Word: stecher
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...cross-country race, a 14-sec. lead is a comfortable cushion. Yet Demong's push against Austria's Mario Stecher set up, for this observer's money, the most memorable finish of the Vancouver Olympics to date. It made you seriously wonder why this sport doesn't garner more attention in the U.S. as well as admire Europe's good taste in obsessing over an event that Americans foolishly offer a big fat yawn. After all, what's more engrossing than a good old-fashioned race to the finish...
...Demong steadily chipped away at Stecher's lead, cutting it in half after 1.7 km and down to 2.2 sec. halfway through the final leg. "If I were an oddsmaker," said a public-address announcer, a purported Nordic combined expert, "Stecher is the guy you wouldn't want at the end." Was the Austrian toast? Demong finally passed Stecher - and for a moment, it appeared as if Stecher was about to give up and ski off the course. Going into the final 0.8-km stretch, the duo was essentially tied...
...Stecher built a small lead, but Demong passed him again, this time on an uphill climb. "I hoped to move up a gap of four or five seconds and hold on to the finish," says Demong. "I was like, Ah, I think I'm getting there. And then I hit him with my pole. I was like, Arrgh, he's still here." On a downhill glide, Stecher made the final pass, and Austria won the gold...
That is what Judge Martin B. Stecher of the New York State Supreme Court has done in a case involving Jim Bouton, a baseball pitcher turned TV sportscaster (and now TV series actor). In 1971 Bouton enlivened one of his news spots by taking an interview with Alex Webster, then the coach of the stumbling New York Giants football team, and running part of it backward on the air with no sound. Webster was not amused by the gimmick, which made him look like a demented Donald Duck. Claiming that he had been portrayed as a "dullard and a stupid...
...Judge Stecher threw out Webster's plea, saying that Bouton, in expressing his opinion, was protected by the First Amendment. As for Webster's contention that First Amendment guarantees did not apply because Bouton intended to entertain rather than inform, Stecher ruled that the line between the two was simply "too elusive" to define. The judge did concede, however, that "television is essentially an entertainment medium, and its news personnel are often as much entertainers as reporters." Next case...