In Brooklyn, You Can Feel the World Cup Heating Up

5/15/2014

In the background, Bedford Avenue, where Duke Snider home runs used to land.

I spent a lovely day in Brooklyn on Wednesday. As soon as Mike From Whitestone turned downhill, I felt the surging image of Duke Snider slugging the ball over the screen and into Bedford Ave.

Mike parked near McKeever Pl. and I could feel my head swiveling like a compass needle to the apartment buildings where Ebbets Field used to be.

But I was the only person talking about the Brooklyn Dodgers, about ancient history.

The occasion was a career expo at Medgar Evers College, where several hundred very qualified students were seeking leads on jobs, on futures. I heard about the expo through Monica and Miguel Mancebo of Selective Corporate Internship Program (SCIP), which does such a fine job of preparing young people for the job market.

The students saw my soccer book on the table and wanted to talk about their sport. One young woman from Trinidad plays defender for the Medgar Evers team; another young woman roots for VfB Stuttgart, from her home town; a volunteer told me she roots for Barça and her husband roots for Real Madrid. And Michael Flanigan, the director of development and major gifts officer at Medgar Evers, told me how he referees soccer matches in his spare time.

I marveled at the résumés of the Medgar Evers students, their life stories, their work experience. Many of them have worked in kitchens, in day-care centers, in nursing homes. They see it as paying their bills. I told them to be proud of their work; they were learning the process, the system. Many of them want to be doctors and teachers, accountants and, good grief, journalists. I wanted to hire them all.

I hope by now somebody has.

Medgar Evers Students and Bank Recruiter/Courtesy M&M Mancebo.

Some of the people who made it work

Andrew Tansey

5/16/2014 02:54:07 pm

I puffed about the link between jogo bonito and the Valley Stream Jogo Bonito in "It Must Be Nice to Be Brazil" from 5/8, and now I wonder . . . will my copy of "Eight World Cups" be one of the first to arrive in Brazil tomorrow night?

Speaking with my kid the courier on the Flushing Line today en route from Grand Central to Citi Field's convenient commuter lot (why else would I go there?), we admitted to a moral dilemma about FIFA, which seems unconcerned about the Qatar workers. I had put my foot down by refusing to set it again in the new Stadium (in the Bronx) when I could not afford to take my father to a game before they closed the old and then saw the prices for the new. Do I have the character to boycott the beautiful game in my small way because of FIFA's blindness, at a minimum, or worse? I know I will watch and in indirect ways support the infra- and superstructure of the global game, and I am not too proud of it right now. I remember our first team meeting when I welcomed the players and parents to travel soccer, under the auspices of the Long Island Jr. Soccer League and, in turn, Eastern New York Youth Soccer and, in turn, USSF and, in turn FIFA. By degrees of separation, players, coaches and referees are all part of the system.

I customarily thank you for stimulating ideas in my head. Those I struggle with now are not so pleasant. What can we do about it? A bit of a ludite, I thought maybe an attempt at an articulate letter to Geneva. Maybe the second last page of the Times' A Section.

We are lucky to live in New York. I am pleased to hear of the promising futures of the young folks near where Mom used to watch PeeWee Reese and (her throb) Pete Reiser and, during the War, lug scrap metal to Ebbets Field for free admission. At least her labors were voluntary.

George Vecsey

5/17/2014 01:07:39 am

Andrew, the game is the game.
I'm going to write something about Blatter (again).
Have we discussed WWII before? As soon as my man Mike From Whitestone turned south on Bedford, I remember that hill -- 1944! -- my dad taking me to a war bond rally in EF. I was 5.
A tank rolling on the field! Fat Freddy Fitzsimmons hawking bonds.
No game, of course.
Flatbush. The Mother Ship.
You have to do what you have to do about the Yankees. It is a sterile theme park.
I'm at peace with the Yankee team because of the past generation -- Bernie (he kind of got pushed sideways in Memory Lane) and Jeter and Rivera and straw-boss Jorge. And Torre. They were real.
Yankee Stadium and FIFA are also real.
What we call a dilemma.

GV

mike from whitestone

5/16/2014 02:54:11 pm

Thanks from the 'wheelman' GV. I enjoyed it from driving down memory lane talking about dem' guys from Flatbush to the career fair and meeting the wonderfully diverse group of students with the opportunity to hear their experiences while sharing some of mine. I got another free lesson in my soccer education too. Great day for a great group.
It was a great day for a career fair, lets play two.

George Vecsey

5/17/2014 01:10:35 am

Mike: thanks for getting me there. I am proud to once in a while join the team from the NYT plant. You get me to great places.
GV

Camille McIntosh

5/18/2014 05:24:52 am

I enjoyed the day for sure. This was the best career fair I've been to at Medgar Evers College. Next year will be even bigger and better.

George Vecsey

5/18/2014 11:38:40 am

Thanks for noticing my site. I am still glowing from meeting so many nice people. GV

Alan Rubin link

5/18/2014 08:42:42 am

Nice to see the NYT involved in such meaningful activities.

I mentor high school and junior college students, many from under privileged families. It is very satisfying to see them grow, develop confidence and move on to productive careers.

It is unfortunate that a privileged segment of our society prefers to pump millions to move their agenda rather than provide the programs that would prepare better citizens. I do not believe that they even have a clue to the potential of those they refer to as "takers". A cost/benefit of the return of the investment in these youngsters would would send a strong message, but the "haves" are tone deaf.

George Vecsey

5/18/2014 11:42:19 am

Alan, you kept your store going on the Upper West Side for a long time...good for you.
The impetus for my trip is from the NYT plant in Queens. They do a lot of outreach to high schools, one a satellite school from my old neighborhood in Jamaica. I love getting home.
GV

John McDermott

5/20/2014 02:49:22 pm

And a very, very good book it is!

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

In Brooklyn, You Can Feel the World Cup Heating Up

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