Word: rituals
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...what seems lazy may be calculated strategy. "I take swimming for what it is--a sport," says Hall in an interview at the Phoenix Swim Club, his home base. "For some, training becomes a ritual as important as the competition itself. You feel trapped. The line at the bottom of the pool haunts your dreams." Gary Hall Sr., who set 11 world records in his time and held his 21-month-old namesake aloft after making his third Olympic team in '76, isn't worried about his son. "At warm-up meets, he goes through the motions, and that freaks...
...lived in the D.C. suburbs nearly all my life without experiencing this uniquely Washingtonian Independence Day ritual. This was the summer, I decided, to claim my birthright as a citizen of the nation's capital...
...political purity. To the horror of her fellow students, she clamored to experience the nobility of manual labor, and was eventually allowed to serve at a Beijing tool factory, pretending to make lathes. Her naivete proved to be almost, but not quite, invincible. She learned fluent Chinese by shouting ritual denunciations ("Down with counterrevolutionary element Yuan...") but eventually began to question the rigid ideological slogans...
This Harvard, where Radcliffe teas (with actual tea) were taken seriously as a subliminal erotic ritual and where no one thought twice about putting on ties and jackets for lunch or class, started to implode by the spring of our first year. By then it was 1968, which brought in rapid succession the Gene McCarthy campaign, the Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy '48 assassinations and, finally, during summer vacation, the Democratic convention in Chicago at which many college kids who looked like us (and in a few cases actually were us) fell under the brutality of Richard Daley...
...first intemperate disgust at the media for pursuing the admiral even to his death, his ritual shame, his seppuku, erupted behind the question: Who cares? Who gives a damn if he wore a couple of battle decorations he should not have...