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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leap Day and the Fosbury jump that was no flop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(cell phone, circa 2000)

(tv remote)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somos el Mundo, an Olympic preliminary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hasta nunca. I hope never to see you again.

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

How to fix the fix in tennis?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discovering the Olympic world

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

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

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

(Gene Jeansonne, right)

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

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

But he lived.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Olympics as a classroom

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

“Kibitz,” Jake offered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I still have my Catalan flag.

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

Rams’ move follows the money

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Word that the Rams will return to Los Angeles has me temporarily unstuck in time and briefly suspended from cynicism.

November 2, 1958. My 12^th birthday. The substantial gift from my father was to accompany him, no sports fan but a steadfast parent, to the Los Angeles Coliseum to attend my first NFL game, between the Rams and Chicago Bears.

To a sixth-grader, this was a magnificent thing, and the occasion began to take on enormous heft when my father and I found ourselves stranded, moments before kickoff, on the 110 Freeway as we approached the stadium exit. There were 100,470 souls about to squeeze into the substantially roomy Coliseum, one of the grand American sporting venues. The Rams were 2-3 at the time, the Bears 4-1, yet that crowd remains the second-largest in the history of the franchise—founded in 1936 in Cleveland before spending 49 seasons in L.A. and the last 21 in St. Louis.

What ensued that afternoon was a wild 41-35 Rams’ victory and an audacious one-man performance by the Rams’ 5-foot-11 running back Jon Arnett, whose weaving, breathtaking journeys across the floor of the Coliseum—repeatedly leaving Bears defenders grasping at air—accounted for 298 yards. Arnett ran 72 yards with a screen pass; returned a punt 36 yards through traffic; brought back another punt 24 yards and another 58 yards; launched runs from scrimmage of 52 and 38 yards.

Back then, before there was video, the Los Angeles Times regularly published a series of birds-eye photos of consequential plays, employing little dots to illustrate the progression of a ball carrier’s trek downfield. It’s possible that those day-after newspaper recreations of Arnett’s forays were a factor in propelling me toward an interest in sports journalism.

Anyway. My family left L.A. in 1962—not for a bigger stadium, corporate suites or naming rights—so my geographical distance accelerated the natural process of outgrowing a young lad’s starry-eyed fandom. But as a sports reporter for almost a half-century, I crossed paths with the Rams several times before they left California in 1995; in fact, I interviewed their relentlessly hands-on owner, Carroll Rosenbloom, just months before he died in 1979.

And what I learned then has echoed through the years: Fabulously wealthy team owners regularly threaten to move as a ploy to wangle political support for more palatial stadiums, better financial breaks from the local authorities and the helpless taxpayers.

Rosenbloom had owned the Colts in 1971 when they won the Super Bowl, but he became unhappy with the stadium deal in Baltimore and made a franchise-for-franchise trade with then-Rams owner Robert Irsay the next year. By 1979, the season the Rams at last qualified for the Super Bowl in their sixth consecutive trip to the playoffs, Rosenbloom had arranged for the team to play in nearby Anaheim the next season, complaining about the 77-year-old L.A. Coliseum’s amenities—“Even in the press box, I can’t get to a toilet without walking for seven minutes. I take an empty tennis ball can with me so I can take a leak without missing seven minutes of the game.”

What prompted Rosenbloom’s widow, Georgia, to pack the Rams off to St. Louis in 1995 was her failure to get a new stadium arrangement in L.A. (NFL owners attempted to block the move but Georgia Frontiere, by then married for a sixth time, prevailed by threatening to sue.)

She died in 2008 and Stan Kroenke, the Missouri native who had helped her manipulate the transfer to St. Louis, went from minority to majority ownership. And now it is Kroenke, who married into the massive wealth of the Walmart Waltons, who has burned a bridge with the St. Louis community in search of greater riches in L.A.

In his application to the league requesting the move, he declared a new St. Louis stadium proposal would put him “on the road to financial ruin.” And on the road to Southern California, because “home,” to these people, is where the money is.

Fans, the folks so emotionally (as well as monetarily) involved in all this, naturally have no power in such decisions, as a recent New Yorker magazine spoof by satirist Andy Borowitz reminded:

Two days after their team completed a losing season for the 15^th time in 17 years, a consortium of Cleveland Browns fans has formally applied to relocate the NFL franchise to Los Angeles. Unlike other teams vying to move to L.A….the Browns’ application is believed to be the only one submitted entirely by fans.

According to Butch Rydzewski, the Browns fan who is masterminding the relocation effort, Los Angeles is the ideal destination for the team “because it is two thousand miles away and someplace most of us have no intention of ever visiting.”

Meanwhile, awaiting the construction of the gold-digging Kroenke’s luxurious new stadium in Inglewood (which is a “suburb” essentially surrounded by the sprawling Los Angeles city limits), the Rams will play next season in the venerable Coliseum.

That, to my 12-year-old self—oblivious to the robber-baron bent of professional sports fat cats—is where they belong.

Why the Al Jazeera report on doping is not shocking

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This is not meant to cast aspersions on Peyton Manning or any of the other prominent athletes implicated for obtaining banned performance-enhancing substances in the recent Al Jazeera report. (Those named all denied the allegations, and two have filed defamation suits.) And this certainly isn’t intended to condone doping in sports.

But a matter-of-fact reaction to the Al Jazeera piece is to recall a 40-year-old declaration by two-time Olympic weightlifter Mark Cameron. It was around 1976 when Cameron suggested that if his fellow competitors were told that eating scouring pads would make them stronger, there would not be a clean pot within miles of the gym.

About that time, on an assignment to cover the U.S. Olympic track and field trials, I was so bombarded with heavy hints of widespread doping that I began to wonder if it was possible for anyone to qualify for the Olympics without a prescription. In the weight events, particularly, American athletes were claiming that virtually all of the top international competitors were engaging in prohibited chemical activity. And so they must as well. Discus thrower Jay Silvester, who had won a silver medal in the previous Games, estimated that “99 to 100 percent of the world-class weightmen use steroids.”

When asked directly if he was in that category, Silvester said, “No comment.” The discus winner at those trials, Mac Wilkins, responded to the same question with this wink-and-nod quote: “Aren’t steroids supposedly illegal?”

Some things are a mystery, but some things are abundantly clear. Irrefutable evidence of doping violations is difficult to pin down, but elite athletes have been seeking an edge—by almost any means—forever. And it has only been during the current century, when the high-profile sports of baseball and football finally began to take serious anti-doping measures, that real penalties—and therefore a stigma—were attached to juicing.

Long before Major League Baseball or the NFL paid attention to this stuff, the U.S. Olympic Committee hired its first drug-control chief, Dr. Robert Voy, recognizing in the early 1980s a need for aggressive testing. The first major drug busts in sports were at the Pan American Games of 1983, in Caracas, and 1987, in Indianapolis, and it was then that Voy said significant anti-doping progress only would commence “if the NFL would go back to fielding 235-pound linemen, instead of 285-pounders; if the NFL would face the steroid problem; if Division I college football would wipe out steroid use, which they could do for the same money they spend on tape.”

Now, 30 years later, New York Times columnist Michael Powell has made the same point in his sober reaction to the Al Jazeera undercover documentary naming Manning (among others)—that the “shock would be to discover that more than a few men in this morally compromised sport are completely clean. In the last two decades, the weight of NFL linemen has jumped by 50, 60, 70 pounds, and men the size of linebackers play wide receiver.”

Powell quoted University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke’s observation that “football and doping kind of go hand-in-hand.”

This is not the kind of information the typical sports fan—or the typical sports journalist—much cares to think about, and that has enabled sports authorities to mostly look the other way, especially since theirs is an endeavor in which “doing anything to win” is a maxim.

These days, at least, we have tentatively accepted that the first step in resolving the doping issue is to acknowledge the extent of the problem. So that stars fingered by Al Jazeera, as in the the BALCO and Biogenesis scandals, are inclined toward passionate repudiation—instead of instructive parables about scouring pads and clean pots.

The Olympics: My window on the world

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If I were writing a book on my experiences covering 11 Olympic Games (which I so far only have threatened to do), here is where I would start…..

Tonya and Nancy already had hijacked the Lillehammer Olympics by the time citizens of the world arrived in Norway in February 1994. There already had been weeks of legal scrimmages and news-conference scrums leading up to the Games, feeding the public’s compulsive appetite for sordid, sensational theatre.

Every day was a headline: The bodyguard squealed. The hit man confessed. Tonya Harding denied everything. OK, Harding knew—but only after the fact—of the Olympic Trials plot against figure-skating rival Nancy Kerrigan. Harding’s ex-husband ratted on her.

It was a paperback novel. A game of Clue. (It was the bodybuilder. With a telescoping baton. In the practice rink.) The story had operatic heft, daytime TV melodrama, something to offer to crime sleuths and voyeurs alike as it veered from serious to silly. It was an episode that simultaneously brought unprecedented attention to the Olympics even as it revealed the underbelly of ferocious competition—and didn’t necessarily show media coverage at its best.

So, we should talk about that.

Meanwhile, though: Consider the Olympic big picture, this wonderful mess of contrasts, this incongruous pageant of crass commercialism, uplifting personal triumph, clashing politics, inspirational brotherhood, divergent cultures and international confusion—all balled up into this wacky theme park consisting of mostly odd sports.

And just plain adventure.

Two days before the Lillehammer Opening Ceremonies, I and a couple of fellow ink-stained wretches visited an army-green tepee positioned on the edge of frozen Lake Mjosa—down the hill from the center of Lillehammer—to sit cross-legged on reindeer rugs around a cozy fire for a chat with four Sami women.

The Sami—don’t call them “Lapps,” the politically incorrect term Norwegians often used that translates to “outcasts”—had created a campsite to position themselves in the Olympic spotlight and depict the traditional life of their people, nomadic reindeer herders from the northern-most edges of Norway, Sweden and Finland.

Gunhild Sara Buljo, marveling a bit at temperatures (8 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit) far warmer than at her home near the North Pole, was wearing a multicolored, hood-like gohpin on her head and a ruffled, pleated knee-length gakti dress of blacks and reds. She resembled a square dancer from somewhere in the American Midwest. Ellen Eira Rasoal sat next to her, stirring the contents of three large black pots. “Reindeer meat, coffee and”—Rasoal smiled—“toddy.”

Another Real Olympic Experience. Through the intensity and drama of grand sporting competitions and global ambiance, the Olympics never fails to provide what Times of London columnist Simon Barnes once described as “an unfailing source of fabulousness” with “an incandescent vividness….”

So true. Beyond the competitive landscape are the lessons. Geographical, historical, cultural, political, lingual. Culinary.

In Seoul (1988), I learned that eating kimchi can clear your sinuses, whether you want them cleared or not. In Barcelona (1992), I discovered a daily timetable that takes some getting used to—the locals take their afternoon siestas, don’t eat dinner until around 10 p.m., regularly lounge at outdoor shops drinking coffee or stronger beverages until 2 or 3 a.m. In Nagano (1998), a handful of us found the small tunnel near the Olympic complex where government, military leaders and Emperor Hirohito were to have been sheltered late in World War II in the event of the ground war which never came.

In Sydney (2000), I was repeatedly informed by laid-back native Aussies that there are “no worries.” In Athens (2004), I was constantly reminded that a walk along Aristotle Street or Socrates Street did not cause one to be philosophical so much as practical: Red lights did not necessarily apply along the buzzing, narrow roadways. And motor scooters were known to pull onto sidewalks among the pedestrians.

In Lillehammer—while editors were terrorized into insisting that “we must keep this Tonya and Nancy story alive,” dispatching four times the manpower necessary to detail every sniffle and frown on display in figure-skating practice sessions—I learned about the Sami’s indigenous tonal chant, the Yoik; about how most modern Sami lived in log cabins rather than tepees; about how each Sami family in the far North kept its own flock of reindeer. For food, for entertainment (they raced them), for clothing and rugs.

I also learned about trolls.

Everywhere were statues of trolls, some only four inches tall, others as high as a grown human’s chest. It was possible to buy a Troll Certificate, which proclaimed: “This is to Certify That (insert your name here) has visited Norway, the Kingdom of the Trolls, and today became a member of the Friends of the Trolls.” It had a very official Friends-of-the-Trolls seal in the lower right-hand corner.

There were troll restaurants, a Troll Garden Hotel, an entire Troll Park in Lillehammer’s Gudbrandsdalen Valley, a “world’s largest troll sculpture”—45 feet high, weighing 70 tons and looking like a furry takeoff on Rodin’s “The Thinker”—in nearby Hunderfossen. And whole sections of troll literature in Norwegian bookstores.

I was told by Kjerstin Hansen, who worked for the Ministry of Family and Children in Oslo, that trolls “are quite dumb. Most of the stories about trolls have something to do with a princess being taken away by a troll, then someone rescues the princess, and the troll doesn’t even understand what happened.”

Trolls, the natives related, can be fooled into benign dancing to the music of famous Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, and often can be talked out of potential trouble by little children. Yet my search for a real, live troll did not go well.

“Maybe you are looking in the wrong places,” one Lillehammer resident said.

“You should look up there, in those mountains above the Olympic ski jump,” an Olympic volunteer suggested. “But you must go at night. And you must not bring a flashlight or torch. Trolls don’t like light.”

At the Olympic information desk, it was recommended that “you need to have a lot of fantasy” to find a troll. “And aquavit,” which is a strong alcoholic drink made from potato and caraway. “The homemade stuff is the best,” I was assured.

But then, in the end—without benefit of flashlight or liquor—I became convinced that I had found this American troll, set loose in Norway to bring a cloud of confusion to everyone and everything. Tonya Harding.

The conclusion of that eerie Tonya and Nancy tale came in Hamar, the satellite Olympic city an hour’s drive south of Lillehammer where the figure skating competition played out in a smallish arena that seated 6,000 people and was crawling with media. Even though most Norwegians preferred to follow the biathlon—a combination of cross-country skiing and shooting.

The women’s long-program skating final was on February 25, 1994—50 days after the bizarre attack on Harding’s rival, Kerrigan, during a practice session at the U.S. Olympic skating trials in Detroit. (I should have known something unpleasant was afoot in the Motor City that week; there was no hot water in my Detroit hotel shower.)

The Harding-Kerrigan dirty-tricks story brought an invasion of high-profile television celebrities such as Connie Chung and big-name columnists, dispatched to Norway in anticipation of possible mayhem—parachuting into what they believed would be a gold-medal showdown between the two U.S. rivals. Teams of reporters were ordered to synchronize their watches to Tonya Standard Time and pay her full attention—even during the first week of the Olympics, before Harding had arrived in Norway.

What added to the whole Twilight Zone tension, of course, were the backgrounds of Harding and Kerrigan. One, Harding, a hardscrabble Oregon lass, a smoker (though Harding lied about that) proud of her blue-collar skills as drag-racer and mechanic, street-wise and tough. The other, Kerrigan, a more traditionally elegant practitioner of the event and highly sought for endorsements—a sort of Cinderella, whose father was a welder on disability, her mother legally blind.

Of course, when Harding arrived in Norway, out of shape and moody, the weirdness factor only multiplied. My newspaper, Long Island’s Newsday, became so caught up in the anticipation of physical danger that it photo-shopped a front-page picture of Harding and Kerrigan virtually side-by-side in practice to suggest an on-ice confrontation.

So, OK, the what-bleeds-leads tabloid types got part of what they wanted. During practice between the skating short and long programs, there was a bizarre training-session crash: Another Tonya—Tanja Szewczenko of Germany—collided with Oksana Baiul, the 16-year-old orphan from Ukraine and eventual gold medalist, who suffered a cut on her leg, requiring stitches, and a strained back.

And that wasn’t all. The next morning’s warmup session for the gold-medal final featured a double-dare incident, wherein two-time champion Katarina Witt shouted down France’s Surya Bonaly after a slight fender-bender resulting from Bonaly’s intimidating drive-bys while the top competitors shared the rink.

Throughout this melodrama, what most news organizations missed was how the singular Tonya-Nancy story was thoroughly tangled in the stereotype of women in sports. No other Olympic sport—no other sport, period—is as committed to presenting women in the “traditional” sense of beauty and effortless grace as figure skating is.

Furthermore, “traditional” values of commoner (Harding) and princess (Kerrigan)—though only partially based in fact—fueled a theater aspect that served to keep women’s figure skating on the fringe of “real” sports, thereby furthering a marginalization of women athletes.

There was a goodly amount of irony to that. The Lillehammer Olympics were staged in a nation theoretically ideal for promoting women’s sports, in that Norway is a country of the vigorous outdoors and Norwegians of both sexes, from the time they are 3 or 4 years old, are introduced to cross-country skiing and camping in the frozen woods.

At the time of those Olympics, both Norway’s prime minister (Gro Harlem Brundtland) and president of its parliament (Kristi Kolle Grondahl) were women, as is Norway’s current prime minister (Erna Solberg). Plus, of course, Norway’s queen, Sonja.

Yet in Norway’s push to win medals during those ’94 Olympics, almost all of the 230 million Norwegian kroner (about $33 million U.S. at the time) poured into its sports federations was going into men’s sports. And, after all, when that male chauvinist French Baron Pierre de Coubertin founded the Modern Olympics in 1896, he declared the Games to be “the solemn periodic manifestation of male sport based on internationalism, on loyalty as a means, on arts as a background and the applause of women as a recompense.” He fought against the inclusion of female athletes in his Games.

So there we were in that winter wonderland, most of us ordered by editors to take the daily bus ride from our housing in small accommodations near Lillehammer, down to Hamar, to witness another dull skating workout and the fairly embarrassing effort of hundreds of reporters to get Harding or Kerrigan, or anyone else, to say something interesting or informative about the upcoming competition. (I did borrow a colleague’s rental car one day for the short trip, and was treated, as I drove, to live play-by-play of the men’s downhill on the radio. In Norwegian. There was great excitement in the broadcaster’s call, though I was helpless, with my uneducated American ear, to understand any of the description. It just sounded like, “Babada babada babada babada Tommy Moe! Babada babada babada Tommy Moe! Tommy Moe! Tommy Moe!” At least I was not surprised to learn, a bit later, that American Tommy Moe had turned in a terrific run. And won.)

Understand that editors who wouldn’t know an Axel from an 18-wheeler expected a buildup to a sort of Ali vs. Frazier fight of the century. There were legitimate aspects to the nutty episode, of course, with Harding threatening to sue the U.S. Olympic Committee if she were prevented from competing, and the USOC lawyering up to insure against future embarrassment of this kind. But veteran Olympic observers long before came to the conclusion that Harding was completely off her game. Kerrigan’s physical recovery from the attack by Harding’s henchmen was a story. Harding’s competitive possibilities were nonexistent.

She had been runner-up in the 1991 world championships, part of the American sweep with winner Kristi Yamaguchi and third-place Kerrigan, but by the time she got to Norway, she was no threat to medal, really nothing more than a sideshow. She eventually finished a badly beaten eighth.

It was Kerrigan who took the lead in the skating short program and who performed the competitive routine of her life in the decisive long program, only to lose a narrow 5-4 judges’ vote—strictly along Eastern bloc-Western partisan lines—to Baiul.

Not quite three years later Baiul, having relocated to Connecticut to further a professional skating career, was arrested for driving drunk at 97 miles per hour in a 45-mph zone in suburban Hartford. Not Harding’s fault. But during and after the Lillehammer Olympics, an over-the-top chaos seemed to emanate from the Harding stakeout.

In the end, it was as if Typhoid Tonya had cast her evil spell on the entire proceedings. And the whole life-imitating-art-imitating-life extremes became—and remain—deeply ingrained in the popular culture.

Louden Wainwright III wrote a song, “Tonya Twirls:”

You knew she was in trouble/ When you saw her bodyguard.

When you saw those two together/ You knew it wasn’t hard

To see that she was different,/ Not just one of the girls;

With their gliding and their sliding/ And their piroutees and twirls.

There have been versions of Harding trotted out on Seinfeld, on the Simpsons. Weird Al Yankovic included the Tonya and Nancy account in his music video “Headline News,” with a scene of “Tonya” and “Nancy” literally wrestling on the ice. “Tonya, The Musical” was a short-run, low-budget, very-far-off-Broadway show in which “Tonya” sang, “I want the cash” and rhymed it with “I’m tired of bein’ white trash,” and “Nancy” simpered through “It’s Not My Fault I’m Good.”

In 2008, “Tonya & Nancy, The Rock Opera,” was staged in Portland, Ore. (with the real Tonya in the audience one night).

“My mom is legally blind,” sang the Kerrigan character in the introductory number.

“My mom is legally nuts,” responded the Harding actress.

On the 15^th anniversary of the Lillehammer Games, I spoke to the original creative source behind that production, novelist Elizabeth Searle, who called the Tonya and Nancy drama “a primal story that taps into the themes of American life. It’s a microcosm of our celebrity-crazed, super-competitive, violent, glitzy society. There’s just a theme of obsessive competitiveness of American life; almost anyone can relate to that. The jealousy. The wanting to do anything to win. Also, the characters: You couldn’t imagine these people.”

The rock opera’s songs were ripped directly from headlines and from actual quotes, with titles such as “Whip Her Butt” (sung by “Tonya”), “Estacada” (a lament by Harding’s ex-husband, Jeff Gilloly: “When you wake up sleeping in your car in Estacada, ‘cause your house is surrounded by reporters and FBI…”)

Other titles were “The Laces Broke”—a reference to Harding requesting a do-over during her Olympic final because of skate problems—“You’re the One” and “It’s Our Whole Life” (a Tonya-Nancy duet).

Searle called the strangely true Tonya and Nancy drama an “absurd, only-in-America dark comedy. And, unlike O.J., it didn’t end tragically. Some people can still laugh about it.”

So, one Olympic cycle after the Harding-Kerrigan caper, when Tara Lipinski and Michelle Kwan were gearing up for a far more benign duel for Olympic gold in Nagano, battling each other at the national championships in the country music capital of Nashville, I couldn’t pass on attempting a lyric that melded the local genre with the competition.

I envisioned words set to music featuring a slide guitar and fiddle accompaniment—quintessentially middle American. The thing would have been published, if two crack Olympic writers—Jay Weiner of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and Brian Cazeneuve of Sports Illustrated—and I had been able to sell our proposal for a thoughtful yet fun-loving book we were going to call “Numb and Numb-er, The Winter Olympics Guide for Flakes.”

It went something like this….

I can’t figure skatin’/ And I can’t figure her

Slippin’ around with guys in sequins/ Fallin’ on their wallets with a certain frequen

Cy.

‘Course I’ve heard of Tonya/ Heard of Nancy, too.

But this ain’t exactly stock-car racin’/ Ain’t football and ain’t quail-chasin’ –I

Guarantee.

… (Chorus)…

No knee-cappin’, no fist-fightin’/ No bad-mouthin’ in a bind.

She’ll smile right onto that gold-medal stand/ If she can just stay off her behind.

Is Tara in the short program?/ Is Michelle in the long?

Does size have somethin’ to do with things?/ How come there’s music but nobody sings

The songs?

…

Some costumes’ll make you cry,/ Some’ll make you laugh.

Judges just settin’ there with poker faces/ Givin’ life sentences on the basis

Of a four ‘n’ a half.

…(repeat chorus)…

About the four-and-a-half reference: This was before they changed skating’s scoring system, from a perfect 6.0. But, then, there are lots of old country songs out there that allude to nickels in jukeboxes and dimes in pay phones.

And, by the way, during that visit with the Sami women? We asked if those folks, visiting from up there above the Arctic Circle, had ever heard of someone named Tonya Harding. One of the women solemnly removed a stick that was stirring the pot of reindeer meat. And gently whacked herself on the knee.

John Jeansonne

Newsday sportswriter emeritus/Hofstra University journalism adjunct

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How to fix the fix in tennis?

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The Olympics as a classroom

Rams’ move follows the money

Why the Al Jazeera report on doping is not shocking

The Olympics: My window on the world