After years of opening the Washington Post and the Annapolis Capital daily to check the sports sections for the feats of the Centrowitz children and my son Jay (lacrosse and soccer) at Broadneck High School outside of downtown Annapolis, I was pleasantly shocked to see the name “Matt Centrowitz” on the cover of City Paper (“ ‘I Coach. You Run,’ ” 12/8). I am transitioning back to living in Washington, where Jay was born, and it looked like a taste of home. Although I first expected a story about son Matt, thinking maybe he had transferred to American University, I was very surprised to read a story about his dad instead. Yes, I knew Coach Centrowitz coached his children and about his earlier feats as a runner, but the story was unexpected and quite a coincidence for me.

But two comments: First, I’m from New York City, too, and the beginning of your story, in what I view as an attempt to make Coach Centrowitz sound “NYC tough” by discussing his bodily needs, was unnecessary. We baby boomers of NYC heritage are tough by nature, and his coaching methodology is really tough, but the way you approached it was inappropriate. Secondly, you missed an opportunity we need to take at every possibility: the lauding of a family man who brought up great children who excel in running like their father did and who have been shown to be great sportsmen and -women. That feat may even be rarer than Coach Centrowitz’s success at American University and one he should be very proud of!

Jery Y. Huntley
Columbia Heights

Declaration of No Dependents

It is a pity that Benjy Ferree, the author of the song “Private Honeymoon” (One Track Mind, 12/8), put all his research into Ken Burns’ film about Thomas Jefferson instead of the Web page tjheritage.org. Here he would have found that DNA proved that the Jefferson/Woodson claim in the film was nonexistent. There was no match. Click on the Jefferson-Hemings Scholars Commission Report (by 13 prominent scholars) who found no proof that Thomas Jefferson fathered any slave child.

Herbert Barger
Ft. Washington, Md.

Tool Talk

Dan Savage’s advice that CAP (the young man who had lost two girlfriends because they felt his 4.5-inch penis did not penetrate enough for sufficiently “sensational” intercourse) should avoid surgery is right, but it shows Savage’s crudely misanthropic underlying propensity to reduce human beings to empty sex objects (Savage Love, 11/10).

Savage, who sometimes derides married heterosexuals as “breeders,” fails to read into CAP’s cri de coeur a more basic, and more human, concern about being able to successfully reproduce (attracting and holding a suitable mate, having to rely on one of her previous amours to breach her hymen, being able to impregnate her with healthy children).

Savage should have told CAP his anatomy is unusual but not, in the vernacular of ethics, a “departure from the plan of creation” so as to be grotesque, and that the women who dismissed him for it are prima donnas who would likely be unwilling to accept other aspects of him as well. That is, he is better off parting ways with them before he invested more time and commitment.

Savage should have told CAP to look for a woman with her own physical insecurities, such as a flat front. Such a woman might have trouble nursing her infant, but both members of such a partnership would be mutually empathetic to one another’s being not quite physically optimal.

Then he should have suggested CAP consider having responded by sweeping each of his former girlfriends off their feet into a standing or kneeling “69” and, regardless of whether she reciprocated, bringing her to sensation without any penetration, a kind of unverbalized reductio ad absurdum of her prior complaint, which might win for him at least some respect from each of them.

Dino Drudi
Michigan Park