Yes, that CBS. The Tiffany Net News has launched Public Eye, and ombuds-type blog over at CBSnews.com (which is run by the exceptionally able and very smart Dick Meyer).

Normally, one might scoff at this sort of project as being so much window dressing, except that CBS has wisely put Vaughn Ververs in charge of the blog. Ververs is a long-time hero from The Hotline. Ververs is simply a stud journalist and a serious guy. CBS deserves all sorts of plaudits for this move.

Update, 3:30 p.m.: Yes it’s “Vaughn,” not “Vaugh.”

Andre Agassi doesn’t have a chance to win against Roger Federer. More to the point, Agassi doesn’t have a chance to even win a set against Federer. Federer is that good; Agassi is that old.

Yet here we are, Agassi up a break in the second, and playing like a champion. If he can get his first serve percentage back up, keep Federer away from the net, and keep pounding away on the kid’s backhand . . .

To be honest, even if all of those things happen, it would be an enormous achievement for Agassi to simply get a set off of the number one player in the world. And you know what? That doesn’t take anything away from what he’s done ove the last two weeks. In fact, it only underscores Agassi’s greatness.

Mary Carillo, John McEnroe, and Dick Enberg make up the best commentary trio in all of sports. Talking about Agassi’s career today, Carillo remarked, “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.”

Good stuff.

Update: Galley Friend J.E. writes in:

The “never too late” quote you cite is from George Eliot, author of the scourge of every 10th grade English student, “Silas Marner.” If only the book had been as good as the quote.

The real news here is that Mary Carillo is a former professional athlete who reads George Eliot!?! Who knew?

Matt Labash has the best piece yet written on Katrina and New Orleans. Amazing stuff:

In the parking lot outside the hangar sits George Lainart, a police officer from Georgia, who has led a flotilla of nine airboats over land to try to pitch in with the rescue. But his crew has been on the bench for two days, waiting for FEMA to assign them a mission. After making serial inquiries, Lainart is climbing out of his skin, and I later find out that his team circumvented FEMA altogether, got down to New Orleans, and stayed busy for five days straight. Though he shredded his hull by running over asphalt, cars, fire hydrants, and other debris, his crew saved nearly 800 people.

“FEMA was holding up everything, they didn’t have a clue,” complains Lainart. “They were an absolute roadblock, nobody was getting anywhere with those idiots. Everybody just started doing their own missions.” While opinions on the ground differ wildly as to who deserves the most generous serving of blame pie among George W. Bush, Louisiana’s governor, and New Orleans’ mayor, everyone I speak with agrees that FEMA officials should spend their afterlives in the hottest part of Hell without any water breaks.

There’s more:

Gloria, a kindly British-accented volunteer and an LSU English professor, tries to comfort her, and to get some answers from somebody. But nobody has answers. “Now, now, your world’s been turned upside down, hasn’t it?” commiserates Gloria, who tries to calm Lurleen down. It’s the only attempt at consolation that I personally witness from even a semi-official source in the four days I spend in Louisiana. I have to leave, so I slide Lurleen 20 bucks, throwing my arm around her to give her a squeeze. She grabs me back like I’m a life preserver, saying, “God bless you” over and over again, hungry for the most meager kindness.

I walked the avenues of lower Manhattan in the days after the World Trade Center went down, and the camaraderie of people coming together was palpable. But Louisiana after the flood is different and darker. Perhaps it’s the scope of the catastrophe, perhaps the undercurrent of violence, but even many of the aid workers seem to have turned to stone.

And more:

As I walk across the field toward the highway, I’m accosted by grasping humanity. Half of them want to know if I’m an aid worker, the other half want me to “call their people,” which I try, but there’s no cell service in New Orleans. Two thirtysomething black gents, who introduce themselves as Gregory and Richard, want me to see the squalor of their encampment, which could give any slum in Bangladesh a run. An old man they’re taking care of wets his pants, and Richard has to take him to a makeshift bathroom, which is nothing more than a sheet shielding a patch of bare ground. The six or so children they’re looking out for, three of whom are Richard’s, are suffering from exhaustion, and one has asthma, his face swollen from allergies. Separated from his family in the flood, Gregory doesn’t even know where his four children are. “I haven’t seen my babies,” he says. “I don’t even like to talk about it, it hurts so bad. Ya feel me?”

They’ve been there for three days, but neither has been able to obtain answers about where or when they’re going if a bus ever comes, so I grab them and pull them over some barricades to talk to some authorities. They are shirtless from the flood, with plenty of chest tattoos. Together, we look like a rap group and their manager. When I turn my recorder on as I interrogate a soldier on their behalf, he grows peevish, and tells me to turn it off and move along. When I approach a cop, and ask why these people aren’t getting taken care of, he sips a Coke, while reclining against a squad car. “If it were up to us, we’d have all of them on vehicles, and get them someplace safe.” Well who’s it up to, I ask irately. “I have no idea,” he says.

Are you getting the picture? If not, try this:

On the street right in front of the Convention Center, I see a circle of chairs around a black tarp. A body lies underneath it. It’s been there since the night before. I pull the tarp back and see a black man lying in a pool of blood. He wears work pants and a shirt featuring an ascending angel, not unlike the angels standing sentry over the whitewashed crypts in Metairie.

There’s a pair of scissors pointing at his head, which look like a murder weapon. But they’re not. They were used to cut duct tape and paper, which are attached to his torso, notifying whoever removes him of the phone numbers of his next of kin. Whoever his people were wanted to get the hell out of New Orleans, even if it was without him. They could hardly be blamed.

Witnesses tell me what happened. Dwight Williams, who wears shorts without underwear and no shirt (what he escaped the flood waters in), says the night before, a New Orleans Police Department vehicle pulled up. “For whatever reason, the gentleman made a move to the car,” he says. “It took five seconds, the entire incident. The cop opened the door, shot him, and that was it.” Another black man walks past me, barking, “He didn’t stop. If we don’t stop, they got the right to shoot the f–out ya. I’m a refugee in my own country! They shot that old man. F–this here!”

There is more after that. More than you can believe, more than you can bear. And there is a reason why the American people should demand accountability from our elected officials. Katrina was an act of God. No one could have reasonably prevented it. But the aftermath has been a failure of our leadership.

Simply amazing.

This long, long New York Times Magazine piece, A 90’s Kind of Rivalry, is my gift to you. Beautifully written by Peter de Jonge, it’s almost impossible to find (thanks to the writer’s guild lawsuit) and I’m grateful to the person who posted it on their website.

De Jonge profiles Agassi and Sampras in tandem, exploring them as athletes and as men. It’s the most insightful piece of writing on tennis you’ll find outside of John Feinstein’s Hard Courts.

Some samples:

In many ways, their well-marketed public personas run exactly counter to the way they play. Agassi may seem daring when he screws in his earrings or laces up his black sneakers or shaves off all his body hair, but on the court, he is the far more conservative and repetitive player of the two. He is also the harder worker, the more compulsively prepared, and as some of Sampras’s recent matches have shown, the better-conditioned. And while Sampras may look like the boy that every father wants his daughter to bring home, he is all but uncoachable and plays with almost reckless abandon. . . .

It is Agassi, the putative bad boy whom Nike pitches as the creator of rock-and-roll tennis, who is the born-again Christian and, if you can take his old pal Barbra Streisand’s word for it, a “Zen master.” A therapy graduate and a voracious reader of pop-psych authors like Marianne Williamson and Tony Robbins whom Agassi has called “one of the most evolved people I’ve met”), Agassi is constantly seeking reassurances that he has changed, that he is getting better. Sampras, whose favorite line from literature is “Don’t ever tell anybody anything,” from “The Catcher in the Rye” . . .

On the real Pete Sampras:

One of the many revelations of the time I spent with Sampras is his foul mouth. Obscenities are such a weight-bearing element in his terse syntax that with the expletives deleted, often all that’s left is the name of the guilty. “[expletive] Rusedski!” he blurts out, for the sheer joy of it; later, when I remind him how frequently Brad Gilbert, Agassi’s notoriously gregarious coach, brings up the fact that Gilbert is four and four in the eight times he met Sampras as a player, he says, “[expletive] Brad!” He tries to point out the meaninglessness of the statistic. “I mean, this [expletive] guy here is 1-0 against me,” Sampras says, pointing to Annacone, who is wading in the shallow end with a silly grin, not quite sure whether to look proud or insulted. “You want to humble Brad, just ask him about the Slams,” says Sampras, who is well aware that, despite the $5 million in prize money that Gilbert has earned in a long career as a sort of overachieving bottom-feeder, he never advanced beyond the quarterfinals in any of the four major tournaments. “Just ask him about the Slams.” . . .

The more Sampras reveals of himself, the more it seems that his admiration for Agassi does not extend much beyond his ability to hit a tennis ball. When I ask what he specifically likes about Agassi, intending him to cite some attractive human quality, he draws a blank, then says, “I like the way he travels,” referring to Agassi’s private jet.

And about Agassi’s youth:

Agassi’s first tennis coach was his Armenian-born father, Mike Agassi, who had immigrated to the States after competing in the 1948 and 1952 Olympics for the Iranian boxing team. On the day that Andre first opened his eyes, Mike Agassi tied a tennis ball to a string and dangled it over his crib — “to get him to follow the ball.” When Andre was old enough to sit in a high chair, Mike taped half a Ping-Pong paddle to his hand and tossed balloons at him, “to teach him timing.” And a few years later, Mike put Andre on the cement court he had built in the backyard of the family’s Las Vegas home and began bombarding him with hundreds of balls a day, spat out by 11 machines capable of manufacturing every kind of spin or angle.

Mike Agassi had long harbored the goal that one of his children would be a champion. After the first three Agassis burned out early, Andre was his last, best hope. He was a pure prodigy, a toddler who hit with topspin, moving into the junior-tournament circuit at 7 and, before heturned 13, rallying with at least half a dozen pros who came through Vegas.

Through the lens of psychotherapy, Agassi now sees the earliest stages of his tennis education as a mild form of child abuse. In an interview with Tennis magazine, Jim Courier recalled a junior tournament at which Mike Agassi took Andre’s runner-up trophy and threw it in the trash. These days, communication between father and son is cordial but sparse. . . .

At 13, Andre was shipped off to the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, the notorious Florida tennis factory. Two days after his 16th birthday, Agassi turned professional, with Bollettieri, a law-school dropout who had never played competitive tennis, as his coach. In one early stretch as a pro, Agassi lost in the first round of nine straight tournaments, an experience that left him bawling on a Washington park bench, where he was comforted by a minister who traveled with the pro tour — the same minister who not long before had helped Agassi become a born-again Christian.

And on Sampras’s athletic genius:

According to Sampras family lore, Pete taught himself to play by hitting against a wall with a racquet he had found in the basement. One weekend morning when Pete was 9, his father, an engineer for NASA, took him to the Jack Kramer Tennis Club in Manhattan Beach, on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Pete Fischer, a pediatrician who grew up in Yonkers, was just getting off the court, and Sam Sampras asked him to hit with his son. When they were through, Sam asked how much Fischer would charge to do it regularly. “Nothing,” said Fischer. Thus began one of the least likely coach-athlete pairings in the history of sports. “You have to see him,” says Sampras of Fischer. “He’s bald with glasses, about 6 foot 2, has a bad back, is kind of hunched over and a little overweight. He’s like a mad scientist. He tried to put his brain in my body.” . . .

[Fischer] recalls that before he met Sampras, he had speculated with a friend what might happen “if a pure athlete, somebody like Willie Mays, had taken up tennis.” And now here he was, rallying with a silent little kid whom Fischer sensed with frightening surety might indeed be tennis’s Willie Mays. “He hit every ball square center, where he wanted to hit it,” Fischer says. “You can’t conceive of how good he was unless you were there.” (In fact, until Sampras won the U.S. Open, Fischer often feared that he had disastrously tampered with history by encouraging him to play tennis instead of baseball.)

This all goes far beyond tennis. Print out the story, take it home, and read it over the weekend between matches. You won’t be sorry.

The Wershovenist Pig argues that casino stocks are a good bet in the wake of the hurricane.

This New York Times story is not comforting. Andrew Sullivan understands the problems inherent in the Times story:

They were worried about partisan politics and how things might be “perceived” if they acted to respond to what was by then obviously a monumental crisis. Then there’s this caveat in the anonymous quote: “unless the security situation made it completely clear that she was unable to effectively execute her command authority and that lawlessness was the inevitable result.” Wasn’t that completely clear to many at that point? The first responders were overwhelmed and these politicians were worrying about gender issues and partisan politics? Given the fact that thousands of lives were at stake, “perception” is not or surely should not be an issue. Nor should petty fights over jurisdiction or legal wrangling. Nor should the relative incompetence of governor Blanco. If she was incompetent, then that’s all the more reason for Bush to have over-ruled her.