambling interview, and, when asked whether he ever saw signs of sexual abuse, Allred answers yes but then gives a strange qualification:

"You can get caught up in the black and white of it all. There are bad apples in every religion who exploit people."

Jewish pugs and holy considerations

We're taught at a young age that Jews are more book smart than playground tough, a big reason why guys like Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax and, perversely, even Kayo Konigsberg are inspirations to young Jewish boys. If this were the case, and it is, boxing would be the last sport to search for Jewish sports stars. Think Freud in flamboyant shorts. Actually, don't.

But though their ranks are thin, the brotherhood of Jewish boxers has included two greats: "1920s light-weight champ Benny 'Pride of the Ghetto' Leonard, and the Depression-era fighter Barney Ross," who left the bigger mark.

He was born Dov-Ber "Beryl" Rasofsky in 1909 to Eastern European immigrant parents living on Manhattan's Lower-East Side. Two years later the family moved to Chicago and settled in that city's Maxwell Street Jewish Ghetto, where his father owned a small grocery. The young Beryl showed some talent as a Talmud scholar, but after his father was murdered by two robbers when he was 14, he became a street kid who demonstrated even more potential with his fists.

He first put his fighting skills to the service of the Al Capone gang that ruled Chicago at the time, providing occasional muscle and beginning a life-long friendship with a fellow Jewish tough guy named Jack Ruby, later to gain fame as the killer of JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. By 1929, the re-named Barney Ross was recognized as one of Chicago's top young boxing talents, traveling to New York City to win one of the first inter-city Golden Gloves tournaments ever held.

Tales of Talmud and tape still arise from time to time, like the lengthy piece in New York magazine two years ago about the holiness of a Chasid who pummels pugs for a living.

Tribal identity and ethnic politics have always played a major role in boxing. ... Dmitriy Salita is different. He’s Jewish, for one thing, in an era when “professional Jewish athlete” is most likely to serve as a punch line or trivia answer. And unlike great Jewish boxers of the past, who heard the bell as a clarion call to assimilation, not spirituality, Salita is openly devout. Orthodox tenement tough Benjamin Leiner changed his name to Benny Leonard so his mother wouldn’t discover he had taken up prizefighting. When she did learn his secret, she is said to have declared, “A prizefighter you want to be? Is that a life for a respectable man? For a Jew?”

More recent Jewish boxers have strayed even further from religious practice. Or they had far shorter to stray in the first place. Max Baer, the sneering villain of Cinderella Man, fought with a Star of David on his shorts but in fact was raised Catholic (Baer’s Jewish manager apparently encouraged the display for marketing reasons). Mike “the Jewish Bomber” Rossman, the 1978 light heavyweight champion, was born Albert Michael DiPiano and tattooed the Star of David onto the calf of his right leg, in direct violation of the Jewish prohibition against self-mutilation. And for sheer sacrilegious chutzpa, few will ever outdo Vincent Morris Scheer, a New York City Jew who apparently decided he’d be a bigger draw as “Mushy Callahan—the Fighting Newsboy.” Role models? True believers? Feh!

Today, the New York Times got into the mix with a profile of Yuri Foreman, a light middleweight boxer and ... rabbinical student.

Foreman said his studies to become an Orthodox rabbi eased the physical stress of his boxing training. But he said he set the sport aside while reading the Talmud or attending classes twice a week at IYYUN, a Jewish institute in Brooklyn.

“Boxing and Judaism go side by side, because it’s a lot of challenges,” he said. “I would love to be a world champion and a rabbi.”

Not surprisingly, the Times found a rabbi who questioned the piety of Foreman inflicting pain on others and another who said they were proud that a Jew was debunking the myth that members of the Tribe are all meek. (Where have we heard this before?)

Well, the conclusion of "Raging Bull" aside, Foreman's foray is definitely holier than Meir Kahane's old motto: "Every Jew a .22."

'We talking about practice'

You've probably noticed that publishing has been a bit less frequent at The God Blog the past two weeks. That's because I've been having a lot of problems with Blogger. Fortunately, The Jewish Journal is a few weeks away, I'm told, from launching a new Website, complete with a much, much, much -- much -- friendlier blogging platform.

The new site should go live right around the beginning of the NBA playoffs. Speaking of which, there is a dogfight in the West for that final playoff spot, pitting my man B. Diddy and his Warriors against the Mavericks and Allen Iverson's Nuggets. The few degrees of separation gives me a great excuse to embed this video of my favorite press conference of all time.

Whatever happened to Sidd Finch?

Hayden "Sidd" Finch was pious as a yogi and could hurl a fastball with as much velocity as a speeding Maserati. In the spring of 1985, he shamed some of the New York Mets' best batters, even Nails.

The phenomenon the three young batters faced, and about whom only Reynolds, Stottlemyre and a few members of the Mets' front office know, is a 28-year-old, somewhat eccentric mystic named Hayden (Sidd) Finch. He may well change the course of baseball history. On St. Patrick's Day, to make sure they were not all victims of a crazy hallucination, the Mets brought in a radar gun to measure the speed of Finch's fastball. The model used was a JUGS Supergun II. It looks like a black space gun with a big snout, weighs about five pounds and is usually pointed at the pitcher from behind the catcher. A glass plate in the back of the gun shows the pitch's velocity—accurate, so the manufacturer claims, to within plus or minus 1 mph. The figure at the top of the gauge is 200 mph. The fastest projectile ever measured by the JUGS (which is named after the oldtimer's descriptive—the "jug-handled" curveball) was a Roscoe Tanner serve that registered 153 mph. The highest number that the JUGS had ever turned for a baseball was 103 mph, which it did, curiously, twice on one day, July 11, at the 1978 All-Star game when both Goose Gossage and Nolan Ryan threw the ball at that speed. On March 17, the gun was handled by Stottlemyre. He heard the pop of the ball in Reynolds's mitt and the little squeak of pain from the catcher. Then the astonishing figure 168 appeared on the glass plate. Stottlemyre remembers whistling in amazement, and then he heard Reynolds say, "Don't tell me, Mel, I don't want to know...."

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Finch was almost surely a disciple of Tibet's great poet-saint Lama Milaraspa, who was born in the 11th century and died in the shadow of Mount Everest. Burns told them that Milaraspa was a great yogi who could manifest an astonishing phenomenon: He could produce "internal heat," which allowed him to survive snowstorms and intense cold, wearing only a thin robe of white cotton. Finch does something similar—an apparent deflection of the huge forces of the universe into throwing a baseball with bewildering accuracy and speed through the process of siddhi, namely the yogic mastery of mind-body. He mentioned that The Book of Changes, the I Ching, suggests that all acts (even throwing a baseball) are connected with the highest spiritual yearnings. Utilizing the Tantric principle of body and mind, Finch has decided to pitch baseballs—at least for a while.

So why have you never heard of the young pitcher the New York Mets kept secret two decades ago? Because Finch was an April Fool's joke in grand fashion, complete with a massive profile in Sports Illustrated written by the legendary George Plimpton. Maybe you remember this, but I was a bit young.

The subhead of the article read: "He's a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd's deciding about yoga — and his future in baseball." The first letters of these words (through "yoga") spell out "Happy April Fools Day." Despite this clue and the obvious absurdity of the article, many people believed Finch actually existed. The magazine printed a much smaller article in the following April 8 issue announcing Finch's retirement. It then announced it was a hoax on April 15.

A link to the article was on the homepage of CNN.com today, and the VideoJew fell for it.

Tennessee's Jewish Volunteer

We are now firmly into March Madness, with the Sweet Sixteen beginning tomorrow, and that means three things: decreased work productivity, a deep run by the Bruins and a lovable Jewish coach known best for his high-flying persona and his creamsicle-orange sports coat. I'm not a Tennessee fan, but I do like Bruce Pearl (pictured in less clothes than usual), even if he does have a penchant for hugging women my age. He received this favorable profile in The Washington Post:

He is the grandson of an Austrian Jew who came to America in the 1920s and lost scores of relatives in the Holocaust. He was reared conservatively by his parents, Barbara and Bernie Pearlmutter, a salesman who shortened the name to Pearl for convenience sake, in Boston in the racially charged 1970s. He learned to think hard about right and wrong on social issues such as forced busing, to appreciate the ethnic mix of Boston from Southie to the North End, and to defend his faith with his fists.

"I grew up watching kids swing at each other because their skin was a different color," he says.

Pearl was a three-sport star at Sharon High who consciously set out to counter stereotypes. "And of course there was something stereotypically not tough about being Jewish," he says. He resented it when the annual athletic banquets would begin with "In Christ's name we pray." It made him feel discounted, excluded. God was with him, too, he told himself. When his friends crossed themselves, he made the Star of David.

When he was a senior, he was playing first base one afternoon when a base runner called him a "Jew Boy." Pearl tapped his glove, signaling the pitcher to throw to first. When the ball slapped into Pearl's mitt, he whirled, smacked it into the runner's face and started swinging. "I went to dukes," he says. He was tossed from the game.

He had his choice of local colleges, but he specifically chose Boston College because it was the best sports school in town, and because he wanted to prove a Jewish student could make it at a Catholic university.

"I wanted kids to meet someone who was Jewish, and have them say, 'Gosh, you don't look Jewish, or act Jewish,' " he says. "I wanted to talk about religion, to have those discussions."

(skip)

When Pearl took his team on tour of Europe last summer, he scheduled a stop at the Terezin concentration camp. As they toured the site, he told his players, "They killed 6 million of us 50 years ago 'cause of how we prayed."

Shortly before the team reconvened on campus this fall, Pearl's daughter Leah celebrated her bat mitzvah, and Pearl invited his players. He beams as he tells the story of how warm it made him feel to gaze through the crowd at the Heska Amuna synagogue and see his players towering over the heads of the guests, some of the Vols 6 feet 9 or taller.

"Here came these talk, dark, handsome men, all wearing yarmulkes," Pearl says delightedly. Then he adds his favorite detail: how he heard some of the players greeting the other well-wishers.

"They were going, 'Shalom, y'all.' "

(Hat tip: GetReligion)

A March miracle for the Bruins

The most wonderful time of the year begins now, with the tip-off of the NCAA tournament. The last few years I have taken work off at the start of March Madness to soak in full days of pandemonium. This year is no different. I'm not sure what to expect, no one ever is. But I'm sure there'll be a moment or two as memorable as this one.

My wife and I were cheering so loudly during the Gonzaga-UCLA game two years ago, banging the walls and jumping around like apes for a good 20 minutes, that I seriously expected the cops to show up. They never did, and two days later I was in Oakland watching UCLA eek by Memphis en route to another Final Four.

(Last fall I played poker with Adam Morrison, who was peeling off $100 bills like he was feeding quarters into a pinball machine. I was mature enough not to mention the last game of his college career. Coincidentally, the next morning his season ended when he busted his knee in a game against the Clippers.)

Anyway, enjoy the madness and thank God -- seriously because the tournament starts this year on Maundy Thursday -- that it's March. I'll be back this weekend to wish The God Blog a belated happy birthday.

March Madness began in January

I'm skipping work today for the Pac-10 tournament. So, to remind you how awesome college basketball is, enjoy this display of unreal athleticism, also known as The Dunk of the Year by UCLA's Clutch Westbrook.

On a religious note, there is a short story about UCLA assistant Scott Garson in this week's Jewish Journal and Coach Ben Howland attends my church.

Christians looking for a fight

Remember the Fightin' Christians of Elon University? Me neither. But Elon is now one win away from entering the NCAA Division I Tournament -- and possibly meeting my divinely elected Bruins -- but Rick at Deadspin won't be rooting for Elon to upset Davidson tonight.

That's because Elon athletics once had one of the greatest nicknames of all time; the Fightin' Christians. But when the school moved up to Div. I competition in 1999, they changed it to the Phoenix.

That's just lame and wrong. By Elon officials caving to political correctness, we are deprived of seeing a pugnacious parson with a pilgrim beard squaring off with the Tar Heel logo in the first round of March Madness. Well anyway, since Elon isn't using the nickname any more, maybe Bob Jones University could pick it up.

Tommie Harris' anti-Semitic joke

Peter King is Sports Illustrated's senior NFL writer, and this week he is on a USO trip with pro football players to visit troops in Afghanistan. He's keeping a diary at his Inside the NFL blog, and I imagine this joke by Bears defensive tackle Tommie Harris, one of a few ribs that King says bring "levity to serious surroundings," wouldn't go over well with the ADL.

Harris riddles us for a while, then produces a joke best saved for last.

"What did the pig say to the Muslim?"

Silence.

"Shalom."

Jewish boys team may forfeit Shabbat playoff

Evidenced by Jordan Farmar and contrary to what Cartman told Kyle, Jews can play basketball. Observant ones just can't play on Shabbat. And that is causing a problem for some boys in Colorado.

DENVER -- State senators have taken up the cause of a Jewish boys basketball team whose playoff run may be halted because its players can't play on the Jewish Sabbath.

The Herzl/Rocky Mountain Hebrew Academy team could be headed for a regional championship on Saturday, March 8, if it wins one more game. But the Denver team's religious beliefs prohibit students from playing on the Jewish Sabbath between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday.

If Herzl/RMHA makes it to the regional championship and refuses to play a Saturday game, another school would be chosen to take its place, CHSAA commissioner Bill Reader said.

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Sen. Tom Wiens, R-Sedalia, said there must be a way for the CHSAA to accommodate the team.

"It just seems like the bureaucracy has run amok here," Wiens said.

Hat tip to my wife for sending this story, which is a fairly familiar one.

(Image: UCLA Jersey)

A godly athlete on sharing his faith

Religion, he feels, is the main source of his strength, and because he realizes not everybody shares that feeling today, he sometimes refers to "the challenge of being in the minority in the world." ... "I don't try to be overbearing in what I believe, but, given a chance, I will express my beliefs."

If I told you that line was in reference to a star athlete, I wouldn't imagine you could guess whom. A number of sports stars, and journeymen, come to mind when I think of faith and basketball or baseball or football. And afflicted-minority syndrome is increasingly popular with my fellow American Christians today.

But, surprisingly, I came across those lines last night in John McPhee's "A Sense of Where You Are," the profile he wrote more than 40 years ago of basketball great Bill Bradley, a white man of not-so-humble means who was educated at Princeton, the citadel of the American Presbytery. Hardly a typical minority.

Bob Knight's foul mouth

I saw this compilation of great Bob Knight moments on Sportscenter last night. My in-laws are Hoosiers, but I'm a Bruin, and therefore have no place in my heart for other college basketball programs. Knight was a great coach, always good for a laugh ("that would be an insult to Mickey Mouse") and, more than any other college coach in history, a win. But he lacked the character -- most people do -- granted the Wizard of Westwood, "the greatest coach of the 20th century" and a mighty fine Christian too.

The montage left out a few choice soundbites from Knight's career, some of which were included in this Sportscenter Top 10 from when he got his 800th win. My favorite is No. 8, when he referred in a press conference to journalism as "one or two steps above prostitution."

Muslim piety and race policy collide *

Juashaunna Kelly, a Theodore Roosevelt High School senior who has the fastest mile and two-mile times of any girls' runner in the District this winter, was disqualified from Saturday's Montgomery Invitational indoor track and field meet after officials said her Muslim clothing violated national competition rules.

Kelly was wearing the same uniform she has worn for the past three seasons while running for Theodore Roosevelt's cross-country and track teams: a custom-made, one-piece blue and orange unitard that covers her head, arms, torso and legs. On top of the unitard, Kelly wore the same orange and blue T-shirt and shorts as her teammates.

The outfit allows her to compete while complying with her Muslim faith, which forbids displaying any skin other than her face and hands.

As one of the other heats was held, two meet officials signaled to Kelly and asked her about her uniform. Meet director Tom Rogers said Kelly's uniform violated rules of the National Federation of State High School Associations, which sanctioned the event, by not being "a single-solid color and unadorned, except for a single school name or insignia no more than 2 1/4 inches."

Rogers then told Kelly she was disqualified. Kelly dropped to her knees and began sobbing.

This story from last week's Washington Post reminds me of those stories we see every now and then about a Christian teen who won't spell on Sunday or a baseball superstar who won't play on Yom Kippur (or Walter Sobchak who doesn't roll on Shabbos).

But this, plainly, is ridiculous. Kelly did not make a conscious decision to sit out a specific game that conflicted with, say, Eid al-Adha. Still, she was disqualified because of a conflict between her religious beliefs and cultural practices and a silly set of rules likely in place to keep high school races looking more like the NFL and less like the NBA.

For a story about how a Muslim football player makes it through the daytime fasting of Ramadan, check out this story I wrote a few years ago for The Sun.

*Check the comments for a little discussion about how I got this story wrong.

She was disqualified because the unitard was multi-colored instead of one color, not because she is Muslim and not because she wore a unitard. It should have been one color

No longer searching for Bobby Fischer

He was probably the greatest chess player the world has ever seen. He also was virulently anti-American and anti-Semitic, odd because he was born in Chicago to a Jewish woman. Bobby Fischer, who had been living for years in exile, died Thursday.

He had emerged briefly in 1992 from a mysterious seclusion that had lasted two decades and defied an American ban on conducting business in wartorn Yugoslavia to play a $5 million match against his old nemesis, the Russian-born grandmaster Boris Spassky.

After he won handily, he dropped out of sight again, living alone. He avoided arrest on American charges over his Yugoslavia appearance and stayed in touch with his few friends in the United States by telephone, compelling them to keep his secrets or risk his rejection.

He lived in Budapest -- and possibly the Philippines and Switzerland -- and emerged now and then on radio stations in Iceland, Hungary and the Philippines to rant in increasingly belligerent terms against the United States and against Jews.

Genius was certainly too much pressure for Fischer, whose appearance, when he made it, was constantly on the wane and prone to outburst. Often on the radio, the most telling of these was his Sept. 11, 2001 reaction to the terrorist attacks:

"This is all wonderful news," he announced. "I applaud the act. The U.S. and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians, just slaughtering them for years. Robbing them and slaughtering them. Nobody gave a sh--. Now it's coming back to the U.S. F--- the U.S. I want to see the U.S. wiped out."

Fischer added that the events of September 11 provided the ideal opportunity to stage a long-overdue coup d'état. He envisioned, he said, a "Seven Days in May scenario," with the country taken over by the military; he also hoped to see all its synagogues closed, and hundreds of thousands of Jews executed. "Ultimately the white man should leave the United States and the black people should go back to Africa," he said. "The white people should go back to Europe, and the country should be returned to the American Indians. This is the future I would like to see for the so-called United States." Before signing off Fischer cried out, "Death to the U.S.!"

When Fischer was released from detention in Japan two years ago, he was confronted at a press conference by Jeremy Schaap, the ESPN broadcaster whose father had befriended a young Fischer.

"I knew your father," he drawls to the young, dark-haired Schaap. "He rapped me very hard. He said I didn't have a sane bone in my body. I don't forget that."

I ask about chess; a Russian TV crew asks about Kasparov; the Icelanders ask whether Fischer likes herring, but the Schaap affair won't go away. Fischer insists on returning to it, and things suddenly turn ugly. "Let me get back to this guy," says Fischer, pointing at the young, dark-haired Schaap. "I hate to rap people personally, but his father many years ago befriended me, took me to see Knicks games, acted kind of like a father figure, and then later like a typical Jewish snake he had the most vicious things to say about me."

Schaap snaps at that, says "I don't know that you've done much here today really to disprove anything he said," and walks out. All on camera. Maybe it's a made-for-TV set-up, maybe not, but it certainly chills the air: Fischer groans and there is a half-minute silence before the woman from Icelandic radio can can things back on track with another question about herring. The human being starts to emerge from under the baseball cap, then bang, he's off again with another lengthy exposition of his intricately wrought, completely bonkers theories, usually rounded off with: "It's all on the internet! Why don't you go look it up?"

'Remembering Greenberg'

Every day that I go into the office, I walk past one of many poster-sized covers of The Jewish Journal that always grabs my attention.

Ryan Braun might be nicknamed The Hebrew Hammer, and he deserves it. But this cover is of the original semitic slugger, Hank Greenberg.

The former Tigers star bears no relation to me. (Need proof? Just watch me play softball.) But few names in sports that aren't Koufax merit more pride for the Tribe than Hank Greenberg.

Long before Shawn Green said he wouldn't play on Yom Kippur, and then did, Greenberg sat out a crucial game against the Yankees. The 2000 story focused on the documentary, "In the Life and Times of Hank Greenberg."

Greenberg's greatness is undisputed. In a career interrupted for most of five seasons by World War II, the lumbering first baseman hit 331 home runs,compiled a .313 career batting average and knocked in 1,276 runs. In 1937, his 183 runs batted in were one fewer than Lou Gehrig's league record. His 58 home runs in 1938 were second to the 60 hit by Babe Ruth in 1927. "No question that he was the greatest Jewish hitter of all time," said Steve Greenberg, one of Greenberg's two sons and a former deputy commissioner ofMajor League Baseball. "But that's not how he wanted to be remembered. If you talk to players of that era, they knew he was one of the greatest players.Ted Williams said he was his idol." In Ms. Kempner's homey documentary — a quilt of newsreel footage, interviews and spirited music selections like Mandy Patinkin singing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" in Yiddish — Greenberg is a quiet hero flawed only by his fielding range. To the worshipful fans who adored him as "Hankus Pankus,"Greenberg was a "messiah," "a Jewish god," a Moses-like savior who refuted the stereotypesabout what Jews could do.

"I had this Captain Marvel, Hank Greenberg, on my shoulder," Rabbi Reeve Brenner says in the film. "He was my big brother, my mishpocheh" (family). Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard Law School professor, adds, "He was what "they" said we could never be." When the Tigers traded Greenberg to the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1947, Don Shapiro, an oral surgeon and fan, felt as if "your bubbe" — grandmother — "moved to Mississippi." The passion is poignant, humorous and over the top, like Ms. Kempner's. Yet those who admired Greenberg know his achievements came in the face of ethnic baiting by fans and rival players and the anti-Semitic rantings of the Rev. Charles E. Coughlin, the so-called radio priest from the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, and Henry Ford.

"At the height of domestic anti-Semitism and the Nazis overrunning Europe, here was a Jewish player so good, so powerful and almost breaking Ruth's record," Ms. Kempner said."Two months after Hank nearly broke Ruth's record, Kristallnacht happened in Germany." In a 1984 interview used in the film, Greenberg recalled: "There was always some leatherlung yelling at me. I found it was a spur to make me do better because I could never fallasleep on the field. As soon as you struck out, you weren't only a bum, you were a Jewish bum."

Surprising religion mention in ESPN story about NBA trade value

In Bill Simmons' annual column on the trade value of NBA stars, Dwight Howard comes in at No. 2, "completely and utterly untouchable," right behind LeBron James. Makes sense. The Magic center is a physical freak who has two 30-20 games already this year. But here is a quality you don't often hear mentioned in trade talks:

One other bonus with Howard that nobody mentions: Because he's a devout Christian, even when he turns 35 in 2020, those will be Christian years -- he won't have any of that smoking-drinking-partying mileage on him, which means he could play at a high level until his early-40s (much like how Kurt Warner keeps chugging along at age 36).

Kevin Everett walks, even if it's not on water

It's difficult to imagine Kevin Everett, the Buffalo Bills tight end who was paralyzed only three months ago, recovering any quicker than he has. Some might call it a miracle. Whether divine intervention or medical innovation, Everett knows whom to thank:

If he has despaired, he does not admit it. Instead, he describes only a transforming strength that has come with his injury. "I look at my life in a whole new fashion," says Everett. "You realize how blessed you are. You thank God even more when you wake up in the morning and for every little thing you have. I thank God for sparing my life and letting me be here for my family and my fiancée. I've been able to see how much people love me, and how much I love them."

That's from a long story Sports Illustrated published online yesterday, complete with a photo gallery that shows Everett walking in the park and working out at the gym. This for a guy who couldn't even twitch a few days after incurring his injury in the season opener. Here's how it begins:

Every step is precious now. Every movement is a gift. Every morning brings another sunrise, full of sweet promise. When Kevin Everett was a little boy growing up in Port Arthur, Texas, he would sit with his grandpa James Nico, and the older man would explain to him life's lessons. One of them was this: Don't ever be bitter. Just keep doing your best, even when things aren't looking so good.

Even when you are lying, helpless and twitching, on the floor of a football stadium, unable to move your limbs and unable to take a deep breath. Even when you drift to the surface from a deep, chemically induced sleep two days later and find yourself in a hospital bed, with tubes in your throat and in your groin and machines beeping in every corner of the room and your mother gently rubbing your forearm, asking you through her tears, Baby, can you feel this? Please blink your eyes once if you can feel this.

You know I love you, don't you, baby? Please blink once if you know. And you slowly blink once, though you don't remember it.

Even when you're at a rehabilitation hospital almost a month later and an occupational therapist puts a tiny, one-pound weight in your right hand and asks you to do one biceps curl with the same arm that once blocked NFL linebackers on Sunday afternoons. And you just can't do it. Even when your life is unfathomably changed at the age of 25. Even then.

Here is Kevin Everett now, sitting at a breakfast table in a corner of the house the Buffalo Bills' tight end bought last year for his family in the Houston suburb of Humble. His fiancée, Wiande Moore, a sprinter whom Kevin met when both were athletes at the University of Miami, sits to his left, and the two of them pick at the remnants of supper. His mother, Patricia Dugas, is in the kitchen putting the finishing touches on a Christmas gingerbread house with Kevin's youngest sister, Davia, 11. His other two sisters -- Herchell, 15, and Kelli, 14 -- are sitting nearby on family room couches in front of a wall-mounted TV tuned to MTV but muted because Herchell is tapping out a social studies paper on her laptop. It is a family place at a family time.

"I'll tell you what," says Kevin. "I'm still trying to figure out everything that's happened in my life lately. But I don't think anybody has life figured out. I know you've got to take the good with the bad, and you've got to be strong. Plain and simple. Just because you get knocked down doesn't mean you've got to stay down. That's what I feel about all of this. If you get knocked down, you've got to get back up."

So he gets up. He rises from his chair and walks easily to the kitchen, opens the refrigerator and takes out a drink. Then he walks back. Simple as that. And yet not simple at all.