Word: perfects
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When the time comes to get back into politics, however, selling access can have its downside, as two top Bush campaign consultants, Stuart Spencer and Charles Black, are finding out. Each had what seemed to be a perfect client: the government of General Manuel Noriega of Panama (Spencer) and that of Prime Minister Lynden Pindling of the Bahamas (Black). Both politicians headed regimes that had full treasuries and lots of messy problems. But these drug- tainted leaders are proving to be unsavory associates for aides to a presidential candidate who favors the death penalty for drug dealers...
...Soviet care and feeding of athletes at times looks enviable, it is far from perfect. For one thing, it can be ruthless. After Kayaker Nikolai Oseledetz shared victory in the four-man team, 10,000-meter event at the 1986 world championships, he asked for a Moscow apartment and was told he would get one. After he was cut from the national team the next year, he was brusquely informed no more flats were available and continued to reside, apart from his wife of five years and son, in a drab room he shares with another kayaker. That separation...
...nearly nonpareil. To put the grand slam of tennis in perspective, it is far rarer than either baseball's (16) or horse racing's (eleven) triple crowns. The recent demigods, Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert and Billie Jean King among them have 47 major tournament victories, but none managed that perfect dominance over their rivals and the calendar. Only four other tennis players, male and female, belong in this most exclusive of tennis clubs: Don Budge (1938), Maureen Connolly (1953), Rod Laver (1962 and 1969) and Margaret Court (1970). On Saturday Steffi Graf of West Germany joined that short list, after...
...enacted with models -- correct down to the fabric, wires and rivets -- of those old, often ungainly aircraft that took the first pioneers aloft. Larry Kruse, a dean of Seward County Community College in Liberal, Kans., launched his replica of a 1911 Voisin into the fitful afternoon breezes. An almost perfect twelve grams of craftsmanship with a 13-in. wingspan, the plane is powered by a rubber-band motor turned 2,300 times. The Voisin bucked and churned, its tiny pusher propeller sending it 125 ft. high, its miniature control flaps guiding it across the field...
...Munich Games who, with her double-jointed contortions and infectious grin, convinced us that human hearts beat within the bodies of robotic Soviet athletes. Four years later at the Montreal Games, it was a long-limbed brooding Rumanian, Nadia Comaneci, who stole hearts by posting the first perfect 10s ever in Olympic gymnastics competition. Then in Los Angeles in 1984, American Mary Lou Retton bounced + into our living rooms with her big vault and still bigger smile, assuring her place in the pantheon of gymnastics greats and on boxes of Wheaties...