Did Russia invent baseball? Did Romania?

(Abner Doubleday)

Here’s a holy-cow revelation. Baseball—what Walt Whitman called “our game, the American game;” what historian Jacques Barzun recommended as the ideal window to “know the heart and mind of America”—may be just another U.S. import.

More shocking: There are assertions out there that baseball was invented on the other side of the Iron Curtain, in lands that the old Commie-baiter Joe McCarthy judged to be as un-American as you can get.

The New York Times recently published a story that cited Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s claim that baseball had its roots in the Russian heartland. (Not surprisingly, current Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin—always eager to disparage Western primacy—has seconded Stalin on the matter.)

That’s not all. In 1990, a Romanian sports official suggested to me—more diplomatically, but just as confidently—that baseball very well could have originated in a small Transylvanian village more than 200 years ago.

Naturally, such a revelation smacks of heresy to the hot-dog, apple-pie faithful. (And, to some extent, sounds a bit like self-serving boasts by foreign elements.) But this is what you get when you rummage around in the dustbin of history—a debate of baseball evolution (with characteristics developed over time and great distances) as opposed to baseball’s New World creationism (fully formed in its current structure right here in the U.S. of A.)

Let us first acknowledge that scholars, while long ago dismissing as myth that Civil War general Abner Doubleday invented the game in rural Cooperstown, N.Y., nevertheless recognize Elysian Fields in Hoboken, N.J., as the sport’s mid-1800s birthplace. Baseball archaeologists do accept that the sport likely was influenced by the English games of rounders and cricket. But shaped by a Russian stick-and-ball game called lapta? Or Romania’s oina?

The Times cited a 2003 Moscow newspaper article in which the vice-president of the Russian Lapta Federation, Sergei Fokin, theorized that “Russian immigrants or Jews from Odessa [now part of Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire] brought lapta to America, and baseball evolved from there.”

Folkin argued that “lapta is a much older game, and there are so many similar concepts: tagging runners out, hitting and catching fly balls, for example.”

(Russian lapta)

But what about the lapta “pitcher,” a member of the batting team who kneels by the batter and serves up a lazy underhand toss?

As for Romania’s oina—pronounced OYN-yah—I was on assignment in Bucharest in the spring of 1990 just as the country officially revived baseball, which had been banned for a half-century because Communist despot Nicolae Ceausescu considered it a capitalist sport. When the hated Ceausescu was executed amid the Eastern bloc upheaval shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a fellow named Cristian Costescu was appointed national baseball chief, based on his previous job running the oina federation.

(Romanian oina team)

Oina, he contended, “was exactly like baseball” in its original form in the southern Romanian village of Alba Iulia and was brought to the United States by two immigrants in the early 1800s. Costescu said those immigrants became soldiers in the U.S. Army and taught their game to fellow troops—who happened to be commanded by none other than Abner Doubleday.

The Doubleday reference, as noted above, could be a disqualifying factor in Costescu’s oina-baseball timeline. (Oina, by the way, employs the same “pitcher” role as lapta, which makes it closer to T-ball than baseball.) Furthermore, the Russians’ lapta-to-baseball story loses a bit of credibility for anyone who witnessed the 1990 baseball game between the U.S. and USSR during the now-defunct Goodwill Games in Seattle.

At the time, because baseball was about to become an Olympic medal sport for the first time at the ’92 Barcelona Games, nations such as Romania and the about-to-collapse Soviet Union were eager to hone their diamond bona fides. Yet all indications were that they were starting from scratch.

The Soviets had recruited an American businessman named Rick Spooner, who was based in Moscow, to work with the natives. “About two years ago,” Spooner told me then, “a batter got hit in the back with a fastball, turned around and said to me, ‘Richard, what does that mean?’ I said, ‘Boris, that means you go to first base.’”

A cycling coach, Vladimir Bogatyrev, who never had seen baseball until he toured Cuba with his cycling team, was hired to manage the national team. Three baseball diamonds hurriedly were built in the USSR but, when the Soviets got to the Goodwill Games in Seattle in the summer of ’90, they mostly were mimicking American players’ habits of chewing tobacco and spitting, slapping high fives and tipping their caps—with rudimentary evidence of mastering pitching, hitting and fielding skills. They lost that game to the Yanks, 17-0.

“Chew tobacco?” Soviet catcher Vadim Kulakov said. When he smiled, his teeth showed the answer. “Red Man,” he said.

First baseman Ilya Onokov proudly related that, like so many Major Leaguers he had studied, he had a nickname, which he reported in clear but accented English. “WACK-yoom CLAY-nar,” he said. The vacuum cleaner.

Through five Olympic cycles, neither the Soviet Union/Russian team nor the Romanians ever qualified for the Games. But, now that baseball has been reinstated for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, after being dropped from 2012 and 2016, there surely will be renewed efforts to ramp up baseball commitments in those countries.

Possibly, we again will hear their cases for having birthed the sport.

In 1990 Costescu, the Romanian official, showed me some articles he had published on the history of oina, one of which asked, “Baseball=oina?” Just so he would not be accused of outright plagiarism, Costescu offered, tactfully: “We are not saying Romanians invented baseball. We are saying this: We would not like someone else to tell us that oina was invented by others.”

That’s a deal. (But we Yanks reserve the right to keep calling it the “World” Series, whether the lone non-U.S. team from Toronto makes it or not.)

The question of protests

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With any big news story, there really are more questions than answers. Has Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand during the national anthem before NFL games enlightened the public about racial inequities in America? Or has it merely empowered the scribes and Pharisees—talking heads and comportment police—to lecture over what constitutes an appropriate protest?

Has Kaepernick sparked a debate about police treatment of minorities, which is his stated intention? Or has he fueled an argument about whether he, as a $19-million-a-year backup quarterback, is in any position to speak for the oppressed?

By not participating in what his critics consider an act of patriotism, is he disrespecting American military troops and those who serve the country? Or he is reinforcing what the anthem and flag stand for—the freedom of expression guaranteed by the First Amendment?

Should we be talking about this?

For the animated adult cartoon “South Park,” to which nothing is off limits, assumptions of uncompromising certainties in the Kaepernick case are skewered by its satiric rewriting of the Star-Spangled Banner’s lyrics:

Colin Kaepernick is great.

Cops are pigs, cops are pigs.

Wait, someone just took my stuff, I need to call the cops.

Oh, no, I just said cops are pigs.

Who’s gonna help me get my stuff?

Why did I listen to Colin Kaepernick? He’s not even any good.

Oh, I just got all my stuff back.

Cops are pigs again, cops are pigs.

Colin Kaepernick is a good backup….

As a career sports journalist, I was struck by the thoughtful observations of SUNY-Oswego communications professor Brian Moritz, a former sportswriter, who mulled whether reports subsequent to Kaepernick’s first protest on Aug. 26 somehow are hijacking his original intent.

“If two of the most primary news values are conflict (aka disagreements) and deviance (something outside the norm),” Moritz wrote on his sportsmediaguy.com Web site, “then it’s natural for reporters to focus on people who disagree loudly with Kaepernick. Ambivalence is not a great news value, especially not if one or more players voice strong disapproval of Kaepernick’s actions. Those disapproving voices get amplified in the follow-up stories (because they fit the established news values), and I wonder how much that amplification inadvertently isolates Kaepernick and his position.

“The point,” Mortiz added, “is not whether Kaepernick is right or wrong. We’re grownups. We’re allowed to disagree. The point is whether the way we…cover a story effects public perception of the issues involved.”

Does it stray from Kaepernick’s message to know that a principal in Florida told students they would be ejected from sports events if they didn’t stand for the national anthem? Or that a Massachusetts high school football player was threatened with suspension if he mimicked Kaepernick? That presidential candidate Donald Trump invited Kaepernick to leave the country and Iowa congressman Steve King compared a player’s kneeling during the anthem akin to “activism that is sympathetic to ISIS”?

According to a report in the U.K.-based Telegraph, an Alabama preacher informed a high school football crowd, “If you don’t want to stand for the national anthem, you can line up over there by the fence and let our military personnel take a few shots at you.”

Perhaps it further inflames Kaepernick’s detractors that Wesley Morris, in a New York Times Magazine essay, pointed to the football establishment’s long history of seeking “to conflate itself with the military, making it easy to confuse players with troops and political protest with treason.” Morris argued that “modern patriotism has become Kabuki citizenship” through rituals that have turned national loyalty into “a matter of optics—of theater.”

A few other pros have joined Kaepernick’s no-standing stance during pre-game anthems. As the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times noted, the Supreme Court in 1943 established that citizens cannot be forced to pledge allegiance to the American flag or engage in other patriotic demonstrations, and a 1969 ruling reinforced the constitutional right to express political opinions as long as they don’t impose on “the rights of others.”

In the end, it does not appear that Kaepernick has endangered anyone, with the possible exception of himself. He “has placed his livelihood in peril in the service of his conscience,” contended Penn State professor Abraham Iqbal Khan in a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette opinion piece, calling that “a risk that merits our attention.”

Meanwhile, it surely does no good that Fox Sports commentator Jason Whitlock—like Kaepernick, an African-American—has questioned not only Kaepernick’s integrity and football ability, but also his blackness?

“This kid was about Instagram models, tattoos, his abs and building up the Colin Kaepernick brand—until the very moment he loses his starting quarterback job,” Whitlock said, “and now he’s out here and he’s ‘Martin Luther Cornrow.’ And he’s got cornrows, he’s Allen Iverson, he’s Angela Davis. I don’t buy it.”

Jason Whitlock, by the way, was working as a scribe for the Kansas City Star in 2009 when he similarly lit into Serena Williams—at the time a champion of 11 Grand Slam tennis tournaments—for being overweight and deficient of “guts….an underachiever [who] lacks the courage to fulfill her destiny.”

To that, Williams, who since has won 11 more Slam events, had a question: “Who is Jason Whitlock?”

Mozart and football

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The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra was well into its forceful, menacing rendition of The Requiem when I thought of New York Jets training camp, in progress just a few miles from Lincoln Center. Not because of conductor Louis Langree’s physical exertions—slashing the air with his arms, balling his fists, pointing and exhorting the musicians and chorus, sort of a Peyton Manning of maestros. Rather, I was reminded of what Langree had told me in a discussion of classical music in a football setting nine years earlier.

At the time, Jets head coach Eric Mangini had embarked on a brief—and arguably unsuccessful—experiment in which he piped the most culturally refined symphonic sounds into the heads of his gridiron behemoths during study portions of camp. Mangini was inspired by the so-called “Mozart Effect,” which suggests that listening to the 18^th-Century master’s work makes a person smarter.

Langree, as director of the Mostly Mozart Festival since 2002, was an obvious man to query on the topic. In a phone interview, he confessed that he had “no idea” whether Mozart’s music stimulated learning, though he said he had “heard there were some studies on farms” in which “they put the cows in stables and at night put on different music. Michael Jackson. Beethoven. Duke Ellington. And when they played Mozart, the cows gave the biggest amount of milk.”

Langree, a Frenchman, admitted limited knowledge of American football. “I’ve heard of the Jets. I don’t know how many players there are on a team,” he said.

But he suggested that to promote more concentration by Jets players, or any workers, he might play Mozart’s last movement of the Jupiter Symphony (Symphony No. 41), which he described as “a vision like the time of enlightenment.” More to the point, and this is what struck me during the recent concert, he said he might attempt to provoke players’ aggression with “excerpts from The Requiem. This is music panic, almost. Truly hell, or fear of hell. The end of the world.”

Ominous. Rousing. Smash-mouth music. Hit-em-again, hit-em-again. Harder. Harder.

It should be noted that Eric Mangini, like Mozart, was a fellow who found unusual success at an early age in the field of his endeavor and, like Mozart (who was composing music at 5 years old), was labeled a “genius” by many critics for a willingness to break the molds of his profession. In 2006, Mangini not only was the youngest head coach in the National Football League, at 35, but also was named his conference’s coach of the year when the Jets won 10 of 16 games.

It was in August of 2007, however, that he attempted the Mozart project—a true rejiggering of the football DNA—and the team wound up going 4-12. In 2008, after an 8-3 start, the Jets lost four of their last five games and Mangini was fired.

Nevertheless, just exposed to the Mostly Mozart production, I am inclined to ascribe to a Leo Tolstoy observation that “music is the shorthand of emotion” and is therefore ideally suited to assertive sports activity. At last year’s U.S. Open tennis championships, by the way, there was a harpist performing just outside the player entrance.

Likewise, at the 1987 Pan American Games in Indianapolis, a woman named Diane Evans, a member of the Indianapolis Symphony, played a harp in the foyer of the hall that was housing the Games’ weightlifting competition. All manner of grunting and groaning was going on inside the building, while Evans argued that harps and symphony halls “are perfectly appropriate” in the athletic setting. She had taken in the Pan Am baseball competition, and decided that the pitcher warming up was “just slow pieces followed by faster pieces.” She asked, “Do you know what an etude is?”

I had to look it up. It is a musical composition for the development of a specific point of technique. Strikingly similar, one could argue, to a drill that helps offensive linemen refine their footwork to improve blocking ability. Or a workout that hones a pass receiver’s routes.

So: Virtuosity in different forms. Mostly.

Centrowitz, reclycled

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“Are you kidding me?”

It was a good question, one that Matthew Centrowitz said he put to “everyone I know” in the moments after he won the Olympic 1500-meter final, having shocked three-time world champion and 2008 Olympic gold medalist Asbel Kiprop of Kenya as well as the rest of the field. “Everyone” included Matthew’s father, Matt Centrowitz Sr., who was celebrating wildly in the stands of Rio de Janeiro’s Maracana Stadium as his son took a victory lap.

“Are you —– kidding me?” Matt Sr. shouted back. Whereupon the two commenced volleying the phrase back and forth.

Kiprop aside, it has been Olympic doctrine that Americans just don’t come through in the so-called “metric mile,” 120 yards shy of a mile, which vies with the 100-meter dash as the most appealing of track and field’s events. The last Yank to prevail at that captivating Olympic distance, in 1908, was Mel Sheppard, a man whose application to become a New York City policeman somehow was rejected on the basis of a “weak heart.”

So it could be said that, in Rio, Centrowitz’s karma ran over Olympic prognosticator’s dogma. A real dent in accepted belief. In 1912 (Abel Kiviat), 1936 (Glenn Cunningham), 1968 and 1972 (Jim Ryun), Americans were pre-race favorites based on the fact that they held the world record in either the mile or 1500—or both—entering the Games, yet repeatedly failed to win gold, until it became normal procedure. Other legitimate U.S. threats at the distance, Marty Liquori in the 1970s and Alan Webb in 2004, also succumbed short of Olympic glory to injury or strategic muddles.

Anyway, for those of us who began reporting on track and field happenings in prehistoric times, there were lots of echoes to young Centrowitz’ breakthrough, beyond repeated Are-you-kidding-me astonishment. It was four decades ago that I covered a handful of Matt Centrowitz Sr.’s elite races, including his runner-up finish in the 1976 U.S. Olympic trials at 1500 meters and his victory in the 1980 trials at 5,000 meters.

(I also interviewed Abel Kiviat, by the way. Not during his 1912 Games in Stockholm. Rather, in 1982, when Kiviat was then the oldest living U.S. Olympian at 90, we chatted about his disappointment in losing the 1912 Olympic 1500 by a tenth of a second, and about his Olympic roommate, a fellow named Jim Thorpe, whom Kiviat remembered fondly.)

EUGENE, OR - JUNE 29: Matt Centrowitz (white jersey) and Dick Buerkle #51 (red jersey) compete in the final of the Men's 5000 meter event of the 1980 USA Track and Field Olympic Trials held on June 29, 1980 at Hayward Field on the campus of the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon. (Photo by David Madison/Getty Images

(Matt Sr., 1980)

The senior Centrowitz is a native of The Bronx who had come to prominence at Power Memorial High School in Manhattan—basketball hall-of-famer Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s school, since closed—and for one year at Manhattan College before transferring to the University of Oregon, then and now a track powerhouse. He was a genuine mile star in his time, having broken the school record of the late Oregon legend Steve Prefontaine, though Centrowitz’ 1976 Olympic experience ended abruptly. He was eliminated in the first round, finishing sixth in his 1500 heat. And, in 1980, President Jimmy Carter’s boycott of the Moscow Games left Centrowitz home with the rest of the U.S. team.

But maybe what’s past is prologue. When the storied old Millrose Games downsized from a half-century of annual Madison Square Garden productions to Upper Manhattan’s chaotic Armory building in 2012, a skinny lad named Matthew Centrowitz—recently turned pro after a career at the University of Oregon—brought down the house by winning the featured mile in a hot 3:53.92.

He didn’t look that much like the Matt Centrowitz I remembered. A better tan. No mustache. Shorter hair. Finer features. But the kid could motor and, sure enough, it was—as the tattoo on young Centrowitz’ chest proclaims—“Like father, like son.”

It is unbecoming for a sports journalist to root for a team or individual athlete and, anyway, I didn’t have time for cheering while cranking out a story on deadline that night. But in the Rio final, to watch Matthew Centrowitz’ execution of an apparently risky, yet ultimately brilliant game plan—his dawdling early pace, his insistence on controlling matters from the front of the pack throughout the race, his blistering final lap—was good stuff. And to see his dad, a guy who has been in the arena, come essentially unglued with the result, was—I don’t know—Olympic.

Are you kidding me?

(Statue of the mythological Echo in Seattle, next to a running path)

Ryan Lochte, drowning diplomat

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Consider the Olympic ideal of worldwide peace and brotherhood, of this global festival meant to foster respect for all amid the Games’ divergent cultures and languages. Now, think about American swimmer Ryan Lochte’s behavior in Rio de Janeiro, just in terms of foreign diplomacy.

His kind of statesmanship wouldn’t get a fellow into the front door of the International House of Pancakes.

Lochte was just one of 11,000 athletes at the Rio Games, virtually all of them carrying on admirably, but he managed to reinforce the notion that U.S. citizens routinely tote their superiority complex abroad. Reports of his post-competition drunken conduct were bad enough. But for him to lie about the circumstances, and paint himself as a victim, not only denigrated his Brazilian hosts but also smeared all of us Yanks all well.

Juxtapose Lochte’s demeanor to how U.S. soccer superstar Mia Hamm evaluated the last of her three Olympic experiences in 2004 in Athens. “One of the things we focused on,” she said, “was that this was a great time to show that different countries and different nationalities and creeds can come together to celebrate sport and humanity. It wasn’t about Us versus Them. It was about what we all do.”

Jamaica’s Usain Bolt demonstrated such kinship this week, moments after winning the second of his three sprint gold medals in Rio—on his way to nine in three Olympics—with the grace to pause during a live TV interview with a Spanish reporter and stand in silence while the U.S. anthem was played for the winner of the race following Bolt’s.

Compare that thoughtful gesture to the haughty existence of the U.S. basketball team, a collection of pampered millionaires housed on a luxury ocean liner to maintain their distance from the hoi polloi in Rio’s bustling athletes’ village. When asked by a French reporter about “living on a boat,” U.S. head coach Mike Krzyzewski gave a rambling, persnickety response, beginning with his sarcastic clarification that “we don’t live on a boat. We’re staying on a boat. I actually live in Durham, N.C., and have a swimming pool.”

Krzyzewski’s feeble explanation for the special treatment, that “we’re here to play basketball”—as if all the other basketball teams, and all the athletes in 28 sports, weren’t in Brazil with similar competitive expectations—merely echoed decades of coddling the American hoops community at international tournaments.

At the 1983 Pan American Games in Caracas, Venezuela, U.S. head coach Jack Hartman moved his team from the village to Americanized hotels, moaning that the playing conditions “are questionable and the living is less than desirable.”

Bill Wall, when he was executive director of the U.S. basketball federation, went a step further at the 1991 Pan Am Games in Havana, Cuba, chartering $10,000 flights to Miami between games to house and feed the team in a luxury Cocoanut Grove hotel.

“If it makes us spoiled and arrogant,” Wall said then, “so be it.”

Such a sense of entitlement—the assumption of exceptional care to guarantee on-the-court success—is especially strong in the U.S. basketball organization. Even before NBA players were welcomed into the Olympics in 1992, and ever since, U.S. players always have been provided the classiest accommodations, away from the athlete villages, even at the 1996 Atlanta Games. (This is one reason that, of all the Summer Olympic sports, basketball interests me the least.)

And now we see an American swimmer who can be just as tone deaf and contemptuous of non-Americans as Bill Wall was.

Too bad he hadn’t talked to Donna de Varona, three times an Olympic swimming gold medalist at two overseas Games, in Tokyo and Rome in the 1960s. De Varona once told me that “the best thing I did to prepare to compete internationally was to read the ‘Ugly American’ when I was 12 years old.’”

That 1958 political novel depicted the failures of the U.S. diplomatic corps in Southeast Asia. For less than $10, Lochte can get a copy on Amazon.com. Just in case, though, somebody should alert IHOP about a potential international incident if Lochte is in the vicinity.

Lightening Bolt. Out of nowhere.

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Randalls Island is a small patch of detached land surrounded by three of New York City’s five boroughs—Manhattan to the West, The Bronx to the North and Queens to the East. An estimated 340,000 vehicles pass through Randalls every day, on the series of three bridges collectively known as the Triborough, slowing only to pay the toll.

Under the central portion of the Triborough, there is a small stadium—a virtual secret in The Big Town that boasts such sports palaces as Yankee Stadium and Madison Square Garden. To have had Usain Bolt paint his first sprint masterpiece there, on May 31, 2008, was the ideal metaphor for how momentous track and field performances—and superstars—can come out of nowhere.

That night, Bolt, then 21 years old and still a self-proclaimed 200-meter specialist barely known outside his native Jamaica, struck down the world record in the classic 100-meter dash, in 9.72 seconds. He soundly defeated Tyson Gay, then the reigning world champion, in a shockingly quick flash of brilliance that fell somewhere between surreal and incongruous.

Of course, a rousing electrical storm had delayed that record run two hours past its scheduled start. Naturally, people already were calling young Usain “Lightening Bolt.” And everyone there was forced to rethink the cliché about lightning never striking the same place twice.

In fact, the same remote development had happened in the same highly improbable location twice before that. In 1961, during the U.S. national championships on Randalls Island, Villanova University’s Frank Budd set a world record (9.2 seconds in the old hand-timed days) at 100 yards, which was then more commonly contested than the slightly longer (by roughly nine yards) 100 meters.

Then, when the national championship meet returned to Randalls Island in 1991, Leroy Burrell—who had been something of an understudy to track poster boy Carl Lewis—edged Lewis with a world 100-meter record. That day, Burrell and Lewis showed up wearing tuxedo warmups. Dressed to the nines, one could say. And produced times of 9.90 and 9.93.

Both the Budd and Burrell world bests, 30 years apart, were rendered in an increasingly decaying Downing Stadium, which had 22,000 seats but needed only a tenth of them for the Burrell race. Downing Stadium had been around since 1936, when, on its opening night, a fellow named Jesse Owens won the 100-meter race in that summer’s U.S. Olympic trials, sending Owens on his way to winning four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics—widely considered a rebuke of Nazi propaganda that blacks were inferior.

Dilapidated Downing Stadium was razed and a much smaller, much improved 4,500-seat Icahn Stadium—with track and field dimensions built to Olympic standards—was opened 13 years before Bolt arrived on the Randalls Island scene. At Icahn or May 31, 2008, Bolt was only months into his pursuit of the 100-meter event, which was kind of a second language to Bolt’s born-to distance of 200 meters. And was being attempted only, he said, because “I don’t want to run the 400 meters and I need another race.”

At 6-foot-5, he wasn’t convinced the shorter race gave him time to unfurl all his levers. But that night he was motivated, he said, by “fear of this man”—pointing respectfully to Gay—and boosted by a standing-room-only crowd of 6,500, thousands of them from New York’s track-passionate Jamaican community, waving Jamaican flags and decked out in green-and-yellow national colors. So predictable was the Jamaican ex-pat interest in the sport that meet organizers provided a post-event concert of pulsing reggae and ska music, while Bolt expressed to a small gathering of journalists that he was pleased with his result, “but it was only one race.”

Ten weeks later, Bolt, on the express train to worldwide fame, re-wrote his 100 record at 9.69 on the big stage of the Beijing Olympics, added a 19.30 world record in the 200 and introduced his archer’s-pose exultation, which reportedly came from a Jamaican dancehall move at the time.

The shooting-arrow gesture remains a central feature in his act, now that he became the first athlete ever to win the 100 in three consecutive Olympics this week. Which calls to mind the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow lines…

I shot an arrow into the air,

It fell to earth, I knew not where;

For, so swiftly it flew, the sight

Could not follow it in its flight.

Or maybe it just conjures the Jimmy Buffett verse in “The Rocket That Grandpa Rode”….

Sounds like bragging, but it’s true.

I’m not tryin’ to big-time you.

Not that world-class sprinters tend to be excessively humble about their gift. Especially since the psyche game plays such a prominent role in their endeavor. Among the former world-record holders in the 100 meters, Maurice Greene (1999-2005) was one of the least subtle, flaunting a G.O.A.T. tattoo—“Greatest of All Time.” (Greene never won an Olympic 100.)

Years before, Charlie Greene (no relation) would race wearing dark glasses, even at night, calling them his “re-entry shields,” and John Carlos would express his hope to fellow competitors that they had “brought your asbestos suits, ‘cause you’re going to burn up.”

Steve Williams, who briefly shared the world record in the 1970s, described “all the cruising, looking over your shoulder, easing up in the heats” as “enjoying being the king holding court.” Carl Lewis’ pre-race ploy, rather than the typical heavy breathing or the stare-down of rivals entering the blocks, was to unnerve opponents by offering a handshake.

Generally, though, Lewis’ demeanor was that of a man so assured of greatness that he mostly kept himself apart from the rest of humankind. After he won the second of four gold medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, he was so north of aloof that he spoke only into a microphone that was borne by appointed messenger to the press tent. The tape recorder was set on a table in front of a bank of microphones and played.

Talk about big-timing us. One newspaperman slyly reported Lewis’ post-event statement this way: “It said, ‘This is one of the most difficult competitions I have been in….’”

Not: “He said….” “It said….”

Still, we tend to love these swaggering gunslingers given to frowning, posturing, huffing and puffing, because of what they can provide: The sudden, unexpected shock of thrilling, unprecedented speed. As if out of nowhere.

Or just Randalls Island.

Olympic swimming’s close shaves

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Children of the Fifties would recognize the medium: A series of five or six roadside signs, spaced for sequential reading by passing motorists, rhymed and with a punch line before concluding with a plug for the sponsor, which was a brand of brushless shaving cream.

(Example: Drinking Drivers. Nothing Worse. They Put the Quart. Before the Hearse. Burma-Shave.)

The company, Burma-Shave, was sold in 1963 and its iconic red signs—which had been spread throughout the contiguous United States—disappeared. But let’s get to the message, which dates to 1956 and remains an Olympic staple: Elite swimmers, seeking every little edge that might allow them to win by a hair, shave their entire bodies.

(So I made up that Burma-Shave verse at the top to fit the occasion.)

Legs. Arms. Backs. Armpits. Chests (the men, that is). Sometimes heads.

It’s a ritual. A psyche job. It’s a beginning, swimmers’ own personal Olympic opening ceremony, traditional and formal, like cutting a ribbon or breaking a bottle of champagne over a ship’s bow. Along with tapering down their training mileage anywhere from two to five weeks before their most important meets, these barbers of aquatic skill scrape off every last bit of bristle, down and fuzz.

According to the Indiana University’s Counsilman Center for the Science of Swimming, “the effect of shaving on swim performance is not well understood….mostly anecdotal in nature and includes physical, psychological and neurophysiological factors.”

But the center’s namesake, the late Hall of Fame swimming coach Doc Counsilman, acknowledged in 1968 that “shaving the hair from the arms and legs may increase the swimmer’s sensitivity to the ‘feel’ or pressure of the water and, consequently, improve his coordination.”

The story is that an Australian freestyler named Jon Konrads first took a razor to his whole body before a 1956 meet and, according to American John Naber, who won four golds at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, “was the laughingstock of his whole team.” Except Konrads proceeded to cut a full two seconds off his best time and, by the end of that season, at the Melbourne Olympics, all of the Australian swimmers were shaving. (Konrads set 26 world records in his career and won a gold medal at the 1960 Rome Olympics.)

Years ago, Naber explained shaving’s benefits to me this way: “Steve Martin used to say that he put a slice of baloney in his shoes before he performed to help him feel funny. Well, shaving helps you feel fast. It is an essential ingredient in a swimmer’s state of preparedness.”

Many Olympic swimmers have said they first shaved before they were teenagers, even if they hadn’t yet grown any hair on their bodies, because everyone else was doing it. Chrissy Ahmann-Leighton, before she won two relay golds and an individual silver at the 1992 Barcelona Games, told me she first shaved when she was 8. “We had a big party on the pool deck and everybody shaved,” she said. “Then, you’re a part of the team.”

The first time shaving, Naber said, “is like getting the first dent in your brand-new automobile.”

The swimmers use barber clippers, safety razors and straight razors. They get teammates or wives or girlfriends to shave their backs. (Although, Naber said, “you never shave somebody in your same event.”)

There are limits to this almost endless quest for aerodynamics. B.J. Bedford, a member of the U.S. women’s gold-medal relay team at the 2000 Sydney Games, had shaved her head before the previous Olympic trials but swore never to do it again. “My head,” the then-blonde Bedford said, “looked like a dirty tennis ball when my hair started growing out.”

To avoid that problem, virtually every top swimmer wears a cap.

Swimmers have related that the shaved sensation “makes the water feel like soap,” that it resembles “a dolphin and how slippery they are in the water.” Three-time 1984 gold medalist Rick Carey’s response to my research on this matter was, “You’re asking me to describe what a tomato tastes like and all I can say is, it tastes like a tomato.”

Just as significant as taking off all their hair, many swimmers believe, is shaving’s removal of a layer of dead skin, moving up the level of sensitivity. Rowdy Gaines, the triple gold medalist at the 1984 Los Angeles Games who is doing NBC-TV commentary in Rio de Janeiro this month, called the shaving routine “real mental. But, then, it’s real physical, too. I don’t know how to describe it. The feeling is like a greased watermelon. You feel silky. It’s tingly. It’s cold.”

So….

(Lather up. Take the plunge. Soak up victory. Like a sponge. Burma-Shave.)

Bringing a colossus of Rhodes back to life

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There is a wonderfully expressive lyric by They Might Be Giants, about the 19^th Century avant-garde artist James Ensor, that goes

Meet James Ensor/ Belgium’s famous painter/

Dig him up and shake his hand/ Appreciate the man.

And that, essentially, is what Michael Phelps has done to Leonidas of Rhodes. By winning his 12^th career Olympic gold medal in an individual event this week—and with the able help of crack Olympic historians—Phelps has revived the late (very late) Leonidas and his remarkable athletic dominance.

Details are hit and myth. But there is no doubt that no one else, since Leonidas sewed up the last of his dozen Olympic victories in 152 B.C., had piled up so much Games’ hardware. (“Hardware” isn’t the right word, really; champions in the Ancient Olympics received olive-wreath crowns cut from a sacred tree in Olympia. Not medals.) For that record to have lasted 2,168 years is as much a tribute to Leonidas as it is to Phelps.

Overall, Phelps is easily the most decorated Olympian ever, with 21 total golds, but nine of those have come in relay events, which didn’t exist in Leonidas’ time. Swimming competition didn’t exist then, either; Leonidas was a versatile runner. Also, while Phelps, now 31, is competing in the Games for a fifth time (he did not medal as a 15-year-old in 2000), Leonidas needed just four Olympic cycles to win 12 times, the last when he was 36 years old.

According Tony Perrottet’s 2004 book, “The Naked Olympics/The True Story of the Ancient Games,” accounts of those contests were no more specific than describing a champion who “could catch hares on foot….and not just because sundials and water clocks were incapable of precision. The Greeks simply did not share our modern passion for comparing performances.”

“Instead,” Perrottet wrote, “the Greeks accrued ‘records’ by the sheer number of an individual’s victories—opting for quantity rather than quality. The greatest Olympic runner of all time by this yardstick was Leonidas of Rhodes, who won all three footraces in the Games of 164 B.C. and was given the honorary title Triastes, or ‘triple crowned.’”

In each of the next three Olympics, Leonidas repeated his trifecta in what some sources describe as the stadion and the diaulos, races of roughly 200 and 400 yards, and the hoplitodromos, a run of about a quarter mile while outfitted in bronze armor with a shield.

(Sportswriting colleague Charlie Pierce, who has gone on to bigger things with his political posts for Esquire, put up this photo of Leonidas…)

(With the comment, “Thank god for Speedo, is all I can say.”)

Perrottet unearthed the fact that, even had the Greeks been able to record race times in Leonidas’ day, they would have been meaningless because “there were not even standardized lengths for the stadiums….Every running track was ‘six hundred feet,’ but this was literally six hundred times the foot size of whoever first walked it.”

Dramatic enough were reports that Leonidas could run “with the speed of a god” and was worshipped as an immortal on his native island of Rhodes. Because of him, other athletes began keeping track of their victories on memorials.

Somehow, it seems appropriate that Phelps’ exceptional run of Olympic success began in the home country of Leonidas and the Games themselves. At the 2004 Athens Olympics, Phelps arrived like the new Poseidon, a 21^st Century god of the seas stirring up a storm in the Olympic pool. He was only 19, but had won six events (and set six world records) in the previous year’s world championships.

His tales in Athens seemed akin to the ten labors of Hercules, Greece’s legend of the strongest man in the world who, by passing repeated tests thrown at him by the gods, became the only mortal accepted onto Mount Olympus as a god.

Phelps won six gold and three bronze medals that summer, methodically working his way through the competition like Hercules slaying the nine-headed Hydra, killing the vulture that feasted on Prometheus’ liver, snuffing out the most fearsome lion in the world, cleaning the Augean stables, and so on. It was historic stuff, taken up a notch by Phelps’ unprecedented eight golds in Beijing in 2008, four golds (and two silver) in London in 2012 and, so far, three golds in Rio.

Now Phelps’ medal tally is recalling the feats of Leonidas, who could be considered a more modern Colossus of Rhodes, his Olympic triumphs standing for more than 2,000 years like the 98-foot statue that was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, until it was destroyed by an earthquake in 226 B.C.

So Phelps has done with Leonidas what They Might Be Giants suggested was in order for the long-gone Belgian painter.

Raise a glass and sit and stare/ Understand the man.

Lilly King, Olympic doping and the best revenge

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Rio’s first case of a poor winner, 19-year-old American swimmer Lilly King, made me thankful for having gotten a glimpse during the Olympic opening ceremonies of four old Brazilian models of sporting graciousness.

Joaquim Cruz, Gustavo Kuerten, Oscar and Hortencia—endearing characters who brought a strong dose of courtesy to their significant, exuberant athletic skills—could offer a lesson to the boastful, lecturing King, wagging her finger at Russia’s Yulia Efimova in the process of King winning their 100-meter breaststroke duel.

In my more than four decades of covering international sports, it was a treat to cross paths with the four Brazilians during high points in their careers. And it was heartening to see them honored this month—Cruz and Oscar as two of the six who marched the Olympic flag into Maracana Stadium, Kuerten and Hortencia as two of the last three links in the torch relay to light the Olympic cauldron. Possibly candidates for most American viewers’ Who’s That? list, that quartet in fact ranks at the top of Brazil’s Who’s Who, both as athletic heroes and goodwill ambassadors.

By contrast, we now have the talented but self-righteous King, who dismissed Efimova as a “drug cheat….I’m not a fan” and repeatedly made a point of her own purity.

Efimova indeed was suspended for 16 months after a prohibited stimulant was found in her system during an out-of-competition test almost three years ago. But her Rio eligibility involved two not-yet-definitive circumstances: Evidence of a state-sponsored doping operation in Russia (though it is unclear whether that touched all Russian athletes, while Efimova was training in southern California for years), and Efimova’s positive test in March for meldonium, which the World Anti-Doping Agency acknowledged may have been taken by Efimova and others—legally—prior to it being added to the banned list on Jan. 1.

The complexities—all the gray areas and uncertainties, including a Russian report that U.S. star Michael Phelps’ “cupping” therapy might be similar to meldonium use for promoting quick recovery—appear to indicate that Lilly King should stay in her lane. Just swim, already, and enjoy success on the grand stage.

Be a little more like Gustavo Kuerten—Guga, to Brazilians—who was a three-time French Open tennis champion and ranked No. 1 in the world when he was upset by Yevgeny Kafelnikov—a Russian!—in the 2001 U.S. Open quarterfinals. Kuerten, who carried a big, goofy smile everywhere and refrained from fits of temper, was quizzed after that Kafelnikov loss on his perceived nonchalance about failing to win a Grand Slam tournament on any surface other than the French’s red clay.

“It’s not that I don’t care,” Kuerten said then. “But I’m not giving all my life for that. I think, if you don’t get upset when you lose, it’s very bad. If you’re comfortable with losing, it’s not fine. So I feel disappointed and I fell frustrated. But, also, maybe tonight I can have a good dinner, drink one beer, go out. If I had won, I don’t have this chance. So that’s the good part.”

Oscar—full name, Oscar Schmidt, though he was on a first-name basis with the international basketball community and known as Mao Santa (Holy Hand) in Brazil—introduced himself to the jingoistic U.S. basketball culture at the 1987 Pan American Games in Indianapolis. A 6-8 ½ sharpshooter, Oscar scored 46 points to lead Brazil to a gold-medal victory over the heavily favored Yanks, lifting Brazil from a 20-point first-half deficit.

Rather than gloat and trash talk, Oscar attributed his team’s victory to “using experience and excitement,” and agreed with the notion that the Americans were “the best, absolutely.” One reason he had turned down a chance to play in the NBA after the Nets drafted him in the sixth round in 1984, he said, was that he foresaw himself spending too much time on the Nets bench.

“I would rather play 40 minutes and play with my friends” on the Brazilian national team, he said. Not until 1989 were NBA players allowed to play for national teams (and not until 1992 in the Olympics), and meanwhile Oscar began a run of five Olympics, 38 games, in which he scored 1,094 points for a 28.8 average.

He and fellow marksman Marcel Souza, who scored 30 in that Pan Am final against the U.S., were known in Brazil as the team’s “piano players,” while their teammates were “the piano carriers.” Oscar said, “One of us shoots and the other four go for the rebound. If my friend makes 40 or I make 40, that’s good, if we win. Any shot is a good shot. Any time. Sometimes, the shots go it.”

Cruz, when he upset world record holder Sebastian Coe of Great Britain in the 1984 Los Angeles Games’ 800-meter final, likewise served as a reminder that Olympic observers must be ready for the unexpected. He opened his post-race press conference by playfully inquiring, “Anyone here speak Portuguese? No? Too bad.”

He was, in the Olympic spirit, a citizen of the world—son of a recently deceased Brazilian carpenter, studying and running at the University of Oregon. To defeat Coe, who these days is a British lord and president of the international track and field federation, “It is impossible to describe my feelings,” Cruz said then. In two languages, he said, “I do not know words to say it.”

Then there was Hortencia—Hortencia Maria de Fatima Marcari—the splindy, excitable hoops star who made her first national basketball team at 15. She was 31 years old when she led Brazil to the gold medal in the 1991 Havana Pan Am Games, 36 and still a central figure with the 1996 Atlanta Olympic silver medalists. Flashy and emotional, Hortencia would pound the press table on her way downcourt, exulting over every point. She would gesture wildly in animated discussions with teammates. Hers was a universal display of competitive joy with which anyone, anywhere, could identify.

So, likely it is a curmudgeonly reaction to juxtapose Lilly King’s finger-wagging (and Michael Phelps’ similar gesture) to those Brazilian examples of sporting spirit and manners. The moral disgust over doping, after all, is thoroughly reasonable. It’s just that all the personal factors, political expectations and testing imperfections involved in substance abuse are unknowable.

Given that, might a gold medal provide contentment enough for King? Modern Olympics founder Pierre de Coubertin argued, a bit magnanimously, that “the most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part. The essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.”

But even conquering, without chemical aid, ought to need no further comment. As 17^th Century Welsh poet, orator and Anglican priest George Herbert put it, “Living well is the best revenge.”

Olympic opening ceremonies: Giving peace a chance

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Get ready for some alternative reality. A dose of international brotherhood. A recess (however brief) from cynicism. The biennial Olympic opening ceremonies are upon us.

Brace yourself for a show that walks the line between delusions of grandeur and a welcome security blanket for our imperfect world, between navel gazing and a sincere optimism. Unlike Everyman, every day, who just shaves and showers and gets on with business, the Olympics confronts its figurative dawn by grandstanding for peace, by preaching and praying and prophesizing. (While never neglecting to feed the television-ratings beast.)

Of the 11 Olympic opening ceremonies I covered for Newsday, none disappointed. Though unavoidably political and nationalistic—all that flag-waving!—none of them failed to be, in some way, an uplifting glimpse into a better human condition. Almost subliminally, the ceremonies manage to promote a faint understanding of Others, parading the host nation’s culture and history.

In Nagano, Japan in 1998, there were ringing Buddhist temple bells and enormous sumo wrestlers symbolically stomping out evil spirits. In Sydney, Australia in 2000, there was a bow to Aboriginal roots and a goofy “lawnmower ballet.” In Lillehammer, Norway in 1994, there were reindeer pulling sleds and so-called folk skiers, zig-zagging down a ski slope playing fiddles. In Athens, Greece in 2004, there were figures of gods and legends brought to life off Grecian urns and sarcophagi—and the reminder that Nike was a goddess, not a shoe. In Turin, Italy in 2006, the ceremonies concluded when the fat man sang: Luciano Pavarotti’s performance of his famous “nessun dorma” aria. In Los Angeles in 1984, there was a Hollywood production of singers, dancers, piano players and a Buck Rogers character flying into the stadium on a one-man jet pack. In Atlanta in 1996, there were pickup trucks.

“Sport,” then-International Olympic Committee president Juan Antonio Samaranch declared during the Sydney ceremonies, “is an essential part of education, which is the real wealth of any country in the world.”

Part of the ceremonies’ formula can feel a bit overdone, self-important and quasi-religious: The Olympic hymn, raising of the five-ring Olympic flag, recitation of the Olympic oath. Plus, there is lurking under the feel-good vibe an undeniable influence of American television executives, far more interested in viewership than global tolerance.

For the Atlanta Games, the dramatic, ghost-like appearance of Parkinson’s-challenged Muhammad Ali to light the Olympic cauldron was the creation of NBC Sports president Dick Ebersol. Celebrated sports journalist Dave Kindred, in his 2006 book, “Sound and Fury,” described how Ebersol, using the clout of NBC’s multi-billion dollar rights fees paid to Atlanta’s organizers, overcame Atlanta chairman Billy Payne’s aversion to what Payne called Ali’s “draft dodger” history during the Vietnam War.

If NBC had its way, in fact, this week’s Rio de Janeiro opening ceremonies would override the traditional order of national teams’ entrance into the stadium—done alphabetically in the language of the host nation—so that the United States contingent entered near the back end of the program to retain U.S. viewership. (In Portuguese, the United States is “Estados Unidos,” so the Yanks will show up early in the parade.)

All in all, though, the truly universal ceremonies provide marvelous bits—the last-second surprise of who will light the Olympic cauldron and the increasing technological wizardly of firing up that big candle—one more element that renders Super Bowl halftime shows, in comparison, merely elaborate concerts.

In Barcelona in 1992, a Spanish archer named Antonio Rebollo shot a flame-tipped arrow 100 feet in the air, sailing it directly above the cauldron to ignite the fire. In Lillehammer, a Norwegian student barreled down a ski jump with the torch in hand. In Sydney, as water cascaded down the end-zone stands, Aboriginal track champion Cathy Freeman waded into a pool at the base of the waterfall and lit a ring of fire around her that ascended slowly up the rim of the stadium.

Great stuff.

It is easy to argue that the ceremonies—like the whole Olympic package—are Pollyanna fluff. The ceremonies’ nod to the ancient Olympic Truce, for instance, calling for the revival of the 8^th Century B.C. tradition of ceasing wars to guarantee participants and spectators safe passage to and from the Games, is powerless. During the Lillehammer Games, as civil war raged in the 1984 Olympic host city of Sarajevo, Samaranch pleaded, “Please, stop fighting. Please, stop killing. Drop your guns, please.” Two years later in Atlanta, amid endless sabre-ratting of various governments, Samaranch acknowledged, “Our only weapon is sport.”

But I can handle a little naivete. Shortly before he assumed the IOC presidency (2001 to 2013), Belgian physician Jacques Rogge told a handful of us Olympic reporters, “We make no pretentions to broker peace. We’re just a symbol; it’s up to the politicians.”

During the 2004 opening ceremonies in Athens, Rogge elaborated on that symbolism. “We need peace,” he told the crowd. “We need tolerance. We need brotherhood. Athletes….show us that sport unites by overriding national, political, religious and language barriers.”

So, again: Might as well give it a try.

John Jeansonne

Newsday sportswriter emeritus/Hofstra University journalism adjunct

Did Russia invent baseball? Did Romania?

The question of protests

Mozart and football

Centrowitz, reclycled

Ryan Lochte, drowning diplomat

Lightening Bolt. Out of nowhere.

Olympic swimming’s close shaves

Bringing a colossus of Rhodes back to life

Lilly King, Olympic doping and the best revenge

Olympic opening ceremonies: Giving peace a chance