Word: clay
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Probably it is necessary for us to have heroes so that, by inoculation, we will learn to distrust heroes. Baseball idols peddling autographs at $15 a scribble provide this useful disillusion today. A few decades ago, the clay feet -- frostbitten, of course -- were those of polar explorers. Wally Herbert, who reached the North Pole by dogsled in 1969, writes knowledgeably about two of the most fascinating of the fakers: Robert E. Peary and Dr. Frederick Cook, archrivals in heroics and fraud...
...first casualty is memory. Every advance in writing, from stone to clay to paper to electronic blips, is at the same time an advance in erasing. In the electronic age erasing has become literally effortless: it takes an act of commission -- you must command your computer to SAVE -- to retain information. Simple omission, or an electrical storm, turns computer thoughts to ether...
...quote: "The United States tried, by depressing the clutch of diplomacy and downshifting the gearshift lever of rhetoric, to remain neutral." Also: In 1929 the nation's economy "was revealed to be merely a paper tiger with feet of clay living in a straw house of cards that had cried 'wolf' once too often...
...theme of youthful impertinence, especially Chang's, rang through the tournament and carried for a distance. "It's embarrassing," grumbled John McEnroe all the way from England, where preparing for grassy Wimbledon seemed a more profitable exercise than adding to 34 years of U.S. desperation on French clay. Since Tony Trabert succeeded at Paris in 1955, not one of the grand Americans -- not Stan Smith, not Arthur Ashe, not Jimmy Connors, not McEnroe -- had ever won the French. And the brazen way Chang finally did it galled McEnroe, 30, who muttered the fairly amazing statement, "We've got to teach...
...showed me a lot of courage," Lendl said. "He deserves credit." Defending champion Mats Wilander, who has fallen off the charts this year, was less magnanimous. Watching Chang dispatch his Swedish teammate Edberg in the finals, Wilander said, "It just shows you that anyone can beat anyone on clay...