19th Hole: The Readers Take Over

MR. BUCKLEY'S VIEW
Sirs:
I will never, repeat never, open another issue of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED. What qualifies William F. Buckley Jr. (Strange Bedfellows, Sept. 25) to write an article in a sports magazine? This simpering champion of the upper dog may have a place for his deathless prose, but it certainly "ain't" in a sports magazine. Is there no hiding place?
CHARLES CARTER
Long Island City, N.Y.

Sirs:
Mr. Buckley is clever. However, I cannot appreciate being force-fed his political self-delusions during my weekly hour of sporting reclusion.
STEVEN SCHMITT
Allentown, Pa.

Sirs:
Bill Buckley's gingery analysis uses sport for nothing more than an excuse to poke a few jabs at the same liberal concepts he's been bobbing around for years. What are the differences between U.S. "demiamateurism" and Soviet "professionalism" that could account for the basketball loss at the Olympics? "Single-mindedness" and "bilateral" exchange of culture, Bill tells us. Was Ed Ratleff any less "single-minded" than Aleksander Belov about winning for his team?

Buckley runs his political and historical references from A to Z in a dazzling display of verbal gymnastics. The final serving is a cup of Siberian gruel and Bill Buckley's inscrutable smile.
WILLIAM JOYCE
South Wellfleet, Mass.

Sirs:
For all the wit and accuracy of William Buckley's comments upon the state of international sports, his tiresome attempts at political allegory proved quite lame. Actually, the only thing he proved is that, for William Buckley, international politics is a game roughly equivalent to hockey or basketball, i.e., it is to be played to win and, if you are a man, you will give it everything you've got. Which is all fine and good. Except that with the nuclear puck, I don't want to be around when the sticks start swinging, and none of us will be around when they are through.

One would like to think that international sports are precisely the forum for such necessary and even valuable national energies to be played out. But surely the skates, the pucks and the sticks should be left outside of the arena when the object of the game involves human lives. Didn't the misplaced machismo of the Arab terrorists at Munich teach us at least that very lesson?
REN WESCHLER
Santa Monica, Calif.

Sirs:
William Buckley has hit us again with his best punch—not his vocabulary, but his impeccably logical mind—and, man, did we need it. With his simple but analytical redefinitions of such terms as "sport," "victory" and "superiority," Buckley has tendered a spice of realism to an athletic world already heavily peppered with spurious glories. Too bad we can't accuse the International Olympic Committee of similar sanity. Perhaps then it could have avoided becoming—through its appointed officials of boxing, gymnastics, diving and basketball—the second largest terrorist organization represented at Munich, one which compared ideologies rather than athletes.

The best course for the future is obvious. We have to restore career specialization to its natural order, putting Buckley in charge of the Olympics and giving those faceless components of the IOC a shot at real politics. We would then have a Utopia of athletic objectivity and political poetic justice.

But, no, I guess not. Imagine the International Olympic Committeemen as Supreme Court members, each voting according to how he thought the others were going to vote. Or imagine Avery Brundage in any position of political power at all.

Even if such difficulties were avoidable, people would never trust the arrangement. The Buckley-run Games would come too close to following the intent of athletic ethics, rather than the letter, and there is a dismal dearth of men with enough of Buckley's sanity to tolerate such a circumstance.
JEFF HARVEY
North Syracuse, N.Y.