Scorecard

Eugenia Williams
The Judge Couldn't See

Jean Williams has a clear conscience. Williams, the judge who blew the Holyfield-Lewis fight—and became known to sports fans by her full name, Eugenia, as well as nastier terms—concedes that Lennox Lewis won the pivotal fifth round, but says her view was often obstructed. "I called what I saw," Williams says.

A $39,200-a-year clerk in Atlantic City's landlord-tenant relations office, Williams says she earned $5,100 for her night at the fights. She is amazed that by calling the fight 115-113 for Evander Holyfield she has spurred a New York grand jury investigation and a state senate hearing into the bout All the fuss is not only "very hurtful," she says, but nonsensical too. Williams, 48, filed for bankruptcy in January, citing $33,000 in credit card debt, and says she'd never call attention to herself by fixing the prizefight of the year. "My office has been under the gun numerous times," she told SI last week, referring to city hall probes of the landlord-tenant office. "I'm not going to do anything illegal knowing they're watching me like a hawk."

Now she's pestered by strangers and by 4 a.m. calls from reporters. "You never know who's outside the door," says Williams, who hopes to be just Jean again soon. As for the bout that made her infamous, she sees Holyfield-Lewis more as a failure of fighters than of judges: "I've seen both of them box before, and I've seen them apply themselves more."

Balloon Trek
Inherit the Wind

Switzerland's Bertrand Piccard, a 41-year-old psychiatrist who's heir to a line of adventurers, is no stranger to unscheduled stops. Piccard was forced to park his gondola in the Mediterranean in 1997 and in a Myanmar rice paddy in '98 in two previous attempts to circumnavigate the globe by balloon. That's why he and his British copilot, Brian Jones, didn't mind missing their target, the Pyramids, by about 300 miles when they landed their Breitling Orbiter 3 in Egypt on Sunday. Less than 24 hours earlier, traveling at 130 mph seven miles over Mauritania in northwestern Africa, they had completed the first around-the-world balloon trip. As his ground crew sprayed champagne, Piccard announced by satellite phone, "I am with the angels and completely happy."

He and Jones had relied less on technology—their $2 million balloon was nothing special in this biz—than on meteorology. Since a balloon has no propulsion system, its pilot must keep it in the speediest air he finds going his way. Like a freeway driver changing lanes, Piccard kept shifting altitude to take advantage of winds at different heights, keeping Orbiter 3 clear of storms, mountains, hostile airspace (two American balloonists who strayed over Belarus in 1995 died when Belarussian helicopters shot them down) and stagnant air. "It was like a jigsaw puzzle, and finally we put it all together," said Alan Noble, the team's flight director.

Switzerland's new hero has adventure in his blood. In 1932 Auguste Piccard, Bertrand's grandfather, piloted the first balloon to reach the stratosphere. Auguste also invented the bathyscaphe, a submersible in which his son Jacques—Bertrand's father—explored the 36,000-foot-deep Mariana Trench in the Pacific.

While the homage may be coincidental, it's fitting that the intrepid Piccards and the Star Trek captain have sound-alike surnames. Such men are born to boldly go you know where.

IOC Muddle
Throwin' a Samoan