Scorecard

DECADE	U.S. WINS	INTERNATIONAL WINS	AVG. FINAL SCORE
1920s-80s*	4	2	6.8-4.3
1940s-50s*	6	1	7.9-4.1
1960s*	5	0	19.3-l1.1
1970s*	5	0	176-11.2
1980s*	2	3	14.3-13.7
1990s*	4	3	14.8-14.8
*Ryder Cups †Ryder and Presidents Cups

Utah Olympic Scandal
What's Buried in the Bids

The charges of vote-buying by the Salt Lake City Olympic bid committee that surfaced last week won't cost Utah the 2002 Winter Games, but the International Olympic Committee's probe into the scandal is likely to shed more light on the seamy side of the Olympic bidding process.

Last weekend the IOC launched an investigation into the $400,000 the Salt Lake bid committee spent between 1991 and '95 on U.S. college tuition for 13 foreign students. Six of the beneficiaries were relatives of IOC members who voted in the '95 balloting that awarded the Games to Salt Lake City. "In hindsight, I believe the program should not have been part of the campaign," Salt Lake Olympic Committee president Frank Joklik said, though he denied the tuition payments were meant as bribes. Education funds were just part of the juice spread by the Salt Lake bid committee as it vied to host the 2002 Games. On Sunday, Utah's largest health-care provider, Intermountain Health Care, admitted that it gave, through the bid group, free surgical services in 1994 to at least two IOC members or their relatives. Sources close to the SLOC told SI that the bid committee also arranged for shopping sprees and ski weekends for IOC officials ostensibly visiting Utah to inspect prospective Olympic facilities.

Such perks violate IOC rules—historically observed in the breach—that prohibits officials from accepting gifts valued at more than $150 from bidding cities. Several high-ranking international and U.S. sports officials have told SI about being asked by IOC members for everything from cash to vacations to sexual favors as part of the bidding process through the years. Last weekend 80-year-old Swiss lawyer Marc Hodler, the IOC's longest-serving member, rocked the committee's quarterly meeting in Lausanne with accusations that in the last 10 years IOC members or their representatives have demanded millions of dollars to deliver votes to bidding cities.

IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch, who has told the investigative panel to look into Salt Lake's activities, says he will expel any IOC members found to be corrupt. He should also revamp the system by which Olympic cities are chosen. The current process grants a vote to all 115 IOC members, many of whom—because they represent nations that field small Olympic squads or, in the Winter Games, none at all—have little interest in where the Olympics are held. Such members could be more easily tempted to cast their votes for cities that offer the most graft. Says one member of the SLOC board of directors, "Despite what the IOC says, putting on the Games isn't about the athletes. It's about money."

Archie Moore (1913?-1998)
A Smiling Champion

Archie Moore, who said he was 39 when he won the light heavyweight title in 1952 (he was to hold it for 10 years), was the only boxer to face both Rocky Marciano and Muhammad Alt Moore, who died last week at age 84, lost those fights, but he won 194 others (against 26 defeats and eight draws) in a career that ran from '36 to '63. His total of 141 knockouts is the professional record. One "opponent" who went the distance, George Plimpton, remembers the Old Mongoose.

A.J. Liebling described Moore's eyebrows as he confronted Marciano as "rising like storm clouds above the Sea of Azov." I have my own mental image from when I "fought" him (a three-round bout in 1959, an early foray into participatory journalism that I wrote about for SI). I not only suffered a severe nosebleed, but, thanks to a congenital condition known as "sympathetic response," also moved around the ring in tears. As I stared at Moore, I was struck by how composed he looked, a pleasant face, kind-eyed. In a clinch he whispered to me, "Breathe, man, breathe."

We kept in touch over the years. He would reminisce. He told me that one of his first fights was against a brawler known as Piano Mover Jones. "He was a furniture mover in Hot Springs, Arkansas," Archie said, "who could lift an upright piano into the back of a truck I played a tune on him." He fought more than 200 times after that, and his knockout total is one of those truly unassailable sports records. Toward the end of 28 years in the ring he said, "I'm like the drunk in the bar who wants just one more for the road." He was almost 50 when, in his last fight, he knocked out a man named Mike DiBiase in the third round.

Moore became a trainer after that. I saw him when he was with George Foreman's camp in Zaire for the Rumble in the Jungle in 1974. Among other tasks, he had the unenviable job of countering Muhammad Ali's poetic ramblings with some of his own. Pretty good, too: