March Madness…and Stony Brook

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When Steve Pikiell arrived on Eastern Long Island’s Stony Brook University campus in 2005, embarking on his first season as a head basketball coach in Division I, he had three small shelves installed in his office, one slightly higher than the other.

The lowest shelf was reserved for the game ball that would commemorate his first victory. (That souvenir appeared months later, on Jan. 2, 2006, in Pikiell’s 10^th game, after one of only four victories in 28 games that season.) The next shelf up was set aside for Stony Brook’s first league title in Division I. (That was occupied on Feb. 24, 2010, with a victory over America East Conference regular-season runner-up Vermont.)

The top shelf was left empty for “that NCAA ball,” Pikiell said shortly before his teams reached the first of five conference tournament finals in the last six years in 2011. “When the guys come in here and tell me how hard they’re working,” he said then, “I just point to that shelf and say, ‘If you’re working that hard, we’d have that ball up there already.’”

So now—not so terribly long after Pikiell envisioned what certainly seemed to be a stretch in 2005—his team has met that goal with a first-round NCAA Tournament date against the University of Kentucky.

A bit of history, in terms of context, is in order, since the match-up is widely construed as Stony Brook fighting with rocks against Kentucky bazookas.

First, Kentucky (where the emphasis on college basketball long has been so substantial that it has bordered on obscene): Kentucky is the most successful college basketball operation in history—more NCAA tournament appearances (55), wins (120), Sweet Sixteen (41) and Elite Eight (36) appearances than any other school, with eight national titles that rank second only to UCLA’s 11.

Kentucky also was caught up in the point-shaving scandals of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

By 1924, Kentucky was playing in the largest basketball arena in the South, seating 2,800, moved into an 11,500-seat coliseum in 1950 and now plays in 23,000-seat Rupp Arena, named for 42-year, 880-game-winning coach Adolph Rupp.

Stony Brook, in humble comparison, has been playing in a relatively palatial 4,000-seat on-campus arena the past two seasons after years in what resembled a high school box—1,700-seat Pritchard Gymnasium. Originally the State University College of Long Island, founded in 1957—shortly before Kentucky won its fourth national title—Stony Brook didn’t begin playing intercollegiate basketball (in non-scholarship Division III) until 1960, didn’t settle on its current campus until 1962 and didn’t move to Division I until 1999.

The first time I did any reporting for Newsday on Stony Brook history, I found far more emphasis on its health sciences and medical school than on its athletic prowess (nothing wrong with that), with even a quirky nod to its 1973 graduate school alumnus Stephen Kaplan, who became the world’s foremost vampirologist, founder of the Vampire Research Center. Kaplan conducted a world-wide 1980s demographic study in which he was curious to hear from people who had seen vampires, been attacked by vampires, knew vampires, claimed to be vampires, wished to correspond with vampires or wished to become vampires. (Kaplan, known as a skeptic of the infamous Amityville Horror hauntings of the mid-1970s, died in 1995.)

Stephen Kaplan

Anyway, when Stony Brook’s administrators concluded that big-time athletics was a reasonable endeavor to generate publicity and school spirit and opted for sports scholarships, they first hired veteran Canisius and Fordham coach Nick Macarchuk, then opted for Pikiell, a former captain of UConn teams that advanced to the NCAA Tournament’s Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight.

There was no sexy heritage of Stony Brook basketball greatness when the 38-year-old Pikiell arrived. Nothing like Kentucky’s folklore. Then again, I am reminded of what celebrated coach Larry Brown told me when he was coaching at Kansas in the mid-1980s. Brown, now at SMU, led 10 professional teams and got perennial powers UCLA and Kansas to the NCAA title game. Yet he made the apparently counterintuitive point that “tradition is who’s been in the Final Four the last four years. The top recruits…think of tradition as what’s on the tube right now….”

True enough. To some extent, the way it works is that high school big shots want to be on ESPN or the networks, those arbiters of tradition. Yet Pikiell somehow kept selling recruits on that cramped, dinky Pritchard gym for years, gave them a Nostradamus view of a future NCAA Tournament status, and crafted some nice, entertaining teams.

So Stony Brook isn’t Kentucky. So what? My occasional dealings with Pikiell were of a committed, respectful, optimistic gentleman. A top-shelf guy.

Cuba and golf

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There is a 1954 television episode of “I Love Lucy” in which Lucy buys Ricky a set of golf clubs for their anniversary, then regrets it when he and pal Fred Mertz become obsessed with the game.

Until the fawning coverage of New York Mets’ outfielder Yoenis Cespedes’ recent tour of the Palm City, Fla., links during another relentlessly uneventful baseball spring training, that “Lucy” show may have been the last widely disseminated account of a prominent Cuban playing golf.

It is showing one’s age to know that the TV role of Ricky Ricardo, a Cuban singer/bandleader, was played by real Cuban-born singer/bandleader Dezi Arnaz. (Ask you grandmother.) But when it comes to the old club-and-ball sport on that Caribbean island, time has pretty much stood still between the addictions of Ricky and Cespedes.

That’s because golf was banned in Cuba after the 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro, who mocked the game and U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower’s devotion to it. Castro’s transformation of the island from a playground for rich American capitalists to his Communist template—“Socialism or Death”—included the demise of all but one of the nation’s courses.

A rare photograph unearthed at a 2014 London auction, interpreted as ridiculing Yanqui extravagance, showed Castro and fellow Marxist rebel Che Guevara playing golf in military fatigues and combat boots shortly after the revolution. Sort of a farewell to irons in Cuba.

Layouts, where golfing greats Sam Snead and Ben Hogan once played, disappeared. Only a small nine-hole course near the Havana airport, built by the British in 1953, was preserved to entertain diplomats and foreign businessmen. Not until the Spaniards constructed a plush resort in the early 1990s on Varadero Beach, two hours from Havana, was a second Cuban course carved out. Also for foreigner duffers only.

So, while sport was declared by the Castro government to be “the right of the people” in Cuba, that didn’t include golf. To a young Yoenis Cespedes, the odds were approximately zero that he would have known the first thing about the game, since he was born in 1985 and raised in Campechuela on Cuba’s opposite coast from those two off-limits-to-Cubans courses.

In 1991, when I was in Cuba to cover the Pan American Games, I interviewed a fellow named Jorge Duque who, at the time, was the country’s only golf pro. His job was to offer lessons to visiting diplomats at the Havana course, then called the Diplo Club. “In Cuba, when you are born, if you are a boy,” Duque said then, “you are playing baseball or soccer or boxing. Those are in our blood. We never think of golf. It’s not part of our life.” Before training for the Diplo assignment, Duque knew only that golf “is that game you play with the bag, and you hit the ball. And that’s all. It’s like the moon. It’s like this”—he formed a circle with his hands—“and it has little holes and it’s up there.”

Baseball, of course, has been so widely played so well for so long in Cuba that the national team has been winning world, regional and Olympic championships since the 1930s. Fidel Castro himself, pre revolution, was briefly considered a pitching prospect by the old New York Giants. And even the end of U.S.-Cuba relations barely slowed the steady flow of Cuban baseball talent to the States. Since 1959, more than 90 Cubans have defected to play in the Majors. Cespedes is one of 10 to become All-Stars, and one of 27 Cubans on current big-league rosters.

But it wasn’t until shortly after Cespedes escaped the island in 2011 that Cuban officials announced preliminary approval to bring back the bourgeois excess of golf. Foreign developers concluded that Cuba’s almost desperate need for cash had nudged the government to turn to golf resorts in an attempt to lure free-spending tourists (besides Americans, still under the cold-war-era trade embargo, though President Obama has asked Congress to end it). There is a plan for four luxury resort projects and eventually as many as 16.

Things are changing. Next week Obama will become the first U.S. president since 1928 to visit Cuba, and the agenda of incremental improvement in the two nations’ dealings will include Obama’s presence at a baseball exhibition between the Tampa Bay Rays and Cuban national team.

Whether the opportunity to play golf (one of Obama’s enthusiasms, it happens) should be conflated with freedom and democracy is debatable. But, in the meantime, there may be no more obvious example of a conspicuous consumption capitalist than the fabulously paid ($75 million for three years) Cespedes, who paraded $1 million worth of personal vehicles into Mets camp and escorted a group of reporters to witness his U.S.-discovered upscale passion for golf. And that is in stark contrast to his homeland, which continues to look like something from a black-and-white “I Love Lucy” set.

Whatever happened to peace and brotherhood?

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I knew Mitt Romney. (Well, a little bit.) And Mitt Romney is no Mitt Romney. At least, he doesn’t seem to be the same guy who, in the wake of a vote-buying bid scandal, deftly marshaled the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics through a minefield of fears about terrorism, potential xenophobia and the usual Olympic headaches.

As organizing chief of those Games, staged just months after 9/11, Romney managed not only to restore global Olympic officials’ faith in American know-how and American humility—after the 1996 Atlanta Olympic poohbahs’ arrogant, slipshod performance—he also struck a blow for international understanding.

Whoever that fellow was who, during a 2012 presidential campaign, belittled 47 percent of the American citizenry and called upon undocumented immigrants to “self-deport,” the Olympic Mitt Romney preached that “we care about what the world thinks of America….It’s important that America not only enforce peace but also demonstrate that.”

At a time when many Olympic visitors worried there would be too much U.S. jingoism in response to the emotional wounds of 9/11, Romney invited Desmond Tutu, the anti-apartheid South African archbishop, and Polish labor activist Lech Walesa to be among the high-profile characters in Salt Lake’s opening ceremonies.

“Just as you find that you can’t fight terrorism on your own,” Tutu said, “you can’t have the Olympic Games on your own. You need help.”

Walesa admitted “thinking if I should be here, because you remember I was on the other side [in the cold war]. But now we have this new attitude….I hope we will now go to a different world of this good struggle.”

Now we have the disorienting Romney-Donald Trump tete-a-tete, which feels as personal as it does political, and I certainly won’t take sides in that squabble. (Except to say that the really, really little bit that I knew Trump—from a lengthy mid-1980s interview regarding his ownership of a team in the short-lived U.S. Football League—gave a clear glimpse of Trump’s struggle with facts.)

Anyway, leading up to—and during—the 2002 Olympics, the version of Mitt Romney on display was an open-minded, efficient manager with a manageable ego. After two former Salt Lake City Olympic organizing officers had been indicted for paying $1 million in money and gifts to International Olympic Committee members in exchange for votes to host the 2002 Games, Romney was recruited in 1999 by then-Utah governor Mike Leavitt to come to the rescue.

Wealthy enough to turn down $285,000 in annual pay for the gig, Romney saved the community from embarrassment and financial crisis by engineering a $400 million turnaround, slashing $200 million in expenses and raising $200 million from previously reluctant sponsors.

“There is no greater irony,” he said then, “than my being given this Olympic responsibility. I was not a great athlete and I’ve never been in the business of sports.” During his days as an investment banker in Boston, he said, he had become a New England Patriots football fan, but the Olympics generated “special feelings and emotions. I didn’t get teary-eyed when the Patriots won the Super Bowl. I do get teary-eyed when I watch Chris Klug [the snowboarder who won a bronze medal competing with a liver transplant] and watch Sarah Hughes’ performance [to rise from fourth place to win the figure-skating gold].”

Romney seemed genuine enough in that settling (with the possible exception of his black, perfectly groomed hair, though that may be jealousy on my part), and aware of his obligations as a public figure. He appeared to be all-in on the Olympic ideal of international peace and brotherhood. He said he “knew the power of one badly chosen word,” a reference to when his father, George, suddenly disappeared as a Republican presidential candidate in 1968 after saying he had been “brainwashed” on U.S. policy in Vietnam.

Months after the 2002 Olympics, Romney ran for governor of Massachusetts. And won. No surprise. He had spoken publicly of his political aspirations the day after the Games ended, when his name recognition was sky high. Then, out of mothballs to run for president in 2012, he wasn’t quite recognizable. Except for the hair.

Forty-seven percent and self-deportation just don’t jive with the Olympic spirit. Then again, what must Desmond Tutu and Lech Walesa be thinking about Donald Trump?

Bud Collins, R.I.P. (Real Inspirational Person)

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Really accomplished people aren’t necessarily nice, but Bud Collins was. In the extreme. He was much too busy—as the Boswell of Tennis, the sport’s premier historian and conscience who brightened newspapers, magazines and television—to bother with showing the ropes to young whippersnappers arriving on the beat. But of course he did. Unfailingly and for decades.

Collins, who died Friday at 86, was far too recognizable—bald head, big smile, sweater thrown jauntily over his shoulders, pants with patterns so loud they could speak for themselves—to take any time mixing with the hoi polloi. Yet he always did.

During those brief shuttle-bus rides from parking lot to main gate at the U.S. Open—no VIP treatment for him—Collins would be invited by fans to “enjoy the tennis today.”

“What’s not to enjoy?” Collins would respond happily. When they asked about his work, he would say, “I haven’t worked in—what?—40 years.”

He unfailingly saw “good in people” and unabashedly loved tennis, though neither of those realms necessarily guaranteed virtue. His reporting was even-handed, sometimes critical but never mean. Irreverent but lighthearted. With a goodly amount of literacy and puns.

In 1993, with the confluence of the Academy Award nomination for the film “Prince of Tides”—which starred 51-year-old Barbra Steisand—and the news that Streisand was dating 22-year-old tennis star Andre Agassi, whose often novel tennis attire included form-fitting bicycle shorts, Collins playfully dubbed Agassi “The Prince of Tights.” Not unkindly, he called Monica Seles, one of the first of the sport’s loud grunters, “Moanin’ Monica.” And tall, gangly, big-hitting Pam Shriver “The Great Whomping Crane.” And blonde, defensive-minded Caroline Wozniacki “The Golden Retriever.”

He described the sport as “a pitcher of lemonade. Sweet and piquant, altogether tasty. The lemons, freshly picked and squeezed, yield something a little different each time. Delightful. Refreshing. Satisfying. I never tire of the flavor. Pour me another glass, another match.”

And the more folks who would join him in that appreciation, the merrier.

My first time to cover Wimbledon was in 1986. That meant two appealing weeks to report from the sport’s cathedral, with the added bonus of having my wife and 6-year-old daughter simultaneously experience a London holiday. They took in museums and shows, castles and other tourist attractions, with no thought of witnessing any live tennis, because the lines—sorry, “queues”—for Wimbledon tickets stretched forever outside the tennis grounds every day.

One morning we were having breakfast when Bud dropped into the same restaurant, a place called Grumbles. (Ironic name, that, since Collins never was heard to moan about anything, though he lost a live-in companion and a wife to brain cancer, and had a sister and brother-in-law murdered by a former patient of their drug rehabilitation center.)

Typically, Collins stopped to chat. (All of us were staying at the same nearby apartment complex, Dolphin Square, because it long ago had been recommended to Newsday reporters staffing Wimbledon by one Bud Collins.) Naturally, without us even hinting, he offered to get tennis tickets for my wife and daughter. He did the same a few years later, too—just as he did over the decades for countless others whom he treated like close friends.

“Of course I remember him,” my daughter responded to my text that Collins had died. She now lives and works in Shanghai, yet she mentioned that “there is someone else here who also knew him….”

Everyone knew Bud. Everyone owed him something. Often on the Wimbledon nights that I worked past 11:30 p.m., when the Underground shut down at the tournament’s Southfields Station and the only option was an expensive taxi ride back to Dolphin Square, Collins—who wrapped up his Boston Globe stories after finishing day-long TV gigs—would offer a ride in his car provided by NBC.

He was among the most valuable souls who escorted me through a half-century of sports journalism, all those models of ethics and persistence, purveyors of history and contacts, practitioners of what old sportswriter Dan Jenkins once described as “literature in a hurry.”

Plus, Collins was good company. He was entirely too knowledgeable—tennis’ most authoritative voice and on a first-name basis with generations of players and officials; tennis royalty, really—to kibitz with us commoners. But he did, as equals.

It was from Collins that I learned about Richard Norris Williams, the Titanic survivor who later won two U.S. championships. And about fashion throwback Trey Waltke, a Californian who in 1983 wore long flannel pants and long-sleeved, white button-down shirt at Wimbledon against former champion Stan Smith. (And won.) It was Collins who pointed me—and so many others—toward the coaches and former players who could discuss the sport’s trends, technology, rules, international hotspots and foibles.

After taking a fall in his New York hotel during the 2011 U.S. Open, which resulted in a ruptured quadriceps tendon that required 10 surgical procedures, Collins disappeared from tennis press rooms, creating a decided vacuum of knowledge and just plain fun.

Last September, when U.S. Tennis Association poohbahs officially christened the Flushing Meadows press center the “Bud Collins U.S. Open Media Center,” Bud briefly appeared—in a wheelchair, speaking barely in a whisper—for the honor.

(Bud Collins’ last appearance at the U.S. Open. Sept. 6, 2015.)

Superstars Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova were among the players, shakers and movers who greeted Collins that day, followed by fellow tennis journalists. It was obvious that Collins was struggling a bit to identify all the old faces, an incongruous reversal for a man so long the master of recalling every name and detail.

Several of us said, “I’m not sure he knows me anymore. But I have to say ‘hello.’ And ‘thanks.’”

(It was always Bud Collins’ room. But this made it official.)

Leap Day and the Fosbury jump that was no flop

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For Leap Day, let us consider the most revolutionary jump in sports history.

“It all developed under stress,” the jump’s author, Dick Fosbury, told me a few years ago during an endorsement appearance in New York City. He was a high school sophomore in Medford, Ore., in 1963, a high jumper on the track team who had become so depressed over his lack of improvement in the event that he begged his coach’s permission to abandon the traditional foot-first “straddle” style.

During a national high school meet, Fosbury found himself “intuitively” curve his approach to the bar, lead with his head, then “hunch over my shoulder and begin to rotate. I didn’t practice it. In practice, I’d be goofing around on the hurdles or watching the girls work out.”

Anyway, there obviously was no owner’s manual to consult.

“It was all in the meet,” Fosbury said. “I was just trying to lift my butt up and, by the end of the day, I was upside down over the bar.” He finished fourth that day, clearing 5-feet-4, to the best of his recollection. “But I didn’t care about that. I just wanted to compete, to be in the game.”

He had no label for the style. “I was just trying to use the right technical terms,” he said, “so I called it a ‘back layout.’ But there was a photo in the Medford paper with the caption, ‘Fosbury Flops Over the Bar.’ So the next time somebody asked, I said, ‘Back home, they call it the ‘Fosbury Flop.’

“I like the name. I like the irony. The conflict. Is it good or is it bad? It happened because I couldn’t adapt to the old style. I failed. Then I just discovered a new way for me to be competitive.”

What leapfrogged his visually weird technique into international consciousness, while coaches roundly dismissed its possibilities, was Fosbury’s 1968 Olympic victory in Mexico City, when he hushed the crowds each time he Flopped toward the winning height of 7-4 ¼. Naturally, high jumpers around the world quickly began to mimic the Flop, so that within three Olympic cycles, only three of the 16 high jump finalists in the 1980 Moscow Games were not using the style.

Of the 10 men who have held the world record since 1968, nine—including current holder Javier Sotomayor of Cuba at 8 feet-0 ¼ inches—have employed the Flop. The one exception was Vladimir Yaschenko, a Ukrainian who competed for the old Soviet Union and reached his peak—7-8 ¼ —in 1978 with the soon-to-be obsolete straddle method. Even Pat Matzdorf, a straddler who held the world record at 7-6 ¼ shortly after Fosbury’s seismic 1968 Olympic triumph, switched to the Flop after failing to make the 1972 Olympic team.

Fosbury said he “never dreamed about going to the Olympics; that just became a natural event in the course of that year when I was jumping well.” Furthermore, he claimed no intellectual property for devising the Flop. He recalled how he spotted a young Canadian girl, when both were competing in the same all-star track meet after his senior year in high school, who was using essentially the same technique he had chanced upon two years earlier.

Her name was Debbie Brill—she later finished eighth in the ‘72 Olympics—with what briefly was called the Brill Bend. There was no way, Fosbury said, that she could have known beforehand about him or his Flop. And that only convinced him that “biomechanically, it is the most efficient way to jump high. It’s been studied to death and proven to be so.”

The physics of the thing even prompted a short-lived experiment in the early 1970s in the long jump, in which an athlete would do a somersault from the take-off board in search of greater length. That, of course, was christened The Flip, but was a genuine flop. It didn’t even make it to the next Leap Year.

This is one of many reasons I never made it to the Olympic high jump

Olympic reporting: . . . – – – . . . (S.O.S)

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There was a perfectly good reason that an American colleague was unable to make a call from his cell phone during our early morning bus ride to cover the triathlon competition at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. The gadget in that fellow’s hand, he realized after several exasperating moments, turned out to be the TV remote from his room in the press village. Where, of course, he had left his cell phone.

(cell phone, circa 2000)

(tv remote)

Such wacky moments routinely are visited upon Olympic journalists, most of them related to confusion—a by-product of information overload and the cycle of too much adrenaline and too little sleep—and the fundamental need for communication.

There is too much going on during the Olympics, at too many sites, to feel in complete control. And it may as well not be happening at all if reporters can’t get the word out to their reading, listening and watching customers.

It is no solace, furthermore, to know of far greater struggles in the pioneer days of sports journalism. There is no comparative happiness to be aware that, in 1847, the New York Herald had to employ pony-express riders to deliver, two days later, Joe Elliott’s story of a major prize fight from Harper’s Ferry, W.Va. Nor that, months after that, the Herald arranged to receive Elliott’s dispatch of a fight in Baltimore via Samuel Morse’s five-year-old telegraph. In 1899, the Herald paid Guglielmo Marconi a whopping $5,000 to transmit results of an America’s Cup yacht race on his new wireless from waters just off the New Jersey shore.

By the 21^st Century, obviously, the existence of mobile phones and laptop computers, plus the dawning of WiFi availability, had made the relaying of information over great distances relatively easy and mighty quick. But the ink-stained wretches among us, advancing toward that scatterbrained not-a-cell-phone moment in Sydney, experienced our share of challenging days when tools of the trade included massive, first-generation portable computers slightly larger—and much heavier—than a newborn baby, and the endless craving for both a power outlet and a telephone land line.

At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, when the small press room in nearby Mission Viejo was overwhelmed by newspaper people covering the women’s cycling road race, my colleague Joe Gergen had to go knocking on doors of local residents in quest of an available phone to link with his computer. (He was generously accommodated, evidence of the true Olympic spirit.)

We called one of the earliest of those so-called portable contraptions—the TeleRam Portabubble, circa 1980—a “machine.” As if it were something from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. In order to convey a reporter’s well-chosen words via audible beeps of some sort, that appliance required that a telephone receiver be inserted into two holes atop the device. And held snugly in place for agonizing minutes, with the mere hope that the story was being successfully relayed. Among the Portabubble’s shortcomings, of which there were several, was its inability to function properly in a noisy place (such as a packed sports stadium filled with shouting spectators).

So a sentence originally input as “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” was likely to arrive at an editor’s far-away computer reading something like “Ofy idkem lmo utyew nyhe jhg zoim wla.” This required the already harried on-site journalist to retreat to a trusty portable typewriter—mine was a turquoise Smith-Corona, upon which compositions had been rendered in parking garages, deserted lockerrooms and airport terminals—to reproduce the original yarn, then dictate it by phone to a living person at the home office.

The completion of such dangling-over-the-abyss tasks could be exhilarating, what felt like the sportswriting equivalent of ascending Mount Everest.

At least the Portabubble was a giant leap forward from the first movable computerized writing apparatus I tested—very briefly—during Montreal’s world track championships in 1979. That mechanism had the display screen in the back, which required a small mirror and a vastly uncomfortable sitting position to view one’s own work.

After the Portabubble, the Tandy Radio Shack was smaller, lighter and more reliable, though its attached “acoustic cups” for docking the phone receiver also had issues and there still was no back-up battery power. There were tales of crowded press centers with all those Radio Shacks plugged into power strips in a tangle of wires, when one reporter would accidentally unplug a fellow scribe’s machine, wiping out everything he had written. On deadline. Naughty words ensued.

Anyway, though technology marched on, it was the experience of Olympic (and other international) reporters that it did not do so in a universal way. A pre-Olympic scouting trip to Barcelona, a year before the 1992 Games, revealed that the Spanish phone system was still measuring the length of a call with steady clicks—spaced only seconds apart—and that such clicks immediately shut down computer transmission. (Back to verbal dictation.)

Among Barcelona’s dramatic infrastructure advances, in time for its Olympics, was a state-of-the-art phone system. In fact, the ’92 Games hosts had a far better concept of messaging than did my editor, who issued beepers to staff members during those Olympics. The beepers served no purpose other than to interrupt reporters and send them in frenzied search of nearby phones, scrambling around scenic but steep Montjuic, to check in with that languishing editor, who regularly could be found with his feet up in the press center. “Oh,” he said on one occasion. “I was just testing to see if the beeper works.” After that, mine didn’t. I left it in a drawer.

The telephone situation in Seoul in 1988, equal to several Olympic host nations, was top-notch, but there were other communications hurdles inherent in the Games’ tangles of so many moving parts. The phone assigned to me in the main stadium was two rows away from my designated seat, and for some reason, it took a week to simply allow me to change seats.

In Nagano for the 1998 Winter Games, the big green phone boxes in the press center included a small display screen, on which a little cartoon woman would make a polite bow of thanks—“Arigatou”—as soon as the customer hung up. Sometimes, we bowed in return.

By then, cell phones had become de rigeur for any self-respecting journalist. We were beginning to float in cyberspace, starting to experience the incredible lightness of being able send information instantly, a nirvana of communication. No worries, as the laid-back Aussies constantly said during Sydney’s 2000 Games. Or maybe we were just feeling Olympic giddiness. (Where did I put my phone, anyway?)

Somos el Mundo, an Olympic preliminary

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Call me unworldly. Some years ago, a driver pulled alongside my rented car late one summer evening at a stoplight in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I was on the island to cover the 1979 Pan American Games, the so-called Western Hemisphere Olympics, dipping a toe into the international sports waters for the first time.

From that driver, through his open window: “Que hora es?”

From me: A blank stare, and, “Uhhhhh…”

Again, politely: “Que hora es, por favor?”

Again, baffled, and with elaborate, nonsensical hand motions: “Uhhhhh….I’m sorry. I….I don’t understand….”

“Ah,” he said, and rephrased the question in perfect English: “Do you have the time?”

It may be the first lesson of travel beyond these shores that we Yanks, lucky enough to be born in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, are not exceptional in every way. Just days into that Pan Am assignment, I discovered my own linguistic shortcomings in comparison to the natives, as well as American gymnastics officials’ execution of a graceless loophole around failure, and the very embodiment of the Ugly American in U.S. basketball coach Bobby Knight.

Is winning really the only thing? In the case of the gymnasts, U.S. officials purposely sent only four athletes apiece for the women’s and men’s competitions, aware that five were necessary for team scoring. Which meant they would compete without any danger of losing.

U.S. 800-meter runner James Robinson, awaiting a judge’s decision on whether he illegally impeded an opponent, grumbled, “The Americans are always getting screwed. I won’t be surprised if I get screwed out of the gold.” In fact, Robinson was awarded the victory. In fact, many observers—including several from the U.S.—thought Robinson indeed merited a disqualification.

As the Games played out, under the swaying Puerto Rican palms and, in some cases, at competition venues overlooking the blue Atlantic, even a prominent U.S. journalist, aghast at incidents of personal discomfort and imperfection, was guilty of casting aspersions. Washington Post columnist Thomas Boswell’s sometimes snarky reports—not all based in fact—of administrative and logistical foul-ups, moved Puerto Rican Governor Carlos Romero Marcelo to publicly denounce Boswell’s “racist tone.”

(With U.S. and Canadian colleagues in San Juan)

(Full disclosure: There were some blunders, traffic issues and miscommunications. And thank goodness for the vending machines in the basement of my motel, with heated cans of Chef Boyadee ravioli to provide life-saving 2 a.m. sustenance when nothing else was available. But my own editor, Dick Sandler, wisely cautioned me to consider the bigger picture and keep the less consequential inadequecies in context, and out of the newspaper. Sure enough, significantly larger organizational snafus and official arrogance were yet to come in my international missions—most notably on the home turf of the world’s greatest superpower, during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.)

Particularly ironic, amid all the lowly foreigner allusions tossed around San Juan in ‘79, was an apparent ignorance among U.S. visitors that Puerto Rico is one of us, a U.S. Commonwealth; that, while they have their own culture and language, Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. They just happen to have autonomous athletic teams (many stocked with players raised and based somewhere in the States).

There are, of course, knuckleheads extant in every part of this big, round ball upon which we live. But some of them are “us,” as well as a few of “them.” Beginning with that Puerto Rican adventure, and through many subsequent trips for pre-event and competition coverage of 11 Olympics Games as well as a handful of other global sports happenings, I became convinced that assumptions of superiority, simply based on birth in the U.S. of A., can be woefully misguided. (I also came to appreciate the wisdom of at least attempting a few phrases and greetings in the local tongues.)

By the time I had successfully navigated two other non-U.S.-mainland Pan Am Games and right to my last Olympics, the 2006 Turin Winter Games, it was abundantly clear that neither competence nor grace-under-pressure is the province of a singular culture. And that an only-winning-matters temperament is neither attractive nor especially admirable.

Among the embarrassments occasionally generated by U.S. jocks on the international stage was the trashing of two rooms at the 1998 Nagano athletes’ village by members of America’s ice hockey team after their quarterfinal upset loss to the Czechs. That was the first time NHL pros participated in the Olympics and the U.S. team, laboring under the assumption of gold-medal entitlement, miserably failed the red-face test. Keith Tkachuk proclaimed their Olympic participation “a waste of time” and joined teammates in a code of silence, refusing to cooperate with officials investigating the incident.

At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, U.S. swimmers Troy Dalbey and Douglas Gjertsen, relay gold medalists, somehow escaped criminal charges after stealing an $860 decorative lion’s-head carving from a local hotel and lamely acknowledging nothing more sinister than “boyish exuberance.”

Uhhhhh….I’m sorry. I….I don’t understand….

Happily, it turns out, there is a majority of chivalrous U.S. folks at these global gatherings who are able to grasp the concept of being a good guest. And appreciative of the experience. In San Juan in ’79, that included a 17-year-old boxer from Jackson, Tenn., named Jackie Beard, who proclaimed himself “glad I’ve come. Who from my hometown has ever gotten the chance to come to the Pan Am Games and represent his country, and even had a chance to win the gold medal?”—which he did.

Regrettably, though, the news magnet—the Puerto Rican Games’ headliner—was the pompous, culturally clueless Knight, true to his us-against-them colors and cited in Sports Illustrated’s coverage for “gross incivility.” Knight was ejected from the Americans’ first game of the Pan Am tournament for vehemently arguing calls during a 35-point victory, reprimanded by international basketball officials, arrested and charged in a heated argument with a local policemen, accused of directing demeaning slurs at the women’s team from Brazil and dismissive of Governor Romero when the latter attempted to defuse any thoughts of a home-court conspiracy against the U.S. players. Through it all, Knight took a perverse pride in blustering that he was “not a diplomat,” made it clear he would not speak to Puerto Rican reporters, cursed the locals and belittled them with, “All they know how to do on this damn island is grow bananas.”

He was off-base there, too; Puerto Rico’s economy for decades had been based on a multi-faceted industry and tourism, and before that, sugar cane and coffee. Yes, they had no bananas.

“You do not deserve respect,” Gerraro Marchand, Puerto Rico’s delegate to the international basketball federation, told Knight at the conclusion of the Games. “You treat us like dirt. You have said nothing but bad things since you got here. You are an embarrassment to America. Our country.”

Even worse, Knight—whose University of Indiana teams were college juggernauts—was elevated to the 1984 Olympic head coaching position by U.S. basketball officials who defended him as “a coach of great renown” in spite of public off-color comments he repeated in paid speeches after his departure from San Juan. “When that plane was taxiing on the runway and taking off,” Knight told attendees at one rubber-chicken appearance, “I stood up, unzipped my pants, lowered my shorts and turned my bare ass to the window of that plane—because that’s the last thing I wanted those people to see of me.”

The best I can surmise, as a patriot of international brotherhood who nevertheless is verbally handicapped, an appropriate response to the dark and whining Knight would be….

Hasta nunca. I hope never to see you again.

Or: Y que no ya no regrese. And don’t come back. (Loosely: Good riddance.)

How to fix the fix in tennis?

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Following the bouncing ball of innuendo, there could be some hardened cynics out there who dare to connect Serena Williams’ shocking loss in the Australian Open semifinals with the match-fixing reports that shadowed this year’s Grand Slam tournament Down Under. Anyone who has been around Williams, a ferociously ambitious champion, would dismiss such a low-down link out of hand. It’s just that the gambling mind-set includes the notion that there is no such thing in sports as an upset. Only a fix.

And even dismissing that more rascally point of view, it doesn’t take real evidence of skullduggery to create a pervasive fear among fans that somebody might have a thumb on the scales at times.

While the joint report by the BBC and Buzzfeed, published at the start of the Australian Open, mostly rehashed suspicious matches from 2007, there was this dog whistle days later: The New York Times detailed an abnormal volume of bets on an obscure mixed-doubles match and subsequently observed some dubiously executed shots in that match.

It’s all murky stuff, open to various interpretations. Who can tell if a player is trying his or her best? A few messy forehands, a volley flubbed into the net, a couple of double faults. Maybe there are honest instances of temporary loss of concentration, what the old Australian great Evonne Goolagong described as “gone on a walkabout.” Maybe there is the matter of an injured player, aware he or she cannot win, nevertheless choosing a below-par performance over skipping the match and forfeiting the loser’s prize money.

While the bookies and bettors are thinking: Fix. Thinking: It only takes one to tangle reality.

No less a tennis insider than Patrick McEnroe—who has been a player, coach, player-development official and commentator—told the Times a couple of years ago that his sport is a “very easy game to manipulate” and that, if he were so inclined, he could “throw a match and you’d never know.”

Veteran tennis author Peter Bodo, in an espn.com post, argued that the current controversy was “less about match-fixing than the difficulty of actually proving matches have been fixed, and identifying the culprits.”

Bodo called that a “wake-up call to tennis officials who might not have understood how deeply they’ve become entwined with gambling entities, and where those associations might lead.”

Early in the tournament, eventual Aussie runner-up Andy Murray suggested that it was “hypocritical” for the Open to have an official gambling partnership with United Kingdom bookmaker William Hill, while the players are forbidden to accept endorsements deals with such agencies.

On the Australian web site conversation.com, Charles Livingstone of Melbourne-based Monash University worried that the “rampant promotion of gambling on a seemingly never-ending exponential trajectory” not only meant that “more people are likely to gamble,” but also that younger generations have come to “view all sporting contests through the lens of the odds and the ‘value’ available from different bookies.” Possibly sending them on the path to a destructive habit.

“More broadly,” Livingstone wrote, “the inestimable value of the untrammeled enjoyment of sport is lost. If you love a specific sport and see it degraded by scandal after scandal, some part of the enjoyment is gone forever.”

Or, you could think of it like this: A scoundrel willing to risk his reputation as a tennis pro—and possibly his career—by throwing a match, and a blackguard endeavoring to buy that player’s agreement to sandbag (either of which could end up the victim of a double-cross) deserve each other.

Common sense requires an acknowledgement of sports gambling, much of it legal, as well as recognition that great athletic feats can be divine but that not all the actors are angels. And tennis authorities—just as officials in all sport—have a responsibility to keep an eye out for untoward influences. It was the great British detective writer Agatha Christie who said, “Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody.”

As a spectator, though, none of this turns me toward misanthropy, away from sport’s ideal of a battleground of honor, where the best man or woman wins. Upsets can happen.

Discovering the Olympic world

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In 1972 Stan Isaacs, a giant in the sportswriting business who briefly brought his whimsy and intelligence to the role of sports editor at Newsday, assigned me to cover the U.S. Olympic track and field trials in Eugene, Ore. I was no Olympic expert and, furthermore, Stan originally wanted to send one of Newsday’s esteemed baseball writers to the trials as part of an extended West Coast package deal. The Mets and Yankees had scheduled stops in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Anaheim and San Diego right after the 10-day track event.

The baseball guys declined. They had lives. I was still single, so what amounted to three-plus weeks on the road hardly seemed unreasonable. Besides, I had just been promoted from two years of covering high school sports; this would be the Big Time. Furthermore, it could be argued that coverage of a track meet had launched my journalistic career.

I was a freshman at Alemany High School in San Fernando, Calif., and had just signed onto the student paper, the Pow Wow, in the spring of 1962. My brother, Gene, was a varsity hurdler, and it happened that my first by-lined story reported his school record in the 70-yard high hurdlers. (It was a rarely run event, sustaining the record’s longevity and its extended presence on a school plaque, which prompted a friend to declare Gene “a hysterical landmark.”)

(Gene Jeansonne, right)

What I didn’t write about in the Pow Wow, but probably should have, was Gene’s willingness to pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship in pursuit of points for the team. He dabbled in the shot put and, on an occasion when Alemany needed a second pole vaulter merely to clear a minimum height to provide the winning margin in a dual meet, Gene volunteered.

This did not seem entirely irrational to me. When we were younger, he would vault into his upper bunk by grabbing the bed post and rising, feet first, into bed. Alas, in his school vaulting debut, he got sideways on the way up and came down on the vaulting uprights, causing some structural damage to the equipment. So, no Alemany victory. No pole vaulting for anyone for a while.

But he lived.

Anyway, back to Eugene. Oregon. (No relation.)

Everything about those ’72 trials was appealing. The competitive urgency—only the top three finishers, among scores of athletes in each event, would qualify for the Olympics. The setting—Hayward Field, on the University of Oregon campus, was the home office of the school’s celebrated coach, Bill Bowerman, a co-founder of Nike whose public jogging programs there were an early spark in activating the American running boom.

Eugene already was proclaiming itself “track capital of the world.” (These days, its slick brand is a slightly more humble “TrackTown USA.”) A vast number of spectators in the trials’ daily capacity crowds seemed to include a stopwatch among their accessories. As well as a pair of running shoes, at a time before running shoes were worn for anything but running. My juxtaposition to so many folks so casually familiar with fitness, beyond the athletes themselves, helped shake me out of my fat period and prod a circadian running habit that still persists.

It would be another 12 years before I covered the first of my 11 Olympics. (Sports editor Isaacs already was credentialed for the 1972 Munich Games, thyroid surgery bumped me out of Montreal in ’76 and President Jimmy Carter’s U.S. boycott of Moscow in ’80 nixed that assignment.)

But the ’72 track trials offered an enticing glimpse of international sport’s sway. The event’s tangible expectation led me to seek out local prodigy (and emerging global player) Steve Prefontaine, then a 21-year-old Oregon junior who already held American records at two distances and already had a reputation for arrogance. In fact, he seemed friendly enough, and hardly aloof.

“Look,” he said. “I don’t even want to talk about track right now. If you want to talk about the birds and the bees or the local pubs, that’s different. I hope you’ll understand. I’m very nervous about all this and I get upset easily. Somebody will ask a dumb question and I’ll blow up and I don’t want something like that to happen.”

So, no formal interviews, but with his 5,000-meter race not scheduled until the eighth of the meet’s 10 days, Prefontaine nevertheless proceeded to be a constant presence at Hayward Field, signing autographs, sitting shirtless in the sun, jogging when the track was clear. It was as if being seen let everyone—especially his rivals—know he was ready. “I don’t want to give away all my secrets,” he said. “But I sure want them to know I’m around. It’s a psyche.”

He won the 5,000, breezily, breaking his own U.S. record, his star still rising. He ran with conviction, his head cocked slightly to the left and upward toward the scoreboard clock, his own pace more a concern than any challenge from his competitors.

Within three years—after having set every American record in seven distances from 2,000 to 10,000 meters—Prefontaine was not around, killed in a one-car accident hours after winning another 5,000 race at Hayward Field. There were reports of an excessive blood-alcohol level. And I remembered that he told me, instead of track, we could talk about the best pubs in Eugene. Duffy’s, he said, was his favorite.

The trials returned to Hayward Field in 1976 for the next Olympic cycle, as energized and dramatic as their first run there. But with an entirely different Prefontaine presence. Shortly after his death in May of ’75, city and university officials had completed a woodchip-and-bark running path through grasslands and woods alongside the Willamette River near the university campus. It had been Prefontaine’s idea, modeled on the style and terrain of European cross-country courses he had experienced while competing overseas.

Of course, I took my daily runs during the ’76 trials on Pre’s Trail, along with multitudes of other trials’ visitors and local residents. I bought a “Remember Pre” t-shirt.

This July, for a sixth time, the Olympic trials will return to Eugene, culling the U.S. track men and women who will compete at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games. Hayward Field will be packed with the nation’s most knowledgeable track fans. Pre’s Trail will be crowded with runners, some more serious than others. And fortunate sports journalists will get to sample the whole bonfire of enthusiasm.

The Olympics as a classroom

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We were in a taxi in Seoul, Korea, in the early fall of 1988, Newsday colleague Steve Jacobson and I, chasing some Olympic happening or other. The cabbie, intent on making the most of having so many furriners in his presence during that rare global assembly in his city, brandished a small notepad. He said he was collecting words from his passengers’ native vocabularies as a way to improve his language skills, and asked for a contribution.

“Kibitz,” Jake offered.

And that’s what we did, during the brief ride.

It is among the joys of covering Olympic Games to connect, even in some small way, with people and cultures one is not otherwise likely to encounter as a sports journalist. In the Olympic enterprise of fun and games—a world so familiar—the parallel universe of mysterious customs, bizarre happenings and quirky systems affords a broadening experience.

Seoul was one of the more educational of my 11 Olympic stops. Koreans put surnames first, so I became Mr. John for three weeks. (My business cards were in English as well as the Korean alphabet, which is phonetic, so my name came out, approximately, like John Jin-son. Fifteen years after Seoul, when the governor of Gangwon province was in New York beginning that region’s pitch to host a future Winter Olympics, Mr. Kim Jin Sun studied that business card, gave a brief bow and noted with a sly smile, “We are brothers. Jin Sun.” Sure. Brothers from another mother.)

His surname “Kim,” by the way, is strikingly common in Korea—along with “Park” and “Lee”—a fact that was dramatically demonstrated on my first trip to Seoul, leading up to the ’88 Games, with fellow U.S. journalists.

Then, a different Mr. Kim had just finished squiring three of us around the city to meet various Olympic honchos when he excused himself, as we emerged from a cab, bowed and melted into a typically huge mid-day crowd of mostly men wearing mostly grey business suits. My editor at the time, Dick Sandler, suddenly realized that Mr. Kim had left his umbrella in the cab, fetched it and called out, “Mr. Kim, you’ve forgotten….”

Scores of Mr. Kims turned toward Sandler’s voice—though, alas, not our Mr. Kim, who had disappeared. It also was on that Seoul visit that we attended a professional baseball game (no beer sales, but plenty of dried squid available at the concession stands) and witnessed a Kim-to-Kim-to-Kim double play.

(And here’s an aside about a similar revelation regarding family names common to other lands, also in an Olympic setting. As pre-eminent Boston Globe reporter John Powers tells it, he was housed during the 1976 Montreal Games at McGill University, which was the venue for the Olympic field hockey competition, and from his room he could hear the public address announcements of goal scorers. Whenever India was in action, Powers repeatedly heard, Goal by Singh. Goal by Singh. Goal by Singh. His natural newsman’s thought process was, “Who is this fellow Singh? I have to write about this guy.” And he would have, had he not hustled to the next Indian field hockey game to discover that nine of India’s 16 roster players shared the surname “Singh.”)

One reason, and a noble one, that French baron Pierre de Coubertin said he created the Modern Olympics at the end of the 19^th Century was a belief that the world would not have peace “until prejudices are outlived,” and prejudices would not be outlived until everybody was exposed to the lifestyles and the mores of everybody else. It is an ideal rarely realized, but the vagabond nature of the Games does force some confrontations with one’s own ignorance.

We Americans, especially, are faced with our limitations when thrown into the Olympic soup. At the 1984 Los Angeles Games, Saudi Arabian newsman Syed Aref-Ali Shah reasonably noted that “in my country, you can go to any 5-year-old child and he can tell you where Los Angeles is. Here, people don’t even know where my country is.”

And even when we know where a country is, there can be an education awaiting, such as the one offered at the 1992 Barcelona Games on the autonomous region of Catalonia: That it rejects bullfighting—a sport for barbarians in Spain, that other country, I was told—and has its own language and its own flag. Before some competitions there, young men would station themselves outside the arenas and hand out beach-towel-sized bolts of cloth—yellow with four horizontal red stripes—so that all visitors could have their own personal Catalan flag, la Senyera. It is said that the four red stripes symbolize the 9^th Century Count of Barcelona, Wilfred the Hairy, dragging his four bloodied fingers across his gilded shield in a dying patriotic gesture.

I still have my Catalan flag.

And, like that Seoul cabbie, I’ve been able to pick up bits of lingo on my Olympic rounds, though I acknowledge I merely have been, as they say in Australia, a “blow-in.” A stranger. But ready to kibitz.

John Jeansonne

Newsday sportswriter emeritus/Hofstra University journalism adjunct

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Whatever happened to peace and brotherhood?

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Olympic reporting: . . . – – – . . . (S.O.S)

Somos el Mundo, an Olympic preliminary

How to fix the fix in tennis?

Discovering the Olympic world

The Olympics as a classroom