Two years ago, The Times had five sports columnists. With Mr. Araton gone, there are two. One of them is 70. 

There will be no replacements.

The Times’ sports editor, Tom Jolly, explained to The Observer that in many ways, the general-interest sports columnist—at The Times, the Sports of the Times columnist, a designation that has existed since the 1930s—is part of a bygone era.

“The Sports of the Times is a great brand, and I hate to see that brand disappear, but it clearly is changing,” Mr. Jolly said.

He explained that The Times’ sports page will use fewer general-interest writers to generate columns, and will instead rely more on beat writers to provide expertise. He wants them to blog, he wants them to use Twitter and he wants them to write analysis pieces.

“In a world filled with blogs and opinion on talk radio and on cable television, there does seem to be a pretty good craving for expert analysis—the real insight of someone who is there,” he said.

This may not sound like a radical departure, but it is.

Sports desks have traditionally been defined by their big-foot generalists: Mike Lupica at the Daily News, Mitch Albom at the Detroit Free Press, Bill Plaschke at the L.A. Times, Johnette Howard at Newsday, Red Smith at The Times.

While The Times is proposing to do without all that, the alumni are not at all convinced that it’s a good idea.

“That thoughtful, reflective, reported opinion that we used to see has basically vanished,” said Selena Roberts, a writer with Sports Illustrated and a Times columnist from 2002 to 2007. “This leaves the reader, especially since the reader is going to the Web for the analysts’ point of view, with a shallower perspective of what’s going on.”

Ms. Roberts foresaw another, more practical problem with The Times’ plan to ask their access-dependent beat writers to be more authoritative and opinionated.

“Here they are covering a team on a daily basis,” said Ms. Roberts. “What if they blog something or tweet something that comes off as an opinion and it’s very much taken as an opinion by that organization? Do they run into problems because they make a joke about the GM?”

Either way, it’s clear that The Times has rendered its verdict. Now it’s just a matter of time until the end.

“Since they haven’t promoted any new columnists, it seems to me The Times doesn’t care if it’s one or two or five columnists,” said Dave Anderson, a columnist from 1971 to 2007 who is semi-retired and still contributes 18 columns a year. “But to me, this is a sad thing. We all grew up reading sports columnists. Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon. When you’re a sports reporter, people think you want to be an athlete. I didn’t want to be Joe DiMaggio. I wanted to be Red Smith.”

George Vecsey, one of two columnists left at The Times (along with William Rhoden), said that at age 70, he’s about ready to retire.

“I wouldn’t want to get really old in this business,” he said. “It’s a young person’s business.”

“People younger than me should be in their prime and doing this,” said Mr. Vecsey. “When I go to a sports arena and I don’t see [Newsday’s] Shaun [Powell] and Johnette? Who’s going to be the next Selena Roberts? The next Bob Lipsyte? The next Dave Anderson?”

Starting today, Mr. Araton will join a newly created group of Times feature writers. Mr. Araton will be writing features for the Sunday real estate section, Sunday Styles, Real Estate, Sunday Business and A1. It’s no surprise that the Times is starting up a group like this—with a de-emphasis on freelancers, the paper needs an in-house team devoted to thinking entirely about features.

We decided to give Mr. Araton a call and find out about his new gig (and his old one, too). He described his new assignment as a “break from sports,” and said that his change in duties was directed by the masthead. We asked him to give us a look back on his multi-decade career covering sports in this city, and to muse on sports journalism in general.

So, what's the future of the general sports columnist?

“I don’t know what the future is for the general sports columnist in the newspaper business,” he said. “Everything seems to be moving to specialists. The notion of the erudite columnist sitting down and taking the time to think of something unique and different and provocative … well, the news cycles are moving too quickly. You can do it if you’re a Web site. But if you’re a paper, you have to reinvent it.”

We asked Mr. Araton about his favorite moment as a columnist.

“The Daily News’ Vic Zeigel always talked about Ali being that generation’s seminal athlete and moment and person. The whole comeback and the exotic locales where he fought Frazier! That generation always talks about Ali with stars in their eyes. They say things like, ‘We were privileged.’ The one I’d have to pick—all the Bird-Magic finals, and I love basketball so much and I covered all those games in the ’80s, the Jordan years, the Charles Smith getting blocked four times in the Garden—and the one I’ll cherish the most was being The Times’ basketball reporter and covering the initial Dream Team in ’92.”

The Dream Team encompassed all the things that Mr. Araton loved as a columnist—an international stage, globalization, the Olympics.

In fact, Mr. Araton is incredibly unusual in this way. Ask any sports journalist who's been in this town for the last few decades for their favorite moment and they’ll rattle things off like the ’86 World Series, the ’94 Stanley Cup Finals, the ’96 Yankees, the Red-Sox Yankees Series, any one of the Giants Super Bowls, the ’69 Mets, Willis Reed, Joe Namath.

Not Mr. Araton. It’s about the Olympics. It’s about the Dream Team. Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. Boris Becker. John McEnroe. Bjorn Borg.

“I look at [those New York moments] more as a sports fan than a sports journalist,” he said.

The great stories were the sort of tournaments and events for which few New York journalists could get a press pass.

Sort of like his last assignment as a Times sports journalist.

“[It] turned out to be this past Wimbledon and watching Federer break the record. That made up for the fact that I missed last year’s match. When I was watching, I was thinking, if this is my last sports assignment, it’s a great one to finish on.

The Times’ sports desk wasn’t always as strong as it has been more recently. When Mr. Araton switched from the Post to the News in the 1980s, The Times wanted to hire him and he hesitated.

“I would describe it best as slacking,” he said, describing the sports section then. “Sort of like, not substantial. They seemed to have 2.5 pages a day or 3 pages tops. The editions were such that there was very little late stuff in the paper. By the same token, I was, especially after a few tabloid years, I became enamored with how Ira Berkow wrote about sports and how George Vecsey did it. By reading them, you learned that you don’t have to scream at people. You don’t have to pull by the collar. I was kind of attracted by that style.”

He joined in 1991, and the Times sports desk became one of the best in the country.
 
Mr. Araton was born on the Lower East Side, raised in Brownsville and Staten Island. His first reporting gig came when he was 18 with the Staten Island Advance. He bounced in and out of college before graduating from CUNY in 1975.

He was childhood friends with Phil Mushnick, the grumpy TV writer for the New York Post, who asked him if he wanted to come and do night rewrite for the Post. Mr. Araton agreed immediately.

One of the things that turned his career around: Rupert Murdoch. After Mr. Murdoch bought the paper and turned it aggressively tabloid (edgier, more competitive, much like the Post and, well, the whole Internet is now!), streams of writers took off.

Mr. Araton slipped right in and took over as the Knicks beat reporter after getting a vote of confidence from Pete Vecsey, then—and now—the Hoops Du Jour columnist for the Post.

Mr. Araton moved over to the News in the ’80s, then came to the Times in the early ’90s, and became a columnist rather quickly thereafter.

We asked him if, after years and years, he had any fun anecdotes for us.

He gave us two, both covering the crazy Yankees of the late 1970s.

“I was on a Yankees road trip, and it was in the middle of a Reggie Jackson–Billy Martin wars,” he said. “It was a road trip to Texas and Milwaukee and I needed something to create back-page news. It was ’78 and it seemed like they were losing every day and falling into that big hole with the Red Sox. By the end of the week, they had lost five out of six. Martin was getting more belligerent by the day. By time Sunday rolled around, he was feuding with Reggie. So on Sunday, the last game before the All-Star Break, I got there late, which was a rookie mistake. When I got there, a press gathering was breaking up. Your instinct is to say I screwed up here. I was mortified! I knew I was going to be beaten and that the Post would get beaten. The reporters coming out of the locker room all had this buoyant look like they had gotten something. And since I was with the Post, no one was going to help me since we were the most scoop-minded paper. After the game, I got on the team bus and in those days we were riding with the team. I was in a seat and Lou Pinella plopped down in the seat next to me. I loved him, a player’s player. And he starts to go off and, not loudly either, he says we’re done, this is not our year, we’re not playing ball, we have no energy, there’s too much bullshit going with on this club and it doesn’t look like we have a shot. And I said, ‘Lou, can I write this?” And he said, ‘Sure.’”

Paydirt!

“I’m thinking all right I got a scoop. We were a PM paper, so I got back to New York and started writing my exclusive, and it turned out that Pinella said pretty much the same shit to the writers before the game. Lou Pinella sat down next to me and he doesn’t know me from Adam, and he kind of reiterated the stuff before the game, and it might have saved my career. It was an arbitrary act of good fortune.”

And then! The lesson every sports writer has to go through.

“When I was with the Staten Island Advance, I was sent to Yankee stadium in 1976 after they reopened the stadium after the two years of renovation, and they sent me to cover the first game in ’76. They played the Minnesota Twins, and I remember a lot of dignitaries and I remember seeing Mickey Mantle in the middle of the clubhouse. And I thought, ‘This my chance to go say hello to Mickey Mantle’—this is a guy who goes back to childhood! He was sitting with his head down, and I was going to ask some question. And he looked up and he was so glassy-eyed and he clearly had a lot to drink the night before. He mumbled a few things to me. That was my first moment of disillusionment as a sports reporter.”

On a trip to Tiananmen organized by the Main Press Center for the Olympics, Mr. Araton learned of a newly installed rule:

By time Mr. Araton reached Tiananmen, media organizers lectured about 208 species of flowers that had been planted and then were let loose to walk around. By that point, after sitting in traffic after a long bus ride on a hot, muggy afternoon, he was a little too overheated to test that policy. But he promises: "We’ll go back soon to test the new policy, though, and we’ll find out if the Chinese are as vigilant as [Knicks PR man Jonathan] Supranowitz was until [new Knicks GM] Donnie Walsh hit New York and called off the dogs."

The two columnists had dissented mildly with a Times editorial on the subject. The Nov. 18 editorial had suggested that Tiger Woods should boycott The Masters Golf Tournament, which is played at Augusta.

"PLEASE," Mr. Anderson wrote a few days later, "let Tiger Woods play golf. That's what he does, and does better than anybody else. He's not a social activist … it's not his style." The column wouldn't run for two weeks, but the first line could have applied to Mr. Anderson: Please, let Dave Anderson write about golf .

Ira Berkow, the columnist who in many ways has become a kind of in-house sports historian for the paper, said he'd heard an exhalation of disappointment from readers who believed in the sanctity of The New York Times and now felt let down by events-on the sports pages, of all places, the home of Joe Durso, Leonard Koppett, Red Smith and … Dave Anderson.

It was as though a straining editor had spit the bit, booted the ball, taken the dive or whatever sports cliché you wanted to employ: Howell Raines, through Mr. Boyd at least, spiked the column! And not just anybody's column. No Paul Krugman on Larry Lindsey or R.W. Apple on Chateau Marmont, no! But a column by that dangerous, dangerous 73-year-old Pulitzer Prize–winner, Dave Anderson.

And his point guard, 50-year-old terror Harvey Araton.

"I was concerned that if I wrote a column," Mr. Berkow said, "would I have to look over my shoulder?"

So, on Dec. 9, here he was, in an 11th-floor executive dining room at the paper-a tough enough venue under any circumstances, and the food is nothing to write home about, either-one of six columnists brought in by Mr. Raines, managing editor Gerald Boyd and the outgoing sports editor, Neil Amdur. The meeting was a kind of victory, but Mr. Berkow didn't feel victorious. He felt, well, unsure.

He had ever since Wednesday, Dec. 4, when the New York Daily News reported that editors at The Times had killed columns by fellow Times sports columnists Mr. Anderson and Mr. Araton involving the no-admittance policy of women by Augusta. The Times ' involvement in the issue had been remarked upon as one of its strangest crusades-not unworthy, exactly, just odd. Wasn't there an all-girls' sweatshop somewhere in Queens?

At any rate, the executives had been scrambling behind the scenes to calm a muttering staff, but also to challenge the suggestion that the paper's particular editorial agenda-the Augusta pieces were a matter of pride for Mr. Raines, an Alabama-born sports fan with a vision of a national New York Times -had led the newspaper to squash the opinions of anyone who broke ranks.

Then The Times explained that the two pieces hadn't been good enough , issuing a memo so impenetrable that Pravda would have been proud. Then it finally ran the suppressed pieces, so that readers could survey these defective, not-good-enough columns.

And now, it was time to clean up the broken china, to explain to the group who'd been silenced what kind of newspaper it was they were working for.

So Mr. Raines, Mr. Boyd and Mr. Amdur gathered Mr. Berkow, Mr. Anderson and Mr. Araton, as well as William C. Rhoden, Selena Roberts and George Vecsey, on the 11th floor. The editors expressed regret and said that what had happened had been what Mr. Vecsey later described as "an aberration" in the editorial process. The writers were told they would have no future interference and shouldn't be afraid to express themselves. Mr. Raines spoke about The Times as a national paper, which Mr. Anderson said "we all already knew, but was nice to hear about in that setting." The writers told the editors they liked not being tied to the five boroughs and Jersey.

Mr. Berkow brought up the disappointment. Mr. Raines, he said, "acknowledged that, to his credit, and addressed it in a positive way." Mr. Berkow then suggested Mr. Raines write up his thoughts, "because I thought it's important for people to better know him and better know the thinking for what the future holds, in terms of what the top echelon of editors are thinking. It was my suggestion that readers wanted to be reassured about the credibility of the paper."

Like the others, Mr. Berkow said he that emerged "reassured."

Good sportsmanship prevailed. Mr. Raines and Mr. Boyd emerged in one piece-or at least in two. And they were probably lucky to have been facing the sports staff of The New York Times, not the football writers of the Irish Times . But there was blood on the floor: For sinking two benign columns that had committed the sin of snarling the newspaper's party line, the upper management of The Times had shattered the public's general image of the America's greatest newspaper being "without fear or favor," etc. It martyred Dave Anderson and Harvey Araton, neither of whom had ever expected to stand on the John Peter Zenger Memorial Pedestal. And suddenly it needed to reassure the public, and the veteran members of its own staff, that the paper was carrying out its editorial mission in good faith.

"It's inevitable," said Gail Collins, The Times ' editorial-page editor, "when people are making hundreds of decisions every day, that some will eventually come back and bite you. It's made everybody very, very aware of how important it is to constantly underline the separation between the editorial and news sides."

It was Ms. Collins' Nov. 18 editorial that Mr. Anderson had attempted to address in his column. She had been with Mr. Raines in Paris on Dec. 4, when Golfgate actually burst, sending the News , The Washington Post and delirious sportswriters from New York to Maui into thrilled recriminations. Earlier in the week, Mr. Raines and Ms. Collins had gone on a fact-finding mission to the International Herald Tribune , whose full ownership The Times will soon formally assume from its embittered ex-partner, The Washington Pos . (Mr. Raines told members of the staff that the paper would stay in Paris, and that he considered the revamped Herald Tribune one of his most important legacies as executive editor. On Monday, Dec. 9, the Times Company announced that Walter Wells would replace Herald Tribune executive editor David Ignatius, who would return to Washington following the final completion of the sale. On Tuesday, Dec. 10, Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis, confirmed that the paper will continue to run stories from The Post , even after the deal's done.)

"There's no rule," Ms. Collins said. "There's absolutely, absolutely, absolutely no rule that" the news reporters have "to agree with our editorial position."

Nevertheless, that was the crux of the difficulty after Nov. 18-the day The Times ' editorial page called for Tiger Woods to boycott The Masters. That day, Mr. Araton submitted a column around 5 p.m., in which he attempted to link the Augusta controversy to issues regarding the future of women's softball in the Olympics and the enemies of Title IX-the federal statute that assured gender equity in college sports.

When Mr. Araton arrived at the Meadowlands for a New Jersey Nets game that evening, Mr. Amdur informed him that the piece couldn't run the next day in its current form.

The next day, after working it over, Mr. Amdur told him it wouldn't run at all.

"It was explained to me that Gerald"-Mr. Araton meant Mr. Boyd-"felt the idea I was trying to link the two [would] minimize one at the expense of another. I didn't think I was trying to dismiss what was going on at Augusta National, but just trying to say that there are far greater issues of gender equity in sports."

According to one Times source, some within the department agreed with Mr. Boyd, but said they would have run the column regardless. (Mr. Amdur did not return calls seeking an interview). The next morning, Wednesday, Nov. 20, Mr. Araton said he and Mr. Boyd "agreed to disagree."

Mr. Anderson submitted his column on Thursday, Nov. 21. In it, he argued that, contrary to the opinion of the paper's editorial page, Mr. Woods should not boycott the 2003 Masters Tournament. Afterward, Mr. Anderson said, Mr. Amdur told him "it would not fly. He had apparently taken it to Gerald Boyd. Neil told me I wasn't supposed to argue with the editorial page-not the Op-Ed page, but the editorial page itself."

One Times source said that "under the old order, this was the kind of thing that might well have been brought to the attention of the masthead anyway." However, "there's a greater chance it would be brought to the executive editor now because it is more centralized, and there's a greater fear about doing something without clearing it with Howell."

Following the newsbreak by the Daily News , Mr. Boyd contacted Mr. Anderson and Mr. Araton to tell them that he intended to release a memo regarding the situation. Mr. Boyd conferred with Mr. Raines on the memo. But Mr. Boyd's memo explaining things belly-flopped, saying Mr. Anderson's column had been killed to eliminate intramural squabbling, while Mr. Araton's "logic did not meet our standards: that would have been true regardless of which 'side' the writer had taken on Augusta. The writer was invited to try again, but we did not think the logic improved materially."

Needless to say, it didn't soothe the news staff. "That memo did not reflect the effort that both those columnists made to write a thorough and accurate column that stood up to every test imaginable," said one Times employee. "There wasn't anything rash or illogical with it. The memo did not help matters at all."

Mr. Araton said he wasn't "thrilled with the statement," but "at that point, I got the sense that it was only Day 1 of the story being out, that something bigger was brewing and that wouldn't be the end of it."

He was right: The Washington Post and Fox News both went to town on the story, and when Mr. Amdur-who had been on vacation-returned to the office on Dec. 5, he was forced to spend his day putting out brushfires. That night, Mr. Amdur went to what he thought was a dinner in honor of his wife. It turned out to be a surprise party celebrating his retirement, and the first people to greet him were Mr. Araton and Mr. Anderson-the latter fresh from an appearance on CNN to talk about the flap. And while the event eventually became a love fest for Mr. Amdur's 12-year tenure-Mr. Anderson called him "the best editor" he ever had-the specter of the story could be felt. Hell, as part of his going-away present, Mr. Amdur received a crimson T-shirt with "Alabama" printed across the chest … a reference to Mr. Raines' birthplace and interest in college football.

By Friday, Dec. 6, Mr. Raines got directly involved. Having come back from Paris, he called both writers to tell them he'd decided to run their columns after all. He told Mr. Araton he didn't have a problem with the second version he'd turned in. Asked if Mr. Raines had apologized, Mr. Anderson said: "He didn't use the word 'sorry.' He told me about what his decision was now."

The following day, the public make-good measures began. The Times addressed the controversy in its own story by Felicity Barringer by Saturday, Dec. 7, and ran the columns, side-by-side, on Sunday, Dec. 8.

"The reason we went forward and printed the columns was there was a concern there had been an appearance of unfairness," Ms. Mathis said. "And we wanted to address that in open way."

Since then, both columnists have said they're satisfied with the outcome. And Mr. Raines, according to a Times source, has told people that the incident will not change the way he and the rest of the masthead conducts business at the paper. However, the story revealed a measure of control that surprised the outside world. Some asked if Mr. Raines had contracted the kind of iron-fisted attitude that former editor A.M. Rosenthal had insisted upon during his tenure.

"So much of this comes from a top-down management structure as it does 'censorship,'" said one Times source. "These are decisions that would normally be made by a section editor who would say, 'You know what? I don't like this for whatever reason.' … Here, they're actually making the decisions and putting their fingerprints on it and they're going to continue to put their fingerprints on it because they don't trust their editors enough."

Ms. Mathis said: "We are an edited newspaper and certainly one of the jobs of the senior folks in a newsroom is to edit the newspaper. But I also think there is a willingness to listen to people."

Mr. Araton said he received little micromanagement of his column … until now. However, he said the group addressed the issue with Mr. Boyd and Mr. Raines at the Dec. 9 meeting in the 11th-floor dining room. "Once the process begins where management is getting involved in a column like that," Mr. Araton said, "Sometimes, the process just is kind of made more difficult, just because it began. It's unleashing these forces.

"In retrospect, everyone agreed, things would have been better had they said, 'We have some objections to this, call Harvey, call Dave, re-work this. Try and make this better.' Why it got to this point, I don't know."

Say goodbye to Mr. Latte. Or to Tad.

On Tuesday, Dec. 10, New York Times Magazine editor Adam Moss confirmed to Off the Record that Amanda Hesser will no longer write her "Food Diary," where for the past year and a half she's chronicled her life with food and New Yorker writer (and now husband) Tad Friend.

"The Food Dairy had its perfect logical ending with Amanda's wedding [in the Nov. 3 Food Diary]," Mr. Moss said. "That ended that. Amanda may appear in the magazine in other forms.

"From the beginning it was a serial narrative of her life as a single person," Mr. Moss continued, "and it ran its course."

One Times source told Off the Record that part of the decision was due to a backlash from readers who "were sick of reading about Mr. Latte."

In response, Mr. Moss said: "We liked the column. Some readers liked it. Some didn't. But it was not ended because of readers' dissatisfaction."

Ms. Hesser, who remains a writer at The Times , did not return a call seeking comment.

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You want epic? You want hope? You want renewal? You'll have to tear yourself away from cable television's pre-pre-game interviews and the banal in-game banter and get yourself to Morningside Heights on Tuesday, April 9. There, beginning at 5 p.m. at Columbia University's Baker Field ,several groups of women will put on what might appear to be a perfectly ordinary soccer clinic and exhibition game. Perfectly ordinary, that is, if all you see are some women of varying ages and skill levels running around in short pants and acting out some female version of male mid-life crisis.

Look closer and you will find the purity and renewal and hope that only the short of sight still associate with that branch of Global Entertainment Inc. known as professional sports.

The occasion is a fund-raising event to help underprivileged women in Harlem who are going through breast-cancer treatment. Wendy Hollender, an Upper West Side resident, founded the program and helped organize the fund-raiser at Columbia. Ms. Hollender herself is a breast-cancer survivor. She also plays soccer, for a team in the Bronx Irish League called the Parlour Moms, a group of women that came together several years ago at an awards ceremony for soccer-playing children. Talented, complex and determined, these women were not the sort of people who watched life from the sidelines. So they hired a coach who taught them the game, and now the Parlour Moms are in their fifth year of competition.

"We have some players who've never played sports, and others who never played soccer," Ms. Hollender said. "And what we've found is that it's not about how good you are, it's about how much you love it, and how much you're willing to learn."

Following a 5 p.m. clinic by the New York Power, a professional women's team, and the Columbia University women's team, the Parlour Moms will play a team from New Jersey called Goals for Life, a charitable organization that grew out of a women's soccer boom in Montclair, N.J. Like the Parlour Moms, most of whom live on the Upper West Side, the New Jersey women discovered soccer through their children, and found in team sports a side of themselves they didn't know existed, or that had been dormant for years. "I never had that experience growing up," said Beth Albert, a Montclair resident and publicist. "I was 40 years old when I started playing, and it's been absolutely liberating. It's a feeling of great freedom, of feeling like a kid again, the way kids must feel all the time-you know, it's no big deal to run around and get muddy."

Lisa Ciardi was one of the founders of the Montclair women's soccer movement-and that's really what it became, a movement of empowerment and liberation-in 1998. "I was on the sidelines, watching a kids' game, and the ball came by and I stopped it with my foot and kicked it," she said. "The coach said something like, 'That's pretty good. Do you play?'" She didn't, but not for long. What followed-a joyful awakening through sports-provided Beth Albert's husband, New York Times sports columnist Harvey Araton, with material to fill a book. In Alive and Kicking , Mr. Araton not only captures the spirit of these highly motivated women, but also reminds us that sports can still be an inspiring and ennobling enterprise.

The fund-raiser at Columbia, which will conclude with a match between the Power and the university's women's team, promises to be one such example. Many of the Parlour Moms will be no strangers to Ms. Albert, Ms. Ciardi and the other New Jersey women. They've met in charity tournaments before, putting their newfound skills and interest to use on behalf of breast-cancer research. Through soccer, they have not only become more involved in their communities-both their own neighborhoods, and the more global community of breast-cancer survivors and sufferers-but they have met and been touched by people they would never have known otherwise. "We play on a team, but we've expanded that idea-we may watch each other's kids when somebody is sick, or cook them a meal. It seems natural," said Ms. Albert. "It's like a lifelong commitment."

Those are not the words of a professional athlete. Nor, it seems fair to say, are they the words of a typical soccer dad or softball dad or pickup-basketball dad. But they are the words of somebody who clearly has mastered the fundamentals.