Everything They Had

by David Halberstam

  She was facing an important choice, because, while hockey was important to her, it was not the only thing in her life. She was also a good student and she led a normal social life. Her cousin Caroline Apple Gifford, 24, says, “I’ve been with a number of other athletes—both men and women—who have reached that level of excellence, and if you’re around them for even a few minutes, you know immediately that they are athletes and it’s the dominating part of their lives. There’s a kind of natural arrogance to who they are and what they’ve accomplished. They really let you know in the first instant you meet them that they are jocks. But A.J. is different—you could be around her for a long time, and unless she had to go off to practice, you might never know that she was a jock playing at that high a level. Maybe it’s the nature of women’s hockey at this moment—it’s so new, and these women have had to fight so hard for their place in the sports world, and they’ve gotten so little recognition that they’re all able to remain very modest.”

  For coach Ben Smith, who is exceptionally popular within the world of hockey, working with the women has been an epiphany. When USA Hockey suggested he give this a try back in 1995, he was wary. He was a men’s coach at a big-time hockey school, Northeastern, and he had been an assistant coach for the 1988 men’s U.S. Olympic team. He had accepted the offer of working with the women, he later noted, because it was proposed on a winter day and he had forgotten that by taking it up he would lose a summer of sailing and golf. But soon he was hooked. “These are wonderful, focused athletes,” Smith says. “They want to go to the rink each day for the same reason I do. They love hockey, pure and simple. There are no agents around, no big bonuses awaiting them, no commercials to be filmed. I love it.”

  The first thing he learned was that he had to be very careful of what he said, because women are unusually coachable, and they take seriously everything he says. On his first day he noticed that as they loosened up before practice by skating around the rink, they had their sticks with them, but no pucks—a contrast to the way most men warm up. At the time they were soon to leave on a trip to Scandinavia. Smith immediately blew his whistle. “Look,” he told them, “unless they’ve changed the rules and I haven’t been told, even in Finland and Sweden when you play hockey you do it with a puck.” So they skated over and explained to him that the previous coach had told them they were never to warm up with a puck, and so unless told otherwise that was the way they practiced. “I learned from that,” he said. “I try not to say too much.”

  Right after the first selections had been made in late August, the team flew to Scandinavia for a series of games—three with the Swedes and then three with the Finns. International travel was often hard for these young players. They had to deal with jet lag, time zone changes, eating different foods and being away from home. Besides, it was a new team just beginning to come together. But what took place abroad pleased Smith. Sweden was not a powerhouse, and the Americans won all three games rather easily. But the Finns were another matter. They had come in third earlier in the year at the world championships and had almost achieved parity with the U.S., and now they were playing on their home ice. Again the Americans swept all three games. Mleczko emerged as one of the most important players on the team, a player who, in Smith’s words, made things happen. She played well on the trip, with four goals and six assists—the high scorer on the U.S. team. She played particularly well in one game, a blowout of the Swedes, and the next morning Smith stopped by to see her at breakfast. She looked a little tired.

  “Hey, A.J.,” he asked, “how’d you sleep last night?”

  “Not very well, Coach,” she answered. “I don’t know. For some reason I was wired and couldn’t fall asleep.”

  “Well, A.J., when was the last time you scored four goals in an international competition?” he asked. “Do you think that could have something to do with being so wired?”

  The U.S. players, Smith believes, have a good chance for a medal. They lost in overtime to the Canadians last April in the finals of the world championships, and though hockey is considered a Canadian sport, the Americans think they are closing in fast on their rivals. There is an added edge to the competition now, because after the game some of the Canadian players began to talk about how high-powered the American financing is, something that was particularly offensive to these young women who had sacrificed so much to get where they were and were receiving so little support. At the 1997 championships, it was clear that the American women, in terms of their skills and their overall talent bank, were as good as the Canadians. But what they lacked was the inner toughness and confidence that comes only with experience. As A.J. says, “We know that we’re as good as they are. What we have to do now is prove it on the ice, as much to ourselves as to them.”

  Ben Smith, for one, thinks that those fans sitting at home watching will be pleased by the aesthetics of the sport, by how fast and artistic a game it is. The women’s college game is not yet there in terms of talent, he says; the talent, though considerable enough to form a national team, is not deep. In a few years, with the help of a showcase at the Nagano Olympics, more and more women will want to play, and soon the college game will benefit from that. Smith hopes that women’s hockey will not be corrupted if it becomes more successful. He is wary of the game becoming big-time too quickly. It is important in life, he believes, to be careful what you ask for, because you might actually get it.

  ALI WINS ANOTHER FIGHT

  From ESPN.com, March 21, 2001

  Muhammad Ali won one of his most important victories the other day. It was a long time coming, almost 30 years, and it was over one of his most difficult opponents, himself—or perhaps more accurately, his lesser self. He finally admitted he had transgressed by going far beyond any acceptable line when he had belittled and taunted Joe Frazier during the hype for their three historic fights.

  Back then, he had called Frazier an Uncle Tom, said he was much too ugly to be a champion and called him, on the occasion of their third fight, a gorilla. Frazier, unable to fight back verbally, for words were never among his weapons, remained hurt and bitter long after the fights were over.

  When Ali finally apologized, he accepted the fact that he had wounded another, very worthy man. “Joe’s right [to be bitter]. I said a lot of things in the heat of the moment that I shouldn’t have said. Called him names I shouldn’t have called him. I apologize for that. I’m sorry. It was all meant to promote the fight.”

  Ali’s apology was both magnanimous, and long overdue. What he had said at the time was cruel and unacceptable. He had taken Frazier, the least political of men, and cast him in the most unlikely of roles, that of the great white hope, a role that Frazier in no way deserved.

  Included in the apology was a covert admission on Ali’s part that he owes no small amount of his own remarkable claim to greatness to Joe Frazier, innately far less physically talented an athlete, but every bit as indomitable of spirit. The simplest of all the many truths of Ali’s magnificent career is that without the three Frazier fights, Ali is not Ali. For their fights represent one of those great moments in sports when two superb, lion-hearted athletes—with vastly differing skills—arrive at the same place at almost the exact same time.

  Because of Frazier, we know how great Ali was, how strong, how resilient and how resolute, and how courageously he could take a punch—for early in his career it was said of him that that was a particular weakness and vulnerability. When he was on the way up, and when he first won his crown, we always knew how great Ali said he was; when it was all over, the fights with Frazier done, we knew that the reality was greater than the hype, the walk better than the talk.

  The Liston fights, after all, are not defining—the Liston that Ali beat, however threatening, was old, out of shape and the shadow of the mob still hangs heavily over the second fight. The fight with George Foreman in Zaire is the equivalent of one Frazier fight, but it is a relatively small part of what would eventually become a much larger body of work.
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  Let me be absolutely clear in what I am saying, because Ali is such a complicated and controversial figure, particularly for writers who came of age in my generation, when a great many people quite deliberately got him wrong and resented his changing his name, becoming a Muslim and, more than anything else, refusing to serve in Vietnam. I am a huge Ali fan. I thought him a great fighter, a remarkable, luminescent personality, a genuine original (unlike so many thin imitators who have come along since), in the end someone so large on the landscape that he transcended the smaller world of sports for the larger one of American history.

  I was still a young reporter covering Civil Rights in the South when he burst on the scene in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and like many of my friends I was taken by his talent, his youth and joyousness. On that night in February 1964 when he fought what still seemed like the invincible Liston, I remember going to the theater with my friend, Gay Talese, and being frightened for him, scared that something young and fresh and original was going to be destroyed by something heavy and menacing.

  His becoming a Muslim did not bother me. It seemed like a legitimate choice, a serious one for a complicated, bright, but alienated young man. Most important, it seemed to be a choice made out of conscience, which is the only thing that counts.

  But a generation of older sportswriters, many of whom already disliked him because he seemed too boastful, were now even more offended—he had changed his name, and joined up with a group that seemed to them to be outside the mainstream of American life, more openly hostile to their way of life than anything they had yet encountered. For a generation of men made uneasy by anything save the conventions they already accepted, what he represented was immensely threatening.

  When he refused induction, they became even angrier, though among the most vociferous there were few who had ever heard a shot fired in anger. That hardly bothered me: I had already spent two years in Vietnam as a correspondent, and my negative reporting about the war had angered two Presidents of the United States.

  But the world of sportswriting which defined him in those days was immensely conservative; it is part of Ali’s unique power and uncommon intelligence, the fact that he was well ahead of the curve, that he survived, true to himself, without changing, and it was the world of sportswriters which had to change in the coming years.

  Sportswriting then reflected not merely older American values, but older unrecognized American prejudices, and Ali in so many ways seemed an affront to them, and to the extremely thin fabric of that era’s tolerance.

  There were a lot of sportswriters at that time who thought they were liberal because they had accepted the arrival of Jackie Robinson: in their view it was all right for black athletes to play against whites—thus they were more enlightened than those who had gone before them—but it was not all right for them to have opinions on anything except sports. If they spoke out on racism in general, then they had gone too far. (It was all right for Jackie Robinson to play baseball, but it was not all right for him to complain about how hard it was to find housing in a white neighborhood.) That was the generation of sportswriters who, deep into their careers, tried to call him Cassius Clay.

  A generational faultline ran through American society in those days, and Ali (who spoke against the war publicly a year before Martin Luther King did), as much as anyone on the national scene, seemed to reveal it and define its prejudices and conflicting values: How you felt about Ali put you on one side or another in something much larger.

  Ali, by the prevailing dominating opinion of the day, was supposed to be grateful for his right to fight; after all, the traditionalists would argue, look how much money he was making. He should accept his good fortune, and refrain from being a critic of America’s domestic racial policies, let alone its foreign policy.

  To me, his stand on Vietnam was the rarest of things, a genuine act of conscience by a prominent American on a compelling moral issue about which he felt passionately, and for which he was willing to pay a very high price. It meant that someone at the very top of his profession was willing to give up the thing he cared about the most because of his beliefs—extraordinary in any circumstance, but more so with someone like a fighter who has so brief a career. I remember the moment when all the top black athletes of the era gathered to meet with him, some of them trying to talk him out of it, suggesting that he play the game, go along with the draft, fight some exhibitions for Uncle Sam and not risk so much for, what seemed to many of them, so little.

  But he refused to compromise his beliefs. That made him unique. Not just among fighters, not just among athletes, not just among blacks, but among all his fellow citizens. There were all kinds of people in the upper level of the U.S. government in those days, all of them better educated and seemingly more sophisticated than Ali, who dissented from Vietnam but who did not act on their beliefs. Because of that, Ali remains special to me—the only high-level American who in effect resigned his job because of his beliefs on Vietnam.

  I thought he was a brilliant figure, something of a comet who had burst upon us and for whom we had remarkably little preparation: joyous, funny, talented. He sometimes seemed like a great one-man, multi-act Broadway musical that was both tragedy and comedy, and for which he was author, director, and principal actor. With Ali everyone else got second billing.

  But there was a dark side as well, the occasional cruelty to opponents both in and out of the ring, and that detracted from the rest of the performance; for whatever political baggage that they brought to the fight, it was unbecoming, hardly worthy of him.

  He was unnecessarily cruel to Floyd Patterson. More, he behaved badly with Frazier as well, talking about how ugly he was, and calling him an Uncle Tom. It was ugly stuff, mean and gratuitous. The hype of the fight hardly needed it, and it was unacceptably demeaning to Frazier.

  Frazier after all was a great fighter, but not in any other way as gifted as Ali, unable to play the game with the media (and thus the public), a man who could only be a target in the game Ali was orchestrating. He could never, because of his limitations, quite get out of the box that Ali had consigned him to. Ali was born to do as well with the media as with his opponents; he could always speak for himself, Frazier never could. But in doing this, in letting the game become too cruel, Ali diminished in the eyes of those of us who admired him and wanted him in every way to be worthy of his own greatness.

  The truth was that Joe Frazier was never a Tom, and he was not a white man’s fighter, nor in any way was he political. When Ali was barred from fighting by the U.S. District, Frazier had spoken up for him and his right to fight. Frazier’s only politics were his fists. Fighting was his only ticket out of the cruelest kind of poverty.

  Frazier was the son of sharecroppers in South Carolina, closer in his roots to slavery than Ali, darker of skin when that still mattered a great deal more in this country, less advantaged than Ali in all ways, most especially physically. All he had was his will, and courage, the willingness to pay an awful price to maximize the one ticket he had been given to get out of poverty.

  Only in courage were he and Ali equals. Lest we forget, they fought three times and in each fight there was little definable difference between the winner and loser. In the first fight, in March 1971, Frazier won in 15 rounds in an awesome bout; when it was over both fighters had to go to the hospital, and Frazier was unable to fight for another ten months.

  The second fight, some three years later, was won by Ali in 12 rounds. The third, in September 1975, when Ali was 33, and Frazier 31, was the famous Thrilla in Manilla, perhaps the greatest fight of all time. At the end of it, when Frazier had tried to answer the bell for the 15th round, Eddie Futch, the referee, had stopped him, ended the fight, and had cut off Frazier’s gloves.

  “Sit down, son, it’s all over,” Futch said. Then he added: “No one will ever forget what you did here today.”

  Nor in 26 years have we forgotten yet.

  THANKS, SOCCER, SEE YOU IN FOUR YEARS

/>   From ESPN.com, August 2, 2002

  This is something of a confession. It has taken me some 36 years to realize it, but I am a fan of World Cup soccer, but not of soccer itself. For a long time I was loath to admit this. I realized that I was hooked on the World Cup one morning this year when I got up a little early first to walk the dogs and then to watch the early games, even though the U.S. team had already been eliminated—thus it was not pure Yankee chauvinism. But truth be told, I do it for the pleasure of the nationalism involved, not for the love of soccer. Nor do I think, as things currently stand, I can be cured. I like, within reason—no assassinations and really rough stuff—the nationalism at play at moments like this in World Cup years and Olympiad years, this time all those wacky Koreans cheering like mad, and trying to get even for what happened to one of their skaters during the Winter Olympics.

  Bobby Charlton, since knighted, will be remembered for sobbing tears of joy when England eventually lifted the Jules Rimet Trophy as 1966 World Cup champs. My erratic relationship with the game—it is not love-hate, it is not love-love, and it is most surely not hate-hate, started some 36 years ago when I was working for the New York Times in Europe, I had just been expelled from Poland for writing articles that displeased the Warsaw regime (whose representatives had often complained to me about my referring to the government as a regime, which I, despite the frequent warnings, continued to do, and in fact still enjoy doing today). Since I had also been asked by the Prague regime—there it is again, that word, but they really were regimes—not to come back, that left of the three principal countries assigned to me, only Hungary where I was now welcome. And it was obviously time for me to go. Departing Warsaw (or deported from), I was stationed temporarily in Paris.