I’m your captain, I’m your captain
Though I’m feelin’ mighty sick…
— Grand Funk Railroad, “Closer to Home/I’m Your Captain”, 1970
Molly Roberts, a columnist at the Washington Post, wrote a lengthy tribute last week to one of the most admired men in America.
No, it wasn’t about me, unfortunately. Her piece was titled: “Anthony Fauci built a truce. Trump is destroying it.” Yes, the one and only Dr. Anthony Fauci — scientist, researcher, bureaucrat, media personality…
…captain of his high school basketball team?
Little Tony Fauci?
Ms. Roberts reports that Anthony Fauci attended Regis High School, a Jesuit-run school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and was something of a basketball star there:
“All you really need to know about Tony Fauci,” says Jack Rowe, a former president and chief executive of Mount Sinai NYU Health, “is that, at five-foot, seven-inches, he was the captain of his high school basketball team.”
What Jack Rowe, former president and chief executive of Mount Sinai NYU Health, failed to mention is that the rest of the team ranged from five-foot, two-inches to five-foot, six-inches. Come on, folks… any kid who seriously wanted to play basketball enrolled at nearby Park East High School. You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of five-foot, seven-inch Jesuits who’ve ever played for the NBA.
Generally speaking, if you attended a Jesuit high school in New York, you wound up director of a $6 billion research facility like the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). And a good thing, too. Tony Fauci would have got murdered playing against LeBron.
My point being, while Tony Fauci may have been too short for basketball, but he still became a “captain” of sorts. A captain of science.
As indicated by this photo, our current President — who claims he was able to dunk the basketball in high school, “very, very easily, piece of cake” — stands about a head taller than Dr. Fauci. But size apparently doesn’t matter when you are calculating public opinion.
A recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed that 67 percent of voters trusted Dr. Fauci for information on the coronavirus, compared with 26 percent who trusted the President. According to my pocket calculator (with fresh batteries), 67 is more than twice 26. Not bad for a pint-sized former basketball team captain.
But Dr. Fauci has been described in a televised interview with President Trump (who, as we mentioned, is a head taller than the good doctor) as recently as last weekend as, quote, “a little bit of an alarmist.” Whether the President was using the term “a little bit” in reference to Dr. Fauci’s “height”, or as a commentary on the doctor’s occasional tendency to terrify the public, was not immediately clear from the interview.
We’re not sure which would be worse?
What we are dying to see… and I mean the term, ‘dying’ in the figurative sense… what we are dying to see is a game of one-on-one between Dr. Fauci and the President on the White House basketball court. Then we can find out who, exactly, is “a little bit” of whatever.
And who has the better jump shot: science or politics.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.