Newly At A Loss for Worlds

By Tom Callahan

In the throes of an international losing streak, U.S. athletes might glance around now and concede that while they are still among the good players, they are no longer the champions of the world. Even in intramural sports, Americans like to claim global title, though the baseball World Series has had a slightly tinny sound elsewhere and must positively clank in Cuba. At a true World Series in Pennsylvania last month, the Taiwanese Little Leaguers beat the home team as usual, but this time the score was 21-1.

As the Czech Ivan Lendl defeated the Swede Mats Wilander last week in the U.S. Open, the grand-slam tennis season closed without an American-born champion of any gender for the first time in 18 years. Excluding the aging Chris Evert, 32, no American-born woman active today has ever won Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, the French Open or the Australian Open. In terms of the Davis Cup, the U.S. (a recent loser to Paraguay) has been reclassified a minor- league country, a zonal qualifier.

Wondering if they are attracting the best U.S. athletes, tennis people are given to imagining basketball players like Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan across the net from West Germany's Boris Becker. But this comfortable fantasy may have lost something since Brazil trimmed David Robinson, Danny Manning and the rest of America's college elite in the Pan Am Games. Some cry, "Whence cometh the next John McEnroe?" But others are pleased to remember that, if only by the accident of his father's army station, he cometh from Germany. McEnroe broke his old record for ugly behavior at the Open, earning $17,500 in fines and a two-month suspension. Shortly after, Czechoslovakia's Hana Mandlikova had a minor Mac attack worth $500. Asked what language Mandlikova chose to curse in, British Supervisor of Women Georgina Clark expressed more than the truth when she replied, "American."

The Washington Post has detected a feeling in Canada that Sprinter Ben Johnson's recent world-record triumph over Carl Lewis in the 100-meter dash ran deeper than a foot race. Some Canadians see national reflections in the downtrodden stammerer Johnson and the American peacock he dusted at the World Games in Rome. "Lewis was pretty and polished in his U.S. national colors," reported the Toronto Globe and Mail. "Johnson was plainly attired in his baggy suit." Anyway, the World's Fastest Human is now a Jamaican Canadian.

This week the U.S. will try to regain the Ryder Cup it lost two years ago at the Belfry Club in England to Spain's Seve Ballesteros and Germany's Bernhard Langer, the foremost golfers in the world. This time Captain Jack Nicklaus is optimistic about the Yanks' chances. Australian Greg Norman is neutral, and the site, Nicklaus' own Muirfield Village course in Ohio, is particularly unfamiliar to the foreign players. The annual Memorial Tournament there regularly conflicts with the British P.G.A.

Time was, the U.S. would have been a cinch on any course in the world. At Royal Birkdale in 1969, England's Tony Jacklin, this year's defending captain, had a short but missable putt on the 18th hole for a final tie so implausible that in a hallmark of sportsmanship, Nicklaus gave it to him. "After years of Britain's never winning," Nicklaus recalls, "the spirit of the match, international goodwill, was all that really mattered."

This is the attitude of Bill Toomey, the Olympic decathlon champion of 1968, a former World's Greatest Athlete in that long American line from Jim Thorpe to Bruce Jenner, through Bob Mathias and Rafer Johnson. But "now the decathlon is virtually made in Europe," he says. "I keep hoping there is somebody out there who could at least compete with Daley Thompson." Toomey is not inconsolable though. He knows that track, in particular, has been a missionary sport, and that many foreign stars have American universities in their backgrounds.

"In the old days," he says, "the Russians took pictures of us in track and field. Then all of a sudden we were filming ((High Jumper)) Valery Brumel. That's the way it works. You share with each other because competition is the name of the game. Tables will always turn, but in the long run it makes us all better." In the Peace Corps and for the State Department, Toomey has passed his knowledge along to 69 countries.

Similarly, Pete Newell could smile at Brazil's great basketball moment last month. In 1960 Newell coached Oscar Robertson and Jerry West to the Olympic gold medal by an average of more than 40 points a game. "What's the fun in that?" he asks. Along with other coaching ambassadors, he began traveling the world and spreading the gospel. "Now there are good basketball players in Japan, the Philippines, Turkey, Israel, Lebanon ((a Beirut pivotman carried Syracuse to the last N.C.A.A. final)), all over Western and Eastern Europe, Africa, almost everywhere. We're not going backward; they're just coming forward. I don't think that's so bad."

The coming force in the N.B.A. is a Nigerian, Houston Rocket Akeem Olajuwon (whose countryman Christian Okoye, incidentally, gained 105 yds. last week in his pro-football debut with the Kansas City Chiefs). Newell says, "I asked Akeem recently about his wonderful footwork. He replied, 'I played much soccer.' The foreign athletes' background in soccer may be a tremendous asset. They have an ambidexterity with their feet. I think if I were still coaching basketball, I'd have my team play soccer."

Has shunning the world's most popular game ended up costing the Americans in everything else? If so, only one thing could be more ironic. A Toronto- Montreal World Series.