How does Lance Armstrong do it? People ask that. I used to wonder myself if he had discovered some drug that has not yet showed up on the testing radar. Greg LeMond certainly seems to feel that Lance is up to no good. LeMond earlier this year made noises during an interview about the need for Lance to fess up and admit it. Then there was a book that came out which claimed Armstrong was not “clean.”

The Greg LeMond I remember was a fair-minded guy who never really bad-mouthed any other cyclist when he was competing, so his comments personally caused me great distress. Do these two guys have bad blood going on now? Lance recently made noises about how he wouldn’t be putting on weight once he retired, the way LeMond did. So, let’s assume something is up and they hate each other now. Maybe LeMond is a bit jealous of what Lance has accomplished.

LeMond was actually the first American cyclist to really put the sport on the map in this country. He rode some fine races in the Tour, and showed a world of courage. His final day time trial, when he came from a nearly impossible time deficit to beat Tour leader Laurent Fignon in 1989, was the most remarkable Tour finish EVER. No two ways about it. And LeMond did not have the strong teams committed to him the way Lance does today. So yes, I suspect there may be jealousy in the mix somewhere.

But still, I have come to the conclusion that Lance is the straight shooter he appears to be. He is simply a remarkable physical specimen, as CNN reported last night in a story about him. Physically, he has genes to die for, in spite of those same genes predisposing him to testicular cancer. His cancer did one good thing, it made him lose about twenty pounds. Not that he was a fattie to begin with. But Lance started athletic life as a triathlete, and they tend to carry a few more pounds (in muscle) than most cyclists need. So losing the weight was an excellent thing for him.

The CNN report also detailed how his heart is larger than most hearts, it pumps nearly double the amount of blood of regular folk. He has beautiful muscles too, they can go a lot longer without the same amount of lactic acid buildup that depletes the systems of other athletes.

In a word, the man is built for suffering, and that is really what the Tour de France comes down to. It’s not about the bike, although having a high-tech bike like the ones out there today can certainly help your confidence. It’s not even about the training, although Armstrong trains scientifically, meticulously, and you always need good training under your belt.

It’s all about how your mind, body and psyche process the suffering you are undergoing.

Armstrong suffers, I do not mean to say otherwise. He is human. But it’s the way he deflects it, absorbs it, resolves it. However you want to tackle the metaphysics of the thing. When you watch the faces of the guys climbing those mountain peaks, sweat dripping off them, you can almost tell they are in another time zone. Having climbed a few peaks in my time, it really helps if you can just let your mind, willingly, go deep into the suffering, until that ferocious wall of pain starts to break down, to become diffuse, and you feel you’ve broke through something. It’s almost meditation in action. LOTS of action.

The other day I heard Lance say, speaking of how he trains, that he loves going out for a six hour training ride, and wrecking himself. That’s exactly how I used to speak about it. You were happy you wrecked your body. Wrecking your body was the Key to the Kingdom.

Another time I heard him say, “I go out for six hours, maybe in the rain, maybe in the heat, I wreck my body, I come home, I feel great.”

Lance is the only athlete I can recall, besides Andre Agassi, who can so beautifully describe his inner workings as an athlete, and how that affects him as a human being.

That is what sets Lance apart from the rest of the field. They all know how to suffer, that’s why they’re here. For that feeling of exhilaration when you break through so much suffering. The endorphins just flow, you feel like you’ve ingested the finest drug the world has to offer.

Lance knows how to drain this particular cup like nobody else. Fortunately, in a few days, the liquidity of suffering will be magically transformed, this time into champagne, as he stands atop the victor’s podium.

Damn, the boy looks great in yellow.

– – – – – – –

So the tennis roadshow has shifted from the red clay of Roland Garros at the French Open, just two weeks ago, to the doom and gloom of grass at Wimbledon.

Well, maybe not quite doom and gloom. Actually the weather in London has been quite remarkable, in the 70s and 80s, a veritable heatwave for them. Monday the temperature was 92, the hottest it has been in 28 years. Friday they may get some rain, but so far the weather has been cooperating, and the load of early matches are getting finished. The courts apparently bounce higher and harder when the weather is warm, and the big servers are loving life.

Suddenly we see players who come out mainly for this tournament, people like Greg Rusedski and Mark Philippoussis. Mario Ancic and Joachim Johansson can also pound big serves, and they should work their way further into the draw.

The first man to fall by the wayside was Maria Sharapova’s stalker. He was identified before the tournament started and banned from the grounds. More will follow, we can be sure. Especially if Maria keeps doing those sexy commercials where she magically pulls a camera from out of her underwear. Maria claimed not to even notice the guy, probably true. She is surrounded by so many people now, only some of them bodyguard types, she probably doesn’t know who is part of her retinue and who isn’t. As long as she can identify the girl on the other side of the net.

The shift from clay to grass in such a short space of time ushers in a whole new crowd of grass court specialists, and ushers out the clay court people who barely bother to cross the Channel. The Spaniards generally do not like Wimbledon. Carlos Moya made an appearance last year, but generally before that he usually found reasons to pull out. This year it was his shoulder (legitimate though). Tommy Robredo, the 13th seed, should have gotten through the first round, but he didn’t. But Juan Carlos Ferrero is here, trying to rebuild a career sapped by injuries and inconsistency the last couple of years. He does not make it easy on himself though, his first two matches have gone the distance.

Mariano Puerta, the finalist at the French, at least bothered to show up. He had to tear himself away from the festivities held in his honor back in Argentina, so give him an “A” for effort. He knew he wouldn’t last long though, his long strokes and baseline play are perfect for clay, totally impractical on grass. Bergsmuller took him out in the first round in three sets.

THE GUYS WHO LOOK GOOD

Marat Safin has been very impressive. For some reason this year he seems to feel a lot better about playing on grass. Before that, he used to echo Marcelo Rios of Chile, who liked to say that “grass is for cows.” Winning can do that to a boy’s mind. And Safin has been winning easily, in straight sets, with efficiency and a business-like attitude. Drama free. Let me stick my neck out now and say that the men’s semi here will feature Safin and Federer, and Safin may upset the Fed Man as he did at the Australian Open earlier this year. After that match, I wrote that Marat is the one guy who will consistently be able to bother Roger, he has the power and the game to do it. On more surfaces than Rafael Nadal.

Roger and Andy Roddick have moved easily through their matches. Roger exudes confidence, he fully expects to win this. After all, as McEnroe said, the man has the game of God. Roddick could meet Nadal in the other semi, I think he can beat Nadal on grass.

Lleyton Hewitt will face Safin in the quarters, and I expect Safin will prevail. Hewitt apparently criticized the seedings at Wimbledon, why I am not sure. He is ranked #3, Roddick is ahead of him and Roger is on top. Does he think he should be ranked ahead of Roddick? Beats me. Maybe impending fatherhood is making him uptight. His kid will pop out of the womb with a clenched fist, no doubt, and a hail and hearty “Come on!”

Rafael Nadal is playing better on grass than I thought he would. He actually went out in the first round of one of the tune-up events on grass, so I did not think he would fare well here. Mary Jo Fernandez and Brad Gilbert, in their commentary, were debating the merits of Nadal playing doubles here too, as he did at the French. Mary Jo thinks it will help his volleying, but I tend to agree with Gilbert. It’s a lot of energy expended over a long two weeks. Why not just have a good half hour of net practice in lieu of running around on a doubles court for best of five sets? But hey, that’s a 60-year-old body talking versus a 19-year-old’s.

THE WOMEN

Lindsay Davenport looks awesome. And as lean as we have seen her. I think she is going to win it all.

The only major shock of the tournament so far was Justine Henin-Hardenne going out in her opening round to Eleni Daniilidou, of Greece. And in a way it really was not such a big surprise. Maybe Justine read that article in the New York Times the other day, about how all the top girls in tennis now are nearly six feet tall. Justine is barely 5’6″. The day of the Little People in tennis may be nearly over, now you really need that height and those levers that go with it. I feel sorry about this, but it seems inevitable. I like seeing Justine play, she has a beautiful, complete game. In a way, she did what Martina Hingis could have done: build up her body with more muscle, get more pop on her serves, hit out with more power and develop even more speed. Justine loves to train. Martina was never the grunt though that the Belgian is.

But that may be part of the problem Justine faced with Daniilidou, a very tall, powerful player whose game resembles Amelie Mauresmo’s. Justine did not play any tournaments on grass leading up to Wimbledon. She was nervous about her endurance, obviously, and did not want to play herself into the ground.

But then the draw came out, she saw who she was facing in the opening round, and she probably regretted that decision. This could be the breakthrough tournament Eleni Daniilidou’s career has needed, she has a lot of power, a great serve and all the shots. Now with that she has the confidence that comes from beating one of the tournament favorites on the women’s side.

Power on through, boys and girls.

The byline of this column is: “anything and everything about life, tennis and sports.” With that in mind, here is my sports wish list for the year.

Watch a cricket match. I grew up in a small village in England. My only cricket memory is a bad one. I was playing cricket with my friends one day when I accidentally put my hands in front of the wicket and caught the only ball that was ever going to come close to knocking the wicket off. We were terrible. No-one could throw the ball accurately enough to get anyone out. After my faux-pas we gave up and trooped home.

Watch one of the weekly foosball tournaments held in Orange County. My dining room table is a cool blue acrylic foosball table with see-through sides and two sets of identical acrylic players. Makes it harder to play because the both teams look alike but that’s the price you pay if you want upscale high-tech design.

Check out the rock’em sock’em Roller Derby world. The LA Derby Dolls lost the lease on their space but they hope to be back in action soon.

Find out why lacrosse is the fastest growing sport in this country. I watched a game of box lacrosse and found it almost indistinguishable from hockey. How much did you miss hockey during the lockout this season? Today let’s look at field lacrosse and see if that helps explain its popularity any better.

We are watching the 2005 NCAA Division I semifinal between Duke and Maryland at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, the home field of the Philadelphia Eagles. A lacrosse field is a bit longer and a bit wider than a football field. The goals are fifteen feet away from the end lines so we will see a lot of play behind the goals.

The first clue that helps explain the game’s popularity is controversy.

In their quarterfinal game against Georgetown, Maryland’s Bill McGlone scored a goal into an empty net with just over a minute to go to put Maryland up 9-7. The Georgetown coach immediately asked for a stick check. Lacrosse has very strict rules about the dimensions of the stick. The webbing that holds the ball cannot be too deep because that would make it too easy for the attacker to hold onto the ball while fighting through wrap checks, slap checks, poke checks and body checks on their way to the goal. To test the pocket, the umpire rotates the stick upside down. The ball should fall out when the pocket is at a 45 degree angle. The ball did not fall out of McGlone’s stick. He had to serve a three minute penalty which means that his team had to play one man down. Georgetown scored a goal to tie the game but Maryland managed to score a goal in overtime to win 9-8. More controversy, more press.

Athletes are switching from soccer to lacrosse because they can score more goals. It’s also easier to carry the ball on your stick than dribble it up the field on your foot. Unlike soccer, you can substitute on the fly. Whenever a Maryland or Duke player scores a goal, they go to the sidelines for a rest. It’s like playing football because you can lay someone out but you don’t have to stop every single play and stand around waiting for the next play to start.

The offense most resembles a game of basketball. Quick passes, pick and rolls, spin moves, fast breaks and quick passing. Duke’s players are beating Maryland to the ball. They win eight of the first ten face offs and they are passing the ball well. By the time Duke gets ahead 6-1, six different Duke players have scored. Maryland is taking quick shots at difficult angles. These bad shots lead to fast breaks that lead to a lot of goals for Duke. It’s just like watching the 2004-5 Los Angeles Lakers. Thanks heavens Phil Jackson is back.

Duke’s goalie, Aaron Fenton, is first team All-American and he’s playing like it. He stops point blank shots and throws beautiful outlet passes. There is no shot clock in field lacrosse. Imagine that Dwyane Wade could set up behind the goal all day and Shaquille O’Neal could stand in front of the goal without a three second penalty. That’s what is looks like today. Duke is controlling the ball and playing superb defense. By the middle of the third quarter, Duke’s attackers have more fouls than the defenders on the team. That’s a good indication that every player is scrapping for the ball.

Maryland started uncharacteristically slow and never recovered. Duke wins the game 18-9.

It’s an exciting game with fast moves, pinpoint passing and enough bodies sprawling to make it interesting but not brutal. It doesn’t have the aerial acrobatics of basketball, it doesn’t have the sophisticated patterns of football, it’s not as fast as hockey, it’s not as boring as soccer. It has a little bit of each sport and that makes it appealing to a lot of athletes and a lot of spectators. Over 44,000 turned up to watch the final between Duke and John Hopkins.

That’s a pretty popular sport.

I was a student at Old Dominion College during the years 1968-70. This was an amazing period in the history of the United States. Protest actions in different areas developed into movements that would bring huge changes to American society.

In 1962, Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring and ushered in the environmental movement.

On June 27, 1969, the day of Judy Garland’s funeral, a large group of gay men resisted arrest during a police raid on The Stonewall Inn in New York City and touched off the Stonewall Riots. A seminal moment in the gay rights movement.

On March 7, 1965, Martin Luther King led a group of 600 marchers from Selma to Montgomery in support of the the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Before they could make their way out of Selma, they were beaten and gassed by police.

In between acid trips and Jimi Hendrix concerts we were also marching in support of civil rights, but in a safe harbor. We were mostly white in a mostly white college. We weren’t subject to fire hoses, police dogs, and bombs. In a testament to the racism at the time, people were shocked by the Kent State killings and horrified, but not necessarily surprised, by the treatment of African-Americans carrying out the same protests.

While I was watching the semifinals of the 2005 NCAA Division I lacrosse championships, I learned that lacrosse played a role in the civil rights movement.

Unlike tennis which started out as an upper class sport and is still an upper class sport, lacrosse was originally played by Native Americans. You know what happened to Native Americans. What happened to lacrosse? By the 1960’s, it was played almost exclusively at prep schools and elite east coast colleges. It was a white sport played by rich white kids.

There were exceptions. Jim Brown, the great Cleveland Browns running back, played at Syracuse in the 1950’s. Some consider him the best lacrosse player to ever play the game. There was also a team at Forest Park High School in Baltimore, Maryland – a hotbed of lacrosse. That is where Miles Harrison, Jr. took up the game. He went on to attend the predominantly black school Morgan State College and it was there in 1970 that he started a lacrosse team. Their coach was a white Jewish administrator at the school, Chip Silverman.

They picked up their sticks, ignored the “nigger” comments and took great joy in pushing the rich white boys all over the field.

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King had already been murdered. John Carlos and Tommie Smith had already raised their black gloved hands in protest on the podium at the Mexico City Olympics. The least these players could do was go out and represent their fellow students and athletes by playing out the same struggle for recognition on the lacrosse field.

Lacrosse is not a tame sport, it’s a full contact sport. Players wear helmets and padding. Some of the Morgan State players were football players who’d never played the game before. They picked up their sticks, ignored the “nigger” comments and took great joy in pushing the rich white boys all over the field. They felt even greater joy in defeating Washington and Lee, the Virginia school named after the Confederate leader, which was the top team in the nation at the time. How sweet was that for a black man in the 70’s?

What is the legacy of this team of football players and lacrosse players with a coach who’d never coached lacrosse before? Kyle Harrison led Johns Hopkins to an undefeated season and their first NCAA championship in eighteen years. He is the 2005 NCAA lacrosse player of the year. Kyle is the son of Miles Harrison. John Christmas, an all-star player at Virginia, and Towson midfielder Oliver Bacon are also sons of men coached by Silverman.

And you know the movie is coming soon to your neighborhood. Harrison and Silverman wrote about the team in their book, Ten Bears. It has been optioned by Warner Brothers.

Lacrosse is the fastest growing sport in the country. It has spread from the east coast across the country to the west coast and, finally, there are top African American players at the high school and college level.

I’m just getting over the French Open and here comes Wimbledon in eight days. I thought I’d get into the mood by watching a Wimbledon final between John McEnroe and Björn Bjorg. I was around in the early 1980’s and paid close attention to tennis but I never realized that all eleven of Borg’s grand slam championships came on grass and clay. Five (straight) Wimbledon wins and six at Roland Garros. As far as I know this is unique in the history of tennis.

For a good reason.

You have to be willing (and able) to slog through endless twenty-five stroke rallies for five sets on powdery red clay and lots of red mud if you want to win at Roland Garros. Rafael Nadal had already won five tournaments on clay this year before he arrived in Paris and took the championship.

Wimbledon champions, on the other hand, take every opportunity possible to roll a shot deep into their opponent’s court so they can get to the net and stay there until they get an easy put away.

While I was rooting around the web looking for help in explaining such a dichotomy in Borg’s play, I came across one of the finest pieces of sports writing I’ve ever read. Tim Pears has written a profile of Borg for the British paper The Guardian that uncovers the deep conflicts you’d expect to find in the fiery competitor who transformed himself from a racket throwing “nut” into an iceberg of imperturbable calm. Pears calls on everything from Patanjali’s yoga sutras to filmmaker John Cassavetes to explain Borg’s struggle to transform his inner self to the point where he could pursue his deep passion for tennis without burning up in the process.

“Yoga”, according to the sutras, is “the ability to direct the mind exclusively towards an object and sustain focus in that direction without any distractions.” A tennis ball is as good an object as any other.

Another sutra states that “The mind can reach the state of Yoga through practice and detachment.” Focus and detachment, a good description of Borg’s on court demeanor. Win the point or lose the point, you couldn’t tell by looking at him. While you could easily find John McEnroe deep in the throes of despair over a missed shot or busy berating fans and officials with the most creative trash talk ever heard in the quiet world of tennis, across the net, there was Borg standing at the baseline idly bouncing a few balls on his tennis racket waiting for everything to blow over so he could get back to work.

Nobody bothered to taunt Borg because they knew it was a waste of time. Tweak McEnroe just a little bit and you had an afternoon of entertainment waiting for you.

McEnroe needed Borg. You didn’t see him losing it when he played a match against the unflappable Swede. What was the point? Borg presented him with a blank slate, nothing. There was nothing to provoke McEnroe so he was forced to concentrate on playing tennis.

Which is exactly what he did, sublimely, in their 1980 Wimbledon final. He fought off seven match points to win the fourth set tiebreaker 18-16 and even the match at two sets all. Anyone else in Borg’s position would have been so shaken by failing to cash in on seven match points that the fifth set would have been a routine slide into defeat. But this is Borg. He calmly walked to the baseline and fought through an 8-6 fifth set to win the match.

McEnroe needed Borg. You didn’t see him losing it when he played a match against the unflappable Swede. What was the point?

A quick look at the sports pages tells you that championship athletes who have mastered parts of themselves well enough to perform exceptionally well in competitive situations don’t necessarily make exceptional human beings. Borg had problems with drug abuse after retiring and even suffered an overdose. Conversely, bad behavior on court doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person. McEnroe was voted “Father of the Year” by the National Father’s Day council and you can see him everywhere in tennis today.

They were a fascinating contrast not in personality but in how they chose to deal with their personality. McEnroe could not control himself. Borg could control himself only too well.

There are probably a number of reason tennis isn’t as popular now as it was during the time of Borg and McEnroe. We’re desperate for a rivalry. Of course we’d love to see a show of superb tennis in a big time grand slam final. But what we really want is to see two people willing to play out their deepest passions and tortured desperate selves to the point where the only thing left is pure, sublime tennis. That is what Borg and McEnroe gave us.