January 8, 2007

  • January 8, 2007

    Monday, January 08, 2007

    Giants Loose To Eagles


    Doug Mills/The New York Times

    Giants quarterback Eli Manning threw two touchdowns and one interception in the Giants’ 23-20 playoff loss to Philadelphia.

     

    Paul Hawthorne for The New York Times

    The Eagles’ David Akers kicked the game-winning field goal as time expired. He was perfect on three attempts in the game. More Photos >

    January 8, 2007
    Eagles 23, Giants 20

    Giants Put Up Fight, but End Up Losing in Familiar Fashion

    PHILADELPHIA, Jan. 7 — The ultimate downfall was swift and agonizing for the Giants, which made it a perfectly appropriate way to end the season.

    A football sailed between the southern uprights of Lincoln Financial Field on Sunday as the last second ticked away, and the Philadelphia Eagles had a 23-20 first-round playoff victory. It ignited fireworks and a lasting cheer.

    The Giants sulked their way to the locker room, losers for the seventh time in their final nine games. The team president and co-owner John Mara sat silently in the third row of the press box.

    The loss knocked the Giants out of the playoffs and into a stage of uncertainty. The Giants were expected to be in the midst of a championship run this January. Now they have a general manager to hire and perhaps a head coach, if Mara and the team’s other owners decide to dismiss Tom Coughlin.

    Minutes later, in the bowels of the stadium, Mara; Coughlin; the retiring general manager, Ernie Accorsi; and the personnel director, Jerry Reese, talked quietly.

    Coughlin had spoken to his team as if he expected to be back, players said, but did not address his job status with them or with reporters. Mara declined to answer questions.

    “Not right now,” he said. “I’ll have something to say in the middle of the week.”

    Everyone, it seemed, was still focused on the game, not its long-ranging repercussions. It was a result that will be viewed as a fitting capper to an 8-8 regular season: filled with possibility, dissolving into a puddle of disappointment.

    The Giants had taken the game’s first lead, as they did 13 times in the regular season. Predictably, they fell into old habits, squandering enviable scoring chances and letting the opponent nudge momentum the other way until the Giants were left scrambling to recover.

    Gamely, they did, showing typical fight until the end. But it proved to be only the latest tease, as the entire production — the game and the season — drifted into nothing but a memory of blown opportunities and broken hopes, carried off on a 38-yard kick by David Akers.

    The Giants tried to ride the legs of the retiring running back Tiki Barber, and he gained 137 yards on 26 carries in his final game. Sprinkled with a handful of completions from quarterback Eli Manning to receiver Plaxico Burress, including two for touchdowns, the Giants erased a 10-point deficit and found the score tied, 20-20, with 5 minutes 4 seconds remaining.

    Manning did not touch the ball again. He finished 16 of 27 passing for 161 yards, 2 touchdowns and an interception.

    The Eagles’ offense slid through the Giants’ defense in the final minutes, simultaneously milking the clock and moving the chains. The Giants used their remaining timeout, but they were helpless to do anything more, having used their other two on the previous drive.

    Running back Brian Westbrook, Philadelphia’s versatile facsimile of Barber, carried four times for 34 yards before the Eagles squatted a few times to exhaust the Giants’ season to its final three seconds.

    Those details will evaporate quickly to make room for the big picture. The Giants were 6-2 and playing the Chicago Bears for top position in the conference Nov. 12. But they lost six of their final eight regular-season games, winning the last one to slip into the playoffs.

    After Sunday’s game, Coughlin hammered a theme of team unity. He is not popular with players, who tire of his militaristic ways, but the Giants never quit playing hard. It may be the key argument for keeping his job.

    “I told our team I was proud of them,” Coughlin said. “I think they demonstrated a great concept of team this year. Through the bad, they hung together. There was never any quit. It wasn’t always pretty. There were some ups and downs, but I was very proud that they hung together as a team.”

    Coughlin has one year remaining on a four-year contract he signed in January 2004. He led the Giants to an 11-5 record and a division championship in 2005, but the Giants lost at home to the Carolina Panthers, 23-0, in the first round of the playoffs.

    The Giants have never fired a coach whose last team made the playoffs, and few coaches in N.F.L. history have been dismissed after a postseason game — and fewer still after back-to-back playoff appearances.

    “Whatever happens, it’s not our decision,” the rookie defensive end Mathias Kiwanuka said. “But I feel like we have a good thing going.”

    By contrast, the Eagles (10-6) arrived with a five-game winning streak and a division championship gleaned from the wreckage of collapsing seasons by the Giants and Dallas Cowboys. The Giants and the Eagles, with a rivalry linked by about 100 miles of the New Jersey Turnpike, split their two regular-season games in 2006. Each team won close games on the road.

    The Giants were in position to do it again. They trailed by 17-10 at halftime and by 20-10 late in the third quarter before a 47-yard pass interference penalty against Eagles cornerback Sheldon Brown, who was trying to cover Burress on an underthrown ball, put the Giants at Philadelphia’s 14.

    The Giants moved 8 more yards and were inside the 10 for the second time in the game. But, for the second time, they were forced to kick a field goal, this one 10 seconds into the fourth quarter as the sky spit a slight drizzle.

    The Giants got the ball back, and Manning coolly led them on an 80-yard drive that needed to go 100 yards because of three consecutive penalties.

    The Giants drove to the Eagles’ 23 with 7:04 remaining in the game. Then tackle David Diehl was called for a false start. Guard Chris Snee was called for another. And a long gain on a screen pass to Barber was wiped out by a holding penalty on Snee. The Giants had first and 30 at the 43.

    After an incompletion, Manning lobbed an 18-yard pass to Burress, then hit him again with a quick strike to the left for a first down. Seemingly granted a pardon from season’s end, the Giants tied the score, 20-20, on an 11-yard touchdown pass to Burress over the middle with 5:04 remaining.

    As much as the ending stung, the Giants might look at their inefficiencies earlier in the game as the precursors to the loss.

    The Giants were inside Eagles territory on six drives in the first three quarters, including two forays inside the 10-yard line, but the chances were converted into a touchdown and two short field goals.

    Outside the locker room, Barber received hugs and congratulations from friends and family, then gave Coughlin an endorsement, saying he had “done great things in his three years here.”

    His now-former teammates filed past him quietly, not sure what the future holds, certain only that the season was gone.


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    Dick Pound, chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency

    January 2, 2007    

    Gary Kemper/Associated Press


    Amazing Race Ben Johnson, right, outruns Carl Lewis, middle, to 100-meter gold in Seoul in 1988. Pound had to defend Johnson after he tested positive for a steroid because Pound was the only lawyer in the Canadian delegation. The gold medal was eventually awarded to Lewis.

    Jennifer Karady for The New York Times
     

    Dick Pound, chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency and global evangelist for the cause of pure sport, is not, technically, a law-enforcement man, but he thinks like one. He is part romantic, part hard-boiled realist. He hopes for the best from people but is not surprised when he doesn’t get it. He believes deeply in the grandeur of sport, less so in the goodness of athletes.

    Pound has been WADA’s leader since the International Olympic Committee created it in 1999 to “harmonize” efforts to clean up the murky underworld of performance enhancement. In theory, he could have limited his concerns to the various Olympic sports, but instead he has also sparred with what he likes to call the “North American pro leagues,” including Major League Baseball, whose anti-doping policies he has long characterized as “a joke.” His style is all confrontation, all the time, and the bigger the target — Carl Lewis, Lance Armstrong, the entire U.S. Olympic establishment — the better.

    As it happened, the news that the cyclist Floyd Landis had failed a drug test at the Tour de France broke in July, in the midst of a series of interviews I had with Pound in Montreal, where he runs WADA and also holds down more big jobs and positions than would seem humanly possible: partner at a top law firm, chancellor of McGill University, member of the I.O.C. and editor of something called Pound’s Tax Case Notes. He belongs, as well, to that bizarre subset of people who write long books as a hobby, eight of them so far. (One that I picked up in an anteroom of his office, a history of his law firm, ran to a door-stopping 559 pages.)

    On this particular day, Pound, who is 64, looked tired. His broad face was drawn, his complexion pasty. He had just returned from China, and his back hurt. Thinking about Landis seemed to enliven him. He spoke of the cyclist as if he were some sleazy perp just collared by the vice squad. “He was 11 minutes behind or something, and all of the sudden there’s this Herculean effort, where he’s going up mountains like he’s on a goddamn Harley,” he said. In the 2006 tour, Landis raced in pain while awaiting a hip replacement, went out to an early lead, lost it, then seemed to miraculously regain it. “It’s a great story,” Pound said. “Wonderful. But if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”

    Pound took something like a schoolboy’s delight in talking about Landis’s lab result, which supposedly showed his testosterone level to be grotesquely above what is typical for most men. Landis has denied taking a prohibited substance and is fighting what could be a two-year ban from cycling. “I mean, it was 11 to 1!” Pound said, referring to Landis’s reported testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio, a measure used to identify doping. “You’d think he’d be violating every virgin within 100 miles. How does he even get on his bicycle?”

    With an annual budget of $22 million, WADA oversees the testing done by the world’s sports federations. The agency finances research, credentials a global network of drug-testing laboratories, conducts some of its own drug-testing of athletes and regularly updates its list of banned substances. It puts out a number of publications, among them a magazine called Play True. Its most important accomplishment has been to persuade 191 nations, including the United States, to sign on to its Anti-Doping Code — which prohibits most of the world’s top athletes from taking anything on WADA’s list of banned substances and, in the event of violations, generally blocks them from appealing to the legal systems in their home countries. (Appeals are heard by the Switzerland-based Court of Arbitration for Sport.)

    WADA’s targets — drug-taking athletes and their coaches, handlers and chemists — have plenty of money and science on their side. They invent new compounds or new methods of masking old drugs, and all Pound and his allies can do is try to anticipate their moves and try to catch them. The drugs work remarkably well — see East German women’s track-and-field athletes, circa 1980s, or big-league baseball players, 1990s — and in ways that often surprise anti-doping authorities.

    Performance enhancement is like any other kind of underground activity: the participants are the only ones who know for sure what they’re up to. Anabolic steroids were for weight lifters, home-run hitters and sprinters and would never help an athlete in an endurance event like the Tour de France, right? Yet that’s what Landis tested positive for. How that might have helped him climb mountains is unknown — except, if he took them, by Landis and any enablers. Everybody thought pitchers never used steroids because they value flexibility more than strength. Then baseball started checking for steroids, and about half the positive tests came from pitchers. In university laboratories across the world, and in places like the United States Department of Defense, scientists are dreaming up yet new ways to enhance human beings — steps that may very well be taken by elite athletes before they are perfected or even considered safe.

    Battling the known and the unknown, and probably outspent and outgunned, Pound has seized the prerogative of the underdog: fight with whatever you’ve got. Fight fair. Or unfair. His best weapon is his brilliance as a formulator of quotes, his ability to make headlines and call attention to his cause. (He takes great pride in this; one of his books is titled “High Impact Quotations.”) Pound is not a stereotypical Canadian, if you think of Canadians as reticent, nor is he very lawyerly: he assembles whatever facts he can gather, but when they’re not attainable, sometimes just makes them up.

    Take the ruckus he caused when he charged that one-third of players in the National Hockey League, or about seven per team, were using illegal performance enhancers. Sitting in his office, I asked him how he came up with that estimate. He leaned back in his chair and chuckled, completely unabashed to admit that he had just invented it. “It was pick a number,” he said. “So it’s 20 percent. Twenty-five percent. Call me a liar.”

    Pound certainly understands that he can be abrasive. What he cannot grasp is how anyone could not comprehend the rightness, the essentiality, of his mission. “How is the sport real if the athletes are not real?” he asks. He has heard himself compared to a sheriff in the Wild West, as if that’s a bad thing. “I don’t get that. Weren’t the sheriffs the good guys?”

    Pound grew up, as he likes to say, in a succession of “smelly mill towns” in Canada, wherever his father, an engineer, happened to be working. The last of them, Ocean Falls, 36 hours north of Vancouver, reachable only by boat, had a smaller-than-regulation-size indoor pool and a gifted coach who birthed a succession of great swimmers, the best of them Pound, who by the time he reached McGill University was known as Dick Pound the Swimmer, a man on his way to a sixth-place finish in the 100-meter freestyle at the 1960 Summer Games in Rome and a place of prominence in Montreal and, beyond that, greater Canada.

    Pound will mention his athletic exploits, but usually with a hint of self-deprecation. “If you want a pointless statistic,” he said to me at one point, “I am the last Canadian to reach the final of the 100 freestyle.”

    He passed up a chance at the 1964 Olympics and set out on his career. He is a tax lawyer by trade. His position as chancellor at McGill is largely ceremonial, although it takes up hundreds of hours a year. He was previously president of McGill’s alumni association and of its board of governors.

    Kip Cobbett, the managing partner at Stikeman Elliott, Pound’s law firm, describes his colleague as almost frighteningly efficient: “You ask him for a memo on some complicated topic, it’s on your desk 15 minutes later, and it’s perfect.” It helps that Pound can so quickly access his opinions. “He is willing to draw conclusions before other people are willing to draw conclusions,” Cobbett says. “That’s not a common thing anymore, whether because of caution or political correctness.”

    Pound was first elected to the I.O.C. in 1978, and his quarter-century tenure has been marked by several anomalies — the most intriguing one his defense, in 1988, of Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter who won the 100-meter dash at the Summer Games in Seoul but then tested positive for the steroid stanozolol. Still a decade away from his incarnation as a crusader against performance-enhancing drugs, Pound represented Johnson before the I.O.C.’s medical commission after Johnson’s positive test — a job Pound says was foisted upon him because there was no other lawyer with the Canadian delegation.

    After Johnson assured Pound he was clean, Pound asked him, Could someone have spiked his post-race beer? No, he got his own beer. Anything unusual in the collection of his urine sample? No, nothing. “Give me some bullets,” Pound remembers thinking. “I’ve got nothing to say.” But there wasn’t much of a defense to offer. Johnson was stripped of his medal, and it was awarded to the second-place finisher, the American Carl Lewis.

    On my first visit to see Pound in Montreal, I asked him about Lewis, arguably the greatest athlete the United States has ever produced. A long jumper and a sprinter, Lewis won nine gold medals in four Summer Games between 1984 and 1996. “Carl and I are fairly cheery,” Pound said. “I’ve never gone after him, other than to say, ‘Here are some things that did happen.’ “

    Pound has argued that Lewis should not have been allowed to run in Seoul should have never been in that 100 final with Ben Johnson because Lewis tested positive for a banned substance at the U.S. Track and Field Trials earlier that summer, a result that American officials disregarded. “USA Track and Field was, of course, the gold medalist at doing that,” Pound told me. What Lewis tested positive for, Pound said, “was a steroid of some sort. A steroid.”

    Pound is at his most ferocious, and sometimes most reckless — a one-man truth squad — when looking toward the past. But athletes live in the here and now. They don’t like anyone digging into old files and certainly not into old blood or urine samples.

    In 2003, the U.S. Olympic Committee’s former director of drug control turned over documents to Sports Illustrated and The Orange County Register that showed Lewis had tested positive in 1988 for banned stimulants found in cold medicine — not anabolic steroids. Many would consider that a distinction without a difference: testing positive, for whatever banned substance, often brings harsh disciplinary action. But while ephedrine and two other cold-medicine ingredients found in Lewis’s system might improve performance at high-enough doses, the U.S.O.C. accepted his explanation that he took them to fight a cold.

    In a telephone interview, Lewis summed up the situation for me: “The only thing they have on me is Sudafed. A cold medicine. … If he had any more, it would be provided.”

    At one point, Pound claimed he had documents relating to Lewis’s failed tests. “I have them somewhere,” he said. “I wouldn’t throw them away.” But when I asked him before my second visit if he could dig them out, he said he couldn’t find them. It didn’t seem to bother him any more than acknowledging that his estimate on the percentage of chemically enhanced N.H.L. players was pretty much a wild guess. Pound’s words are sort of like darts: he lets them go, accumulates points, then throws some more.

    Pound has also kept up a running battle with another American sports icon, Lance Armstrong, the seven-time Tour de France winner who has fought a seemingly endless series of allegations that he used erythropoietin, or EPO, which increases red-blood-cell production and enhances the flow of oxygen to muscles. Pound has piled on by pointing out what he calls certain “problematic statistics” — including the fact that the next three men who finished behind Armstrong in the 2005 tour, his crowning victory, were all investigated for suspected EPO use and banned from last year’s tour.

    Pound leaves it at that. But the implication is clear: Armstrong was riding with a bad crowd, so how could he be clean and win? Pound told me he likes Armstrong, or at least he likes the mythic Lance: “I like the idea of sports heroes. Nothing I like better.”

    They even talked on the telephone about two years ago, according to Pound, when Armstrong called to defend cycling. Pound recounted their conversation: ” ‘Hello, it’s Lance Armstrong. I just want to tell you I love my sport.’ And I said, ‘That’s great, Lance, but sometimes there’s gotta be tough love.’ It was fairly inconsequential, and we left it just short of the Hollywood producer thing — we’ll do lunch.”

    On matters involving Armstrong, Pound adopts a tone of insinuation often mixed with sarcasm. When I asked if he thought Armstrong cheated, Pound replied: “You’ve got to be kidding. Why would I get into a lawsuit with Lance? Let him deal with the problems he’s created.”

    Armstrong told me he telephoned Pound twice to confront him over his public comments. He also wrote the I.O.C. demanding that Pound — whom he referred to as “the quotemeister” and “a showboat” when we spoke — resign or be removed. Armstrong says he believes Pound and WADA have run roughshod over his and other athletes’ rights, and he is not alone in that criticism. An investigative article by The Los Angeles Times in December concluded that the agency is “a closed, quasi-judicial system without American-style checks and balances.”

    It is not always clear whether critics are objecting to WADA or Pound. The organization’s Anti-Doping Code, with its limits on athletes’ appeals, can certainly be construed as heavy-handed. But without it, WADA might well be tied up in an array of legal systems, from federal courts in the United States to regional courts in China to, conceivably, courts in small towns in Mongolia or Uzbekistan or wherever some athlete happened to fail a drug test.

    Pound’s tendency to go off like a loose cannon is less defensible. Athletes and their representatives are beginning to challenge the legitimacy of WADA itself, rather than just the particulars of the charges against them, and Pound may be fueling that reaction. John Hoberman, a professor of Germanic languages at the University of Texas who writes extensively on issues of athletic doping, credits Pound for aggressively raising the profile of his cause but says that he has been “fast and loose with historical fact, and with what you can and cannot say with regard to the verifiable level of drug use among elite athletes.”

    Because Pound engages big targets — and the biggest ones are in the United States — he has repeatedly had to fend off charges that he is somehow anti-American. “How could I be?” he responded when I asked him about this. He pointed out that his wife is from Chicago and that three of their five children attended college in the U.S.

    Then, typically, he fired off another salvo. “There aren’t too many people who are prepared to point the finger at America and say: ‘Hey, take off the [expletive] halo. You’re just like everybody else.’ That’s a problem in America. America has a singular ability to delude itself.”

    Pound’s biggest role in sport, before joining WADA, is one that can be seen as having helped create the very thing he is now fighting. Pound was the I.O.C. money man. He recognized that Olympic organizers were undervaluing their product and, as chairman of the I.O.C.’s television and marketing committee from 1983 to 2001, he dragged the games into the big-money era by negotiating richer deals with multinationals like Visa, McDonald’s, Kodak and Coca-Cola. In 1980, the I.O.C. got about $100 million for its TV rights; for the Beijing Games in 2008, the total will be nearly $2 billion.

    Pound was, as well, a trusted adviser to and protégé of Juan Antonio Samaranch, the former I.O.C. president who personally chose him for the WADA post. Samaranch, a minor official in the Fascist regime of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and a canny politician within the Olympic movement, appointed Pound in 1999 to lead an internal investigation into bribe-taking and the awarding of the 2002 Winter Games to Salt Lake City. That task almost certainly ended any realistic chance Pound had of succeeding his mentor as president; Pound finished third in the election for the post in 2001.

    Andrew Jennings, a British investigative journalist who has written three books on the International Olympic Committee, told me he believes Pound so valued his place within the I.O.C.’s inner circle that he abided the group’s questionable ways of doing business until Samaranch cast him in the role of reformer. “He’s not corrupt,” Jennings says. “He’s not seedy. He’s too classy for that. But Dick sat very happily with this ragbag of European princes and second-rate royalty.”

    Jennings says Pound “did very well at giving sports away to commercial interests” and, by making the games vastly bigger and the money available to athletes more plentiful, thereby increased temptation and cheating. “The sponsor money brought the doping,” he claims, adding that it also financed the lavish travels and perks of I.O.C. members. Craig Masback, C.E.O. of USA Track and Field and a frequent target of Pound’s, says that “it seems logical that with more money, there is more temptation to make the tragic decision to cheat.” But he adds that it may be too pat to equate the money and drugs. “There was plenty of doping before there was a big financial incentive,” Masback says.

    Pound, not surprisingly, disputes that more money begat more doping. He argues that increased revenues made sport more inclusive by enabling the I.O.C. to make grants to athletic federations in poorer nations. And if the I.O.C. is a jet-setting social club, underwritten by sponsorship money, Pound, by his own and other accounts, has never been a big part of it. While other I.O.C. members hobnobbed at Olympic venues, he says he spent “18 hours a day in a tent, baby-sitting sponsors.”

    For all his quotability, Pound is not particularly gregarious and can even be socially awkward. “He’s warm,” says Cobbett, his law partner. “He’s pleasant. He’s not aloof. But he’s not going to work a room.”

    Pound says that by leading the Salt Lake City probe, he “saved” Samaranch and, by extension, preserved the Olympic brand. “The reason the sponsors didn’t bail is because I said we would fix the problem.”

    WADA, of course, is also very much about preserving the Olympic brand. Sponsors want to associate with an idealized, “Chariots of Fire” view of sport, not the doped version. Even when Olympic athletes test positive, Pound says, “it oddly enough adds to the luster of the Olympic brand. Even though we don’t always get it right” — by this he means the fight for drug-free sport — “people understand and respect that we are trying, and that’s what separates us from the N.F.L. and N.B.A. and others.”

    WADA is a bureaucratic dynamo — an organization that in a very short time has extended its tentacles across the globe, spawned regional anti-doping organizations, created the anti-doping code and, mainly through Pound himself, broadcast a strong message that doping is risky. Violators do stand a chance of being discovered and disciplined. The Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative steroids case, which led to the suspension of the elite sprinters Tim Montgomery and Kelli White — and cast further suspicion on the slugger Barry Bonds — was first cracked open at a WADA-accredited lab in Los Angeles.

    In the previous era of doping, until the fall of the Berlin Wall, cheating tended to be sponsored by governments and inspired by nationalism — most notably in the systemic doping of the East Germans. Current doping is driven more by economics and organized on the Balco model: a loose confederation of athletes and coaches, sometimes representing various nations and sports. Anti-doping officials, Pound among them, assume there are other Balcos out there, hidden from view.

    What constitutes unfair enhancement for the purpose of athletic achievement — as opposed to, say, the latest kinds of training — is clearer to Pound than it is to some others. He says he can discern (if not always exactly define) what violates “the spirit of sport.” He told me at one point: “It’s like they used to say about pornography. You know it when you see it.” He says “artificial” methods should not be introduced into training, and he expresses a deep concern for health: no one, he says, should have to be “a chemical stockpile” in order to compete.

    The specificity of WADA’s list of banned substances — hundreds of steroids, stimulants, beta blockers, masking agents and other compounds — tends to make the whole anti-doping endeavor look tidier than it really is. Weight and endurance training, strictly speaking, enhance performance, yet nearly everyone would agree that they fall within the spirit of sport. But what about scientific approaches to nutrition? And all those vitamins and nutritional supplements that athletes gobble by the handful — believing (or hoping) that they are performance enhancers?

    Or to consider an example that WADA has recently struggled with — what about simulated high-altitude training that boosts the production of red blood cells? Some athletes are lucky enough to live at altitude; for years, others with the means to do so have traveled to train at altitude; and lately, a small number have taken to living and sleeping in hermetically sealed tents or rooms that simulate high-altitude conditions, what WADA calls “artificially induced hypoxic chambers.” Pound has been troubled by them, considering them, at best, “tacky.” The WADA executive board declined for now to bar them at its most recent meeting last fall, deciding instead to circulate a letter warning of possible health hazards associated with the chambers.

    Pound, though, only rarely gets bogged down in the loftier questions. He’s a man who identifies a challenge and puts his head down and works. There’s a tax code. There can be a drug code.

    “Who is not braced for the first renegade human clone?” Joel Garreau asks in his book “Radical Evolution.” Garreau argues that the next frontier of technology will be aimed inward, toward human enhancement. This is Pound’s real challenge: The future. Pound’s wife, Julie Keith, a well-regarded short-story writer, says that her husband likes to “fix things” — but you can’t fix what is not yet clearly in view, least of all with bluster and high-impact quotes.

    Garreau’s book sounds like really far-out science fiction, but lots of cutting-edge medicine — from cochlear implants that allow the deaf to hear to retinal implants that allow the blind to see to nervous-system hookups that allow people to directly control their artificial limbs — would have seemed just as far-fetched a few decades ago. Given such advances, a current Defense Department research project to build “the metabolically dominant soldier,” a warrior who can “run at Olympic sprint speeds for 15 minutes on one breath of air,” hardly seems preposterous. The same goes for a “pain vaccine” that will block pain and inflammation for 30 days or drugs that will allow soldiers to fight for a week without sleep and still make good decisions.

    Much of the research Garreau uncovered is from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a longtime incubator of innovation, including a precursor of the Internet. One Darpa researcher refers to himself as a “combat zoologist.” Another, the leader of the metabolically enhanced soldier project, told Garreau, “My measure of success for this is that the I.O.C. bans everything that we do.”

    The references to athletics and the I.O.C. are telling. The ultimate in physical enhancement is to go beyond known current limits. Elite athletes are acutely aware of those limits, because they bump up against them daily. At some point no amount of training makes them stronger, faster or better able to endure long distances.

    The most advanced medical research, including gene therapy, exists to help severely compromised people, those with Parkinson’s, diabetes, various muscle-wasting diseases; but the physical elites, those trying to push beyond the upper limits, often seem as desperate for them. Still, it’s hard to disagree with Ramez Naam, who argues in “More Than Human” that researchers should not put brakes on their work because some might misuse it. “Scientists cannot draw a clear line between healing and enhancing,” Naam writes.

    About four years ago, Pound became aware that a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, H. Lee Sweeney, was changing the genetic structure of mice to create supermice with greatly enhanced musculature, which is not lost as they age. The research is intended to help those with muscular dystrophy, but Sweeney has received e-mail messages and calls from weight lifters, bodybuilders and other athletes and coaches — in one case, from the coach of a high-school wrestling team — wanting to know how to adapt the technology for performance enhancement.

    When Sweeney and other scientists told Pound it was possible — although not demonstrably safe — for an enterprising chemist to appropriate the published research for athletic purposes, Pound challenged the researchers to create a test that would detect this particular form of gene doping. I heard Pound, in a speech at Princeton last fall, tell an audience that such a test was “close.” Sweeney, who consults for WADA’s gene-doping panel, agrees that progress is being made but says that Pound may be overstating matters.

    “They’re giving out grants, and those doing the work are making progress on showing what kind of changes would occur,” Sweeney explains. “But none of this convinced me that these changes are not what you would see with training. All of the tests have been done on sedentary animals. That’s not the right study. You need an animal that is in training.”

    The scientists Pound expects to devise tests for any new enhancements are, generally, the same ones doing the research on them — for purposes of curing the sick. They’re pretty busy. Pound is never going to have more than a small part of their attention.

    And even as WADA tries to figure out how to detect whether athletes are using the latest methods of performance enhancement, ever newer research is coming on line — not off-in-the-future stuff from Darpa, but knowledge and techniques that can be applied now. For example, Sweeney says he is currently experimenting with a myostatin inhibitor in dogs; because myostatin puts the brakes on IGF-1, a protein that promotes muscle growth, when you inhibit or turn off the myostatin, the IGF-1 continues to do its work, and dogs get bigger.

    Sweeney says he hopes this science might one day help those with muscle-wasting diseases, but it is not close to being considered safe for human use. Still, it could probably be adapted for athletic enhancement even more easily than the experiments that created the supermice. And the research has all been published. “I don’t think WADA considers that anyone could be doing this yet, but they sell the scientific community short if they assume that,” Sweeney told me. “There are serious heart risks associated with this, but athletes, as far as I can tell, don’t care.”

    Sport everywhere is broken down into divisions: you play in the big leagues or Triple A. With Manchester United in the English Premier League or three rungs down with Notts County. John Hoberman, the University of Texas professor and the author of “Testosterone Dreams,” is among a growing number of thinkers who envision, at some point, another way of dividing up sport: the doped and the undoped. He’s not looking forward to it; he just says it’s inevitable.

    “The whole reality of elite sport is that it’s vulnerable to doping,” Hoberman says. “The N.F.L. is a ticking time bomb. That’s been a Pound topic. He’s been a scold to Selig,” meaning Bud Selig, Major League Baseball’s commissioner. “Good for him. We need that. But I would say to him: the people who you want to idealize are not cooperating in very large numbers. And you know what? When you look at the historical record, they were never terribly interested in the first place.”

    What Hoberman, who calls himself a doping historian, means is that athletes have always looked for any edge — going back to the ancient Greeks, who ate mushrooms and dried figs to gain a perceived energy boost before competition. Cyclists, as recently as a half-century ago, were using strychnine, which is a stimulant as well as a poison. Victor Conte, the Balco mastermind, has said that the sprinter Tim Montgomery told him that if he could win an Olympic gold medal, “it wouldn’t matter if I died right on the other side of the finish line.”

    Pound knows that some people believe he is naïvely engaged in an unwinnable fight; he’s just not sure what they expect him to do. “What do you say?” he responds. “It’s too complicated, too big, so let’s just give up?” To simply permit unfettered doping, he says, is not a solution. “You could look at them as just gladiators, these big cartoon characters, but that’s somebody’s kid out there. What if your kid had to do that just to play high-school ball?”

    Pound told a freshman seminar at Princeton that WADA was “created under Swiss law.” I don’t think the students cared too much about that, but it is the sort of thing that’s important to Pound: rules, and a structure that encodes them. Maybe what Pound has put in place — WADA, the anti-doping code, the long list of banned substances — will hold for only another decade or two. But he is determined to keep up the fight for as long as possible.

    “Here’s the deal,” he says. “The shot-put weighs this much. The race is so many laps long. You can’t hollow out your shot-put and make it 12 pounds instead of 16. You don’t start before the gun. Run 11 laps instead of 12. And part of the deal is don’t use these drugs. It’s kind of an affirmation when you show up at the starting line. You are making an affirmation that you are playing the game the way it is supposed to be played.”

    Michael Sokolove, a contributing writer for the magazine, is working on a book about women’s sports after Title IX and the high rate of injuries among young female athletes.

     

    Snowbound Neverland in Colorado

    Kevin Maloney for The New York Times

    A skier slides a rail at Echo Mountain Park in Colorado.

    January 5, 2007
    Ski Report

    Snowbound Neverland in Colorado

    SAM BUCKMELTER, who is 10 years old and lives in Denver, has spent most of his waking life studying the vainglorious snowboard acrobatics of the Great Ones — riders like Danny Kass, Jeremy Jones and Andreas Wiig— whose names and sponsors’ logos are etched in the margins of his fifth-grade notebooks.

    Sam aspires to ride with the goggle-tanned gods who throw slow-motion 900s off flesh-eating cliffs and drop out of helicopters to outride thundering avalanches. Given his dream, the path was clear. Sam convinced his parents to buy him a season pass to the new Neverland of freestyle stunt pilots, Echo Mountain Park, near Evergreen, Colo.

    Perched at 10,500 feet with wraparound views of the frosted Rockies, Echo is the nation’s first winter resort devoted exclusively to the contagious urge to “go huge” and “get your switch-front boardslides dialed.” There are no gently groomed slopes, no wide cruiser runs, not even a single mogul field. Echo is 100 percent terrain park — 50 acres of jumps, rails, boxes, picnic tables, stairs, mailboxes and pipe. With a good-times agenda, Echo aims to be the X Games proving ground for the young and indestructible.

    Echo, 35 miles west of Denver, bodaciously bills itself as “the most exciting place to be with snow pants on.” So on opening weekend in late November Sam Buckmelter came to guinea-pig the claim.

    He and an army of bandana-masked snow desperadoes — freestyle skiers and snowboarders jacked up on SoBe Full Throttle — got their shred on until 9 p.m. under lights that blazed like a Swedish solstice. They pinwheeled across monster gaps and surfed curvaceous dragon rails in “steezy” hood ornament poses while Echo’s jukebox rocked the freestyle world with their favorite thrasher tunes.

    Few parents could be found on the Echo slopes — the energy, aesthetics, acoustics and entire ethos of the place is aimed at kids. Echo’s owner, Jerry Petitt, said he hadn’t built the park to please everyone. He has carved out a narrow, vigorous niche within the ski and snowboard market and is raising his newborn resort with a lot of parenting advice from the very 12- to 29-year-olds he hopes to serve. “It’s nothing against places like Aspen, but the young people we consulted early on told us they can’t afford to pay $75 for a lift ticket or $14 for a buffalo burger,” Mr. Petitt said. “What kept coming back to us was: ‘Keep it inexpensive. Make it for us.’ ”

    The lift tickets at Echo are priced for teenagers on a lawn-mowing budget, and the cuisine is spartan even by cafeteria standards: energy bars and nuke-able burritos from vending machines.

    Mr. Petitt bought the Echo property in 2003 for a mere $700,000. It was just a small defunct ski hill in the midst of a wooded 240-acre lot then. “I called my wife and said, ‘We’ve just bought a ski area!’ which went over really well,” he said.

    Still a passionate skier at 61, Mr. Petitt invested $5 million to develop the first 50 acres into a terrain park, hiring Planet Snow Design, the company that built the superpipe for the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games, to finesse the flow on each slope. They mixed boxes, stairs and rail sequences on one run, a medley of jumps and rocketing “kickers” on another. For rookies laying the foundations for their melon grabs and switch noseslides, they installed a “progression center.”

    “We’ve got to let our riders create us,” said Eric Petitt, 30, Jerry’s son and the architect of Echo’s guerrilla marketing campaign, which focuses on an interactive Web site with a “rant” page where kids weigh in on what they want Echo to be. He hopes to make Echo a year-round park, implementing the ideas generated in Echo’s chat rooms — rock climbing, mountain biking, all-terrain skateboarding, even zip-lining.

    “We’re not going to build any million-dollar homes or stone-and-timber lodges strewn with bearskin rugs,” said Doug Donovan, 34, the general manager, surveying his singularly young clientele swigging Red Bull while recharging by the Xbox at the base lodge. “It’s going to have a rock concert feel to it every day.”

    Echo’s architecture makes creative use of pre-fab industrial design, with corrugated steel and glass jutting out at crisp angles. Underground snowboarding and freestyle ski brands like 4frnt, Unity and Capita are stickered liberally on chair backs, tables and garbage cans. The walls are hung with artwork by Denver area rider-artists — a Japanese woodblock print of Mount Fuji with a snowboarder flying through the air, psychedelic abstracts painted on skateboards.

    “We looked at the industry and realized it’s impossible to build a new Vail,” Mr. Donovan said. “Their model is a giant real estate play more than anything. But if you’re looking to make money on the slopes, you build a skateboard park on snow, close to a metropolitan area.”

    All the growth over the last five years, Mr. Donovan argued, has come from snowboarders, freestyle skiers and the terrain parks that reel them in. Conglomerates like Intrawest, Vail Corporation and American Skiing Company have gobbled up full-service winter resorts where affluent baby boomers spend as much time shopping at Ralph Lauren and dining on corn-fed elk as they do out on the blue and green groomer runs. That has opened the door for smaller, easy-to-get-to day slopes to attract young, underserved locals with more chutzpah and less cash.

    BEFORE starting Echo, Mr. Donovan and Jerry Petitt looked at a trio of resorts in California — Bear Mountain, Boreal and Mountain High — that converted their beginner and intermediate slopes into terrain parks and halfpipes over the last several years, tripling their number of visitors per acre. Other small-scale ski slopes like Mountain Creek Resort in Vernon, N.J., followed suit, and megaresorts from Killington to Mammoth dialed up the wattage on their trickster terrain. But Echo is the only resort to be built expressly for baby boomers’ kids — “echo boomers” like Sam Buckmelter.

    Figuring prominently in Sam Buckmelter’s's personal pantheon of slope stylists are Pat Milbery and Chad Otterstrom. Both are professional shredders who came to Echo on Thanksgiving weekend to impart nuggets of launching and looping wisdom at a Pro Series Camp. “There was nothing like Echo when I was a kid,” lamented Mr. Milbery, 22. “I learned how to ride by building jumps on the hill behind our house. This place is an incubator for the future of the sport — it’s going to spawn bazillions of talented young riders who’ll invent moves we’ve never dreamed of!”

    “Yeah, if I’m still in one piece by the time I’m as old as you, Milbery!” Sam Buckmelter said as he hiked up the hill. “Right now I’m learning to pop off of jumps with steeze” — style — “but one day, I’m going to throw something big off of that.”

    That is a 1961 Tucker Sno-Cat. Back in the day, it groomed this former mom-and-pop one-rope-tow hill. Echo’s staff painted it an electric slime green and recycled it as the platform for a house rail, a trapezoid of logs with steel rails embedded in the tops. While the campers were working on their shred cred, Echo was christening the Sno-Cat rail by holding a jibbing contest (jibbing being the term for riding gantlets of obstacles embedded in the slopes) sponsored by Rome, a low-profile snowboard and apparel company with the advertising mantra “Corrosion of the Corporate.”

    Ten brothers of the board were swarming around the Sno-Cat, taking turns shredcasting the contest with a handheld mike.

    “Next rider steppin’ up is Lance Machado out of Breckenridge, Co-lo-ra-do,” one brother drawled with snow gangsta elocution. “This jibber is comin’ in fast, firin’ it up, takin’ it air … borne! Pullin’ a corked three outta the hat.” (Read: helicoptering 360 degrees on a tipped axis.) “That, my friends, is Lance-the-Ripper!”

    Mr. Machado, the stringy 19-year-old who won the contest, favors a sartorial style borrowed from pioneer punk rockers like Iggy Pop and the Ramones — skinny jeans and tight striped T-shirts — placing him in a sectarian group within the soul-patched, hip-hop-influenced snowboard tribe: the sub-subculture sometimes derogatively labeled Emos. “I always hear, ‘Are those pants painted on or something?’ from what I call the ‘food court gangstas,’ ” Mr. Machado said.

    The politics of shred fashion are murky. But there is a shared ethic behind Mr. Machado’s punk-chic and the standard saggy pants and XXL parkas: Both are anti-brand and, if possible, label averse. It’s a culture of irreverent individualism to which the Echo design team is acutely sensitive.

    Loud banners advertising overexposed corporate brands (Burton, Salomon, Oakley) are shunned here. Only the Echo insignia is stamped on the park’s centerpiece, a 23-foot-high structure shaped like a Stomp Rocket called Knuckles that riders and skiers slide up, flip off and soar over.

    “Without a doubt, there’ll be some carnage off of it,” said Marc Vitelli, who helped design Knuckles. “For those who dare ride up it, it’s game on — anything can happen!” he shouted as a twin-tip skier popped off the hip, arcing backward, arms outspread, a snowboarding Greg Louganis tracing the sky with his fingertips. Seconds later, the rider lawn-chaired (collapsed) on impact.

    “Insufficient rotation” was Mr. Vitelli’s critique, though he whooped approvingly. The only way to learn how to stomp tricks, he said, is by going huge and embracing the occasional yard sale (a total wipeout that litters gear all over the slope).

    Alas, there are no heated pools at Echo to soak battered body parts at the end of the day, and in fact no overnight facilities at this stage. “Unless you want to crash on my couch,” offered Mr. Vitelli, who lives in Evergreen. Eventually, Echo may add a youth hostel-style bunkhouse to spare its customers multiple laps driving up and down the steep, sometimes treacherous 12-mile road between Evergreen and the resort.

    But Echo has its advantages. Set in the front range of the Rockies, it typically gets late snows that can last until May. And unlike most Colorado resorts, it isn’t on Forest Service land, so there’s no regulated close date. Most riders won’t complain about the drive back and forth from Denver, since they’ll completely bypass the I-70 parking lot of weekend skier traffic, and pay less than half the price of tickets at the ski-tropolises on the other side of the conga line.

    Still, Echo isn’t likely to spark a flood of émigrés from stodgy megaresorts. But for the Sam Buckmelters who are coming up at a time when freestyle skiing and boarding are gaining legitimacy, Echo could be the fuse that lights the next revolution in snow sliding.

    “I’m stoked,” Sam said.

    VISITOR INFORMATION

    ECHO MOUNTAIN PARK (303-325-7347; www.echomountainpark.com), 35 miles from Denver, is open daily from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Lift tickets are $25 on weekdays, $35 on weekends (less if you buy in “six-packs” or “three-packs”) and $20 after 4 p.m.

    Boards, boots and twin-tip skis can be rented from Echo’s Garage, the park’s retail and rental shop, for $25 a day.

    Events are held every weekend, like the Shut Up and Snowskate competition on Jan. 6 and the Armashreddin’ Colorado versus Colorado State battle on Jan. 20. The Sports Monster League on Wednesday nights is billed as the first social snow-sports league in Colorado.


     

    Mr. Rock ’n’ Roll Goes to Congress

    January 7, 2007    
    Keith Bedford for The New York Times

    John Hall before an appearance on “The Colbert Report.”

    Mr. Hall, center, with Orleans.

    January 7, 2007

    Mr. Rock ‘n’ Roll Goes to Congress

    AT the peak of their popularity, the 1970s band Orleans was touring 10 months a year, performing their big hits “Still the One” and “Dance With Me.” But John Hall, the band’s guitarist, wasn’t content to stick to the bouncy tunes and lyrics about sweet romance. He also used the stage to lecture audiences about the dangers of plutonium production.

    “He would take the liberty of getting on the soapbox at a lot of concerts and go on a bit about nuclear power,” said Larry Hoppen, the bass guitarist for Orleans. “But you have to understand it in the context of the ’70s, with the Nixon thing and the nuke thing.

    “In retrospect, it was uncomfortable sometimes, but it was never so bad that a manager said, ‘Hey, you’ve got to cut this stuff out.’ “

    Mr. Hall’s rock friends became used to the policy wonk within. Jackson Browne remembers him talking politics backstage while packing up his guitar.

    Mr. Hall was one of many political activists from that era. But when he was sworn in as a congressman on Thursday, he became the first bona fide rock ‘n’ roll musician in the House of Representatives. (Sonny Bono did not play an instrument.)

    The ratty T-shirts and the long hair are gone, and the bare-chested album covers have given way to dark suits, conservative ties and wingtip shoes. When Mr. Hall, 58, unfolds his lanky frame out of his Subaru Outback, he looks corporate, and when he speaks, the words spew in paragraphs on topics like the importance of renewable energy and raising the minimum wage.

    But then there is that moment he plays air guitar to illustrate how facile he is with his left hand. And there are the first name references to Bonnie, Jackson and Pete (Raitt, Browne and Seeger).

    “John somehow managed to keep the idealism that so many people had in the ’60s and ’70s, while at the same time mastering a kind of pragmatism,” said Mr. Browne, who collaborated with Mr. Hall in the studio and in an antinuclear movement in the 1970s.

    Mr. Hall, a Democrat, defeated Sue W. Kelly, the Republican who had held the seat for six terms, to represent the 19th Congressional District of New York, which stretches from the Connecticut line, through the Hudson Valley, across the Catskills and to the Pennsylvania border.

    His inauguration ceremony was attended by his daughter, parents, brother and other supporters; afterward his New York delegation colleagues Nita Lowey and Elliot Engel stopped by. That day, he also helped elect Nancy Pelosi as the first female speaker of the House and tackled ethics rules and legislation.

    Other entertainers have been elected to office — Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger — but most have been Republicans. Mr. Hall is as liberal as the “Bring Them Home” ribbon decal on his car suggests, campaigning not only for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq but also for universal health care and reduced dependence on foreign oil.

    Even in a Congress elected to bring change, his positions are a step to the left of many representatives, and he is a relative novice to politics, his previous electoral experience limited to winning a seat on a local school board and in the Ulster County Legislature. There, he helped defeat a proposal for a trash-burning facility in Saugerties, near Woodstock — a victory that some say hardly merits election to Congress.

    “John was in a band and helped fight a dump, but there’s a big difference between stopping a landfill and fighting issues like terrorism,” said Robert T. Aiello, a Republican Ulster County legislator. “I wish him the best, but he absolutely has his work cut out for him.”

    Ms. Raitt, who organized Musicians for Safe Energy (MUSE) with Mr. Hall in the 1970s, said that early on, the group relied on his ability to think and speak on his feet.

    “John was the brains in the outfit,” she said. “While we were all educated and informed and motivated, in terms of explaining the nuts and bolts, John was always very intellectually astute and articulate, as well as being incredibly facile on the guitar and very plugged into that creative muse.”

    And even as he was writing tunes with stick-in-the-head melodies and sappy lyrics, Mr. Hall was turning out songs about the environment — “Power” — and the economy — “Plastic Money.”

    “His big hits are very sweet, but he’s also really written songs about what he believes in,” Mr. Browne said. “It will be interesting to see what creative power he’ll be able to bring to the political business.”

    Mr. Hall was advised to play down his past in the campaign. He rarely appeared in anything less formal than a suit. His statements were deliberate and careful.

    Which makes it hard to explain how he ended up singing a duet of “Dance With Me” with Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central. In the segment, which ran a few weeks before the election, Mr. Colbert teased Mr. Hall about how pleased he must have been that President George W. Bush had used “Still the One” as a theme song for his 2004 reelection campaign. Mr. Hall said that he had a lawyer draft a formal complaint.

    Mr. Colbert persisted, saying what a fitting song it was for the president because, “we’re still having fun and he’s still the one.” A few minutes later, Mr. Colbert asked his guest to harmonize. Mr. Hall demurred, saying that his advisers had told him to stick to political issues. But when Mr. Colbert chided him, “I say go with what you know,” Mr. Hall was soon singing. The clip, widely circulated on YouTube, helped make the long-shot race competitive.

    Mr. Hall, who won a crowded primary for the Democratic nomination, began with a campaign fund of $57,000 to Mrs. Kelly’s $900,000. But having famous friends didn’t hurt.

    “I didn’t have Exxon or Mobil, but I had Jackson and Bonnie and Pete,” Mr. Hall said. Their concerts in the Hudson Valley area not only raised money — Mr. Browne’s netted $100,000 in two days — but also generated publicity.

    Mr. Hall, who is usually serious and low-key, became emotional when talking about the relationship between music and politics.

    “Jackson sang a song, ‘Waiting Here for Every Man,’ ” Mr. Hall said, his voice catching as he referred to Mr. Browne’s “For Everyman,” “which I remember from his first album, a song that struck me as being about the lethargy and apathy and fatalism of most Americans while they wait for someone to please sort out this mess.”

    The campaign was intense. At one point, an unsigned flier circulated with the message: “John Hall, wrong for America.” It featured Mr. Hall from his rock days, long-haired and bare-chested.

    The day before the election, voters were swamped with automated calls featuring President Bush, who urged them to re-elect Mrs. Kelly.

    “I was going to say thank you,” Mr. Hall said of the phone campaign. “Of all the campaign blunders, it was the most significant.”

    Mrs. Kelly did not reply to messages seeking a response.

    Now Mr. Hall has gone to Washington. A few days after his election, he attended new-member orientation, with lectures on everything from staffing district offices to finding housing. The new members picked up tips like: If you find a pair of comfortable shoes, buy one pair for Washington and one for home.

    On a bus ride to one event, Mr. Hall compared notes about being well known with his fellow freshman Heath Shuler, a former professional football player.

    A few representatives asked him to sing with them, including Paul W. Hodes of New Hampshire, a fellow guitar player. He joked that the two could form a duo, Hall & Hodes — sounds like Hall & Oates, another popular ’70s singing group with whom Mr. Hall is often confused.

    Mr. Hall also spent a week at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, attending sessions that he described as “sobering.”

    In Washington, he has been assigned to the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.

    In some ways, the transition will be easier for him than for other new members. Mr. Hall is used to being a public figure and to traveling. He also has family in the Washington area, including his daughter, Sofi, who is studying for a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Maryland, and a brother, Jerry, a Jesuit priest who teaches at Catholic University. His parents live outside of Baltimore.

    Mr. Hall lives in Dover Plains with his wife, Pamela, a lawyer who, according to Mr. Browne, also plays a mean guitar.

    Between orientation sessions and apartment shopping, he has been back in his district, on “listening tours.” At a recent holiday fair in Putnam County, he segued from discussing post-traumatic stress syndrome with a police officer who had been at the World Trade Center to wetlands management with a woman from a conservation group, and stopped to buy a T-shirt with the message “The One with the Most Guitars Wins ” for his wife.

    Mr. Hoppen said that people might underestimate his former partner.

    “People may figure he’s just a rock star and he lucked out because of the general tide, and they’re wrong,” Mr. Hoppen said.

    Ms. Raitt said she sees him in the mold of Bill Bradley, the former New Jersey senator. “Of all the musicians I know that have been activists,” she said, “the best suited for the job of actually going to Congress is John.”

    Mr. Browne’s take: “A guitar player for Congress, it makes all the sense in the world to me. Musicians organize the world in certain ways. John’s idealism comes from the same place his music does. It comes from joy.”

    Still, the night before his election, Mr. Hall said, he and his wife rented the movie “The Candidate,” starring Robert Redford. “When he wins, he says, ‘What do we do now?’ ” Mr. Hall said.

    “You get the feeling, the look, the personality, the few catchphrases, the buzzwords, the talking points. But then you have to get down to the complexity of actually having to govern.”


    Today’s Papers

    Benchmark Flashback
    By Daniel Politi
    Posted Monday, Jan. 8, 2007, at 5:33 AM E.T.

    The New York Times leads with word that, once again, the White House is talking “benchmarks” when it comes to Iraq. The new strategy that President Bush will propose will allegedly include “a series of goals” the Iraqi government will have to meet by a specified time. The Washington Post leads with Iraqi Health Ministry data that reveals 22,950 Iraqi civilians and police officers died violently last year. The Post emphasizes the huge difference between the first half of the year, when 5,640 Iraqi civilians and police officers were killed, and the second, which saw 17,310 violent deaths. The Wall Street Journal tops its worldwide newsbox with the Democratic lawmakers who went to the Sunday talk shows to discuss their views on Iraq and President Bush’s expected plan to ask for more troops. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi characterized Iraq as “complete chaos” and warned that if the president wants to add troops to the mission “he’s going to have to justify it.”

    USA Today leads with a look into how states are expanding their health-care coverage in order to try to reduce the number of uninsured. The federal government is now preoccupied with other matters, so states are starting to take the issue into their own hands. This all amounts to the biggest experiment with health policy since the 1980s, according to one expert. The Los Angeles Times leads locally with news that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will propose a $465 million cut in California’s welfare budget. Democrats vowed to fight the plan, which risks eliminating aid to “tens of thousands” of children.

    It should come as no surprise if talk of “benchmarks” and a “timetable” feels like déjà vu. After all, as the NYT is quick to point out, the Bush administration and the Iraqi government have agreed on timelines before, but nothing has come of them. The paper points out toward the end of the story that several of the benchmarks in the current plan were merely copied and pasted from an October list. Regardless, these benchmarks might be necessary to satisfy lawmakers from both parties who have made clear they want any escalation in troops to include specific goals for the Iraqi government. But what happens if the Iraqi government doesn’t meet the benchmarks? Administration officials wouldn’t discuss specific penalties. More to the point, if the United States really wanted to impose some sort of punishment (a big if), what kind of penalties are even possible? Short of threatening to abandon Iraq (something everyone would treat as a mere bluff at this point), what else is there?

    The Post got the data through an anonymous Health Ministry official, who was not authorized to release the information. The official also emphasized the figures are incomplete, which means the final toll could be higher. A spokesman for the Health Ministry denied the existence of these numbers, and some officials said the number is too big. At the beginning of the year, a figure released by the ministries of defense, health, and interior said the total number of violent deaths last year was 13,896. A U.N. report released in November said 28,000 civilians died violently in the first 10 months of 2006.

    Everybody mentions five more U.S. service members were killed in Iraq in recent days.

    Pelosi said Congress would not cut off funding for troops, but she did emphasize the White House will no longer have a “blank check.” Meanwhile, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, who confirmed he will be seeking the Democratic nomination for president in 2008, put a damper on hopes that Democrats could affect Iraq policy. Biden said it would be unconstitutional for Congress to “micromanage the war” after it had authorized the use of force. “As a practical matter, there’s no way to say, ‘Mr. President, stop.’ ” So, wait, according to the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, there’s nothing Congress can do about Iraq? If true, it definitely makes Pelosi’s threats sound emptier than they normally would. But is he right? Some views from experts might have helped to figure out the validity of his statements.

    Regardless of Biden’s feelings on constitutionality, he is planning on going forward with his extraordinarily original plan to solve the Iraq problem. Apparently, starting Tuesday, his committee will ask “experts from every perspective” what options remain in Iraq.

    All the papers mention a meeting reporters had with Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, who is the new American operational commander in Iraq and is in charge of day-to-day activities. Odierno didn’t reveal much information about Bush’s new plan, but he did emphasize that any new strategy that is designed to take control of Baghdad must involve coalition troops targeting both Shiite and Sunni neighborhoods. Odierno said up until now efforts have been too concentrated on Sunni areas. As the NYT emphasizes, Odierno also said it might take another “two or three years” before American and Iraqi troops gain control.

    The Post fronts a look at how most immigrants fighting deportation orders often do so without a lawyer. Although they have to present themselves to an immigration court, the government provides no legal counsel for the poor. In a related article, the Post goes inside with complaints that new anti-terrorism laws are being used to reject asylum applicants. Those who give “material support” to terrorist groups are being barred from seeking asylum, even if the “support” was given at gunpoint.

    If the story sounds familiar, that’s because on Dec. 22 the LAT fronted a very similar story. Besides having the same topic, both stories mention how “advocates for refugees” gave as examples a Colombian nurse who was forced to treat a guerrilla fighter and a woman in Liberia was forced to cook for rebels who killed her father, raped her, and occupied her home. If it’s such a widespread problem, there should be more compelling stories, no? The Post does have two other examples the LAT didn’t mention, but it does quote two of the same experts mentioned in the Times last month.

    The LAT and WP front results of a new study that seems to show some stem cells in human amniotic fluid have many of the same qualities as embryonic stem cells. These cells can be easily retrieved from a pregnant woman during routine checkups and would not involve using destroyed human embryos, which is a factor that has led some to oppose stem-cell research.

    Wesley K. Clark writes an op-ed in the Post in which he criticizes the plan to increase troop levels by 20,000 in Iraq. Clark emphasizes “we’ve never had enough troops in Iraq” and says that in Kosovo the United States had 40,000 troops for a population of 2 million. Using the same ratio, it would mean at least 500,000 troops should be in Iraq. Regardless, Clark insists the United States should focus on diplomacy in order to find a solution to the crisis. “The underlying problems are political, not military,” writes Clark.

    Shocking! … According to a new study by the Congressional Budget Office mentioned in the NYT, the ones who benefited most from Bush’s tax cuts were, wait for it, the very rich.

    Daniel Politi writes “Today’s Papers” for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.

     

    Saturday, January 06, 2007

    The Lover Who Always Stays

    Rupert Pole | b. 1919

    The Lover Who Always Stays

    Jill Krementz, (c) 2006. All rights reserved.

    Pole was persistent, which led to Nin’s double life.

    December 31, 2006
    Rupert Pole | b. 1919
     
    By SARA CORBETT

    If you believe, as the writer Anaïs Nin did, that life should be full of rich drama and inspired sex, then naturally you would be thrilled to board an elevator in a Manhattan apartment building in 1947 and encounter a staggeringly handsome young man. The fact that he is wearing a flamboyant, full-length coat of white leather and still sports a bashful smile only adds to his allure. And when you realize, upon introducing yourself, that the two of you are headed to the same cocktail party, it could seem that your fate is set. You are, after all, always looking for another lover.

    You spend the next hours perched beside him on a small sofa at the party, as Nin’s biographer Deirdre Bair would later recount, talking and talking and never once mentioning the fact that you are 44 years old and married. He is 28, regally tall and wears his dark hair in a low pompadour. “Danger!” you will write in your diary that night. “He is probably homosexual.”

    He is not homosexual. You learn this rather strenuously two days later, having invited him to dinner at the apartment you normally share with your husband. Your husband, a middle-aged banker named Hugo, is in Havana on business. The name of your new lover is Rupert Pole. He has the impression that you are divorced, and certainly there is no need to correct this. He himself is freshly divorced, a failed actor with pillowy lips and clear blue eyes, who until recently made his living singing and dancing on cruise ships. He plays the viola and studies astrology and is soon to go West, back to California, where he was born. He is good enough sexually to cause you to cancel your other assignations — there can be five in a week — to focus on him alone. You will later say he is the most potent man you’ve ever known.

    And so. When he goes West, you go, too, climbing into his 1941 Ford roadster dressed all in purple. Rupert wears a Tyrolean hat and a wool scarf. He smokes a pipe as he drives. What you have told your husband — a man you feel warmly toward but who does not satisfy you in bed — is that you are road-tripping with a dear female friend.

    It would be wrong to say that Rupert Pole is never angry, never jealous, that he sits passively in the roadster while you pop into the Denver post office to pick up general-delivery mail sent by the lovers and friends you left behind. You fight a little, especially after he is forced to wait as you write back. But there is something in Rupert, some glimmer of tolerance, some unquestioning abidance with how things are, that you are beginning to appreciate. When you reach the golden desert of the West, you make love outside on a sunbaked boulder.

    From now on, your life goes more or less like this: Six weeks with one man, followed by six weeks with the other. On the East Coast, Hugo is wealthy enough to pay for your manicures and trips to your analyst, and together you take long vacations in Acapulco. But you tell Hugo that you yearn for the seclusion of the West, specifically for a small cabin in the scrubby mountains outside Pasadena, where you go to do your writing. He may presume that you are alone, but of course you are not: Rupert is now a forest ranger, and the cabin — a spartan affair owned by the Forest Service — is his station. Rupert ruins your manicures by making you scrub floors, haul water and mend socks, but you love him, at least in six-week stretches.

    He believes you when you say you must return to New York for meetings with editors. He believes you when you invent magazine assignments — when, indeed, you invent whole magazines — that keep you on the East Coast. And when you tell him that you are unreachable, staying with a friend who has no phone, he believes that too. You go back and forth and back again. Up in the mountains, people start calling you “Mrs. Anaïs Pole.”

    He begs you to marry him, but you put him off. Every day you are at Rupert’s house, you send a letter to Hugo, describing the loneliness of the writing life. When in New York, you write Rupert long missives complaining about how hard you are working as a journalist. You pen those letters from bed, as Hugo’s maid delivers breakfast on a tray. You have told so many lies now that you have to keep them written down in a notebook. You have two men who won’t stop believing you, and somehow that has made it impossible to leave either one.

    Why won’t Rupert give up? You assume that his strapping body and pretty face will attract some younger woman who’ll stay full time. But Rupert seems to want only you. His life is a happy feedback loop: he works his job, spends the evenings reading Time magazine, waits for you to come home. His faith wears you down.

    And so. In a dusty little town in the Arizona desert in 1955, as quietly as you can, you marry Rupert Pole. For the next 11 years you are the wife of two men, on two coasts. You liken yourself to a trapeze artist, swinging from one husband to the other. The lies have multiplied to the point that you now keep them in a file you refer to as “the lie box.” It has two sections: one labeled New York, one Los Angeles.

    Rupert leaves forestry to teach middle school in Los Angeles. Hoping that you’ll stop traveling so much, he builds a house for you, with a stone fireplace, an outdoor writing table and a pool where you both swim naked. He grows a beer belly but remains ruthlessly good-looking and hungry — not just for sex but for sex with you.

    Eventually, you tell him everything. Your body is weak from all the flights; the weight of the lies is making you old. Also, you are becoming famous as a writer, and you’ve got two men claiming your royalties on their tax returns. You unload the full truth on Rupert rather than Hugo, knowing that if Rupert hasn’t left you yet, he probably won’t now. You annul your marriage to Rupert and remain married to Hugo. After all these years, you owe Hugo something — a warped form of loyalty, perhaps, or at least access to your new wealth.

    Rupert takes it all in without wavering, perhaps understanding that in losing the marriage, he has won something bigger. When slowly you start to die of cancer, you finally resolve to live full time in California because you are too weak, really, to do otherwise. On days you wish to speak to Hugo, Rupert picks up the phone and dials the number for you, allowing you to preserve the myth of your marriage. He gives you injections, takes you to the doctor, and when you crave release, he gently carries you into the glittering pool behind the house so that you may swim.

    When you die, The Los Angeles Times obituary will remember you as the wife of Rupert Pole; The New York Times lists your widower as Hugh Guiler. But it is Rupert you’ve named as your literary executor, the guardian of 35,000 pages of your diaries, your fullest version of the truth. And it is Rupert who rents a small plane to fly over the coast near Santa Monica, finding a sparkling cove over which he sets your ashes adrift. When Hugo dies in 1985, eight years after you, Rupert honors his last wishes by scattering his ashes over the same waters. And now that Rupert is gone as well, having stayed on quietly in the house he built for you, having honored you by publishing new, less censored versions of your diaries — you would hope the same for him. You would hope that somebody flies what’s left of Rupert Pole up over that sparkling cove, over those billions of mingling sea molecules, and finds exactly the right moment to let him go.


     

    Wendy Wasserstein | b. 1950 d.2006

    Wendy Wasserstein | b. 1950

    Everybody’s Wendy

    Jill Krementz, (c) 2006. All rights reserved.

    Wendy Wasserstein at home in 1997.

    December 31, 2006
    Wendy Wasserstein | b. 1950

    Everybody’s Wendy

    Along with their own grief, what those who knew and loved Wendy Wasserstein close up couldn’t get over was how so many strangers knew and loved her from afar. There was no big-time playwright, perhaps no celebrity, more approachable than Wendy. She was incapable of turning away from the fan who stopped her on the street. She would show up for any obligatory cause, cultural event or party, if only someone asked. She was everybody’s Wendy. Everybody who met her, everyone who was touched by her writing, thought they knew her intimately. This is not something that would be said about David Mamet or Edward Albee.

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    As news spread of her death, the strangers who had felt so proprietary about Wendy buttonholed her friends and family in person and by phone, letter and e-mail with their own outpourings of loss and vivid memories of chance encounters. André Bishop, the producer whose career and life had intertwined with Wendy’s since their early days in the theater, was almost overwhelmed by the size of the crowd that turned up for the memorial he staged in March at Lincoln Center‘s Vivian Beaumont Theater. (The overflow had to settle for a satellite broadcast at Juilliard.) The program included some of Wendy’s favorite actors performing scenes from her plays and some of her closest friends and artistic collaborators recalling her infectious humor and countless acts of generosity. Among Wendy’s many selfless works was the creation of a mentoring program that opened up New York’s theaters to public-high-school students who would otherwise be shut out.

    Yet what lingers most from the memorial these months later is the montage of home movies and photos at its end: Wendy hamming it up for the camera during her ostensibly cheerful middle-class childhood. Wendy, an uncommon woman among the Playwrights Horizons gang of men, preparing to conquer the New York theater from way West 42nd Street. Wendy, middle-aged, successful, a fixture of the establishment, yet still with that wide-open smile and ragamuffin’s wardrobe. And finally, Wendy in late-in-life parenthood, the single mother of Lucy Jane. The dramatic arc of the Wendy chronicles was a shapely three acts plus an epilogue, marred only by the abrupt fall of that tragic final curtain.

    And yet what haunts all these months later is this: There was something missing in those pictures, something that had fallen through the cracks. As Wendy knew better than anyone, the most revealing, and heartbreaking, drama can often be found in what is not said.

    The Wendy Wasserstein who was always there for everybody (including me) at every crisis and celebration, the Wendy with that uproarious (yet musical) laugh and funny (yet never bitchy) dialogue for every fraught situation, the Wendy the whole world knew and adored was also an intensely private person who left many mysteries behind. Though she had countless circles of friends, the circles didn’t always overlap: her life was more compartmentalized than she let on. Though she had written a memorable memoir for The New Yorker about her personal and physiological journey to childbirth, the subject of her child’s paternity was strictly off-limits. Though it was apparent that she was ill for several years before her death, she hid the specifics and terminal gravity of her illness (lymphoma) until the endgame gave her away. By then she was out of reach of intimates who might have wanted to have a cognizant goodbye.

    After her death, her closest friends were left to compare notes and clues about what had gone unsaid. But we had no answers. Roy Harris, the devoted stage manager for many of Wendy’s plays, including her last, “Third,” spoke for many of us when he published a tender reminiscence that also acknowledged his anger “that she hadn’t allowed any of her friends to be a part of her final months.”

    As Roy wrote, dying was entirely Wendy’s “own business.” She was entitled to her decisions and her secrets. But the fact that she so successfully took so many of those secrets to the grave was a major revelation in itself. How could the most public artist in New York keep so much locked up? I don’t think I was the only friend who felt I had somehow failed to see Wendy whole. And who wondered if I had let her down in some profound way. I grieve as much for the Wendy I didn’t know as the Wendy I did.

    That Wendy I miss badly enough. We met just as her career as a playwright and mine as a drama critic were starting in earnest. Because of that journalistic conflict, I excused myself from reviewing her plays. But she was my loyal companion to other writers’ plays as I made my reviewing rounds in the 1980s. She’d say yes to all my invitations, no matter how suspect the title of that night’s production (“Moose Murders” included). She was not without her own closeted talent for unsparing drama criticism. At one long-forgotten fiasco, we returned from intermission to discover a “real” swimming pool displayed on stage, with an invalid perched in a wheelchair at its edge. Wendy turned to me with a conspiratorial grin. “Honey,” she said in that husky tone that signaled a punch line was on the way, “by the end of this play that woman in the wheelchair will be in that pool.” (We were not to be disappointed.)

    If I had reviewed Wendy’s plays, I imagine I would have said what her many critical admirers did: She was a voice for the boomer generation whose wit could not disguise the seriousness of her often frankly political passions. Even the plays that didn’t succeed had their indelible scenes of sharp, articulate outrage as her heroines took stock of a world that promised women many more choices, in love as well as in life, than it actually delivered.

    In retrospect, Wendy’s public image, that of a cuddly, always-merry Wendy doll, undersold just how tough her writing was and just how tough she was. She wasn’t from a family overstuffed with high-achieving business executives for nothing. A woman of her generation didn’t have her career in the theater, especially the commercial theater, without fighting for it.

    The plays may well look different with the passing of time and without the author herself on hand to mediate between them and the audience. Like so many who loved her, whether up close or from a seat in the balcony, I keep replaying the monologue she wrote for her iconic heroine, the star art historian Heidi Holland. On the verge of becoming a single parent, Heidi is contemplating the unfulfilled ideal of sisterhood among women of her generation. “It’s just that I feel stranded,” she says. “And I thought the whole point was that we wouldn’t feel stranded. I thought the point was we were all in this together.”

    But of course that was never the point, and Wendy understood that before many of us did. Everybody’s Wendy, that garrulous character adored by so many, was an act of artifice. “The Heidi Chronicles” was the truth. Perhaps only now that Wendy is gone can we begin to appreciate the full force of what she worked so hard to say.


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