RUSSIA NETS A "NYET"

                The 2018 Winter Olympics will begin its 16-day run in South Korea on Feb. 9 with a surprise absence—official Russia. I say that’s a surprise not because the Russians are undeserving of being booted; their massive, long-running and state-supported flaunting of the doping rules have few parallels. It’s because I didn’t think the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which runs the quadrennial winter and summer fests, had the cojones to do their duty in this matter.

            

               You’ll recall that the IOC faced pretty much the same choice just before last year’s Summer Games in Rio, with pretty much the same evidence. It punted to its constituent sports federations, some of which did the right thing (mainly track and field and weightlifting) but most of which didn’t. The upshot was that the Russkies were able to strut their stuff in Brazil with only minor interruption. In the last six months, however, the case against the odious Putin regime was strengthened to the point where a “da” no longer would pass either the smell or eyeball tests, and stronger action was unavoidable. Thus is justice done in the world of international sport.

                Alas, the ban was less than the total one that many observers, and 37 national anti-doping agencies including the U.S.’s, had called for. Russian flags, anthems and uniforms won’t be displayed in the Games’ base city of Pyeongchang but individual Russian athletes with lily-white drug records will be allowed to compete, if any can be found. They’ll do their things under the banner of OAR, which stands for Olympic Athletes from Russia, but their medals won’t count in the official table. Further, Russian honchos have had their VIP passes yanked, meaning that if Putin wants to show up to cheer his minions he’ll have to buy a ticket and sit with the hoi polloi. That in itself would be worth tuning in to see.

But partial as it was the IOC’s action still was praiseworthy on a couple of grounds, one of which is that it goes against the grain of sports generally. The main problem with sports governance worldwide, from the IOC to the NCAA, is that the regulators wear the two hats of promoter and policeman. The functions are incompatible and, given that it’s bad for business to knock the product you’re selling, the promoter side almost always wins. If most of my sportswriter colleagues understand this they never bother to point it out.

The other is that bucking Russia requires no little personal courage. Putin and his mafia know where their adversaries live and are not averse to playing rough when things don’t go their way. They can and will crash your computers, loot your bank accounts and run up big Mastercard charges in your name, and if they really don’t like you they’ve been known to send around a guy to stab you with a poisoned umbrella tip while you’re going about your business. I’ll bet IOC members are buying devices that start their cars remotely.  I know I would be.

The practices that got Russia in trouble were no less blatant, or carried out with no less an air of impunity. The country’s athletes have been doping for decades, with a long trail of suspensions, but the scheme the country pulled off when it hosted the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi was breathtaking even by those standards. According to the testimony of Grigory Rodchenkov, the man who headed its anti-doping testing programs during the time in question, more than 100 athletes were dosed with a performance-enhancing drugs cocktail washed mixed with sweet vermouth before that event and had “clean” urine samples substituted for their real ones post-competititon.

 The swap was carried out through a hole punched in the testing lab’s wall with state agents on both sides, a “B’ movie device if there ever was one. Crude as it was, the plot might have succeeded it if not for Rodchenkov’s 2016 defection to the U.S. to escape the heat generated when a Russian athlete at another venue was caught for doping.  The scientist still is in this country, hiding out. The icing on the cake came in the release of Rodchenkov’s diaries and a recent leak of internal digital files on the athletes involved. Both were reported in the New York Times, which has led in its coverage of the story.

According Rodchenkov and others, the plot was overseen by Vitaly Mutko, then the nation’s minister of sport and, now, its deputy prime minister. He’s a crony of Putin’s from their days in St. Petersburg city government. That’s testimony to the level of government involvement in doping and the importance Russia assigns to shows of excellence on the world’s sports stage.

Russia’s responses to the probes leading up to the IOC ruling, and to the ruling itself, have been its usual ones to any criticism—bluster and denial. It blames it all on Rodchenkov and wicked and envious foreigners. That’s interesting because any reinstatement to top-level international sports should require a thoroughgoing revamp of its drug-testing facilities and procedures, including the kind of transparency the country resists for any of its actions.  Without it Russia should stay on the outside looking in.

 Not only does Russia resist blame, it also thumbs its nose at the world by such actions as making the above-mentioned Mutko the head of the organizing committee for the soccer World Cup scheduled for Russia next year. Russia has been a darling of both the IOC and FIFA, the outfit that runs world soccer. That’s because all three are (or have been) kleptocracies that like the graft to flow smoothly.  In barring Russia in Korea the IOC has veered from that pattern. Whether it’s a precedent or a one-off remains to be seen.

HOLIDAY NOTE—If you have Chicago Cubs’ fans of any age on your gift list you could do worse than buy them my book, “For the Love of the Cubs,” which celebrates the team’s glorious 2016 World Series championship. They didn’t win it last season so it’s still current. It’s available on amazon or barnesandnoble.com., among other places.

               

               

                

ALI, AGAIN

                Muhammad Ali was, without a doubt, the leading sports figure of the 20^th century, and one of the era’s foremost personages. Through sheer force of personality he broke cultural as well as athletic norms-- sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. The fact that he was a black American with obscure roots in Louisville, Kentucky, who barely made it through high school and spent the last 20 or so years of his life palsied and all but mute, makes his saga all the more remarkable. We won’t see his like again.

                

               Ali lived a big life and, now, there’s a biography that fits it. It’s “Ali, A Life,” by Jonathan Eig, all 623 pages of it, including 84 pages of acknowledgements, notes and index. It’s a heckuva book and you should read it. It’s worth the time.

                Eig was a colleague of mine at the Wall Street Journal. Our paths never crossed there but they did later, when he ran a website called ChicagoSideSports, to which I contributed. Sports often are dismissed as trivial, life’s toy department, but they and our reactions to them can illuminate human affairs as well as any other endeavors. Eig showed that in his previous biographies of Jackie Robinson and Lou Gehrig, two other seminal American sports figures. Good reporting and insightful writing know no categorical bounds.

                I never was a fan of Ali. His incessant bragging turned me off, as did the cruel ways he denigrated his opponents, most of whom were black men like himself, and his embrace of a sect of Islam that declared all white people “devils.” As I wrote in a WSJ column when he retired in 1979, and again shortly after his death last year at age 74 (you can scroll down to see my blog of June 15, 2016), boxing for him wasn’t a test of skills within a confined space and agreed upon rules but psychological warfare without limit.  His disdain for conventional notions of sportsmanship was nothing less than revolutionary and reverberates still, to our continuing loss.

                I suspect that others shared those views, but managed to overlook them. Ali’s refusal to be patronized struck a note that lit up the civil-rights movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, which Eig chronicles. Further, the boxer was so handsome (he’d say “pretty”), charismatic and downright likable that many people would forgive him anything. My stint as a full-time sportswriter began in 1983, after Ali had left the ring, and I never spoke with him, but he was a ringsider at a number of fights I covered and his arrival in the arenas never failed to illicit cheers that dwarfed anything the actual bout would elicit.

                Eig’s treatment of his subject is sympathetic but unsparing, highlighting Ali’s many contradictions. Ali’s rhymes made him known as a wit but he was all but illiterate and, probably, dyslexic, someone who received a “certificate of attendance” after high school, not a diploma. He loved money and talked about it incessantly but showed little care for it once it came his way. He was a moralist who divorced his first wife because she refused to bundle up in public as his Nation of Islam’s rules dictated, yet was an open adulterer and an absent and negligent father.

                

                Ali’s boast of being “The Greatest” stood up best in the ring, where his offensive skills and generalship were unmatched. He didn’t hit as hard as some other heavyweight champions or, even some of his contemporaries, but he more than made up for that with his grace, quick hands and speed afoot. The late Jim Jacobs, proprietor of the vast “Greatest Fights” film library and Mike Tyson’s first manager, once told me he thought Ali was the fastest fighter ever, of any weight category. That’s quite a claim for a man who stood 6-foot-3 and in his prime fought at about 215 pounds.

                As Eig notes, however, some of Ali’s boxing strengths would turn into weaknesses. As a young fighter his speed and upper-body flexibility gave him all the defense he needed so he never bothered to learn such basic skills as the bob and weave or the use of his gloves and arms to block punches. As he aged and slowed he became easier to hit. That led to his discovery of his unusual ability to take a punch, the basis of his “rope-a-dope” ploy of his later bouts, especially his epic victory over the powerful George Foreman. Ali’s belief that allowing sparring partners to hit him freely because it increased his resilience further hastened the neurological problems that disabled him beginning in middle age. One only could conclude that the real “dope” in Ali’s cutely named tactic was he, not his foes.

                The outlines of Ali’s life and career are well known to just about any potential reader of Eig’s book, but like in any good biography the author’s research justifies the read. The details of Ali’s free-spending ways and disdain for good financial advice are mind boggling. One story has him going with a friend to buy a Rolls-Royce and plunking down $88,000 for one (this was in 1976). On the way out of the dealership he remembered that he needed a birthday gift for his then-wife Veronica, so he got her an Alfa Romeo. When he got the Alfa home Veronica said she didn’t want it because she couldn’t drive a stick shift. Instead of returning the Alfa Ali gave it to the friend and promptly bought his wife a Mercedes instead.

                A six-page transcript of an impromptu conversation between Ali and Joe Frazier, recorded in 1970 when the two ring greats were young and on speaking terms, illuminates the complex relationship between the two men.  There’s an eye-opening story of how two U.S. Supreme Court justices saved Ali from prison in his draft-refusal case by fashioning a one-off verdict spurred by their realization that a not-guilty finding would justify his leaky reasons for refusing service, while a guilty one might set off riots.  The court certainly does read the newspapers.

                I do have a couple of nits to pick with the book. One is common to sports biographies generally, its excess of information on athletic contests long forgotten. The other is the author’s failure to adequately explain how Ali was able to continue his allegiance to Nation of Islam head Elijah Muhammad after the brutal murder of his close friend Malcolm X by followers (agents?) of Mr. Muhammad. But maybe there was no explanation for that.

                In sum, Eig has done us a favor by writing this book and we should do him a favor by reading it. You can buy one on Amazon for $17.34, no big deal.