Enemies (Personal Foulf Book 13)

And, on some level, doesn't this happen in other sports? Basketball, by its nature, ensures a closer, sometimes contentious, relationship between players and officials. And because we're talking about human beings, it shouldn't be astonishing that grudges arise. In the NFL, there are plenty of examples of game-changing and star-driven calls, scandals, and questionable officiating.

Although there is some griping initially, rarely do those issues linger the way they do in the NBA. When the New England Patriots were reprimanded for "Spygate," it was considered an isolated incident by an organization. I talked to a few football coaches then who privately admitted that although they didn't go as far as Bill Belichick, stealing plays from the opponent's sideline was a routine practice. But only the Patriots' integrity was questioned, not the entire league's.

The NFL strengthened the rules on quarterback hits to protect the star position. And although that's been criticized -- mostly by defensive players -- no one is derisively referring to the NFL as a "superstar league. In the NBA, a bad game from an official -- or in Donaghy's case a tainted referee -- is used as a measuring stick of the entire league's credibility, and that's not fair.

The NBA has a perception problem, not a reality problem. The reality is that most games are officiated just fine and Donaghy is a dirty official who has taken advantage of the situation. It doesn't help that coaches and players talk about how a player won't get certain calls because he's a rookie.

It doesn't help that NBA fans frequently promote the idea the league is fixed. Ask any NBA fan about the Kevin Garnett and Pau Gasol trades and you're likely to hear that the NBA orchestrated those deals because it needed two of its most sacred franchises to compete for championships to increase the league's bottom line. NBA fans believe LeBron James will wind up in New York not because he loves the city and wants to be there but because the league needs a major superstar in the biggest media market in the world.

Even though Nike conceived the puppet commercials independently, it was perceived as a message that the league wanted Kobe vs. Given that so many NBA fans think this way, it's impossible to reason with them and convince them Donaghy's words aren't written on stone tablets. If the league were as fixed as everyone believes, would the Knicks have been this bad for nearly a decade? Would the San Antonio-Cleveland Finals ever have happened? What gets lost is the fact that commissioner David Stern has investigated Donaghy's accusations several times and each time the conclusion was reached that Donaghy was indeed the lone gunman.

But that won't stop fans from believing Donaghy, who claims in his book that another prisoner was sent by the mob to break his kneecaps. Sounds like an episode of "The Sopranos. When it comes to basketball, everyone is an expert and officiating is so subjective that no matter what the box score says, you just can't convince people that the game is being called evenly and there is no bigger agenda being served. All Donaghy's book proved is that, like most successful bettors, he studied trends and tendencies. He also committed the sports version of "insider trading.

To help make this website better, to improve and personalize your experience and for advertising purposes, are you happy to accept cookies and other technologies? Donaghy's book is bunk d Jemele Hill. Foles sparks Eagles' biggest upset since Philadelphia Eagles. Leavis and his wife, Queenie, reign with a far scalier hand over their student disciples than the Trillings, Lionel being far more steeped in ambiguity, dialectical subtleties and flickering equivocations Diana was another story than the cocksure Leavises.

Every Saturday on their lawn the Leavises conduct an informal seminar in which to evaluate literature and vent their grievances, deploring T. Returning to New York, Podhoretz makes two fateful visits: Podhoretz prided himself, as well he might, on being the only young man to write for both Partisan Review and the New Yorker , making him a member of two exclusive societies — double bragging rights.

When I first read Making It in my own early gunslinger days, I skipped the military chapter, wanting to hop ahead to the gossipy goodies. This was a mistake. He even forgets his comparisons of basic training to concentration camps and Chinese brainwashing once he evolves into an interventionist hawk with missiles strapped to both wings.

Upon re-entry into civilian life, Podhoretz returns to a cratered Commentary. Warshow has died of a heart attack at the age of 37 and Cohen, sunk into depression, is admitted into Payne Whitney, leaving a power vacuum at the magazine. He would later commit suicide. The problem with relating office politics is that such Kabuki drama is of interest only to those inside the office. Outside the office, Making It perks up again as Podhoretz picks up where he left off as the wonderboy of the name-dropping circuit.

One of the best-known passages in Making It is its account of the status update running like a stock ticker through the minds of the inhabitants of this snowglobe world. Was so-and-so not invited by the Lowells to meet the latest visiting Russian poet? Did Partisan Review neglect to ask so-and-so to participate in a symposium? Paranoia is its own species of adrenaline.

Hill: Donaghy's book is bunk

Position is power, he learned as the low man on the totem pole in the military, and now he had a position. After much shadowplay and stratego, he is named sole editor of Commentary in , acquiring executive authority with a significant status upgrade. He discovers that he is adept at editing manuscripts, such a relief after the rock-quarry drudgery of writing, and even better at the entrepreneurial side of being editor in chief — at talent-wooing and scoring the coups that make the chattering classes click like castanets.

Podhoretz spots it as a zeitgeist mover and serialises in Commentary to a rousing welcome. From the moment he sets foot on Paradise Island, Podhoretz is suffused by a bliss alien to the vast majority of highly evolved neurotics who have never enjoyed a tropical junket. I loved everyone, and everyone loved me. I did not blame them; I even loved myself. He fiddled with the notion of writing a book about Mailer, he confides:. Such a book, I thought, ought properly to be written in the first person, and it ought in itself to constitute a frank, Mailer-like bid for literary distinction, fame and money all in one package, otherwise it would be unable to extricate itself from the toils of the dirty little secret.

Writing a book like that would be a very dangerous thing to do, but some day, I told myself, I would like to try doing it. There would be no buddy movies in their future.

A year or so earlier, Podhoretz had thrown a dinner party for Jackie Kennedy and not only was Mailer singularly not invited, his literary nemesis William Styron had been asked in his stead to entertain her highness. Making It may have been intended as a tell-all, but what it delivered was a tepid modified limited hangout, to borrow a Watergate catchphrase.

The review bore no relation to the encouraging sentiments Mailer had expressed when he read the galley.

He accused Mailer of his own failure of nerve, of acting the role of bad-boy revolutionary while not crossing certain lines with the Establishment, preferring to side with the shunners. Mailer countered that, whatever his mixed motives, it was a second reading of the book that gave him second thoughts, not any navigational tacking to keep himself on the safe side of the druid elders. Lines of communication remained temporarily open between the Normans, but their beautiful bromance was over.

Looking back on it, I was probably too cruel. Worked on his magazine and listened to music and hardly saw anyone. Podhoretz is nothing if not active and enterprising.

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He was editor for 35 years, the magazine steadfastly supported by the American Jewish Committee even after its circulation dropped and its contributors narrowed into the same old bag of ideologues and pontificators, a far cry from its eclectic prime. Even so, he and the magazine he headed changed history, though not for the better.

James Wolcott

He may have also retained an affinity for rich guys unashamed to live large. It allowed him to frame the downing of Making It as the initial penalty for the sin of Speaking Out, which he fashioned into a soapbox on which he would grandstand for evermore as the martyr-avenger of political correctness, defiantly violating liberal shibboleths and lecturing everybody else on their loss of courage and conviction. The stern upholder of heterosexual norms was a later guise. This was not unforeseen.

And they may be more mellow; sometimes as we age, memory softens our perceptions of reality. In Podhoretz Returns and Son of Podhoretz , the monster may turn out to have a heart of gold. How shrewd of Friedenberg to perceive that Making It might be the first instalment of a Frankenstein trilogy.

Personal Foul by Tim Donaghy

How mistaken he was in floating the prospect of mellow maturity. He became a permanent sorehead. The brutal, little mind of Norman Podhoretz! By the time Podhoretz got to Ex-Friends , he was recycling anecdotes and digging up old grudges from the graveyard. This is unfair, but no excuse for a Lear-like rage, a howling on the blasted heath.

Enemies For Ever

Friends are fickle, enemies are for ever, and the face in the mirror every morning fades to parchment. Now, at the age of 87, Podhoretz is an even older fart, but one who can take grim satisfaction, if his mind inclines that way, at having outlived all of his enemies, detractors, disappointers, tormentors and rivals, of being able literally to have the last word. Even younger antagonists such as Christopher Hitchens and Alexander Cockburn predeceased him.