Coach Vivian Stringer

A picture of Coach Vivian Stringer hangs high in the Rutgers basketball arena, the only face in the RAC rafters, looming near the ceiling like some stained-glass window of a saint in a church. It adorns a banner honoring her 2009 induction into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in a class that included Michael Jordan—and his infamous, testy acceptance speech. But like MJ, this saint has a potty mouth. And the shiny wood floor below has reflected fewer smiles from that flesh-and-blood face on the sidelines this season.

Saturday afternoon, Ms. Stringer will try for the fourth time for her 900^th victory when her Lady Knights visit St. John’s. With a record of 5-7 in the Big East and 14-11 overall, this highly accomplished and much-acclaimed coach is enduring her annus horribilis.

Earlier this season, her Lady Knights stunned their fans by losing to both Seton Hall and Princeton, an unthinkable embarrassment that Jersey outsiders might not fully grasp (imagine losing to your kid sister on a backyard hoop—on television, in your underpants). Her team might not make the N.C.A.A. tournament for the first time since 2002 and the tension is showing.

In a recent outburst strident even by Ms. Stringer’s stinging standards, she criticized the skills of her players, disparaged the success of other sports on campus and seemed to challenge Athletic Director Tim Pernetti for a vote of confidence that did not come. She also called some critical fans “crazies.”

Black History month and the impending milestone should have made this February a triumphant time for Ms. Stringer, the working personification of success, a soon-to-be 65-year-old survivor raised in an era when coaching opportunities were not easily available for blacks and women and girls played a limited-zoned game of six-player teams with less running. And yet...

“It’s not supposed to be like this,” Ms. Stringer said late last week after a practice. “I want to sigh.”  As she said it, she released a long, slow breath, as if forcing herself to try to relax.

Only six other Division I coaches, people like Bobby Knight and Pat Summitt, have crossed the 900-win threshold. But Rutgers home crowds have fallen to below 2,000, on average, less than half of what they used to be when Ms. Stringer took her team as far as the 2007 national championship game.

At a Feb. 8 news conference, a question about her critics ignited the bitter rant.

“If I fall to these crazies—and that’s what I say they are—then I’m losing my mind,” Ms. Stringer said.  “That’s how people are: What have you done for me lately?” And she said much more.

Eight days after her diatribe, Mr. Pernetti spoke with Ms. Stringer at length by the team bench before a defeat against Connecticut at home. After dodging reporters for more than a week, Mr. Pernetti was persuaded to do a brief presser at halftime.

He acknowledged that he called Ms. Stringer on the phone the day after her outburst.

“It was a good, productive discussion and we’ll leave it at that,” Mr. Pernetti said. Hardly a ringing endorsement of his coach, and Mr. Pernetti was asked to assess the women’s basketball program overall.

“I don’t want to talk about the program until the season is over,” he said.

What about Ms. Stringer’s desire for a contract extension?

“I’m not having a discussion about contracts,” Mr. Pernetti said, referring to the media, adding only that contract dialogue with Ms. Stringer’s advisers has been “ongoing for an extended period of time.”

At slightly more than $1 million per year, she is said to be New Jersey’s highest-paid state employee, something frequently mentioned in the Star-Ledger. Speaking to the newspaper before Ms. Stringer’s harsh words, Mr. Pernetti said: “Vivian has built a national program and that’s what we expect—a national champion.”

When asked last week if the situation with Ms. Stringer is “sensitive or delicate,” Mr. Pernetti played dumb and said he didn’t understand the question. Perhaps comprehending the overall situation most clearly was Geno Ariemma, the legendary UConn coach.

“Coaches are human, they are subject to the same frustrations and disappointments as anyone else,” Mr. Auriemma said. “I’m sure what ‘C. Viv’ said was out of frustration. She’s usually very good at keeping everything in perspective.”

One perspective shows the loss to Connecticut was the 10^th straight for Rutgers in what used to be one of the great rivalries in women’s college basketball.

Ms. Stringer—speaking of the 900-win milestone as just that—said: “I’ll be glad to get it over. I can’t even begin to share with you the stress. I don’t even want my sister to talk about it.”

One account of her verbal explosion early this month reported that Ms. Stringer clapped her hands twice for emphasis while shouting at reporters, “We’ve got people who cannot dribble to the left or to the right.”

She broke out the cuss words and even tried deflection, emphasizing how the football team has not won a championship while she has been successful at Rutgers.

“This program has been the star of this university in athletics for the past 15 years,” Mrs. Stringer said of her basketball team.

Her boss, Mr. Pernetti, is a 42-year-old former Rutgers football player who is finishing his fourth year as athletic director as the university turns toward football with an expanded stadium and a move to the Big Ten.

“Pernetti needs to be who he is supposed to be,” Ms. Stringer said. “Step up. Declare who you are. I don’t care about anybody else . . . And he knows—he should know—what time it is, and he does.”

Ms. Stringer has a flair for the melodramatic and hyperbolic, which you may have picked up on, but it’s often with good reason. She has compared herself to Sisyphus, the king in Greek mythology who was doomed to push a big boulder up a hill, only to have it fall back to renew the struggle.

Such a moment hit like a metaphoric meteor in Ms. Stringer’s best-remembered and most contentious moment in the spotlight, after she took her 2007 team to the NCAA championship game but lost, 59-46, to Tennessee.

It was her second Final Four team at Rutgers after one each from Cheyney State and Iowa before she moved to Rutgers in 1995.

But even before the 2007 players returned to campus, New York-based radio host Don Imus described them the next morning as “nappy-headed hos,” a concise blend of racism and sexism that got Mr. Imus fired by WFAN and Ms. Stringer mad.

“I couldn’t help but wonder if the fact that I was black had made our team seem blacker and therefore more open to ridicule and hatred,” Ms. Stringer wrote in her memoir, Standing Tall.

Ms. Stringer and her players landed on Oprah and Mr. Imus soon landed at WABC, where he provides a comic edge and lots of Fox News guests to the Right Wing Entertainment complex that dominates that powerful spot on the dial.

Ms. Stringer felt that Mr. Imus robbed her players of the praise they had earned and wrote in her book that his words were “vile, venomous, sexist, racist and hurtful . . . those words had stirred up a lot of old, unresolved feelings.”

Ms. Stringer rebounded with a season of 27-7 and an NCAA regional final; the next season slipped to 21-13 and three games deep into the tournament. And in the three seasons since, Ms. Stringer’s teams have won just one of four NCAA tournament games.

Just trying to make the tourney this season is the latest of her public struggles that began when she was a high-school student from Edenborn, in Western Pennsylvania, in 1964.

With the backing of the NAACP, she protested to the school board that her exclusion from the cheerleading squad was based on race. She won her case.

However, in her Hall of Fame acceptance speech, Ms. Stringer insisted she’s really not one for pom-poms and jazz fingers. “I’m not a cheerleader,” she said. “You know, ‘2-4-6-8, who do we appreciate?’ That’s not my thing.”

Aside from the fight against racial discrimination, she had a personal motive to battle the school board: so she would stand near the sidelines and tell the boys how to play.

“I would say, you know, ‘Make that extra pass!’” she recalled. “’Don’t you see guys free underneath?”

As a freshman at Slippery Rock, C. Vivian Stoner—her name then—met the love of her life, Bill Stringer. They married and had three children but their infant daughter, Nina, turned out to have spinal meningitis and would need constant care.

The next challenge came when her husband died of a heart attack on Thankgiving of 1992.  Her oldest son, David, a football player, was peripherally involved in a shooting by someone else at North Carolina State in 1998 that left a man dead.

Her younger son, Justin, suffered but recovered from a brain injury in a serious car crash in 2000. Her book, a lively read, recounts all of this and much more and makes it clear that she remembers every slight, every hurt. She writes and talks often of how much she cries and of “earth angels” who buoy her. She speaks of miracles and omens. She is a breast cancer survivor.

Ms. Stringer has deep brown eyes that lock in while she talks or listens. Sometimes, she speaks in a stream-of-consciousness with free association. When angry, these statements can exceed 30 minutes. But most people in her presence pick up her personal charisma.

With long, flowing hair, well-tailored suits and tasteful jewelry, Ms. Stringer exudes the energy and style of a much younger person. “I like spunky people,” she said. She follows political news and opinion shows on cable TV because “Life is kind of boring if you don’t have an opinion.”

And she has many. Ms. Stringer said a Republican woman in Iowa recently suggested

Ms. Stringer run for office there. “I’ve thought about it,” Ms. Stringer said, of politics in general. Had she not coached, Ms. Stringer said, “I would’ve been a lawyer. I’d’ve taken care of the poor people.”

But her tongue might be a bit too tart for political correctness. After the Connecticut game, discussing her shorter players, Ms. Stringer said: “No disrespect to midgets, we call our little people ‘midgets.’” Think Maxine Waters with a dash of Joe Biden.

A better comparison might be with her future peers in the 900 Club of Division 1 coaches. There are only six in history, a sign of how elite a club it is. The retired Ms. Summitt leads all with 1,098. The other women are Silvia Hatchell of North Carolina, at 902 and counting, and the retired Jody Conradt of Texas, at exactly 900.

The men are Mike Krzyekwiski of Duke at 950 as of Thursday afternoon and Jim Boeheim of Syracuse at 912, both still active. The retired Mr. Knight won 902.

In the past, in a different context, Ms. Stringer once said: “It’s one thing when you are hunting it’s another thing when you are hunted.” Perhaps now she feels a bit of both.

“Fired up! Fired up!” said the director walking down the main aisle of the Pepsi Center last night. He wore a white T-shirt with Obama’s face on it and a baseball cap. He gave a high five to Newark Mayor Cory Booker, sitting in the front row of the Jersey delegation. “We going to drop double nickels tomorrow night," Lee told Booker, who laughed and nodded his head. "Obama’s going Jordan in the Mile High Invesco field. Double nickels! Double nickels, baby!”

Booker gave his approving reviews. Waving a Biden sign, topped with an American flag, he said the vice presidential nominee had done an exceptional job of showing that John McCain’s “longevity doesn’t equal expertise.” Biden, he said, had shown himself to be a “real guy with a good heart who loves his family and loves his country. And people felt that.”

Three years later, as Jay-Z himself puts it, “the worst retirement ever” is over: Kingdom Come (Roc-A-Fella), the new album he so half-heartedly swore would never happen, has been released. Turns out it’s an encore that no one needed—especially not Jay-Z, who sounds like he doesn’t quite know why he’s doing this. The ostensible impetus falls somewhere in between “the game needs me” and “I need the game” (I’m paraphrasing), but the fact that Jay can’t decide for sure means that Kingdom Come flounders. Imagine Superman standing in the middle of the road, all dressed up with nowhere to go.

This is not an acceptable state of affairs for a guy whose success has been built on a keen sense of narrative and dramatic timing—a guy who dropped the curtain on his recording career just as he was ascending to the throne of Def Jam Recordings and positioning himself as the youngest elder statesman in rap. The story we were supposed to tell our kids was that Jay-Z was a drug dealer from the Marcy Projects who’d become the best rapper alive, only to bow out at the pinnacle and conquer the corporate world with the prettiest girl in R&B at his side. A good story, and Jay-Z stayed more or less faithful to it for three years. But now he’s unraveled the legend.

To call Kingdom Come a disappointment would be an understatement (but then again, Jay-Z’s track record has led us to expect outrageous triumphs). Until a few recent duds, every guest appearance he’d made from behind the president’s desk at Def Jam felt like a taunt, a reminder that he could do this rapping stuff better than anyone—but that he chose not to. He had better things to do. He crammed all his ideas into 35-second verses shoehorned into tracks made by his friends and protégés. The constraints helped him work up that rags-to-riches “hunger” that everyone always wants from rappers.

Un-retiring, then, was the swiftest way to grow fat and floppy.

Some will argue that Jay-Z has nothing left to say, but that’s missing the point. All Jay-Z ever rapped about was himself—his excellence was in his ingenuity, his ability to come up with more creative ways than anyone else to flaunt success (“Bricks to billboards, grams to Grammies”) and destroy his enemies (“We kill you motherfuckin’ ants with a sledgehammer”). That ingenuity is not in evidence on Kingdom Come: Most of the time, Jay sounds like he’s quoting himself. The best jokes happen when he mixes his well-oiled sensibility as precocious young rap star with the jargon of Wall Street. On the title track, he boasts of “showin’ growth” and being “so in charge”; on “30 Something,” he says he “don’t got the bright watch” but “the right watch.”

And so, despite (or perhaps because of) the grown-man hubris, the only time Jay betrays any urgency is on the Dr. Dre–produced “Trouble,” in which he threatens to get the “the papers writing stories like: ‘didn’t they know, this what happened when they made that rapper CEO.’” And later, to his young detractors: “Probably hustled with your pops / go ask your parents / it’s apparent, you’re staring at a legend who / put a few little niggas in they place before / trying to eat without saying their grace before / blasphemous bastards, get your faith restored / you’re viewing your version of the lord, God MC, little nigga, applaud! / Or forever burn in the fire that I spit at y’all.”

Most of the time, Kingdom Come makes Jay-Z sounds like a guy who used to like being a rapper. Over the course of an hour-long album, he’s unable to articulate a reason why he felt compelled to undermine his own carefully constructed mythology. The songs aren’t worth the damage done. Think Michael Jordan on the Washington Wizards, or Terminator 3. Jay-Z sounds as cocksure as ever, but something has been lost to his indecision.

Three years later, as Jay-Z himself puts it, “the worst retirement ever” is over: Kingdom Come (Roc-A-Fella), the new album he so half-heartedly swore would never happen, has been released. Turns out it’s an encore that no one needed—especially not Jay-Z, who sounds like he doesn’t quite know why he’s doing this. The ostensible impetus falls somewhere in between “the game needs me” and “I need the game” (I’m paraphrasing), but the fact that Jay can’t decide for sure means that Kingdom Come flounders. Imagine Superman standing in the middle of the road, all dressed up with nowhere to go.

This is not an acceptable state of affairs for a guy whose success has been built on a keen sense of narrative and dramatic timing—a guy who dropped the curtain on his recording career just as he was ascending to the throne of Def Jam Recordings and positioning himself as the youngest elder statesman in rap. The story we were supposed to tell our kids was that Jay-Z was a drug dealer from the Marcy Projects who’d become the best rapper alive, only to bow out at the pinnacle and conquer the corporate world with the prettiest girl in R&B at his side. A good story, and Jay-Z stayed more or less faithful to it for three years. But now he’s unraveled the legend.

To call Kingdom Come a disappointment would be an understatement (but then again, Jay-Z’s track record has led us to expect outrageous triumphs). Until a few recent duds, every guest appearance he’d made from behind the president’s desk at Def Jam felt like a taunt, a reminder that he could do this rapping stuff better than anyone—but that he chose not to. He had better things to do. He crammed all his ideas into 35-second verses shoehorned into tracks made by his friends and protégés. The constraints helped him work up that rags-to-riches “hunger” that everyone always wants from rappers.

Un-retiring, then, was the swiftest way to grow fat and floppy.

Some will argue that Jay-Z has nothing left to say, but that’s missing the point. All Jay-Z ever rapped about was himself—his excellence was in his ingenuity, his ability to come up with more creative ways than anyone else to flaunt success (“Bricks to billboards, grams to Grammies”) and destroy his enemies (“We kill you motherfuckin’ ants with a sledgehammer”). That ingenuity is not in evidence on Kingdom Come: Most of the time, Jay sounds like he’s quoting himself. The best jokes happen when he mixes his well-oiled sensibility as precocious young rap star with the jargon of Wall Street. On the title track, he boasts of “showin’ growth” and being “so in charge”; on “30 Something,” he says he “don’t got the bright watch” but “the right watch.”

And so, despite (or perhaps because of) the grown-man hubris, the only time Jay betrays any urgency is on the Dr. Dre–produced “Trouble,” in which he threatens to get the “the papers writing stories like: ‘didn’t they know, this what happened when they made that rapper CEO.’” And later, to his young detractors: “Probably hustled with your pops / go ask your parents / it’s apparent, you’re staring at a legend who / put a few little niggas in they place before / trying to eat without saying their grace before / blasphemous bastards, get your faith restored / you’re viewing your version of the lord, God MC, little nigga, applaud! / Or forever burn in the fire that I spit at y’all.”

Most of the time, Kingdom Come makes Jay-Z sounds like a guy who used to like being a rapper. Over the course of an hour-long album, he’s unable to articulate a reason why he felt compelled to undermine his own carefully constructed mythology. The songs aren’t worth the damage done. Think Michael Jordan on the Washington Wizards, or Terminator 3. Jay-Z sounds as cocksure as ever, but something has been lost to his indecision.

Usher is searching for a $10 million downtown pad, according to New York magazine. Courtney Love’s Soho love nest is again on the market. And will Tom Ford ever have his “Wal-Mart on the Hill?”

Instead of looking at boring buildings this week, Christopher Gray writes about men dressed up like buildings, at the 1931 Beaux-Arts Ball. The event was billed as "modernistic, futuristic, cubistic, altruistic, mystic, architistic and feministic." The Real Estate definitely would had been there.

There’s further evidence this weekend that real estate brokers can do anything, according to the New York Times. Now, they’ll find you a condo, and a spouse to go with it.

-Michael Calderone

The Full Monty is based on the 1997 hit movie of the same title that was set in poverty-stricken Sheffield (Joe Cocker country), and along with more or less everyone else, I liked the movie a lot. Its sentimental story about a group of tough, unemployed steel workers who strip for one night only to pay the credit card bills or raise enough dough for child support was touching and very funny, and its secret was its utterly unexpected, modest charm. We rooted for these North of England characters-who were very real, by the way, as real as the blighted landscape of Sheffield, the city of steel itself. Now cut to Broadway.

The book by Terrence McNally ( Love! Valour! Compassion!, Master Class, Ragtime ) has been broadly transplanted to Buffalo. Broad is the word, though in a moment of linguistic sophistication there's the line "We may be retired and living in Buffalo, which is probably an oxymoron." Its source in A Chorus Line was better: "To commit suicide in Buffalo is redundant." But the distinguished Mr. McNally and the usually sophisticated director Jack O'Brien have underlined every character, every performance, every lame joke, every cheap campy move, everything-in the name, I imagine, of popular appeal. Yet the original movie was already wildly popular.

Take the show's quite embarrassing opening scene, in which an effeminate professional male stripper does a solo strip down to his spangled "G-string." A plant in the audience has yelled out, "Welcome to girl's night out! Who says Buffalo doesn't rock?"

The blah pop rock is meant to kick it all up a notch. (Music and lyrics by David Yazbek in his Broadway debut.) But as the stripper rocks on for Buffalo, a cell phone rings onstage. Where can it be? The stripper is looking for it everywhere. Where can it be? It's in his jockstrap.

End opening scene.

Ain't life grand? But I'm afraid the tone of coarse witlessness has been set from the start. Why the male stripper is homosexual becomes clear later when he's mocked by the macho blue collar workers for being a "fairy." "I got a show to do," he tells them, mincing in his cowboy costume. "This time I'm John Wayne-go figure!" But Mr. McNally's point is that he's really tougher than the straights and he's sexier. A fight scene ensues: The gay stripper sure packs a punch. Then they ask him "how to be sexy." Who cares either way? But the dramatist is anxious to explore the hackneyed gay-lib issue of "manliness" in the dubious arena of male strip nights, and for a while the musical is off on the tangential question, Can straights strip as well as gays?

The Full Monty gets back on track-but to where? Showbiz's idea of working men and women has always been suspect. But everyone here is a caricature: the ever-loyal housewives and loudmouthed sluts; the lovable old pianist and showbiz pro who turns up to play the piano for the lads (and crack showbiz jokes); the phony relationship between the divorced dad and his young son. "I love you, you fuck," says the son to the father.

It's a pleasure to see André De Shields, the star of Ain't Misbehavin ', on Broadway again. But look what this silky, great performer must put himself through playing a character named Horse (nudge-nudge).

We first meet him when he auditions to join the group of amateur strippers by showing them how he can dance. But everything in this show is exaggerated, milked and mugged. So Mr. De Shields' Horse must enter literally as if he can scarcely walk-staggering in like a geriatric. Hence the line, "What's the use of a big bundle if you need a walker to carry it around?" But we know it's André De Shields, and we know he can dance . If anyone can rise above this lame material, it's him. And so he surely does-raising the roof and bringing the show to the boil at last in a dubious James Brown knock-off number entitled "Big Black Man." But when he's rehearsing with the troupe later, he becomes a comic geriatric figure again who can't dance a step.

Cheap laughs, mass appeal. Or so they seem to be insisting. Mr. De Shields must suffer further indignity in Act II when Horse confesses he's worried about stripping. (The joke is therefore on the black man.) "What am I gonna do, Lord," he panics. "It ain't getting any bigger ." "So, you're trying to tell me you've got a small dick, Horse?" says the salty old broad who's the pianist. "We gave the world Buffalo wings," goes another exultant line. "Now we're gonna give 'em Buffalo wieners." "What are you going to call yourselves-the Dancing Dicks? Bring your telescopes!" And so on. Broadway letting its hair down like this is about as attractive as a Friars Club roast or a karaoke outing on a Saturday night. But the original film wasn't about dicks. It was about comic desperation; in its appealing essentials, it was about love.

The shoddy musical version makes every blatantly predictable choice. Mr. Yazbeck's score is all-purpose pop-rock, his ballads a particular weakness. "I look at you / Standing there / You're still a prince / You're still the answer to a prayer …

"What is a man / Why does he bother / 'Cause he's a man / 'Cause he's a father …"

There's an attempted replica of a suicide scene in the film, when one of the characters amusingly tries to asphyxiate himself in a car. Here, the car-designed by set designer John Arnone-is some kind of dinky cartoon version, like a covered golf cart. The character is still asphyxiated, but there's no smoke! Mr. Arnone's attempt at an industrial set looks dull, static and under-budgeted. It doesn't move or propel the action forward in any way. Jerry Mitchell's choreography is more or less confined to the Act I closer, "Michael Jordan's Ball," that pays rousing tribute to the airborne skills of Michael Jordan. His slam dunks inspire the amateur strippers to take courage.

But then, in the dress rehearsal scene when the guys try out their first strip, the musical version turns their specially invited audience into senior citizens from a rest home. Geriatrics again-this time with walkers and wheelchairs. One of the old folks is a dummy, actually. The dummy's making up the numbers. You're not supposed to notice.

They've even botched the signature scene of the entire movie-when the guys unconsciously broke out into their strip dance while standing on the unemployment line. The scene now takes place during a funeral. Someone's mum has died, and the following happens: The Lord's Prayer; a suggestion of the strip dance; a mournful ballad (Sample lyric: "Is it the wind that I hear gently whispering?"); and the coming out of two gay members of the group as they hold hands, no doubt wondering what's in the wind.

For what it's worth, they don't actually "do the full monty." They promise to. They tease . They build up to the moment in a cheerleading crescendo to rival the World Series. But this is less The Full Monty , more the three-card monte. Now you see it, now you don't. The show promises the world. It doesn't deliver.

Still, I was sorry that Asti's had gone. Admittedly, I'd only been there once, when I first came to New York, but it was an institution. The place had great atmosphere, with virulent red flock wallpaper covered with dozens of signed photographs of obscure opera singers. I decided to give the new restaurant a try, and I showed up for dinner on a Saturday night in the company of my son and his friend, both 12 years old. The boys balked at the door when they saw the sign outside. "Are you sure this place is for kids?" they asked.

After walking through a dark, sexy red lounge set with sofas and a bar, we entered the dining room, which looked just like the place I remembered, only more so. The room (designed by David Rockwell) seemed even redder than I remembered–the ceiling is red, the padded banquettes are red and even the tiles in the bathroom are red. The same sort of red flock wallpaper is hung with even more celebrity photographs, dating back to the teens, among which the new owners had mixed in (and highlighted) old photographs of nude pinups that Stanford White (if not Al Goldstein) would have delighted over. The boys averted their eyes as we were shown to our table.

"Are these napkins pornographic?" asked my son, unfolding a square of gold-colored linen embossed with small silhouettes, like Vargas pinup girls in various poses. He and his friend quickly put them on their laps and drew up their chairs so they were concealed under the table. When the waiter arrived to take our drink order I asked, "Aren't you going to sing for us?" He looked puzzled. So instead of "La Donna e Mobile," we had Barry White over the sound system.

A few minutes later, a busboy set down a mysterious tiny silver dome before us. My son lifted the lid expectantly. His face fell. "Butter! I thought it would be a delicacy."

But there is a real delicacy at Strip House, to be shared by the table for $26: foie gras "torchon." The two thick slabs are so buttery and rich I could feel the cholesterol coursing through my veins as I consumed chunks of it on toasted brioche. It has the same effect on me as chocolate.

There is also the occasional oddity. A first course of skate and escargot was as strange as it sounded. The skate was a perfect piece of fish with a golden crust, moist inside, but underseasoned. On top of it were snails that looked as though they'd been trying to crawl across but expired before getting to the other side, where they would have landed in a lovely herbaceous lemon parsley sauce. On the other hand, I was won over by a "flan" consisting of braised beef short ribs wrapped in soft leaves of cooked endive and served with roasted garlic cloves and tiny chanterelle mushrooms.

Basically, this restaurant, with its rotisserie and broiler, is a steakhouse. And Mr. Walzog certainly knows how to produce great steak. The boys split a porterhouse that was juicy and pink, with a strong beefy flavor. The strip sirloin was one of the best steaks I've eaten; it was seasoned just right, so that there was a little crunch of sea salt when I bit into the charred crust. A trio of lamb–chop, loin and a braised flank–was a better choice than the rotisserie pork shoulder, cooked to a crisp under a dark mahogany glaze. Whole red snapper (replacing sea bass on the menu) was also overcooked, arriving from the rotisserie in an exhausted mush. Our waiter cheerfully took it back and replaced it with the strip loin, for which I am still grateful.

In steakhouse tradition, there are side orders of vegetables, and they're worth the extra six bucks. Potatoes roasted in goose fat were light and floury inside a crunchy golden crust. Cooking had intensified the already pronounced flavor of "melted" heirloom tomatoes in shades of green, orange and red. I didn't get much of a taste of the advertised truffle on the creamed spinach, but the greens were just fine. Vegetables en papillote tasted better than they looked when I broke open the parchment envelope and saw a rather colorless medley of artichoke, fennel, carrots and red pepper.

Strip House has a comprehensive, interesting wine list with many bottles under $40. The list is peppered with quotes from Ovid, Pliny, Napoleon and George Meredith, among others. But I wish the waiter wouldn't have kept saying "Can I remove the evidence?" each time he cleared away an empty glass. They should add Ernest Dowson to the list of quotes: "They are not long, the days of wine and roses.…"

For dessert, the boys shared a fondue reminiscent of Scout camp. A chocolate dipping sauce was served over a flame in a copper pan and they set about spearing chunks of pineapple, strawberries, marshmallows and chocolate pound cake rolled in coconut. "Do you think a chocolate-covered maraschino would taste good?" asked my son, taking one out of his "virgin" Shirley Temple. Of course it did.

Pastry chef Wayne Harley Brachman may have had the "Girl in the Red Velvet Swing" in mind when he came up with raspberry crêpes suzette. She would probably have liked the chocolate cake à la Kiev, too. (Our waiter looked nonplused when I asked if melted chocolate spurted out instead of butter.) It was a molten chocolate hazelnut cake concealed inside a phyllo pastry package, accompanied by a roll of chocolate ice cream wrapped in nuts, hot fudge sauce and raspberry coulis. But the flaky caramelized apple tart was my favorite, with brown sugar hard sauce and mascarpone ice cream.

At Alain Ducasse, when they present you with the high three-figure bill after your dinner, they give you a choice of pens, among them Montblanc and Cartier, with which to sign the check. Strip House ought to give you one of those ball-points with a picture of a woman in a black bathing suit that falls off when you lower the pen to write. More fun than a Montblanc any day.

Strip House

* 1/2

13 East 12th Street

328-0000

Dress: Casual

Noise level: Fine

Wine list: Well priced and interesting with international choices

Credit cards: All major cards

Price range: Main courses $22 to $32

Lunch: Tuesday to Friday noon to 3 p.m.

Dinner: Tuesday to Thursday 5:30 to 11 p.m.; Friday and Saturday to 11:30 p.m.; Sunday cocktail lounge open to 2 a.m.

* Good

* * Very Good

* * * Excellent

* * * * Outstanding

No Star: Poor

Now that he's gone–he says it's "99.9 percent" certain–we're ready for the summing up. But we've already been at it for years. Larry Bird, early in Michael Jordan's career, called him a god in human form. The longtime Laker star Jerry West, Mr. Clutch himself, said Mr. Jordan was the only player who reminded him of himself. Michiko Kakutani, reviewing this book recently in The New York Times , wrote that Mr. Jordan was a "magician," an "icon" and a "legend." But my favorite comment came from a member of the Spanish squad that played against the United States in the 1984 Olympics. "Michael Jordan?" a dazed Fernando Martin told an interviewer, "Jump, jump, jump. Very quick. Very fast. Very, very good. Jump, jump, jump."

Where Michael Jordan the athlete is concerned, I don't think David Halberstam's 17th book, Playing for Keeps , has much to add. This long study has the customary Halberstam virtues, but it also has a large problem: We know the story already. How can we not? We're awash in sports media. Perhaps a kind of willed ignorance of this fact is necessary in writing a book of this kind. Mr. Halberstam's basic conclusion is that Mr. Jordan was the dominant player of his age because he was the most talented, the hardest working and the one who wanted most to win. Very good. Very fast. Jump, jump, jump. He was also the most beautiful, thanks to a dazzling smile. He took the game "to a new level." (I counted this phrase and its variants 26 times in Playing for Keeps , but I'll come back to Mr. Halberstam's style later.)

Mr. Halberstam starts his story with Mr. Jordan as a young high school player in Wilmington, N.C. (He neglects to mention that baby Michael was born in our very own Brooklyn.) As a freshman, Mr. Jordan was so skinny he was actually cut from the varsity basketball team. But he filled out, and he worked hard, and by his senior year in high school, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which had an excellent basketball program, was certain it wanted him. "There was a kind of underground quality to the early sightings of Jordan," Mr. Halberstam recalls, "not unlike the early sightings of the young Julius Erving." Pro scouts and other interested parties began to notice. When Mr. Jordan hit the winning basket in the final seconds of the N.C.A.A. finals as a freshman against Georgetown in 1982, the secret was out.

I'll skip over the 1984 N.B.A. draft,Mr. Jordan's high-scoring early years, the Bulls' first "three-peat," the Dream Team, the Nike endorsements, Space Jam , the gambling controversies, the horrific murder of Mr. Jordan's father, Mr. Jordan's stint with the Chicago White Sox organization and so on.

If you don't know about these already, it's unlikely that you'll be much interested in Mr. Halberstam's book.

Let's fast-forward instead to June 1998. There are 6.6 seconds on the clock. The Utah Jazz are trying to force a seventh and deciding game in the N.B.A. championships. Mr. Jordan has just scored to bring the Bulls within one and has quickly stolen the ball back. Turn to the photograph in the insert of Playing for Keeps or go to Barnes & Noble and thumb Mr. Jordan's own glossy keepsake, For the Love of the Game , and see the same moment from three angles. Mr. Jordan is to the left of the key. He has feinted, causing Bryon Russell the defender to stumble. Mr. Jordan has squared up and released a jumper. Look at the faces of the Utah fans–the mouths open in anguish, the woman in the grayish shirt collapsing onto the broad shoulder of her boyfriend, whose own fists are clenched. It's like a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder: There, in a distant corner of the frame, is a single Chicago fan, his arms raised up, beaming, living an entirely different moment.

The match-up of Mr. Halberstam on Mr. Jordan is most successful when Mr. Halberstam gets to play to his strengths. During his long journalistic career he has written often and interestingly on business, race and culture. This helps Playing for Keeps stay a move ahead of most sports books. It is the skillful recapitulation of a business and cultural moment. Mr. Jordan's arrival in the league, as Mr. Halberstam points out, happened to coincide with David Stern's elevation to N.B.A. commissioner. Mr. Stern and Mr. Jordan, hand-in-glove, with ESPN taping it all and Nike providing the footwear, changed basketball from a marginal sport with a drug problem into a worldwide pop-culture juggernaut. Fortune magazine estimated that during the course of his career, Mr. Jordan earned $10 billion for the league, the broadcasters and the advertisers. Mr. Halberstam observes astutely that Mr. Jordan's success as a pitch man derives from his remarkable position vis-à-vis America's most painful divide: "If … he of the brilliant smile," Mr. Halberstam writes, "was not burdened by the idea of race, why should you be burdened by it either?"

Time for a literary parlor game. Mr. Halberstam is to writing as blank is to basketball? But I have no idea who blank might be. Let's try something else, let's give each home-team author a New York streetscape. I'll show you how it works. Janet Malcolm is Gramercy Park, perfect and fussily precise. Tom Wolfe is Third Avenue (sorry, Tom). Norman Mailer, of course, is 42nd Street, though by now he's over by the Fed Ex offices on 11th Avenue. In this game, Mr. Halberstam is literature's Lexington Avenue. His prose isn't always pretty, but it's readable. There are snarls, vendors blocking the lanes and many fender-benders (such as the following: "That first summer back, [Jordan] went out to Hollywood to shoot a goofy movie in which he co-starred with Bugs Bunny"). But in the end Mr. Halberstam gets you there. Not even the fact that Mr. Jordan reneged on an interview could stop our best and brightest.

Due to the pressure of publishing schedules, some questions go unanswered. I would have liked to know how long Mr. Halberstam thinks the world Mr. Jordan made will endure. Since the book went to press, the bubble is already showing signs of bursting. Mr. Jordan retired at the conclusion of a long owner lockout. Sneaker companies are beginning to question the wisdom of promoting sports stars. Latrell Sprewell, who was suspended for choking his Golden State coach, has come to the Knicks. In Mr. Halberstam's eyes, I imagine, this is three-quarters of the apocalypse. But we'll have to wait for the book tour to find out.

Mr. Halberstam doesn't try to guess what Mr. Jordan's second act will be. At his retirement press conference, Mr. Jordan's wife, Juanita (who appears in only one paragraph in Mr. Halberstam's book), announced that she expects her husband to stay home and help raise the kids. Others speculate that he will go to work for Nike or McDonald's. The New York Post says he is studying piano with Ahmad Rashad.

At the same press conference, when journalists asked Mr. Jordan why he was only "99.9 percent" sure he would retire, he responded defiantly: "Because it's my 1 percent and not yours. I chose to walk away knowing that I could still play the game. That's exactly the way I wanted to end it." My suggestion, offered in all humility, is that whatever this great icon, magician and legend turns to next, it shouldn't have too much to do with math.