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EVENTS & DISCOVERIES
Brundage Reconsiders
Since he is also a well-known collector of Oriental art and a student of things Asiatic, it was perhaps only logical for the International Olympic Committee's chairman, Avery Brundage, to behave in an inscrutable manner amid the storm of criticism that followed the now-famous May 28 meeting of the IOC in Munich. It was then, you will recall, that the IOC passed a resolution advising the (Nationalist) Chinese Olympic Committee that it could "no longer be recognized under that name since it does not administer sport in China." What brought down the thunder and lightning was the implication, with all of its overtones in world politics, that only the Chinese Communists have a right to the name China.
In the weeks thereafter, the IOC chairman seemed to support this viewpoint. In interviews in Switzerland in mid-June Brundage was taking the line that "all we ask is that the Nationalists change their name.... The word China has got to go." Let them call themselves Formosa, or Taiwan, or something.
Last week, after more than a month of reflection and more than a month of stiff criticism, Avery Brundage modified his stand. He announced that he would support Nationalist China's bid for readmission under the nomenclature offered by the Nationalists themselves: "The Olympic Committee of the Republic of China."
Brundage's decision has still to be ratified by the IOC itself (its next scheduled meeting is in February), but it should satisfy most of Brundage's free-world critics, who have included the U.S. Olympic Committee, the Congress and President Eisenhower. The principle that Brundage is now ready to espouse seems to us close to the one expressed in this magazine on June 15: "Brundage and his IOC fellows can and should say to both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung, 'Gentlemen, your athletes, by whatever name you choose to call them, are welcome in our games, provided they conduct themselves as sportsmen.' "
A Matter of CO[2]
When three runners collapsed at Philadelphia in the 10,000-meter run last week, they were suffering from 1) cerebral anoxia and 2) metabolic imbalance. The first is insufficiency of oxygen in blood reaching the brain, the second a disturbance in the delicate balance of ion chemicals in the body fluids. Oddly enough, the worst treatment they could have been given would have been the administration of pure oxygen.
"The trigger that keeps your lungs working usually is carbon dioxide, CO[2]," Dr. Paul Schrode of the University of Pennsylvania explained. "These boys, running the 10,000 meters, blew out so much CO[2] that their breathing was triggered instead by simple oxygen hunger. But had pure oxygen been supplied immediately after their collapse, and before their CO[2] had been replenished, they might have simply quit breathing." The metabolic imbalance came about through the excessive loss of liquid during the race. Max Truex, a finely trained athlete with no excess body weight, dropped from 132 to 125 during the race. The two Americans had their liquid loss replenished by intravenous injections of a glucose-and-salt solution; by Sunday morning after the Saturday afternoon race, both were perfectly healthy and looking forward to the 10,000-meter run at the Pan-American Games.
"They would doubtless have recovered completely in any case," Dr. Schrode said. "They are young, healthy men in perfect condition. Bob Soth's blood pressure when he finished the race was somewhere beyond the limits of the gauge. His pulse was 176 a minute. But his arteries are elastic, and they can take that kind of strain with no damage. The same thing is true of Truex and of Hubert Pyarnakivi, the Russian."
The cerebral anoxia happened because, as the runners used up their CO[2], the heart pumped faster and faster, rushing blood through the lungs to pick up oxygen. But the blood, at its accelerated pace, could not assimilate enough oxygen from the lungs, so that the heart pumped faster to up the supply of oxygen, which then became less because of the speed of transit through the lungs. Eventually the oxygen supply to the brain became so small that the athletes began to lose consciousness, with the first faculty to suffer being the sense of balance. That's why Soth and Pyarnakivi began to run leaning backward. The courage they showed in continuing to run was, in reality, the repetition of a pattern of orders from the brain which continued after the athletes had lost conscious control of their bodies.
Soth and Truex possibly suffered more Sunday morning in the hospital than they did Saturday on the track. Said the night nurse to the day nurse: "Take good care of these two. It's important for international relations. They're Russians."
The Economics of Bowling
The American Machine and Foundry Company has just announced that it has delivered its 60,000th automatic pin spotter to a bowling center in Detroit. An old theory of economics once held that all such advances in mechanization made for revolution by the simple process of putting people out of work. The economic laws of sport, however, are evidently different from those governing more serious human enterprise: no pathetic host of human pin boys has been eliminated by AMF's 60,000 mechanical pin spotters, no picket lines are springing up to demand that pin boys be retained; indeed, bowling on a big scale (big enough to be important economically) did not begin until after the human labor of setting bowling pins had become unnecessary.
It took the automatic pin boy to make bowling economically important. How important may be suggested by the words of AMF's Board Chairman Morehead Patterson to stockholders: Unfilled orders came to $136 million, earnings for the first six months were 78% above those of the same period last year, and "the major portion of the increase can be attributed to record orders for AMF bowling equipment." Before its success in the bowling business, AMF was an austere machine shop, the House of Morgan of machinery makers, manufacturing things like nuclear reactors, electrical motors, bread-wrapping and cigarette-making machines. Its competitor, Brunswick-Balke-Collender, has also come into the bowling business with its automatic pin setter, which it sells outright for $8,100 (AMF rents its pin spotters), and the other day Brunswick announced it had landed a whopping order for $14 million worth of new bowling lanes and automatic equipment.
Fine flourishing statistics like these were impossible before automation struck the alleys. Most of the 22 million Americans who bowl have taken up the sport since automatic pin handling came into being. All the expansion overseas, now reaching major proportions also, began after the need for pin boys vanished. It would have been almost impossible to have found a labor supply big enough to set all the games that are being bowled on automatic lanes. In all, about 90,000 such lanes are now installed or on order. And the huge air-conditioned suburban and shopping-center bowling lanes aimed at attracting school children and housewives in the hours when men bowlers are absent, have blossomed every where, changing the look of a large part of the country.
Sport is, after all, a leisure activity, embodying a certain well-being and relaxation, and it may be that its peculiar economic laws are influenced by that fact. The industrial revolution made for leisure because it turned over to machines the labor performed by people. The automation of the bowling lanes, and the consequent expansion of the sport, is the harbinger of a social revolution in which leisure itself is made wider and more enjoyable even for the (theoretically) unemployed pin boy.
They Ain't Hay
The artichoke is a patrician vegetable that looks like a big thistle but isn't. (The Jerusalem artichoke is not even an artichoke, but that's another story.) All artichokes are a nuisance to grow, particularly because they like a cool, foggy, frost-free climate. The Artichoke Center of the World is Castroville, Calif., which is south of San Francisco and cool, foggy and frost-free. The Larousse Gastronomique gives 57 recipes for preparing artichokes.
No one eats an artichoke raw except a French racehorse named Jamin (see page 13), who consumes a kilogram a day, one or two bites to an artichoke. Jamin is a French trotter, and the champion of Europe. He will appear at Roosevelt Raceway, Westbury, N.Y. in the inaugural International trot this weekend. According to Jamin's driver, Jean Riaud, most horses are very fond of artichokes, which certainly will come as news to American horses, most of whom have never even seen, much less eaten, one. One good reason is that artichokes, at least in the East, cost about 19 cents apiece when they're in season. Artichokes also cost a lot in France, but Riaud says that he gives them to Jamin as a g√¢terie, or treat, "because Jamin is not like other horses. He is so special." He is, having won 20 of his last 25 races.
Special or not, Jamin might well find that he has to make do, just this once, without his favorite food. Originally, you see, the U.S. Department of Agriculture impounded all the fodder that Jamin and the other European trotters had brought along with them. This difficulty was hurdled last week when the Department gave all the fodder its stamp of approval-all save the artichokes, for they were nowhere to be found. Despite Jean Riaud's claims that he had shipped a week's supply, Roosevelt Raceway officials decided not to waste time idly hoping the artichokes would turn up; instead they contacted Ralph D'Arrigo, a U.S. artichoke broker, in an attempt to get more.
"There's a hell of a shortage," said one Roosevelt official, "but D'Arrigo has set up some kind of a mercy mission. He's had experience with that kind of thing; he once had to get a bunch of bananas for a sick kid or something. They're putting those little plastic domes over them or something out there in California and trying to force the damn things. I sure hope it works."
Won 100, Lost 35
James Moore Tatum, an incurable optimist whose confidence could hardly be contained by his 240-pound body, never wanted to be the toughest kid in town. "I just want to be the guy who whipped the toughest kid in town," he used to say.
To do that, in the world of college football coaching, Sunny Jim Tatum felt it necessary to work almost constantly, day and night, during the 14 years he spent at North Carolina, Oklahoma and Maryland. He whipped all of the toughest ones during his career. Won 100, lost 35.
Bluntly and tirelessly, he sought the main ingredients for his favorite football prescription: good material and scholarship funds. The two were as closely related, he felt, as chickens and eggs. To those who criticized him as "a parasitic monster of open professionalism," Sunny Jim replied: "If they didn't want big-time football, they wouldn't have hired me, and if they don't want me they can fire me." He took precautions against being fired in the only way he knew: by seeing that more and more tickets were sold to his football games.
In order to sell tickets and avoid the figurative but very real heat so often applied to football coaches Tatum felt compelled at times, in the dead of winter, to turn off the heat in his office. "I have a lot of work to do," he once told a shivering sports-writer. "If I leave the radiator on, the place will get warm and I may get sleepy."
Perhaps because, as he put it, "the rate of attrition is tremendous in coaching," Sunny Jim recently began planning to build a bowling alley near Chapel Hill. Except for that one venture, he devoted his organizational skill to coaching, not bothering to organize a periodic escape from the tension which pressed upon him constantly. If he ever relaxed at all, it probably was during those frequent, friendly visits, marked by his own warmth and understanding, with alumni, prospects and friends, with almost anyone who was willing to talk football.
Even when he went to Canada for a "vacation" this summer, Sunny Jim couldn't resist the opportunity to help his old friend, Peahead Walker, drill the Montreal Alouettes.
Although he never seemed to realize it—not even after periodic hospital visits that usually resulted in a diagnosis of sheer exhaustion and stern warnings to slow down—Sunny Jim's long, tireless hours probably kept him from being the toughest kid in town. The pressure of those hours may have been at least partly responsible for his falling victim last week to a normally puny adversary, a virus ailment that killed him just a few days after he contracted it.
Bang-up Job
Who's this, on this tug,
Causing all of the rumpus?
It's a nautical pug
Who is boxing the compass.
—RICHARD ARMOUR
ILLUSTRATION
"As Confucius say, 'A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it is committing another mistake.' "
TWO ILLUSTRATIONS
They Said It
Paul Richards, Baltimore Oriole manager, in admiration of Washington Slugger Harmon Killebrew: "He has enough power to hit home runs in any park—including Yellowstone."
Mrs. Roberta Bonniwell, longtime women's track star and coach, decrying the apathy of the American female toward track and field: "They are inclined to be lazy. But even so, if our national idol were a javelin thrower or a shotputter instead of a movie star, we'd have more than a mere handful of girls trying out for international meets."
Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, horseman and trainer, on the occasion of his 85th birthday: "I'll celebrate with a rum cocktail. I take a drink now and then. I gave up smoking years ago. I eat anything I want, except baked apples before breakfast, and milk. Milk gives me a headache."
AVERY BRUNOAGE NOW AGREES THAT THE REPUBLIC OF CHINA CAN CALL ITSELF THE REPUBLIC OF CHINA IN THE OLYMPICS
—News item
