In 1984, Mulkey's writing was gold

      For five months in 1984, Kim Mulkey was on our team -- the Shreveport Journal sports department. 

     Just as in every phase of her life, she was very good at what she did. She could have been a sportswriter.

     (Don't laugh. It is a noble profession. And don't you forget it. Somebody has to do it. 

      Her spectacular four-year basketball career at Louisiana Tech finished -- with a fourth consecutive women's Final Four appearance -- Kim was entering the next phase: Trying to make the United States women's basketball team for the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

      She made it ... and helped her team win the gold medal. 

      And during the journey -- the tryouts, the team selections, the practices, the exhibition games, the trip to LA, the Opening Ceremony, the time in the Olympic Village, and the Olympic competition itself, she told the story ... in the Shreveport Journal. 

     In 14 segments, beginning April 19, "Kim Mulkey's Olympic Diary" appeared on the Journal sports pages. 

     Here is the promo for the start of the series:

     Kim had played for U.S. teams in international games for three years and had been one of college basketball's best women's players during that time. So she was a natural for the tryouts. 

     She was a natural for the Journal, too.

     The idea was generated -- as were many stories in the paper in those late 1970s/1980s years -- by the paper's editor, Stanley Tiner. 

     We took it from there ... and so did Kim.

     Believe me, it took some effort on her part. She had to write out, or type, her stories, and then make a call to the Journal sports department and, as I recall, dictate her words to us. On our end, it meant typing it into our computers and preparing it for the next day's editions.

     We had the easy part. Kim could write. She needed very little help, maybe a little editing here and there. Of course, her stories were excellent ... good reads, in newspaper terms.

      She was, after all, a summa cum laude college student; the sportswriters at the Journal were not.

     So it was time-consuming for Kim, between her basketball tryouts and travels.

      As I recall, her pay was a few million dollars short of what she's made as the women's head basketball coach at Baylor (and now LSU), or even a few thousand dollars short as an assistant coach for 15 years at Louisiana Tech.

     I think she did it for the good of the country ... and the Journal. It was a free ride.

     It was a pleasure to team up with her, and I remember that Journal readers enjoyed her stories. By then, she had been the "darling" of Louisiana Tech women's basketball fans for four years, the little point guard with the pigtails. The  big winner, the champion.

     Truth is, she had fans, too, in the Journal sports department (see Jerry Byrd's column) and also The Times, where our friend Jim McLain covered the Lady Techsters' story for many years.

     So her stories were gold for us, and the U.S. team -- coached by Pat Head Summitt, by then not quite the legend she would become at the University of Tennessee -- earned its gold by beating South Korea in the title game (remember, Russian athletes boycotted the LA Games in '84).

      Kim wasn't the only Louisiana Tech player to mine that gold. So did center/forward Janice Lawrence.

       (Lawrence was the Final Four's "Most Outstanding Player" when Tech and Mulkey won a second consecutive national championship in 1982. The Lady Techsters lost to Southern California, led by Cheryl Miller, in the 1983 championship game, 69-67, and 1984 semifinals, 62-57.)

     Here is how Kim ended her final "Olympic Diary" story, which ran in the Journal on August 8, the afternoon after the previous night's gold-medal game and ceremony:

       You probably know the rest. A lot of her dreams have come true ... and now, at LSU, there are more dreams and more goals. 

       The Journal is no more, having folded in 1991. Kim Mulkey's story rolls on ... and it's been a golden adventure.

If it is Olympics speed skating, color it Orange

      Not as much of an Olympics fan as I once was, and not that interested in the Winter Olympics ... except for speed skating.
      That's right. It is the Dutch in me. The Dutch love speed skating, and they are excellent at it.
      For the past two decades, they have dominated long-track (outdoor) speed skating.
      Give you the facts: At the last Winter Olympics, in Sochi, Russia, 2014, The Netherlands won 23 of the possible 36 medals in the sport -- men and women combined. Eight gold, seven silver, eight bronze. Domination.
      That included four 1-2-3 finishes, only Dutch people standing on the medal podiums and the Dutch flag being raised on the flag poles, and the Wilhelmus -- oldest national anthem in the world -- being played.
      Loved it. Mom and Dad would have loved it. My Dutch friends -- especially those in that small but marvelous and beautiful country -- loved it.
      Could it happen again? Not likely, but the Dutch team is still deep and talented.

Kees Broekman (photo from a 1955
sports book in Holland; I still have it.)

      And it all began with Kees Broekman in 1952. My first sports hero, the first athlete from Holland -- I was 4 1/2 there then -- to win a Winter Olympics medal.
      He's still a hero there. More on this below. 
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      I will watch parts of the Opening Ceremony tonight on NBC-TV -- recording it -- because I like the Olympic pomp.
      Especially like when the Olympic flag is marched in, solemnly, and when the Olympic torch arrives at the main stadium and is fired up. Beautiful sight, always.
      But as for the Winter Games themselves, when is the speed skating?
      Answer: It begins Saturday, and there will be one event each of the first seven days. 
      Good thing is, don't have to watch it all. We can be selective. Because South Korea is so many hours ahead of us, the competition starts at about 5 a.m. here. Not about to get up and start watching. 
      I will wait for the results to be posted. If the news is good (if the Dutch or the Americans do well), I will watch the event that evening on NBC. 
      If not, that's fine, too. Outdoor speed skating, honestly, is not terribly exciting. Two competitors only at a time, and the clock is their main opponent. The grass is growing, paint is drying, watched water doesn't boil , your computer hourglass is spinning (cliches' for b-o-r-i-n-g).
      But it's not boring if you are rooting for the winners. So I watched a lot of speed skating in 2014. Hoping for more of the same.
      (Short-track speed skating -- which is like roller derby -- can be more exciting. It's faster, there is bodily contact at almost every turn, and it doesn't take nearly as long as long-track. But, dang it, it is a contrived sport.)
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      For me, the widespread Winter Olympics menu is down to speed skating and ice hockey.
      And even hockey now has its limitations. It was very interesting to watch the U.S. and Canadian teams, and other world powers, matched when they all had National Hockey League players on their rosters. But no more; the NHL pulled out after 2014.
      So the U.S. team is down to mostly collegiate players. They will compete hard, and we'll root them on. 
      What we remember, of course, is that it was a team of U.S. college players who gave us the "Miracle on Ice" in 1980 (Lake Placid) -- the upset of the mighty not-so-invincible Soviet Union team I consider the No. 1 U.S. sports moment of my lifetime.  
      Some of the old standbys that I watched in the early TV days of the Winter Olympics, beginning in 1960 (Squaw Valley, Calif.) -- Alpine skiing, bobsledding, luge and ski jumping -- are in my past. 
       You can have snowboarding, skeleton, freestyle skiing (moguls? The only mogul I know is Taylor Moore), biathlon, Nordic combined, and -- oh, Canada, it's a curling iron.
       Figure skating gets so much attention -- millions of TV viewers -- and used to watch. But it's like gymnastics (and, heaven forbid, the ugly side of it); those sports are so tainted by the judges' national leanings, the beauty of the events does not outweigh the slanted scoring. I'm out.
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      It has been six years -- Summer Games in London, 2012 -- since I wrote about the Olympics, and my love for them. http://nvanthyn.blogspot.com/2012/07/can-you-hear-olympic-theme-song.html
       Now I think that, like so much of American sports, the Olympics are too much -- money, attention, oversaturation, more television hours than anyone can handle. 
        And arguably, too much politics and too much nationalism. 
       I contradict that by saying that I root for the red, white and blue -- the Americans in every sport (yeah, America first!). Except for speed skating and -- Winter Olympics aside, when it applies -- soccer.
       In those sports, my No. 1 country is also red-white-and-blue (the Dutch flag, horizontally from top to bottom) with orange -- the national color, thank you, the royal House of Orange -- as the main uniform color.                
        America has had some speed skating legends -- Eric Heiden (five golds in one Olympics), Bonnie Blair, Dan Jansen (when he stayed on his feet), and, in short-track, Apolo Anton Ohno (who also ballroom danced championship-style on TV). The still-active Shani Davis is our biggest name now.
        The Netherlands' superstar in the sport was Ard Schenk (three gold medals in 1972). But he followed the legacy of my man Kees Broekman.

The silver medalist, Kees Broekman (left), could only
look up to gold winner Hjalmar Andersen in 1952. 

         Kees competed in four Olympics, first at age 20 in 1948 and last at Squaw Valley in '60. Twice (1956-'60) he was The Netherlands' flagbearer for the Winter Games. By then, he actually had moved to live in Norway.
         He really never got close to winning Olympic gold, though. His misfortune was his peak came when Hjalmar Andersen of Norway was the best in the world, a three-time gold medalist in 1952 (that guy was not popular in my house). Kees finished 11 seconds behind in the 5,000, 25 seconds back in the 10,000. Not close.
          And when he finally did win a major championship, the all-around title in the 1953 European Championships, it coincided with the Jan. 31-Feb. 1 night of the massive North Sea flood of the greater part of southern Holland.
          Broekman's skating career carried over into coaching. He was tutoring skaters in Berlin, where he moved, when he died at age 65 in November 1992.
          But some of us never forgot him, and there is a street named for him in Amsterdam. Nice. 
          And he is the first reason why people whose blood sometimes bleeds Dutch orange were blessed with the speedskating gene.       
          Skate on. 
  

"That Bolt guy" and other Olympics stories

       My Olympics observations ...
     I have always been an Olympics fan -- as I wrote in a blog piece before the 2012 Summer Games in London began -- so I again reveled in Rio and Brazil these past two weeks. 
    Didn't spend as much time watching on TV as others did, but I watched enough. Could not turn away from track and field -- still love it after all these years -- and the best part was this was a wonderful diversion from the gawd-awful, never-ending political and social media discussions (and I use "discussions" loosely).

Matt Centrowitz's golden 1,500-meter run finish
(The Washington Post photo)

    Before I go any further, here is my favorite story of these Olympics: Matthew Centrowitz Jr.'s gold-medal glory in the men's 1,500-meter run. 
    Oh, hallelujah. What a story. Son of an Olympic-runner father, son of a track/cross country coach. The first United States winner of this event in 108 years.
     Jim Ryun, somewhere in Kansas, had to be overjoyed. Those of us who loved Jim Ryun -- our favorite runner in 1964 through 1972 -- had to love it. 
     This one was long, long overdue -- at least 48 years overdue. (More on this below.)  
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      We were on Facetime last week and asked our 8-year-old granddaughter, Josie -- who has been taking gymnastics lessons for a few years -- if she was watching the Olympics.
    "Yes, the gymnastics," she answered, "and that Bolt guy."
    Yes, even our precocious children know of Mr. Bolt, the fastest runner in history, a forever legend, a charismatic (and kind of crazy) character.
    I think Josie liked his lightning-bolt victory pose. We all got to see it nine times in nine races ... over three Summer Olympics. He is awesome.
     But so were Michael Phelps (again and again -- dang, 28 Olympic medals, 23 gold), Katie Ledecky and Simone Biles, and so many others ... and the beautiful, joyful country of Brazil.
    Despite all the pre-Olympics concerns, and some tacky Olympic stories (unfortunately, American-made), Rio did it right.
    Those of us who love the pageantry and the traditions of the Olympics opening and closing ceremonies had to be satisfied. Maybe other cities/countries have spent many more dollars, but they did not put on any better, more colorful shows, than Rio de Janeiro and Brazil.
 ---
      There is, for me, a lot of pride in seeing the United States athletes dominate the competition, especially in track/field and swimming and basketball. But, gosh, shouldn't we expect that -- as much money and time as we invest in pro, college and even at the high school/amateur levels?
       It's good to be an American.
       It is also good -- and I think you'll understand this -- to be a native Dutchman.
       I still feel emotional when I see The Netherlands flag being carried in or -- better yet -- on the gold-medal flag pole. And in the closing ceremony Sunday night, it was great to see the athletes at one moment dressed in a sea of orange; no question what country that represented.
       Had a friend send me a text early in the Olympics -- when the U.S. faced Holland in, I think, women's volleyball -- asking me who I rooted for in U.S.-Holland games.
       My answer: It depends. If it's men's soccer, no question -- the Dutch team was/is my first love. If it's speed skating or bicycling, probably Holland, but not always. Anything else, let the best team win ... I'm rooting for both. (Think Louisiana Tech vs. LSU.)
       But, honestly, I do think there is a bit too much nationality involved in the Olympics, too much flag-waving. Just my view. I enjoy seeing any superior performance by any athlete from any country.
       Some of the great moments, for instance, were Mo Farah's double golds-- repeated from four years ago -- in the men's 5,000- and 10,000-meter runs, and the amazing 400-meter world record by the runner from South Africa.
       It is also nice, U.S./Dutch partisanship aside, to see the host country take some significant gold medals. Brazil deserved that, just for its Olympic host efforts. So good for its men's volleyball team, and its men's beach volleyball pair ... and, yes, men's soccer.
       For Brazil, that final men's soccer victory-- on the hallowed turf of Maracana Stadium -- was the one it wanted. Brazil thinks of itself as the king of soccer.
        But, but, but ...
        Look, it was all the drama you wanted -- a tie game with Germany, a penalty-kick shootout after extra time (have I told you lately how much I detest PK shootouts to settle world-level soccer games?), and superstar Neymar's final golden PK.
        Let me remind you, these are basically under-23 national teams. These are not THE national teams.
        Make what you want that this was an equalizer for what happened in the Brazil-Germany semifinal of the World Cup -- in Brazil -- two years ago. No, it wasn't. That 7-1 Germany victory, a Brazil embarrassment, was achieved by the best players in the world, not under-23 teams. So there.
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      Now about women's soccer. Those are the national teams, and so it was tough for the U.S. world champions to lose a PK shootout to Sweden after a 0-0 tie. It was tougher to hear U.S. goalie Hope Solo -- who made her team spokesman? -- carp about Sweden's team being "cowards."
      Shut up, Hope, and tell you teammates to score and keep you from being the victim in the PK shootout.
      Speaking of shutting up. Ryan Lochte, what the hell? This was the most overblown, overrated story of these Olympics. I guess NBC -- carrying the games on TV here -- felt that it had to be the news lead/interview subject, repeatedly. Too much, just a punked-out story.
       And then there was the overblown public reaction to gymnast Gabby Douglas not showing what many felt was the lack of respect during the U.S. national anthem. C'mon, people, give her a break; she's represented this country well for two Olympics.
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       Now, Matt Centrowitz Jr. -- "like father, like son," as the tattoo on his chest says, and he proudly showed it off.
       Like Dad, who ran in the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, he also followed him to run at the University of Oregon. He wanted the Olympic medal Dad didn't get, and four years ago in London he missed out by a split second of a podium finish in the 1,500.
       Watching Matt Jr., I could not help but think of Jim Ryun in the prelims and then the final Saturday night. 

Jim Ryun: 1972 Summer Olympics
(Getty Images)

       Because for three Olympics (1964, 1968, 1972), I rooted for no athlete more than Jim Ryun. He was 1 1/2 months older than me, and he was the first high school athlete to break 4 minutes in the mile run (in our junior-year spring, 1964). The next year, he set a national high school mile-run record (3:55.3) that stood for 36 years. He was in the Olympics at age 17.
        A year later, running for Kansas University (his hometown was Wichita), he set world records in the mile (3:51.3) and 880 yards (1:44.9). He was one of America's greatest athletes then.
         We thought he'd win the 1,500-meter gold for sure in the 1968 Olympics. But running in the mile-high altitude of Mexico City, even though he ran a career-best 3:37.8, he finished almost three seconds behind Kip Keino of Kenya, who was accustomed to running at heights. 
         Ryun had beaten Keino several times on flat land, and I am convinced he would have done so if the Olympics had been on flat land.
         But what we also didn't know then was that Keino was the first of what would become decades-long distance-running domination by Kenyans.                     
        And that only the first of two Olympics heartbreaks for Ryun (and us). Even worse was four years later in Munich's Summer Games when Jim was tripped up and fell during a qualifying heat. He was out; the U.S. protest was denied by Olympic officials.
        Ryun always remained one of our heroes. I wasn't a political fan (he was a very conservative 10-year House of Representatives member from Kansas), but some things can be forgiven.
        Matt Centrowitz, on Saturday, led almost the entire race, and set a very slow pace, much to his liking. When it came time for the sprint -- and the field included the past two Olympic champions in the event -- he held them all off in a gutsy, determined, golden effort.
        So what if it was the slowest men's 1,500-meter final (3:50) in 84 years? It was pure gold.
        Made my Olympics. For Josie, it was "that Bolt guy."
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http://nvanthyn.blogspot.com/2012/07/can-you-hear-olympic-theme-song.html