Scorecard

Empty Field, Empty Titles

Only five of the 12 figure skating medalists from Lillehammer bothered to compete in last week's world championships, in Chiba, Japan. And absolutely no one was surprised.

None of the women who won an individual Olympic medal was there. Oksana Baiul was reported to be recovering from injuries suffered in an on-ice collision during practice in Lillehammer, though she didn't appear to need much "recovery" while skating to the gold medal. Silver medalist Nancy Kerrigan was resting from her emotionally draining winter. And China's Chen Lu, who got the bronze, withdrew from the worlds with a stress fracture in her right foot. As a result, Yuka Sato of Japan, fifth at Lillehammer, easily won her first world title and the privilege of forever answering the question: But whom did you beat?

The three biggest names from the men's competition in Lillehammer, non-medalists Viktor Petrenko, Brian Boitano and Kurt Browning, were also MIA in Japan. So were the golden pair of Ekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov and the silver twosome of Artur Dmitriev and Natalia Mishkutienok. Two of the top three ice dancing couples also sat this one out: silver medalists Maya Usova and Aleksandr Zhulin and bronze medalists Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean.

If it's so clear that skaters are burned out after the Games, why does the International Skating Union (ISU) persist in holding these sham world championships in Olympic years? Money, naturally. Television fees make the championships worthwhile for the ISU whether the field is world class or minor league. And does the ISU, a notorious black hole when it comes time to disperse those fees, share any of the booty with the competitors whom skating fans tune in to see? Are you kidding?

The title world champion is indelibly tarnished by this pointless and downright lousy competition. In Olympic years it should be scuttled.

Coming to a Head

Coach Jimmy Johnson and owner Jerry Jones, the brain trust of the back-to-back Super Bowl champion Dallas Cowboys, are headed for divorce court. Johnson will almost certainly coach Dallas throughout next season—that will probably have been confirmed at the press conference Johnson was scheduled to hold in Dallas early this week—but then sail off to his new house in the Florida Keys, abandoning the last four years of his contract. That's what the lacquer-haired coach's closest friends in the football business were saying last week after the Jimmy-Jerry rift became front-page news at the annual NFL meetings in Orlando.

Jones brought this latest trouble on himself. After happening upon Johnson and a few of his friends, including two former Cowboy employees whom Jones had fired, at a party, Jones offered an awkward toast to the Cowboys' success. The response was less than warm, and Jones felt that Johnson and the others had snubbed him. Several hours later, as he held court in a hotel lobby bar, in the company of four journalists and several friends and bystanders, Jones launched into a diatribe against Johnson, taking care to say that it was off-the-record. The theme was predictable: I'm the boss, he's just the coach. I'll fire him if I want to. He works for me. Etc. Etc. Jones had said the same things before.

At nine the following morning Johnson got a phone call in his room—the Deep Throat is still unknown—telling him what Jones had said, including Jones's declaration that he was going to fire Johnson and replace him with former Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer. To his credit Jones didn't deny his remarks when The Dallas Morning News broke the story last Wednesday, though he claimed that his off-the-record trust had been violated.