Author Archives: johnfjeansonne@gmail.com

About johnfjeansonne@gmail.com

Newsday sportswriter emeritus and adjunct professor in the Hofstra University school of communications.

To the Giants, the Opposite of Miraculous

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Apparently it is not possible to have a televised New York Giants-Philadelphia Eagles game without a brief reference to the Giants’ Great Stumblebum Play of 1978. There it was again during this regular-season’s finale between the old rivals.

TV continues to call it “the Miracle of the Meadowlands”—an event contrary to all laws of nature that unfolded 41 years ago at the Giants home in the Jersey wetlands.

I call it Moby Fumble (Thar the Giants Blow it!). And the Big Oops. From the Giants’ standpoint—and I was then the team’s beat writer for Newsday—it was the manifestation of the imperfect human condition. On steroids. Not merely because of the turnover itself—that happens, no?—but the fact that the blunder was facilitated by a thoroughly illogical plan at the most inopportune time.

The Giants were leading, 17-12, and had the ball, third-down-and-two at their 29-yard line. The clock was running; 20 seconds to go. The Eagles were out of timeouts. All the Giants had to do was have quarterback Joe Pisarcik take the center snap and fall on the ball. And the game would be over.

To almost all of the 78,000 spectators already headed for the parking lot—and to all but of few of us reporters who refrained from joining our colleagues’ rush to the lockerrooms—the game was over.

Except Pisarcik was ordered to run “Pro 65 Up,” a play requiring the execution of a little spin move and a hand-off to running back Larry Csonka. They muffed the exchange, then watched helplessly as the ball hopped into the arms of Eagles defensive back Herman Edwards—a passer-by, really—who was free to run 29 yards the other way, untouched, for the winning score.

It was The Most Incredible Play Call (and Fumble). The offensive coordinator who called the play, Bob Gibson, was fired the next day. The following week, leading in the final seconds of the first half against Buffalo, the Giants introduced what has become known around football as “the Victory Formation”—wherein a team positions three players tightly around the quarterback, circling the wagons for a static hike-and-kneel-down motion.

“That’s out Philly play,” Pisarcik snorted after the Buffalo game, exasperated that Gibson hadn’t thought of such an obvious precaution against the Eagles. “Ha. It wasn’t put in last week. We call the play ‘a day late and a dollar….’”

That the Giants proceeded to be blown out in the second half by Buffalo was just more evidence of how that The Play Call (and Fumble) Seen ‘Round the NFL was metastasizing. The team’s GM, former All-Pro Andy Robustelli, resigned at season’s end. Head coach John McVay was not retained.

What may have been seen as a miracle for the Eagles was, to me, the Archduke’s Assassination (ask a World War I historian), the trigger to a toxic domino effect that re-ordered the entire Giants organization from top to bottom.

Whatever the perspective, it is good for the TV executives to continue recalling such a consequential instance. And for a sort of replay: On Dec. 29, the Giants were within three points of the Eagles early in the fourth quarter when, on second down from his 27, Giants quarterback Daniel Jones botched a low shotgun snap, recovered, then lost the handle again.

It was something of a minor miracle (yes, in the Meadowlands) that the Eagles’ Fletcher Cox found himself in the right place to cover the ball at the Giants’ 2. Arguably the game’s turning point, that set up a quick Philly touchdown and the Giants’ 12th loss in 16 games.

The Giants fired their coach the next day. A lot like 41 years ago. So again, the team is straying from the road to success, seeking some sense of control. Call it fishtail.

 

Occupy Halftime

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Surely it is a tribute to the Harvard-Yale game’s enduring status that climate-change activists chose it for their disruptive (but thoroughly peaceful) protest Saturday. A public demonstration requires an observant public. So, while those two egghead institutions long ago ceased to prioritize football; while the NCAA’s sports-industrial complex essentially drew a chalk outline around the Ivy League’s major-league status more than 40 years ago, Harvard-vs.-Yale still attracts a crowd.

It is a bit arrogant, of course, too snobbishly exclusive, the way the Harvards and Yales continue to call it “The Game,” as if there were no other of such importance. But there were 44,898 witnesses at the Yale Bowl for the 136th renewal of their annual duel. That was eight times the average attendance at Yale’s previous five home games this season.

That was enough for a quorum. Enough to affect the message from 200 protesters who stormed the field at halftime calling on the two elite institutions to divest their massive investments in fossil fuels. “Nobody wins,” some banners carried onto the field warned. “Yale & Harvard are complicit in climate injustice.”

Of course there were cries of condemnation for the “inappropriate” setting. Officials at the two elite schools, as well as the Ivy League office, harrumphed that while they were passionate believers in free speech, they found it “regrettable”—according to an Ivy League email—“that the orchestrated protest came during a time when fellow students were participating in a collegiate career-defining contest and an annual tradition when thousands gather around the world to enjoy and celebrate the storied traditions of both football programs and universities.”

Not the venue, in other words. Which is the same kind of inverted reasoning that granted Colin Kaepernick the right to protest police brutality and racial inequality—but not during the National Anthem before high-profile NFL games. Too many people might see him and be forced to think about the issue.

College theoretically is about promoting critical thinking, and both Harvard and Yale brand themselves as leading bastions of learning and justice. All nine members of the current Supreme Court attended either Harvard or Yale. Six U.S. Presidents went to Harvard; five to Yale. (Once, at The Game, Harvard’s band spoofed 350-pound President William Howard Taft—a Yale man—for getting stuck in the White House bathtub.)

So here was something of a teaching moment Saturday, a chance for concerned students to stoke awareness of what they believe is their schools’ misguided contribution to the carbon emissions problem. Their occupy-halftime movement resulted in a few dozen arrests and plenty of social media commentary and a delay of almost an hour in re-starting the game. (Sorry: The Game.)

Because the Yale Bowl is the rare college stadium which didn’t join the 1980s business model of installing lights to satisfy television, the teams played into virtual darkness, a quarter-hour after sundown. But that only enhanced the football drama, their scuffle finishing in the gloaming after a second overtime period. Yale won, 50-43, and one of its giddy players dismissed the inconvenience of the protest by declaring that his mates were prepared to play “until tomorrow.”

Part of the irony is that Yale was America’s Original Football Factory—the Alabama of the early 1900s—a perennial national champion prior to World War I, fielding All-Americans (possibly semi-professionals rather than ordinary students) and producing a lineage of influential coaches. The Yale Bowl, when it opened in 1914—the biggest and best of its kind—was called a “handsome and remarkable monument to the cult of the pigskin.”

It’s just that not since 1968 has Yale, Harvard or The Game gotten any attention to speak of. That was the year that Harvard scored 16 points in the final 42 seconds to salvage an improbable tie and led to the Harvard Crimson’s memorable headline, “Harvard beats Yale, 29-29.”

Hmmm. Nobody won? Developments during The Game in 2019 might have presented an opportunity to think about a final score.

Political football

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Is this how Donald Trump ended up at the LSU-Alabama game on Nov. 9?—after a memo from a White House staffer that went….

“If at any time during the remainder of this term the President wants to see and be seen by a tremendous crowd of enthusiastic Southerners, I suggest we consider sending him to one of the big football rivalry games.

“….football is a religio-social pastime in the South, particularly when you get teams like Alabama and Mississippi playing. That would be a good way to get him into a key Southern state and get to see many people from the two states, without doing anything political.”

Sure enough, there was Trump in Tuscaloosa, Ala., among the 101,821 pigskin faithful.

Wait. The above communication was for Richard Nixon in the fall of 1969. It’s just that these days, with headlines of Trump “Out-Nixoning Nixon” on other matters, the thought occurred that the current occupant of the Oval Office might endeavor to implement a similar Southern Strategy.

LSU was ranked No. 2 in the nation and Alabama No. 3 going into this month’s showdown of unbeaten powers. In 1969, No. 1 Texas was about to play No. 2 Arkansas in early December when Nixon announced he not only would attend the game but would be bringing with him a Presidential plaque to personally declare the winner to be national champion. The Commander-in-Chief as gridiron kingmaker.

In both cases, such a non-political appearance was clearly political. With the Republican Party’s 1960s electoral tactic of picking off Southern white voters reluctant to accept civil rights initiatives, Nixon brought further attention to a game that came to be known as “Dixie’s Last Stand”—the final major American sporting event played between all-white teams.

Trump, after he had been roundly booed at a Washington Nationals World Series game and a mixed martial arts event in New York City, could assume the citizens of the red states of Louisiana (where he got 58 percent of the 2016 vote) and Alabama (62 percent) promised a more comfortable reception.

At the 1969 game in Fayetteville, Ark., Houston Post sports columnist Mickey Herskowitz reported that the capacity crowd “did not include a few dozen [Vietnam] antiwar demonstrators who stood, quiet and reproachful, on a grassy hill overlooking the stadium, holding signs addressed to the President. The largest read: ‘Give peace a chance.'”

Fifty years on, in Tuscaloosa, dissent was likewise minimal—seven students in the stands wearing T-shirts spelling out “impeach” and small groups of protesters outside the stadium. The South’s religio-social pastime again ruled the day.

Anyway, Trump left the game with still eight minutes to play. Not only did he miss three more touchdowns in LSU’s rollicking 46-41 victory, but—unlike the stir caused by Nixon a half-century earlier—Trump’s only post-game comments came in a generic tweet, offering thanks for “a great game.” Nixon wound up wading into a partisan and regional fuss by appearing in the Texas lockerroom minutes after the team’s come-from-behind 15-14 victory, wearing makeup for the television cameras and clapping victorious coach Darrell Royal on the back. With the promised “championship” plaque in hand.

The problem then was that there still were bowl games to be played and Penn State, like Texas, also finished its season unbeaten. (This was 29 years before the NCAA officially designated a single bowl to be the national championship game; prior to that, sportwriters’ and coaches’ polls christened a No. 1 team, and sometimes more than one.) Ninety thousand letters and telegrams came pouring into the White House from outraged Penn State backers. A few of the school’s alums picketed 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The White House lamely offered to produce a second plaque to acknowledge Penn State’s active 29-game winning streak, longest among the nation’s major colleges. To which Penn State coach Joe Paterno (a Republican), replied, “You tell the President to take that trophy and shove it.”

Four years later, at Penn State’s commencement ceremonies, Paterno told the gathered graduates and dignitaries, “I’d like to know how could the President know so little about Watergate in 1973 and so much about college football in 1969.”

Tricky stuff. And P.S.: Texas officials said that the Nixon plaque, which he had taken back to D.C. to be engraved immediately after the ’69 game, never was seen again. Only this year did the school’s athletic department produce a replica. Out-Nixoning Nixon?

Cain seemed so able, until…..

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At 16, Mary Cain was pulverizing decades-old school and age-group track records. She was, as this week’s headline on her New York Times video op-ed put it, “the Fastest Girl in America.”

The rest of that headline: “Until I joined Nike.”

Now 23 and long absent from the elite running scene, Cain has cited Nike’s Oregon Project, the training system of recently banned coach Alberto Salazar, as emotionally and physically abusive. His emphasis on weight loss, she said, led to low bone density that caused five broken bones. She didn’t get her period for three years and battled suicidal thoughts.

Should we have seen this coming? On Feb. 18, 2013, Cain, then a high school junior in the New York City suburban of Westchester, set high school and under-age-20 records in a single race, the women’s mile at New York’s Millrose Games. That came just three weeks after she shattered a high school mile mark that had existed for 41 years, and three weeks after she crushed a 35-year-old high school two-mile record by a disorienting 17 seconds.

There were 44 events that night in the world’s oldest and most prestigious indoor meet, mostly featuring professionals and experienced collegians, but it was the spindly 5-foot-6 Cain—including her long ponytail, she was barely more than 100 pounds—who stole the show.

She was bound for Olympic glory, already appearing fearsome on the sport’s horizon. She was still 18 months from taking her driving test, already a running prodigy. And yet, in covering that event, I was compelled to include this paragraph:

Some veteran observers and coaches worry that Cain might be experiencing a case of too-much-too-soon, as if she were trying to play the One Minute Waltz in 30 seconds. There are too many tales of promising young careers knocked out of orbit by injury, over-training, eating disorders and the complications of maturing bodies.

And here we are. In the Times op-ed, Cain said Salazar, three times New York City Marathon champion in the early 1980s and mentor of 2012 Olympic gold (Britain’s Mo Farah) and silver (American Galen Rupp) medalists at 5,000 meters, was “constantly trying to get me to lose weight.”

Known for pushing limits with his own training, Salazar last month was handed a four-year ban by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency for “multiple anti-doping rule violations” he had pressed on his athletes (though none of his charges were named or penalized). His skeleton key for opening the door to success was turning Cain into a skeleton, demanding she become “thinner and thinner and thinner,” she said. She found herself “just trying to survive.”

In 2015, two years after joining the Oregon Project, she returned home to New York and enrolled at Fordham University.

When she had burst onto the track scene as a high school junior, Cain appeared thoroughly self-assured. She recounted how, at 10, she had been a competitive swimmer who wanted to follow Michael Phelps’ watery path to the Olympics. Her event was the butterfly until a sixth-grade after-school track program hooked her and, the first time she was timed in the mile, ran a startling 5:47, an age-group performance that would leave any of track’s stopwatch-loving crowd misty-eyed and weak-kneed.

She met Salazar at the 2012 Olympic track and field trials at the University of Oregon—Salazar’s alma mater and near his Portland home—when she advanced to the 800-meter quarterfinals. She had Just turned 16. Salazar immediately arranged to coach her long-distance, from her home’s opposite coast, and quickly fashioned training specifics for her final two high school years.

One tactic was an attention to her “core strength,” recognizing the torso is the body’s center of power. Another was to have her train wearing a contraption called “ShoulderBack,” a harness to promote ideal posture.

When Cain chose to turn professional rather than run collegiately upon high school graduation, it was a decision many of the running community questioned. She enrolled at the University of Portland to be near Salazar’s training base, but insisted that “to be completely consumed by track might be a little bit out of my comfort zone.” She said she wanted to have college friends “who are less track-y.” But she also said she “totally won’t have a roommate, because I sleep in an altitude tent,” one of those newly-fashionable athletic accessories to enhance the body’s production of more red blood cells, boosting endurance.

She also said then, in the midst of posting times she never again achieved with the Oregon Project, “At this point, I just kind of roll with it. I don’t really know what to expect these next few years. And I kind of like that. I kind of like it being a little bit of a mystery. For me and for everybody.”

“The most famous marathoner of all time….”

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Rosie Ruiz died last month, but it’s possible she never will go away. Her one audacious public act more than 39 years ago—briefly hoodwinking officials and spectators into believing she had won the Boston Marathon despite having run only the last 1/26th of the race—established that her name would live in infamy.

Proof was in the prominent obituaries by all the major news outlets. All afforded Ruiz what P.T. Barnum, another celebrated hoaxer also persisting past his expiration date, declared was more important than bad publicity: They spelled her name right.

“Rosie Ruiz, the Boston Marathon winner who wasn’t,”… (Washington Post)

“Rosie Ruiz, the Boston Marathon course-cutter who was stripped of her victory….” (Associated Press)

“Rosie Ruiz, famous for cheating in the 1980 Boston Marathon…” (Sports Illustrated).

“Rosie Ruiz, whose name became synonymous with cheating…” (New York Times)

In her 66 years, she never ran a marathon. Yet Bill Rodgers, the 1980 men’s Boston champion who reigned as the world’s best practitioner of that event in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, once called Ruiz “the most famous marathoner of all time.”

Unheard of until she crossed the Boston finish line on April 21, 1980, Ruiz instantly became a household name. A punch line. In the chaos of a 4,900-runner field—448 of them women—the question wasn’t necessarily “how?”—how was a non-competitive 26-year-old able to pull off such a scam?—but “why?”

“I just don’t understand,” Rodgers said then.

These days, the male and female Boston champions each are paid $150,000 in prize money. But in 1980, all the winner got was a laurel wreath and a bowl of beef stew—a decades-old tradition in its final year before Boston’s cuisine evolved toward post-run treats such as yogurt. Not until 1986 did Boston offer prize money.

Boston being the oldest and most celebrated race of its kind, Rodgers was the rare soul who parlayed consistent dominance into a financial benefit with eponymous running gear and a Boston running store. But Ruiz, even had her surprise breakthrough been legitimate, hardly was in line for any windfall.

So why would she have risked the thoroughly predictable scorn that surfaced immediately with her vague, evasive and essentially clueless post-race comments? Fellow runners and officials were astonished—in fact, offended—by her complete lack of knowledge about training or the Boston course and an inability to summon any details about her participation.

Eyebrows were raised higher by her failure to have been spotted at any checkpoints along the way, and just how she had produced a Boston women’s record time that required averaging five-minute, 30-second miles for 26 consecutive miles when she previously had claimed her best time for a single mile was 5:30.

But she showed up at a New York press conference four days later wearing her winner’s medal and insisting she deserved it, even as a Delaware newspaper published a story by an author named Marty Craven that he had met Ruiz jogging in Central Park the previous month, and “she told me she knew this girl who cheated in the New York Marathon by taking the subway, and I started to tell her how easy it would be to cheat in Boston….I think the friend she was talking about was really her.”

In fact, it was.

Ruiz never gave up that medal. She never acknowledged her dastardly deed, and never responded to any of several invitations to run subsequent marathons. Still, with the news of Ruiz’ death, Canadian Jacqueline Gareau—the real Boston winner in 1980, her victory officially acknowledged a week after the race—told Canada’s National Post that she “forgave [Ruiz] completely. It’s not a big thing for me.”

“Why she never apologized—that belongs to her,” Gareau said. “Maybe she was not completely right in her mind. I’m just hoping she’s forgiven herself. Hoping that, on some kind of way, that she was okay.

“You know, she was part of my life.”

And, in a way, immortal.

Play now, heal (and pay) later.

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In many ways, Nick Buoniconti was a parable of the football culture. He punched above his weight—a low draft choice, theoretically too small to be a pro linebacker, but whose doggedness and toughness landed him in the Hall of Fame. He played hurt, a point of highest praise in his sport, and won two Super Bowl rings. Yet he spent the last four years of his life, before his death at 78 this week, “paying the price,” in his own words—suffering from dementia he believed resulted from more than 500,000 hits to the head during his 14-year professional career.

Yet, to the end, and even having endured the trauma of his son’s paralysis, the result of a college football injury in 1985, Buoniconti insisted that he “always loved” football. “I still do.”

During my six years of covering the NFL, the longest conversation I ever had with Buoniconti was during Super Bowl Week in 1974, when he made clear his realization—and acceptance—of the “athlete’s dilemma,” what author John Weston Parry described in his 2017 book as “sacrificing health for wealth and fame.”

It was five days before the Big Game in Houston, during a post-workout media opportunity on the Dolphins’ practice field as Buoniconti’s Miami Dolphins were preparing to face the Minnesota Vikings. Almost off-handedly, Buoniconti described the pain from three floating chips in his right elbow and how his coach, Don Shula, had just nixed surgery to fix the problem.

“It’s my elbow,” Buoniconti said. “But what can I say? Shula decided that if I had the operation before the Super Bowl, there may have been complications and I wouldn’t be ready to play this week. I’ve learned that it’s a player’s obligation to play.”

His wasn’t the only example that day of football’s split-screen image, a requirement of yeoman strength in juxtaposition to physical disarray. Among Buoniconti’s teammates, safety Jake Scott had five metal screws holding together a broken hand (but joked that the team’s biggest fear was “a lightning storm.”) Guard Bob Kuechenberg had a pin in his right shoulder, cornerback Tim Foley had a pin in his left shoulder and tight end Jim Mandich had a pin in his left hand.

None of them missed the game (won by the Dolphins for a second consecutive Super Bowl title).

Buoniconti had injured his elbow three weeks earlier and aggravated it in the conference title game the following weekend. Because he was having “trouble moving my fingers and there was radiating pain down my arm,” he said, Dolphins’ physician Herbert Virgin agreed to operate immediately.

Except: “Well, after the [conference championship] game that night,” Buoniconti said, “I dropped into King Arthur’s Place [a Miami bar/restaurant] and saw Shula there and he offered to buy me a beer. I said I couldn’t, that I had to be going. Shula asked, ‘Where?’ I said, ‘I’m going over to the hospital to get the bone chips taken out of my elbow.’ Shula said, ‘What?!’”

Shula summoned Virgin, two other physicians and Buoniconti for a consultation that, according to Buoniconti, went like this: “There were five people there and one man, Shula, decided I shouldn’t have the operation. You know, we decided. But we really didn’t. Shula will probably give me hell for saying this stuff.”

Likely, Buoniconti—a two-time all-pro—was protected from discipline over that loose-lips moment for the same reason Shula blocked his medical care: Shula needed Buoniconti in the Super Bowl.

My phone call to Virgin later that day brought the doctor’s refusal to discuss the situation. “I am under strictest orders from the coach not to discuss this unless [Shula] gives permission,” he said. Shula denied any interference. “Did Virgin say he couldn’t discuss this?” Shula said. “Well, anything that’s of a confidential nature within our team, we prefer to keep it that way.”

Virgin later called back to say he in fact had permission to explain that “it’s no big deal. Nick can’t injure himself further. If it bothers him during the game, we’ll just give him some Darvon, and that’s only glorified aspirin.” (Darvon was banned by the FDA in 2010 because of heart risks.)

There are endless examples similar to Shula’s stiff-arm response to prioritizing health over football, and Buoniconti acknowledged as much that day.

“We all know this stuff about having arthritis 20 years from now,” he said then. “But, heck, I understand that football players don’t live past 50, anyway, because of their injuries and because they tend to be overweight as soon as they finish competing. But I’m not thinking of 20 years from now. I’m thinking of Sunday.”

He was 33 at the time and he lived past 50. By 28 years. But there was a football price.

 

A long moon shadow

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I thought of Ralph Kramdem (“To the moon, Alice!”)

I thought of black and white television amid the first lunar landing’s 50th anniversary celebrations. Almost as astonishing as the technological marvel of having sent humans 238,900 miles through space to walk on Earth’s natural satellite was the realization that a half-century has elapsed since the big event.

Listen, kiddies: In 1969, there were no cell phones, laptops, digital camera, DVDs, hybrid cars. There was no email, Google, GPS, global warming. (There was no #MeToo movement, either, which helps explain how the fictional Brooklyn bus driver, Kramden, got away with regularly threatening to send his wife into orbit.)

Anyway, I was there, vicariously taking in another startling happening during that remarkable year when the Amazin’ Mets won the World Series and almost a half-million of my generation went to Woodstock, even as relentless bad news wouldn’t go away. The Vietnam War. Student protests. Chappaquiddick. The Manson family murders. Civil rights unrest.

I was 22, a couple months out of college. The operative counsel among my age group was not to trust anyone over 30. We grew our hair and wore terribly gaudy clothes. (Bellbottoms!) There was reason to wonder if the country was coming completely apart along generational and racial lines. (Hmmm.)

Still, I don’t recall being especially pessimistic about the future, and possibly the Apollo 11 story had something to do with that—an awesome development long before the word “awesome” came to be such a threadbare adjective. At the time, the equivalent hyperbolic expression—likewise so overused that it was rendered devoid of real impact—was “far out.” Except the moon landing really was far out.

I was working at the New York City offices of the United Press International wire service, mostly taking Major League baseball results by phone and re-writing game summaries. It was a Sunday. Shortly after 4:15 p.m. on July 20, the bank of teletype machines that brought in UPI dispatches began emitting alarm bells to signal major news, attracting a stampede of folks from around the building. The lunar module had landed.

At the time, though I obviously didn’t know it then, my future wife was at Newsday’s Long Island headquarters, transcribing moon musings from the newspaper’ columnists—putting her far closer than I to what several of my journalism colleagues have called the biggest story of our lifetime.

It certainly was beyond me—still is—how rocket scientists, audacious visionaries and hundreds of thousands of worker bees could fashion such a project. All the more mystifying, as I drove home from work that evening, was how the astronauts’ voices could be beamed from the moon’s surface to my car radio—but were lost as I drove from Manhattan through the Queens Midtown Tunnel. As if I suddenly were on the dark side of the moon.

I got to my rented room in time to see Neil Armstrong’s first steps around 11 p.m. On a black-and-white TV. He, and minutes later, Buzz Aldrin were alone. No Alice.

Here comes the judge in the bow tie

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There was an era when track and field officials, the guys with stopwatches—“These Are the Souls That Time Men’s Tries,” a Newsday headline once proclaimed in a delightful play on the famous Thomas Paine quote—were attired quite formally in tuxedos and bow ties.

And that comes to mind with the death of John Paul Stevens this week at 99. Stevens, of course, was widely recognized as “the Supreme Court justice in the bow tie,” and in 1992, he weighed in on the eligibility of 400-meter world record holder Butch Reynolds during the U.S. Olympic Trials.

In the greater scheme of calling balls and strikes in such weighty matters as Bush v. Gore and the Citizens United case, Stevens’ Reynolds decision likely is only recalled by my fellow sports journalists who dealt with the story at the time. But it was a significant application of individual due process as well as U.S. versus athletic jurisdiction.

At issue was whether Reynolds, who was fighting a two-year suspension for doping, not only was personally ineligible for the Trials, but whether he would violate a vague international track federation “contamination” rule. That is, by competing, he might render ineligible not only the other 31 entrants in the Trials’ 400 meters—and also the upcoming Barcelona Olympics, for which the Trials was a qualifier—but the entire 866-athlete field in all of the Trials’ events.

Reynolds arrived at the 10-day meet, which played out in New Orleans, brandishing an order from a U.S. district court that had cleared him to run, based on his ongoing argument that a positive urine sample for steroids from a 1990 meet in Monte Carlo had been mislabeled and in fact came from another athlete.

Later the same day, however—on the eve of the first of four rounds of the 400-meter competition—a circuit court granted the appeal by the U.S. track governing body, with three other 400 runners as co-defendants, barring Reynolds.

Reynolds’ representatives immediately petitioned the Supreme Court and, less than three hours before the competition was to begin the following day, Justice Stevens ordered Reynolds be allowed to run. All the other 400 competitors, excluding Reynolds’ younger brother Jeff, then voted to reject meet officials’ attempt to further delay the competition, with the possibility of formulating a Plan B—determining the 400-meter Olympic team apart from the Trials’ process.

The track federation was in a hopeless bind: As the U.S. arm of the international governing body, it was required to uphold the latter’s ban on Reynolds, even as it was bound by the Supreme Court order to let Reynolds run. (Stevens’ fellow justices had quickly concurred with his ruling, the first time the Supreme Court ever ruled on an Olympic matter involving competition.)

With the other 400-meter runners threatening to sit out the event if Reynolds (and his brother) ran, prominent U.S. track official Leroy Walker convinced Primo Nebiolo, the international federation president from Italy, to back off the “contamination” ultimatum.

In all the chaos, the five-ring Olympic logo seemed to have added a sixth—the vicious circle. Ultimately, everybody ran, with the top three finishers in the final guaranteed Olympic berths and the top six eligible for the 4×400 Olympic relay. Reynolds finished fifth.

“I guess I’m going to Barcelona,” Reynolds said. “If I’m not chosen to run on the relay, I guess I won’t run. But I’ve proved Butch Reynolds can take a blow and keep on going.”

Shortly before the Barcelona Games, his name was withdrawn from the U.S. roster. Five months later, he was awarded $27.3 million in damages by a Columbus court, citing the world-governing body for “ill will and a spirit of revenge.” But that was negated by an 1994 appeals court ruling declaring it had no jurisdiction over the Monte Carlo-based international federation. And the Supreme Court declined to intervene again.

But the justice in the bow tie had given Reynolds his shot.

Just sorta fixed my aorta

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It was as close as I’ll ever get to resembling Michael Phelps: Undergoing the complete removal of body hair, from the neck down, in preparation for a significant occurrence.

In the case of Phelps and other elite swimmers, shaving their arms, legs, backs, armpits and chests is a time-honored ritual in pursuit of the slightest edge in major international competition. The practice may be as much a psyche job as a physical benefit; former Olympic champion John Naber once explained it by recalling how comedian Steve Martin “used to say that he put a slice of baloney in his shoes before he performed to help him feel funny. Well, shaving helps you feel fast.”

Me? I was obliged to undergo a thorough depilation as an essential bit of readiness prior to open-heart surgery. The hospital orderly wielding electric clippers kept assuring me of the need to eliminate any bacteria that may cling to body hair. Anyway, since that pre-event pageantry—like a ribbon-cutting or breaking a bottle of champagne over a ship’s bow—occurred before the administration of anesthesia, it’s about all I remember about the whole process.

As my wife has noted, I emerged from the post-op fog repeatedly asking, “When are they going to do the surgery?”

By then, of course, I was hooked up to an IV drip, nasal oxygen prongs, blood-pressure cuff, bladder catheter and heart monitor, with a small plastic drainage tube protruding from my torso. And still there was some sense that the entire deal might have been a parlor trick, a sawing-the-woman-in-half illusion. I can’t say I ever was in any real pain. Some degree of post-operative discomfort and boredom, yes.

The team of surgeons—and let’s hear it for the best in modern medicine—had carved a four-inch opening in my sternum in order to fix a badly leaking aortic valve, then glued me back together, all in about three hours. For the next few days, I was fed pills of various shapes, colors and functions—some to get rid of extra fluids, some to counter dehydration, some to insure against an irregular heartbeat, some to regulate cholesterol, maybe a couple of placebos, for all I know.

I suppose that people in my age bracket, almost three-quarters of a century without having shuffled off this mortal coil, have an increasing likelihood of such adventures. Body parts start to wear out, and it had been a year-and-a-half since my primary-care doctor, during a routine physical, detected a heart murmur. That led to a visit with a cardiologist and occasional monitoring of the situation—without any lifestyle changes—until the most recent round of tests precipitated the human equivalent of a service recall.

I was informed by my surgeon that the necessary repair would be accomplished via a “minimally invasive” procedure and that there was only a one percent chance I wouldn’t make it through. Just in case, though, my wife lined up two Broadway plays and a ballet the week before surgery. The kind of things you can’t take with you.

It turned out there was no rush for such unrestricted leisure. Hours after surgery, I was walking the hospital halls. Four days after the valve job, I was sent home. Ten days on, my cardiologist said that four—maybe five—weeks hence, I could expect to resume my daily morning runs.

Meanwhile, there was a lot of paperwork involved. Too many afternoon naps. Some bad jokes about male chauvinism now that my replacement part is the valve of a pig. But, all in all, it was just another episode in the continuing saga of advanced maturity.

The hairs have grown back, by the way. But don’t worry; nobody is going to see me in a swimming pool, much less a Speedo.

Horse talk

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What if you could get a tip on this week’s Belmont Stakes straight from the horse’s mouth? Valuable inside dope of how the nags are feeling? How they think workouts have gone? Whether there might be an intimidation factor favoring an opponent?

This assumes, beyond the old saw, that horses can talk. Also, that they would want to share any personal information. A half-century of work as a sports journalist taught me that elite athletes don’t necessarily care to offer their thoughts about the big game. To inquiries regarding insight on one’s performance, a common jock’s retort often goes something like, “You saw it.”

In 2008, when Big Brown was a major sports story—winner of the Kentucky Derby and Preakness leading up to the final leg of the Triple Crown at Belmont—the satiric news source The Onion spoofed Big Brown’s “arrogant refusal to speak to reporters.”

No bon mots from him. The flip side of such silence was offered by Frank Vuono, whose 16w marketing company was handling Big Brown’s lucrative licensing deals at the time. “There is no question we attach human qualities” to fine thoroughbreds, Vuono told me—traits such as courage, intelligence, honesty and heart. And the fact the horses “don’t talk back,” he said, “makes them perfect clients” and, as an added bonus, keeps them from offending anyone.

My late Newsday colleague Bill Nack once described the “borderline mythic” treatment of 1973 Triple Crown winner Secretariat being due, in part, to the fact that he was “this gorgeous mute who came along who was totally honest; all you had to do was feed him and train him and he’d do what you asked.”

Just as humans often are granted the appellation of “hero,” based solely on the ability to hit a home run, dunk a basketball or make an unexpected game-saving play, so do four-legged winners of sporting contests tend to be somehow admired. They don’t go into burning buildings to save babies, yet they often are ascribed the qualities of goodness and determination. As if an inbred ability to run fast indicated a never-give-up valor.

One of my first racetrack assignments in the fun-and-games business resulted from my curiosity regarding the difference in training processes between human and equine racers. A horse, I was reminded then by the best thoroughbred coaches, doesn’t know a Triple Crown from an eighth pole. They can’t be coaxed to workouts based on the lure of world records or fame. They can’t be threatened with, as one trainer put it, “Look. I’m going to kick you off the team if you don’t shape up.”

Still, there’s the Mr. Ed thing, the anthropomorphization of critters, the urge to sort of put ourselves in the animals’ shoes. To suppose what they might be thinking.

A recent takeoff in the New Yorker presented this year’s Kentucky Derby in the purported words of the race’s participants. So Country House, eventually declared the winner of that controversial event, described his confusion in how “everyone was running like mad. On my back was a tiny man dressed like a bumblebee. He had a stick and he was hitting my ass. Which was weird.”

The piece obviously was done for laughs, with Long Range Toddy admitting, “I don’t love running. I think walking at a brisk pace can give you the same kind of cardio with much less stress on your body.” And War of Will making the point that “my name is Greg, not War or Will. I don’t know what that even means or why people call me that.”

Not to disparage horse sense, but the truth is that thoroughbreds—1,500 pounds of muscle and speed—have brains the size of a walnut. They run 35 miles per hour on ankles the size of human ankles, with men on their backs—not a recipe for relaxed sprinting—so it is pretty clear that what you see on the track is what you get. And don’t expect an interview process would produce any more enlightenment about the race’s turning point or strategy or horse expectations.

Maybe a neigh or a whinny. But anyone claiming more from the horse’s mouth is hearing voices. Anyway, when Maximum Security became the first Kentucky Derby winner to be disqualified for interference in the race’s 145-year history, I strongly suspect he would have had only one thing to say.

“No comment.”