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On Basketball, In Orlando, Heavy Choices and Risks

By HARVEY ARATON
Published: March 13, 2012

It is an old double standard in professional sports that when the marriage of star and team
dissolves, the player will inevitably risk accusations of infidelity while the team will get to
rationalize the severance as a prudent business decision.

Current cases in point: Based on public consensus, the Indianapolis Colts were apparently
wise to forgo a $28 million bonus and jettison the aging, injured but iconic Peyton Manning. But if
the Orlando Magic should feel forced to unload Dwight Howard by Thursday afternoon — even
after Howard curiously took back his season-long trade demand late Tuesday night — you can bet
the N.B.A.’s premier center will be castigated as having turned his back on the kind-hearted
franchise and city that took him in as an 18-year-old.

People will criticize Howard for deserting a team that has spent generously — if not
judiciously — in trying to build a championship unit around him. Some will wonder what kind of
cad would break the heart of the Magic’s 86-year-old owner, Richard DeVos, and many will cite
Howard’s departure as the latest evidence of how spoiled rotten the current generation of the
N.B.A.’s gifted and talented has become.

In many ways, they are. But free agency is not an indulgence; it’s the players’ contractual
right. And if Howard ends up in New Jersey, one of several possible destinations, on the way to
Brooklyn with the Nets next season, he will require no explanation beyond having heard that
Junior’s on Flatbush is the place to go for quality cheesecake.

These career decisions typically become inflated matters of personal accountability when
N.B.A. superstars make them — as LeBron James might have reminded us before Howard’s 24
points and 25 rebounds led the Magic to a 104-98 overtime victory over the Miami Heat on
Tuesday night. Then he said the Magic should ‘roll the dice’ by keeping him and risk losing him for
nothing next summer. It all sounded like a plan, allowing the Magic more time to put better
players around him — or spare the Nets from shedding precious assets to acquire him now.

Commissioner David Stern, from time to time, has suggested that the court of public
opinion is harsher in its judgments of his very visible and predominantly African-American player
base — hardly a radical contention. But Stan Van Gundy, the Magic coach, pointed out that when
baseball stars become free agents, there is compensation for teams that lose them and few are
affected in the way Cleveland was, for example, when James migrated to Miami.

“In baseball you can pay Albert Pujols as much as you want and he may be the best hitter in
the game, but you can still only hit him one out of every nine times at bat,” Van Gundy said. “His
team’s not going to fall apart because he left. With us, you can go to Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade
or LeBron James every time down the floor. It’s not, oops, we got five guys, he just had his turn,
he’s got to wait four more.”

True enough, when Pujols bailed on St. Louis for sunny Anaheim, few people outside
eastern Missouri were insulted. Certainly no one in the White House was compelled to weigh in.
But President Obama took the opportunity on Monday during a local television interview to

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address the fear and loathing that has enveloped central Florida, telling the host, “If I were the
owner, I’d do everything I could to get him to stay.”

How much is too much? According to an ESPN report, the Magic had already promised
Howard the acquisition of a companion star and the privilege of determining the fates of Van
Gundy and the general manager, Otis Smith. That precipitated a new round of news media teeth
gnashing and maybe was why Van Gundy — after saying “if they want to fire me to please
somebody, fine” — sounded like the only person in Orlando not ready to compare his team’s
ordeal with the unimaginable departure of Disney.

“From our standpoint, I wish we had a system where Dwight had no choice, but we’ve got
to be fair to our players, too,” he said.

As for what the N.F.L. has, the right to slap a franchise tag on a player to retain him, Van
Gundy said: “If you want to do that, be fair, make the rule that you can’t trade anybody either. You
draft them, you’re stuck with them.

“Like everybody, we want it both ways. But I think our system is fair. It was negotiated. It’s
not desirable what we’re going through, but it’s not anyone’s fault.”

Not Howard’s. He has done his share over the last seven years to help the DeVos family
build the gleaming Amway Center and maximize its revenues. He could decide to stay, or the
Magic could retain him for the rest of the season, with no guarantees.

“Well, I told those guys, I’ve been telling them for the past two or three weeks now that I
want to stay and finish the season,” Howard said, putting the onus on the franchise to risk
competitive bankruptcy and a repeat of what happened with Shaquille O’Neal in 1996.

Compared with what Cleveland got for James, the Nets’ reported offer of Brook Lopez and
other assets would be a haul. Maybe the Knicks owner James L. Dolan is beginning to realize he
didn’t score the coup of the century in Carmelo Anthony and he will make a late bid.

Meanwhile, Alex Martins, the Magic’s chief executive, said there are “plenty of teams”
willing to take Howard as a short-term rental.

When Howard said he wanted to stay Tuesday night, what he did was put the Magic in the
position of having to make the most prudent business decision. Which is the game of professional
sports, for all those who play.

Sports Briefing | Tennis

Nadal Romps to Reach Indian Wells Quarterfinals
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 13, 2012

Rafael Nadal eased into the quarterfinals of the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif.,
beating his countryman Marcel Granollers, 6-1, 6-4. It was similarly easy on the women’s side for
top-ranked Victoria Azarenka and No. 2 seed Maria Sharapova, who won their matches in just
more than an hour.

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Fifth-seeded David Ferrer lost for the second time this year, 6-4, 6-3 to Denis Istomin of
Uzbekistan. Ferrer has won three titles this season and was seeking his 20th match win.
Music Review
Saying Hello With Youthful Exuberance
Benjamin Beilman and Yekwon Sunwoo at Merkin Concert Hall
By STEVE SMITH
Published: March 13, 2012

For two young musicians out to make a lasting first impression, it would be hard to pick a
more appropriate selection of pieces than those chosen by the violinist Benjamin Beilman and the
pianist Yekwon Sunwoo on Monday evening at Merkin Concert Hall.

The event, presented by Young Concert Artists, included three works by young men striving
for effect beyond their years, as well as two pieces by composers in their twilight, recalling
youthful pleasures.

The concert nominally belonged to Mr. Beilman, who at 21 has accumulated an impressive
tally of awards: in 2010 alone, a bronze medal at the International Violin Competition of
Indianapolis; first prize at the Montreal International Musical Competition; and three individual
performance prizes as a winner of the Young Concert Artists International Auditions.

Mr. Beilman’s handsome technique, burnished sound and quiet confidence in Mozart’s
Sonata in E flat (K. 302) showed why he has come so far so fast. But Mr. Sunwoo, who initially
connected with Mr. Beilman at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, was no mere supporting player.
His playing was crisp and effervescent, with crystalline trills; in a work that demanded parity, he
was an ideal foil.

Richard Strauss’s comparably youthful Sonata in E flat (Op. 18)suggests in its heated first
movement the furrowed brow (and moist palms) of a novice striving to make a big splash: a quality
aptly conveyed by Mr. Beilman’s sweeping bravura and Mr. Sunwoo’s grand responses. A chaste,
muted middle movement gives way to a boisterous finale, in which the Strauss of the symphonic
poems bounds forth in heraldic dotted rhythms.

Chris Rogerson, at 23 a composer in residence with Young Concert Artists, based his “Once”
on the prologue to “The Long Goodbye,” Meghan O’Rourke’s memoir recounting her grief over the
death of her mother. Airy, soft-spoken ruminations are limned with ominous clouds, wrong-note
pangs and themes abruptly cut short; in the finale Mr. Rogerson deftly evokes flickering fireflies
and children scampering to catch them. Heard in its New York premiere, the work was
sympathetically played and warmly received.

Unaccompanied, and playing from memory with vigor and unfussy precision, Mr. Beilman
brought out rusticity and nostalgia in Prokofiev’s imaginative late Sonata for Solo Violin. Rejoined
by Mr. Sunwoo, he closed the concert with another autumnal work, Kreisler’s sumptuous
“Viennese Rhapsodic Fantasietta,” providing an affectionate account of Kreisler’s “Liebeslied” as
an encore after a robust, prolonged ovation.

Young Concert Artists presents its annual gala concert on May 9 at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln
Center; (212) 721-6500, yca.org.