Update, don’t change, the Olympic record

Here’s what can’t be done about drug cheats in the Olympics. You can’t rewrite history.

So, okay: Use the big stage of the Rio Olympics to rail against clear evidence of Russia’s state-sponsored doping program. But think twice about re-distributing medals won by obviously tainted Russians in recent Games. The non-Russian athletes theoretically in line to inherit ill-gotten hardware may have been juicing as well. (Maybe they’re clean. But maybe they weren’t tested. Or maybe they had their own ways of beating the tests, just without help from bureaucrats.)

It’s not as simple as that old Superman episode in which the Man of Steel righted a wrong by reversing the earth’s rotation, thereby turning the clock back prior to a dastardly deed to make all well again.

The only answer, however unsatisfactory, is a full accounting of events. Such as: Ben Johnson won the 1988 Seoul Olympics 100-meter dash in a world-record 9.79 seconds. And Ben Johnson was found to have used steroids. And a 2012 ESPN documentary on that race offered strong evidence that most—maybe all seven—of Johnson’s fellow 100-meter finalists were guilty of doping at some point in their careers.

(Only Ben Johnson’s shadow, right, remains?)

The last time a government put its thumb on the Olympic scales with a national doping program involved East Germany in the 1960s and ‘70s, though that widely suspected foul play wasn’t documented for two decades. That’s when the United States Olympic Committee, arguing that its athletes had been victimized, agitated to upgrade or award medals to as many as 50 American swimmers.

Specifically, a USOC test case involved the women’s medley relay team at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, when U.S. star Shirley Babashoff grumbled, after finishing second, that the victorious East German women had deep voices and looked like men. (“We are here to swim, not to sing,” an East German coach famously declared.)

When East German sports authorities did sing in 1997 court testimony, acknowledging their chemically assisted Olympic triumphs, then-USOC president Bill Hybl called it “a matter of fundamental fairness” that the Olympic record book be amended and Babashoff and dozens of her American teammates be presented gold medals.

That didn’t happen, and probably shouldn’t have amid the excruciatingly complex unknowns, shades of gray, legalisms and politics involved. Not to mention anti-doping efforts that continue to be imperfect—even when honest, apolitical drug administrators are involved.

Among those who believed there was no more delicate surgery than rewriting history was Dwight Stones, who held the world high jump record for three years in the mid-1970s but was 0-for-2 in going for Olympic gold, finishing third in 1972 and ’76. In ’72, Stones was beaten by Soviet Juri Tarmac and East German Stefan Junge, two athletes likely operating under government-mandated steroids programs similar to the recent Russian model.

But Stones rejected the USOC effort to revise long-ago results. “It’s a witch hunt,” Stones told me then. “I look at what a great life I’ve had, growing up in the greatest country, where I could do anything I want, go anywhere I want. There is no way we can relate to what it was like not having freedom, growing up in the East German or Soviet system and how compelling the reward schedule was in sports at that time.”

So, leave well enough alone. Just make sure all positive tests and doping admissions—however belated—are added to the record of Olympic results.

Meanwhile, be careful about the International Olympic Committee order to ban all Russians from Rio who have served past suspensions for failed drug tests. Because there are a number of U.S. Olympians in that category being welcomed to Rio, most notably the 2004 Olympic 100-meter champion, Justin Gatlin.

Is it fair to the clean competitors that the IOC has chosen not to issue a blanket rejection of the entire Russian delegation—even though IOC president Thomas Bach has proclaimed “zero tolerance” for illegal substances and called the Russians guilty of a “shocking new dimension in doping” and an “unprecedented level or criminality”?

Then again, is there justice in holding every Russian athlete responsible for Vladimir Putin’s win-at-all-costs, juice-on-the-loose scheme? Might there be at least a few Russians who weren’t involved in, of weren’t aware of, the industrial-scale hanky panky?

The dilemma is that a broad assumption of every Russian’s guilt prior to Rio’s competition feels like profiling. Yet given the cynical, systematic swindle arranged by Russia’s front office, the IOC’s decision to leave the eligibility of Russian athletes to the various federations of the 28 Olympic sports resembles an abdication of its authority.

Former sports journalism colleague Phil Hersh, who covered 17 Olympics, nicely summed up the IOC’s non-action on his Globetrotting Web site by offering a multiple-choice of descriptive words: Shameful, fair, hypocritical, righteous…pass, punt and kick.

I pick “all of the above.” That is: a full accounting of events.

The first report of the first male First Lady

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Could it be that Roy Blount Jr. is a visionary? In 1990 the humorist, author and one-time sports-journalism brother published “First Hubby/A Novel About a Man Who Happens to be Married to the President of the United States.”

It’s an occasionally absurd tale. The narrator, a good ole boy named Guy Fox, is a writer of modest accomplishment whose spouse, Clementine, has risen through the political ranks to the vice presidency on a third-party ticket. Then, when President DaSilva—his first name never is revealed in the book’s 285 pages—dies when struck by a fish (yes, absurd), Fox suddenly finds himself being “the first male First Lady of the Land.”

There are plenty of puns, silly song lyrics and signature Blount wisecracks. Guy Fox expounds on the Secret Service, social issues, sex, race, the media, politics and about feeling self-conscious to be chewing tobacco in the First Lady’s office. (He relates that the long tradition of tobacco-chewing in the White House included Warren Harding popping whole cigarettes in his mouth and Andrew Johnson once mistaking a senator’s hat for a spittoon.)

There are quirky historical tidbits about several former First Ladies, Fox’s thoughts about raising kids and his observations on the overwhelmingly (and, he insists, unnecessarily) large staff assigned to him. Plus, of course, there is the deliberation on how he ought to be addressed.

“People don’t actually call you Mr. First Spouse, do they?”

“People call me Guy,” he says.

When Blount penned this novel, the closest anyone had come to the fictional Guy Fox’s situation was John Zacarro in 1984, after his wife, Geraldine Ferraro, was chosen by Walter Mondale to be the first female vice-presidential candidate representing a major American political party.

(Mondale didn’t come close to stopping Ronald Reagan’s re-election, and it didn’t help Ferraro that Zacarro, like a certain 2016 Presidential candidate, was a Queens, N.Y., real estate developer who inherited his father’s business and was caught in some bank-financing skulduggery.)

Now, of course, one William Jefferson Clinton could wind up being the first real First Hubby. (During his wife’s original presidential campaign, former President Clinton told Oprah Winfrey in 2007 that his Scottish friends suggested he call himself First Laddie. In recent months, possible titles of First Matie, First Gentleman and First Dude have been thrown around.)

But, about Roy Blount as a political prophet:

Included in “Now, Where Were We?”—a 1989 compilation of his essays from publications such as The Atlantic, Esquire, New York Magazine and Gentleman’s Quarterly—is the piece, “Why It Looks Like I Will Be the Next President of the United States, I Reckon.” In that, Blount envisioned a “brokered” convention, “somebody waiting in the wings” at the end of a chaotic Democratic Party primary that sounded a lot like the Republican’s (un)civil strife this season. Blount wrote how, unlikely as it may have seemed, political bigwigs had to settle on him, someone “perceived as too abstract and austere. A writer, not a politician.”

Which could be overcome, he wrote, by

Lying.
Easing folks’ minds.
Setting an example of the feasibility of getting away with things.

In “First Hubby,” slipped in with his account of romancing Clementine, his thoughts about The Muppets and how he has no interest in autographing pictures for schoolchildren who write in at their teachers’ behest—“Tell them to go climb a tree. That’s what I did when I was their age”—are some fascinating dialogue and situations that could have come from current politicians and pundits.

From Blount’s imaginary President DaSilva:

“People ask me whether I’m not put off by some of the panhandling tactics of the urban homeless. Well, you know it’s not only homelessness that’s up, it’s also shamelessness. If Donald Trump can behave the way he does, then why shouldn’t people go up to strangers in the street, get right up in their face and ask for money?”

A disapproving Donald Trump reference. Right there on Page 170 of a 26-year-old book. The DaSilva character also sounded a bit like Bernie Sanders at times:

“We need a middle-class revolt, which forces the rich to pay for programs that help the poor aspire to that old-fashioned goal, a decent living….”

And what about this Blount song lyric in “First Hubby”?

You got big old hair and a little bitty heart.

I should’ve known about you from the start.

Your pompadour is a work of aaaaaaart—

You got big old hair and a little bitty heart.

I don’t know. I think I could vote for Roy Blount. Even if that would cause his “First Hubby” effort to remain pure fantasy.

(Roy Blount Jr.)

This sounds familiar: Olympic doping and politics

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An Olympics without Russians? This feels like where I came in.

In 1984, my first of 11 Olympics, the Russians and their 14 fellow Soviet republics staged an Eastern bloc boycott of the Los Angeles Games. That was in retaliation for President Jimmy Carter’s politically motivated snub of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, a disorienting back-in-the-U.S., back-in-the-U.S., back-in-the-U.S.S.R. tit-for-tat.

(1980 Moscow Olympics)

(1984 Los Angeles Olympics)

This time, it isn’t Ronald Reagan calling the Olympics’ No. 2 superpower “the evil empire.” Now that the Court of Arbitration for Sport has let stand a world track and field federation ruling, Russia’s athletes in that sport face a blanket ban from next month’s Rio de Janeiro Games. Based on the July 18 World Anti-Doping Agency report on state-sponsored cheating, the International Olympic Committee could extend the Rio embargo to Russians in all 28 sports.

The difference in 1984 and 2016 may seem obvious: One nonattendance voluntary, the other imposed. Except, in both cases, it can be argued that two troublesome Olympic staples, politics and drugs, are simultaneously at play.

Take the second instance first: There is documented evidence that almost half of all positive drug tests at the past two Summer Olympics belonged to Russian athletes. (And that was before the former Soviet lab boss blew the whistle on his country’s dastardly operation to manipulate testing at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi.) Still, Russian officials have couched the potential banishment from Rio as just one more American attempt to humiliate their nation. So: Politics?

The Russians point to information that other countries—Kenya prominently among them—are guilty either of implementing elite athletes’ drug use, or turning a blind eye toward the practice. Without—so far, anyway—any consequences. (The Russians say that some of their individuals may be guilty of juicing, as athletes are throughout the world, but their leadership does not condone it.)

As for ’84, when the whole idea of the Soviet boycott of L.A. appeared thoroughly political, at least one fellow didn’t think it was that clear-cut.

That spring, Bob Goldman released his book, “Death in the Locker Room/Steroids and Sports.” In a telephone interview discussing his research, Goldman proposed to me that, among the various and complex reasons the Soviets chose to stay away from L.A. was the fact that “those guys have realized they aren’t going to get clean in time. They know they’ll get caught in L.A.” for steroid use. So, then as now: Politics and drugs?!

The previous summer, at the Pan America Games in Caracas, there had been the biggest drug bust in sports history. Nineteen athletes from 10 countries were nailed for failed tests in a makeshift Venezuelan lab, and we reporters found it a bit suspicious that 13 U.S. track athletes immediately boarded flights home on the eve of their competition. (Some returned days later, perhaps having been reassured in private screenings that they were not vulnerable.)

The seismic Caracas event seemed to indicate either a belated push by international sports pooh-bahs to get serious about steroid use, combined with new diagnostic tools to do so, or merely a signal to Eastern bloc players who might be contemplating chemical assistance at the ’84 L.A. Games. Or, more cynically, a public relations move, so there would be no second-guessing of Los Angeles’ ability to catch any bad actors and, therefore, no questioning of test results. Talk about a political move.

Since forever, the Olympics has been a so-called “war without bullets,” a theater for demonstrating national superiority (minus potential bloodshed) that was particularly embraced by Communist nations. Even with the balkanization of the old U.S.S.R., its Olympic team kept emphasizing victory: In 1992, its team comprised of Russia plus most of the recently separated Soviet republics, it piled up medals under the banner of the Commonwealth of Independent States. (We called them the “Commies” for short.) And, after that, even without Lithuanian basketball players and Georgian wrestlers and Ukrainian weightlifters as Olympic mates, the Russians soldiered on quite well.

Have they been winning through the decades because of systematic, government-backed fudging on doping? In “Death in the Locker Room,” Bob Goldman asserted that an American doctor, John Ziegler, had witnessed the Soviets using “straight testosterone” in the 1952 Olympics and felt that U.S. athletes deserved a more level playing field. Ziegler’s answer was to approach a pharmaceutical company to help him develop anabolic steroids and synthetic grown hormone.

Goldman wrote that Ziegler introduced those substances to American athletes “with the best intentions and saw his baby grow into a monster that frightened him.”

Best intentions. So, now that we have fostered our share of dopey dopers, a partisan, holier-than-thou attitude is not helpful. (That’s just more politics.) And the Olympics, while armed with nice ideas, has been proven to have rubber teeth in these matters.

In the case of the former East Germany, for instance, none of its athletes ever tested positive at the Games, but a series of trials and court testimony years after the dissolution of that country revealed an extensive government-mandated steroid operation. (It’s all in Steven Ungerleider’s book, “Faust’s Gold.”)

As an Olympic patriot, a believer in the Olympic ideal of promoting international goodwill through a sort of United Nations in Sneakers, I will miss seeing the Russians in Rio—if it comes to that. But I continue to root for all Olympic efforts striving for fair play in a setting that can be tempting to gold-diggers.

In that Bob Goldman book, he told of how he asked 198 world-class athletes, mostly weightlifters and their weight-throwing counterparts in track and field, “If I had a magic drug that was so fantastic that if you took it once you would win every competition you would enter, from the Olympic decathlon to Mr. Universe for the next five years, but it had one minor drawback—if would kill you five years after you took it—would you still take the drug?

More than half, 103, said yes.

So this feels like where I came in.

Always a retiring fellow

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Only very briefly did I have a front-row seat to Tim Duncan’s masterful 19-year NBA career, and only in his earliest days with the San Antonio Spurs. Duncan was 22 years old at the time, in his second pro season. He was then, as he remained until his retirement this week at 40, the antithesis of the clamorous NBA culture. Amid the sport’s garish theatricality—raucous crowds, deafening music, enabling acoustics—Duncan’s game was one of muted perfection.

The occasion was the 1999 championship finals against the New York Knicks. Because a labor dispute had delayed the start of the 1998-99 season until January of ’99—and because my Newsday editors had failed to replace our departed Knicks beat writer during the NBA owners’ lockout—I became a last-second stand-in to chronicle that abbreviated Knicks campaign.

That the Knicks wound up in the finals against the Spurs and Duncan was a most unlikely development. Through 42 games of the truncated 50-game schedule, hurriedly pieced together with the labor cease-fire, the gyroscopically challenged Knicks barely were able to maintain any equilibrium, slogging along with a shaky 21-21 record.

But they evolved into a spunky outfit at just the right time, the first No. 8 seed to ascend to the finals by shocking top conference seed Miami, sweeping Atlanta and knocking off Indiana. Along the way, they lost perennial all-star Patrick Ewing with a torn Achilles and arrived in San Antonio—the two teams had not met during the season—with former all-star Larry Johnson hobbling on a sprained knee.

The Spurs, meanwhile, were at a full gallop, about to set an NBA record of 12 consecutive post-season victories during the Knicks series. Steve Kerr, the former Chicago Bulls sharpshooter who now coaches the 2015 champion Golden State Warriors, was a role player on that San Antonio team. Avery Johnson, who spent five years as an NBA coach and now coaches the University of Alabama, was a vital Spurs factor who scored the championship-clinching basket with 47 seconds to play in Game 5. Imposing 7-foot-1 all-star David Robinson, who was late in his 14-year-career, was the Spurs inside force.

But the primary motor for San Antonio was Duncan, the high tide who lifted all teammates’ boats. Against the Knicks, Duncan scored 33, 25, 20, 28 and 31 points in the series. He took 16, 15, 12, 18 and 9 rebounds. He blocked shots, delivered assists and was the obvious final-round MVP—the first of three such honors in the five championships he eventually won with the Spurs.

Seldom has one player made so much noise. Yet so quietly. Throughout his career, Duncan betrayed so little emotion, on and off the court, that The Onion, the satirical news source, once posted the farcical headline: “Tim Duncan Hams It Up for Crowd by Arching Left Eyebrow Slightly.”

His was not a false humility. Pressed during that Knicks series whether he could see himself as a 6-11 point guard, since he seemed to play every other position effortlessly, Duncan acknowledged that he would be happy to try. And that he believed he would have an impact in that little man’s role.

But he never indicated any desire whatsoever to seek the spotlight. Instead of narcissistic showboating and self-promotion, instead of angry slam dunks and demonstrative chest-beating, Duncan was restrained eloquence. Turn-around jump shots banked gently off the glass. Spinning layups. Rebounds. Shtick-less efficiency.

It was typical that Duncan skipped the kind of season-long farewell tour Kobe Bryant embarked upon this past season and left his retirement announcement (without comment) to a Spurs press release.

(San Antonio River Walk)

He came to be Old Man River Walk, as much a landmark in San Antonio as the network of restaurants, bars and shops along the city’s eponymous waterway. Yet, just as his basketball home was not the definition of glamour, his style was not the sort that spread his name beyond hard-core fandom. My own informal poll has concluded that, while casual sports observers easily can identify Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony, they struggle to place this Tim Duncan fellow.

All those years ago, during the 1999 finals in which Duncan put the Knicks on the road to extinction (their last NBA finals appearance, by the way), his opponents and teammates offered reviews that never needed revising….

Knicks head coach Jeff Van Gundy: “Nobody on the planet can guard Duncan. [And on defense], he is the long arm of the law, does a great job of turning us into a jump-shooting team.”

Knicks forward Latrell Sprewell: “He is long, excellent with the ball, has a great touch for a big guy. We have to go back to the drawing board.”

Spurs teammate Mario Elie: “He just does his job, doesn’t complain, doesn’t bring attention to himself.”

Iceland’s soccer referendum on England: Leave

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Dateline LONDON.

Now does not appear to be England’s finest hour. Apart from the obvious—the so-called Brexit vote to pull Great Britain out of the European Union, rattling the world’s financial markets and unleashing political chaos within the United Kingdom—there is the matter of football. (Soccer, to us Colonists.)

England is the Motherland of Soccer, the sport’s original superpower, and Monday’s staggering upset loss in the European Championships to historically insignificant Iceland has contributed to a sense of England’s fading global influence. The 2-1 loss to Iceland, just days after filing for divorce from the E.U., loosed a soul-searching anguish in a nation so long convinced, as Shakespeare wrote, that it was “the envy of less happier lands.”

“Less happy” would be an understatement for England’s general mood right now. Prime Minister David Cameron is resigning, his opposition party has declared an overwhelming lack of confidence in its own leader, European bigwigs are taking a good-riddance stance on the Brexit vote….and the soccer loss is being cast as a “disgrace” and “pathetic failure.” “Stiff upper lip” does not appear to apply.

It happened that I arrived here for a brief holiday just in time to read the supremely self-assured pre-match analyses of the Iceland duel, with English fans—and especially English bettors—certain there was “no way,” an one pundit put it, “that a major footballing force like England should be losing to a country you could make disappear with a hairdryer in about four hours.”

Normally, I could work up a reasonable passion for England’s endeavors. This is a polite, civilized nation of diversity and gumption, the land of Churchill, the home of the Beatles, the team of David Beckham. But Iceland’s rollicking advance into the Championships’ knockout round, against all odds—coinciding with My Fellow Americans’ semifinal loss in Copa America—had moved me to declare a week ago that Iceland is my new favorite team.

When the big game arrived Monday evening, we were strolling through Leicester Square in search of theatre tickets, while pubs overflowed with fans straining for a glimpse of TV sets inside. That included a pair of policemen, who informed my wife—not too long after kickoff—that Iceland had a one-goal lead.

Iceland! The tiny Nordic island with more volcanoes than professional soccer players! The smallest nation ever to qualify for a major soccer tournament! My new favorite team!

For the last 20 minutes of action, my daughter and I strained for a glimpse over jostling patrons, beers in hand, on the fringes of Philomena’s Irish Sports Bar and Kitchen in the Holborn district. The end left muttering fans dispersing into the night, and the next morning’s papers raged at the players’ bewildering lack of offensive pressure and English goalie Joe Hart’s “huge blunders” after he had gotten only his fingers on the decisive goal.

English manager Roy Hodgson immediately fell on his sword, quitting in shame even faster than David Cameron had over the Brexit vote. There was much angst over England’s training deficiencies and the poor investments of the national soccer federation. “English coaching is rotten to the core,” one headline declared.

Even some of the art at the Tate Britain gallery seemed to address England’s current misery. But, too, this is the home of Monty Python, and The Times of London showed the good humor to run a large feature headlined, “So we all want to be Icelandic now, ja?” Because, the piece pointed out (among other things):

—The men are beefcakes (citing “Game of Thrones” bad guy Gregor Clegane, who is played by Icelander Hafthor Bjornsson)…

—They have magnificent beards…

—Iceland is the third happiest country in the world, according to a U.N. survey (behind Switzerland and Denmark. (Take that, Bill Shakespeare.)

—Plus, the Times writer added, “Did I mention they’re good at football?”

Ja, and that’s my new favorite team. But I’m not worried about England. Churchill said, “If you are going through hell, keep going.”

My new favorite team

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Iceland has become my default position in this Summer of Soccer. Now that My Fellow Americans have been eliminated from Copa America, thrashed by world No. 1 Argentina in that major tournament’s semifinals, Iceland’s compelling—shocking—advance into the knockout round of the European championships has my full attention and rooting interest.

This hardly is a renunciation of citizenship. And certainly not a dismissal of the Yanks’ decided progress over the past generation, from Third World to Emerging Nation to legitimate international presence in the sport. While countless pundits in my chosen field of sports journalism continue to dismiss U.S. proficiency and—especially—U.S. fan interest in soccer, the Americans in fact are one of only seven nations to qualify for the past seven World Cups. (Only global powers Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Italy and Spain—plus Far East regional force South Korea—have equaled that.)

Furthermore, there hardly was shame in the Yanks’ 4-0 loss in the Copa semis to Argentina and its Messi-merizing superstar, five-time world player-of-the-year Lionel Messi. Despite the embarrassing admission recently by New York talk radio blowhard Mike Francesa—who claims to speak for mainstream U.S. fans—that he and his listeners never had heard of Messi or Copa America, a sizeable chunk of the populace long ago came to realize that there are few displays in sports to equal the cool, lyrical expertise of Messi and his mates.

Still, I must move on. And what better spectator value than a classic case of unexpected overachievement against great odds and established potentates? The Washington Post precisely summed up matters with a headline labeling Iceland “your new favorite team.”

More than the team, which never had qualified for a major soccer tournament in 23 previous tries and has levitated more than 100 spots in the sport’s world rankings over the last three years, is the appealing mash-up of Iceland’s distinct culture, geography, language and people.

Of course it is ironic, as a native of the land that celebrates Christopher Columbus, to be discovering Iceland at this late date. Icelandic explorer Leif Eriksson found us first, 500 years before Columbus. Iceland also beat the United States to the punch by (at least) 36 years with a female head-of-state. In 1980, Vigdis Finnbogadottir became the world’s first democratically elected woman to the presidency, and served for 16 years.

Now, with its soccer team threatening to pass the Yanks in the world rankings—Iceland began the month No. 34, the U.S. No. 31—the only reasonable thing to do is get aboard the bandwagon and embrace an appreciation of the tiny Nordic Island, where everybody literally is known as someone’s son or daughter.

The traditional Icelandic system of naming children discards surnames with each generation. If I were Icelandic, for instance, I would not be John Jeansonne, taking my father’s family name, but John Fredsson—because my father’s given name was Fred. And my daughter would not be Jordan Jeansonne, but Jordan Johnsdottir. “John’s daughter.”

(The full name of Bjork—the singer-songwriter who possibly is the most widely known Icelander in the world—is Bjork Guomundsdottir.)

Isolated up there at the juncture of the Norwegian Sea and Atlantic Ocean, just south of the Arctic Circle, and 1,000 times smaller than the United States in population, Iceland is easily (and logically) overlooked. At least until its national team pulls the rug out from under Hungary, Portugal and Austria with two ties and a win on the big stage of the European championships. Then, we begin to notice that roughly 10,000 of its folks, among a population of 330,000, are merrily chanting and wearing Viking helmets in the crowd in suburban Paris, while the players put on an a stirring show.

The country is so tiny—60 U.S. cities have larger populations than all of Iceland—that Iceland defender Karl Arnason considered the crowd in France and estimated that “I know probably 50 percent of them. Or at least recognize them. It’s like having your family at the game.”

The Iceland fans are “Tolfan,” which translates to “Twelve.” As in the “12^th man” moniker famously adopted by U.S. football fans of the Seattle Seahawks and Texas A&M Aggies. Johann Olafur Sigurdsson, blogging for the Euro2016 Web site, declared upon Iceland’s conquest of Austria that “June 22 should be a national holiday from here on.” Exhibit A of that day’s outrageously unlikely success can be found on the Internet in the shrieking, enraptured (and unintelligible) reaction to Iceland’s last-second winning goal by Iceland broadcaster Guomundur (Gummi Ben) Benediktsson.

Tolfan refer affectionately to their players as Strakarnir Okkar—“Our Boys”—and American-born, Iceland-raised soccer pro Aron Johannsson recently offered a translation of the compliment “duglegur” that is being lavished on those Iceland lads.

“You know how, in the United States, you say ‘good job’ or ‘good boy’?” Johannsson was quoted. “In Iceland, we say, ‘Hard work! That was some hard work you did there!’” Duglegur!

At 8 p.m. Monday, local time in France, Iceland will play England—the nation that merely invented soccer—in Nice, for a ticket to the Euro quarterfinals. I’ve got to get hold of a Viking helmet to show some solidarity.

Playing the ponies (or vice versa)

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There is an old horseplayer joke that goes something like this: I bet on a horse at 10-to-one. He didn’t come in until quarter past two.

I was reminded of this—and other wagering wisdom imparted over the years—during a recent day at the races. “You take a dart,” one veteran patron of the betting windows once counseled, “and you throw it at the board.”

You blindfold yourself and try to pin the tail on the donkey.

But who doesn’t like a challenge? About once every year or two, my friend Tony and I venture to lovely Belmont Park—the green, almost rustic arboretum covering 430 acres on the edge of New York City—for an afternoon of idle chatter and the dare of channeling Nostradamus, with the full understanding that we are unlikely to become hundredaires. At best.

There is no point in affecting a hard-bitten railbird’s disguise by, say, not shaving and purchasing a big cigar. Or buying a Daily Racing Form to pore over the lineage of the steeds and the successes of various trainers and jockeys. None of that will help.

Over the course of six races last week, the only four-leaf clover I found was a nag named Warriors Diva, who paid a measly $3.80 on a $2 bet. One other choice, Dot Matrix, finished second. (The official race chart said that Dot Matrix “stalked the winner from the two path and proved no match.”) Another, Mean Season, came in third.

At least those “almosts” were better than One Nice Pal, who finished 10^th in a 12-horse field. (Official chart: “Chased the pace along the inside, forwardly placed under encouragement from three furlongs out, swung just off the inside for home. Folded.”) Among my other $2-to-win bets, Kettles On was fourth, Graceful Gal sixth, Singsong ninth. (Singsong also “folded”).

In fact, even before the racetrack bugler had played his little “Assembly” ditty for the first time, calling the horses to the post, Tony lost $3 on Preferred Parking and I parted with $3 on General Admission.

On one of my occasional thoroughbred racing assignments for Newsday over the years, a Belmont regular recited to me the gambler’s prayer: “Dear God, let me break even. I need the money.” He also recommended that the first question to put to a handicapper is, “What kind of car do you drive?”

Another teaching moment, about how the track is not a consequence-free zone, came years ago during an interview for a story about former Giants running back Joe Morrison who, at the time, was in the midst of his NCAA coach-of-the-year season at the University of South Carolina.

Among the musings of Morrison, who was a horse owner and racing fan on the side, was a recollection of his first trip to the track during his playing career. He had been invited to look into some mutuel windows with a service station owner he had befriended, and “the first time I went to the races with him,” Morrison said, “he threw his pocket change on the floor of the car just before we got ready to walk into the track. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘We have to make sure we have toll fare home.’”

When I was a mere proverbial knee-high sports journalist, dispatched to help with coverage of the Belmont Stakes, I was appalled to learn that there was a betting window right there in the press box. Naivete is not a sin, but I had assumed that fellow ink-stained wretches were too busy with their unbiased reporting on the races to indulge in an activity that required all-out rooting (quietly, be assured) for a particular result.

It turns out that thoroughbred reporters aspire to be thoroughbred reporters because they are as drawn to those windows as to the sport’s characters and story lines. I’ve come to accept that reality as an innocent enough way of hedging their bets: Get paid to write about the ponies, while engaging in what the Brits and Australians refer to as “punting skills.”

Nevertheless. I am only able to rationalize my participation in the gambling aspect of thoroughbred racing by retaining a rank amateur’s dread. Handicapper Harvey Pack used to tell neophytes that a horseplayer must be “confident and resilient. “ I would suggest “fearful.”

My proposal: Instead of having a race-track official on the other side of that window to accept your down payment on the great riches that theoretically will result from your powers of prediction, why not just have a small toilet in there? You put in your money and flush.

All of this is not to say that I can’t justify forfeiting around $20—always just $2 bets on eight to 10 races—as the price of entertainment for a day of occasional adrenaline rushes and the fellowship of disappointment.

But I know how my trip would come out in the unique prose of racing charts: The Dilettante started sluggishly, rushed up momentarily, briefly threatened but quickly came under pressure, wandered and fell back steadily. Folded.

King (Clinton?) vs. Riggs (Trump?)

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Here’s the sports analogy for what already is a theatrical, historic Presidential campaign: Billie Jean King as Hillary Clinton, Bobby Riggs as Donald Trump. A woman of substance and accomplishment vs. an attention-craving egotist considered by many folks to be a con artist. A female pioneer against what used to be known as a male chauvinist pig. With bad hair.

In 1973, King and Riggs played a tennis match, won by King, that was more about the so-called glass ceiling than a racket-and-ball contest. Because it paired the 29-year-old King, at the height of her career as a 12-time major-tournament champion, against a 55-year-old geezer whose last of three major titles was 32 years in the past, physiological comparisons of innate female/male strength and speed hardly applied.

More to the point was King’s symbolic intrusion into the Old Boys’ Club. In the circus-like buildup to their match, Riggs had been bluntly dismissive of women’s role in society as well as women’s tennis—at a time when the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution had passed both houses of Congress and was awaiting ratification by state legislatures.

So, beyond the promotional excesses of the King-Riggs “Battle of the Sexes,” which felt at times like a public leg-pulling exercise, the match in fact became a prominent piece in the real national struggle that was playing out over gender rights. And Riggs had no interest in assuming what the current presumptive Republican Presidential candidate repeatedly disdains as political correctness.

Riggs was a showboating hustler and gambler, reportedly with large debts and ties to the mob. Months before the King showdown, he had challenged Margaret Court—whose 24 major-tournament championships remain more than those won by the likes of Steffi Graf and Serena Williams—and easily defeated her in a best-of-three-sets exhibition.

Against King, then, polls—that, is, the betting odds—overwhelmingly favored the blustering Riggs to repeat his proxy proof of apparent male superiority. The King-Riggs match employed the men’s more demanding major-tournament format of best-of-five sets, but King needed only three for her decisive sweep. A triumph of competitive chops over empty braggadocio.

In the following day’s New York Times front-page account, Neil Amdur wrote that King “attacked with a professional cool” while Riggs “hit marshmallow shots, some of which went in….Most important perhaps for women everywhere, she convinced skeptics that a female athlete can survive pressure-filled situations and that men are as susceptible to nerves as women.”

In Sports Illustrated, Frank Deford wrote that King “has prominently affected the way 50 percent of society thinks and feels about itself….”

There were stories of secretaries marching into offices the next day and demanding raises, or announcing that their coffee-making days were over. King immediately was seen as a unifying leader in the fight for gender equity—far beyond tennis and sports in general—and a fire under the new federal law, Title IX, that prohibited sex discrimination in public schools.

Likely, the pre-match carnival barking (mostly by the hectoring, boastful Riggs) had helped entice more than 30,000 spectators to pay their way into the Houston Astrodome and an estimated 50 million Americans (and 90 million worldwide) to watch on television. Beyond the hyperbole, the happening itself clearly produced a broad significance. (Momentous enough that, 44 years later, there will be a biographical movie based on the match released in 2017.)

“Everybody knew it was a gimmick,” Donna Lopiano, one of the most influential figures in women’s sports, noted years later. “But, up to that moment, the women’s movement had played the fringes, with things like bra-burning. Because that was sports and a woman proved her athleticism, it struck at the heart of male dominance.”

King herself said recently, “I hated the term ‘Battle of the Sexes.’ When I was younger, I’d lose to guys on purpose. But I knew playing Bobby had huge social significance. I knew, athletically, it meant nothing. But to the world it meant everything, because it was on guys’ terms. That’s why it worked.

“The only attention women get is when we get in their arena.”

(Donald Trump)

(Bill and Hillary Clinton)

Four decades later, with his wife in the arena, one William Jefferson Clinton has a front-row seat to the 2016 political analogy that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has called “the most stark X vs. Y battle since Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.”

P.S. When Bill Clinton said, in 2009, that “she has probably done more than anyone in the world to empower women and educate men,” he was talking about Billie Jean King.

Ali’s (unintentional) boxing lesson

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Perhaps Muhammad Ali’s foremost talent, we have been reminded by the deservedly warm tributes following his death last week, was his ability to make folks uncomfortable. It is accepted fact: In the ring, he dispensed downright pain. From his platform as a global celebrity, he caused the establishment to squirm—most notably over its foot-dragging on civil rights and the prosecution of the ill-advised Vietnam War.

Most right-minded people eventually took his strong hints. But there is another piece to the Ali legacy, plenty disquieting, that society doesn’t appear especially eager to confront. That is, the savage ramifications of his sport—how the estimated 29,000 blows Ali absorbed slowly dimmed his lights over his last 30 years. Possibly the most vigorous, eloquent champ in boxing history was rendered listless and mum long before the end.

As a career sports journalist, I am keenly aware of boxing’s inherent drama, its deep well of vivid characters and compelling examples of the human condition. The sport has been a favorite topic for the best wordsmiths—Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, H.L. Mencken, Richard Wright, George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, on and on—by offering its primal contest inside the ropes and crazy carnival world outside them.

By any civilized standard, though, it is a ticking time bomb of physical and mental impairment, of glorifying cruelty for entertainment’s sake.

In the days of Friday Night Fights on fuzzy black-and-white television sets, 50 and 60 years ago, boxing felt like something of the Sweet Science it was billed to be. A demanding test of strategy, style, persistence. But in July of 1979, in Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico, just outside San Juan, I was covering the boxing competition in the Pan American Games when a boxer appeared to separate his opponent’s soul from his body. The “knockee”—as Lardner described a knockout victim in his short story, “Champion”—was left lying on his back, his head dangling over the ring apron, tongue hanging out and unmoving, like some chicken who had just had his neck rung.

It occurred to me then why I preferred sportswriting over war correspondence. I wasn’t interested in witnessing death. The poor fellow—I can’t remember his name or country—was soon revived, but in the relatively few times I was assigned to cover boxing (both amateur and professional fights) over the years, I was reminded of the barbaric geometry of fitting roundhouse punches into a square ring. Accompanied, on almost every occasion, by fevered, howling spectators thrilled to see a man administer a lullaby to his opponent with his fists.

There always was a hint of ancient Rome, when the original gladiators entertained the public by engaging in mortal combat. Fight nights are a festival of adrenaline, a celebration of testosterone, with so many “manly-art” clichés. Bow-tied referees suggest a courtliness; women in underwear and high heels, prancing around the ring to announce the number of the upcoming round, communicate a stag party.

My last boxing assignment for Newsday was at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center in March 2013, during which a welterweight named Keith Thurman gave macho voice to his “love for putting people to sleep,” and the main event featured 46-year-old Bernard Hopkins as the poster boy of prizefighting persistence at a time of growing concern in all sports over traumatic head injury. (Pick your adjective for Hopkins: Maturation? Dotage? Seniority? Everlast? Senility?)

Hopkins retained his world light heavyweight title that night, his blows thudding off opponent Tavoris Cloud as loudly and forcefully as hockey pucks striking a goalie’s pads, and declared himself “an inspiration” to young kids.

There was much bleeding in all of the evening’s six bouts—and surely unseen internal damage inflicted—while the crowd called for more of the same. Public demand, after all, was what allowed organizers of the first Madison Square Garden fight, in 1882, to skirt laws at the time against prizefighting by calling their enterprise, featuring John L. Sullivan, “an illustrated lecture on pugilism.”

In 2014, the Health Research Funding web site released a murderers’ row of chilling statistics: That 90 percent of boxers will experience at least one brain injury during their career; that the force of a professional boxer’s fist is equivalent to being hit with a 13-pound bowling ball traveling 20 miles per hour; that studies found, at any given time, as many as 40 percent of ex-boxers had symptoms of chronic brain injury.

During Ali’s heyday, an appealing aspect to his fighting, though brutal by definition, was that it somehow seemed civilized. Athletic. Flamboyant. More like a magic show than an alley brawl. But his long, slow decline with Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder believed to have some relation to head trauma, should insist that we face some inconvenient truths.

The singular goal of boxing is to leave an opponent with little imaginary birds twirling over his head. There is, unmistakably, fortitude required of the sport’s one-on-one dual—and Ali’s mettle in the ring has been justifiably hailed—but wasn’t his real impact on society his moral courage? And wasn’t his brain a terrible thing to waste?

Low down hockey

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The generally accepted belief is that John Brophy, who died last week at 83, was the personification of hockey’s roughhousing minor-league culture. And that the Brophy experience was faithfully depicted in the zany 1977 movie Slap Shot by modeling its aging career bush-leaguer Reggie Dunlop (played by Paul Newman) on Brophy.

No argument here. Especially since I had gotten a pretty good picture of the unfashionable, hardscrabble, traveling-circus low-minor leagues during a week-long, 1,500-mile bus trip with the Long Island Ducks in 1971. Our poor man’s magic carpet was a rickety old conveyance, retrofitted with bunks in the rear half. The players existed on fast-food stops, beer, Tums and cheap motels.

It happens that the irascible Brophy spent 18 years in that setting, half of that time with the Ducks, though he had just been traded—at 37—to the Eastern Hockey League’s Jersey franchise before I was assigned by Newsday to chronicle the team’s slog to EHL outposts in Charlotte, Greensboro and Johnstown, Pa.

That was the season before the NHL’s expansion Islanders materialized, so that East of Manhattan’s Rangers, the Ducks were the only professional (sort of) hockey outfit. They took their name from one of the Island’s oldest and most prominent industries; though now gone mostly bust, the production of Long Island ducks was an abundant blessing to restaurant chefs for decades.

What better fit those teams—and their rag-tag, underdog league—is the image of actual ducks, however calm they appear above the surface, working furiously underwater, out of sight.

My ’71 adventure, right from the start, took on the feel of a John Steinbeck short story, with a theme of fate and oppression, of downtrodden protagonists. It began in the parking lot of the Ducks’ home arena, a long-since demolished old barn, dark and drafty, in Commack, N.Y., on an early November Sunday morning at 10:30. (An hour late, because the bus wouldn’t start.)

The bus had been painted by a 16-year-old Ducks fan in the team colors of red, white and black, suggestive of a carnival wagon to Lorne Rombough, a 23-year-old Ducks forward, who recommended, “It should have pipes with music and balloons coming out of the top.”

Once in Charlotte, the team was departing its motel for practice, with players hanging out of the windows, when the back door of the bus swung open, scattering hockey sticks and other equipment in the road. Ducks publicist John O’Reilly, who also served as radio play-by-play man, was reminded of a TV sitcom about blundering U.S. soldiers in the Wild West. “We look like F Troop,” he said.

Rombough, whose half-season with the Greensboro team the year before theoretically qualified him to give bus driver Bill Smith directions to the two Carolina arenas, twice got the Ducks lost. On both occasions, there was a call from within the bus to team captain Butch Morris, a ninth-year league veteran: “Yeh, Butch. Get up here by the driver. We’re lost.”

Morris came to the rescue, while Rombough’s more accurate contributions were related to the spectator behavior the Ducks could expect. When he and his former Greensboro mates played at Charlotte, Rombough said, “The players on both teams used to stand back and watch the fans fight.”

During a game in Commack two weeks earlier, Charlotte’s Mike Rouleau had bashed Ducks goalie Guy DeNoncourt over the head with his stick, knocking out DeNoncourt and sidelining Rouleau with a three-game suspension. According to Morris, “Once Rouleau was suspended, he was just sitting in the stands throwing hockey pucks at the players.” And days after the incident, O’Reilly received a Halloween card signed by a Charlotte fan: “We are anxiously awaiting your arrival with chairs in hand.”

Still, the Ducks, in a league embodied by the fiery, bombastic Brophy, soldiered on. “You can’t make a career of this league,” said Morris, who was 28 at the time and said he was able to keep playing because he made more money as a steel worker in the off season (just as Brophy had sustained himself).

“Sometimes you get really low, after a couple of losses or a bad road trip,” Morris said. “But you snap out of it. Everybody in this league plays because he likes it. Because, let’s face it, the league doesn’t have much to offer. It’s a chance to move up. But how many players move up?

“It’s more of a hobby, really. If I were traded away from Long Island, where my other job is, I probably would quit hockey. I don’t’ know for sure, but I’d have to think seriously….”

Among the more introspective of those Ducks was Cornell (Corky) DeGraauw, a 20-year-old Dutch-born forward who had settled in the Toronto area and, just graduated from the Canadian Junior League, was married with an 18-month-old daughter.

“I can put up with this because I want to play hockey,” DeGraauw said one morning over breakfast. “I think most of the guys are disappointed to be here. They have been kept from higher leagues and they think they should be playing somewhere better than this.”

Nevertheless, DeGraauw decided, “On the bottom of the contract, it says, ‘P.S. The owner may void this with 48 hours’ notice.’ Let’s see. We have lost two straight games and that figures out to just about 48 hours. I’m glad to be here.”

DeGraauw’s quirky take on the travel situation was that “flying is OK, because it’s nice to look down at the ground that you’ve always seen before on maps, and see that there really isn’t a big red line which separates Canada and the U.S. But the bus…well, I like the card games, anyway.”

On the bus, beyond the handful of card players, team comedian Jean-Marie Nicol amused himself by tying the shoestrings of napping teammates to the seat chair legs, or threatening to sing when coach Ed Stankiewicz sought relief from general racket by turning off the radio. Michel Letourneau, a diminutive 20-year-old French Canadian who did not speak English, spent the entire trip quietly observing his surroundings, wide-eyed. “The guy is from the North Pole, where all the bears are white,” DeGraauw teased Letourneau, who in fact hailed from a small Quebec town at roughly the same latitude as Minnesota’s northern border.

Some veterans chose to pass the time by giving free haircuts to rookies, an act of hazing not exactly welcomed by the haze-ees. In the Charlotte game, Rombough lost a tooth and forward Bill Morris (no relation to Butch) needed three stitches near his right eye. Defenseman Phil Persia, proud of his prowess at fisticuffs, badly bruised a knee.

There were regional difficulties, too, for all those Canadian lads crossing the Mason-Dixon Line (on-sides?) for the first time. DeNoncourt, attempting to order a Coca Cola, was presented with a Mountain Dew. DeGraauw insisted he “knew better than to order Today’s Special.” Dan Tremblay, a 20-year-old from Manitoba, declared the mild weather unfit. “It has to be 10 below to play hockey,” he said.

Butch Morris, meanwhile, not only attended to on-ice duties, dealing with hockey’s curious version of Roberts Rules or Order—the eye-for-and-eye, punch-and-counterpunch aggressiveness—but also was something of a shepherd to teammates. When there was poor service at a restaurant along the interstate, Morris assumed the role of waiter, serving coffee to fellow players. When team trainer Bill Lumley fell ill at the end of the trip, Morris was the fellow who added the duty of skate-sharpener.

He was no John Brophy, the white-haired menace whose 3,840 career penalty minutes were 3,663 more than Morris’ total. “The best thing that ever happened to that guy,” Morris said of Brophy, “was that he was prematurely gray.” Morris’ rather crooked smile and slightly scarred face hardly were unique in the EHL, nothing nearly as dramatic as Brophy’s scraps with players, opposing fans and security guards.

But maybe I should have taken better notes on that trip, which was a metaphor for the sport’s penalty box if there ever was one, and thought in terms of a movie script. Sin Bin?