July 26, 2021 – davidbruceblog #2

Horse Racing

• In 1936 in Cuba, American track star Jesse Owens was supposed to run an exhibition race against Conrado Rodrigues, but the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), which was angry at Mr. Owens because he had skipped some money-raising exhibitions after the 1936 Olympics (although Mr. Owens would not have been paid for running in the exhibitions), threatened to revoke Mr. Rodrigues’ amateur status. Therefore, instead of racing against Mr. Rodrigues, Mr. Owens raced against a horse! Because he was given a big lead, Mr. Owens won.

• The owner of a horse once gave famed jockey Eddie Arcaro detailed instructions on how to win a race. Mr. Arcaro followed the instructions exactly, but he finished last instead of first. The horse’s owner was angry and said to him, “I told you exactly what to do! You were supposed to stay in fourth position until the last turn and then take the lead as you came into the stretch.” Mr. Arcaro replied, “What? And leave the horse?”

Injuries

• After gymnast Kurt Thomas won a gold medal in floor exercise at the 1978 World Championships — thus winning the United States its first gold medal ever at this level — he became an instant celebrity and even appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. During his appearance, Johnny asked him, “Kurt, have you ever had any injuries in gymnastics?” Mr. Thomas replied, “Nothing serious, although I did fracture my neck once.”

• Dana X. Bible was a football coach at the University of Texas. He cared about his players, and he once had a center who would play hurt, hiding his injury so he wouldn’t be taken out of the game. Therefore, Mr. Bible asked another player to keep an eye on the center, and if the player noticed that the center was hurt to tell him so that he could take the center out of the game.

• Rodeo clown Benjie Prudom once found herself in a tight spot with a bull in an arena. She put her hand out in front of her, and the 1,900-pound bull ran into it. Of course, people were concerned about her, and when she had gotten out of the arena, someone asked if her hand was broken. She replied, “No, but my fingernail is.”

Language

• World-class women’s gymnastics coaches Bela Karolyi and his wife, Marta, used to speak in their native Romanian when discussing the faults their gymnasts had made during practice. However, they noticed something odd after the young gymnast Betty Okino began training with them. When they used Romanian to criticize an error in a gymnast’s routine, the next time the gymnast did that routine, the error had been corrected. One day, Bela mentioned, in Romanian, an error that young Betty had made and Betty’s eyes grew round. Bela noticed, and he asked her, “You speak Romanian, don’t you?” Betty whispered, “Yes,” everyone laughed, and thereafter Bela and Marta communicated in Hungarian.

• When world-class gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi defected from Romania to the United States, he didn’t know English. He started work cleaning in a restaurant for a man who called him a son of a bitch. Since Mr. Karolyi didn’t know what the words meant, he looked them up in a Romanian-English dictionary. “Son” meant “child of,” and “bitch” meant “female dog,” so Mr. Karolyi put the meanings together, and since everybody loves little puppy dogs, he figured the restaurant owner liked him and was calling him something good. It wasn’t until later, when Mr. Karolyi called one of his gymnastics students a son of a bitch, that he learned that the phrase was not complimentary.

• Maury Maverick, Jr. was raised to be polite and not use bad language in letters. While he was a student at the school that became the Texas Military Institute, he felt that he should have received a letter in football. When he wrote home that he did not receive it, he wrote that he had been “sexually intercoursed” concerning the letter in football.

• Dominique Moceanu won a gold medal as a member of the United States women’s gymnastics team in 1996 at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia. Her mother, Camelia, was born in Romania and came to the U.S. as an adult. Camelia learned English by watching television and looking up words she didn’t know in her Romanian-English dictionary.

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