Beautiful music

Want a sports quote for the ages? Consider this from 1987, by Marcel Souza, regarding his and—especially—teammate Oscar Schmidt’s starring roles when Brazil knocked the heavily favored U.S. national basketball team off its hoops high horse to win that summer’s Pan American Games gold medal:

“There is a saying in Brazil. We are the piano players. And the others are the piano carriers.”

“One of us shoots,” Schmidt clarified, “and the others go for the rebound.” Artists collaborating with manual laborers.

Never heard of Oscar Schmidt (who just died at 68)? Basketball, after all, long has been a United States-centric endeavor—specifically, an NBA showcase—and Schmidt chose instead to play out his 29-year career with club teams in his homeland, in Italy and in Spain. When the then-New Jersey Nets drafted him in 1984, NBA rules still banned its employees from Olympic competition, so Schmidt prioritized remaining the headliner for his national team.

“I would rather play with my friends and play 40 minutes,” he said then, and went about scoring 49,973 career points (with a per-game average of 30.7), more than anyone in history until LeBron James passed him two years ago. In five Olympics, a record, Schmidt totaled 1,094 points, also a record, averaging 28.8 per game and including an otherworldly 42.3 average at the 1988 Seoul Games.

He was the maestro of point production, a 6-8 ½ virtuoso of the long-range jump shot, scoring from binocular range before anyone had seen the likes of Stephen Curry’s dead-eye three-pointers. Schmidt years later told NBC Sports that “there was not a shot I didn’t like. I like them all because I practiced them all….So give me the ball. If you don’t want me to shoot, don’t give me the ball.”

In that ’87 Pan Am final, Schmidt scored 46 points, 35 in the second half of the 120-115 upset in which Brazil overcame a 20-point first-half deficit that seemed to reinforce the sport’s assumed pecking order. Fellow piano player Souza had 30 that game. Quite a recital, pretty much eliminating the need for the Brazilian piano carriers.

“Any shot,” Schmidt said many times, “is a good shot. Any time.” To perfect his three-point wizardry, he said, “My wife goes with me in practice and passes me the ball 500 to 1,000 times. That’s why I married her.”

There were 16,408 spectators at that Pan Am final in Indianapolis, smack in the middle of Hoosier Hysteria, when Schmidt introduced himself to the mostly jingoistic American hoops fans. In Brazil, he was Mao Santa (Holy Hand); to the international basketball community, simply “Oscar.”

The Yanks, at the time, had lost only two of 67 games in 36 years of Pan Am basketball, and featured a roster including two All-Americans, David Robinson and Danny Manning; two NCAA championship Final Four MVPs, Pervis Ellison and Keith Smart; plus future NBA players Rex Chapman, Pooh Richardson, Willie Anderson.

More than four decades of my covering international sports offered few treats to compare with Oscar’s Pan Am show, which he later called the highlight of his rollicking athletic career. He wound up on four separate basketball Halls of Fame, praised by such NBA greats at Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. At the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, he was honored as one of six who marched the Olympic flag into Maracana Stadium for Opening Ceremonies.

Possibly a candidate, when he showed up in Indy in ’87, for American sports viewers’ “Who’s That?” list, Oscar left town as one of the Pan Am Games’ three most endearing characters, along with Souza and Hortencia, the flashy, emotional Brazilian women’s basketball star who would pound the press table in exultation over every point and gesture wildly in animated discussions with her teammates.

Theirs were universal displays of competitive joy with which anyone, anywhere, could identify. But most of all, at that event, there was Oscar, who wound up on the “Who’s Who” catalog of athletic heroes and goodwill ambassadors. He wasn’t just Brazil’s best piano player; he was a basketball Franz Liszt, a hoops Vladimir Horowitz.

Farewell to a friend

My friend Ron died a couple of weeks ago. College roommate my senior year, a pal long before and long, long after. I was a sports journalist. He was a real journalist, a 30-year veteran of Voice of America, reporting on people and issues that really mattered.

While I was busy chronicling self-important jocks scoring touchdowns and muscling slam dunks, Ron was covering the likes of Madeleine Albright, the first woman to be U.S. Secretary of State. He reported on doings in Eastern Europe and with NATO, his bylines on such events as the trial of Libyan suspects in the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am flight over Scotland and the bloody dissolution of the former Yugoslavia.

Back in college, I could name Heisman Trophy candidates and various sporting heroes. Ron knew all that, too—we both worked in the sports department for The Maneater, our student newspaper at the University of Missouri—but he also could recite the names of every single member of Congress. During his sophomore year, he was a member of the four-person Missouri team that twice appeared on the televised College Bowl quiz show. A big deal; the victory over New Jersey State College and loss to the University of Pittsburgh were covered by the New York Times.

He hailed from Falls Church, Va., just outside Washington, D.C., and paid attention to what was going on in the real world. I recall his description of Richard Nixon—“nefarious prevaricator”—a characterization that certainly could apply to the Current Occupant.

Ron possessed a terrific chuckle and an appreciation of the little foibles in this big old goofy world. Given that the third person in our college apartment was a bit unkempt and appeared to have many girlfriends, Ron referred to him as “the family dog.” Also, he clearly understood my status as anything but a ladies’ man in college. I had a date—sort of a date—with a lass who was another member of the student newspaper, to attend an informal concert on campus. Things were wrapping up when she approached and announced, “I’ll get a ride with the drummer.”

After which there were various occasions—when he and I were together at some event or other—that concluded with Ron deadpanning, “I’ll get a ride with the drummer.”

The man always was on the mark, his superpower a keen observation of situations. So it was a treat, over the years, when we could get together—sometimes with his wife Ann (another Maneater alum) and sometimes at the most unlikely locales. I was lining up a trip to Eastern Europe in 1990, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, partly to cover a pair of the U.S. national soccer team’s pre-World Cup matches in East Germany and Hungary and to report on the dramatic political changes affecting international sports.

Ron was based at the time in Vienna, so we arranged to meet for a couple of days in Budapest and, one evening, with Hungary just days away from its first free election in 45 years, Ron invited me to join him at a “meet the candidate night.” He schooled me on the fact that Hungary had been edging for two decades toward a Western economy through so-called Goulash Communism, which the locals considered “cheating the Russians.”

I was told the joke that the reason for an old Communist law banning alcohol sales 24 hours before an election was to “guarantee that no Hungarians were seeing double—and therefore thinking there were two political parties from which to choose.” That there suddenly were 52 parties—52!—when I attended that candidates’ night was surreal enough, especially when a woman in the back of the room stood to address the potential politicos. “The Communists,” she informed them, “gave me a job showing French tourists around Budapest; the last thing I want to do is show French tourists around Budapest. What are you going to do about that?”

And I think it was the next afternoon that Ron and I were walking along the banks of the Danube and came across a Budapest spring festival that included a man in a straw boater singing, “Just a Gigolo” (with two mini-skirted background singers echoing “Gigolo! Gigolo!”). Could have been in New York City or Lincoln, Nebraska, rather than on that side of what had been the Iron Curtain.

I’d love to know what Ron would think now of the latest developments in Hungary, where—from a distance—it feels like reverse whiplash from 1990. Right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a close ally of fellow autocrats Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, has just been voted out of office after 16 years during which he eliminated checks and balances and stacked his nation’s judicial system and nominally independent agencies with his loyalists. (Which sounds a little too close to home.)

Of course, earlier this year, Trump moved to dismantle the Voice of America. And now Ron Pemstein, among VOA’s most knowledgeable veteran reporters before his retirement, is gone. Just when we’re in need of hearing some good news.

I keep thinking of how Ron often answered the telephone: “Is this somebody with good news or money?”

Atlas (not the guy in Greek mythology)

I have not been everywhere. (That was Johnny Cash; check out his 1996 song.) But I have spent at least one night in eight of the top 10 cities—and 12 of the top 20—named in this year’s rankings of the world’s best by the global magazine Time Out.

Here goes (with their Time Out rank in parentheses): Melbourne (1), Shanghai (2), Edinburgh (3), London (4), New York City (5), Mexico City (7), Seoul (9), Tokyo (10), Hong Kong (15), Madrid (19).

Some people have all the luck. To have visited these far-flung locales is the sort of rambling that can happen if one spends much of a newspapering career covering national and international sports—one of the five W’s of journalism is “where”—and has a daughter who ends up being something of a world traveler herself, these days settled with her Scottish-born husband and young son in London.

I submit this travelogue as evidence that it is possible to take the bumpkin out of the country. And I subscribe to the Kurt Vonnegut observation that “peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.” Unexpected moves and potentially disorienting life changes are gifts. Opportunities to learn something. I was born in Louisiana, raised in Texas, California and New Mexico, attended college in Missouri.

And in Melbourne, during the 2000 Sydney Olympics, I learned the locals’ term for foreign visitors is “blow-ins,” and the general atmospherics reminded me of laid-back Southern California, total strangers referring to everyone as “mate.” Shanghai was where my daughter worked for eight years, and where she helped my wife and me during our visit to navigate the city by providing cabbies with her address written in Chinese. Highlights there included the waterfront area known as The Bund, and chancing upon the “dancing grannies” ubiquitous in local parks.

Edinburgh was an overnight stop on a train trip to Stonehaven, Scotland, where my son-in-law’s mother lives. Lovely castle there. London is like a second home, having passed through almost 30 times—on vacations, assignments for Newsday, regular visits to my daughter. A great, diverse, energetic place and, yes, I enjoy the occasional pub visit.

New York City has long been a sort of reverse suburb to my suburban Long Island home, and it long ago was briefly my place of residence while working in the Big Town right out of college. I’d live there now if I could afford it.

Mexico City popped up on an Olympic-related work project, with the bonus of bringing my wife and daughter along. The place was crawling with green Volkswagen bugs at the time, standard vehicles for the local cabbies.

Seoul, cite of the 1988 Olympics, was densely populated—mostly, it seemed, by men in grey suits, all named Mr. Kim. A colleague and I attended a pro baseball game there and witnessed a Kim-to-Kim-to-Kim double play. Tokyo, a temporary landing spot connected to the 1988 Nagano Olympics, was striking for its service mentality—gas-station workers racing out to fill your tank or clean your windshield the moment you appeared.

Hong Kong was a side trip upon which my Newsday boss insisted prior to the Seoul Olympics; at the time, it was then still a United Kingdom possession, which meant there were a lot of red double-decker busses, with a surprisingly Western feel. Madrid—again, I had brought my wife and young daughter to do some vacationing while I was working—appeared as part of pre-Olympic reporting leading up to the 1992 Barcelona Games.

I found lots of other cities equally intriguing for various reasons. Prague. Athens. Budapest. Florence. Singapore. Even Havana, sadly depressed by long-standing American political isolation. And that was 25 years ago.

It must be noted that the Time Out ratings emphasized that it highlighted its chosen cities as the nicest places to live; its ratings involved quizzing more than 24,000 locals based on 44 criteria ranging from the food, nightlife and culture to affordability, happiness and the “overall city vibe.” I, meanwhile, mostly experienced them as a visitor, which obviously is a different thing.

Anyway, the list got me thinking of that old Johnny Cash song—

I’ve been everywhere, man

Crossed the desert’s bare, man

I’ve breathed the mountain air, man

Of travel I’ve had my share, man

I’ve been everywhere.

—which, combined with the Time Out ratings, prompted this itemization of my geographical wanderings, which have taken in 48 of the 50 states. (No Hawaii or South Dakota, and with the admission that Alaska is counted only because I walked outside of the airport in Anchorage while awaiting a change of planes.)

Another caveat: I list 32 countries by starting with the United States and by including Puerto Rico, a self-governing Caribbean island technically a U.S. commonwealth. And Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China. Also counting England, Scotland and Wales separately as three—rather than as just one United Kingdom. And East Germany, which now is part of a unified Germany but, when I was there in 1990, still was a separate nation. One rationale for this generous accounting is that each of those places has—or had, in the case of East Germany—its own “national Olympic team.” And, thus its own national identity.

So. I commence with Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Cuba, Czech Republic, France….

And so on, all the way down to ….Spain, Switzerland, Trinidad and Tobago, Vatican City (yes, it’s a country), Venezuela. And, by the way, my daughter has me beat. At least 42 countries are on her list, and good for her.

Back to the Johnny Cash song (originally, I learned, it was a tune written by Australian Geoff Mack in 1959, with lyrics more appropriate to that nation). Cash cites 66 cities (along with a few states); I’ve been to 38 of them. The first verse begins….

I’ve been to Reno, Chicago, Fargo, Minnesota

Buffalo, Toronto, Winslow, Sarasota

Wichita, Tulsa, Ottawa, Oklahoma,

Tampa, Panama, Mattawa, La Paloma

Bangor, Baltimore, Salvador, Amarillo….

Ditto for me on 15 of those. So far.

Track and field’s St. Patrick

“Occasionally,” Ron Delany once argued, “spectators are missing the point by turning their attention too often to the clock. The record. It’s not ‘How fast is he going to run?’ To me, it’s ‘What is he going to win?’”

Delany, who died last week at 91, won scores of races, the most memorable being the 1956 Olympic 1500 meters when he was 21 years old, establishing him as a sort of track-and-field St. Patrick in his native Ireland, an inspiration to his economically struggling homeland. He was a celebrity there the rest of his life.

He had come to America from Dublin at 19, in 1954, on a track scholarship to Villanova University outside Philadelphia, where his racing dominance opened a pipeline of Irish middle-distance champs to the school—future Olympians Eamonn Coghlan, Marcus O’Sullivan, Sonia O’Sullivan (no relation) among them.

How fast did Delany run? It’s an unavoidable question in a sport devoted to the stopwatch, all those competitions that conclude with a huddle of officials, stopwatches poised in outstretched hands, crouching at the finishing tape to record the minutes and seconds (and splits of a second) expended.

That tableau is so common that it was the source of a whimsical report proposed by an editor at Long Island’s Newsday sometime before I was employed there—just so that editor could play on Thomas Paine’s eloquent 1776 observation during the Revolutionary War’s darkest hour, “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

That editor’s punning headline, introducing those clock-watchers: “These are the souls that time men’s tries.”

Yes, and the late Paul Zimmerman, for years the New York Post’s elite track reporter, packed his own stopwatch to meets to time not only the runners but also the length of National Anthems played before those events. Track fans, too, typically engage in appraising athletes’ velocity, something Delany had “found extremely hard to take” during his career. He was booed fairly often while winning in less-than-record time. There were tales of track meet patrons tossing beer cups at him during races at New York’s Madison Square Garden for not setting a faster pace.

He addressed this matter in 1996 during a chat before a Garden celebration of past stars of the Millrose Games’ famous Wanamaker Mile—which Delany won four consecutive years in the late 1950s. At 60, always a hardcore track afficionado himself, he zeroed in on the essence of the 1992 Olympic 1500 final, which had been played out at what was described as “a shockingly slow pace”—slower than the women’s Olympic final had been that year.

“But what! A! Race!” Delany enthused. “Tense, tactical race! “Noureddine Morceli [the favorite from Algeria] got trapped in the pack on the final backstretch—and [Spain’s] Fermin Cacho burst from the pack and won!”

“That’s the beauty of sport, races like that,” he said. “Your emotions rise at times like that. I confess that I sometimes cry when I see the beauty of sport. Sometimes, in a subliminal dream, I train again. I race again. Of course, I win again. Then I wake up.

“Of course,” he then confided, “I quietly noted, ‘Geez, I could’ve won that race!’ If they’re running 3:31, no way. But if they’re going to dawdle for three laps, I could kick ass.” Cacho had run 3:40.12—“pretty slow,” confirmed Delany who, 40 years earlier, also burst from the pack—10th place with a lap to go—to take his Olympic gold in 3:41.2.

His triumph had come two years after England’s Roger Bannister was the first human to run the mile in under four minutes, a feat then compared to Edmund Hillary and guide Tensing Norgay conquering Mount Everest. Bannister, and the next nine men to break the four-minute mark after him, all were in Melbourne, Australia, for Delany’s ’56 Olympic 1500 meter victory.

Talk about running fast. Four members of the exclusive sub-four club were in the stands: Bannister, Australian Jim Bailey and Englishmen Chris Chataway and Derek Ibbotson. On the track were Delany, Australian John Landy, England’s Brian Hewson, Hungary’s Laszlo Tabori and Denmark’s Gunnar Nielsen. (Landy finished third that day, Tabori fourth, Hewson fifth, Nielsen 10th. Hungarian Istvan Rozsavolgyi, the tenth sub-four man, had been eliminated in the Olympic semifinals.)

Throughout his post-running career, Delany remained a hero in Ireland, where he was a marketing consultant, member of the Irish sports council and Irish tourism council and worked with third-world charities. He was recognized wherever he went.

“I had one little guy,” Delany said during that 1996 discussion, “come up to me in Dublin and say, ‘Are you Ron Delany?’ I confessed that I was, expecting some sort of compliment. He said to me, in that very Irish way, ‘I never saw anyone who got so much mileage out of winning a bloody medal.’”

So, it indeed was about the medal. Not the time. “That’s the point,” Delany said. “I don’t have to explain that I ran the Olympic 1500 in such-and-such a time. The time is an irrelevancy. I won the Olympics.”

Where in the world is….?

If war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography—an insightful observation often attributed to Mark Twain—then we Yanks must be scrambling to locate not just Iran but also Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arb Emirates—all feeling collateral damage since the United States and Israel set in motion the latest Mideast chaos.

What if, instead of this bombs-away teaching moment, we had just waited for this summer’s soccer World Cup tournament, in which 48 nations are ticketed to play at 16 sites in the U.S., Canada and Mexico? Might that be a less xenophobic, and more humane, global lesson than what the imperialist Trump and warmongering Netanyahu have wrought, their idea that apparently the only acceptable humans are those exactly like oneself.

There was a lovely essay in the New York Times this week, by former soccer professional and U.S. national team member Charlie Davies, recalling how his original introduction to the sport—and to far-off lands—was having attended a game the last time the United States hosted the World Cup in 1994. Two days shy of his 8th birthday, he took in a match in Foxboro, Mass., between Bolivia and South Korea—countries, Davies wrote, “I had never heard of.”

What he remembered was “seeing so many people from all walks of life gathering….There were tailgates with all different foods and people playing pickup soccer….strangers gave you high fives….”

Now that’s the way to learn about the rest of the world.

Instead, we are reminded of past U.S. Presidents ordering American youth toward early graves by visiting violence upon Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam—quagmires that didn’t solve much in the name of democracy or future peace. Country Joe McDonald just died; is that why I’m hearing the cynical anti-war lyrics from his 1969 Woodstock appearance in my head so loud and clear?

It’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?

Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn; next stop is Vietnam.

And it’s five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates.

No time to wonder why, Whoopie! we’re all gonna die!

An early, ancillary consequence of the war in Iran is directly connected to the 2026 World Cup, a real possibility that Iran’s national team—the first to qualify for the tournament—will now be forced to forego its appearance in the Cup, either by being barred from entering the United States or simply choosing not to subject itself to ICE-related crackdowns.

Simon Chadwick, a professor of Afro-Eurasian sport at the Emlyon Business School in Shanghai, told Al Jazeera that, “Ultimately, the diplomatic solution [will be] that Iran itself just steps aside and withdraws from the tournament…

“Given that they [Iran] are going to have to play their games in the U.S.”—first-round matches in Los Angeles and Seattle—“I find it unlikely that they will be there….It’s very difficult to see the U.S. allowing players, backroom staff and officials to enter the county.”

And it’s highly unlikely that those games, set for mid-to-late June, will be moved to Canada or Mexico at this late date.

Simon Kuper, author of the book “World Cup Fever,” noted in a Times op-ed piece that the dominant mood in the nine World Cups he has attended “is almost always international friendship.” But “that is not the spirit of the United States under the Trump administration….

“The United States’ basic message to foreigners seems to be: We hate you. The feeling is mutual. Many of the world’s soccer fans are dreading a tournament in a country that a growing number of foreigners are afraid even to visit.”

So, even if Iran’s team participates in the Cup—“I don’t really care,” Trump said dismissively—its citizens face a Trump administration travel ban. Senegal, Ivory Coast and Haiti—all Cup qualifies—also are on that list.

Then there have been hints by some European leaders, because Trump has threatened to invade Greenland, that their nations should boycott the World Cup; even Sepp Blatter, the former president of FIFA (soccer’s global governing body), made a call to “stay away” from the United States. And don’t even mention current FIFA boss Gianni Infantino’s sycophantic award of the organization’s weird “peace prize” presented in December to Trump.

Anyway, should Iran fail to show up—either by choice or American force—World Cup organizers most likely would replace it with the team from Iraq. Which recalls how the 2003 George W. Bush war, waged on false claims that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction,” similarly touched the soccer competition at the 2004 Athens Olympics—another international sports festival that ought to be a better source of geographical instruction.

At those Games a quarter century before the 2026 World Cup—before the ICE age—there was a highly sensitive diplomatic dance over whether the United States might provide armed guards for its athletes, against the Greeks’ insistence on controlling law enforcement matters with assistance from NATO.

Iraq was slated for the Olympics soccer opener in Patras. (Consult the atlas, fellow Americans; Patras, on the Peloponnese peninsula, is Greece’s third largest city, 133 miles from Athens). Iraq’s national team had been forced to play Olympic qualifying “home” games in Jordan because American bombs had damaged Baghdad’s stadium and, anyway, no visiting squads were willing to travel to Iraq.

Sepp Blatter was at the game—Iraq vs. pre-Olympic medal favorite Portugal—as were hundreds of singing, dancing Iraqi ex-pats, some them living in Greece, some in Australia and other lands in between, expressing what several called a connection to “family.” No untoward events materialized as Iraq won, 4-2, eventually advancing to the Olympic bronze-medal game (a loss to Italy).

But the Bush war had hung over the proceedings; several U.S. athletes spoke of “American hate,” of fans and athletes from other nations who “watch the news and they have their opinions.”

Really, there must be a better way than war to educate them. And us.

Hockey proxy

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If we’re going to hang our conviction of American exceptionalism on Olympic hockey tournament results, we at least ought to include credit to the women who also serve in that war-without-bullets.

Yes, the U.S. men this week conjured a rollicking gold-medal overtime victory over Canada, their first Olympic title since the so-called “Miracle on Ice” of 1980, a semifinal shocker over the Soviet Union, cast in the role of international menace. (Talk about a morality play!)

But it somehow was only reluctantly acknowledged by the self-appointed manly man in the Oval that the American women’s team was equally successful at the Milan Cortina Games.

In fact, if it’s global superiority Donald Trump yearns to reinforce through hockey, there is the matter of three gold medals won by the American women in eight Olympic tournament appearances, with four silver and a bronze in the other five. The U.S. men, meanwhile, now total three golds in 26 Winter Games over 106 years.

One of those successes by the guys, of course—the most recent before Sunday, 46 years ago—set off a similar beating-of-the-chests on these shores. But in far different circumstances.

In 1980, the Soviets were the established international hockey heavyweights and, on an implied level, were the athletic extension of a government considered the world’s most dangerous nuclear-age bully, its players assumed to be malevolent Communist robots.

Real enemies, if you will. Contrast that to the fact that this year’s winning American men’s goalie plays professionally in Canada, for Winnipeg, and 22 of the 25 members of the Canadian Olympic team make their living with U.S.-based teams. So this bunch of international opponents are now returning to NHL action as familiar professional teammates.

There were no NHL pros involved in ’80, the Cold War still was raging, and the Olympics—theoretically above politics but so often a proxy for ideological and political conflict—was handy for some sabre rattling and nationalistic bluster. Plus, we Yanks were hungry for some form of self-assurance, in a funk of insecurity over the Iran hostage crisis and outraged by the USSR invasion of Afghanistan two months earlier.

(Twenty-one years later, U.S. policy makers invaded Afghanistan, but that’s another story.)

So the meaning of that big game in Lake Placid was immediately inflated—perverted, really—as a representation of global pre-eminence. Herb Brooks, the U.S. coach, called his team’s 4-3 victory evidence that our way of life was better than the Soviets’. U.S. editorials declared that the hockey triumph “lifted the spirits of Americans everywhere.” The whole thing was schmaltzified—splendid hockey gone to hokey—and eventually Disneyfied in the 2004 movie “Miracle.”

Thoughtful people right after the 1980 game lamented the war mentality attached to that hockey summit, and how flimsy it was to hang one’s hat on the result of a sporting event. ABC-TV’s Jim McKay, widely respected for his work amid the Olympics’ brotherhood-of-man idealism, nevertheless hadus veered into jingoism when he signed off at the close of those Games, sounding near tears over the U.S. hockey victory. “What an Olympics!” McKay gushed. “What a country! Let’s say it here: We are a great people!”

Except: What if our hockey lads hadn’t won the Big Door Prize that winter? And what about the fact that, overall, the East Germans (23) and Soviets (22) both accumulated more medals in those Games than the Americans (12)? Were we therefore a lesser form of humans?

Plus, there was this: Because of the USSR military incursion into Afghanistan shortly before the Lake Placid Opening Ceremonies, President Jimmy Carter—who twice telephoned Herb Brooks with congratulations and called the hockey players “American heroes”—had ordered a U.S. boycott of the Summer Olympics in Moscow scheduled that summer.

A U.S. Summer Olympian, volleyball player Debbie Green, was among those outraged by the political hypocrisy. “The athletes in the Winter Games,” she said, “get all the praise for their work, and now just because our Games are in Moscow, we’re accused of being un-American” for wanting to compete.

Of course sports always is an Us-against-Them exercise. You choose your side, identify with your tribe. Here in 2026, you add Donald Trump’s Manifest Destiny pretentions and his mob-boss vision of Canada as the 51st state, wrapping himself in the flag figuratively raised by our athletes in those two Olympic finals against our Neighbors to the North.

Let’s say it here: Whatever the hockey skills and player grit at work—and the championship games were fabulous theatre on the big stage—winning Olympic gold is no test of national strength, no proof that God is on our side. The competition is Us-against-Them, but the result is not a manifestation of Good-vs.-Evil, no verification of special virtue in the United States. Or, in this case, no evidence that it is a man’s world.

As Abigail Adams cued a previous U.S. President: “Remember the ladies.”

To do. Or just to watch.

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Is anyone out there, while witnessing the athletic adventures being televised from Northern Italy, tempted to try a Winter Olympic sport? To have yourself shot out of a ski start house, over the edge of a mountain, or flung down a twisting ice tunnel, face-first, on a skeleton sled? To have a go at spins and leaps—even backflips!—on a frozen surface while balancing on thin blades of steel? To push the envelope of risk in search of potential chaos, just to see what can be done?

To mainstream American sports fans—to most American residents, in fact—we are talking about conversing in a foreign language. Pig Latin at best, and I am not claiming to be fluent.

But what if I told you I have attempted a few of these endeavors. (Well, sort of.) As a newspaper reporter who covered the Winter Games five times, I occasionally was presented with something of an Olympics-for-Dummies beginner’s course.

Figure skating. (I use the terms “figure” and “skating” loosely.) In 1994, prior to the Games in Lillehammer, Norway, Michelle Kaufman, who was the Olympic beat writer for the Detroit Free Press, organized what was the first—and, as far as I know, last—National Media Figure Skating Championships. With the usual rabble of Olympic reporters all in Motown for the U.S. Olympic figure skating trials, Kaufman arranged for the use of a rink, rental skates, even some recorded music to accompany our…ahem…routines. (We were on our own for skating outfits, which I recall ran toward sweatshirts and jeans.)

There were a couple of folks among us who actually knew what they were doing. I recall a woman who wrote for a skating magazine who was demonstrating spins and jumps, some real dipsy-doodling. But, as Randy Harvey of the Los Angeles Times noted, “We can see that at a figure skating event anytime.” He preferred the Larry-Curley-Moe bits, such as the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s Jay Weiner shuffling around as half of a pairs team—the other half being a chair. I suspect it was not so much a prop as a device to prop him up.

Having grown up in warm-weather locales with scant experience on ice, I took a similarly safe approach. The “judges,” some Olympic coaches and officials who had joined the frivolous morning hijinks, were situated at one end of the rink, so I chose to glide—shamble? totter? lumber?—to the opposite end, whereupon I did a few ponderous back-and-forth repeats before making a quiet exit.

Listen: The Quad God was still three decades in the future, and I did avoid producing a “double cheek” (falling on my wallet). And was abundantly rewarded. One of the appointed judges, Linda Leaver, who had coached 1988 gold medalist Brian Boitano and therefore was eminently knowledgeable of all things figure skating, presented me with a perfect 6.0—the highest possible score in the sport at the time.

“I don’t know what you did,” she said. “You were too far away. I just figured it must have been okay.”

Bobsledding. In early 1993, I was assigned by Newsday to attend a session on bobsled science at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid, N.Y., and that weekend’s working trip was a rare opportunity to bring my wife and daughter for a little sightseeing.

It happened that conference organizers invited anyone in our group to take a bobsled run, executed—should I use that word?—in one of the older, less rapid models. So, with two professionals—one steering and the other braking—sandwiched around my wife, 13-year-old daughter and me, off we went, barreling down the icy chute at about 50 miles per hour through the half-mile plunge. Bobsledding has been described, not inaccurately, as “the champagne of thrills.”

And then there was the ride on a luge.

In late 1997, prior to the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, some of us ink-stained wretches, in town to do a bit of pre-Olympic reporting, were offered—dared?—to try out the luge track after getting brief instructions:

Lie on your back on the sled. Head back. Legs straight. Feet turned in slightly. Grab the small handles on the sled just under your knees. Though a real luger steers by subtly shifting his or her toes, barely shrugging a shoulder or ever-so-slightly lifting a knee, we were told: “Don’t do that. Don’t move. Just hang on.”

The reporter who went immediately before me—a woman I didn’t happen to know—was barely on her way when I heard her piercing screams, which didn’t stop until she had reached the bottom.

But I let them pack me on the sled, and immediately experienced that the gravity of the situation was the gravity of the situation. The luge, yanked downhill on an elevation drop of 300 to 400 feet—a bit like sailing off a 30-story building—rapidly gains momentum amid a clattering not unlike a passing train.

We amateurs had cheated that day by starting our runs halfway down the Nagano track, but were hurtling along at 40 to 45 miles per hour after just one turn—about half the speed Olympians reach—wind whistling in the ears despite a crash helmet. The real revelation was feeling, at the conclusion of the trip, completely out of breath, as if I’d sprinted down the hill rather than having laid as passively as possible on that conveyor.

Far less taxing was curling, which a handful of us journalists sampled in Salt Lake City prior to the 2002 Games. It may be worth noting that David Wallechinsky, in his series of exhaustive “Complete Books of the Olympics,” called curling a sport that “allows non-athletes to take part in the Winter Olympics.”

It’s like horseshoes or shuffleboard or bowling; requires no running or lifting or jumping. A 42-pound granite stone, resembling a tea kettle because of the shape and handle, is slid toward a bullseye-like target 146 feet away called the “house.” Teammates brush the ice in front of the moving stone; the faster they sweep, the farther the stone will go, with the intention of reaching the scoring area, maybe to guard the target against an opponent’s stone or bumping said stone out of its advantageous position.

Our experience in Salt Lake City was short-lived. My appointed teammate, with an apparent rush of adrenaline, sailed the stone so rapidly toward the house that I, at a full sprint, never caught up to it; never got close enough to apply a broom. It swept right past me.

There is a bottom line here: Some sporting activities are better for spectating than participating.

Changing seasons

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This is to suggest, now that the Winter Olympic Games are upon us, that these quadrennial versions of international sleigh rides and snowball fights could stand to promote more diversity, equity and inclusion. As varied as they are—featuring men and women from 92 national delegations skiing, skating, bobsledding, curling, snowboarding, biathloning across Northern Italy during the current edition—the Winter Games pretty much remain the “white man’s (and women’s) Olympics.”

Think of the not-so-wealthy countries populated by people of color. In Modern Olympic history, Cuba has won all of its 244 medals at the Summer Games. None in the Winter. Brazil (170 medals), Kenya (124), Jamaica (94), Argentina (80) have the same imbalance, with no Winter Olympic hardware.

Jamaica’s bobsled team at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics was an unlikely sensation, of course, inspiration for the 1993 film “Cool Runnings” and that tropical land’s first of regular Winter Games appearances. But from the original 30th-place finish in the two-man event, Jamaica’s best showing since has been no higher than 14th.

A major factor is geography, of course, and related meteorology. Live in the Alps or other snowy climes and the odds of developing one’s luge or ski-jumping skills are greatly enhanced. It’s hardly a surprise, then, that less than half the globe’s countries show up at the Winter Games, and that, according to nbcolympics.com, there were only five African nations—Eritrea, Ghana, Madagascar, Morocco and Nigeria, fielding a total of six athletes—at the 2022 Beijing Winter Games. A record low. That was down from eight African countries at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics in South Korea.

But, wait. There is a solution to this inequity, a way of promoting marginalized countries and peoples to reach wintry Olympic heights: Move some sports from the Summer Olympic program to the Winter Games. And logically.

Basketball, for instance, is mostly contested in winter since it was created in December 1891 as a means to keep Canadian-born instructor James Naismith’s students at the Springfield, Mass., YMCA Training School fit during long New England winters. And, P.S.: When basketball made its Olympic debut at the 1936 Berlin Summer Games—outdoors—it didn’t make much sense. Especially when a pouring rain descended on the gold medal final in which the United States slogged through a 19-8 victory over Canada on a water-logged clay tennis court.

Olympic boxing certainly can happen in the wintertime. And volleyball. Wrestling. Weightlifting. Based on past results, moving those sports to the Winter Games surely would bring the first non-Summer medals to Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rice, Bahamas, Chile, Dominican Republic, Indonesia and others.

It is a fact that the Olympic Charter specifies that Winter Olympic sports are to be contested on snow or ice. But need that be settled law? Especially at a time when global warming has made snow and ice harder to come by. Studies indicate that man-made snow, which has become common (and necessary) in recent Olympic cycles, exacerbates climate change, and further research warns that, without artificial snow, only four cities in the world would be capable of hosting the Winter Games by 2050.

So, as the Winter Olympics continue to literally melt away, this isn’t a call for, say, boxing on ice—oh, that’s called hockey—though that might be interesting. This isn’t backing how some Olympic poohbahs have envisioned adding “snow volleyball” (quite a reverse from some chauvinist IOC member recommendations, upon the appearance of beach volleyball in the 1996 Summer Games, that it would get more attention if women should wear skimpier outfits).

Just last June, newly elected IOC president Kirsty Coventry organized a working group focused on possibly altering Winter/Summer Olympic lineups. Not exactly a push for rebranding the operation into Indoor Olympics and Outdoor Olympics, but Coventry herself is the personification of how assumptions can sometimes be misleading. A former swimming champion from Zimbabwe, Coventry’s seven medals make her Africa’s most decorated Olympian. She is white.

Anyway, Coventry’s task force has been assigned with “identifying ways for sports to be added to or removed from the program through a clear and transparent process. It will also consider the suggestion that traditional Summer or Winter sports could cross over.” Two sports that are pushing for admission into the Winter Games are cross-country running and cyclocross—neither contested on snow or ice—but clearly meant to add diversity to the Winter event. Sebastian Coe, the former Olympic middle-distance running champion who is president of track and field’s international federation, has said as much, citing cross-country in the Winter program as a way to put African athletes in position for Winter medals.

Let the Games diversify.

Greenland invades the Olympics!

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It may be too late for a pair of siblings, competing in the upcoming Winter Olympics biathlon competition, to put Greenland on the map (as the illogical expression goes). Even for, say, a certain geographically challenged, arrogantly xenophobic American who doesn’t appear to know the world’s largest island (836,000 square miles) from nearby Iceland.

But we can hope that 24-year-old Ukaleq Slettemark and her 21-year-old brother Sondre generate some unprecedented attention for their birthplace that is enlightening. One of the grand features of the Olympics is the glimpse it can provide of generally ignored regions, their customs, history and people. If Ukaleq Slettemark, racing in her second Olympics, or her brother could somehow win a medal (though that isn’t likely), there would have to be, for instance, some public explanation of why Greenland’s red-and-white flag—the Erfalasorput, which means “our flag”—would not be raised.

Greenland has its own ski federation, founded in 1969, is a member of at least five international sports federations and competes independently at the Arctic Winter Games since their inception in 1970. But as a semiautonomous territory in the Kingdom of Denmark, and without its own national Olympic committee, Greenland’s athletes compete under Denmark’s red-and-white Nordic-cross flag, the Dannebrog.

Greenland, with only 57,000 citizens—roughly half the population of Tuscaloosa, Ala.—hardly boasts a massive talent pool, and too much attention always is paid to Olympic medal counts that mostly reflect the food chain with the largest, richest, most powerful countries on top. Yet the Slettemarks, amid the Games’ universal display of competitive joy—with which anyone, anywhere, could identify—might open a window on learning of sports in Greenland and Greenlanders’ contribution to Denmark’s Olympic participation.

Three Greenlandic skiiers were part of the Danish team at the 1998 Nagano Winter Games and one of those, Michael Binzer, got plenty of attention back home for finishing 41st in the men’s 50-kilometer cross-country freestyle event. Among the handful of Greenlanders who wore Demark’s colors in past Games was the Slettemarks’ father, Oystein, in the 2010 Vancouver Games’ biathlon event, which combines cross-country skiing and rifle shooting. The Slettemarks’ mother, Uiloq, also was a biathlete who competed in the 2012 World Championships and, on the side, founded the Greenland Biathlon Federation; she raced when she was 7 months pregnant with Ukaleq and was still active, with her husband, on the World Cup circuit in their 40s.

Here are more potential discoveries, courtesy of the Slettemarks’ Olympic presence: When Ukaleq was born, the family lived in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, the northern-most (and one of the smallest) capital cities in the world, thought to have the highest percentage of aboriginal people in the world among its 20,000 residents. Nuuk sits on a fjord on the Southwest edge of the nation, with no roads connecting it to the rest of Greenland, though there is an international airport and boat traffic.

When she was 4, young Ukaleq was traveling widely to competitions with her parents and, since conditions for biathlon training are better in Norway, the family lived there parttime when Ukaleq first tried the sport. All were back in Greenland for the Arctic Winter Games when Ukaleq, not yet a teenager, entered the biathlon competition as a last-minute replacement. And won.

She won Greenland’s first-ever medal at a major international event with a gold in the 2019 Youth World Championships in Slovakia and made her World Cup debut in 2020 in Austria. At the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, she finished 53rd in the individual biathlon race and 65th in the sprint.

So it’s safe to say that the Slettemark family knows a lot more about the world than the world knows of their homeland. A recent Associated Press dispatch quoted Ukaleq’s thoughts that demonstrate she clearly has been paying attention:

–Her dream is racing “under the Greenland flag, but at the same time, I feel like everyone knows that we’re Greenlandic and we will race with our own suit that we designed with some Greenlandic markings on it,” she said. “And we feel well taken care of by the Danish Olympic Committee.”

–She works as a sustainability ambassador in the face of global warming. “I come from Greenland, I see the changes. I care about winter not disappearing.”

–And, about the deranged White House rumblings threatening ownership of Greenland: “Terrifying….I’m very good friends with the U.S. athletes. I think they’re all really nice people. [But] we’re imagining the worst-case scenario….”

She said she has heard people on the biathlon circuit hoping that, as Russia remains banned from the Olympics since its invasion of Ukraine, the same should happen if the United States attempts to forcefully take over Greenland. “I feel,” she told The AP, “more strongly connected to the Danish team because of everything that’s going on in the international politics. I think it’s really special that Greenland and Denmark stand strong together.”

There must be a lesson about allies in all this.

It’s just talk

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Ahm fixin’ to declare that Ah don’t talk with a drall.

[Throat clearing here] OK, radio voice…

An essay in The Atlantic’s One Story to Read Today newsletter, “The Last Days of the Southern Drawl,” just caught my eye. I recall, when I was growing up and my father was regularly transferred—Mississippi to Texas to California to New Mexico—there were classmates at each new family stop who would study me, one eye halfway closed, trying to pinpoint why I talked funny. Gol-lee. And when I settled in New York after college, visits to my siblings in Texas and Missouri and to my aunts and cousins in Louisiana brought remarks from them about my apparent altered mode of communication. Oy.

It seems there was something of a moving target in my speech patterns—literally based on moving. Might I have been saying “Y’all” at times, then “You guys” at others? Maybe mimicking, intentionally or otherwise, different regional accents to which I was exposed, with some unavoidable genetic link? (Both parents were born and raised in Louisiana.)

In that Atlantic piece, Tennessee native Annie Joy Williams wrote that she had been determined not to have a Southern accent when she grew up because, as a child, she had “watched people snicker at the redneck characters on television who always seemed to play the town idiot. I knew what the accent was supposed to convey,” she said. “Sweet but simpleminded.”

I don’t recall any such self-analysis or thoughts of rejecting my roots in the way I spoke. But there possibly were subconscious, changing patterns of adaptation to different regional language. As a rule, people here in New York—my home since college graduation a half-century ago—do speak more rapidly than high school pals did in Hobbs, N.M., and fellow students in Columbia, Mo. And, I mean, you have to keep up.

(There was a period, years ago, when I briefly was my newspaper’s ice hockey beat reporter, spending a fair amount of time around Canadians, and suddenly detected myself ending sentences with “Eh?”)

I’m going to assert that I never conversed in a full-out drawl, which I have seen defined as “speaking in a slow, lazy way with prolonged vowel sounds.” Lazy!? In his delightful 1977 book “Crackers,” Roy Blount, Jr. railed against Northeasterners’ dismissal of the accent from his native Georgia as a sign of ignorance, prejudice or bumpkinism. As if the way he talked somehow was confessing to hating Blacks or “confessing to being barefooted,” which he wrote would prompt him to “get right up there at the dinner table or whatever it is and show them my shoes. Not that I’m wearing shoes for any Northern person’s benefit.”

In the Crackers chapter titled “Being from Georgia,” Blount wrote, “I am talking the way it feels right in my mouth. ‘Pore,’ for instance, is a lot better way of pronouncing the word poor than ‘pooor.’ When you say ‘pooor,’ you purse your lips like a rich person. When you say ‘pore,’ you say it the way poor folks and poor old souls and poorhouse residents say it when they say, ‘This is a poor excuse for living.’”

Blount argued that “you’re supposed to sound like the way you grow up. Advancing it along and remixing it, up to a point.” He had relocated from Georgia to Massachusetts (and then with a second home in New Orleans), and related how “people back down home accuse me of losing my accent. And then I get off the plane on the other end and people are saying, “You’re not from the city, heeya. I thot I heard a little….”

That’s what I’m talking about here. New childhood friends in California, after our family had arrived from Texas, likely placed me somewhere between a cowboy and a rube. My sister recalls schoolyard peers calling us “Tex.” Then, going back the other direction, to New Mexico, the locals again put me in the outsider category based on my speech. (Maybe with the hint of a Valley Guy accent? Was I saying “like” too often?)

By the time I got to Missouri, where that state’s natives themselves don’t even sound the same, depending on whether they’re from rural “Mizzou-RUH” or citified “Mizzou-REE”—there was yet another transmogrification of my larynx detected.

I have, somewhere among my various (insignificant) possessions, a “Texas Passport” that I purchased at a Dallas airport curio shop years ago. That document helpfully emphasizes some Texas assumptions with a couple of pre-printed personal statistics: For height, it says, “6-foot-6.” For sex, “Yes.” As if that stereotype somehow defined me beyond a doubt.

Shaped by geography, social class, ethnicity, listening to sports radio play-by-play on the radio, it is reasonable that my pronunciation and pacing might vary. My daughter, raised on Long Island without, I insist, a Lawn Guyland accent, lives now in London with her Scottish-born husband and English-born son, and I’ve certainly noticed that my grandson says “Toe-MAH-toe.” While I say “Toe-MAY-toe.”

But sociolinguistics have noticed that things can change. The Atlantic article noted how early years of the Great Migration, from South to North in the U.S., resulted in the older generation “taking their accents with them,” but that their descendants, part of the more recent relocation to Southern climes, don’t talk the same way. Not to mention online influences at work over the years. YouTube and such.

Listen: I refuse to be pigeonholed merely based on articulation. Drawl, schmawl. I self-identify as a Citizen of the World.