Tennis made perfect sense. By 1989 I knew most of the important people in the sport well, both on and off the court. I didn’t get along with all of them—especially a lot of the agents—but I knew them all. Tennis was still hugely popular, but McEnroe and Connors were both well past their peak and there was concern about when the next American men’s star was going to come along. I can remember Arthur Ashe, as early as 1985 when he was still the U.S. Davis Cup captain, standing on the top of a bleacher at the French Open saying, “So where’s the next McEnroe? The next Connors? I don’t see them anywhere.”
Ashe’s words proved prescient a year later when no American man made it past the quarterfinals at the U.S. Open for the first time in the Open era. In fact, the only quarterfinalist was Tim Wilkison, who had the tournament of his life to get to the round of eight. McEnroe looked completely lost going down in the first round to Paul Annacone following a lengthy sabbatical earlier in the year. After losing to Brad Gilbert in the first round of what was then the season-ending tournament in Madison Square Garden, he told his childhood pal Mary Carillo that if he couldn’t beat Brad Gilbert, he shouldn’t be playing tennis.
“We were driving uptown in Manhattan and he was just screaming,” Carillo said. “ ‘If I can’t beat Brad F—ing Gilbert, I shouldn’t be playing.’ ”
So he didn’t play for the next six months.
Connors was playing but was about to turn thirty-four when the Open started. He lost his third round match to Todd Witsken, a rookie on tour from Indiana whose highest singles ranking would be forty-three. It was the first time since 1973 that Connors hadn’t at least reached the semis at the Open.
That left Ivan Lendl and Miloslav Mecir to play in the final. Midway through the second set of Lendl’s straight-set rout, fans began streaming out of Louis Armstrong Stadium. Ed Fabricius, who was the USTA’s publicity director at the time, was standing just outside the stadium as the third set began. “It looked as if there had been a bomb scare,” he said. “People were running for the exits.”
It was after that Open that Sports Illustrated ran its infamous cover photo of Lendl with the caption: “The Champion Nobody Cares About.”
Years later, Lendl admitted that cover bothered him. “I just don’t know what I did to deserve that,” he said. “I worked hard to get better at my game. I never went crazy on court like John and Jimmy did sometimes. My English got better as time went on. They don’t want to like me, okay fine. But I thought that was over the line.”
No one was more guilty of being unfair to Lendl than me. I was like the guys at SI. Of course, I recognized that he was a superb player—Lendl ended up winning eight majors, as many as Connors and one more than McEnroe. He grew into a tenacious competitor, one who was never out of a match no matter how far down he was. After ducking Wimbledon early in his career because he wasn’t comfortable playing on grass, he realized his mistake and worked tirelessly to become a good enough volleyer that he could win Wimbledon. He made the final twice, losing to Boris Becker in 1986 and to Pat Cash in 1987. In 1990, he made one last all-out attempt to fill the one hole in his tennis resume, skipping the entire clay court season—including the French Open, which he had won three times—to work on grass and prepare for Wimbledon. He still lost, in the semifinals to Stefan Edberg. By then I felt bad for him because I knew how hard he’d worked to win that year.
“Actually the match with Stefan didn’t bother me that much,” he said. “I didn’t play poorly. He was just too good that day. I did everything I could to win Wimbledon [Lendl always said Veembladon] that year, and it wasn’t quite good enough. I have no regrets.”
My relationship with Lendl bottomed in the summer of 1986 when I wrote a column saying I thought it was ridiculous for then Vice President George Bush (a big tennis fan and Lendl friend) to try to push Congress to waive the five year waiting period for citizenship so Lendl could play in the Davis Cup for the United States. I wasn’t really being critical of Lendl as much as I was being critical of those who thought the Davis Cup was so important that the country’s laws should be ignored to try and win it. Lendl didn’t see it that way.
He was in Washington playing in what had been the Washington Star International and now had some other corporate name on it. It was still known to all of us at the Post as “The Donald Dell Open.” Lendl won a taut three-set semifinal from Connors during which he got so angry at one point that he slammed his racquet to the ground—which was very un-Lendl-like.
In his postmatch press conference, someone asked Lendl what had happened to cause the racquet slam. He shrugged. “I just figured that no matter what I do out there, John Feinstein’s going to rip me for it,” he said. “So I slammed my racquet.”
That got a laugh. When Lendl was finished he walked over to me, pointing his finger at my chest. “I don’t deserve the shit you write about me,” he yelled.
Since we were in public, I wasn’t going to get into an argument. I just said, “I’m sorry you feel that way, Ivan.” He glared at me and stalked away.
What Lendl didn’t know at that moment was that our relationship was about to change because of something that had happened to me a couple of weeks earlier in Czechoslovakia.
AFTER WIMBLEDON THAT YEAR, the Post had sent me to the first Goodwill Games, in Moscow. From there I went to Prague to cover the Federation Cup—the women’s version of the Davis Cup—an event that was being covered by American newspapers for one reason: it would be the first time that Martina Navratilova would be returning to Czechoslovakia since she had defected in 1973. She was now an American citizen, having waited the five years, and would be teaming up with Chris Evert on the U.S. team.
I got myself into trouble on that trip—first in Moscow, then in Prague.
The Goodwill Games—created by Ted Turner after the Soviet boycott in Los Angeles to try and get U.S. and Eastern Bloc athletes competing against one another again—was one of the great adventures of my life. A group of us had flown from Wimbledon to Moscow. We arrived on Monday afternoon, checked into the massive Hotel Moscow, which was across the street from Red Square, and went straight to the track-and-field venue.
As it turned out, Sergey Bubka broke the world record in the pole vault that night. Bubka was breaking the world record about once a month in those days, and doing it in front of his fellow Russians—or Soviets, back then—was a very big deal. Rather than go to Bubka’s press conference, Dave Kindred and I walked through the stands to the track to talk to the two American vaulters, Earl Bell and Mike Tully. Our sense was Bell and Tully could give us a better idea what made Bubka so great than Bubka could speaking through a Russian translator.
Two things were surprising that night. First, after two weeks at Wimbledon, where approaching an athlete without written permission from fourteen people could result in you being put to death, it was refreshing to just be able to walk up to two people and introduce yourself.
“Nice to be in a free country,” I cracked to Kindred as we walked across the track unimpeded.
“At Wimbledon we’d be in jail by now,” Kindred said.
“At least,” I answered.
Tully and Bell were both friendly and outgoing. But they didn’t give us what we were looking for—or at least what we were expecting—on Bubka, our second surprise of the night.
“He’s beaten the system,” Bell said. “He’s figured it out. Or his doctors have figured it out. No way you can be that good that often if you aren’t getting help.”
Kindred and I were both wide-eyed. Bell was standing there casually calling a guy who had just broken a world record a cheat. I think I must have said something clever like, “Really? Seriously?” Bell shrugged and waved Tully, who was gathering up his equipment, over to us.
“Hey, Mike, what’s the key to Sergey’s success?” he said.
Tully made a gesture with his hand as if he was releasing a syringe into someone’s arm. “He’s juicing,” he said. “Has to be.”
“But drug testing
?” I said.
They both laughed. “Their scientists are always ahead of the testers,” Bell said. “He’s masking it. No doubt about it.”
Kindred and I looked at each other. We had thought we had a pretty good first-day story when Bubka had broken the record. We now had something we hadn’t bargained on getting. We raced back up to the interview room wondering if there was some way to ask Bubka privately about what Bell and Tully had said. We knew we weren’t going to ask it in an open press conference—in part because we’d give the story away, but also because it would be rude to bring something like that up in front of an adoring crowd. When we got upstairs, Bubka was being led away by security people. There was no way to get close to him.
So we wrote. The next day, all hell broke loose. The Soviet government and Bubka were furious—not with Tully and Bell, or with Kindred for that matter, but with me. Why? Kindred’s story was almost identical to mine, but it appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The Journal-Constitution wasn’t delivered each morning to the Soviet embassy in Washington. The Post was. In fact, the embassy, on 16th Street, backed up to the Post building, on 15th Street. From George Solomon’s window, you could see the back of the embassy.
So I was the bad guy, not Kindred. Bubka denounced me and denounced the Post and said there was no truth at all to what Tully and Bell had said. The Soviet sports bureau did the same. Oh well, I figured, at least someone was reading my stuff.
A couple of days later Ben Johnson absolutely destroyed Carl Lewis in the 100-meter dash. Once again, because the Soviets had essentially given us free rein, Kindred and I were able to walk right up to Lewis within a couple of minutes of the race ending to talk to him. We were standing in the tunnel a few yards from the finish line. Lewis made Tully and Bell sound gentle when he talked about Johnson.
“He’s cheating,” Lewis said. “There’s no doubt about it. Look at him. You think that body’s real? No way.”
Kindred and I looked at each other walking away and had the same reaction: Tully and Bell’s accusations had an absolute ring of truth to them. They weren’t said with any malice, more matter-of-fact. Actually, both guys made a point of saying how much they liked Bubka personally. Lewis sounded to us like he was whining. He’d gotten his butt kicked, he wasn’t used to it, and he couldn’t take it. So he called Johnson a cheating steroid user.
As it turned out, Johnson was a cheating steroid user who was stripped of his gold medal when he tested positive at the Seoul Olympics after again beating Lewis. I was in the stadium for that race too, and it was about as electric an Olympic moment as I’ve ever witnessed. Too bad it wasn’t real.
And Bubka? He went on to break the world record in the pole vault thirty-five times, he won an Olympic gold medal in 1992, and he never tested positive for anything. My gut feelings are usually pretty accurate. They weren’t in Moscow.
After Lewis finished ripping Johnson I wrote a story that began, “The first Goodwill Games are rapidly becoming the Ill-Will Games.” I went on to quote Lewis on Johnson and made it pretty clear that I was skeptical. I described Johnson’s race in glowing terms. The Soviets, already on alert for anything I wrote, went completely crazy over the “Ill-Will Games” line. They put out all sorts of statements about the fellowship among the athletes and how hard they and the people from Turner Broadcasting had worked to make the Games a success for all. The funny thing was, I was making fun of Lewis and other whining American athletes—not the Soviets—in the Johnson/Lewis piece.
A few days later, when I was introduced to Ted Turner, he looked at me and said, “So you’re the guy the Sovietskies are so pissed off at.”
Yup, I was the guy.
A couple of days after the Lewis/Johnson story, Pravda wrote a long story on what a huge success the Goodwill Games had been. There were only two bad guys, they said, in the entire scope of the Games. One was Secretary of State George Shultz, who had refused to sign off on letting American boxers who were in the armed forces participate in the Games. The other was me.
Gary Lee, who was then the Post’s Moscow correspondent, translated the story for me. Sitting in the Post’s Moscow bureau he started reading the section about me aloud. First, he read the Russian, then he translated. Midway through the first sentence, he burst out laughing.
“What is it?” I asked.
“They called you fat,” he said.
The actual line was this: “Who is this dull, unoriginal, and roundish journalist who breathes the dark, long-lost breath of the Cold War?”
Pretty good writing, I must admit. When Steve Woodward of USA Today decided to do a notebook item on Pravda ripping me, he asked me if I wanted to comment. “Sure,” I said. “Dull and unoriginal, maybe, but roundish is hitting above the belt.”
Aside from being attacked by Pravda and the Soviet government, I had a great time in Moscow. Most of the people could not have been nicer, and as I said, the access we had to the athletes was terrific. Most nights, after we had all finished writing, the American writers would gather in the Hotel Moscow, where we were all staying, for late-night drinks. Frequently, at about two or three o’clock in the morning, we would walk across the street to Red Square to watch the changing of the guard at Lenin’s Tomb. The guards were changed every hour of every day. What was cool about it in the middle of the night is that you could hear the new guards coming before you actually saw them. You could hear their heels clicking on the cobblestones just before they rounded the corner to the main portion of the square, where they very formally took over for those who had been on guard beforehand.
One morning, when there were no events going on, Dave Kindred, Tom Callahan (who was working for Time magazine at the time), Bud Shaw (who was also with the Journal-Constitution, for whom this was a big event since Turner was based in Atlanta), and I decided we wanted to go see Lenin. We’d seen the long lines waiting to go through the tomb during the daytime, so we checked with the concierge at the hotel to find out how long we might have to wait.
“One moment,” the concierge said.
A minute later he was back with a very attractive young woman who worked for Intourist, which was the agency that had made all the travel plans for the international media. The young woman walked us across the street to a spot in the line about two hundred yards from the entrance to the tomb, which was maybe a five-minute wait to the front door. She spoke in Russian to several people and a moment later said to us, “Join the line there.”
We did as we were told. No one said anything except for one man, who was clearly French, and furious. This was during a time when U.S. relations with France were not wonderful. Earlier that year, when the U.S. had asked the French government for clearance to send planes through their airspace en route to Libya, the French had said no.
The Frenchman began yelling at the four of us in clear, accented English: “How dare you cut into the line this way? Who do you think you are? We have been waiting in line almost two hours and you cut the line this way? It is outrageous!”
Before any of us could start to explain we were just doing what we’d been told to do, Callahan jumped in. Tom has a temper and he is very quick on his feet. He looked right at the man and said, “You know, we wanted to go to the end of the line. We were going to go to the end of the line, but we just couldn’t do it. You know why? Because we were just so tired after our planes had to fly all the way around France to get to Libya that we just couldn’t do it!”
Clearly a lot of the Russians in line spoke English because they all started laughing. The Frenchman glared at Callahan for a moment and said nothing. A few minutes later, after being instructed to keep our hands at our sides and not talk while in the tomb, we were inside. Lenin was inside a glass case, dressed in a dark suit, lying propped up on a pillow. Ted Turner would later say that he thought Lenin looked pretty good when he saw him, “but a little bit pale.”
The whole thing was actually quite eerie. Still, it was something you had to do at least once if you were in Mos
cow.
From Moscow I went to Prague, which is one of the most beautiful cities I have ever been to in my life. I didn’t figure to get into any trouble there covering the Federation Cup and Martina Navratilova’s return to Czechoslovakia. I had done a long interview with Martina during the Eastbourne Tournament for a Sunday feature that would run the day before the event began. The only real story after that would be how the Czech fans reacted when Navratilova was introduced as part of the American team.
The answer to that question came quickly: the minute the Americans marched into the stadium, almost everyone was on their feet cheering. When Martina was introduced, the cheers were overwhelming. It was a neat scene.
The first few days in Prague were like a vacation. The weather was perfect, we were all staying at a beautiful hotel right on the river, and there wasn’t that much work to do after the opening ceremonies. We did a lot of sightseeing, going to, among other places, a Holocaust museum that was absolutely heartbreaking, and the second oldest temple in Europe. It was one of the few times in my life that I felt intensely proud to be Jewish.
My reverie was interrupted by a phone call from George Solomon. The Capitals, Washington’s hockey team, had just signed a player named Michal Pivonka. This was significant to me, in George’s mind, because Pivonka had defected from Czechoslovakia in order to sign with the Caps.
“See what you can find out about the guy since you’re there,” George said.
“George, this isn’t like the Caps just signed a free agent who’d been playing for the Flyers. I can’t just call the general manager and get a scouting report.”
“Poke around,” George said.
Poke around. I was behind the Iron Curtain. You didn’t just “poke around.”
Still, I figured I’d give it a shot and when I got nowhere I could honestly tell George I’d tried. I found a number for the Czech Hockey Federation. I even found someone there who spoke English. I don’t remember word-for-word what he said, but it was something like this: “Pivonka is a minor prospect. We are not concerned that he is gone. If he chooses to leave his family and his country that is his choice. It is not our problem.”
One on One Page 23