War (and) Games

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Let’s say you’re an optimist. In late November, United Nations members overwhelmingly passed an International Olympic Committee resolution calling for the worldwide cessation of violence during the two weeks of next summer’s Paris Olympic Games. Uplifting, no?

It’s called the Olympic Truce, a tradition first invoked 1,247 years ago—776 B.C.—when Greece’s warring rival city-states agreed to suspend all fighting to stage the first of the ancient Olympics’ elaborate sporting festivals. Merely a time out from butchery, but a ray of hope.

Let’s say you’re a pessimist. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has now been raging for almost two years, an aggression that in fact began with the annexation of Crimea in 2014. The recent Israeli-Hamas truce fell apart just days after it was implemented and fears of an expanded and brutal Middle East war persist. Can a collection of international sports poohbahs really expect to somehow put the brakes on these things?

Or, to cut that baby in half, what if the best you can expect is pragmatism?

In 2000, the Olympic Truce Centre was formally established in Athens and veteran diplomat and human rights activist Stavros Lambrinidis was named director. “We are not claiming to have a magic wand, where governments and religious organizations have failed,” Lambrinidis, now European Union ambassador to the United States, said when the Games returned to their ancient birthplace in 2004. “We hope to communicate to the world during the biggest peaceful celebration of humanity, where 12 more countries are members [of the IOC] than the United Nations, that with every representative in the stadium, of every religion, every color, every political point of view, you cannot fight and play at the same time. You can’t.

“You shouldn’t send some of your youth to play and some of your youth to die.”

Before the Truce Centre debuted, Olympic officials regularly had pitched the old call to give peace a chance—at least during the couple of weeks of their global athletic competition—with the slight possibility that all the world’s leaders and policy makers might like the idea.

In 1992 for the Barcelona Summer Games, the IOC cited its Truce tradition to grant Olympic status to Bosnia-Herzegovina, the breakaway Yugoslavia republic that was then taking a beating from the Serbs in their bloody civil war. Two years later, during Opening Ceremonies at the Lillehammer Winter Games, the IOC got a one-day pause in the ongoing Yugoslav war to allow 10,000 children from both sides of the conflict to be inoculated.

Then-IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch, in an unusual plea at the Lillehammer Opening Ceremonies, asked on-site spectators “and even those watching from your homes” to stand for a moment of silence for former Yugoslav city of Sarajevo, which had hosted the 1984 Winter Games, “whose people for over two years have suffered too much.

“Please,” Samaranch begged, “stop fighting. Please, stop killing. Drop your guns, please.”

No such thing happened for another year. In 1998, the Clinton administration was pressured to delay bombing raids in Iraq during the 1998 Nagano Winter Games. The Bush administration likewise was convinced to temporarily cease attacks on Afghanistan during the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. Neither of those military halts was permanent. And among the contradictory Olympic messages is how its Opening Ceremonies typically feature both a symbolic release of the “doves of peace”—and a military flyover. Not to mention the Games’ rampant nationalism even as they offer a brief alternative of play.

“I understand the cynicism,” Truce Centre director Lambrinidis said at the 2004 Athens Olympics. “This is a hard world. If it were a loving, peaceful world, you wouldn’t need an Olympic Truce. I’m willing to talk to any cynic—who, usually, by the way, are closet romantics. Is this a partly romantic appeal? Absolutely. Is it unrealistic? Absolutely not. The question is whether you can be a hard-headed realist and do some good. The question is: Do world leaders want to take this and run with it?”

He called himself “a convert” to the Olympic Truce tradition, a belief that beyond providing merely a diversion from bad news in the real world, it is an attempt to confront what is behind the discouraging front-page headlines. “The fact that the war doesn’t stop is not proof the Olympics Truce doesn’t work,” he said. “Whether it will stop wars for 16 days is not a legitimate yardstick.

“The power of this is that it’s not just a call for one more truce; it’s tied to an event in which every county in the world wishes to participate. You must create not just a police shield, but a moral shield around the Games that exercises public-relations pressure, even on non-state actors. Why treat terrorists as differently?

“It is not our job to decide what is a legitimate conflict and what isn’t, or whether a war is for self-defense or not. And these are Games for the youth of the world. You cannot punish the youth of the world for the sins of their leaders. We cannot use the stick approach, but we can use the carrot.”

Shutout

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Well, I almost spoke to Henry Kissinger once. Not about his Secretary of State career nor engineering the Unites States’ opening to China, nor negotiating the American military exit from Vietnam, nor reshaping U.S. relationships with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, nor creating a legacy that, upon his death at 100, is being described as both enormously powerful and not-a-little hypocritical.

No, no. It was about soccer. And, anyway, he didn’t come to the phone.

This was in early 1990 and was related to the efforts of a South African-born son of German and Scottish parents who at the time lived in England but was attempting to cut through some red tape to expedite his naturalization as a U.S. citizen. The urgency was for the fellow to be eligible to play for the Yanks’ side in that summer’s World Cup.

Sounded like the kind of thing a world-famous strong-armed diplomat such as Kissinger could fix, no?

The athlete in question was Roy Wegerle, then 25 years old. Wegerle believed that, based on various national connections, he should be permitted to choose his “home team” among (then-West) Germany, Scotland or England—all of which had qualified for the quadrennial soccer championship. Yet he preferred wearing the U.S. colors because he was married to an American woman, whom he had met when both were students at the University of South Florida, and he intended to settle on these shores. Unsaid—and maybe not to the point, but true nevertheless—talent was much thinner on the U.S. side and therefore Wegerle’s best bet to see plenty of playing time.

What I knew those days about Kissinger, beyond the obvious—that he was a shaker and mover known for getting his way—was that he once said world soccer politics “make me nostalgic for the Middle East.” Described as the “No. 1 U.S. soccer fan” before the sport really caught on in the States, Kissinger served as chairman of the board of the old North American Soccer League, which gained sudden attention in the late 1970s when the sport’s legendary Brazilian Pele finished his career with the New York Cosmos. He was convinced to take that leap, Pele said, by Kissinger, who once compared the game to warfare—and also ballet.

There meanwhile was an NASL tie to Wegerle, who had signed his first professional contract with the Tampa Bay franchise right out of college.

I was not aware, until reading it in last week’s New York Times obituary, that Kissinger—as a young lad in his native Germany just as Hitler was ratcheting up the Holocaust machinery—was so “passionate about soccer….that he risked confrontations with Nazi toughs to see games even after signs had gone up at one stadium declaring ‘Juden Verboten.’”

So, as the opening of that ’90 World Cup approached, the word was out that Kissinger would be the ideal person to expedite Wegerle’s naturalization. Because Wegerle’s wedding had occurred in July of 1987, that left him one month short of eligibility for U.S. citizenship in time for ’90 Cup’s early June start.

Oddly, though Wegerle was meanwhile thriving in the English Premier League as a proven scoring threat for London’s Queens Park Rangers, U.S. national team coach Bob Gansler was noticeably cool to welcoming Wegerle aboard.  Besides, immigration lawyers weren’t sure Wegerle’s green card would be valid since he had been living and working outside the United States for almost four years.

Anyway, with the U.S. national soccer team among my Newsday assignments, it was time for a phone call to Kissinger Associates, the New York City-based international geopolitical consulting firm which had been founded and run since 1982 by the former Secretary of State and former National Security Advisor.

Didn’t get past his spokeswoman, though. She made it clear that Kissinger had better things to do (and more important people to talk to), saying that the Wegerle situation was “not something he would get involved in.”

So: Close but no cigar.

Wegerle did become an American citizen within a couple of years and did play for the U.S. national team (for 14 years) and did appear in two World Cups with the Yanks (in 1994 and ’98), then turned to professional golf.

But I really did speak to Pele a couple of times.

Nov. 22 (a long time ago)

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Surely it is ironic that I and my fellow high school journalism students—theoretically the news hounds of the future—were among the last to get the word on Nov. 22, 1963. Because our classroom’s intercom unit was on the blink, we blithely wandered into the cafeteria for lunch, puzzled by the atmosphere there that was somewhere between frenzy and dumb bewilderment, with no clue that President John Kennedy had just been shot.

Even now, 60 years later—sixty!—what transpired then feels a bit like a teenagers’ warped gag: Whaddya think about Kennedy being shot? (Yeh, right.)

This was in Hobbs, N.M., my junior year. A Friday. Even more surreal than the day’s unsettling news, it shortly was determined—not too long after Walter Cronkite solemnly removed his spectacles and confirmed on national television that Kennedy had died—that the evening’s football game between us Hobbs Eagles and the visiting lads from nearby Roswell would go on as scheduled. We were told that Kennedy would have wanted it that way, though it occurred to me that Hobbs High School officials could not have discussed this with the President either before, and certainly not after, his demise.

We lost the game. I didn’t play a down and went home to watch TV reports on the day’s events as well as historical references to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination 98 years earlier. Then, weirdness squared, I was among the millions of citizens watching the tube two days later when Kennedy’s accused killer, a U.S. Marine veteran and defector to the Soviet Union named Lee Harvey Oswald, was murdered by strip-club owner Jack Ruby in the Dallas police station garage as the cameras rolled. All of this, it should be noted, long before America’s growing embrace of the gun culture.

Now, with another anniversary of that spooky weekend upon us, and with Kennedy’s fact-challenged nephew Robert Jr. currently attempting a nonsensical Presidential campaign, a vague mood of disbelief endures. (A related moment of disorientation happened in early June of 1968, when I was wakened by a radio report that Bobby Kennedy had been shot dead after a political appearance. “Dummies,” I remember thinking, half-conscious, “that was John Kennedy—and it was five years ago!”)

It now has been 30 years since a business trip to Dallas facilitated my visit to the orange-brick Texas School Book Depository, where the sixth-floor corner window was still ajar above Dealey Plaza. From that window, Oswald—using a scope on his rifle in his so-called “sniper’s perch”—fired as the Presidential motorcade, creeping toward him up Houston Street, slowed to take a sharp left turn below, onto Elm. Just 265 feet away.

I was with a journalism colleague that 1993 day, determined to trace some key movements of Nov. 22, 1963. From the sniper’s perch, by then transformed into a museum, we took the short drive to the hospital where Kennedy had been whisked and, like Oswald two days later, was pronounced dead; then to the city’s Municipal Building where Oswald, like Ruby two days later, was locked in the same cell. (A kindly policewoman, who gave us a tour of the place, asked if we were interested in seeing where Ruby was shot. Her sly answer, pointing to her stomach, was “right here.”)

I naturally had seen the Zapruder film, the silent 8mm color home movie shot by a Ukrainian-born American clothing manufacturer who accidentally captured the instant of the President’s assassination. I had heard the conspiracy theories about the grassy knoll and a second shooter. Whatever; Kennedy was long gone and there was no going back.

Except it was natural enough to think what the country and the world might have been like if Kennedy had lived. And in 2011, I read Stephen King’s novel 11/22/63, drawn to it not such much as a hard-core history buff but curious about possible new insights into yet another day in infamy.

King’s tome, almost 900 pages, proved to be as phantasmagorical as the happenings in November ’63—which should have occurred to me, given King’s art form: horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, fantasy. It’s far too late for a spoiler-alert review, but King’s plot involved an English teacher who travels back through time in an attempt to prevent the Kennedy assassination.

I won’t tell how the book came out. Except to affirm that Kennedy is still dead. (Sixty years!)

Everlasting Moby Fumble

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Might this suggest immortality? Veteran sportswriter Mark Whicker, in an early October edition of his regular The Morning After posts that address various developments in the sports world, cited a memorably bizarre last-minute event in a 1978 NFL game that he said “became known as “Moby Fumble….”

Hey! That’s what I labeled it back then. It lives on?!

Whicker was comparing a recent case of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory—Miami University’s turnover with 24 seconds to play earlier this season that gifted Georgia Tech the decisive score—to the enormous blunder, 45 years earlier, by the New York Giants. In ’78, the Giants—ahead by five points with ball possession, no time outs remaining, the clock running down from 20 seconds—chose not to have their quarterback take a knee and bollixed a handoff that instantly resulted in a Philadelphia Eagles return for the winning score.

A whale of an error. So: Moby Fumble.

It was a thing of such enormous negligence, so thoroughly illogical, and Whicker noted that it “hadn’t been seen again” until the ghastly Miami-Georgia Tech finish. He resurrected my appellation from my days as Giants’ beat writer for Long Island’s Newsday. (Well, he also noted that, in Philadelphia, the positive spin on such an unlikely turn had been “The Miracle of the Meadowlands”—that’s where the game was played).

It is not common for some lowly wordsmith to coin a phrase—much less one that endures. The fleeting impact of a journalist’s wordplay is such that Norm Miller, a colleague on the Giants beat with the Daily News at the time, often reminded of newspapers’ day-after use: Fishwrappers. Perfect for keeping your fish-and-chips warm and absorbing grease.

Not that that truth stopped us scribblers in our Ahab-like maniacal quest to hunt down illusive word pictures.

Because the apparent doofus-ness of the Giants’ play selection on that long-ago day, to attempt a handoff—when they literally could have sat out the final seconds—my original description of the moment was “The Most Incredible Play Call (And Fumble).” Not so catchy and far too wordy, but none of the Giants players—certainly not quarterback Joe Pisarcik—had agreed with such a lulu of a strategy, and the assistant who called the play that Sunday, Bob Gibson, was fired on Monday.

That same day, I was perusing my book shelf, stalled in preparing to file a follow-up report, and stumbled onto Herman Melville’s acclaimed novel. Nothing to do with football, but an example, certainly, of the futility of the human struggle in a senseless world. Thus the first draft to appear in Newsday: “Moby Fumble (Thar the Giants blow it!).”

From that game’s theatre-of-the-absurd conclusion, the far-reaching repercussions meant another title had to be conjured to encapsulate what the one play had wrought. A week after the assistant coach’s quick dismissal, the team debuted what has come to be known as the “victory formation,” wherein three players are positioned tightly around the quarterback, circling the wagons for a static hike-and-kneel-down motion. Too late for those Giants. Both the head coach, John McVay, and the general manager, old Giants playing hero Andy Robustelli, were gone at the end of the season. The entire organization, leveled by a single blow, had to be rebuilt.

I felt compelled to offer some other allusions of the fumble’s affect as the gathering storm played out: “The Archduke’s Assassination.” “The Big Ooops.” “The Great Stumblebum Play.” But to get right to the point, just: Moby Fumble.

Everlasting? Destined to live in perpetuity? Doubtful. And I was just Ishmael, the narrator. But call me grateful for Mark Whicker’s little recollection.

The final score….

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So many sportswriting colleagues knew Bobby Knight far better than I, and many found him to be as brilliant and charming as he was intimidating and derisive. Can’t say I’m jealous at having missed out on more exposure to the man. What I witnessed during Knight’s infamously antagonistic behavior during the 1979 Pan American Games in San Juan, Puerto Rico, as well as glancing brushes with his hostility at a few NCAA tournament stops, was quite enough exposure to bullying, demeaning treatment of others: players, women, reporters, officials, et al.

Knight, who died at 83 on Nov. 1, was an enormously successful basketball coach, three times national champion at the University of Indiana and ranked No. 1 in career Division I victories at the time of his 2008 retirement. He was praised widely for sticking to recruiting rules and insisting that his player attend class.

But he was a Professor of Conquest who based his worth on being a winner, and was regularly forgiven his toxic conduct by fellow coaches and basketball administrators because his teams could put the most points on the board. That, in spite of his being publicly and regularly profane, all fury and outrage when things didn’t go his way and never willing to take blame if they didn’t.

Furthermore, he felt put-upon, even when given thoroughly evenhanded evaluations. In a comprehensive 1981 treatment of Knight’s plusses and minuses, Sports Illustrated’s master of human profiles, Frank Deford, cited Knight’s dismissive take on sportswriters (and, by extension, everyone else) with Knight’s argument that “all of us learn to write by the second grade, then most of us go on to other things.”

“At the base of everything,” Deford wrote, “this is it: If you’re not part of basketball, you can’t really belong, you can only distort.”

In other words: Who are you to criticize the winningest coach around?

Given uncommon access to Indiana’s daily hoops operation in the 1985-86 season, Washington Post reporter John Feinstein produced the best-selling book “A Season On the Brink” in which he presented Knight’s detailed game preparations, his high expectations of player deportment (something of an irony, given their coach), his demanding training sessions as well as his huge popularity among Indiana fans.

But, since Feinstein also faithfully recorded Knight’s well-known use of obscenities (though Feinstein downplayed that a bit) and other obvious foibles, Knight accused Feinstein of being “a whore and a pimp.” To which Feinstein, a man of wit and not easily cowed, reacted: “I wish he’d make up his mind so I’d know how to dress.”

“Too many media folks deified him by virtue of his championships and, to a lesser extent, his graduation record,” veteran New York sportswriter Harvey Araton posted upon Knight’s death. “But as the financial rewards created by revenue-producing college sports grew along with his stature, he became what Coach simply cannot be—the most powerful man on campus, subservient to no one. His self-righteousness ultimately consumed all that he was.”

So about the ’79 Pan Am Games. Right out of the box, Knight assumed a superior badgering attitude, bickering with officials from Puerto Rico and Mexico throughout the opening U.S. game against the outmanned Virgin Islands team.

With seven minutes to play in a 136-88 rout by the Yanks, Knight loudly whined about a measly U.S. charging foul and was ejected, leading to a hasty meeting of international basketball authorities the next day to reprimand Knight. Though several U.S. hoops bigwigs refused to condemn Knight, basketball delegates from several Latin American nations flatly branded Knight “the ugly American” and the U.S. Olympic Committee president, Bob Kane, admitted he felt “there is a certain amount of noblesse oblige necessary” from his delegation.

That was before Knight was arrested at a training session for slurring the Brazilian women’s team and getting into a scuffle with a Puerto Rican policeman; before Knight declared that “the only people on this whole goddamn island I care about are my players;” before Knight told a U.S. journalist, whom he assumed to be a local reporter, that “I don’t talk to Puerto Ricans;” before he insulted the natives by saying that “all they know how to do on this damn island is grow bananas.” (Not only a demeaning statement, but inaccurate; Puerto Rico never was known for banana production.)

Knight then justified everything he had done and said, following the United States’ gold-medal victory over host Puerto Rico, by declaring, “I just know we are nine-and-oh [wins and losses] down here. I’m not a diplomat. I don’t know anything about foreign policy. [A worker at the village] told me that when the U.S. picked me to coach, he knew the U.S. had come to win. Well, that’s what we did.”

Worse, Knight would not cease and desist with his rude comments regarding that competition and its hosts. Three years later, at an event sponsored by a hospital in Gary, Ind., Knight told the audience that as he left Puerto Rico, “when the plane was taxiing onto the runway and taking off, 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.”

Deford wrote in 1981, “Although it’s fashionable to say Knight rules by intimidation, he actually rules more by derision. He abuses the people he comes into contact with…”

Knight and U.S. basketball decision-makers insisted the anecdote in Gary was “just a joke, and dismissed the Hispanic organizations that were calling Knight a racist and demanding he not be kept as the Americans’ 1984 Olympic coach. Ed Steitz, who was president of the U.S. basketball federation, insisted, “We’re not about to tell Bobby Knight, ‘You can’t say this or that.’ He’s a coach of great renown. There is no way we’ll reconsider Bobby Knight’s appointment as U.S. Olympic basketball coach for 1984. We’re convinced he’s the right man to win the gold medal.”

He did win that gold medal. But in the end, that wasn’t the only thing noted in his obituaries. In the end, it wasn’t just about basketball victories.

Give ’em a break

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Here’s a workable definition of Olympic sports: Activities that are (usually) interesting to watch but virtually impossible to perform by the ordinary citizen. Ever try pole vaulting? Fencing? Marathoning? Weightlifting?

The fast-approaching 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris will provide a new example: Breakdancing. Let’s see what you have to offer in that discipline before dismissing it as not being a real sport.

Wikipedia—not that you want to put all your faith in that ubiquitous online site—declares that Olympic entry is limited to sports “based on athleticism or physical dexterity.” Which certainly would qualify breakdancing, though it should be noted that chess and bridge are among the organizations that have petitioned for Olympic recognition.

As a veteran sports journalist who has covered 11 Olympic Games, I am accustomed to—and fascinated by—the ongoing arguments and maneuvering over which endeavors deserve Olympic inclusion.

In his enlightening Sports Illustrated report on the 1972 Olympic Marathon, in which he finished fourth, Kenny Moore noted that even some athletes sometimes questioned the comparative validity of fellow participants. Moore quoted an American rower contending he found it “hard to call people in yachting, equestrian and maybe shooting real Olympians. In my mind an Olympian is an individual who approaches the limits of human performance. That entails enduring a kind of pain that you don’t get riding in a sailboat.”

There have been arguments that Olympic poohbahs ought to raise the drawbridge and refuse to let in any more events. And, indeed, the Games have been struggling with the problem of gigantism for some time—how to organize and fund a 17-day festival which, in its Summer iteration, must accommodate in excess of 11,000 participants, with all the attendant issues of facilities, housing, transportation and so on.

Opposition exists to welcoming perceived “trash sports”—except: who defines what is a trash sport? Might that be any exhibition staged solely for the purpose of being televised, featuring participants whose only qualification is being celebrities? It must be acknowledged that there is no doubt the Olympics is bullish on getting more eyeballs, reaching new fans and thereby banking more TV money.

There have been efforts, for a long time, to get ballroom dancing into the Games—an activity which, frankly, doesn’t seem to be as physically demanding as breakdancing, since ballroom dancers never spin on their heads or strike one-arm handstands. And what about bocce? Bowling? Aerobics? All of them are interested in inclusion.

If sport climbing, rugby and surfing—all new Olympic sports—were lumped under one umbrella of competition, along with the proposed acceptance of cricket, flag football, lacrosse and squash, they could fit the generic description once suggested by a fellow Olympic reporter: Horsing Around.

Times change. Croquet was in the 1900 Paris Games. (And featured the first appearance of women in the modern Olympics.) Golf showed up in 1900 and ’04, then disappeared until 2016. Jeu de Paume, forerunner to modern tennis, was in the 1908 London Games. Motor boating was included in 1904 and ’08. Polo from 1900 through 1936, when the gold-medal final drew 45,000 spectators. Tug of War—now, that entails more pain than riding in a sailboat—was contested from 1900 through 1920.

It could be argued that opposition to some sports is a function of close-minded, provincial judgement that fails to take in different regional tastes and cultural influences. Table tennis? Big in Korea, as is badminton in China, field hockey in the Netherlands and Germany, volleyball in Brazil. Taekwondo, introduced at the ’88 Seoul Games, is widely followed in Korea. Cricket, returning to the Games in 2028 after a 128-year absence, originally was spread by the world-conquering British empire and now has a rabid following throughout South Asia; any India vs. Pakistan cricket match is of Super Bowl importance to citizens of those nations. The only sport more popular in more countries than cricket is soccer.

And the major reason that American football never has been part of the Olympic show is because only one nation embraces it as its No. 1 sport. So it’s not as if there is no reason or rhyme to Olympic acceptance of sports.

Back to Wikipedia, which considers sport to be “any form of physical activity or game, often competitive and organized, that aims to use, maintain or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants and, in some cases, entertainment to spectators.”

So bring on breakdancing, which originated in the Black and Puerto Rican communities of New York City and has expanded globally, promoted by the World Dance Sport Federation. It is road tested, with an array of organizations and competitors “from Switzerland to Kazakhstan” at a recent international competition, according to ESPN.

No need to be fully conversant in breakdancing lingo—toprocks, downrocks, freezes and so on. If you must, think of it as another elite form of horsing around. It’s going to be interesting to watch.

Just in case….

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One circumstance to send journalists scrambling is the sudden discovery that a person of significant accomplishment is seriously ill at a relatively young age. Mary Lou Retton, the 1984 Olympic gymnastics champion who became a household name at 16, is now only 55, but when her daughter announced that Retton was “fighting for her life” against a rare form of pneumonia, the need to prepare a public account of Retton’s life took on great urgency.

It is one thing when superstars and politicians creep into their 70s and 80s and it becomes due diligence to cobble together a chronicle of their unique place in the parade of humanity. As a major newspaper editor once put it, “You would not want to write Hugh Hefner’s obituary on deadline.”

Failing to prepare is preparing to fail. Which is why pre-written obituaries are common in the news business, often supplemented with an interview of the not-yet-departed while he or she is still with us. Organizations such as the Associated Press, aware of average life-expectancy statistics, have hundreds of obits ready on Known People of a certain vintage, including the most prominent members of the Royal Family and the two living Beatles. The New York Daily News’ obituary of Rosa Park, published upon her death at 92 in 2005, had been written more than decade earlier.

But the other scenario is the unanticipated fatality—John Kennedy, Jr., or Princess Diana, as examples—that leaves news outlets frantically piecing together life-story details for swift publication. And here was Retton, something of a sports/marketing giant (though she is only 4-foot-9), abruptly becoming a candidate for a gone-but-not-forgotten review.

Retton’s star turn was brief but of considerable consequence. Her gold medal victory at the ’84 Los Angeles Games was the first by an American female in the Olympic gymnastics all-around individual competition—her sport’s glamor event. That landed her image on boxes of Wheaties, the self-proclaimed “Breakfast of Champions” that had been similarly featuring sports superstars for 50 years. But, before Retton, only men.

Her lightning strike on American gymnastics inspired waves of young girls to take up the sport and eventually led to U.S. women owning the event for the past five Olympics. Previous to Retton, in the eight Olympics in which women’s gymnastics had been contested, competitors from Eastern bloc nations won every all-around gold.

It didn’t hurt Retton that the old Soviet Union, whose athletes had won five of those earlier titles, had boycotted the L.A. Games amid Cold War tensions. And Retton’s impact was boosted by the fact that more than 180 million Americans watched at least part of the ’84 Olympics on TV, precipitating bidding wars among networks for future Olympic rights.

Whatever. Retton’s rollicking Olympic success established her as a boldface name, a cultural figure, in part because she didn’t quite fit the norm. Women’s gymnastics already had evolved into a showplace for girls in their tweens, acrobatic little tykes with nerves of steel.

Retton had been animated by watching the Olympic perfection, eight years earlier, of Romania’s Nadia Comaneci, and her only evidence of anxiousness regarding the dangers of derring-do gym routines was that she bit her nails. But it was Retton’s coach, Romanian defector Bela Karolyi—who had burst onto the international scene as Comaneci’s coach—who identified an evolution in Retton’s style. “You’re not a butterfly,” he told her.

Though only 94 pounds, Retton was built more for strength than speed. Rather than trafficking in the traditional stringy gymnastic grace, she commanded the spotlight with flash more than frills. She was described by USA Today’s veteran Olympic reporter Christine Brennan as “an ever-smiling 16-year-old tomboy, a tiny fullback in a gymnast’s leotard.”

Plus, she was a quick study, making her first big splash at New York’s Madison Square Garden a year before the Olympics by scoring a perfect 10 with a floor exercise introduced to her by Karolyi just five days earlier. She won her Olympic gold a mere five weeks after undergoing arthroscopic surgery for torn knee cartilage.

She retired from the sport just two years later but remained a spokeswoman for various products, a motivational speaker and a recognizable personality on various TV shows. She married, had four children and divorced. She forever was in demand for public recollections of those ’84 Olympics, calling herself “the old pioneer,” and for years topped polls establishing her as the public’s favorite athlete.

There was this moment midway through 1984 L.A. Games when Retton wandered into a newsstand and was flabbergasted by how sprinter/long jumper Carl Lewis, who won four gold medals in track and field, seemed to have become the face of those Olympics. “Gol-lee!” she exclaimed. “Carl Lewis is on the cover of both Time and Newsweek!” By the end of the 17-day festival, she had joined him. And become “America’s Sweetheart.”

Just days after October 2023 reports that Retton was “fighting for her life” came news that she was showing “remarkable progress” in her recovery. So no need for that obituary yet. And while no one gets to write his or her own ending, Retton long ago provided plenty of background for news hounds.

Another new kid on the block

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Perhaps we could emphasize Da’vian Kimbrough’s uncommon situation—this summer, the 13-year-old California lad became the youngest person to sign a professional soccer contract—from a demographic standpoint. According to sociologists who study such vague and unofficial designations, Kimbrough, born in 2010 and having just missed Generation Z, appears to qualify as a member of something called the Alpha Generation.

That puts him quite apart from Japan’s 56-year-old Kazuyoshi Miura, reportedly the oldest still-active soccer pro in the world, who is on the Generation X roster. Italian keeper Gianluigi Buffon, still going strong at 45, is at the most recent end of the X crowd. And there’s Argentine superstar Lionel Messi, 36. A Millennial. Or Gen Y’er.

And as long as we’re throwing these inexact labels around, might the Alpha-Gen Kimbrough now be marked as an up-and-coming Alpha Male, defined as a fellow tending to assume a dominant or domineering role in his chosen field.

For context, consider the case of Freddy Adu.

In late 2003, Freddy Adu similarly was summoned from the kids’ table to join the grownups. He was 14, signed by D.C. United of Major League Soccer, which made him, at the time, the youngest soccer pro ever. (In keeping with the generational thing, Adu, now 34 and retired from the sport, is a Y.)

Unlike Kimbrough, whose contract agreement with the Sacramento Republic of the second-tier United Soccer League was not widely reported, Adu was introduced at a New York City press conference months before his first game with United. He was guaranteed a $500,000 salary, highest among MLS’ 240 players at the time, and had a $1 million Nike endorsement deal but reminded that “I am just a kid” and that his mother probably would drive him to team practices.

Adu was welcomed to the sport by no less than soccer’s all-time wizard, Pele, who declared that Adu reminded him of the genius composer Mozart, “who started when he was 5 years old,” Pele noted.

(Pele was of the Silent Generation, by the way, which followed the Greatest Generation and led to Baby Boomers, which came before…. Well, point made. Mozart, who lived in the late 1700s, apparently missed the Awakening Generation and is more accurately situated in the Classical Period of music eras—between the Baroque and Romantic periods. But that’s another ballgame.)

Anyway, Adu’s own status as a prodigy quickly appeared to have legs. In his April 2004 MLS debut, Adu became the youngest athlete to participate in a major U.S. professional team sport since a pup named Fred Chapman, at 14, pitched for Major League Baseball’s Philadelphia Athletics 117 years earlier.

Chapman never played another Big League game, but Adu, in his second game, drew a national TV audience and sell-out crowd to Washington’s RFK Stadium. In his third game, against the MetroStars at the old Giants Stadium, Adu scored his first goal—and said he would celebrate by just hanging out with his mom.

He did not go on to enduring Mozart- or Pele-like greatness, playing in a handful of tournaments with the U.S. National Team but mostly spending his 15-year career with lower-level teams in Europe, though he wound up with a reported net worth of $12 million.

Kimbrough has not yet played a game for Sacramento, instead assigned to the club’s youth development academy. Between Adu and Kimbrough, a couple of other 14-year-olds—Francis Jacobs, in 2019, and Maximo Carrizo, in 2022, slightly lowered the age of youngest to sign pro soccer deals, though they also remain with their team’s youth programs.

Of course, all these wunderkind developments spice the ever-evolving world of sports. And they remind the rest of us, and probably Kazuyoshi Miura, of bygone generations.

 

Been there, and been done in like that

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If you are old enough—and I certainly am—you might recall a New York Giants’ loss strikingly similar to this season’s 0-40 opening-night shellacking administered by the Dallas Cowboys. Worse, even. Fifty years ago, the Giants were bludgeoned by the then-Oakland Raiders, 42-0.

It could be said that the Giants’ current co-tenants in their New Jersey stadium, the Jets (who likewise have fancied themselves a post-season contender), were not the only team to immediately reveal a certain Achilles heel.

An aside here from the Book of Ecclesiastes (not that there is anything spiritual about the business of professional football): “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

Well, OK, some things are new, or at least a variation on the theme. In ’73, the Giants’ president was Wellington Mara; since his death in 2005, his son John has been the boss, though both at times have been criticized by so-called loyal fans for being too loyal to long-time Giants associates.

In ’73, the Giants entered that Raiders game amid an inferno of a season and had long before abandoned all hope; they were 1-5-1 on the way to 2-11-1. By contrast, the 2023 Giants, before crashing and burning against the Cowboys, were talking about playing deep into January. And, after their comeuppance, insisted they have time to effectively deal with their damaged psyche.

Another significant difference: In 1973, the Raiders still made California their home and the National Football League still marketed its devout campaign against sports betting; now, of course, the Raiders are based in Las Vegas, the world’s gambling capital, and the league gleefully partners with several sportsbook operations.

There is overwhelming evidence that the practice of prognostication is essentially doomed and a pretty good example of addiction. Unless, that is, there is no money involved. Back in the antediluvian days of 1973, Wellington Mara would engage in weekly sessions with his sons, John and Chris, picking winners of the upcoming games. Just for fun, though they would employ those Vegas betting odds. Going into Oakland for the Nov. 4 game, Wellington—either having lost faith in his ’73 team or simply having begun to smarten up about its chances—liked the Raiders minus 11 points. (He wound up having 31 points to spare.)

The Giants coach then was Alex Webster, a former star back for the team and a fellow much admired by Wellington Mara. And Webster—in the room for that guessing game among the Maras—reportedly laughed in a good-natured way at Wellington’s prediction. Not taking it personally, apparently.

During that season’s slog, Mara had made it clear on several occasions that he would not fire Webster and Webster confirmed that he and the boss had “an agreement that I will step down myself if I feel I’m not doing the job.” (Whether he was pushed of jumped, Webster in fact was gone at the end of the season.)

After the Raiders had stomped the Giants the way California winegrowers dealt with grapes, Raider coach John Madden—remember, this was 50 years ago—was stunned by how easy it had been. “They must be a better team than that,” Madden said then. “We really could have scored many more points.”

Unlike the reaction of 2023 Giants players, with their circle-the-wagon assurances that they are capable of avoiding being 0-40 clobberees again, the ’73 Giants players’ 0-42 loss merely intensified a building dyspeptic, churlish in-house mood. Tight end Bob Tucker, who failed to catch a pass for the first time in 47 consecutive games, called his teammates “a bunch of quitters.” Defensive tackle Carter Campbell lamented that “people were laughing at us.” Assistant coach Jim Garrett declared that “there is a distinct need for leadership on this team, to say the least.”

Garrett, of course, would have his own leadership questioned years later when, as head coach of Columbia University in 1985, he called his players “drug-addicted losers.” (He wound up resigning at the end of that season before he could be fired.)

All right. The sun will come up tomorrow. Will there be anything new on the horizon for this New York team?

Miraculous staying power

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Do you believe in nostalgia?

Visit Lake Placid, N.Y., and you will be immersed in countless references, souvenirs and images recalling the moment in sports history when sportscaster Al Michaels hyperbolically asked 34 million American viewers, “Do you believe in miracles?”

It’s a central feature in the village’s international claim to fame as Winter Olympic host. It was a long time ago—43 years—before more than half of the world population was born. But, still: Approaching upstate Lake Placid now from the main road off the New York Thruway, one can’t avoid the various 1980 Olympic sites—the Mount Van Hoevenberg complex with its bobsled and luge run, the biathlon venue, the Olympic ski jump.

At the village’s southern edge, there are the flying flags from the 1980 participating Olympic nations, as if those Games still were going on, just outside the speed skating oval where American Eric Heiden won five gold medals, and adjacent to the imposing Olympic Center that includes two hockey arenas—from the two Lake Placid Winter Games, in 1932 and 1980—situated, naturally, at “Miracle Plaza.”

It has been more than a decade since the New York Times noted how Lake Placid “can feel cryogenically frozen in time—1980 to be exact, which was when this secluded pocket of the Adirondacks hosted its second Winter Olympics” yet continued to “look much as it did when Jimmy Carter was in office.”

And still: Forty-three years on, around town there are pictograms of the various Winter Olympic sports displayed on buildings; an old bobsled perched on a sidewalk; 1980 Olympic jerseys, signed by members of that winter’s U.S. team, hung in hotel lobbies; rows of shops with sweatshirts and caps adorned with 1980 logos; the local newspaper’s masthead proclaiming Lake Placid “host of the 1932 and 1980 Olympic Winter Games;” books and memorabilia chronicling the so-called 1980 “Miracle on Ice.”

On Labor Day weekend—this Labor Day, 2023—the Adirondack Daily Enterprise and the weekly Lake Placid News both ran reports on New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s recent visit to Lake Placid and her specific recollections of that “miracle” 1980 semifinal ice hockey victory by the underdog Americans over the Soviets. Gillibrand even noted that her parents had attended the game. Which apparently prompted current Olympic Regional Development Authority board president Joe Martens’ aside that “It’s kind of a running joke in Lake Placid—there were 8,500 people in here for the game but 30,000 people say they were here.”

It was just a hockey game. But it featured a shocking upset by a rag-tag team of American amateurs over the four-time reigning gold medalists from the old Soviet Union. And amid Cold War tensions, the Yanks’ thoroughly unlikely upset of the so-called Evil Empire was widely cast as a victory for righteousness, somehow evidence of Americans’ morality, and as the game’s final seconds ticked away, Michaels laid it on pretty thick with his “miracles” question.

Forty-three years ago. Sooo yesterday, no? Yet the Lake Placid of 2023 hardly has a Paleolithic feel; rather, it is a thoroughly up-to-date, scenic burg, alive with flora and fauna, centered by serene Mirror Lake with the Adirondack Mountains as a picturesque backdrop.

It teems with energy—joggers, swimmers, dog walkers, baby strollers, kayakers and cyclists—and with community affairs such as the I Love BBQ and Music Festival Weekend surrounding Labor Day, and a state golf championship for seniors and “superseniors” (65-plus).

It’s just that village leaders know how their bread is buttered. So, along with the ongoing Olympic reminiscence is the continued outreach for similar—if less famous—international winter competitions such as last February’s World University Winter Games and next month’s World Figure and Fancy Skating Championships, in which competitors form artistic squiggles on black ice.

The local population is not quite 2,500 but there are year-round crowds of tourists, many speaking in foreign tongues, lured by the village’s international renown and resort status.

“If the town were not smothered in Olympic logos,” the long-ago Times travel piece reported, “visitors might forget about its Olympic connections and think they had wandered into an idyllic Swiss hamlet.

Not likely, that. The miracle has been held over by popular demand.