Word: nearing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Which is not to say Hayes and Nicklaus never sweated. But if perspiration could be qualified, broken down and quantified, the Olympian probably distills the purest athletic effort by the drop. The most arcane sports, which include many of the Olympic events, are nearly always learned late and hard, in the U.S. after playing baseball and football for a while. Speed does come naturally to the beautiful racehorses of the running track, like Florence Griffith Joyner, though at the world-class level science kicks in and a specialized knowledge is required. Hobbled running backs reach uncertainly for their hamstrings...
Meanwhile, on the other side of deception, the Japanese gymnast Fujimoto broke his leg at the knee near the completion of his floor exercise. Not wanting to worry his coach or teammates, he kept the torturous pain to himself ("My whole blood was boiling at my stomach") and performed wondrously on the side horse before glancing ruefully up at the rings. Everything in Fujimoto's ring routine looked normal until the grimace just before the dismount, when he compounded his fracture with a dislocated knee and crashed in a heroic heap. Last year Tim Daggett also powdered a leg bone...
...here, too, sacrilege has become the order of the day. "Children, create something new!" ordered Wagner near the end of his life, and in the postwar period, directors have taken his exhortation literally. Wieland Wagner, Wolfgang's late brother, gave tradition a kick in the lederhosen with his spare, psychologically penetrating productions of the 1950s and '60s. In 1976 French Enfant Terrible Patrice Chereau booted it out the door entirely with a conception that updated the story to the Industrial Revolution and nascent Marxism. Now comes Kupfer, with a daring viewpoint that is as Teutonic as Wolfgang's thick Franconian...
...responsibilities thrust upon him and is compelled by his constituency to return -- kaffiyeh in hand -- to plead for help from the King. "Behind Hussein's action is his conviction that Arafat won't be able to pull it off," says Joseph Sisco, former U.S. Under Secretary of State for Near East Affairs...
...same time, Israel is using a variety of repressive measures to dampen the spirit of rebellion. With revenues from the occupied territories slashed as much as 50% by a Palestinian tax boycott, the government has begun staging "tax raids." Some 9,000 residents of Beit Sahur, near Bethlehem, were placed under curfew for a week after 300 townsfolk threw away their Israeli identity cards to protest orders to pay back taxes. When a mob stoned Israeli cars in the village of Beit Omer a few weeks ago, the authorities retaliated by refusing to issue market permits to 50 local fruit...