Manhood

TRY TO FORGIVE one more piece and some personal reflections in the matter of Lisa Olson, the Boston Herald sportswriter whose embarrassment in the Patriots' locker room has generated so provocative and durable a publicity stunt.I was not motivated or otherwise good enough to play college football, but high school football was a definitive experience.To understand the locker room, even in high school, you must understand that football is not merely or even primarily a game. It is ritualized warfare.

SO WE'RE down the street at a neighbor's backyard barbecue a couple of weeks ago when my wife is asked to leave. It's our son who does the asking.Seems girls are around and, well, you know how it is: No self-respecting guy can make a move on the babes if his mother is watching. So Mom, would you mind going home before someone sees us talking and thinks we're related? Thanks, Mom.Sensitivity even seals the deal with a kiss on the cheek.Behind him, Marilyn looks as if her mouth just sprung a hinge.

BOSTON - There is the moment in Kate & Leopold when the 19th-century hero comes galloping after the 21st-century damsel in distress. He is, mind you, mounted on a white charger that had to be unhitched from a horse carriage. Sitting atop this unlikely steed, Leopold, Duke of Albany circa 1876, literally sweeps Kate, marketing researcher circa 2001, off her feet in the middle of Central Park. He then corners the purse-snatcher and returns the prize to the lady as if it were a handkerchief in a tournament.

Such an odd couple. One's a working-class mate, a gangling fletch of a man, big-eyed and tumultuous, with a ragged mop of hair and a fund of ready resentments, spitting anger and energy. He could be a Boomtown Rat.The other's a trim and tidy intellectual, under a neat spritz of TV-weatherman's hair, who can discuss Freud and Oedipus as they play across Irish literature, or the nature of dramatic structure in a voice both gentle and exquisite.What a team. Mutt and Jeff? Abbott and Costello?

When we search for the reasons 6-year-old Tiffany Smith wascaught in the crossfire that snuffed out her life, we should not rush to judgment and automatically blame ''drug dealers.'' That was the mistake made in the shooting death last year of Jay Bias Jr. When the facts came out, it transpired that Mr. Bias died as the result of an argument he did everything he could to avoid.The only fact we know in the case of Tiffany Smith is that she died as the result of an argument she had no part in. The argument may have been about drugs.

It's a safe bet Ta-Nehisi Coates' father no longer thinks he's "a disgrace to the family name." But 16 years ago, that's exactly what Paul Coates told his fourth-oldest son. At the time, Ta-Nehisi was a junior at Polytechnic Institute. It was near the end of the school year. Ta-Nehisi struggled at the elite Baltimore school his first two years there, failing three courses when he was a freshman and three more when he was a sophomore. Ta-Nehisi was given a reprieve - you know, the kind that Baltimore schools Chief Executive Officer Andres Alonso thinks schools like Poly and City College and Western aren't giving to failing students - and allowed to return.

LIKE JESUS, Robert Eades wept. Standing before a crowd Sunday at First Baptist Church in Annapolis, Eades addressed several of those assembled individually and begged their forgiveness."

Words come easily for Dick Cavett, so he had no trouble yesterday capturing the periods of overpowering despair that have kept this funnyman in his bathrobe for weeks while contemplating the relief that might come from suicide.Mr. Cavett, 56, strode into a room full of reporters at Johns Hopkins Hospital, his shirt open at the collar, tie slung over his arm, and quipped, "It's no fun being a specimen."Then, asked to describe clinical depression for those who might not understand, he had this to say: "Everything turns sort of colorless.

It's not easy being a boy in the '90s. Two decades of divorce frenzies, absent fathers, changing social attitudes and blurred gender roles have left American males more confused than ever about their self-image.Should they eat quiche? Should they act macho? Or should they wander into the woods to beat drums and hug each other?Time was, boys could look to their fathers or to the movies for role models. In the '50s, Marlon Brando, James Dean and other rebels without a creed helped define a generation's masculinity.

Christmas, 1993. Someone will give me cologne. Just what I needed, I'll say, even though my current bottle of Paul Sebastian has the half-life of plutonium.I don't even know when or why to wear cologne anymore. What, splash a little on for work? My co-workers don't need or care to smell me. We don't have that kind of relationship.The only time cologne meant anything was when we were little. Using cologne years before we shaved or dated was a rite of passage. Around age 13, we started coating our faces with Dad's Old Spice, Jade East or Skin Bracer.