Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame Catherine Zeta-Jones for Marrying Michael Douglas

She is now eligible for AARP.

He's been eligible for it for 25 years.

September 25, 1944, 75 years ago: Michael Kirk Douglas is born in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

September 25, 1969, 50 years ago: Catherine Zeta-Jones is born in Swansea, Wales.

People who know me know that I have a hopeless celebrity crush on Catherine, and that it bugs me that, although we're roughly the same age, she married someone so much older with my name. (The fact that he was born in the city next-door to the town where I grew up has nothing to do with it.)

But can I really blame her?

Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame Catherine Zeta-Jones for Marrying Michael Douglas

5. A Sympathetic Ear. She had already been a celebrity in her native Britain for a few years, but she was just becoming a big star in America at the time they met, with her star turns in The Mask of Zorro and Entrapment. Having someone, literally, in-house who knew what it was like to be a big star in America was helpful.

4. Industry Cred. His friends and allies became hers, and helped steer her to the right projects.

3. The American President. No, not Trump -- or even the man who was President when they met, Bill Clinton. I'm talking about the movie Michael made in 1995, playing a fictional President, a widower who ends up dating an environmental lobbyist played by Annette Bening.

In 1990, Bening was 31, and Warren Beatty was 53, when they filmed Bugsy together, with Beatty playing Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, the gangster who helped make Las Vegas, and Bening played Virginia Hill, Siegel's mistress. (When they met, in 1945, Siegel was 39 and Hill was 29.)

Annette Bening, now 61; and Warren Beatty, now 82.

They have 2 sons and 2 daughters.

There had previously been a movie about Hill in 1974, titled simply Virginia Hill. It starred Dyan Cannon, then 37, and Harvey Keitel, actually younger at 35, as Siegel. But Cannon, too, married a much older actor: In 1965, at 28, she married Cary Grant, then 61. It lasted only 2 years, but it produced each's only child, actress Jennifer Grant.

By the time they met, Douglas was 54 and Zeta-Jones was 29, but Beatty and Bening were still together -- and they still are, as well. Surely, after having co-starred with Bening -- when Douglas was 51 and Bening was 37 -- it had to have occurred to Douglas that, if Beatty, also a man honored for his acting but notorious as a womanizer, could find true love in his 50s, maybe he could, too.

Incidentally, in The American President, while people objected to the widowed President Andrew Shepherd and the never-married Sydney Ellen Wade having a relationship on the grounds that he was the President and she was a lobbyist, the characters' apparent large age difference was never brought up.

2. Michael Douglas -- as he was then. True, he was already 54 years old, and he had costars playing his wife, or girlfriend, or mistress, when they should have been playing his daughter. But he wasn't elderly. He was still considered a very charismatic romantic leading man.

To put it another way: These actors turned 54 years old this year, or will: Kevin Costner, Charles Shaughnessy (Mistah Sheffield on The Nanny), Jeff Daniels, Kelsey Grammer, Bruce Willis, Jimmy Smits, Peter Gallagher, Kevin Conroy and Steven Culp. Each of them still gets taken seriously as a romantic lead, or an action hero, or even both.

1. They're Still Together. It's been rough at times, but they continue to work it out. Their son Dylan is now 19 and in college. Their daughter Carys is 16, and has already appeared on 2 magazine covers with her mother. Both inherited the "Douglas Dimple" made famous by Michael's father Kirk Douglas, now 102 years old and one of the last survivors of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

At Kirk Douglas' 100th birthday party.

Front: Kirk and wife Anne Buydens, who has also since turned 100.

Back: Carys, Michael, Catherine and Dylan.

Kirk's 1st wife, Michael's mother, Diana, died in 2015.

VERDICT: Not Guilty. It looks like they're going to stick with what works until it stops working.

UPDATE: Kirk Douglas died on February 5, 2020, at age 103.

Giorgio Chinaglia, 1947-2012

Imagine that Babe Ruth, after elevating baseball to new heights -- or Red Grange in football, or Michael Jordan in basketball, or Wayne Gretzky in hockey -- had destroyed the league he had helped make.

That couldn't happen, right?

It did. And it is a major reason why American soccer fell a generation behind.

*

Giorgio Chinaglia (Key-NAHL-ya, no middle name) was born on January 24, 1947 in Carrara, Tuscany, Italy. The country's post-World War II unemployment led his father to pick up the family and move to Wales in 1955.

At the age of 13, Giorgio was signed as an apprentice by Swansea Town Association Football Club, the team now known as Swansea City A.F.C. In 1964, he made his senior debut for "The Swans," against Rotherham United in an FA Cup match. In 1965, Swansea won the West Wales Senior Cup, defeating Llanelli (a name that sounds both Welsh and Italian, interestingly enough) 3-0 in the Final, with Chinaglia scoring one of the goals.

In 1966, with compulsory military service still in effect in Italy, the family returned so that Giorgio could serve. He said it straightened him out and getting his career on track: "Otherwise, I'd probably still be in Wales, slogging it out in the mud, and drinking ale. The Italian Army has a special regiment for soccer players, so all I did in the service was to train all day, and when my club had a game, get a pass."

Because he had played professionally outside of Italy, the rules of the time, set by the Lega Nazionale Professionisti, meant that he could not play in the top division, Serie A, for 3 years. He signed with Massese, in Serie C, the 3rd division. He soon switched to Naples club Internapoli, before his ban was up in 1969.

At that point, he signed for Società Sportiva Lazio, starring for them through 1976. The club had been sponsoring a soccer (or "football," or "calcio" as they would say in Italy) team since 1900, but had never won Italy's top division. In the 1972-73 season, they came close to winning it, losing out only on the final day of the season. In 1973-74, they finally won it, led by striker Chinaglia (who led the league in goals), centreback and captain Giuseppe Wilson (son of an Englishman and a woman from Naples), and midfielders Luciano Re Cecconi and Mario Frustalupi.

S.S. Lazio, or just "Lazio" (LOT-zee-oh), is named for its administrative region, one of 20 of what Italy calls what Americans would call a State. It contains the national capital, Rome. The other major Roman club is named for the city: Associazione Sportiva Roma, or A.S. Roma, or just "Roma."

It is one of the nastiest rivalries in European sport. Roma have traditionally catered to the leftists in the Rome area, while Lazio have a notoriously right-wing fan base, epitomized by a later striker, the avowed fascist Paolo Di Canio, still regarded as the club's greatest hero.

Both Roma and Lazio are known for their ultras, the former's in the Curva Sud (south curve) of Rome's Stadio Olimpico, the latter's in the Curva Nord (north curve). Trouble is to be expected: If you want to see a home game against either club, do not make it one in which they are playing each other, a Derby della Capitale. (Roma is planning to move to a new stadium for the 2018-19 season, leaving the Olimpico to Lazio. Whether that will help the crowd situation, I don't know.)

Lazio's players, especially then (and in the later case of Di Canio), were known to be as crazy as their fans. All the players I mentioned, including Chinaglia, were party animals. Re Cecconi met his fate in one crazy endeavor: On January 18, 1977, he and 2 teammates pretended to rob a friend's jewelry store. Their guns were fakes. The friend's was not, and he shot Re Cecconi, dead at age 28. His last words were, "It was a joke! It was a joke... "

*

By that point, Chinaglia was already gone. He thought of himself as a businessman, and was angry at Italy's corporate laws and taxes. In 1972, when Lazio toured America, he began investing in American real estate. Being selected, but hardly used, for Italy in the 1974 World Cup may have been the last straw. In 1975, he bought a house in Englewood, Bergen County, New Jersey, and told Clive Toye, the president of the North American Soccer League's New York Cosmos, that he wanted to play for them. If Toye wouldn't buy him from Lazio, he said he would buy his own team.

Toye bought him from Lazio for the 1976 season. He joined Brazilian legends Pelé and Carlos Alberto, and German titan Franz Beckenbauer. In 1977 (Pelé's last season), 1978, 1980 and 1982, the Cosmos won the Soccer Bowl, the NASL's championship. In 1978 and '79, he was joined by former Lazio teammate Giuseppe Wilson.

Der Kaiser, O Rei and Don Giorgio.

Three giants of the other kind

of football at Giants Stadium.

Giorgio was a goal machine. Not quite as much of one as he thought he was. He thought he was so much of one, he would refuse to pass to Pelé. With Pelé retired, Chinaglia became the team's most popular player.

He played in 5 Soccer Bowls, scoring in 4 of them, and scoring the winner in 3 of them. He led the NASL in scoring 4 times. He set the League record with 34 regular-season goals in 1978. He scored 32 in 1980. He scored 16 hat tricks for the Cosmos. He scored 7 goals in a Playoff game against the Tulsa Roughnecks in 1980. He was named NASL Most Valuable Player in 1981, even though the Cosmos lost the Soccer Bowl to the Chicago Sting.

He was flamboyant. He was arrogant. He would say to his opponents, "Look at me. I am Giorgio Chinaglia. I beat you!" For a country whose biggest athletes in recent times had included Reggie Jackson, Pete Rose, Bill Walton, and, of course, Muhammad Ali, this was something to eat up.

"Look at me. I am Giorgio Chinaglia. I beat you!"

But his massive ego would lead to his downfall, and that of the team, and that of the entire League. For in America, a sports league cannot survive at the major league level if it doesn't have a New York team that is financially stable.

Ban Johnson of baseball's American League knew this as early as 1902. This nearly doomed the NFL in 1925, and the AFL in the early 1960s, before things got straightened out in each. The strength of the Nets probably kept the ABA alive as long as it did, but not having a sound New York team doomed the WFL in 1975 (and would later hurt the USFL in the mid-1980s).

By 1984, the days of the Cosmos packing the 77,000-seat Giants Stadium, or at least making it look like they could if they could simply sign the next Pelé (Would that have been Italy's Paolo Rossi? Brazil's Dr. Sócrates? France's Michel Platini? Probably Argentina's Diego Maradona, but he wasn't all that famous yet), were over. Due to expenditures on star power, the team had never turned a profit. And with Chinaglia having retired at the end of the previous season, they missed the Playoffs for the 1st time in 9 years, and were now desperate, just a year and a half after winning their 5th title. (They had also won in 1972, before Pelé.)

Chinaglia had built a strong friendship with team owner Steve Ross, and convinced Ross to sell him 60 percent of the team's ownership. This was a big mistake. Then Chinaglia made an even bigger mistake: Handing operational control of the team to Peppe Pinton, his personal assistant. Pinton could easily have been a target for the timeless soccer chant, "You don't know what you're doing!" He believed his job was to do what Chinaglia would want, not to do what was best for the team.

The Cosmos were bankrupt. After the 1984 season, the NASL, also bankrupt, collapsed. Without a genuine major league, American soccer suffered until the staging of the World Cup in 1994 and the founding of Major League Soccer in 1996.

Chinaglia moved the Cosmos into the Nassau Coliseum, and into the Major Indoor Soccer League (MISL). But indoor soccer, played on artificial turf on a much narrower and shorter field, one that could fit inside a hockey rink, whose boards meant that there was no out-of-bounds unless you kicked the ball into the seats, was a very different game. Most players were used to the outdoor version, and did not excel. Likewise, most of the players who did well in the MISL had not done well in the outdoor, regular-sized version. After the 1985 season, the original New York Cosmos were no more.

*

Chinaglia, however, was not bankrupt. His real estate holdings saw to that. In 2006, he attempted to buy Lazio. But Italian authorities suspected that he was being financed by the Camorra, the Naples version of the Mafia, and he had to back out. He returned to America, and never set foot in Italy again, fearing that he would be imprisoned.

His English always good, due to having spent much of his youth in Wales, he hosted The Football Show on Sirius Satellite Radio. Also in 2006, he sat for an interview for the documentary Once In a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos. He put his full ego on display. And others who were interviewed had, outside of how good his scoring touch was, nothing good to say about him.

Like so many kids in the New York Tri-State Area in the Jimmy Carter term and the 1st Ronald Reagan term, I was crazy about him. I had no idea he not only wasn't a good person, but that he had helped wreck the team and, indeed, the entire League.

When Major League Soccer was founded, they established a New York team, and wanted to call it the Cosmos. But Pinton still held the legal rights to the Cosmos name and all its various trademarks. He refused to let MLS have it. So the team became the New York/New Jersey MetroStars, and later the New York Red Bulls. Meanwhile, other old NASL names were used in MLS: The San Jose Earthquakes, the Portland Timbers, the Seattle Sounders and the Vancouver Whitecaps.

In 2009, Pinton sold his Cosmos interests, and a new team with the name was announced in August 2010, with Pelé involved (in name only). MLS rejected this expansion franchise, as they didn't have a stadium deal in place -- unlike New York City FC, which is partly owned by the Yankees as well as Manchester City FC, and was able to play at Yankee Stadium. The new Cosmos began play in August 2011.

Giorgio Chinaglia was named an "international ambassador" for the new Cosmos. But he did not have much of a chance to enjoy this. He died of a heart attack 3 days ago, April 1, 2012, in Naples. That's Naples, Florida, not Naples, Italy. He was 65 years old.

He was married twice, first to Connie Eruzione, a cousin of American Olympic hockey legend Mike Eruzione. He had 3 children, daughters Cynthia and Stephanie, and, in between, son Giorgio Jr.

*

UPDATE: The new Cosmos -- known to some as the "CosFauxs" for their pathetic attempts to suggest that they're the same team that won 5 League titles -- began league play in the new North American Soccer League in 2013, playing home games at Hofstra University's 11,929-seat Shuart Stadium in Hempstead, Long Island, across from the Nassau Coliseum -- which the original Cosmos had used in the 1972 and '73 seasons.

In 2014, in one of their period attempts to tie their "history" in with that of the original team, they retired Giorgio Chinaglia's Number 9, as they had previously retired 10 for Pelé, who is still a club ambassador. They've won the NASL title in 2013, 2015 and 2016, and were runners-up in 2017. In 2013, they famously defeated the Red Bulls in a U.S. Open Cup match. In 2015, they did the same to NYCFC.

No matter: They remain the 3rd-biggest soccer team in the Tri-State Area, an afterthought. They played at MCU Park on Coney Island, home of the Mets' farm team, the Brooklyn Cyclones, in 2017 and 2018. In 2019, they moved back to nearly where they started, to the 10,102-seat Mitchel Field, just north of the Hofstra campus and the Nassau Coliseum. There are, once again, a small club in Hempstead.

They may have had Spanish icon Raúl, but nobody thinks of them as the club of Pelé, of Carlos Alberto, of Beckenbauer, of Dutch stars Johan Neeskens and Wim Rijsbergen, of Yugoslavs Vladislav Bogićević and Werner Roth, of Chinaglia.

"Look at me. I am Giorgio Chinaglia. I beat you!"

Giorgio Chinaglia remains a legend. If he were still alive, he'd tell you himself. Alas, he would not want all of his legend to be told.

He did not believe that he could return to Italy alive. He did so in death, and was buried in Rome, at Cimitero Flaminio.

All Thumbs With Football; Gary Speed, 1969-2011

Thumbs down to East Brunswick. I knew my Dear Old Alma Mater was going to lose the Thanksgiving game to the Purple Scum, probably badly... but 40-7 after 3 quarters? No, the final score of 40-20 does us no favors. Come on, have some pride.

Thumbs down to Rutgers. All the Scarlet Knights had to do was beat Connecticut, hardly a great team, to claim at least a share of the Big East title and have a shot at a Bowl Championship Series berth. It was almost identical to the EB-Old Bridge game: 40-10 after 3 quarters, before closing to 40-22.

A few years ago, Greg Schiano told us, "It's time." But, as Keith Sargent said in the Home News Tribune, the future never comes. Schiano has had more time to build a champion than Rex Ryan has had, so when does he start to get questioned? The fact that RU had the chance this season, after a losing season last year, speaks well of Schiano. The fact that this seems to be the furthest he can take the program does not.

Thumbs up to the Jets. They beat the Buffalo Bills 28-24. This was a character-testing game, and they came through, especially Mark Sanchez. Whatever his problems are, they do not include a lack of guts. I can question his intelligence, his judgment, and his execution; but not his poise or his courage. (UPDATE: The Jets ended up losing their last 3 games to finish 8-8 and miss the Playoffs.)

Thumbs up to the Green Bay Packers. They beat the Detroit Lions on Thanksgiving, 27-15, to advance to 11-0. If Sports Illustrated doesn't name Aaron Rodgers their 2011 Sportsman of the Year, they're going to have a lot of explaining to do.

(UPDATE: They split it between the coaches of college basketball's National Champions, Mike Krzyzewski of Duke and Pat Summitt of Tennessee. This was understandable. The defending champion Packers finished 15-1, but were knocked out of the Playoffs by the Giants.)

Thumbs up to the Detroit Lions. Yes, the Packers beat them pretty badly, but they're moving in the right direction. They even acted quickly to punish Ndamukong Suh, which is a good sign: They not only want to win, but also to win in the right way. Some teams (the Pats of the last few years, the Raiders of the 1970s and '80s) wanted to win in the worst way; the Lions want to win in the best way. (UPDATE: They finished 10-6 and made the Playoffs.)

Thumbs down to Ndamukong Suh. You're a great talent, and you're ruining it. You could become the new Mean Joe Greene. Instead, you're becoming the new Albert Haynesworth -- and as Dick Smothers would say, "That was not a compliment!"

Thumbs down to the people behind the BCS. Regardless of whether Louisiana State wins or loses the Southeastern Conference Championship Game, you're going to have Alabama in your BCS National Championship Game -- and they didn't even win their Division of the SEC!

Thumbs up to the University of Kentucky. The Wildcats beat Tennessee and claimed the Old Bourbon Barrel for the first time in 26 years.

Thumbs up to the University of Wisconsin. The Badgers beat Penn State 45-7, and advanced to the 1st-ever Big 10 Championship Game. Any time Paterno State loses, it's good. This time, they got their asses kicked. Of course, as they now know, there are worse things that can happen to a young male's rear end at Penn State.

Thumbs down to all this conference realignment. Although it's making rivalries that always could, and perhaps should, have been, like Nebraska vs. Iowa (the States do border each other), it's also breaking up good ones, like Nebraska vs. Oklahoma and the "Backyard Brawl" between Pittsburgh and West Virginia. But if Florida vs. Florida State, Georgia vs. Georgia Tech, South Carolina vs. Clemson, and Oklahoma vs. Texas can survive realignments, maybe others can as well.

Finally, thumbs up to the British Columbia Lions, who won the Grey Cup, Canada's "Super Bowl," on their home field in Vancouver, BC Place, beating the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. This was their 6th Canadian Football League Championship.

And, unlike when the Vancouver Canucks lost the Stanley Cup Finals earlier this year, the locals did not riot. So that's 6 titles for the BC Lions, while Vancouver has not won a Stanley Cup since 1915.

*

Two days ago, soccer figure Gary Speed appeared on the BBC One TV show Football Focus, and joined his former Newcastle United teammate Alan Shearer to watch that team play Manchester United at Man U's Old Trafford. No one seemed to think anything was wrong.

Yesterday, his wife Louise found him dead in the garage at their home in Huntington, Cheshire, England. He had hanged himself.

Gary Andrew Speed was born on September 8, 1969 -- making him 3 months older than I am -- in Mancot, Flintshire, Wales. He grew up on the street where Kevin Ratcliffe, then captain of Liverpool-based team Everton FC, lived. As Liverpool is near Wales, many people in the Principality support Everton, and many others support Liverpool FC. Also from Wales, and on the great Everton teams of the 1980s, were goalkeeper Neville Southall and left back Pat Van Den Hauwe. So was midfielder Barry Horne, a star (along with Southall) of their 1995 FA Cup winners.

A midfielder, with pace to match his name, Speed was signed by Yorkshire club Leeds United, and helped them win the Football League Division One title in 1992 -- the last title under the old banner, before the English top flight became known as the Premier League.

Note the White Rose of the House of York,

still the symbol of Yorkshire, on Leeds' badge.

In 1996, he was sold to the club he loved growing up, Everton. A year later, Howard Wilkinson, his manager at Leeds, became his manager again, but their relationship soured. In 1998, he was sold to Newcastle United, and helped them reach the FA Cup Final that year (although they lost to North London team Arsenal) and the next (losing to Man United). In 2002, he helped Newcastle qualify for the UEFA Champions League.

He was sold to Lancashire team Bolton Wanderers in 2004, and stayed with them until 2008. They sold him to Yorkshire team Sheffield United, and he played the last 2 seasons of his career with them. He scored 104 goals in his career, and was known for scoring with headers.

He appeared 85 times for the Wales national team between 1990 and 2004, eventually serving as their Captain 44 times. Rarely troubled by injury or suspension, at the time of his retirement, he held the record for the most appearances in the Premier League at 535, until it was surpassed by David James; and only his Everton teammate Southall had made more appearances for Wales.

He retired as a player when Sheffield United named him manager. Only 4 months later, on December 11, 2010, he was named manager of his national team. As usual, Wales struggled, and by August 2011, they were ranked 117th in the world (out of 211 "nations" recognized by FIFA, the world's governing body for soccer). But 2 wins in the Autumn got them up to 45th.

Speed as Wales manager,

with one of his successors as team Captain,

Aaron Ramsey of Arsenal.

He married Louise in 1996, and had sons Tommy and Eddie. In 2010, he was awarded an MBE: Member of the Order of the British Empire. He was still manager of Wales at the time of his death. He was 42 years old.

No one has been able to explain why a man who seemed to have so much to look forward to, and so much respect among his peers, and so many friends, would take his own life.

UPDATE: He didn't leave a suicide note, so no one really knows why he did it. It has been suggested that he was depressed. It is also possible that, with his reputation for heading the ball, he may have sustained brain damage, similar to American football players, and a few other British soccer stars. He was cremated, so there is no gravesite.