Golf’s place in the Olympic club

Beyond ESPN’s “Norm:” Mizzou’s J-School pests

One aspect not addressed in “Norm,” ESPN’s spot-on new documentary of venerable University of Missouri basketball coach Norm Stewart, was Stewart’s relationship with the school’s student journalists. Understand that Mizzou, as home to the world’s first School of Journalism, churned out an unusual number of wet-behind-the-ears pests whom Stewart often accused of “disrupting my team.” Realize, too, that Stewart—devilishly clever and never above haggling to get an edge—knew how to get across his point about school loyalty to us practitioners of theoretical neutrality. Often by announcing that he was “declaring war on the local writers.”

I was a reporter for the university-run Columbia Missourian when Stewart assumed the head coaching job in 1967, and therefore embodied so much of what annoyed him about J-School. “They’re in a learning situation,” he argued to me years later, “They don’t have any knowledge about history, or any interest in it. They’re like all kids. Live for today.”

Guilty. Unlike Stewart, who hailed from the tiny farming community of Shelbyville, near Tom Sawyer’s Hannibal, and had been a two-sport star at Mizzou in the 1950s, most J-School students are virtual foreigners, drawn by J-School’s reputation and not steeped in such matters as Missouri’s established hate for neighboring Kansas. I went to high school in New Mexico, and had classmates from California, New York, Iowa, Virginia, Oklahoma, Illinois and other distant points.

It further rankled Stewart, and justifiably so, that the state’s media centers of St. Louis and Kansas City were slow to acknowledge the rapid ascent of his teams into perennial contenders in the old Big Eight Conference.

In 1982, Mizzou opened the season with 19 consecutive wins and briefly was ranked No. 1, at last in line for some national attention, but the instant it lost its first game, NBC cancelled a planned feature on the team. “I guess I ought to go out and lose five or six games so I can get on TV all the time like UCLA and Notre Dame,” was Stewart’s sarcastic reaction.

It was that February that I maneuvered a Newsday assignment to return to campus, as a ploy to to introduce our Long Island readers to “Stormin’ Norman,” who had created an image throughout the Midwest of a cantankerous soul. Regularly wrangling with officials (and sometimes fans) as he stalked the sideline, Stewart inspired opposing fans to serenade him with “Sit down, Norm!” chants.

Yet, up close, Stewart could be as charming as he was caustic, with an open, sly sense of humor, a crooked smile and tales to tell.

When I visited in ’82, Mizzou was days from a nationally televised match-up of Top 10 teams at Georgetown, which was riding the all-encompassing skills of freshman giant Patrick Ewing. Stewart sat in his office, grinning mischievously, and gilded his reputation as an agitator by relating how he once spliced together a film of what he considered the worst officials’ calls and shipped it to the Big Eight office. He told of a Notre Dame fan who had been badgering him, and how he considered mailing the man a rosary and a snuffed-out candle with the note, “You have caused me to lose my Faith.”

That evening, after Mizzou’s game against Iowa State, Stewart invited me to his home to continue the conversation. He addressed his occasionally brusque coaching techniques and manic attention to defense with self-deprecation: “Players sometimes say, ‘Coach, how do you stop that [offensive move].’ I say, ‘As coaches, we don’t do that. We just identify problems.’”

He spoke fondly of his high school coach in Shelbyville, C.J. Kessler, who originally made a name for himself in basketball-mad Indiana but, as Stewart told it, happened to marry a Shelbyville girl and, when Kessler came to visit the in-laws, “some of the local boys took him out for golf and possibly drinks, and the next morning he wakes up as superintendent of schools and basketball coach. And his wife as the school’s English teacher.”

It was about then I felt the time ripe for a little good-natured J-School revenge, recalling that Mizzou’s coaching job had become open, following the 1966-67 season, not long after I had scrutinized the failures of Bob Vanatta in a column for our student newspaper, The Maneater.

Vanatta’s team had lost 43 of 49 games the previous two seasons. Might I, a smart-aleck sophomore possibly abusing the power of the pen, have hastened Vanatta’s departure—and therefore Stewart’s shot at the job that came to shape his legacy? (He stayed for 32 seasons, won 634 games and eight conference titles and appeared in 22 post-season tournaments. He also survived colon cancer and founded the Coaches vs. Cancer organization that has raised more than $87 million since 1993. All of that is in the “Norm” documentary.)

I don’t recall Stewart’s reaction, although the hurling of rotten tomatoes would not have been out of line. I fully suspect he grasped the jest factor.

And here’s the irony:

In the spring of 1969, months short of graduation, I had arranged to interview Stewart about his landing of prize 6-foot-7 recruit John Brown, the future second-team All-American and eight-year NBA veteran. Stewart was in the hospital receiving treatment for a bad back, but invited me to his bedside to detail the lengthy process of romancing Brown and keeping him away from the likes of despised Kansas U.

That drawn-out struggle, the neighborhood rivalry, the name of the lad whose physical presence was being fought over, put me in mind of Stephen Vincent Benet’s epic 1928 poem, “John Brown’s Body,” about the radical abolitionist in Civil War days.

(John Brown’s body in motion)

It was a cheesy premise for a column, but a visit to the university library unearthed lines in the poem that spoke to Mizzou’s basketball situation, of gaining a real edge on the bitter adversary across the state line only two years into Stewart’s tenure:

The papers praise, but the recruiting is slow,

The bonds sell badly, the grind of the war goes on—

And:

Go down, John Brown,

Go down, John Brown, and set that people free!

And:

Kansas, bleeding Kansas,

I hear her in her pain.

The vice president of the United Press International wire service happened to be in town for Mizzou’s annual Journalism Week and saw the John Brown column. He offered me a position in UPI’s sports department in New York City.

So it was Stewart who generated the opportunity to get me a job.

P.S. In 2008, when Missouri’s J-School celebrated its Centennial with three days of forums and exhibits, Stewart was in the audience for a panel discussion on the ethics and future of sports journalism. It was good to see him. The war was over a long time ago.

Olympic idealism, Olympic optimism

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For the 1988 Seoul Olympics flame relay, the torch-bearer outfit was just a bit dorky, what with the white headband and white gloves. Nevertheless, I highly recommend the occasion for its use.

Likewise, I heartily endorse the relay’s traditional starting point in ancient Olympia, site of the original Olympic competition in 776 B.C. As the relay commenced its latest iteration days ago, leading to the Rio de Janeiro Games in August, it was an agreeable reminder of how reporting assignments for Newsday—and serendipity—afforded me entrée into those rare spaces.

Among the lessons in covering 11 Olympics was how the torch relay, among the semi-religious rituals of the Games, can sometimes seem hopelessly idealistic, almost simple-minded. As sure as there is universal brotherhood and care-free escape from real-world problems, there also is jingoism and political agendas, rampant commercialism and too-frequent doping.

The torch relay, in fact, has its roots in Adolph Hitler’s malicious Aryan supremacy scheme; it was he who cooked up the idea of marching the Olympic fire publicly through other nations toward the 1936 Berlin Games as a propaganda tool. Subsequent Olympic organizers were not above shooing various protesters or the homeless away from the relay’s path for the best possible reflection of themselves. Still, it is difficult to hold a candle to the Olympic flame’s optimism, how it has come to stand for international sport as an instrument of peace and righteousness.

As for the Games’ initial playing field—250 miles from Athens, where a cook named Coroibos raced and won the first Olympic event 2,792 years ago—I discovered during the 2004 Olympics that the place isn’t much more than a clearing surrounded by hills covered with olive, cypress, pine and eucalyptus trees.

The ancient “stadium”—from the Greek “stadion,” which is a “place to stand”—consists simply of a grassy berm around a rectangular, hard-clay field, 210 yards long and roughly 40 yards wide. There is not so much to see there as there is to feel, ghosts and whispers through 85 generations.

There remains a stone arch at the field’s edge, through which the ancient Olympians passed from the Sanctuary of Olympia, location of the Temple of Zeus that was one of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World. What’s left of the temple resembles picnic grounds at a state park. Except, instead of tables and barbeque pits, there are a few classic ruins.

So it is the whiff of infinity that gives Olympia and the torch relay their weight, and therefore does wonders for cutting through any cynicism. When organizers of the Athens Olympics chose to set the 2004 Games’ shot put competition at Olympia, the clash of the ancient and the modern was obvious enough: While electronic scoreboards, public address announcements, sponsorship signage, concessions and other 21^st Century trappings were kept completely out of sight, there was no avoiding the small crowd of reporters and photographers—myself among them—sitting in shady spots on the berm, working on our laptop computers.

The experience of Being There was as memorable as running a one-kilometer leg (not quite three quarters of a mile) of the 1988 torch relay and feeling a bit like Prometheus, delivering the gift of fire. Or Pheidippides, carrying the news of victory at Marathon.

It was my dumb luck that one of the major international sponsors of those Games employed a New York public relations executive who worked closely with my sports editor, Dick Sandler, and was among the relay planners seeking to include an Everyman or two among the 1,539 Olympic champions and celebrities to bear the torch through South Korea, from the southeastern border city of Pusan to Seoul, over 21 days.

My assigned kilometer, two days before the Opening Ceremonies, was in the western port city of Inchon on Sept. 15—a place and date freighted with relevant history. It was in Inchon, precisely 38 years before, that Gen. Douglas MacArthur led a landing of allied troops that split the invading Communist enemy, considered a crucial turning point in the Korean War.

Photographer Don Norkett, among my Newsday colleagues covering the Seoul Games, had fought in that war and recalled how the Korean peninsula was turned in a moonscape of tree stumps and rubble in the early 1950s—a dramatic contrast to the bustling, giddy days of the 1988 Olympics.

To be a torch runner at those Games was a passport to acceptance by complete strangers, halfway around the world. Awaiting my turn to tote the flame, I had local mothers put their babies in my arms to snap pictures. Older women bowed and said annyong haseyo—hello. City officials in blue business suits appeared with handshakes, while a procession of musicians, banging drums and cymbals and wearing headdresses and robes, offered their nong ak, an ancient music of the rice paddy workers after a long day in the fields. I had learned approximately five phrases in Korean, yet was graciously informed at one point that I had “a good Korean accent.”

(Highly unlikely.) But, wow. Thank you. Gamsahamnida.

The spectators along the torch route formed a corridor of glee, shouting through laughter, waving, holding aloft little Korean flags, apparently unable to stop themselves from ear-to-ear smiling. There also was a handful of crew-cut Anglo-Saxons who, when asked if they were American GIs, replied good naturedly (typically), “Who wants to know?”

I should skip the embarrassing part, of having tripped on one of those small reflectors in the middle of the road during my relay leg. The resulting scuffed knee prompted Time Magazine’s Tom Callahan, in his account of the pre-Olympic celebrations, to slyly note that I finished my run “covered in mercurochrome.”

But the torch was kept aloft as I immediately scrambled to my feet and continued on, handing off to a Mrs. Cho Suk Jae of Inchon for the next kilometer. The flame did not go out.

Since then, as before, the Olympics has experienced its brushes with imperfection, scandal and violence. This summer, for Brazil’s turn hosting the festival, potential trouble already is lurking, given that nation’s economic, health and political crises. Beyond the shrinking Gross National Product and Olympic cost overruns that could reach $17 billion, there is the alarming Zika virus and the impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff.

Given all that, as Callahan wrote at the end of the ’88 Games, “exalting the athletes…is tricky. It requires an ability to squint a little and forget a lot, to gild a lot.”

Nevertheless, I remain loyal to the Olympic model, the possibilities of goodwill through global sport. In the ancient Games, women were not allowed, yet at Olympia in 2004, both the men’s and women’s shot put were contested, and the women went first.

Very first, at the 8:30 a.m. qualifying round that day, was Californian Kristin Heaston. She didn’t do well enough to advance to the afternoon finals. But she said, “I’ll have this forever. It’s pretty cool. Pretty cool.”

Pretty cool, indeed. Pass it on.

A baseball habit without rhyme or reason

Tales of a perennial Scrabble runner-up

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2014 was a good year. My best year, really, since Donna and I first locked horns over a Scrabble board in the late fall of 1972. Of the 54 games we contested in 2014, I won 29. That, despite her having pulled off a single-move score of 80 points on Jan. 1, when I somehow recovered to take the game, 317-263.

In July of that year, she hit me with a 74 haymaker on one move and won by 117 points and, three months later, KOed me by scoring 43 and 92 points on her last two turns to finish ahead by 157. Still, I bounced back from that devastation to win three straight in October, then went on a rare four-game tear in November. Early 2015 was encouraging as well, when I swept three games during a February vacation (contested on a new Travel Scrabble set in Florida, where we trained for those evening showdowns with long walks and bike rides during the day).

Understand that, as a professional journalist for all of my adult life—a wordsmith, theoretically—I should excel at a game like Scrabble. Even against a woman with more brains, a Phi Beta Kappa key and multiple degrees in higher education, I should be a contender. At least.

Alas, the documentation of our ongoing competition says otherwise. Currently—though I am not conceding the lifetime trophy just yet—Donna leads, 409 games to 317. With two ties. Just last week, her opening move was a 74-pointer—“bottles”—en route to her 364-233 romp. She leads in 2016, 6-3.

You could say that my play honors the game’s title—“Scrabble” means “to scrape, scratch, scramble, dig, claw, paw, clamber.” Which I certainly do. More than Alfred Mosher Butts could have known in creating this sport in 1938, when he was an unemployed architect living in Jackson Heights, N.Y., in the New York City borough of Queens.

My struggles are clear in the historic record of spousal conflict, tucked inside our 44-year-old Scrabble box. That collection of scoresheets reveals that Donna administered her most sound beating on Nov. 21, 2008, winning by 166 points (360-194), when she put up an 83 in one turn by using all seven letters for a linked “bridge(s)loop.” That was just five months after she hit her all-time game high of 384 points (to my 241), boosted by a 76-point whopper crafted in tacking “nettles” onto the end of “grabs”—and using a triple-word-score square in the process.

On Feb. 19, 1997, her best-ever single-turn total of 134—marshaling her seven letters around a “c” for “va(c)ation” late in the match—turned my 93-point lead into a 41-point deficit and produced yet another demoralizing defeat.

With no disrespect, I briefly considered whether she might have been using a performance-enhancing substance. About the time of a 2013 study by British psychologists at Cardiff University, concluding that chewing gum can improve concentration in visual memory tasks, I noticed that Donna often chewed gum—two sticks, sometimes—during our Scrabble bouts.

More likely, she has continued to hone her word-forming skills by playing the perfectly legal computer puzzle Bookworm (while I waste time checking sports scores).

I am under no illusions of someday approaching the 830 points scored in a 2006 Scrabble game by a carpenter named Michael Cresta, reportedly achieved in the basement of a Unitarian church in Lexington, Mass., while his opponent—supermarket deli counter worker Wayne Yorra—scored 490 to give the two a one-game record total of 1,320. Cresta also set the one-turn mark of 365 points with “quixotry.” (I had to look up the meaning: visionary schemes.)

Visionary, indeed. I did manage an all-time best game of 401 on March 23, 2012, when I twice emptied my rack of seven letters on single turns. But in perusing the chronology of our ongoing Scrabble odyssey, I was distressed to realize, only now, that my one-turn scoring zenith—a 110!, using all seven letters arranged around a triple-score square—in fact was a misspelled word. (“Aquaint”!?! Without a “c”? Got to be kiding!)

That was in 2009. If it ever comes up, with me already 92 games behind, I’m going to cite the statute of limitations. And hang on to that precious victory.

Time out for NCAA mascots

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This is a pet peeve. Why is it that televised coverage of March Madness, which the NCAA insists is amateur sport contested by “student-athletes” motivated purely by devotion to Dear Old Alma Mater, skips the college atmospherics?

Instead of grave, ad nauseam dissection of strategy amid pauses in the action not already taken up with commercials—all that redundant hoops talk-talk-talk—how come we don’t get to eavesdrop on the occasional school fight song? Or catch a glimpse of some mascot high jinx?

During an early-round game in Memphis a couple of years ago, TV missed UCLA’s Joe Bruin acknowledging the geographic proximity to Graceland by donning dark glasses, scarf and white jump suit and hoofing to Elvis music. Can’t help falling in love with that.

Instead of official canned “CBS College Basketball Theme” music going in and out of advertising breaks at this weekend’s Final Four, why not linger briefly on the Oklahoma band pounding out a few bars of “Boomer Sooner”? (The music is a rip-off of Yale’s “Boola Boola,” but any fight song does a better job of placing the viewer on the scene than generic network tunes.)

What mostly separates the Big Dance from just another NBA production are the pep bands and anthropomorphically costumed wildcats and ducks and shocks of wheat—partners in high times for the schools and their most involved followers, the students and alumni.

Not so long ago, I found an interview of Iowa’s Herky the Hawk during a March Madness timeout every bit as stimulating as listening the coaches and players ponder tactics and who’s No. 1. Since birds don’t talk, Herky’s end of the conversation consisted of charades….

Me: How tall are you?

Herky: (Tapping a finger six times into his other palm, pausing, then tapping four times) 6-foot-4.

Me: What year in school?

Herky: (Tapping twice). Sophomore.

Me: Your major?

Herky: (Rubbing his thumb against two fingers). Business.

When lightly regarded Stephen F. Austin shocked West Virginia in this year’s first round, then gave Notre Dame a serious scare, the folks on the “electric teevee machine”—as my friend Charlie Pierce calls it—raved about the gritty, unemotional play of SFA senior Thomas Walkup. What never was mentioned was how Walkup, a muscular lad with a wilderness beard, was doppelganger to the school’s lumberjack mascot. (Newsday’s Laura Albanese noticed, and posted the Tweet below.)

West Virginia, by the way, joins Stephen F. Austin as one of the few colleges whose mascot appears in human form (also bearded) with its Mountaineer. Which is fine, though not as much a conversation piece as St. Joseph’s University’s student-inside-an-eagle suit, who tirelessly flaps his wings throughout games. Or Syracuse’s student-inside-a-giant-orange.

We all know the tournament has no real relationship to higher education. The NCAA’s current 14-year March Madness television-rights deal is worth $10.8 billion. A single conference, the ACC, already was guaranteed $30 million based on advancing six teams into this year’s Sweet Sixteen. The most successful coaches regularly are the highest-paid employees at their colleges. One of this year’s semifinals features two teams—North Carolina vs. Syracuse—shaking off the effects of recent academic fraud.

By stripping away the peripheral ambiance—which, I submit, is a saving grace for an otherwise cynical and hypocritical operation—television’s treatment of the event further amplifies the serious-business aspect. At least give me a hint of campus life with the periodic fight song. And a student in a wacky critter suit.

(Mizzou’s Truman, left, and me)

Upsets are the madness in March

March Madness…and Stony Brook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen Kaplan

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

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

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

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

Cuba and golf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whatever happened to peace and brotherhood?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Jeansonne

Newsday sportswriter emeritus/Hofstra University journalism adjunct

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