Scorecard

Extreme Games
Importing X Sports

How can you get your offbeat sport into the X Games? By impressing Ron Semiao, that's how. In his role as the Juan Antonio Samaranch of extreme sports, ESPN vice president Semiao gets lobbied by extremists with some pretty eccentric ideas. Freestyle jump rope? He's heard all about it. Boomerang throwers and greased-pole climbers have also pushed Semiao to include them in the Games, which have added street luge and aggressive in-line skating to the pantheon of American sports. "We could stage the Wile E. Coyote Games with some of the suggestions I've heard," Semiao says.

The new sport at this year's games, which opened on Sunday in San Francisco, is freestyle motocross—an example of the current X trend toward motorized events. There's a good chance next year's X Games will feature medal competition in jet-skiing. "They're doing some cool stuff with those things on surf," says the 43-year-old Semiao, who sometimes sounds like an Xer himself. "They're getting great air and doing really good tricks."

Even after Semiao adds a sport, athletes can shoot it down. "They tell us if something is cool or not," he says. "We did bungee jumping for two years. We had guys jumping off the bungee platform in kayaks and Elvis costumes. The other athletes finally said, 'C'mon, man.' " Semiao cut the bungee cord after the '96 Games but risked further ridicule last year when he green-lighted doubles skateboarding.

Will extreme go mainstream? Semiao admits he is slower on the trigger these days after learning a lesson in 1995. That was the year Semiao, who'd seen "a really cool picture in Details" of a man soaring through the air behind a kite, added kite-skiing to the inaugural X Games. But the guy in the photo turned out to be the only person on earth who was any good at it. Of his nine opponents at the games, one kite skier got terrible air—he never left the water—and another took off all right but couldn't figure out how to turn his kite. He disappeared down the Rhode Island coast and had to return to the Games in a cab.

The Reggie Lewis Trial
Mudge Slinging

Donna Harris Lewis may have helped ruin her husband's reputation while trying to save it. Former Celtics captain Reggie Lewis is buried in a Boston cemetery, but his plot has no headstone because, says Harris Lewis, "there hasn't been complete closure.... I know he's not at peace right now."

Lewis was a widely admired NBA star when he collapsed during a playoff game against the Hornets in 1993. A group of 12 doctors led by Celtics team physician Arnold Scheller advised him not to play basketball again, but Lewis sought a second opinion from Gilbert Mudge, a prominent cardiologist at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital. Mudge diagnosed a relatively mild condition that could cause fainting spells and said the 27-year-old All-Star could probably rejoin the Celtics in time for the 1993-94 season. Less than three months later Lewis died while casually shooting baskets at Brandeis.

In 1995 a controversial Wall Street Journal article suggested that cocaine use might have damaged Lewis's heart and contributed to his death. According to the story Mudge had told Lewis that cocaine was the only possible reason for his heart trouble. The player's angry widow filed a malpractice suit against Mudge and three other cardiologists who had consulted with him on Lewis's diagnosis. She settled with one of the doctors before the trial; the jury cleared the other two.

Harris Lewis, who has reportedly collected more than $11 million from her husband's contract with the Celtics, says she sued not for the money but to preserve his memory. If that's true, her strategy backfired. Mudge told the court that Reggie admitted to him that he'd used cocaine. Former Northeastern athletic director Irwin Cohen stated that he had been told by the school's former health director, Job Fuchs, that Lewis had tested positive for cocaine while playing there. Wayne Brown, a college acquaintance of Lewis's, told the court that he had used coke with Lewis about six times and provided it to him a dozen other times.