September 29, 1994
Tom and Amy Ruhle planned their wedding and honeymoon “in the two-week gap,” he said at their Montauk home recently, “between the football playoff championships and the Super Bowl.”
That’s how much of a fan Mr. Ruhle, a former East Hampton Town Board member, is. But it’s not just the major televised spectator sports — football, basketball, and baseball — that attract him. Mr. Ruhle loves sports of all kinds, as a spectator and, in several cases, as a participant.
While avid to the nth degree and catholic in his tastes — he can name, for instance, Finnish ski-jumpers, Norwegian cross-country skiers, and African runners at the drop of a hat — Mr. Ruhle is not fooled: “Sports are a reflection of life, the good and the bad. What were the three major sports stories this year?” he said, not waiting for an answer. “Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, O.J. Simpson — did he or did he not kill his wife? — and the baseball strike. Athletes are normal people with extraordinary talent, not gods. Sports shows us at our best, but also at our worst.”
Mr. Ruhle’s three greatest moments in sports, he said, were Greg LeMond’s win over Laurent Fignon in the Versailles-Paris time trial that ended the 2,000-mile 1989 Tour de France, making the American, who’d survived a near-fatal shotgun wound two years before, the overall winner by 8 seconds; Australia’s America’s Cup win in 1985, “snapping a century-long win streak and overcoming the greatest home court advantage of all time,” and Joan Benoit Samuelson’s winning the first Olympic marathon for women in 1984.
“At two miles, the announcer said no woman had ever run that far in Olympic history. That’s one-third the length of the Great Bonac 10K. Until then women had been considered too fragile to run more than 3,000 meters in the Olympics, even though they were doing Ironman distances — 2.4-mile swims, 112-mile bikes, and 26.2-mile runs. Joan Benoit winning that marathon qualifies as my third great moment because it was a landmark for women and because she won it.”
. . . While doubtful that a golden age of participatory sport would arrive in which people competed for the pure joy of sport rather than for lucre, Mr. Ruhle said that essentially it was “the sheer joy of sport” that interested him. “But as long as we’re obsessed with being number-one,” he added, “people will do anything they have to do to win. . . . If you had $10,000 riding on an Ultimate Frisbee game, I wonder if the players would be calling their own fouls as readily as they would otherwise.”
. . . Mr. Ruhle said he was also hopeful that sport was sublimating man’s ancient preoccupation with warfare. “Alexander the Great wasn’t famous for discus-throwing or for running the marathon. It was because he was a conqueror. The same with Attila the Hun, Tamerlane, Napoleon. . . . Hopefully, the Olympic ideal is replacing warfare as one of our national obsessions. . . . The World Cup in soccer takes on the fervor that used to be reserved for combat. Well, it beats the alternative.”