Word: sporting
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Baseball owners say that player salaries are pushing the sport to the brink of financial ruin. By their tabulation, the 26 major-league teams lost $43 million in 1984 and could have a deficit of about $100 million in 1988. Nonsense, say the players, who accuse owners of using legal but oddball accounting methods to create paper losses. New owners, in particular, mark down profits for tax purposes by taking depreciation allowances that are supposed to account for the declining value of their players. In addition, the clubs often count long-term deferred compensation to players as a current expense...
Perhaps the most quixotic quest of all is the faltering effort to establish soccer as a popular American sport. The Major Indoor Soccer League is still limping along with twelve teams, but the North American Soccer League, which played outdoors, disbanded this year. Even so, Peter Bridgwater, majority owner of the N.A.S.L.'s San Jose Earthquakes, is keeping his club together and hopes that a new league will start up. Explains Earthquakes Executive Fred Guzman: "It's a civic matter, like popping for a modern art museum. I mean, what's the satisfaction of owning a string of coin-operated...
What goads them? What makes former Harvard Oarsman Tiff Wood keep training into his 30s? Why does onetime Yale Rower John Biglow ignore severe back pain to continue his training? Why is Brad Lewis, a brooding Californian, so determined to beat the Ivy Leaguers at their own sport? Certainly it is not money, and surely it is not fame. Halberstam, who took the time to get to know the oarsmen in their boats and onshore, offers some provocative answers. They are not likely to make the sport or the sportsmen popular, but they provide valuable insights into the psychology...
...gentlemen's sports" of golf, tennis and yachting all moved smartly out of the summer pleasure domes of the upper class during the past four decades. But polo, the world's toniest contact sport, remained haughtily and expensively cloistered. No more. On weekend afternoons around the country, crowds of tailgating fans show up to watch scores of horses thunder across neatly turfed ten-acre greenswards. Willow mallets whistle--pock--as high-charging riders smack a 4-oz. white wooden ball. Brooks Fire-stone, 49, of the tire Firestones, reports, "It's no longer a social, rich man's game...
...Guard is pleased. Stewart Iglehart, 75, a top competitor from the sport's golden age in the '20s and '30s, wrote recently that "today's ponies ... have noticeably less polish on the field"; his tone suggested that some of the riders are not too polished either. But like it or not, the sport of kings, which traces its roots back through England and India to Persia in 525 B.C., is now enjoyed by the likes of the "Bruise Brothers," a pair of upstart investment bankers who compete in Santa Barbara, Calif., and the bread-and-butter players who gather regularly...