Word: ordeal
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...with his kids, although he says he "usually does not go in for that type of stuff." His talk is simple, without the oratory that made his presidential campaign speeches soar but created doubts that this ambitious young Senator meant what he said. He talks of coming through his ordeal "unscathed but not ungrateful" and of how his wife took charge when that "stab of fear" hit him in the ambulance. There are no tears until he starts talking about his oldest son's inauspicious first year at college, seeing his father the presidential candidate on television regularly...
...sweet, dim Father Felix, the monk who helps Joe out on weekends when he is not chuckling over TV shows. The scenes in which Joe falls woefully short of his ideal of priestly fellowship are wicked social comedy. For days after his curate's arrival, Joe goes through an ordeal of embarrassed detective work in search of the key fact he had failed to learn about the young priest: his name. When the curate's trendy seminary pals come to the rectory for a meal, they grate on Joe by questioning the rule of celibacy and saying they wish they...
After graduating from Yale, Bush succumbed to an itch of the Eastern privileged that Nelson Aldrich has recently described in his book Old Money -- the Teddy Roosevelt yearning to go West and do something physical. Bush presented the matter to himself less as an opportunity than an ordeal -- he thought first of farming, and only then of physical work in oil fields. It was a way of continuing the effete cure on a grander scale; the ironic thing in Bush's case is that the cure would just confirm, in some people's eyes, the ailment. Luckily, Bush had enough...
...champions must strive for it in a solitude as perfect as Jackie Joyner-Kersee's. Four years ago, she narrowly lost the gold medal because a hamstring pull hobbled her in the 800-meter run. Now she has so greatly outdistanced the field in the heptathlon, that epic ordeal in seven acts, that the only rival in the corner of her eye is the memory of her last triumph. Since 1984 she has set the heptathlon world record and bettered it twice; she has shared the world record in the long jump. Regardless of the success and the mental...
Kicking, scratching and dunking are part of the daily ordeal of water-polo players. At age 29, with a wife and a career to attend to, Terry Schroeder might have done without the punishment. But Schroeder, captain of the U.S. team for the second consecutive Olympics, is haunted by the silver medal he and the squad won in Los Angeles four years ago. Haunted by silver? Leading the top-ranked Yugoslavs by a score of 5-2 in the final game and needing an outright win, the U.S. team got caught in a riptide. The Americans gave up three goals...